Quotes of the Day:

"But when fascism comes it will not be in the form of an anti-American movement or pro-Hitler bund, practicing disloyalty. Nor will it come in the form of a crusade against war. It will appear rather in the luminous robes of flaming patriotism; it will take some genuinely indigenous shape and color, and it will spread only because its leaders, who are not yet visible, will know how to locate the great springs of public opinion and desire and the streams of thought that flow from them and will know how to attract to their banners leaders who can command the support of the controlling minorities in American public life. The danger lies not so much in the would-be Fuhrers who may arise, but in the presence in our midst of certainly deeply running currents of hope and appetite and opinion. The war upon fascism must be begun there."

– John Thomas Flynn, As We Go Marching, 1945

"We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it - and stop there; lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove-lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove-lid again - and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore." 

– Mark Twain

"Sometimes people don't want to hear the truth because they don't want their illusions destroyed." 

 Friedrich Nietzsche

1. Aid for Ukraine Benefits the U.S. in More Ways Than One

2. Twilight of the Wonks by Walter Russell Mead

3. Baltimore Bridge Collapse: Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) (CRS Report)

4. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, March 27, 2024

5. Israel–Hamas War (Iran) Update, March 27, 2024

6. Ukraine Takes the War to Russia’s Oil Refineries

7. Putin is "losing control" in Russia: Dictator expert

8. Gigantic Ships Are a Danger—and a Lifeline

9. To Thwart Iran, Fight a War of Attrition

10. An America at Risk

11. Burnings and beheadings: Myanmar junta escalates terror tactics against its people

12. Majority of Americans now oppose Israeli action in Gaza: Gallup poll

13. The roots of this unofficial Nazi-inspired Army Green Beret logo

14. 17 Books Every Service Member Should Read, According to Troops and Veterans

15. Despite common rhetoric, war with China unlikely in near future

16. America Needs a Dead Hand More than Ever

17. It’s Time for a Comprehensive National Maritime Strategy

18. Press Release: Evaluation of the DoD’s Military Information Support Operations Workforce

19. A Time for Choosing”: Urgent Action or Continuing Folly (US Alliances)

20. America, Iran, and the Patron’s Dilemma

21. Don’t Betray the Women of Afghanistan

22. Towed artillery has reached ‘end of the effectiveness,’ Army four-star declares

23. American Strategy on the Brink

24. The World’s Unpopular Leaders

1. Aid for Ukraine Benefits the U.S. in More Ways Than One

Excerpts:

Moreover, supporting Ukraine is not just about geopolitics; it is about standing up for what is right and just. It is about supporting the aspirations of millions of people who yearn for a future free from oppression and fear. As Americans, we must never forget the sacrifices made by those who have fought and died for the cause of freedom. Putin's acts of aggression and fundamental disregard of established international law must not be met with impunity.

Now is the time for the United States to lead by example and demonstrate its unwavering commitment to defending democracy and human rights around the world. When they return to session in April, the U.S. House of Representatives must act decisively and swiftly to provide aid to Ukraine. Doing so is not only in the best interest of the Ukrainian people but also in the best interest of American workers, our military preparedness and global security.

Aid for Ukraine Benefits the U.S. in More Ways Than One

Newsweek · by Nancy Brinker and Philip Breedlove · March 27, 2024

Published Mar 27, 2024 at 7:01 AM EDT

Updated Mar 27, 2024 at 9:55 AM EDT

As tensions escalate and democracy faces a defining test in Ukraine, it is imperative for the United States to stand firm in its commitment to support this besieged nation. Russian President Vladimir Putin's increasingly hostile aggression, coupled with Ukraine's relentless pursuit of freedom and democracy, demands an unwavering response from the international community, and particularly from the U.S.

Having held roles as a former U.S. ambassador in eastern Europe and a NATO supreme allied commander, we have witnessed firsthand the power of international unity and support in the face of threats from abroad. It is strongly in America's interest that the U.S. House of Representatives follows the Senate's lead in illustrating strong, bipartisan support for Ukraine in the face of Putin's savage aggression and tyranny.

Ukraine stands at a crossroads, fighting not only for its sovereignty but also for the fundamental principles of democracy and human rights. The Ukrainian people have bravely stood up against corruption and oppression, demanding a future where freedom and justice prevail. It is our moral obligation to stand with them in their quest for a better tomorrow.

A resident of the house near the epicenter of the explosion is crying out of fear on March 25, in Kyiv, Ukraine. A hypersonic missile hit the Kyiv State Academy of Decorative and Applied Arts... A resident of the house near the epicenter of the explosion is crying out of fear on March 25, in Kyiv, Ukraine. A hypersonic missile hit the Kyiv State Academy of Decorative and Applied Arts and Design. Kostiantyn Liberov/Libkos/Getty Images

Sending aid to Ukraine is not merely an act of charity; it is an economic investment here at home. Funds that lawmakers approve to arm Ukraine are being used stateside to build new weapons or to replace weapons sent to Kyiv from U.S. stockpiles. In fact, of the $68 billion in military and related assistance Congress has approved since Russia invaded Ukraine, almost 90 percent is going to Americans. The American Enterprise Institute has identified 117 production lines in at least 31 states and 71 cities where American workers are producing major weapons systems for Ukraine.

Furthermore, providing aid to Ukraine sends a powerful message to the world that the United States stands firmly behind its allies and will not tolerate threats to democracy and freedom. In a time when authoritarianism is on the rise, it is essential for the United States to demonstrate its unwavering commitment to defending human rights, democratic values and the rules-based international order that has benefited America since the end of World War II.

Prior to the current congressional recess, some members of Congress argued that sending aid to Ukraine is costly and unnecessary, but the cost of inaction far outweighs the cost of providing assistance. Failure to support Ukraine in its time of need would not only betray our values but also embolden Russia and other rogue aggressors to further undermine global stability and security in the Middle East, the Indo-Pacific, and other theaters. Surely, if we adopt the misguided notion that retreating from our obligations is in America's short-term interest, we will find the long-term consequences to be devastating, in terms of U.S. tax dollars resources and personnel.

Moreover, supporting Ukraine is not just about geopolitics; it is about standing up for what is right and just. It is about supporting the aspirations of millions of people who yearn for a future free from oppression and fear. As Americans, we must never forget the sacrifices made by those who have fought and died for the cause of freedom. Putin's acts of aggression and fundamental disregard of established international law must not be met with impunity.

Now is the time for the United States to lead by example and demonstrate its unwavering commitment to defending democracy and human rights around the world. When they return to session in April, the U.S. House of Representatives must act decisively and swiftly to provide aid to Ukraine. Doing so is not only in the best interest of the Ukrainian people but also in the best interest of American workers, our military preparedness and global security.

Nancy Brinker served as U.S. Ambassador to Hungary and U.S. chief of protocol. Philip Breedlove is a retired four-star general in the U.S. Air Force who served as Supreme Allied Commander Europe of NATO Allied Command Operation and is a current leadership council member of the U.S.-Ukraine Foundation.

The views expressed in this article are the writers' own.

Newsweek · by Nancy Brinker and Philip Breedlove · March 27, 2024

2. Twilight of the Wonks by Walter Russell Mead

A very long read that is obviously very critical of the wonks and wonocracy, wonkratic leadership, and wonkratic bureaucracy.

Here is a key excerpt:

Dissatisfaction with wonkocratic leadership may be the most potent force in American politics today. Recent opinion polling shows faith in “meritocratic” institutions at all-time lows. But the assault on wonkocracy isn’t just a matter of economics. The deeply skeptical public reaction to the public health establishment’s vaccine and lockdown prescriptions during the COVID pandemic revealed just how potent a force populist resistance to technocratic governance had become. Similarly, the propensity to embrace sometimes outlandish conspiracy theories testifies to the strength and depth of public skepticism about the “true” motives of ostensibly objective and technocratic officials and civil servants. This kind of populism found both among left- and right-wing movements is becoming a stronger political force. Wonk badges of authority like elite university credentials and peer-reviewed publications in scholarly journals are decreasingly able to legitimate claims to authority in the public debate.

A hatred of wonk privilege pervades both the right and the left in American politics today. On the right, Trumpian populists seethe with skepticism about the consensus of educated upper middle-class opinion behind much contemporary American policy and mores. “Woke corporations,” “woke generals,” snooty academics and self-regarding journalist elites arouse tremendous and growing antagonism around the country.

But the identitarian left hates wonkocracy too. As we’ve seen, wonkery appears with a very naïve concept of meritocracy. It’s not much of a caricature to say that the chief characteristic of a wonk is the achievement of very high scores on standardized tests like the SATs and the LSATs, and the foundational ideological belief of the modern wonkocracy is the conviction that high scores on tests and high achievement in elite educational institutions constitutes the “merit” that meritocracy is supposed to enshrine. Those who test well and flourish in elite educational settings are the best and the brightest our society has, and it is in everyone’s interest that these people be placed in positions of authority and power.

This self-regarding definition of merit often makes wonks feel entitled. They regard their social power and privilege as legitimate because it is established by external criteria. I deserve to go to Harvard and then Yale Law and then McKinsey because I am, objectively, smart. Furthermore, I am disciplined. I do homework and hand in my assignments on time. I have merit and so it is just that I rule. I was born “booted and spurred” thanks to my ability to score well on standardized tests, and the bulk of mankind needs to shut up and let me ride.

The left-wing, identitarian revolt against conventional wonk meritocracy challenges both the objectivity of the tests that establish wonk merit and, more radically, the meritoriousness of wonkishness. As to the tests, critics argue, not always unpersuasively, the privileged scion of a two-earner, upper middle-class couple in a suburb with good public schools has advantages taking the SAT that inner city poor kids do not. And encoded racism in our society makes things worse. For some sectors of the left, people from disadvantaged backgrounds or marginalized social groups are deemed more worthy than people with higher SAT scores (for example) who have had greater advantages in life. And the “merit” of representing a marginalized group can and should offset the “merit” of having high test scores.

The more radical assault identifies the values of wonkishness (Sitzfleisch plus bureaucratic values like punctuality, attention to accuracy in details, and the propensity to conform to the norms of large institutions) as the products of European culture whose privileged place in our society reflects the consequences of white supremacy and perpetuates white privilege. Liberation does not mean giving historically disadvantaged populations equal access to the credentialing factories (aka universities) that admit people into the ranks of the upper middle class. It does not even mean offering a designated percentage of upper middle-class slots to people from these historically disadvantaged groups. It means deconstructing the concept of wonk meritocracy.

Twilight of the Wonks

The 100-year reign of impeccably credentialed but utterly mediocre meme processors is coming to an end

BYWALTER RUSSELL MEAD

Tablet · by Walter Russell Mead · March 26, 2024

Impostor syndrome isn’t always a voice of unwarranted self-doubt that you should stifle. Sometimes, it is the voice of God telling you to stand down. If, for example, you are an academic with a track record of citation lapses, you might not be the right person to lead a famous university through a critical time. If you are a moral jellyfish whose life is founded on the “go along to get along” principle and who recognizes only the power of the almighty donor, you might not be the right person to serve on the board of an embattled college when the future of civilization is on the line. And if you are someone who believes that “misgenderment” is a serious offense that demands heavy punishment while calls for the murder of Jews fall into a gray zone, you will likely lead a happier and more useful life if you avoid the public sphere.

The spectacle of the presidents of three important American universities reduced to helpless gibbering in a 2023 congressional hearing may have passed from the news cycle, but it will resonate in American politics and culture for a long time. Admittedly, examination by a grandstanding member of Congress seeking to score political points at your expense is not the most favorable forum for self-expression. Even so, discussing the core mission of their institutions before a national audience is an event that ought to have brought out whatever mental clarity, moral earnestness, and rhetorical skills that three leaders of major American institutions had. My fear is it did exactly that.

The mix of ideas and perceptions swirling through the contemporary American academy is not, intellectually, an impressive product. A peculiar blend of optimistic enlightened positivism (History is with us!) and anti-capitalist, anti-rationalist rage (History is the story of racist, genocidal injustice!) has somehow brought “Death to the Gays” Islamism, “Death to the TERFS” radical identitarianism, and “Jews are Nazis” antisemitism into a partnership on the addled American campus. This set of perceptions—too incoherent to qualify as an ideology—can neither withstand rational scrutiny, provide the basis for serious intellectual endeavor, nor prepare the next generation of American leaders for the tasks ahead. It has, however, produced a toxic stew in which we have chosen to marinate the minds of our nation’s future leaders during their formative years.

American universities remain places where magnificent things are happening. Medical breakthroughs, foundational scientific discoveries, and tech innovations that roar out of the laboratories to transform the world continue to pour from the groves of academe, yet simultaneously many campuses seem overrun not only with the usual petty hatreds and dreary fads, but also at least in some quarters with a horrifying collapse in respect for the necessary foundations of American democracy and civic peace.

Sitting atop these troubled institutions, we have too many “leaders” of extraordinary mediocrity and conventional thinking, like the three hapless presidents blinking and stammering in the glare of the television lights. Assaulted by the angry, noisy proponents of an absurdist worldview, and under pressure from misguided diktats emanating from a woke, activist-staffed Washington bureaucracy, administrators and trustees have generally preferred the path of appeasement. Those who best flourish in administrations of this kind are careerist mediocrities who specialize in uttering the approved platitudes of the moment and checking the appropriate identity boxes on job questionnaires. Leaders recruited from these ranks will rarely shine when crisis strikes.

The aftermath of the hearings was exactly what we would expect. UPenn, which needs donors’ money, folded like a cheap suit in the face of a donor strike. Harvard, resting on its vast endowment, arrogantly dismissed its president’s critics until the board came to the horrifying realization that it was out of step with the emerging consensus of the social circles in which its members move. There was nothing thoughtful, brave, or principled about any of this, and the boards of these institutions are demonstrably no wiser or better than those they thoughtlessly place in positions of great responsibility and trust.

It would be easier to simply dismiss or take pleasure in the public humiliation of some of America’s most elite institutions—but we can’t. Universities still matter, and as Americans struggle to reform our institutions in a turbulent era, getting universities right is a national priority. The question is not whether our higher educational system (and indeed our education system as a whole) needs reform. From the colonial era to the present, America’s system of higher ed has been in a constant state of change and reform, and the mix of opportunities and challenges presented by the Information Revolution can only be met by accelerating the pace and deepening the reach of that continuing historical process.

Universities are not and never have been castles of philosophic introspection floating high in the clouds. They are functional institutions serving clear and vital purposes in national life. That is why taxpayers and private donors pay for them to exist, students attend them, and society cares what happens on campus. As society changes, the roles that universities are called on to play change, and universities modify their purpose, structure, and culture to adapt to the new demands and opportunities around them. At a time of accelerating social change that centers on the revolutionary impact of the Information Revolution on the knowledge professions, it is not surprising that universities—the places where knowledge professionals like doctors, lawyers, business managers, civil servants, and teachers receive their formal education—face a set of challenges that are urgent and profound.

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Build Back Better Palestinian Authority

This week, Walter and Jeremy talk universal basic income, the decline of New York City, the Houthis as the greatest naval threat since Imperial Japan, and why the Palestinians need a Konrad Adenauer

March 22, 2024

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America’s education system developed in response to the transformation of human civilization over the last 150 years. The Industrial Revolution resulted in a society of unprecedented scale and complexity, and this society required a large class of highly trained specialists and administrators. Architects had to master the techniques to build hundred-story skyscrapers. Engineers had to build bridges and highways that could carry unprecedented masses of traffic. Doctors had to master immense amounts of knowledge as the field of medicine changed beyond recognition. Bureaucrats had to coordinate the efforts of government agencies taking on tasks and managing resources beyond anything past generations had considered possible. Corporate managers had to integrate sourcing of raw materials, design, and upkeep of factories based on cutting-edge technology and management of a labor force as large as some armies in past centuries with financing and marketing operations on an ever-expanding scale. Financiers had to calculate risks and extend long-term credit for corporations and governments whose need for capital eclipsed anything ever previously seen. Military leaders had to coordinate the largest armed forces in the history of the world, operating at unprecedented levels of technology from the tundra to the jungle, and from outer space to deep under sea.

At the same time, scientific research—which for past generations had been something of a hobby for intelligent gentry amateurs—became a vital engine of economic growth and a key aspect of national security. From the gentleman amateurs of the Royal Society showing their intriguing results to Charles II to the scientists of the Manhattan Project building superweapons for Franklin Roosevelt, there is a long and laborious journey. As the natural sciences became more complex, as experiments required ever more expensive and technologically sophisticated equipment, and as their importance to industry and government grew, the sciences required an ever-growing cadre of trained and skilled researchers. And with the increased economic and military importance of science, business, civilian government, and the national security sector required more professionals who could follow the increasingly arcane yet massively consequential developments in the scientific world.

Before the advent of modern computing, much less AI, all this work had to be carried out by the unaided human mind. Modern industrial societies had to stuff vast quantities of highly specialized and intellectually complex knowledge into the heads of a large sector of their population. They had to develop methods of managing and governing this large, technical intelligentsia, the overwhelming majority of whom would be cogs in the machine rather than exercising leadership. And they had to develop and maintain the institutions that could carry out these unprecedented responsibilities.

The consequences for universities were revolutionary. Higher education had to serve a much higher number of students and prepare them with a much higher standard of technical knowledge—and provide technical and specialist education in a much larger number of subjects—than ever before.

From the post-Civil War generation through the present day, the immense task of shaping the disciplines and filling the ranks of the learned professions and civil service shaped the evolution of the modern educational system. What we call colleges and universities today have, functionally speaking, little in common with the institutions that bore those names in pre-modern times. The University of California resembles the medieval University of Paris less closely than my hometown of Florence, South Carolina, resembles the Florence of Tuscany.

The pre-modern university was a small, loosely managed association, and its officials needed to pay the bills, discipline the students, arbitrate the petty jealousies of the faculty, and keep the university as a whole on the right side of the political and ecclesiastical powers of the day. A modern university, even of the second or third tier, will often be large enough to play a significant role as a local or even regional engine of economic development. It may well be the largest employer in the city or town in which it is sited. It will often manage operations ranging from top-of-the-line hospitals to world-class athletic facilities to academic printing presses and day care centers. Larger universities operate dining halls that feed thousands or even tens of thousands of people every day and carry out projects as diverse as cattle breeding and subatomic research.

American universities succeeded in these tasks better than their peers anywhere in the world, and America’s success in the 20th century was not unrelated to the speed and efficiency with which its higher education system adapted to the new realities. But precisely because they succeeded so brilliantly in the past and adapted so effectively to the conditions of late-stage industrial democracy after World War II, American universities face severe difficulties as the Information Revolution upends many of the institutions, practices, and ways of life that characterized the earlier era.

As universities and their student bodies became larger, with the percentage of college graduates in the American population growing from an estimated 1% in 1900 to 6% in 1950 to roughly 25% in 2000, the role of the university-educated in American life also changed. Access to higher education was significantly widened, but the gulf between those with bachelor’s and post-baccalaureate degrees and the rest of the population also widened. There was a day when most American lawyers had never studied in law school, and when many, like Abraham Lincoln, lacked even a high school degree. Today, entrance to the profession is much more highly controlled and those without the requisite degrees face nearly insuperable barriers.

Today, a person with George Washington’s educational credentials could not get a job teaching the third grade in any public school in the United States.

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At the same time, the relationship between higher education and social leadership has largely broken down. In pre-modern times, university graduates were almost entirely recruited from the upper classes, and their university study was consciously intended to equip them for the exercise of real power and leadership. The pre-modern university was dedicated to the artisanal production of new generations of elite leaders in a handful of roles closely related to the survival of the state. The modern university produces scientists, bureaucrats, managers, and assorted functionaries on an industrial scale to provide governments and the private sector with a range of skilled professionals and knowledge workers, most of whom will spend their lives following orders rather than giving them.

One measure of the change is to contrast the credentials of past generations with what is routinely expected of professionals today. Benjamin Franklin’s formal education ended when he was 10 years old. There were no economics departments or doctorates anywhere in the world when Alexander Hamilton, who was unable to complete his undergraduate studies at the then-Kings College of New York (now Columbia), designed the first central bank of the United States. None of the Founding Fathers were as well credentialed or thoroughly vetted as utterly mediocre, run-of-the-mill lawyers and political scientists are today. Armed only with his genius and his scanty formal educational credentials, a young John Marshall could not land an interview, much less a job, with a major American law firm today. Neither Ulysses Grant nor Robert Lee held a doctorate or had any formal professional training after graduating from West Point. Their lack of credentials would ensure that neither, today, would be considered for senior command in any branch of the armed forces. Through most of the 19th century, American colleges and even elite universities did not require doctoral degrees of their faculty. Today, however, a person with George Washington’s educational credentials could not get a job teaching the third grade in any public school in the United States.

The endlessly rising demand for more experts with higher degrees of expertise had profound social consequences, leading inexorably to a kind of society in which “merit” rather than ancestry or wealth was increasingly the key to advancement. If you are a fumble-fingered incompetent with a limited attention span, it doesn’t matter how rich or well-connected your parents are—you still can’t be a neurosurgeon or an air traffic controller.

Advocates of the rising professional meritocracy pointed to Thomas Jefferson’s ideas of a “natural aristocracy” of talent to underline its grounding in both democratic theory and natural law. But merit in the emerging technocratic society of the Industrial Revolution was a highly specialized thing. This is not merit as traditionally conceived in Western civilization. This was not about achieving a holistic ideal of human merit in which wisdom, judgment, virtu, and intellectual excellence are all appropriately considered.

Merit, for the 20th century, was increasingly dissociated from the older ideals. It was more and more conflated with the kind of personality and talent set that define what we call a “wonk.” Wonks do well on standardized tests. They pass bar examinations with relative ease, master the knowledge demanded of medical students, and ace tests like the Law School Admissions Test (LSAT) and the Graduate Record Examination (GRE). Wonks are not rebels or original thinkers. Wonks follow rules. What makes someone a successful wonk is the possession of at least moderate intelligence plus copious quantities of what the Germans call Sitzfleisch (literally, sit-flesh, the ability to sit patiently at a desk and study for long periods of time).

Wonk privilege is a rarely examined form of social advantage, but progressively over the last century we’ve witnessed a steady increase in the power, prestige, and wealth that flow to people endowed with a sufficiency of Sitzfleisch. The wonkiest among us are deemed the “best” and the goal of meritocracy has been to streamline the promotion of wonks to places of power and prestige while sidelining the fakers: those who use good looks, family descent, wealth, or charisma to get ahead.

The 20th century was the golden age of the wonk, as one profession after another demanded people who had more and more of this ability. People who could do the work to get into and succeed in medical school, law school, accountancy school, engineering school, and other abstruse and difficult pre-professional programs earned high incomes and enjoyed great social prestige. But even as professionals developed greater degrees of specialized knowledge, the nature of their work changed. Early in the 20th century, most professionals operated essentially independent of outside supervision or control. Doctors, lawyers, and many others were often in practice for themselves, and their relationships with their clients were long term, confidential, and generally not subject to review by outside bodies.

In the 19th century, when my great-grandfather finished medical school, medical education was not particularly demanding. This made sense; while important 19th-century discoveries like the use of anesthesia and the germ theory of disease were making themselves felt, there was still not all that much specialized professional knowledge that doctors needed to acquire. On the other hand, medicine was very much a “people” business. What distinguished successful doctors from less successful colleagues was more bedside manner than medical knowledge. Successful doctors were people people. With scientific knowledge about health relatively small, what counted most was wisdom. A physician’s ability to see the whole person, think carefully and wisely about their condition, and then mobilize the extremely limited resources of the medical profession to ease their condition made for the most successful outcomes.

In his son’s day, much of that was beginning to change. Cornell Medical School, which my grandfather Dr. Walter Mead attended in the early days of seriously scientific medical education, prided itself on academic rigor, and the second Dr. Mead was familiar with theories, techniques, and treatment methods that his father would not have known. It took more academic ability and personal discipline to train for the profession in the 1920s than it had a generation earlier. But people skills still mattered. My grandfather, though some of his patients paid him in hams and hickory nuts left on the back porch, was one of the most affluent and respected citizens of his town. He helped bring Alcoholics Anonymous to South Carolina, served as a warden in his church, was called in to examine Franklin Roosevelt as the president’s health deteriorated in the spring of 1944, and played a significant role in the quiet discussions that led to the peaceful desegregation of the town in the Civil Rights era. While he brought the best scientific knowledge of his time to the treatment of his patients, his practice remained people-based. He knew his patients’ life stories and families, and this knowledge played a not-inconsiderable role in his diagnoses and treatments.

Eventually, the explosion of medical knowledge in the 20th century turned medicine into a highly regulated and disciplined profession that demanded a lifelong commitment to study. It is not just that medical school requires a much more rigorous program of intensive study before a physician is ready to go into the field. As a recent National Bureau of Economic Research paper put it, “Medical knowledge is growing so rapidly that only 6 percent of what the average new physician is taught at medical school today will be relevant in ten years.” Not many people have the capacity to absorb and retain information at this pace through decades of active professional life.

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Where the Green Movement Went Wrong

This week, Walter and Jeremy talk Super Tuesday results, Benny Gantz’s visit to Washington, the threat of another China shock, and why environmental movements are losing ground across the world

March 08, 2024

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As academic standards tightened, the social status and the relative income of doctors increased. This made sense. Scientifically trained doctors could do more for their patients, and as it became harder to qualify as a doctor, fewer people could master the academic work, and those who did could demand better pay. The prestige was also good. Some may remember the old joke about the mother of the first Jewish president. As her son took the oath of office, she turned to the person next to her and said, “My other son’s a doctor!”

But as the medical profession became more scientifically rigorous and therapeutically successful, it began to change in other ways. Medicine became more capital intensive, and my brother and nephews, like most of their peers who also became doctors, did not go into private practice. They work in hospitals, and much of what they do is governed by rigorous and detailed protocols. The contemporary doctors in the Mead clan are very sympathetic and intuitive people, but medical practice today is increasingly dominated by cost accounting, government and insurance payment protocols, and the need to process as many patients as possible in the shortest amount of time.

Today’s doctors are almost infinitely more scientifically educated than their 19th- and mid-20th-century predecessors, but they enjoy much less autonomy. My grandfather’s medical decisions were not subject to reviews by hospital administrators, state examiners, or tort lawyers. Decisions today that are subject to government or institutional oversight were taken privately and quietly 100 years ago. Doctors made decisions about matters like end-of-life care and abortion without necessarily doing everything “by the book.”

Doctors were among the most admired of midcentury American professionals, but all the members of all the so-called “learned professions” had a good run. Well-paid, well-respected and in charge, lawyers, doctors, clergy, professors, architects, and business executives deployed the knowledge they gained through intensive education and years of practice. And many of the professions further benefited because their professional associations—modeled on the pre-modern guilds that protected the interests of master craftsmen—restricted the number of new entrants into the professions and continuously increased the required levels of training and education required to practice in each field.

But in profession after profession, we see a similar loss of autonomy even as the degree of required technical skill increases. Between government regulators, tort lawyers, and the economic pressures that lead a growing number of professionals to work as employees in large firms rather than managing private practices, outside forces continue to narrow the scope for private judgment and independent action in the American upper middle class. The wonkish qualities of Sitzfleisch and conformity grew in importance while the old gentry virtues associated with social leadership and independent action faded into the background.

The wonkish qualities of Sitzfleisch and conformity grew in importance while the old gentry virtues associated with social leadership and independent action faded into the background.

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Even as the traditional learned professions were vastly enlarged and profoundly changed by the demands of industrial society, both business and government saw the rapid development of wonk-favorable conditions. The rise of large, stable corporations was one of the most distinctive trends in 20th-century America as the era of Gilded Age entrepreneurs and robber barons gradually gave way to the oligopolies and monopolies of the emerging Blue Model economy. With this shift came the emergence of business management as both an academic discipline and a profession. Nineteenth-century factory managers often emerged from the ranks of blue-collar workers based on their intimate knowledge of the machinery and the workforce. In the 20th century, managers were increasingly recruited from graduates of business colleges and MBA programs.

It was government, however, that witnessed the greatest triumph of the wonk. Progressive reformers believed that the road to progress involved kicking out old style political machines and substituting the judgment of dispassionate, scientifically trained administrators who would make policy in what progressives understood as “the public interest.” Getting the politics out of government became a widely supported political ideal, especially in the refined atmosphere of upper middle-class reform.

The well-trained and well-credentialed professional became a central figure in the political imagination of the 20th century. Woodrow Wilson was the most educated president in American history; his adviser Colonel House wrote a novel, Philip Dru: Administrator, about a West Point graduate who takes over the United States from crooked politicians and saves the country by applying scientific administrative principles. Robert Moses achieved almost as much, shoving elected officials aside to remake the transportation systems in and around New York City. Bright-eyed, bushy-tailed reformers proposed reforms like substituting professional “city managers” for the backroom politicians. Schools of public policy rose up across the land to induct new generations of managers and administrators into the principles of management in the public interest.

The new, scientifically trained professional upper middle-class saw itself as the true guardians and guides of the American Way. Above them were the plutocrats and entrepreneurs whose greed and shortsightedness, if left unchecked, would ultimately drive workers into socialism and revolution. Below them were the masses whose chaotic impulses and unformed minds needed guidance and control. Rational, public-spirited, upper middle-class reformers took it upon themselves to repress the excesses of the plutocrats through economic regulation and progressive taxation. They repressed the excesses of the lower orders through measures like Prohibition and the inculcation of appropriate values in the compulsory public schools of the day.

Civil service reform at the municipal, state, and federal levels led to professionalized government bureaucracies. Under the old spoils system, the friends and allies of victorious politicians got government jobs and contracts regardless of academic attainments. In the new system, jobs were increasingly offered to the “best” candidates as measured by scores on standardized tests and similarly “objective” criteria. Ward heelers to the back of the bus, wonks to the front.

In Blue Model America, the wonk was king. Unelected government officials who could not be fired by politicians produced and administered the dense regulations of the post-World War II economy. The large, stable bureaucracies of the monopolies and oligopolies who controlled the commanding heights of the American economy were staffed with well-trained, eminently qualified managers, secure in their jobs and their status. Certified teachers in K-12 and Ph.D. professors in higher education ensured that new generations were educated according to the correct principles. Government functions were carried out by professional civil servants, insulated by lifetime tenure from the whims of politicians.

We had passed, keen observers like the economist John Kenneth Galbraith argued, the age of ideology. Midcentury America had reached a new level of human development. The principles that made for prosperity and social harmony were known. Qualified professionals could develop and implement the good government policies that satisfied these principles. We were in an age of consensus now, with political debates limited to minor issues. We had taken politics out of government and replaced it with administration. Wonkocracy, the rule of qualified professionals selected and promoted by merit as measured by “objective” indicators like test scores and professional degrees from prestigious universities, had arrived.

But then came the 21st century, and everything turned upside down once again.

If the 20th century was the golden age of wonkocracy, the 21st is its decline and fall. For a sense of just how disruptive the Information Revolution has already been, look at what is happening to the cab drivers of London. London’s intricate street pattern, dating back in some cases to the Roman era, was shaped by Anglo-Saxon cow paths, medieval fairgrounds, abbeys, and palaces that no longer exist, and had virtually all been built centuries before the advent of the automobile. It is an intricate, almost unnavigable thicket of one-way streets, dead ends, abrupt turns, and the occasional modern thoroughfare.

Via Meadia

Until recently, to learn your way around one of the most tortuous mazes ever constructed by the hand of man required years of study. To get a coveted taxi license, one had to pass a complex and comprehensive examination on what was called “The Knowledge”: detailed information about the London labyrinth that enabled you to identify the fastest route from point A to point B anywhere in the metropolis. Then came GPS, and virtually overnight The Knowledge didn’t matter anymore. That was bad news for the licensed cabbies, who now faced competition from upstarts like Uber. It was even worse for the people who taught The Knowledge in a process that often took four years and cost something like $12,000 in tuition and fees.

What the London cabbies experienced was a threat to their incomes, their place in society, and their identities as skilled workers. What the teachers of those cabbies experienced was something like an extinction event. Nobody is going to pay thousands of dollars and invest years of their lives in learning The Knowledge if a machine renders that knowledge irrelevant. Enormous effort and investment likewise went into the creation of educational systems that could produce the expanding number of increasingly well-educated and credentialed individuals modern society required. The central and privileged role that knowledge workers played in 20th-century economic life reshaped social hierarchies, political ideologies, cultural values, and the nature of power. The decline of the wonks will be as consequential as their rise.

Bureaucrats, to take just one example, have long been at the heart of a mature industrial society. As social and economic life became more complex during the Industrial Revolution, effective and predictable systems of management and regulation became increasingly necessary. If the residents of the burgeoning cities of the industrial era were to live in safe houses, drink potable water, and eat healthy food, governments would have to administer far-reaching and detailed regulations. To do so reliably, regulations had to be written and institutions developed through which those regulations could be uniformly imposed. A society in which millions of people drove millions of cars at high speeds across road networks built on a continental scale needed to be able to develop and enforce safety standards on car makers, engineering standards on road builders, training requirements for drivers, provide insurance to millions of drivers, and address a multitude of disputes over liability resulting from the inevitable accidents.

In the pre-infotech era, all this could only be accomplished by establishing large, rule-based bureaucratic and legal structures. The millions of humans employed by these bureaucracies needed to be educated for and socialized into these roles. These employees were not educated to be leaders. The point of their training was not to create independent thinkers and nonconformists. Bureaucrats are trained to be functionaries—meme-processors who apply a set of rules to a set of facts. One of the principal functions of a modern university is to provide such bureaucracies with masses of human material capable of exercising the responsibilities while accepting the limitations of a bureaucratic career.

But a bureaucracy is, from an information point of view, a primitive, costly, and slow method of applying algorithms (rules and regulations) to large masses of data. It seems likely that drastic reductions in the size of both public and private sector bureaucracies will be coming, along with major changes in the functions of the workers that survive the coming cuts. That must also lead to massive changes in the educational systems that prepare young people for careers.

Similarly, among other learned professions, the relationship of the human practitioner to the knowledge necessary for the profession will change as radically as the relationship of London cab drivers to The Knowledge. Even before the arrival of AI, we were seeing examples of computers that could read MRI scans as accurately or even more accurately than human pathologists who’d spent the best years of their lives in medical school stuffing their heads with facts. More recently, researchers trained an AI tool to diagnose autism in young children from retinal scans with 100% accuracy. Increasingly, the bulk of the knowledge required by the learned professions will be held in computer systems. Physicians will not need (and will not be able) to “know” as much about human physiology and medical research as the AIs of the not-too-distant future. Ordinary people, with far less specialized knowledge in their heads but with full access to the wealth of machine knowledge will be able to carry out activities that, in today’s world, only highly trained specialists can manage.

The personal discipline and powers of memory and intelligence that make for successful careers in the age of wonkocracy will not lose their usefulness in the emerging world, and there may well be fields or specialized functions in which wonks remain essential. Still, after 150 years in which technological advance was inexorably increasing the importance of Sitzfleisch to human societies, we are now in a period in which technological progress is liberating humanity from the necessity of stuffing the heads of young people with an ever-increasing mass of specialized, functional knowledge aimed at creating a race of highly skilled rule-followers.

There is another force that is already undermining the ability of the learned and the credentialed to defend their places and privilege. It is one of the driving forces in modern history as a whole: the desire of ordinary people to rule themselves in their own way without the interference, well-intentioned or otherwise, of aristocrats, bishops, bureaucrats—or wonks.

Tocqueville used the term democracy to describe this force, but democracy for him was not the well-behaved, values-driven liberal constitutional ideal that our contemporary defenders of democracy have in mind. Tocqueville was talking about a wild, at times dangerous, desire for autonomy that cared nothing for the moral and political restraints embedded in the vanishing aristocratic order of his times. This force drove the American and French revolutions. It ignited the nationalist revolts that splintered the great European and Middle Eastern empires of the 19th century into nation states. It drove the socialist and anarchist movements that overturned kings and set up revolutionary regimes across much of the world. It inspired the anti-colonial and anti-imperialist movements that drove the European colonizers out of Asia and Africa. It now appears in the left and right populist movements that fight established political parties and upper middle-class professional governance on both sides of the Atlantic.

“[T]he mass of mankind,” wrote Thomas Jefferson in 1826, “has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately …” Not even high SAT scores and Ivy League degrees confer that legitimacy, large numbers of Americans believe, and those people see opportunities for liberation in the disruptive consequences of the Information Revolution. Social media breaks the monopoly of the well-credentialed on the flow of news. Search engines and AI chatbots allow patients to question the judgment of their doctors. Investors can bypass brokers. Crypto opens doors for those who reject, or want to reject, the world of central bank-administered fiat money. Advances in information technology, including the proliferation of AI, will offer many more opportunities for “the mass of mankind” to dispense with the services of the “booted and spurred” who wish to guide and ride them.

A hatred of wonk privilege pervades both the right and the left in American politics today.

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Dissatisfaction with wonkocratic leadership may be the most potent force in American politics today. Recent opinion polling shows faith in “meritocratic” institutions at all-time lows. But the assault on wonkocracy isn’t just a matter of economics. The deeply skeptical public reaction to the public health establishment’s vaccine and lockdown prescriptions during the COVID pandemic revealed just how potent a force populist resistance to technocratic governance had become. Similarly, the propensity to embrace sometimes outlandish conspiracy theories testifies to the strength and depth of public skepticism about the “true” motives of ostensibly objective and technocratic officials and civil servants. This kind of populism found both among left- and right-wing movements is becoming a stronger political force. Wonk badges of authority like elite university credentials and peer-reviewed publications in scholarly journals are decreasingly able to legitimate claims to authority in the public debate.

A hatred of wonk privilege pervades both the right and the left in American politics today. On the right, Trumpian populists seethe with skepticism about the consensus of educated upper middle-class opinion behind much contemporary American policy and mores. “Woke corporations,” “woke generals,” snooty academics and self-regarding journalist elites arouse tremendous and growing antagonism around the country.

But the identitarian left hates wonkocracy too. As we’ve seen, wonkery appears with a very naïve concept of meritocracy. It’s not much of a caricature to say that the chief characteristic of a wonk is the achievement of very high scores on standardized tests like the SATs and the LSATs, and the foundational ideological belief of the modern wonkocracy is the conviction that high scores on tests and high achievement in elite educational institutions constitutes the “merit” that meritocracy is supposed to enshrine. Those who test well and flourish in elite educational settings are the best and the brightest our society has, and it is in everyone’s interest that these people be placed in positions of authority and power.

This self-regarding definition of merit often makes wonks feel entitled. They regard their social power and privilege as legitimate because it is established by external criteria. I deserve to go to Harvard and then Yale Law and then McKinsey because I am, objectively, smart. Furthermore, I am disciplined. I do homework and hand in my assignments on time. I have merit and so it is just that I rule. I was born “booted and spurred” thanks to my ability to score well on standardized tests, and the bulk of mankind needs to shut up and let me ride.

The left-wing, identitarian revolt against conventional wonk meritocracy challenges both the objectivity of the tests that establish wonk merit and, more radically, the meritoriousness of wonkishness. As to the tests, critics argue, not always unpersuasively, the privileged scion of a two-earner, upper middle-class couple in a suburb with good public schools has advantages taking the SAT that inner city poor kids do not. And encoded racism in our society makes things worse. For some sectors of the left, people from disadvantaged backgrounds or marginalized social groups are deemed more worthy than people with higher SAT scores (for example) who have had greater advantages in life. And the “merit” of representing a marginalized group can and should offset the “merit” of having high test scores.

The more radical assault identifies the values of wonkishness (Sitzfleisch plus bureaucratic values like punctuality, attention to accuracy in details, and the propensity to conform to the norms of large institutions) as the products of European culture whose privileged place in our society reflects the consequences of white supremacy and perpetuates white privilege. Liberation does not mean giving historically disadvantaged populations equal access to the credentialing factories (aka universities) that admit people into the ranks of the upper middle class. It does not even mean offering a designated percentage of upper middle-class slots to people from these historically disadvantaged groups. It means deconstructing the concept of wonk meritocracy.

This has all gotten more bitter in recent decades because positions in the wonkocracy have become, with the sad exceptions of journalism and the academy, much more lucrative. As our economy evolves and society becomes more complex, the services provided by the learned professions are in greater demand. The upper middle class is more affluent, larger and more visible than it used to be—and naturally enough it is more widely and more bitterly resented.

In detail, both the populist diagnoses and prescriptions coming from the left and right are often mistaken. But the populist resentment of the sleek, self-interested reign of rule-following meme processors for whom blue chip academic credentials are the modern equivalent of patents of nobility, conferring a legitimate right to rule over the unwashed masses, is too deeply grounded in human nature to fade away. The peasants have added smartphones to their traditional weapons of pitchforks and torches, and they are in no mood to peacefully disperse to their hovels.

With the inexorable pace of technological advance, the gravitational pull of economic advantage, the stark requirements of national security, and the molten magma of populist rage all working against the wonkish status quo, the accelerating disintegration of that status quo seems inevitable. The American university, so deeply committed to wonkocratic ideals and so closely tied to the economic, intellectual, and political agenda of the wonkish upper middle class, cannot avoid the maelstrom ahead. It will take more clarity of vision and eloquence of expression than the three college presidents showed in their congressional hearing to steer the American educational system through the coming upheaval, and the nostrums of woke ideology won’t be much help to faculties and students caught up in the gathering storm.

Walter Russell Mead is the Ravenel B. Curry III Distinguished Fellow in Strategy and Statesmanship at Hudson Institute, the James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and Humanities at Bard College, and the Global View Columnist at The Wall Street Journal. He co-hosts What Really Matters, a weekly news and history podcast from Tablet Studios.

Tablet · by Walter Russell Mead · March 26, 2024

3. Baltimore Bridge Collapse: Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

A useful quick turn report from the Congressional Research Service (CRS) can be accessed at the link Link: https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF12619?

Baltimore Bridge Collapse: Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

At about 1:30 a.m. on March 26, 2024, the MV Dali, a container ship departing the Port of Baltimore, struck a support tower of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, MD, causing the bridge to collapse into the Patapsco River. The bridge is a segment of Interstate 695—Baltimore’s beltway—and spans over the Patapsco shipping channel into the harbor. 

A pothole repair crew was on the bridge at the time of the collision. There were 22 crew members aboard the ship, but none sustained death or injury. Seven submerged vehicles have been identified thus far, but more are possible. There have been no reports of oil spills from the ship.

4. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, March 27, 2024

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-march-27-2024

Key Takeaways:

• The UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine (HRMMU) released its 38th report on the human rights situation in Ukraine on March 26, confirming several of ISW’s longstanding assessments about Russia’s systematic violations of international human rights and humanitarian law in occupied territories and towards Ukrainian prisoners of war (POWs).
• Russian officials are tying the US and the West to a broader set of “terrorist” attacks against Russia following the Crocus City Hall attack, likely to intensify rhetoric about alleged Western and Ukrainian threats to generate greater domestic support for the war in Ukraine.
• Russian authorities are increasing legal pressure against migrants in Russia following recent Russian officials’ proposals for harsher measures against migrant communities in response to the March 22 Crocus City Hall attack.
• Russian forces recently made confirmed advances near Avdiivka and southwest of Donetsk City on March 27.
• Russian Storm-Z personnel continue to complain about their poor treatment by the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) as the MoD tries to posture efficacy in its force generation and social benefit allocation system.

RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, MARCH 27, 2024

Mar 27, 2024 - ISW Press

Download the PDF

Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, March 27, 2024

Christina Harward, Karolina Hird, Riley Bailey, Nicole Wolkov, and Frederick W. Kagan

March 27, 2024, 5:10pm ET

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

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

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

Note: The data cut-off for this product was 2:15pm ET on March 27. ISW will cover subsequent reports in the March 28 Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment.

The UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine (HRMMU) released its 38th report on the human rights situation in Ukraine on March 26, confirming several of ISW’s longstanding assessments about Russia’s systematic violations of international human rights and humanitarian law in occupied territories and towards Ukrainian prisoners of war (POWs).[1] The HRMMU report details activities between December 1, 2023 and February 29 2024, and includes new findings about Russia’s abuse of Ukrainian POWs during this timeframe, based on interviews with 60 recently released male POWs.[2] Nearly all of the POWs that HRMMU interviewed detailed how they were tortured by Russian forces with beatings and electric shocks and threatened with execution, and over half of the interviewees experienced sexual violence. HRMMU also reported that it has evidence of Russian forces executing at least 32 POWs in 12 different incidents during the reporting period and independently verified three of the executions. ISW observed open-source evidence of several POW executions during this reporting period: the execution of three Ukrainian POWs near Robotyne, Zaporizhia Oblast on December 27, 2023; the execution of one Ukrainian POW near Klishchiivka, Donetsk Oblast on February 9, 2024; the executions of three Ukrainian POWs near Robotyne, the execution of six Ukrainian POWs near Avdiivka, Donetsk Oblast, and the executions of two Ukrainian POWs near Vesele, Donetsk Oblast on or around February 18, 2024; and the execution of nine Ukrainian POWs near Ivanivske, Donetsk Oblast, on February 25.[3] The summary execution and mistreatment of POWs is a violation of Article 3 of the Geneva Convention relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War.[4] The HRMMU report also details the forced Russification of Ukrainian populations in occupied areas, including the imposition of Russian political, legal, and administrative systems onto occupied Ukraine in violation of Russia’s international legal obligations as an occupying power.[5] ISW has reported at length on the specifics of Russia’s illegal occupation of Ukraine, consistent with the findings of the UN HRMMU report.[6]

Russian officials are tying the US and the West to a broader set of “terrorist” attacks against Russia following the Crocus City Hall attack, likely to intensify rhetoric about alleged Western and Ukrainian threats to generate greater domestic support for the war in Ukraine. The Russian Investigative Committee and Prosecutor General’s Office stated on March 27 that they will consider an appeal from the Russian State Duma to investigate American and Western financing and organization of terrorist attacks against Russia.[7] The Russian Investigative Committee, Prosecutor General’s Office, and the Duma Deputies that made the appeal did not explicitly reference the Crocus City Hall attack.[8] Kremlin officials have previously tied Ukraine and the West to the Crocus City Hall attack but have yet to make a formal accusation, and the Kremlin may refrain from issuing an official accusation as all available evidence continues to show that the Islamic State (IS) is very likely responsible for the attack.[9] Russian officials routinely describe Ukrainian military strikes against legitimate military targets in occupied Ukraine and Russia as terrorism and consistently claim that Western actors help organize these strikes.[10] The Kremlin likely aims to seize on wider Russian social fears and anger following the Crocus City Hall attack by portraying Ukraine, the US, and the West as immediate terrorist threats. The Kremlin likely hopes that perceptions of Ukrainian and Western involvement in the Crocus City Hall attack will increase domestic support for the war in Ukraine, and Russian officials will likely invoke a broader view of what they consider terrorism to further cast Ukrainians as terrorists and the West as a sponsor of terrorism.[11] The Kremlin may still formally accuse Ukraine of conducting the Crocus City Hall attack if it believes that these other informational efforts are insufficient to generate the domestic response it likely desires.[12]

Russian authorities are increasing legal pressure against migrants in Russia following recent Russian officials’ proposals for harsher measures against migrant communities in response to the March 22 Crocus City Hall attack. BBC News Russian Service stated that there has been a significant increase in the number of cases related to violations of the rules of entry for foreign citizens into Russia following the Crocus City Hall attack.[13] BBC News Russian Service reported on March 27 that 784 such cases have been registered since the morning of March 25, as compared with 1,106 during the entire previous week. A Russian lawyer who often works with Tajik citizens reportedly told BBC News Russian Service that over 100 people waited for a Moscow district court to hear their cases on March 25 alone and that Russian authorities are especially targeting migrants from Tajikistan during searches. BBC News Russian Service reported that representatives of the Tajik diaspora in Russia are expecting Russian authorities to conduct a large wave of deportations following the Crocus City Hall attack. A Russian insider source claimed on March 27 that unspecified actors gave the Moscow Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) an “unspoken” order to “not spare” migrants and for MVD employees to use their own judgement in the field.[14] The insider source claimed that a source suggested that Russian authorities are not preparing to conduct raids on migrant communities but will apply the “strictest measures” to migrants in “controversial situations.” Kremlin newswire TASS stated on March 27 that Russian police and Rosgvardia conducted a raid at the Wildberries warehouse in Elektrostal, Moscow Oblast to check the documents of migrant workers, and Russian opposition outlet Baza reported that Russian authorities detained 21 people during the raid.[15] Several Russian ultranationalist milbloggers complained that the way Russian-language schools in Tajikistan are teaching about Russia’s historical imperial occupation of Tajikistan is discouraging Tajik migrants from integrating into Russian society, essentially blaming migrants for the alienation that Russian society subjects them to.[16] Select Russian officials recently called for the introduction of several anti-migrant policies, which Russian authorities are unlikely to enact given Russia’s reliance on migrants for its force generation and labor needs.[17] Russian authorities may continue the practice of raiding migrant workplaces and increase crackdowns at border crossings to temporarily placate emotional cries for retribution following the March 22 attack as the Kremlin continues to develop a cogent and practical response.

Key Takeaways:

• The UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine (HRMMU) released its 38th report on the human rights situation in Ukraine on March 26, confirming several of ISW’s longstanding assessments about Russia’s systematic violations of international human rights and humanitarian law in occupied territories and towards Ukrainian prisoners of war (POWs).
• Russian officials are tying the US and the West to a broader set of “terrorist” attacks against Russia following the Crocus City Hall attack, likely to intensify rhetoric about alleged Western and Ukrainian threats to generate greater domestic support for the war in Ukraine.
• Russian authorities are increasing legal pressure against migrants in Russia following recent Russian officials’ proposals for harsher measures against migrant communities in response to the March 22 Crocus City Hall attack.
• Russian forces recently made confirmed advances near Avdiivka and southwest of Donetsk City on March 27.
• Russian Storm-Z personnel continue to complain about their poor treatment by the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) as the MoD tries to posture efficacy in its force generation and social benefit allocation system.

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

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

Russian Main Effort – Eastern Ukraine

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

Positional engagements continued along the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna line on March 27, but there were no confirmed changes to the frontline in this area. Ukrainian and Russian sources stated that positional engagements continued northeast of Kupyansk near Synkivka and Lake Lyman; southeast of Kupyansk near Ivanivka; west of Kreminna near Terny and Yampolivka; and south of Kreminna near Bilohorivka.[18] Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian forces advanced near Terny, but ISW has not observed visual confirmation of this claim.[19] Chechen Republic Head Ramzan Kadyrov stated that elements of the Chechen Akhmat Spetsnaz “Aida” detachment are operating near Bilohorivka.[20]

Ukrainian officials reported that Russian forces struck Kharkiv City with a D-30 universal joint glide munition (UMPB), a guided glide bomb, on March 27.[21] Ukrainian officials noted that the strike was the first Russian glide bomb strike against Kharkiv City since the beginning of the full-scale invasion in 2022.[22] Ukrainian Kharkiv Oblast Military Administration Head Oleh Synehubov stated that the UMPB D-30 has a range of up to 90 kilometers and that Russian forces can launch the bomb from aircraft or ground-based Smerch multiple rocket launch systems (MLRS).[23] Russian forces struck Myrnohrad, Donetsk Oblast with three UMPB D-30SN guided glide bombs on March 10.[24]

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

Russian forces reportedly advanced west of Bakhmut, although there were no confirmed changes to the frontline in the area on March 27. Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian forces advanced west of Bakhmut along a railway line and a section of the O0506 (Khromove-Chasiv Yar) highway by 1.15 kilometers in depth and 1.85 kilometers in width.[25] A Russian milblogger claimed that elements of the 98th Airborne (VDV) Division are advancing near Ivanivske and are within 500 meters of the city limits of Chasiv Yar (west of Bakhmut).[26] Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu credited elements of the Russian 102nd Motorized Rifle Regiment (150th Motorized Rifle Division, 8th Combined Arms Army [CAA], Southern Military District [SMD]) with seizing Ivanivske on March 24, although ISW has yet to observe visual evidence confirming that Russian forces have seized Ivanivske.[27] Positional fighting continued northeast of Bakhmut near Vesele; northwest of Bakhmut near Bohdanivka; west of Bakhmut near Ivanivske; southwest of Bakhmut near Klishchiivka and Andriivka; and south of Bakhmut near Shumy and Pivdenne.[28] A Ukrainian military observer reported that Russian forces have intensified transfers of equipment and personnel along ground lines of communication (GLOCs) through Kadiivka, Pervomaisk, and Popasna (all east of Bakhmut), but did not specify the destination of these transfers.[29] Kadiivka, Pervomaisk, and Popasna all lie along the T0504 Luhansk City-Bakhmut highway that runs directly from the Russian rear in occupied Luhansk Oblast into Bakhmut, however.

Russian forces recently advanced west of Avdiivka amid continued positional fighting in the area on March 27. Geolocated footage published on March 27 indicates that Russian forces recently advanced within Berdychi (northwest of Avdiivka) and in Orlivka (west of Avdiivka).[30] Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian forces entered Semenivka (northwest of Avdiivka) and are attacking Ukrainian positions within the settlement but that Ukrainian forces are actively counterattacking in the area.[31] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces advanced 200 meters west of Orlivka on the western bank of the Durna River, 200 meters west of Tonenke (west of Avdiivka), 200 meters in the direction of Umanske (west of Avdiivka), 300 meters south of Tonenke towards Pervomaiske (southwest of Avdiivka), and 100 meters south of Nevelske (southwest of Avdiivka).[32] ISW has not observed visual confirmation of these claims. Positional fighting continued northwest of Avdiivka near Berdychi and Semenivka; west of Avdiivka near Orlivka, Tonenke, and Umanske; and southwest of Avdiivka near Vodyane, Nevelske, and Pervomaiske.[33]

Russian forces recently advanced southwest of Donetsk City amid continued positional fighting west and southwest of Donetsk City on March 27. Geolocated footage published on March 27 indicates that Russian forces recently advanced within central Novomykhailivka (southwest of Donetsk City).[34] Positional fighting continued west of Donetsk City near Heorhiivka and Krasnohorivka and southwest of Donetsk City near Novomykhailivka and Pobieda.[35] Elements of the Russian 5th Motorized Rifle Brigade (1st Donetsk People’s Republic [DNR] Army Corps [AC]) are reportedly operating near Krasnohorivka.[36]

Positional engagements continued south of Velyka Novosilka near Staromayorske and Urozhaine in the Donetsk-Zaporizhia Oblast border area on March 27.[37]

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

Positional engagements continued in western Zaporizhia Oblast on March 27, but there were no confirmed changes to the frontline. Positional engagements continued near Robotyne, near Mala Tokmachka (northeast of Robotyne), northeast of Novoprokopivka (south of Robotyne), and northwest of Verbove (east of Robotyne).[38] Elements of the Russian 71st Motorized Rifle Regiment (42nd Motorized Rifle Division, 58th Combined Arms Army [CAA], Southern Military District [SMD]) reportedly continue operating within Robotyne.[39]

Positional engagements continued in east (left) bank Kherson Oblast, including near Krynky, on March 27.[40]

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

Russian forces conducted a series of drone and missile strikes against Ukraine on the night of March 26 to 27 and on March 27. The Ukrainian Air Force reported that Russian forces launched 13 Shahed-136/131 drones from Kursk Oblast and that Ukrainian forces shot down 10 drones over Kharkiv, Sumy, and Kyiv oblasts on the night of March 26 to 27.[41] Ukrainian officials reported that Russian drones struck civilian infrastructure in Izyum, Kharkiv Oblast.[42] Ukrainian Kharkiv Oblast Head Oleh Synehubov stated that a Russian Kh-35U subsonic anti-ship cruise missile struck Kharkiv City on the morning of March 27.[43] Ukraine’s Eastern Air Command reported that Ukrainian forces shot down an unspecified Russian cruise missile over Dnipropetrovsk Oblast on March 27.[44] Ukrainian officials stated that Russian forces struck an industrial enterprise in Mykolaiv City with an Iskander-M ballistic missile on the afternoon of March 27.[45]

Ukraine’s Southern Operational Command Spokesperson Colonel Nataliya Humenyuk stated that Russian forces have stored “several dozen” Zircon missiles in military facilities in occupied Crimea.[46] Ukrainian Air Force Spokesperson Major Ilya Yevlash stated that Ukrainian air defense systems, such as Patriot and SAMP/T systems, can intercept Zircon missiles when they slow down to about 3,700 kilometers per hour on approach to a target.[47]

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

Russian Storm-Z personnel continue to complain about their poor treatment by the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) as the MoD tries to present the efficacy of its force generation and social benefit allocation system. Russian opposition outlet Mobilization News posted a video appeal from Storm-Z fighters from Kaluga Oblast on March 27 wherein one fighter claimed that after signing contracts with the Russian MoD, Russian command sent a Storm-Z unit of 230 people to the frontline, of whom only 38 survived combat.[48] The Storm-Z fighter complained that he has been unable to receive combat veteran status or promised payments from the Russian authorities for his service.[49] Mobilization News released another video on March 27 wherein relatives of killed and wounded Storm-Z fighters complain to Russian President Vladimir Putin that Russian authorities have not issued the Storm-Z fighters combat status or granted payments in the event of their death or injury in Ukraine.[50] The relatives of the Storm-Z fighters blamed the Russian MoD and Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu for the poor treatment and lack of benefits for Storm-Z fighters. The Russian MoD relies heavily on Storm-Z recruits from penal colonies to carry out costly infantry-led frontal assaults against Ukrainian positions and is very unlikely to address complaints concerning their poor treatment. The Russian MoD claimed on March 27 that it is issuing electronic combat veteran certificates and streamlining and digitizing the process for veterans to obtain payments and social benefits — but these privileges evidently do not apply evenly to all personnel who have signed contracts with the Russian MoD.[51]

Russian news outlet Vedemosti reported that US-sanctioned Russian company Baikal Electronics is struggling to domestically package semiconductor chips to produce processors and that over half of its domestically produced processors are defective.[52] Vedemosti reported that Baikal Electronics began to experiment with domestically packaging chips in Russia at the end of 2021 and that outdated equipment and a lack of experienced employees caused the large amount of processor defects.

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

Russian drone developer Albatross LLC told Kremlin newswire TASS that Russian forces used the Albatross M5 long-range reconnaissance drones to guide aviation and artillery strikes while repelling recent pro-Ukrainian Russian raids into Belgorod Oblast.[53] Albatross LLC noted that the modernized Albatross M5 drone has a maximum range of 60-80 kilometers.

Russian state news outlet RIA Novosti reported that Russian T-72B3, T-72B3M, T-80BVM, and T-90M tanks operating in Ukraine use Reflex-M guided weapon systems with the Invar-M/M1 anti-tank guided missiles to strike Ukrainian and Western-made vehicles.[54]

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

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

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

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

Russian Information Operations and Narratives

Russian officials are weaponizing international responses to the Crocus City Hall attack to accuse the West of espousing Russophobic policies and to baselessly blame Ukraine of involvement in the attack. Russian Ambassador to Austria Dmitry Lyubinsky claimed on March 27 that while the Austrian government reacted to the Crocus City Hall attack, it did not use the words “terrorist attack” or condemn the attack.[55] Lyubinsky accused Austria of having “taken a very special position in its hypocrisy” and a “daze of permissiveness” towards Ukraine and reiterated the Kremlin narrative baselessly connecting Ukraine to the attack. Russian Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Maria Zakharova reported that Russia has received 24-hour non-stop words of support from around the globe following the attack, but immediately pivoted to accuse Ukraine of involvement in the attack and blame NATO members of monopolizing the global fight against terror.[56]

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

Nothing significant to report.

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

5. Israel–Hamas War (Iran) Update, March 27, 2024

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/iran-update-march-27-2024

Key Takeaways:

• Northern Gaza Strip: Israeli forces continued operating in and around al Shifa Hospital in Gaza City. Palestinian militias have conducted nearly 70 attacks targeting Israeli forces in and around the hospital since Israeli forces returned to the area on March 18.
• Southern Gaza Strip: Israeli forces discovered a “significant” tunnel network in al Amal neighborhood in western Khan Younis.
• Unspecified US and Israeli officials told Axios that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is planning to send two top officials to Washington to discuss a possible Israeli clearing operation into Rafah.
• Political Negotiations: Three unspecified people familiar with the Israel-Hamas negotiations told CNN that ceasefire talks have reached another stalemate but are continuing.
• West Bank: The IDF said that it conducted a “counterterrorism” operation around Jenin, highlighting the enduring militia network that exists there.
• Southern Lebanon and Golan Heights: The IDF Air Force conducted an airstrike in southern Lebanon, killing at least seven fighters associated with the military wing of a Lebanese Islamist political party Jamaa al Islamiyya.
• Iraq: Faylaq al Waad al Sadiq Secretary General Mohammad al Tamimi threatened to resume attacks targeting US forces if they do not leave Iraq.
• The Islamic Resistance in Iraq—a coalition of Iranian-backed Iraqi militias—claimed two attacks targeting Israeli military infrastructure.
• Yemen: Senior IRGC Quds Force officer Brig. Gen. Abdol Reza Shahlai directed the initial Houthi attacks targeting vessels around the Gulf of Aden and Red Sea in October 2023, according to Bloomberg, further underscoring the Iranian role in these attacks.
• Iran: Senior Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) leaders continued their visit to Tehran.

IRAN UPDATE, MARCH 27, 2024

Mar 27, 2024 - ISW Press

Download the PDF

Iran Update, March 27, 2024

Ashka Jhaveri, Johanna Moore, Kathryn Tyson, Annika Ganzeveld, Alexandra Braverman, and Nicholas Carl

Information Cutoff: 2:00 pm ET

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

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

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

Key Takeaways:

• Northern Gaza Strip: Israeli forces continued operating in and around al Shifa Hospital in Gaza City. Palestinian militias have conducted nearly 70 attacks targeting Israeli forces in and around the hospital since Israeli forces returned to the area on March 18.
• Southern Gaza Strip: Israeli forces discovered a “significant” tunnel network in al Amal neighborhood in western Khan Younis.
• Unspecified US and Israeli officials told Axios that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is planning to send two top officials to Washington to discuss a possible Israeli clearing operation into Rafah.
• Political Negotiations: Three unspecified people familiar with the Israel-Hamas negotiations told CNN that ceasefire talks have reached another stalemate but are continuing.
• West Bank: The IDF said that it conducted a “counterterrorism” operation around Jenin, highlighting the enduring militia network that exists there.
• Southern Lebanon and Golan Heights: The IDF Air Force conducted an airstrike in southern Lebanon, killing at least seven fighters associated with the military wing of a Lebanese Islamist political party Jamaa al Islamiyya.
• Iraq: Faylaq al Waad al Sadiq Secretary General Mohammad al Tamimi threatened to resume attacks targeting US forces if they do not leave Iraq.
• The Islamic Resistance in Iraq—a coalition of Iranian-backed Iraqi militias—claimed two attacks targeting Israeli military infrastructure.
• Yemen: Senior IRGC Quds Force officer Brig. Gen. Abdol Reza Shahlai directed the initial Houthi attacks targeting vessels around the Gulf of Aden and Red Sea in October 2023, according to Bloomberg, further underscoring the Iranian role in these attacks.
• Iran: Senior Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) leaders continued their visit to Tehran.

Gaza Strip

Axis of Resistance campaign objectives:

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

Israeli forces continued operating in and around al Shifa Hospital in Gaza City on March 27.[1] Israeli forces killed dozens of Palestinian fighters and located unspecified military infrastructure and weapons in the hospital area.[2] Israeli Army Radio reported that the IDF surrounded three buildings in the hospital compound, where approximately 30 senior Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) personnel are located.[3] The IDF published footage on March 26 of its forces questioning a PIJ fighter, who said that Hamas and PIJ personnel are “scattered in the buildings” at al Shifa Hospital.[4] The IDF published an infographic of three Hamas and PIJ officials detained at the hospital, including a leader in Hamas’ Security and Protection Department.[5]

Most of the Palestinian militia attacks on March 27 targeted Israeli forces in and around al Shifa Hospital.[6] Palestinian militias have conducted nearly 70 attacks targeting Israeli forces in and around the hospital since Israeli forces returned to the area on March 18. This high rate of attack indicates that Palestinian militias retain a significant degree of combat effectiveness in the area, despite continued Israeli clearing efforts around Gaza City. At least six Palestinian militias have participated in the recent attacks targeting Israeli forces in and around al Shifa Hospital.

A Palestinian journalist reported on March 27 that Israeli forces advanced into parts of Zaytoun neighborhood in southwestern Gaza City.[7] The IDF concluded a two-week-long re-clearing of Zaytoun on March 3.[8] The return of Israeli forces to the neighborhood suggests that Palestinian militias continue to operate there similar to how these militias still have a presence in other portions of the northern Gaza Strip.

The IDF Nahal Brigade (162nd Division) continued clearing operations in the central Gaza Strip on March 27.[9] A Palestinian journalist reported that Israeli forces advanced into unspecified areas east of Bureij.[10] Hamas claimed that its fighters mortared Israeli forces in the area.[11]

The IDF reported on March 27 that Israeli forces discovered a “significant” tunnel network in al Amal neighborhood in western Khan Younis.[12] The IDF said that it used intelligence from questioning detained Palestinian fighters to find three tunnel shafts. The IDF has been conducting a second round of clearing operations in al Amal neighborhood, western Khan Younis, since March 24.[13]

The IDF continued clearing operations in Qarara in northern Khan Younis on March 27.[14]

The IDF published on March 27 footage of an airstrike targeting a Palestinian fighter, who was surveilling Israeli forces in Hamad neighborhood, northern Khan Younis.[15] The IDF said that the fighter was passing information on Israeli troop locations to other Palestinian fighters over a phone.

Unspecified US and Israeli officials told Axios that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is planning to send two top officials to Washington to discuss a possible Israeli clearing operation into Rafah.[16] The Israeli officials are expected to arrive as early as next week. Netanyahu canceled a planned visit of two top Israeli security officials to Washington, DC, on March 25 in response to the United States’ abstention from the UN Security Council resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire. Netanyahu said in a statement on March 27 that his reasoning for canceling the Israeli visit was “a message to Hamas: Don’t bet on this pressure, it’s not going to work.”[17] The White House said on March 27 that the Israeli Prime Minister's Office had agreed to reschedule the meeting.[18] Axios reported that Netanyahu is expected to send the Israeli Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer and National Security Adviser Tzachi Hanegbi.

Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant discussed a possible Israeli clearing operation into Rafah in a meeting with US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin on March 26.[19] Gallant arrived in Washington, DC, on March 25 to meet with top US diplomatic and military officials. An unnamed senior US Department of Defense official stated that Austin presented to Gallant the broad outlines of the Biden administration’s ”alternative approach” to an Israeli operation into Rafah.[20] This approach included Israel targeting Hamas leadership, creating a plan to evacuate civilians, increasing humanitarian aid into the area, and securing the Gazan-Egyptian border.[21] The official also stated that the Israelis were receptive to these outlines. Gallant told reporters after the meeting that Israel needs “to destroy Hamas as a military and governing organization in Gaza.”[22] He also said that they discussed the issue of aid distribution in the Gaza Strip and noted that Hamas is “sabotag[ing] the delivery of aid.”[23] Unspecified US officials said the two discussed the United States selling F-15 and F-35 fighter jets and Apache helicopter gunships to Israel.[24]

Three unspecified people familiar with the Israel-Hamas negotiations told CNN that ceasefire talks have reached another stalemate but are continuing.[25] An unnamed senior Israeli official familiar with the negotiations in Doha told Israeli media said that Hamas’ response to the latest hostage deal offer was “ridiculous” and that Hamas’ leader in the Gaza Strip, Yahya Sinwar, “does not want to move forward with a deal at the moment.”[26] Lebanese media cited unnamed Egyptian sources, who have been in contact with IDF officials, saying that, following the failure of the latest round of negotiations, Israel is unwilling to make any further concessions to Hamas and is preparing for a clearing operation into Rafah after Eid al Fitr or in early May at the latest.[27]

Hamas published on March 27 a video statement of its military commander Mohammad Deif calling for popular marches toward Israel and the Palestinian Territories.[28] Deif stated: “Begin marching now, not tomorrow, toward Palestine, and do not let restrictions, borders, or regulations deprive you of the honor of participating in the liberation of al Aqsa Mosque.”

Israeli media reported on March 27, citing an unspecified Israeli official, that 25 aid trucks reached the northern Gaza Strip without incident.[29] The trucks entered the Gaza Strip through Gate 96, which Israel reportedly opened in early March 2024.[30]

PIJ conducted an indirect fire attack from the Gaza Strip targeting Kissufim in southern Israel on March 27.[31] The IDF acknowledged that the rocket fell in an open area.[32] The IDF Air Force struck the area from which the Palestinian fighters launched the rockets and killed those responsible.

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

West Bank

Axis of Resistance campaign objectives:

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

Israeli forces have engaged Palestinian fighters in at least nine locations in the West Bank since CTP-ISW's last data cutoff on March 26.[33]

The IDF said that it conducted a “counterterrorism” operation around Jenin on March 27, highlighting the enduring militia network that exists there.[34] The IDF conducted a drone strike during the operation, killing two Palestinian fighters.[35] Israeli forces killed a third Palestinian fighter, who threw IEDs targeting Israeli forces.[36] The IDF also said that it detained two Palestinians, who were driving a vehicle carrying “ready-to-use explosives.”[37] CTP-ISW previously assessed that PIJ and possibly other Palestinian militias have a cell in Jenin for targeting Israeli civilians outside the West Bank.[38]

An Israeli Army Radio journalist reported on March 27 that the IDF will turn the Netzah Yehuda Battalion into a maneuver infantry battalion.[39] The Netzah Yehuda Battalion is an ultra-Orthodox military unit that operates primarily in the West Bank.[40] The journalist said that the battalion will train to conduct maneuver in the Gaza Strip and Lebanon.[41] Israeli media reported that some soldiers from the Netzah Yehuda Battalion began operating in the Gaza Strip in January 2024.[42] The Israeli government must present legislation aimed at increasing recruitment among the religious community by the end of March, but it has disagreed over drafting ultra-Orthodox Israelis.[43]

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

Southern Lebanon and Golan Heights

Axis of Resistance campaign objectives:

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

Lebanese Hezbollah has conducted at least six attacks from southern Lebanon into northern Israel since CTP-ISW's last data cutoff on March 26.[44] Hezbollah fired approximately 30 rockets targeting IDF forces in Kiryat Shmona in northern Israel, killing one Israeli civilian and damaging buildings.[45]

The IDF Air Force conducted an airstrike in southern Lebanon on March 27, killing at least seven fighters associated with the military wing of a Lebanese Islamist political party Jamaa al Islamiyya .[46] The IDF and Israeli media reported that the fighters had plotted to infiltrate Shebaa Farms.[47]

Senior Hezbollah official Nawaf al Mousawi said that Hezbollah has increased the rate at which it can stockpile new weapons during an interview with Hezbollah-affiliated media on March 26.[48] Mousawi, who serves as the head of Hezbollah’s Borders and Natural Resources Department, said that the group is now capable of receiving as many weapons in a month as it previously received in six months.[49] Mousawi added that Hezbollah has created new storage facilities and has acquired more accurate missiles for ”naval, ground, and aerial use.” Israel has conducted an air campaign into Syria in recent months to disrupt Iranian efforts to transfer military materiel to Hezbollah. Mousawi also said that Israel is facing logistical challenges and would not be able to strike Lebanon or the Gaza Strip if not for US weapons shipments.[50]

The IDF approved a new training program to increase the Air Force’s readiness around northern Israel.[51] The IDF said that the Air Force has conducted military training exercises over recent weeks.[52] The exercises include "massive, long-range strikes, flights deep in enemy territory, decision-making in war conditions. . . and surprise exercises will be held for the various units."[53] The IDF said that the training will not interrupt the Air Forces’ operations in the Gaza Strip or other areas.

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

Iran and Axis of Resistance

Axis of Resistance campaign objectives:

• Demonstrate the capability and willingness of Iran and the Axis of Resistance to escalate against the United States and Israel on multiple fronts
• Set conditions to fight a regional war on multiple fronts

Iranian-backed Iraqi militia Faylaq al Waad al Sadiq claimed on March 26 that unidentified actors conducted a drone attack targeting US forces at Conoco Mission Support Site in eastern Syria.[54] The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights similarly reported that US forces intercepted a drone in the area on March 26.[55] CTP-ISW cannot verify whether any attack occurred, however.

Iran and its Axis of Resistance remains committed to expelling the United States from the Middle East—by force is necessary—regardless of whether the reported attack on March 26 occurred. CTP-ISW has previously warned that the current lull in Iranian-backed Iraqi militia attacks does not indicate a change in the long-term Iranian and Iranian-backed effort to force the United States from the region.[56] Iranian-backed Iraqi militias retain the capability to resume attacks targeting US forces at any time and for any reason of their choosing.

Faylaq al Waad al Sadiq Secretary General Mohammad al Tamimi threatened during a Newsweek interview published on March 27 to resume attacks targeting US forces if they do not leave Iraq.[57]Tamimi threatened that Faylaq al Waad al Sadiq will target and kill US service members “if an agreement is not achieved” between Baghdad and Washington. Tamimi was referring to ongoing discussions between the United States and Iraq to transition to a bilateral security partnership.[58]  Faylaq al Waad al Sadiq has reported ties to Iranian-backed Iraqi militias Asaib Ahl al Haq and Harakat Hezbollah al Nujaba.[59] Faylaq al Waad al Sadiq also proclaims to adhere to Velayat-e Faqih, which is a core tenet of Iranian governance that enshrines the position of a senior cleric at the head of the regime.[60]

The Islamic Resistance in Iraq—a coalition of Iranian-backed Iraqi militias—claimed two attacks targeting Israeli military infrastructure on March 26.[61] The group claimed to target the Sapir military facility on the Sea of Galilee, northern Israel, with one-way attack drones and Ovda Airbase in Eilat, southern Israel, with unspecified munitions. CTP-ISW has previously observed that the Islamic Resistance in Iraq has transitioned to conducting regular attacks targeting Israel in March 2024 rather than US forces in Iraq and Syria.[62] The group has not claimed any attacks targeting US forces since February 4.[63]

US Department of Defense Deputy Press Secretary Sabrina Singh confirmed that the United States was not responsible for a series of airstrikes on March 25 that targeted Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) and IRGC-affiliated positions in eastern Syria.[64] CTP-ISW previously noted that Israel was likely responsible for the strike.[65]

Senior IRGC Quds Force officer Brig. Gen. Abdol Reza Shahlai directed the initial Houthi attacks targeting vessels around the Gulf of Aden and Red Sea in October 2023, according to Bloomberg, further underscoring the Iranian role in these attacks.[66] Bloomberg cited informed sources. Shahlai’s involvement reflects the prominent role that Iran has had in directing and supporting the Houthi attack campaign targeting commercial and military vessels off the coast of Yemen. CTP-ISW has previously noted the Iranian role in providing targeting intelligence to the Houthis.[67]

Shahlai is the seniormost IRGC Quds Force responsible for the Yemen portfolio but also has an extensive background coordinating other clandestine Iranian activities globally.[68] Shahlai has helped arm and fund Iranian-backed Iraqi militias and supported their attacks targeting US and coalition forces in Iraq. Shahlai planned, for instance, an attack that killed five US services members and wounded three others in Karbala in 2007.[69] He also directed and funded the attempted assassination of the Saudi Arabian ambassador to the United States in Washington, DC, in 2011.[70] The United States attempted to kill Shahlai the same evening as the US airstrike that killed IRGC Quds Force Commander Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani in January 2020.[71] The US Treasury Department designated Shahlai as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist in 2011.[72]

Senior Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) leaders continued their visit to Tehran on March 27. Hamas Political Bureau Chairman Ismail Haniyeh and PIJ Secretary General Ziyad al Nakhalah separately traveled to Tehran on March 26.[73] Haniyeh met with Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and Foreign Affairs Minister Hossein Amir Abdollahian on March 26.[74] Haniyeh also presented a report on “current events and prospects” in the Gaza Strip during a meeting with Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi on March 27.[75] The Hamas readout of Haniyeh and Raisi’s meeting noted that the two officials discussed the "conditions” facing Palestinians in Jerusalem and the West Bank.[76] Haniyeh’s visit to Tehran marks his second trip to Iran since the Israel-Hamas war began.[77]

Iranian media has notably published no reports about meetings between Nakhalah and Iranian officials. Nakhalah has almost certainly engaged Iranian officials since arriving in Tehran or will do so before he leaves. The lack of relevant media coverage is bizarre, especially given the opportunity for the Iranian regime to broadcast publicly its support for the Palestinian militias by having state media cover Nakhalah’s visit. The media silence could indicate that Nakhalah is holding meetings with officials that the Iranian regime does not wish to publicize.

IRGC Ground Forces Commander Brig. Gen. Mohammad Pak Pour visited IRGC Ground Forces units in southeastern Iran on March 27.[78] It is unclear which units Pak Pour visited, although the IRGC Ground Forces has at least four brigades in the southeastern region.[79] Pak Pour’s visit comes amid an uptick in anti-regime militancy in southeastern Iran since December 2023. Jaish al Adl—a Balochi, Salafi-jihadi group operating around the Iran-Pakistan border—has conducted at least five attacks targeting Iranian security personnel since December 2023.[80] The Afghan branch of the Islamic State separately conducted a terrorist attack in Kerman Province in early January 2024, killing over 90 individuals.[81]

6. Ukraine Takes the War to Russia’s Oil Refineries

Ukraine Takes the War to Russia’s Oil Refineries

Kyiv aims to do with explosives what two years of Western sanctions haven’t yet managed.

By Keith Johnson, a reporter at Foreign Policy covering geoeconomics and energy.

Foreign Policy · by Keith Johnson

• Geopolitics
• Russia
• Ukraine

March 27, 2024, 3:37 PM

In recent weeks, Ukraine has found a way to overcome a lack of aid and a dearth of ammunition, using long-range drones to strike oil industry assets deep inside Russia. The attacks on Russian oil refineries—which number at least a dozen so far, including some very long-range strikes—have damaged Russia’s ability to process and refine its huge output of crude oil, dealing a small but meaningful blow to a Russian energy sector that has so far weathered the war and Western sanctions in surprisingly good shape.

The campaign, which has been tacitly acknowledged by Ukrainian security services and officials, is meant to strike at both the economic and logistic sinews of Russia’s war effort, which is still grinding its way through the third year of its invasion of Ukraine. (Ukrainian drones have also targeted Russian defense production plants.)

“These attacks are on a major source for the Russian budget, and that budget is being spent on military equipment,” said James Henderson, an expert on the Russian energy sector at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies.

Moscow gets about 40 percent of its federal budget from the export of crude oil and refined products (and that share is even bigger when converted into Russian rubles), making the sector a key part of the Kremlin’s ability to increase defense spending, rebuild its shattered armies, and purchase huge amounts of foreign-made weaponry to use against Ukraine. Russian refineries also churn out millions of barrels a day of products such as diesel and aviation fuel, which are needed for Russia’s perpetually logistics-constrained armed forces.

The Ukrainian strikes so far, which have damaged numerous refineries and started several fires, have knocked out anywhere between 400,000 and 900,000 barrels a day of refining capacity, according to estimates from energy experts and defense officials. Russia has an installed refining capacity—not all of which it uses—of about 6 million barrels a day, and refineries processing more than 2 million barrels a day have been targeted by Ukrainian strikes, some that did superficial damage and some that did more, in recent months.

While the impact of the Ukrainian attacks has varied from refinery to refinery, they present two big problems for Moscow. First, the continued attacks will further stretch Russia’s limited air defenses across even farther-flung bits of its sprawling territory. Second, due to years of Western sanctions, repairs to more advanced refinery components could be much trickier than in normal circumstances, which could affect Russia’s ability to churn out higher-value petroleum products, such as high-octane fuels.

“The higher-quality products are the ones that are going to be at higher risk,” Henderson said.

The Ukrainian onslaught has consequences that reach beyond the Kremlin. Moscow has retaliated with its own bombing campaign, a reprise of previous years’ efforts to destroy Ukraine’s energy infrastructure. Russian missiles struck power supply facilities all over Ukraine last week in what appeared to be the biggest attack yet on Ukraine’s ability to keep the lights on. That’s especially problematic since Ukraine is running low on air defense ammunition needed to protect large cities and power plants, and the big U.S. aid package remains captive in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives.

The strikes are also rippling into trading rooms in New York and London. Global oil prices have stayed above $80 a barrel over concerns of an escalation of Ukrainian attacks that could inflict further damage on one of the world’s biggest oil producers and exporters. That’s one reason why the Biden administration, facing a fall election, seems nervous about the Ukrainian drone campaign.

U.S. officials reportedly asked Ukraine to limit strikes on Russian oil facilities that could lead to higher prices, though Kyiv has made clear that its campaign will continue. Unlike U.S.-delivered long-range weapons, the drones used for the oil industry assaults are Ukrainian and don’t carry Western restrictions. A White House spokesperson declined to comment directly on reports that it asked Ukraine to abstain from such attacks, but White House national security spokesperson John Kirby reiterated that “we do not encourage or enable the Ukrainian military to conduct strikes inside Russia.”

Since the start of the war, the Biden administration has been leery of squeezing Russia’s energy golden goose too hard, lest it spike global energy prices. The embargo on Russian oil exports was only gradually phased in, and a price cap on Russian crude meant to limit Moscow’s energy earnings has proved disappointing.

What’s more, until recently, Russia was able to use a fleet of shadow oil tankers—vessels that circumvent normal shipping rules such as insurance and identification—to bypass Western restrictions on shipping its crude by sea. All of that has meant that the prewar level of Russian oil exports has been basically unaffected by sanctions and embargoes. But a growing crackdown on shadow tankers, coupled with further Ukrainian strikes, could make for a tighter oil market in months to come, said ClearView Energy Partners, an energy consultancy.

But that’s not Ukraine’s concern. Rather, Kyiv figures that if Russia has trouble processing its crude, it may be forced to pump less. Indeed, Russia this week announced that it will cut oil output to comply with informal production quotas agreed with OPEC+; some energy experts believe Moscow has little choice given the carnage in its downstream facilities.

But there’s another risk, Henderson warned. Just as the United States and other Western countries have gotten more rigorous at cracking down on Russia’s evasion of oil export bans, Moscow may have an incentive to just export more of its unrefined crude. If it does so, it will mean a return to steep discounts on Russian oil as compared with global benchmarks, which will give shippers and third countries reason to get creative yet again at sidestepping sanctions.

Foreign Policy · by Keith Johnson

7. Putin is "losing control" in Russia: Dictator expert

Excerpts:

Roger Boyes, who has written books about how Adolf Hitler rose to and maintained power, started an op-ed in The Times of London by asking if dictators keep their citizens safer than democracies do.

...

His piece referred to the Cold War, suggesting that Putin's political survival was built on being "more protective of the motherland" than the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, as well as a "steadier hand" than his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin.

​...

"One thing is for sure—ordinary Russians who imagined ten days ago they were voting for a trusted leader now feel scared about the future," Boyes said.

​...

Kevin Riehle, author of The Russian FSB: A Concise History of the Federal Security Service, told Newsweek that Moscow ignoring such significant counter-terrorism intelligence "bodes poorly for Russian security in the future.

"Putin's response is to show toughness, to show that the perpetrators will be punished," said Riehle, lecturer in intelligence and security studies at London's Brunel University. "It allows him to claim that he is on the side of the Russian people, even though the attack itself was the result of an FSB failure."

Putin is "losing control" in Russia: Dictator expert

Newsweek · by Brendan Cole · March 27, 2024

BySenior News Reporter

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The terrorist attack at a Moscow concert hall exposed Russian President Vladimir Putin's image as the "great protector" of his country and showed how he is "losing control," according to a British journalist and author who has written about the dictatorship of Nazi Germany.

Roger Boyes, who has written books about how Adolf Hitler rose to and maintained power, started an op-ed in The Times of London by asking if dictators keep their citizens safer than democracies do.

Co-author of Surviving Hitler: Corruption and Compromise in the Third Reich and Seduced by Hitler, Boyes was the newspaper's Eastern Europe correspondent based in Warsaw, Poland, where he covered the Solidarity revolution and the imposition of martial law.

His piece referred to the Cold War, suggesting that Putin's political survival was built on being "more protective of the motherland" than the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, as well as a "steadier hand" than his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin.

Russian President Vladimir Putin attends the ceremony of State Awards for Youth Culture Professionals on March 26 in Moscow. Putin has claimed that terror attacks on Moscow's Crocus Hall, which killed 140 people, had Western... Russian President Vladimir Putin attends the ceremony of State Awards for Youth Culture Professionals on March 26 in Moscow. Putin has claimed that terror attacks on Moscow's Crocus Hall, which killed 140 people, had Western involvement. Getty Images

Despite the war he started in Ukraine with the February 24, 2022, invasion, "Russian towns have by and large been sheltered from the nastiness. He was the Great Protector." However, in Boyes' view, he was "no longer."

This is because the attack on Crocus City Hall on Friday "exposed at once the shakiness of his claim to be Russia's sword and shield, the unpreparedness of the security apparat for a new threat and the low credibility of the regime's war rhetoric."

"The sequencing of events charts how Putin is losing control of the narrative," said Boyes, who noted the death of Putin's most prominent opponent, Alexei Navalny, on February 16 and then his rejection of U.S. intelligence hinting at an imminent Islamic State attack on crowded public spaces.

"One thing is for sure—ordinary Russians who imagined ten days ago they were voting for a trusted leader now feel scared about the future," Boyes said.

Russia's Federal Security Service, the FSB, said it arrested 11 people, including four suspected gunmen identified as Tajik nationals, who appeared in a Moscow court on Sunday on terrorism charges, showing signs of beatings.

Russian officials have insisted that Ukraine and the West had a role, which Kyiv and the U.S. vehemently deny.

But Boyes said that Putin's propagandists had "overreached" in trying to link Kyiv to Islamic State and are now "talking vaguely about western puppet-masters."

"That's when you know a narrative has failed," said Boyes, who noted one scenario could be that Putin might use the attack to pivot away from the war in Ukraine and freeze the conflict while focusing on a more general war against terror.

The crisis could also mean that "Putin is already losing control, that he has allowed internal feuds within the swollen intelligence establishment to get out of hand."

'Bodes poorly for Russian security'

The death toll in the attack climbed to 140 on Wednesday after another victim died in a hospital, Russian officials said, according to the Associated Press.

Islamic State affiliate ISIS-K has claimed responsibility for the attack and social media channels linked to the militant group's videos of the gunmen committing the mass killing.

But FSB chief Alexander Bortnikov alleged Western spy agencies were involved and repeated Putin's claim that the gunmen were trying to escape to Ukraine when were arrested.

However, that was contradicted by authoritarian Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, who said the suspects were headed for Ukraine because they feared tight controls on the Belarus border.

Kevin Riehle, author of The Russian FSB: A Concise History of the Federal Security Service, told Newsweek that Moscow ignoring such significant counter-terrorism intelligence "bodes poorly for Russian security in the future.

"Putin's response is to show toughness, to show that the perpetrators will be punished," said Riehle, lecturer in intelligence and security studies at London's Brunel University. "It allows him to claim that he is on the side of the Russian people, even though the attack itself was the result of an FSB failure."

Riehle believes the FSB is likely to manufacture some "evidence" of Ukrainian and Western involvement in the attack.

"That will likely lead to further violent attacks on Ukrainian civilian infrastructure," he said. "It may also lead to provocative military actions against NATO countries, without full-scale escalation."

Newsweek has contacted the Kremlin for comment.

About the writer

Brendan Cole

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Brendan Cole is a Newsweek Senior News Reporter based in London, UK. His focus is Russia and Ukraine, in particular the war started by Moscow. He also covers other areas of geopolitics including China.

Brendan joined Newsweek in 2018 from the International Business Times and well as English, knows Russian and French.

You can get in touch with Brendan by emailing [email protected] or follow on him on his X account @brendanmarkcole.

Brendan Cole is a Newsweek Senior News Reporter based in London, UK. His focus is Russia and Ukraine, in particular ...

To read how Newsweek uses AI as a newsroom tool, Click here.

Newsweek · by Brendan Cole · March 27, 2024

8. Gigantic Ships Are a Danger—and a Lifeline

Excerpts:

And as the Dali has taught the world, accommodating large vessels is not just about ports. They traverse oceans, sail under bridges, and sail through canals. Imagine if the Ever Given or another ULCV were to strike a bridge. Even a sturdier bridge than the Key Bridge (which received a rating of “fair” during its most recent federal inspection) would struggle to withstand such a blow.

Such calamities happen very rarely. It would be extraordinarily expensive for cities and countries to strengthen bridges and other infrastructure that a massive container ship might hit. . The Dali’s crew and pilots appear to have tried their hardest to steer the ship away from the Key Bridge when the power supply failed, and they issued a mayday call to alert authorities to the fact that the ship was approaching the bridge. This, though, is unlikely to be the last time that machines fail man.

Even as ships get bigger and bigger, with more and more sophisticated technology, the human brain and hands are an indispensable backup. Giving crews a few more tools with which to manually counteract technology may be the best way of avoiding another Key Bridge disaster.

Shipping—an industry that involves ratings, officers, stevedores, crane operators, ship managers, insurers, and many others—goes on delivering your favorite consumer goods around the clock. It remains a miracle that mishaps involving their floating fortresses occur so rarely.

Gigantic Ships Are a Danger—and a Lifeline

The vessel that hit Baltimore’s Key Bridge is more than three times as large as its biggest counterparts 50 years ago.

Braw-Elisabeth-foreign-policy-columnist3

Elisabeth Braw

By Elisabeth Braw, a columnist at Foreign Policy and a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council.

Foreign Policy · by Elisabeth Braw

• Economics
• United States
• Elisabeth Braw

March 27, 2024, 4:59 PM

Out of sight, out of mind. That’s the fate of global shipping, even though all of us depend on it for our daily supplies. Everything from bananas to toilet paper to iPhones travels by sea at some point. But we only pay attention when something goes wrong, whether that happens in the Red Sea, the Suez Canal—or underneath what used to be Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge. This week’s accident, which occurred when the container ship Dali lost power and headed straight into a support pillar, has delivered a reminder of the sheer overlooked scale of the shipping industry—and how unprepared many systems are to handle it.

Out of sight, out of mind. That’s the fate of global shipping, even though all of us depend on it for our daily supplies. Everything from bananas to toilet paper to iPhones travels by sea at some point. But we only pay attention when something goes wrong, whether that happens in the Red Sea, the Suez Canal—or underneath what used to be Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge. This week’s accident, which occurred when the container ship Dali lost power and headed straight into a support pillar, has delivered a reminder of the sheer overlooked scale of the shipping industry—and how unprepared many systems are to handle it.

Part of this is the massive size of today’s container vessels themselves. A few minutes before 1:30 a.m. on March 26, the Singapore-flagged container Dali issued a mayday call, which allowed construction workers on the Key Bridge to get a few cars to turn around. Down below, the Dali appeared to have engine problems; camera footage shows its lights flickering before smoke emerges and it hits the support pillar. Within seconds, the bridge collapses into the water. Some of it collapses onto the Dali, too, and with the bridge, cars plunge into the water. At the time of writing, six people are unaccounted for and presumed dead.

Now lots of ordinary citizens around the world are discovering marine websites such as vesselfinder.com and marinetraffic.com, which track merchant vessels. They will have learned that the Dali has a gross tonnage of 95,128 tons, a summer deadweight of 116,851 tons, and that it’s 300 meters (nearly 1,000 feet) long.

When it struck the Key Bridge, the Dali had 4,679 TEU (20-foot-long shipping containers) onboard and was crewed by 22 Indian seafarers, who had been joined by two pilots from Baltimore. Merchant vessels are predominantly crewed by relatively tiny staffs that are usually made up of people from India, the Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam, Russia, and Eastern European countries. Indeed, it has been decades since it was common for Western Europeans and Americans to go to sea. Today’s seafarers are skilled, but they do hard and lonely work with long absences from home—and when disaster strikes, shipping can be extremely dangerous. Earlier this month, a Houthi attack in the Red Sea cost the lives of three seafarers—two Filipinos and one Vietnamese.

All this is in service of the goods that make our lives so convenient—and which require a vast and largely invisible ocean network to support.

Just consider the arrivals, off-loading, loading, and departures at the Port of Rotterdam, which is merely the world’s 10-busiest container port. Last year, Rotterdam handled 13.4 million TEU at its 14 terminals. That’s 36,712 TEU every day of the year. In the afternoon on March 26, 149 ocean-going ships were docked in Rotterdam, where cargo containers were being offloaded and new ones added. Another 132 were about to arrive, and another 161 had just departed. The expected arrivals included the Ever Living, a sister to the ill-fated Ever Given, of Suez Canal fame.

At a length of 335 meters (nearly 1,100 feet), width of 45 meters (145 feet), and with a deadweight of 104,653 tons, the Ever Living is almost as massive as the Ever Given. But only almost. With a capacity of nearly 10,000 TEU, it’s very similar to the Dali. The Ever Given, by contrast, has a capacity of just over 20,000 TEU, and it’s not even one of the world’s largest container ships.

Indeed, these days, the world’s fleet of ultra-large container vessels (ULCVs)—vessels of more than 14,500 TEU capacity—features a growing number of beasts that can transport 23,000 TEU and more. The MSC Irina, for example, can carry an astounding 24,346 TEU. Today, in fact, the Dali’s capacity of 10,000 makes it a midsize box ship. Compare that to container ships in 1972, when construction began on the Key Bridge: Back then, the largest container ship in the world had a capacity of a mere 2,984 TEU.

The shipping industry keeps making things more efficient—and thus more cost-effective and more attractive. It’s thanks to shipping that it has made so much sense to build a globalized economy: It’s so cheap to ship goods globally that people in wealthy nations can have them made elsewhere, transported across a few oceans, and still pay less than if they were made at home.

But the massive ships come with equally massive logistical demands. Ports have to be expanded to be able to receive and service them. The port service, for example, involves higher cranes with a wider reach: just imagine 24,000 containers stacked upward and sideways. The ports also need larger storage facilities to hold such vessels’ cargo until it’s picked up by trucks. The financial picture involving ULCVs is clear on the vessel-owner side, because buying a ULCV eventually pays off.

Ports are usually public-private partnerships, which means that investment often involves the taxpayer. The Port of Virginia in Norfolk, which the Dali had left just before its ill-fated call at the Port of Baltimore, has just allocated $1.4 billion to widen the port to make it accessible for two-way ULCV traffic. Norfolk is also currently being dredged to the tune of $450 million, after which it’s expected to have the deepest and widest channels on the east coast of the United States.

“This is a true advantage for anyone delivering to or from America,” said Stephen A. Edwards, the CEO and executive director of the Virginia Port Authority, in an interview with World Cargo News. “Our wider channel sets The Port of Virginia apart by allowing for consistent vessel flow, increasing berth and container yard efficiencies, and further improving harbor safety.” It’s a competitive marketplace, and lots of Chinese ports are already set up for ULCVs. Ports and countries that can’t afford ULCV-worthy expansion are out of luck.

And as the Dali has taught the world, accommodating large vessels is not just about ports. They traverse oceans, sail under bridges, and sail through canals. Imagine if the Ever Given or another ULCV were to strike a bridge. Even a sturdier bridge than the Key Bridge (which received a rating of “fair” during its most recent federal inspection) would struggle to withstand such a blow.

Such calamities happen very rarely. It would be extraordinarily expensive for cities and countries to strengthen bridges and other infrastructure that a massive container ship might hit. . The Dali’s crew and pilots appear to have tried their hardest to steer the ship away from the Key Bridge when the power supply failed, and they issued a mayday call to alert authorities to the fact that the ship was approaching the bridge. This, though, is unlikely to be the last time that machines fail man.

Even as ships get bigger and bigger, with more and more sophisticated technology, the human brain and hands are an indispensable backup. Giving crews a few more tools with which to manually counteract technology may be the best way of avoiding another Key Bridge disaster.

Shipping—an industry that involves ratings, officers, stevedores, crane operators, ship managers, insurers, and many others—goes on delivering your favorite consumer goods around the clock. It remains a miracle that mishaps involving their floating fortresses occur so rarely.

Foreign Policy · by Elisabeth Braw

9. To Thwart Iran, Fight a War of Attrition

Attrition? How about a war of exhaustion?

Also, please stop ceding the word "resistance" to the malign actors. They should not be allowed to claim the use of that honorable word (that should be used exclusively for those who resist oppression). We should talk about the Axis of authoritarians, dictators, or totalitarians and not legitimize them with the word resistance.

​Excerpts:

Since neither the U.S. nor Israel can fight its preferred style of war in the Middle East today, both find it extraordinarily difficult to respond to Iranian actions. Strategy, however, is about placing one’s strengths against the enemy’s weaknesses. This can be done in an attrition campaign.

Iran’s strengths are its size and the support its proxies provide, which allow it to maintain pressure on the U.S. and Israel, absorb damage over time, and keep the fight away from its borders while threatening Israeli territory. Israel’s strength is its conscript army, which can execute operations beyond its borders. America’s strength is air and naval power, excellent reconnaissance, and the ability to hit targets almost anywhere in the region.

Israel and the U.S. need to put Iran’s strengths at risk. Their most effective approach is to jeopardize the Axis of Resistance, replacing it with actual direct Iranian control over the Levantine powers it employs as legal shields. The Axis’ greatest benefit is that it provides the power of an imperial entity with very little of the cost. While Lebanon’s Hezbollah handles essential governing tasks in the country’s south, no Axis member formally controls a state. Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen all exist as legal entities. Thus, they are responsible for the basic, costly tasks of civil administration, such as providing public services, setting economic and social policy, and maintaining public finance.

To Thwart Iran, Fight a War of Attrition

Israel and the U.S. should focus their strengths on Tehran’s weaknesses by jeopardizing its proxies.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/to-thwart-iran-fight-a-war-of-attrition-mideast-israel-and-us-need-new-strategy-ad0475ce?mod=commentary_article_pos2

By Seth Cropsey

March 27, 2024 5:28 pm ET

ILLUSTRATION: DAVID KLEIN

The tensions between Jerusalem and Washington demonstrate that neither understands the situation. Israel needs to learn to fight an attrition war against a much larger adversary, Iran. The U.S. must accept the strategic requirements of its regional partner, despite the politically driven drivel offered by President Biden, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, and a Congress that refuses to act. Failure to grasp the conflict’s fundamentals will lead to bad policy and, ultimately, calamity.

Iran’s objectives are expansive: the elimination of American regional power and the destruction of Israel to clear the path for the Islamic Revolution’s ascendance throughout the Muslim world. Its means, however, are relatively limited. Iran lacks the high-tech weapons to take on the U.S. and Israel directly. The Axis of Resistance—its proxy alliance, spanning the Levant and Yemen—lacks the cohesion or capability to conquer Israel.

Iran’s strategy is long-term attrition. It hopes to keep the U.S. and Israel under continuous military stress through Hamas pressure in Gaza and Houthi attacks on international shipping. Iran patiently accumulates operational advantages by building up forces in Syria and Lebanon, squeezing Jordan, and driving the U.S. from its handful of Levantine bases. A key is the al-Tanf complex in Syria, which constrains Iranian logistics and helps shield Jordan from Iranian pressure and smuggling. By creating interlocking strategic dilemmas, Tehran can make it impossible for Jerusalem or Washington to resolve the confrontation with a brief high-intensity operation akin to the 1967 war or the 2003 Iraq war. Iran hopes to compel Israel and the U.S. to turn on each other, leaving both isolated and vulnerable.

Countering Iran will require tolerating more risk. Yet even American willingness to hit back against Iranian harassment of U.S. bases wouldn’t yield a swift and straightforward result. Iran would counter, leading to an extended conflict. An extended conflict is all but guaranteed at this point. Large-scale airstrikes on Iranian territory would impose some cost on Tehran but wouldn’t destroy its operational capacity. A ground invasion is out of the question for strategic and political reasons. The only remaining option, beyond capitulation, is a long-term campaign that undermines Iranian power projection and destabilizes the Iranian state.

This reality explains the trouble Israeli and American strategists have had in responding to Iranian actions. For the campaign outlined above is unmistakably one of attrition.

Attrition is a dirty word in American and Israeli strategic circles. In America, it evokes the Western Front’s brutal stalemate from 1914 to 1918, during which millions were sent to their deaths, and tens of thousands wounded and crippled, for no territorial gains. It also connotes the Vietnam War, when a “body count” approach to measuring battlefield progress failed to defeat the North Vietnamese. American military thought emphasizes “combined-arms maneuver”—the synergistic employment of combined arms, air power, and other elements to collapse the enemy system, as best employed during Desert Storm and Iraqi Freedom.

But most American wars have been won through “attrition” broadly construed—that is, the cumulative effect of pressure applied over time and in many contexts. The North African, Sicilian and Italian campaigns that preceded the invasion of Normandy are examples. The U.S. has seldom fought wars it can win with a single maneuver campaign, making attrition a coherent strategy.

Israeli military thinking avoids attrition for different reasons. An attrition war implies a long one, in which rivals try to outlast each other. Israel’s greatest strength is its whole-of-society commitment to survival, which has produced a mass-mobilization conscript army better trained and with higher morale than almost any comparable force in the world. Israeli society’s relative size compared with that of its adversaries is its greatest weakness. Among its immediate neighbors, only Lebanon is smaller. Hence rather than pitting its small but committed society against a larger adversary in a protracted contest, Israel favors rapid campaigns waged offensively, meaning in enemy territory.

Since neither the U.S. nor Israel can fight its preferred style of war in the Middle East today, both find it extraordinarily difficult to respond to Iranian actions. Strategy, however, is about placing one’s strengths against the enemy’s weaknesses. This can be done in an attrition campaign.

Iran’s strengths are its size and the support its proxies provide, which allow it to maintain pressure on the U.S. and Israel, absorb damage over time, and keep the fight away from its borders while threatening Israeli territory. Israel’s strength is its conscript army, which can execute operations beyond its borders. America’s strength is air and naval power, excellent reconnaissance, and the ability to hit targets almost anywhere in the region.

Israel and the U.S. need to put Iran’s strengths at risk. Their most effective approach is to jeopardize the Axis of Resistance, replacing it with actual direct Iranian control over the Levantine powers it employs as legal shields. The Axis’ greatest benefit is that it provides the power of an imperial entity with very little of the cost. While Lebanon’s Hezbollah handles essential governing tasks in the country’s south, no Axis member formally controls a state. Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen all exist as legal entities. Thus, they are responsible for the basic, costly tasks of civil administration, such as providing public services, setting economic and social policy, and maintaining public finance.

Iran provides financial backing to its Axis partners, and in Syria and Lebanon to the states themselves. But Tehran still outsources the burden of actual governance to these states, which increasingly lack control over their territory and exist primarily to reduce Iran’s direct burden and maintain the fiction of sovereign independence.

Israel and the U.S. have the tools to strike Iranian military capacity in Syria and Lebanon. This is the operational decisive point of Iran’s campaign—not Gaza and Yemen, despite the public focus on Hamas and the Houthis. The U.S. and Israel can rapidly degrade state capacity in Lebanon and Syria, forcing Iran to assume direct control of both territories, or to shrink its defense perimeter to Iraq, thereby essentially abandoning its ability to pressure Israel and the U.S. in the short term.

Winning the Middle Eastern war means ending Iran’s existence as a regional threat. It requires accepting the current conflict’s fundamentals—specifically, understanding that attrition is the only coherent paradigm to apply. The risk is that absent a real grasp of the challenge they face, Israel and the U.S. will talk past—and at—each other, while both fail to develop an effective strategy.

Mr. Cropsey is president of the Yorktown Institute. He served as a naval officer and as deputy undersecretary of the Navy and is author of “Mayday” and “Seablindness.”

10. An America at Risk

 A good question: plans, policy, and strategy. Do either have these?

Excerpt:

We are in a cold war with four traditional nation-states—China, Russia, Iran and North Korea. Simultaneously the world—which alas includes the U.S. mainland—is beset almost weekly by “challenges that surpass the boundaries of traditional nation-states.”

Note that Korea always comes in last (just showing my bias).

An America at Risk

Biden and Trump know the details of the nation’s security threat. Does either have a plan to meet it?

https://www.wsj.com/articles/an-america-at-risk-biden-trump-do-either-have-plan-to-meet-threat-cc08a55f?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=1

By Daniel Henninger

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March 27, 2024 5:26 pm ET

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Wonder Land: Joe Biden and Donald Trump know the details of the nation’s security threat. Does either have a plan to meet it? Images: AP/Reuters Composite: Mark Kelly

Catastrophic failures of national-security intelligence keep happening.

Friday’s attack on Crocus City Hall near Moscow by Islamic State, with some 130 killed, was an intelligence failure.

Hamas’s Oct. 7 rampage, pitching Israel into a war of survival, was an intelligence failure.

Sept. 11 was an infamous intelligence failure.

The first two events sit starkly before the world. But 9/11 no longer does.

With its nearly 3,000 American deaths, “9/11” became shorthand for an attack that happened more than 22 years ago, in 2001. For most of the people we call “younger voters,” the event called 9/11 is a wholly historical event, not one they experienced.

It seems reasonable to ask: Will the U.S. wait for another 9/11 attack before doing what is necessary to avoid or deter it? The unhappy answer is that because U.S. politics has turned inward and memories are short, America likely will be unprepared for another internal catastrophe.

The 9/11 Commission’s examination of the attack’s causes found that insular U.S. security agencies were poor at sharing relevant information. In its conclusion, the commission said: “As presently configured, the national security institutions of the U.S. government are still the institutions constructed to win the Cold War. The United States confronts a very different world today. Instead of facing a few very dangerous adversaries, the United States confronts a number of less visible challenges that surpass the boundaries of traditional nation-states and call for quick, imaginative, and agile responses.”

Can anyone seriously say we are prepared for today’s challenges, which include everything noted in that 9/11 Commission warning?

We are in a cold war with four traditional nation-states—China, Russia, Iran and North Korea. Simultaneously the world—which alas includes the U.S. mainland—is beset almost weekly by “challenges that surpass the boundaries of traditional nation-states.”

Islamic State is on the move again, after regrouping in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.

Hamas—which like ISIS adopted the tactic of posting its bloodthirsty attacks for viewing on the internet—may yet succeed, as the sitting U.S. president bends beneath pressure from anti-Israel voters in the Democratic Party. Israel this week canceled a visit to Washington after the U.S. failed to block a cease-fire resolution in the United Nations Security Council.

Since November, Yemen’s Houthi tribe has fired drones and missiles, supplied by Iran, at U.S. naval vessels and commercial ships in the Red Sea, disrupting global trade.

Niger’s government has formally ended an important but deteriorating military agreement with the U.S.

READ MORE WONDER LAND

• Biden’s Budget: $7.3 Trillion!!!March 20, 2024
• The High Price of Democrats’ Anti-Trump LawfareMarch 13, 2024
• Joe Biden’s Unhappy State of the UnionMarch 6, 2024

Closer to home, the U.S. government reports that members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua are coming into the country across the southern border. One might argue that the “border” is polling high in national concerns not merely because of the migrant flow but because of U.S. overdose deaths from fentanyl made by Mexican cartels, which are amassing millions to buy weapons and political protection.

FBI Director Christopher Wray warns repeatedly of the extramilitary threat from China. On Monday, the U.S. government publicly accused China of using its hacker army to install malware in our civilian infrastructure and defense systems.

The 9/11 Commission said we have to be quick, imaginative and agile. I would add one more requirement: We need to be willing. Unless the U.S. is willing to make the political and military commitments necessary to counterbalance these multiple threats, we could get hit. An underappreciated but emerging reality: American citizens are in the strike zone everywhere—Israel, Haiti, Russia, China, Mexico.

Amid this global chaos, the U.S. political system has thrown up a 2024 presidential election pitting the hesitant, hobbled Joe Biden against an indeterminate, variable Donald Trump. The Security Council’s cease-fire resolution, with its Biden-ordered abstention, didn’t demand that Hamas release its hostages, including U.S. citizens. At the same time, Trump allies in Congress are holding up passage of military aid for Ukraine. In both instances, the message of irresolution to our enemies puts us at risk.

From the Middle East to Eastern Europe to the southern U.S. border, the world is filling with “little green men,” proxies affiliated with the four nation-states committed to winning a cold war against the world’s democracies. Two countries on that battlefield—Israel and Ukraine—are fighting and dying for the rest of us.

It’s hard to blame those in the U.S. electorate who say they don’t want to hear it. That we have problems at home, we’re tired of endless wars. If only they were tired of endless wars. They’re just getting started. Our military recruitment is dangerously down. Theirs is dangerously up.

All roads lead back to the U.S. presidential race. Mr. Biden is running around the country raising money, and Mr. Trump is sitting in courtrooms spending it.

Joe Biden is president, Donald Trump was. Both know the details of the current threat. America’s voters deserve to know what each is going to do about it.

Write [email protected].

Copyright ©2024 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

Appeared in the March 28, 2024, print edition as 'America at Risk'.

11. Burnings and beheadings: Myanmar junta escalates terror tactics against its people

Extension reporting from CNN. Photos and video at the link.

https://edition.cnn.com/2024/03/27/asia/myanmar-military-junta-civilian-attacks-intl-hnk-dst/

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'Apologize in your next life': Video shows Myanmar pro-government militia torture rebel fighters to death

05:28 - Source: CNN

Burnings and beheadings: Myanmar junta escalates terror tactics against its people

By Helen Regan, Angus Watson, Anna Coren, Su Chay and Pallabi Munsi, CNN

 14 minute read 

Warning: This story contains graphic descriptions of violence.

CNN — 

The two young men are bloodied, their feet clamped in wooden stocks.

“What is the PDF (People’s Defence Force)?” their tormentors yell. “Dogs,” they reply.

Humiliated and dehumanized, the men are hogtied and dragged across the rough ground by their thick chains.

In front of dozens of onlookers, they are strung up to a tree and a fire stoked beneath them.

As smoke rises and the flames consume them, the two men writhe and scream in agony – their final moments of unimaginable pain and horror captured on video.

Phoe Tay was 21-years-old, Thar Htaung just 20.

The two young men had left their family farms in northwest Myanmar to join a local armed resistance group following the 2021 military coup, hoping to bring peace and democracy to the Southeast Asian country, their fathers told CNN.

But they were captured during a battle against the military on November 7 last year, and taken to a nearby village, where they were tortured and killed by a pro-junta militia under the watch of Myanmar army soldiers, according to witnesses.

CNN has built a timeline of events, using accounts from more than a dozen witnesses, villagers, resistance fighters, family members and analysts, with analysis of the video and pictures from the day using open source techniques. Those accounts and analysis point to the ruling military as being responsible for the killings, in contradiction of their public denials.

Phoe Tay and Thar Htaung’s deaths are horrific, but they are not anomalies in Myanmar, where the military is waging a war of terror against civilians as it finds itself increasingly on the back foot against a nationwide armed resistance determined to oust it from power.

This split shows pictures of Phoe Tay, 21 and Thar Haung, 20. Phoe Tay and Thar Htaung's family

Those attacks have only increased since a rebel offensive launched five months ago resulted in major losses and defections for the military, multiple sources confirmed.

By waging terror tactics including burnings, beheadings, mutilations, torching villages, and through a massive aerial bombing campaign that has displaced nearly three million people, the Myanmar military is attempting to control and divide the population through a long-established doctrine of fear and brutality, witnesses and analysts say.

United Nations Human Rights Chief Volker Türk recently called the situation “a never-ending nightmare,” where “brutal acts are carried out by trained soldiers against their own people” in a “chilling disregard for human life.”

CNN has requested comment from Myanmar’s military junta spokesperson about the killings and its attacks on civilians but has not received a response. The military has repeatedly said it does not target civilians and often claims it is resistance forces that commit the violence.

Captured and burned alive

Army chief Min Aung Hlaing’s coup on February 1, 2021 deposed the democratically elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi’s party, the National League for Democracy, replacing it with a ruling military junta and plunging the country into a state of instability and violence. Suu Kyi, who was state counselor, is now serving a 27-year sentence following secretive trials.

Widespread public opposition to the military’s forcible takeover and bloody crackdown on protesters has only grown in the past three years and a nationwide armed resistance movement, which includes many of the country’s powerful ethnic rebel armies, now poses a legitimate threat to the junta.

Nestled between the Chin Hills to the west and central Myanmar’s Dry Zone to the east is the Yaw Valley.

“We knew they had no way of escaping. Although we knew they would be killed, we didn’t expect this kind of inhuman killing”

Yaw Lay

The area has been at the center of some of the fiercest fighting between the military and resistance groups, known as People’s Defence Force (PDFs).

Before dawn on November 7, Phoe Tay and Thar Htaung were part of three columns with the Yaw Defense Force (YDF) — one such civil resistance group formed in the wake of the coup — that set out to attack a hospital they believed was being used as a military weapons cache.

The hospital was in Myauk Khin Yan village, a pro-junta stronghold in Gangaw township in Magway region, “Yaw Lay,” a member of the YDF who used his nom de guerre, told CNN. Soldiers had been deployed there since 2022, he said.

But the rebels became trapped by heavy fire. As the group tried to retreat, several fighters were injured while others, including Thar Htaung and Phoe Tay, became separated, platoon commander “Ninja” told CNN, also using a nom de guerre.

Military weapons confiscated by an armed group in Loikaw, Kayah state on November 14, 2023. Myo Satt Hla Thaw/picture alliance/Getty Images

“The last time I saw, they were hunkering down 50 meters away from me,” Ninja said.

The YDF later received a message from an informant in the village saying the two men had been captured alive and warned them not to try and find them.

“We knew they had no way of escaping. Although we knew they would be killed, we didn’t expect this kind of inhuman killing,” Yaw Lay said.

That morning, local villager Zaw Zaw says he woke at his parents’ home in Myauk Khin Yan to the sound of gunfire.

Shortly after, he says, members of the pro-junta militia who controlled the village banged on his door.

“It took me about 10 days without being able to eat and sleep after seeing what happened”

Zaw Zaw

“They happily announced that one person from each house must come to see they have caught the two rebels,” said Zaw Zaw, who asked to use a pseudonym for his safety.

“When I got there, they dragged the two with their hands and legs tied back with chains from the hospital, where the junta troops are stationed. And then, they hanged them on a tree and poured gasoline and diesel on their bodies.”

Zaw Zaw said the two men “were covered with blood” with wounds on their thighs and feet.

About 100 people from the village were made to watch the burning, Zaw Zaw said.

“They were burning them alive… They were moving and screaming,” he said.

A Myanmar military jet flies overhead after bombing the quarters of Karenni Nationalities Defence Force (KNDF), in Kayah state, Myanmar on July 6, 2022. Kaung Zaw Hein/SOPA Images/LightRocket/Getty Images

Zaw Zaw said Thar Htaung and Phoe Tay begged for their lives as they were set alight. He says their executioner replied by saying “apologize in the next life.”

In the video, their charred, blackened bodies can be seen hanging in chains from the tree branch.

“It took me about 10 days without being able to eat and sleep after seeing what happened,” he said.

Following the executions, Zaw Zaw said the militia “locked down” the village and threatened to kill those who left.

The military’s culpability

Myanmar’s military junta has denied it was involved in the November 7 executions in Myauk Khin Yan, blaming “malicious media” that “mislead the international countries and people (sic.),” according to state mouthpiece Global New Light of Myanmar on February 8.

The junta acknowledged the two men in the video belonged to the resistance, but dismissed the video as “fabricated,” and accused resistance forces of posing as regional guard unit members to carry out the killings — allegations vehemently denied by the Yaw Defense Force.

The junta does confirm that an attack took place that day and that its troops, known as the Tatmadaw, were stationed in the village.

“(People’s Defence Force) terrorists attacked the security forces and regional guard unit members in Myauk Khin Yan village of Gangaw Township of Magway Region in November first week of 2023,” the statement in state media read. “They retreated with huge losses, and none of the terrorists were arrested alive.”

“It’s consistent with the doctrine of the military, which is heavily focused on fear and intimidation”

Kim Jolliffe

On March 5, the junta again denied burning the two men to death, saying in a statement, “careful examination of the video reveals that the weapons being carried by the perpetrators were never used by Tatmadaw.”

However, CNN has geolocated the video of the execution to a tree near the hospital in Myauk Khin Yan on November 7, 2023, showing the incident occurred at a time in which the regime was in full control of the village.

To do this, CNN obtained a video of their deaths — which was originally leaked to a local media outlet Khit Thit Media — and compared it to satellite imagery and other video of militia members training in the village, obtained by the Burma Affairs and Conflict Study, a local non-profit analyzing the junta’s movements in Myanmar, and shared with CNN.

Multiple villagers who spoke to CNN consistently said Myauk Khin Yan has been a militia stronghold since the 2021 coup. No resistance force has ever claimed to control the village.

CNN also spoke with four members of the Yaw Defense Force who all described the events leading up to the killing.

On November 7, initial photos of Phoe Tay and Thar Htaung in captivity were shared on pro-military Facebook pages and Telegram channels.

“There’s absolutely no reason that the military themselves wouldn’t do this. And this is entirely consistent with so much testimony over years and years,” said independent Myanmar researcher Kim Jolliffe.

“It’s consistent, not just that there are people capable of doing these things, but it’s consistent with the doctrine of the military, which is heavily focused on fear and intimidation.”

A village of horror

Myauk Khin Yan has also been the location of other gruesome killings, reportedly committed by the militia and Myanmar military based in the village.

In March 2022, a villager was chained to a vehicle by his neck and dragged around until he died, local media reported at the time.

CNN cannot independently verify these incidents, but they fit with witness descriptions of how the militia and military operate in Myauk Khin Yan.

“In that village, their mentality is as though they become heroes if they kill someone as inhumanly and cruelly as possible. Beheading and cutting off fingers and toes, including pulling out the organs from the bodies are happening in that village,” said Yaw Lay, the YDF fighter.

Armed soldiers patrol on a street in Yangon, Myanmar on November 7, 2022. Stringer/NurPhoto/Getty Images

Armed militias like the group running Myauk Khin Yan have become a useful network for the military as it fights a nationwide resistance. Known as the Pyu Saw Htee, these groups have been involved in some of the worst alleged crimes against civilians since the coup began, analysts say.

“The military is deeply involved in preparing these militia. They get military training, they get weapons, they sometimes get food, they get circles of protection and then they directly take part in joint operations alongside the military,” said Jolliffe.

Others are formed by ultra-nationalist Buddhists, members of the military’s proxy Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) and army veterans, analysts say.

The United States, United Kingdom and Canada imposed sanctions on several figures it has accused of providing training and securing arms for these militias, including Hla Swe, formerly a senior member of the USDP — whose constituency was Gangaw Township — and an ex-military official.

A man sits in front of a house that was destroyed by an air strike in Shan state, Myanmar on December 14, 2022. Mai Thomas/SOPA Images/LightRocket/Getty Images/File

Several former villagers told CNN that hundreds of people have fled Myauk Khin Yan since it became a militia stronghold after the coup began. Since the burning, that exodus has continued, they said.

Phoe Ei Thu, 17, lost her leg to a landmine while fleeing Myauk Khin Yan in early January.

Life there had gotten worse since the killing of the two men, she said, citing the militia’s tight controls on access to the village and surging cost of daily necessities.

“It’s just completely extreme… We normally see this in terrorist organizations like ISIS”

Kim Jolliffe

“We had to live under their strict restrictions. We couldn’t do anything other than live according to their command. It was very stressful,” she said.

Several people CNN spoke to from Myauk Khin Yan, who had since left, said villagers were forced to work for the army, including portering and digging trenches. Others were pressured to join the militia, they said.

“In the beginning, I felt depressed about losing a leg. But I am not depressed anymore as I could leave that place. I feel liberated and happy despite losing a leg,” Phoe Ei Thu said.

‘Punishment mode’

The military’s attacks against civilians since its coup over three years ago have been labeled as war crimes and crimes against humanity by UN investigators and multiple human rights organizations.

“The scale and the intentionality of the way that the Sit Tat, Myanmar military, does these things is just completely extreme,” said Jolliffe, the researcher. “We normally see this in terrorist organizations like ISIS.”

“When you can’t win, what you’re left with is punishment”

Richard Horsey

The junta has never enjoyed full control over Myanmar and is now facing the biggest threat to its fragile hold on power. It is losing territory, and there are reports of mass defections of soldiers, even whole battalions.

“They are angry, they are frustrated,” said Crisis Group’s Myanmar Senior Adviser Richard Horsey, adding that the military is “going into punishment mode” against civilians.

“When you can’t win, what you’re left with is punishment,” he said.

Since the coup, advocacy group Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (AAPP) has verified 186 cases of the military or its allied militia burning people to death, with 82 last year, including 12 people under 18. The youngest was 5 years old, according to AAPP.

This aerial photo taken on October 29, 2021 show smokes and fires from Thantlang, in Chin State, where buildings were destroyed by shelling from junta troops, according to local media. Stringer/AFP/Getty Images

The group has also documented 22 beheadings, and says it is still verifying more incidents of violence.

Myanmar Witness, a project from the non-profit Centre for Information Resilience that collects evidence of military abuses, says it has documented more than 400 reports of bodies being burned either before or after execution.

The group has also verified more than a dozen beheadings, but this is “very likely just the tip of the iceberg,” said project director Matt Lawrence.

In one incident in October 2022, a teacher’s severed head was impaled on a spike outside the school gates, according to Myanmar Witness.

Attacks like these in areas accessible to the junta’s ground troops fit a clear pattern, analysts say.

Troops will lay siege to a village, torching homes and destroying food sources as they move through it. Anyone left is killed or tortured, often the disabled, elderly, and other vulnerable people who cannot escape, they say.

“There are particular columns, which are being sent in, particularly to the Dry Zone, to cause mayhem,” Horsey said, referring to the central plains of Myanmar that the junta considers to be the country’s heartland. These well-armed military units of up to 120 men are inserted into an area and “run rampage,” he said.

Terror is also raining from the skies as the military has unleashed a massive aerial bombing campaign in ethnic minority areas or places where there is anti-coup resistance.

The remnants of a Catholic church that was destroyed by a military airstrike in Kayah state, Myanmar on January 26, 2023. Thierry Falise/LightRocket/Getty Images

Analysts and human rights groups say the military’s indiscriminate use of airstrikes and artillery are deliberately targeting civilian infrastructure and are not necessarily motivated by retaking territory. Instead, the aim, analysts say, is to displace populations, drive out communities, and keep areas under resistance control in a state of chaos.

“The Myanmar military is no longer a professional military. It is a criminal gang, a militant criminal gang”

Miemie Winn Byrd

“I know of only one hospital that hasn’t been bombed yet, according to our data. Others have been bombed many times and some we have had to move out and rebuild in a new place,” said Banya Khung Aung, founder and director of the Karenni Human Rights Group, in southeastern Kayah state, (also known as Karenni) where about 80% of the population has been displaced at least once.

These attacks are an attempt “to pacify the population through fear rather than through convincing them that they are a legitimate governing body,” said Lawrence, adding that such assaults appear to rise in line with increases in resistance.

Tactics not working

Junta chief Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing has not publicly condemned or even acknowledged the widespread reports of abuse of civilians by his military.

When no action is taken against the perpetrators, “those type of tactics become a part of the culture of the organization,” said Dr. Miemie Winn Byrd, a retired US Army Lt. Col. and professor at the Daniel K. Inouye Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies.

“The Myanmar military is no longer a professional military,” she said. “It is a criminal gang, a militant criminal gang.”

Soldiers from the Karenni Nationalities Defence Force (KNDF) under mortar shelling from the Myanmar army in Kayah state, Myanmar on January 28, 2023. Thierry Falise/LightRocket/Getty Images

There are signs the military’s tactic of relying on heavy weapons combined with sheer brutality is failing. Its resources are stretched and maintaining airpower is expensive, analysts say.

“You’re starting to see a lot of the airplanes become inoperable, and they have to ground them — they’re falling out of the sky,” Byrd said. “Because every time you run these things, you have to maintain them. And maintenance is expensive.”

The junta also needs manpower to replace losses and defections. Last month, it announced a mandatory conscription law for all young men and women, prompting a rush by young people to get visas out of the country or join resistance forces.

RELATED ARTICLE

‘I don’t want to kill’: Conscription law sparks fear in war-torn Myanmar

As the junta becomes more desperate, there is greater risk to civilians, analysts say, highlighting the urgency for action from the international community.

International sanctions are important, Byrd said, but far more is needed from the global community to cut off the junta’s access to jet fuel and international currency, and to stop its resupply of armaments.

Instead of dividing the people against the resistance, the junta’s extreme violence has only made much of Myanmar’s populace more determined to oust the military from power, according to analysts and people who spoke to CNN in the country.

“I come across so many people who just feel like this is the moment in the country’s history where there has to be this reckoning to try and finally remove the military. There’s also a huge amount of resilience and a huge amount of determination to see this through,” said Jolliffe, the researcher.

Phoe Tay and Thar Htaung’s families are left with anguish and memories. The fathers say they’ve been unable even to retrieve the bodies for burial.

Anti-coup fighters escort protesters as they take part in a demonstration against the military coup in Sagaing, Myanmar on September 7, 2022. Stringer/AFP/Getty Images

Thar Htaung’s father, Soe Lin Aung, 45, urged the UN to act over his son’s horrific death, and for resistance forces not to be silent but “continue this revolution.”

“I want people to remember my son as a martyr as he fought for the country,” he said.

Yaw Lay, who fought alongside Phoe Tay and Thar Htaung, said their deaths have only given him strength.

“(The military) showed how brutal and cruel they are by killing civilians. They rule the country by instilling fear in people,” he said.

“It turned to be my strength in this revolution.”

Reporting and writing:

Helen Regan, Angus Watson, Su Chay, Pallabi Munsi and Anna Coren

Open-source verification:

Gianluca Mezzofiore, Katie Polglase and Benjamin Brown

Data graphics:

Lou Robinson and Rosa de Acosta

Photo editing:

Noemi Cassanelli

12. Majority of Americans now oppose Israeli action in Gaza: Gallup poll

​Not a good sign.

Majority of Americans now oppose Israeli action in Gaza: Gallup poll

• Ivana Saric

https://www.axios.com/2024/03/27/majority-americans-disapprove-israel-gaza-poll?utm

President Biden with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Tel Aviv in October 2023. Photo: Miriam Alster/POOL/AFP via Getty Images

A majority of Americans disapprove of Israel's military actions in Gaza, in a stark shift since last fall, according to a Gallup poll released Wednesday.

Why it matters: The new findings come as Israel prepares for a controversial ground invasion of Rafah. Tensions have grown between President Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as the humanitarian toll of Israel's war has mounted.

Driving the news: 55% of Americans disapprove of Israel's military response in Gaza, a 10-percentage point increase since November, according to the new poll.

• About one in three (36%) of Americans approve of Israel's military actions in Gaza, according to the new poll.
• That's down from the aftermath of Hamas' Oct. 7 attack, when a November poll found that half of Americans approved of Israel's actions.

Zoom in: Among Republicans, the percentage who approve of Israel's actions has dropped from 71% in November to 64% in March, the poll found.

• The dip is even sharper among among Democrats. Fewer than one in five (18%) say they approve of Israel's actions. That's down from 36% in November.
• Among people who identify as independents, the approval rating has dropped from 47% to 29% in the span.

State of play: It's the latest evidence of shifting public opinion on the Israel-Hamas war.

• Half of U.S. adults believe that Israel's military response in Gaza has "gone too far," a poll published in early February found.

• More Americans support providing humanitarian aid to people in Gaza than military support to Israel, a separate survey this month showed.

The big picture: Biden has grown increasingly frustrated with Netanyahu and Israel's actions during the war.

• Earlier this week, the UN Security Council passed a resolution demanding an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and the immediate and unconditional release of all hostages.
• In another sign of the widening divide between the U.S. and Israel, the U.S. abstained from the vote, rather than use its veto. Netanyahu canceled a visit by his senior advisers to the White House afterwards.

Methodology: This poll was conducted between March 1-20, 2024 with 1,016 adults. The margin of error is +/- 4 percentage points.

13. The roots of this unofficial Nazi-inspired Army Green Beret logo

Not helpful.

I would aslk the team guys if you have no sense of history of knoweldge of the origin of this symbol, how is this a morale builder? What it is about this symbol that improves morale? Why do you need it?

The roots of this unofficial Nazi-inspired Army Green Beret logo

militarytimes.com · by Davis Winkie · March 27, 2024

The Nazi-inspired patch spotted on a Green Beret’s helmet cover in a National Guard unit’s recent social media post originated with a 3rd Special Forces Group team, Army Times has learned.

Maj. Russell Gordon, a spokesperson for the 1st Special Forces Command, confirmed that 3rd Special Forces Group elements formerly used the “unofficial” emblem, which was “banned in 2022 by 3rd Special Forces Group leadership when it was brought to their attention.” Leaders banned the logo because of “its historical use,” added Gordon, whose command oversees 3rd Group.

It’s unclear how long the patch was in use with active duty Green Berets, nor is it clear how many teams adopted it or similar imagery in their local logos.

The command previously announced an investigation into “the use of symbols and patches depicting historic images of hate,” after the 20th Special Forces Group’s official Instagram account posted a photo featuring a soldier with a patch depicting a Nazi SS Totenkopf.

The stylized skull-and-crossbones logo was the namesake of the “Totenkopf” 3rd SS Panzer Division. The Nazi high command originally assembled the formation in 1939 from concentration camp guards and SS Einsatzgruppen death squads that systematically murdered Jews in Poland. The division later went on to massacre British and French colonial prisoners of war.

A photo posted to the Instagram page of the 20th Special Forces Group shows a service member, right, with a helmet patch that appears to depict a Nazi SS Totenkopf. (Screenshot via Twitter)

In response to comments on the since-deleted Instagram post, the 20th Group page administrator said “it’s a 3rd group team patch taken out of context.”

However, an Army Special Operations Command spokesperson told Military.com that the soldier pictured is a member of the National Guard’s 20th Group, rather than 3rd Group.

Army Times could not confirm whether or when the soldier was a member of 3rd Group, nor whether he was aware of the patch’s iconographic roots. The Alabama National Guard, home to 20th Group’s headquarters, told Military Times that the state is assisting in the investigation.

On Wednesday morning, an Army Reddit user posted a photo reportedly of a Fort Liberty, North Carolina, training building’s door featuring a sticker with a similar Totenkopf logo. The logo read “ODA 3321,” indicating that the unofficial emblem belonged to a team of Green Berets in 3rd Battalion, 3rd Special Forces Group, which is headquartered at Liberty.

The team’s logo, which includes a similar SS Totenkopf to that seen in the National Guard unit photo, also incorporates the distinctive palm tree featured on the seal of the Deutches Afrikakorps. The Africa Corps fought against British and American troops in North Africa before it was cornered and destroyed in May 1943. The skull-and-crossbones, placed atop 3rd Group’s distinctive beret flash, replaces the swastika in the team’s design.

An unofficial logo of 3rd Special Forces Group's Operational Detachment-Alpha 3321 (left via Reddit), the seal of the Nazi German Afrikakorps (top right/Wikimedia Commons), and the coat of arms of the 3rd SS Panzer Division "Totenkopf." (bottom right/Wikimedia Commons)

Service members in the past have occasionally adopted Nazi imagery in their visual materials. In February, the Montana National Guard apologized for including marching Nazi soldiers in the background of recruiting posters. The Marine Corps’ top officer publicly apologized in 2012 after Marine scout snipers were photographed posing with a flag emblazoned with the Nazi SS’s lightning bolt-style flash. A Marine Corps spokesperson at the time said that an ensuing investigation found that the “SS” was intended to signify “Scout Snipers.”

But Defense Department officials have maintained that such incidents are isolated, and that the troops involved in such scandals are largely unaware of the images’ ideological and historical context.

A Pentagon-commissioned research study released in late December “found no evidence that the number of violent extremists in the military is disproportionate to the number of violent extremists in the United States.”

Yet the military’s efforts to root out extremism, launched in the wake of the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, faced criticism from both the political left as a performative box-checking effort and from the political right as a purported witch hunt against conservative troops.

About Davis Winkie

Davis Winkie covers the Army for Military Times. He studied history at Vanderbilt and UNC-Chapel Hill, and served five years in the Army Guard. His investigations earned the Society of Professional Journalists' 2023 Sunshine Award and consecutive Military Reporters and Editors honors, among others. Davis was also a 2022 Livingston Awards finalist.

14. 17 Books Every Service Member Should Read, According to Troops and Veterans

An interesting list.

17 Books Every Service Member Should Read, According to Troops and Veterans

military.com · by Joanna Guldin · March 27, 2024

As an Amazon Associate, Military.com earns from qualifying purchases.

The military community is awash in book suggestions -- from branch-specific reading lists to those focused on personal and professional development. So we set out to create an essential reading list by surveying the folks who have experienced the impact and importance of a really good book on their service: our Military.com readers.

Hundreds of U.S. service members and veterans responded to our informal survey with their (sometimes very strong) opinions. Their choices emphatically highlighted the books that not only shaped them as service members, but that they believe other troops should read as well. We pored over the responses, categorized them and found the breakout books that readers believe will make a difference to those currently serving in the ranks.

From fiction to military strategy to psychology, there's something for everyone on this list -- and there's the chance that at least one of these titles will be brand-new to you. Make sure you add these top looks to your reading list:

Fiction

While it may seem counterintuitive that novels were often suggested in our survey, many of our readers stated that they frequently applied lessons learned from fictional stories to their military service. Here's what readers had to say about these beloved books:

"The Killer Angels: A Novel of the Civil War" by Michael Shaara: "Though it covers a past conflict, it discusses the American civil-military relationship like no other book. Its insight on tactical preparation for combat is also without equal."

"Starship Troopers" by Robert A. Heinlein: "The book showcases the importance of loyalty, moral courage, recognizing humanity even in adversaries, and the sense of duty that comes from love of country and what it represents.These timeless soldierly values ring true regardless of branch, era or [the] true sci-fi nature of the story."

"Gates of Fire: An Epic Novel of the Battle of Thermopylae" by Steven Pressfield: "It is the quintessential book on leadership, service and sacrifice for the greater good. There are more lessons and good quotes in this book than any other I have ever read."

"Matterhorn" by Karl Marlantes: "Military service with all its warts and wrinkles, the triumph of a small unit activity, the folly of a larger conflict, and the effect of hubris on a generation, my generation, that should inform this and future generations."

TOP PICK: "Catch-22" by Joseph Heller: Since its publication in the early 1960s, "Catch-22" has been a top pick for both military and civilian reading lists, and our survey was no different. This satirical novel borrows heavily from the author's experiences in World War II, but generations of service members have found humor and truth within its pages. As one reader succinctly shared: "Heller's masterpiece is a graphic depiction of how the military actually functions. The characters and situations are only slight exaggerations of the real world."

Nonfiction

Most service members are secret (or not-so-secret) history buffs, so we weren't surprised to see nonfiction picks from our readers. From Korea to Iraq and everywhere in-between, these books offer context and perspectives that can enhance service members' understanding of conflicts, political jockeying, and leadership mistakes and triumphs throughout the ages.

"Black Hearts: One Platoon's Descent into Madness in Iraq's Triangle of Death" by Jim Frederick: "[It h]its home with a lot of truth."

"This Kind of War: The Classic Korean War History" by T.R. Fehrenbach: "The book covers the levels of war, from international strategy to tactical fighting in foxholes. It demonstrates how unpreparedness, egos, and underestimating opponents lead to disaster."

"About Face: The Odyssey of an American Warrior" by Retired Col. David H. Hackworth: "This book stands up to the test of time as a classic with insights into historical conflicts and the impact of decisions made by the Pentagon and the U.S. government."

"War is a Racket" by Gen. Smedley D. Butler: "It exposes the ties between taxpayer funded defense and private business interests going back more than 100 years, by an author whose reputation is distinguished and unassailable. You hear about him in boot camp but don't know what he was really about until you start looking."

TOP PICK: "We Were Soldiers Once ... and Young" by Retired Lt. Gen. Harold G. Moore and Joseph L. Galloway: "We Were Soldiers Once ... and Young" was our reader's standout choice when it came to nonfiction titles. Perhaps known best for its popular 2002 film adaptation, "We Were Soldiers," readers applauded the book's authenticity in depicting the Vietnam War and military service as well as its emotional depth. "I read this 25 years ago and still feel the impact this story had on me. The men in this story made me want to do my best every day to honor their sacrifice," one reader shared.

Military Strategy and Psychology

Looking for an in-depth examination of a particular military subject? These book suggestions offer a deep dive into the nitty-gritty details of military life that can make a huge difference in your service and leadership. Here's a short list of strategy and psychology books, straight from our readers:

"The Boys in the Barracks: Observations on American Military Life" by Larry H. Ingraham: "Anyone who hopes to better understand the modern day soldier should dive into this book."

"Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win" by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin: "This book highlights the necessity for leaders to take charge and 'own' their actions. No blaming, no passing the buck."

"On War" by Carl von Clausewitz: "It is one of the most important treatises on political-military analysis and strategy ever written, and remains both controversial and influential on strategic thinking."

"On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society" by Lt. Col. Dave Grossman: "Not everyone in the military go[es] into combat, but everyone should understand what it takes to kill for those who [have] been in combat or will be going to combat."

"A Message to Garcia" by Elbert Hubbard: "It promotes attention to detail, following orders, taking initiative, and determination."

TOP PICK: "Art of War" by Sun Tzu: Many readers chose "Art of War" by Sun Tzu as their No. 1 reader for service members. Written in the fifth century BCE, this Chinese military treatise carefully details skills and their application to military strategy. Since its translation into English in the 20th century, its wisdom and strategy has also been used for personal and professional improvement, both on and off the battlefield. As one reader explained, reading "Art of War" will help you "... weaponize your intellect."

OVERALL PICK: "Once an Eagle" by Anton Myrer

Overwhelmingly, "Once an Eagle" by Anton Myrer was suggested as the book U.S. service members should read. Over and over, readers cited the novel's accurate depiction of leadership and service across ranks as the reason it rose to the top of their lists. "I've read it cover to cover several times and listened to it as a book on tape as well," one reader shared. "Its examination of moral choices is timeless," another wrote.

Want to Know More About the Military?

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military.com · by Joanna Guldin · March 27, 2024

15. Despite common rhetoric, war with China unlikely in near future

Conclusion:

Certainly, red team analysis points out that conflict is unlikely as an immediate response, but the U.S. must prepare for full-scale war as a worst case, most deadly possibility. While this preparation should be taken seriously by all soldiers, it is by no means an indication of inevitable conflict.

Despite common rhetoric, war with China unlikely in near future

militarytimes.com · by Jacob T. Scheidemann · March 27, 2024

As soldiers look for the next conflict to define their service in a post-Global War on Terrorism era, much of the conversation indicates a belief that direct or proxy war with China is right around the corner. However, assessing the likelihood of armed conflict requires a deep investigation using proven methods that stimulate critical thinking devoid of biases and pitfalls.

In the intelligence community, structured analytical techniques provide order when navigating elusive questions such as assessing future conflict. One such technique, red team analysis, uses an enemy-based approach as a logical starting point for analysts disseminating intelligence to military customers.

Using this approach allows analysts to view topics from an adversary’s perspective and act on foreign stimuli through assessing personal, cultural, and organizational attributes. Stepping into the first-person perspective of Chinese President Xi indicates that he respects the ancient civilization from which China evolved and harbors a lifelong disdain for Western imperialism and influence.

Born in 1953, President Xi grew up in the immediate aftermath of the “century of humiliation,” now defined by century-long objectives of achieving previously held international dominance by the year 2049. Commonly known as the “Chinese Dream,” this pursuit of rejuvenation is marked by five-year plans that outline short-term goals.

The recent five-year plan (2016-20), for example, broadcasted innovation in technology and energy startup companies, according to a 2017 article published in the Journal of Counterterrorism & Homeland Security International. Modern economic, military, and political competition of the United States exasperate the five-year plans and long-term objectives of global supremacy that are overarching cultural and organizational themes of President Xi’s generation.

Red team analysis indicates that China will not interrupt century-long goals to engage in kinetic conflict, explaining why China relies on routine hybrid warfare strategies and tactics. In 2023, despite red team analysis outputs, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency communicated that the intelligence community had valuable information related to Chinese intent to invade Taiwan by 2027.

President Xi did not deny this assertion, however, citing he had no set timeline for invading Taiwan. Red team analysis presents a doubtful outlook of armed conflict in the near future despite conflicting CIA intelligence.

It is difficult to overstate the utility of red team analysis when assessing the actions of adversaries. Oftentimes, analysts can succumb to the pitfall of assigning the same values, motives, and attributes of friendly actors to foreign entities. If analysts were to implement this analytical failure to the outlined scenario, outputs would have overlooked the historical context, long-term objectives, and overarching strategies that form President Xi’s mindset surrounding U.S. relations and emerging war.

For instance, views from within the U.S. fail to recognize vast advancements in personal freedoms afforded to Chinese citizens over the past few decades. (Like much of the rest of the world, COVID-19 restrictions prompted a decrease in personal freedoms that were trending upward in the 2010s.)

By applying personal, cultural, and organizational norms to the scenario, analysts reason that while red team analysis leads one to think armed conflict is likely before or at the end of the century of China’s redemption plan, a few years is too short of a time frame for China to soundly invade Taiwan because the country would have to put aside economic progress.

This factor is especially important considering that China does not need to engage in kinetic operations to successfully degrade the U.S. economy. This assessment, however, merely represents the most likely course of action.

Red team analysis does not deduce every course of action an adversary can take. However, a crucial aspect of red team analysis commonly used in the Department of Defense is deciphering an enemy’s most likely action versus one considered most dangerous.

These distinct courses of action allow customers to plan for both the most expected and most disastrous outcomes of assessed scenarios. Within the context of armed conflict in the South China Sea, commanders of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command must understand each course of action to best posture troop positioning and inform engagements with lawmakers and regional partners.

Certainly, red team analysis points out that conflict is unlikely as an immediate response, but the U.S. must prepare for full-scale war as a worst case, most deadly possibility. While this preparation should be taken seriously by all soldiers, it is by no means an indication of inevitable conflict.

Jacob T. Scheidemann is a transitioning Army officer and intelligence management graduate student who will be working as an all-source intelligence analyst upon release from active-duty. Scheidemann previously served in intelligence leadership roles supporting INDOPACOM and CENTCOM.

16. America Needs a Dead Hand More than Ever

Beware the WOPR and Skynet.

Excerpts:

Conclusion

As mutual interests drive Russia, China, and North Korea closer together, their combined nuclear arsenals pose a growing threat to the United States. Rather than fielding a nuclear arsenal sized and designed to mitigate this expanding risk, the nation is following a path laid out more than a decade ago — when times were very different. In other words, the United States is not fielding the array of capabilities needed to effectively mitigate the increasing attack time compression challenge.

Ensuring that Russia and China understand that the United States can always respond to a nuclear strike is critical. The development of an artificial intelligence-enabled nuclear command, control, and communications system — with the ability to either speed up presidential decision-making (manual mode) or respond automatically — is one way to address this problem.

America Needs a Dead Hand More than Ever - War on the Rocks

ADAM LOWTHER AND CURTIS MCGIFFIN

warontherocks.com · by Adam Lowther · March 28, 2024

In the minutes after a launch detection or nuclear detonation, would America’s nuclear command, control, and communications system enable the president to make a timely and accurate decision to retaliate? We do not know.

In a 2019 War on the Rocks article, “America Needs a ‘Dead Hand’,” we proposed the development of an artificial intelligence-enabled nuclear command, control, and communications system to partially address this concern. In the five years since the article was published, China began an unprecedented expansion of its nuclear arsenal; Russia invaded Ukraine, made repeated nuclear threats, and “suspended” Russian participation in the New START arms control treaty; and North Korea launched a massive expansion of its nuclear arsenal. The United States has not expanded its arsenal by a single weapon or fielded a single new delivery vehicle.

Today, we believe that United States is further behind China and Russia as both nations are modernizing and expanding their nuclear arsenals and fortifying their nuclear command, control, and communications systems. This widening gap in capabilities only increases the coercive power Russia and China have to coerce the United States into backing down from aggression.

We can only conclude that America needs a dead hand system more than ever. Such a system would both detect an inbound attack more rapidly than the current system and allow the president to either manually direct forces to respond or automatically execute the president’s pre-selected response options — for a given scenario.

Previous discussions of artificial intelligence’s utility for nuclear command, control, and communication systems often attribute capabilities and characteristics to artificial intelligence that are distinctly different from anything that is useful in a fielded system. In reality, an artificial intelligence-enabled nuclear command, control, and communications system with a dead hand capability will never turn into the 1983 movie War Games’ War Operation Plan Response or Terminator’s Skynet because it is possible to employ artificial intelligence with discrete capabilities that do not evolve into a sentient system.

In short, the systems we suggest here are very specifically designed to increase the speed at which the United States can detect an adversary attack, speed the president’s ability to respond to an inbound strike, and ensure fielded forces receive the president’s orders. And, if necessary, the president can pre-program his desired response to a number of scenarios and allow the system, when on automatic, to match the strike detected with the president’s desired response. The relative decline of the American nuclear arsenal to those of Russia, China, and North Korea makes such a system a necessity because it complicates adversary calculations when contemplating a nuclear strike on the United States.

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Artificial Intelligence

Discussions of the utility of artificial intelligence in nuclear command, control, and communications systems often devolves into emotional arguments and accusations of some nefarious desire for a general artificial intelligence that will kill us all. This view fundamentally misunderstands the full breadth of tools that are broadly called artificial intelligence. Some clarification is useful.

The Department of Defense defines artificial intelligence as “the ability of machines to perform tasks that normally require human intelligence — for example, recognizing patterns, learning from experience, drawing conclusions, making predictions, or taking action — whether digitally or as the smart software behind autonomous physical systems.”

Artificial intelligence is a generic term often used to lump several concepts together, even when they may not technically qualify as artificial intelligence. Machine learning, natural language processing, expert systems, and neural networks all have utility for the system we seek to design and field. For example, the chatbots that often pop up on a company’s website to answer questions use a combination of pattern-matching, Naïve Bayes, sequence-to-sequence models, recurrent neural networks, long short-term memory, and natural language processing algorithms.

When combined, these tools are useful in automating decision-making. Each has strengths and weaknesses and is useful for some purposes and not for others. This is why they are combined in these larger systems.

All forms of artificial intelligence are premised on mathematical algorithms, which are defined as “a set of instructions to be followed in calculations or other operations.” Essentially, algorithms are programming that tells the model how to learn on its own.

They are only as good as their designers, so building the right design team is critical. Leave out the social scientists, military operators, marketers, and others and data scientists, programmers, and mathematicians build a deeply flawed and biased model. This discussion is important because it distinguishes a system enhanced by various artificial intelligence tools and a general artificial intelligence, which we oppose.

Rather, the system envisioned is something similar to a concept known as the Rational Behavior Model developed by the Naval Postgraduate School for use in autonomous naval vessels. In the Rational Behavior Model, artificial intelligence is used in components of the system related to understanding sensor input, but artificial general intelligence is never used.

Top-level decision-making in the Rational Behavioral Model is performed by pre-planning in order to develop a set of scenarios and pre-planned decision outcomes for each scenario. As we explain, for our system the president participates in a presidential decision conference in which a comprehensive set of scenarios are studied, and a decision is made for each one.

Understanding the Problem

According to the Department of Defense’s Nuclear Matters Handbook, nuclear command, control, and communications “performs five critical functions: situation monitoring; planning; decision-making; force direction; and force management.” These activities include “detection, warning, and attack characterization; nuclear planning; decision-making conferencing; receiving presidential orders; and enabling the management and direction of forces.”

In 2016, the Air Force designated its nuclear command, control, and communications system of systems as the AN/USQ-225 weapon system in an effort to consolidate an otherwise disparate set of legacy systems into something more manageable. This system must detect an adversary launch, decide on an appropriate response, and direct the force into action. The time in which this detect, decide, and direct process takes place is severely compressed by more modern, multidomain adversary capabilities.

The attack time compression challenge is driven by the development of new types of weapons and the sheer number of capabilities adversaries are developing and fielding. Russia, China, and North Korea field an authoritarian arsenal that, when combined, dwarfs the arsenal of democracy in strategic and non-strategic nuclear weapons. Russia and China already have the capability to move up and down Herman Kahn’s escalation ladder in a way the United States cannot.

The attack time compression challenge is nothing new for the United States. As Guide to Nuclear Deterrence in the Age of Great-Power Competition explains, this very challenge was responsible for the creation of today’s nuclear command, control, and communications system. Currently, the NC3 Enterprise Center at U.S. Strategic Command is grappling with the challenge of replacing legacy systems with modern systems that are not susceptible to adversary interference.

Jonathan Falcone and his coauthors address some of the challenges with building an artificial intelligence-enabled nuclear command, control, and communications systems. Philip Reiner and Alexa Wehsener also address these challenges and offer a conservative approach to integrating artificial intelligence into nuclear command, control, and communication systems.

As Reiner and Wehsener write, “We are convinced that time is most usefully spent debating the technical positives and negatives of such integration in a manner that does not simply classify perspectives on the discussion as ‘that’s crazy’ or ‘just don’t,’ or as vaguely as stating that there is a need for an ‘automated strategic response system based on artificial intelligence.’”

Speeding up the detection of an enemy attack and the decision-making process is generally recognized as a necessity. In many respects, this is how to achieve this goal where there is disagreement.

The Dead Hand

The “dead man switch” was first developed as a “fail-safe” mechanism with the introduction of electric trams/streetcars in the United States at the beginning of the 20th century. Dead man switches are now a common safety feature in everything from snowmobiles to Tesla automobiles.

America is no stranger to “fail-fatal” systems either. The Special Weapons Emergency Separation System, also known informally as the dead man’s switch, was a nuclear bomb detonation system built into early B-52 bombers during the Cold War. It ensured that in case of crew incapacitation due to enemy defenses, the nuclear weapons would still detonate once the aircraft dropped below a pre-set altitude.

The Soviet/Russian Perimeter system, when activated, maintains constant communication with the command authority. If contact is lost between the leadership and fielded forces, the system is designed to take this loss to mean an American decapitation strike has taken out the command authority. This leads to the launch of missiles equipped to transmit authorization codes to nuclear forces, which then launch against the United States.

Although there is disagreement, it appears the Soviet Union created Perimeter in order to both deter the United States from targeting the Soviet leadership, part of the American counterforce targeting strategy, and give the Soviet leadership an opportunity to ride out a first strike without losing the opportunity for a second strike. In other words, Perimeter’s existence, at least theoretically, gave Soviet leaders confidence in their secure second-strike capability, in the event of their deaths.

An American dead hand would serve a similar purpose. As an artificial intelligence-enabled system, it is far more accurate to see the dead hand as a system of systems with a wide variety of algorithms embedded into the systems that comprise the nuclear command, control, and communications system. With a combination of hard coding and algorithms, such a system would employ algorithms where it makes sense to perform discrete functions — like assessing data from space-based overhead persistent infrared systems. This is but one example of how a process — evaluating infrared signatures to determine if they are indicative of an intercontinental ballistic missile launch — can be turned over to a set of algorithms that process data faster than the current system. It is also worth noting that the current system of systems collects abundant data, which can serve to train future algorithms on discrete tasks.

Keep in mind, where artificial intelligence tools are embedded in a specific system, each function is performed by multiple algorithms of differing design that must all agree on their assessment for the data to be transmitted forward. If there is disagreement, human interaction is required.

Such a design feature is akin to James Reason’s Swiss Cheese Model of human error prevention. In short, each algorithm acts like a slice of Swiss cheese, with imperfections that are different from other algorithms. When stacked together, the imperfections in each algorithm do not perfectly align to allow a fatal error.

The United States has seen about three dozen accidents involving nuclear weapons since 1950. None of these accidents led to an accidental nuclear detonation because the weapons were built with redundant safety features. The current nuclear command, control, and communications system is also designed with redundancy in mind.

For example, the United States relies on dual phenomenology to determine whether a suspected intercontinental ballistic missile launch is, in fact, an actual launch. It does this by employing space-based infrared systems to detect the infrared signature of a missile launch and then verifies that signature through the use of long-range radars. Two very different systems employ different methods to reach a correct conclusion.

This is just one example of how any nuclear command, control, and communications system should have redundancies that prevent single points of failure. Embedding algorithms into component systems does not change that requirement.

Presidential Decision-Making

According to the Congressional Research Service’s Defense Primer: Command and Control of Nuclear Forces:

The US president has sole authority to authorize the use of US nuclear weapons. This authority is inherent in his constitutional role as Commander in Chief. The President can seek counsel from appropriate military advisors; those advisors are then required to transmit and implement the orders authorizing nuclear use. The President does not need the concurrence of the US Congress to order the launch of nuclear weapons, and neither the military nor Congress can overrule these orders.

The real challenge for the president is that “the president would have less than 10 minutes to absorb the information, review his options, and make his decision.” In other words, after space and terrestrial warning systems detect and verify that nuclear weapons are headed for the United States, the president, while also trying to move to a safe location (White House bunker or Air Force One), will have to get on phone with the secretary of defense and the commander of U.S. Strategic Command to decide on a response — possibly before American nuclear bases are destroyed. He will do all of this without ever having practiced for the event.

While the national command authority exercises regularly, the president is not a participant in those exercises and does not hone his understanding of nuclear weapons employment, targeting, effects, or other critical components of their use. He is reliant on the advice of the military. This is on-the-job training at its worst.

Not only is the current nuclear command, control, and communications system inadequate for the challenges on America’s doorstep, but the presidential decision-making process is woefully inadequate. Thus, an artificial intelligence-enabled system should not only speed up the detect, decide, and direct process but it should also aid the president in improving decision-making.

A process for improving presidential decision-making during a nuclear attack could take the following form. After the president’s election, in a time of peace, the president sits down with advisors and walks through a variety of potential adversary first-strike scenarios. During this process, the president decides on preferred response options for each scenario. These decisions are then input into the system, which either operates manually or automatically.

When the system is in manual mode, it does not function as a dead hand system, but it remains an artificial intelligence-enabled system that more rapidly processes through early-warning data. Once the system detects an inbound attack and a presidential decision conference is initiated, the system can also present the president with the response option that most closely fits his pre-conflict decision. Such a capability has value because it can aid the president in avoiding the bad decision-making that often accompanies high-stress situations.

When the system is in automatic mode, it can detect inbound weapons, match the adversary strike to the president’s closest pre-selected response option, and authorize the execution of a response. Here, the system functions as a smart dead hand, with the ability to match the president’s preferred response to any given strike.

If, for example, the United States found itself in a nuclear crisis, the president could move the system from manual to automatic and notify the adversary that the American dead hand system will automatically respond to any strike against the United States. The objective is to encourage adversary restraint and enable de-escalation but, should that fail, the nation can rapidly respond to a nuclear attack.

For some, our discussion of a nuclear command, control, and communications system that incorporates artificial intelligence tools when and where appropriate, but avoids giving artificial intelligence decision-making authority, may make sense. For others, however, may see presidential pre-selection of response options in an automated command-and-control system as a bridge too far. The idea that a president will agree to pre-select nuclear response options may seem implausible.

Under current conditions, this may be true, but given the lack of experience with such an option it is impossible to know. However, it does not negate the fact that the system and approach offered here improves upon the existing method by including the president in decision-making long before the president is given a few minutes to determine how to respond to an inbound nuclear attack. If, for example, the president began participating in nuclear exercises, and is faced with simulated conditions like those in a real event, the shortcomings of the current system should become evident.

The president has no more important responsibility than the deployment and employment of nuclear weapons. If that day should ever come, our goal is to ensure the sole decision-maker has the best chance to succeed in limiting damage to the United States.

Conclusion

As mutual interests drive Russia, China, and North Korea closer together, their combined nuclear arsenals pose a growing threat to the United States. Rather than fielding a nuclear arsenal sized and designed to mitigate this expanding risk, the nation is following a path laid out more than a decade ago — when times were very different. In other words, the United States is not fielding the array of capabilities needed to effectively mitigate the increasing attack time compression challenge.

Ensuring that Russia and China understand that the United States can always respond to a nuclear strike is critical. The development of an artificial intelligence-enabled nuclear command, control, and communications system — with the ability to either speed up presidential decision-making (manual mode) or respond automatically — is one way to address this problem.

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Adam Lowther, Ph.D., is the vice president for research at the National Institute for Deterrence Studies and host of the Nuclecast podcast. Col. (Ret.) Curtis McGiffin is the vice president for education at the National Institute for Deterrence Studies and a visiting assistant professor at Missouri State University. Together, they have over four decades of experience in the Department of Defense nuclear enterprise.

warontherocks.com · by Adam Lowther · March 28, 2024

17. It’s Time for a Comprehensive National Maritime Strategy

Excerpts:

The challenges facing the combined U.S. Navy, Marines, and Coast Guard in securing the sea lanes are growing. With Houthi attacks in the Red Sea, some vessels now detour thousands of miles to avoid danger. Russia’s war against Ukraine threatens shipments through the Black Sea. In the South China Sea, recent collisions and “blocking maneuvers” by China are just the latest entries in a long list of incidents. Tensions continue to surround Taiwan.

Then there is the uncertain future of deep-sea mining, where China has sprinted to an early dominant lead. At this point, the only thing certain is that mining operations will increase the demand for maritime security. Any comprehensive maritime strategy should consider whether the United States should ratify the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. Not doing so leaves China as the largest funder of the International Seabed Authority that is currently finalizing the rules and regulations of deep-sea mining. The need to protect subsea cables and the receding Arctic ice are also increasing demand on maritime security.

With all these stresses on commercial shipping lanes, this is no time to surrender leadership in securing the high seas. Yet the growing gap in naval ship numbers is concerning. The Pentagon’s recent China power report estimates that the People’s Liberation Army Navy has more than 370 ships, compared with America’s combat-ready fleet of 290 (though America has more carriers and destroyers and superior submarines). The gap will only widen. China’s fleet is expected to grow 21 percent by 2030, while the U.S. Navy’s latest budget submission projects that the U.S. fleet will remain unchanged. When you also consider that the People’s Liberation Army Navy remains mostly concentrated on the western Pacific where is supplemented by a robust coast guard and maritime militia, questions arise as to whether the U.S. Naval Service is scaled to deter.

While Russia has the world’s third-largest navy, its partnership with China (even with joint exercises in the Japan Sea and Bering Strait) is not as robust as America’s alliances. Japan and South Korea combined match Russia’s strength. Australia’s and Japan’s investments in stronger navies reflect the increasing importance of allied nations in maritime power.

The list of America’s maritime vulnerabilities is long. The time available to address them is short. The United States should urgently act to develop and execute a national maritime strategy, one that prioritizes speed and effectiveness — and one that recognizes the value of cooperation with key allies.

It’s Time for a Comprehensive National Maritime Strategy - War on the Rocks

MARK KENNEDY AND JEFFREY KUCIK

warontherocks.com · by Mark Kennedy · March 28, 2024

The United States finds itself in a curious position as one of modern history’s few great powers that doesn’t control its commercial shipping. In fact, it’s not much of an exaggeration to say that the United States owns no commercial ships, has no way to build them, and has nowhere to dock them. As a result, America is highly reliant on foreign partners — some allied, some not — for its economic security.

That dependence would be okay if not for one thing: America currently lacks the ability to protect its economic interests, or that of its allies, during a period of conflict in the western Pacific. Developing this capability will require a comprehensive national maritime strategy — something that the U.S. government currently lacks. This strategy must recognize the need for significant investments and the value of closer cooperation with America’s key allies.

An effective strategy means coordinating U.S. government efforts, in consultation with America’s partners, to address critical vulnerabilities. If a crisis occurred today, the United States would be highly dependent on foreign partners for its shipping, its access to foreign ports, and its shipbuilding — all at a time when America is losing its naval dominance. The United States needs deeper investments at home and abroad to ensure that maritime routes are safe and secure.

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Troubles at Sea

The current reality is that the People’s Republic of China has already tilted the maritime playing field in its favor. China produces “more than half of the world’s commercial shipbuilding output,” while the United States is not among the top 15 shipbuilding nations. China also has a global commercial fleet and ownership in ports beyond its shores, while America does not. And more recently, China surpassed the U.S. Navy in numbers of ships.

These asymmetries in maritime power and capability matter. Today, over 80 percent of global trade volume and 90 percent of military equipment, supplies, and fuel still travel by ship. Yet America depends almost entirely on foreign maritime partners. Less than 1 percent of global shipbuilding happens in the United States. Less than 1 percent of the world’s trading vessels fly an American flag. More than 80 percent of port terminals along America’s coasts are owned or operated by foreign companies, and America owns essentially no ports outside the United States.

The lack of its own global commercial fleet does not mean the United States does not have a vital national interest in securing sea lanes. As the world’s largest importer and second largest exporter, the United States relies on its navy to secure its supply lines by ensuring freedom of navigation through global shipping lanes and offering protection to ships of all nations. While the U.S. Navy maintains unparalleled global naval logistics networks capable of projecting naval power anywhere in the world, it is stretched too thin.

History

How did America find itself in such a difficult position? For one thing, America’s market-driven economic prowess has not translated to maritime security. When faced with the choice of investing in the highly volatile and often unprofitable world of shipbuilding, container shipping, or international ports, American businesses chose to instead invest in more economically attractive opportunities. And while other nations subsidized their shipbuilding and shipping industries as well as the global port networks they maintain, the U.S. government focused on building the most powerful navy. This led to a diminishment of America’s commercial capacity and an overreliance on major players in Europe and Asia.

Regaining the ability to deter requires effort on multiple fronts. Having the strongest navy is necessary but is not sufficient to deter aggression. America should not only expand its navy, but also secure shipping, global ports, and shipbuilding capacity. Bolstering the U.S. merchant marine and maritime industrial base is also necessary but not sufficient. It is inconceivable that the United States can correct decades of neglect to generate sufficient domestic shipbuilding capacity at the speed necessary to reduce its dependence on others. America’s strategy should recognize these limits.

Luckily, the United States has reliable allied partners. Lost in national comparisons of defense spending is that America’s treaty-allied nations have invested far greater resources than it has in shipbuilding, shipping, and associated global port networks. At a time when maritime power is regaining prominence in geopolitics, American maritime strategy should lock in — and expand — these allied assets, just as allies have relied on U.S. military investments.

Shipping

While America ranks fourth in ship ownership tallied by value, half of that value is in cruise ships. However, having assured access to ships is more important than whether they are owned by or flagged in the United States. Fortunately, commercial shipping is dominated by allies. European firms hold a 54 percent share of the global container shipping market. Companies from Asian allies control another 20 percent. While China is expanding, COSCO (its largest presence in the market) has an 11 percent share, and no other Chinese firms are close.

To lock in access to foreign-owned vessels during times of geopolitical stress when surge capacity is needed, the U.S. Maritime Administration contracts with commercial vessels managed by treaty allies for the transportation of military supplies. These include Denmark’s Maersk, France’s CMA CGM, and Germany’s Hapag-Lloyd. The contracted fee encourages firms to overcome current tax, regulatory, and geopolitical risk hurdles to fly the American flag, which is a program requirement. The amount of capacity contracted for, access to mariners to operate these ships, and the ability to use them when the sea lanes are highly contested should be stress-tested. One unresolved complication is that these firms’ home countries may have competing demands during periods of tension. The forthcoming Constellation class of frigates will expand the U.S. Navy’s escort capabilities, helping protect U.S. and allied nations’ shipping interests during conflicts. Yet with China’s missile shield, they are unlikely to support shipping in the South China Sea during a Taiwan contingency. True deterrence requires the shipping capacity to sustain the military and the U.S. economy even during such contingencies.

Ports

Having shipping capacity does not guarantee that boats have anywhere to dock. Beyond its shores, America has virtually no ownership stake in overseas ports. Contrast that with China, which has ownership interests in 92 port projects around the world. Moreover, unlike shipping, the world’s top port operators are dominated by Chinese companies and countries reluctant to show favor during periods of conflict. Operators in America’s treaty allies are further down the list, including Denmark’s APM Terminals (Maersk) and the Philippines’ International Container Terminal Services.

America should enhance coordination within U.S. government agencies and with port operators to ensure priority ports cannot be used for coercion or to America’s disadvantage during periods of conflict. For domestic ports, the National Port Readiness Network seeks to ensure readiness of commercial ports, including accommodations by allied-owned terminals, to support force deployment and other national priorities. For international ports, the U.S. government should define the global ports to which it needs assured access for both military and commercial needs and then secure that access, even if, as with shipping, it contracts for such commitments.

While allied ports in Bahrain, Greece, Italy, and Poland can get ships close to conflicts in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, the same isn’t true in East Asia. In the event of a Taiwan contingency, shipping to Guam and farther west would be contested. This makes access to ports in Japan and those the U.S. military is helping to build in the Philippines vital. With many nations hesitating to commit to providing support during periods of conflict, the United States is expanding its relationships in the region. This includes financing India’s Adani Ports to build a terminal in Sri Lanka and signing a defense cooperation agreement with Papua New Guinea.

Overcoming the tyranny of distance in the Pacific requires prepositioning programs, the U.S. Air Force Air Mobility Command’s Mobility Manifesto, and programs like rocket cargo. Together, these initiatives can all help mitigate the danger of having limited access to port terminals during times of conflict.

Shipbuilding

America’s commercial shipbuilders, working almost exclusively to supply the U.S. Navy while subject to Jones Actrequirements, are reporting record construction backlogs. With its aging fleet requiring more maintenance, the Navy is addressing its aging shipyards with a 20-year, $21 billion plan to modernize facilities and shrink the backlogs that have left nearly 40 percent of America’s attack submarines out of commission. With the United States having fallen from global shipbuilding leadership in 1975 to 19th place today, only 0.13 percent of the world’s shipbuilding capacity resides in North America.

As the recent petition for trade relief and state support filed by the United Steelworkers union and others highlights, Chinese subsidies play a role in this decline. In commenting on this case, the Financial Times observed, “Even Adam Smith, the father of modern capitalism, believed that shipbuilding was one of the very few industries that deserved national support and should not be left to market forces alone.”

Whether building more crewed or uncrewed surface and underwater naval ships, America should bolster its own shipbuilding capacity. But here again, allies also have an important role to play. Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro recently toured South Korean and Japanese shipyards and “called for more allied foreign investment in U.S. shipyards” while he also “doubled down on criticizing the build rates of U.S. shipyards.” The trouble is that there is no reasonable path where scaling up domestic capacity alone, particularly with shortages of skilled labor, can build a big enough navy and rapidly replace ships lost during periods of conflict.

China, Japan, and South Korea dominate global shipbuilding, though many European allies have more capacity than America. Continued partnering with allies for ship maintenance adds capacity and strengthens alliances. The collaborationamong Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, dubbed AUKUS, will help these allies build their own submarines in the long term. Some have suggested Japan, South Korea, and the United States should mirror the AUKUS framework to create a multinational guided-missile destroyer construction program. Yet while the significant size of South Korea and Japan in shipbuilding makes them logical partners, also partnering with nations outside of the same potential geographic sphere of conflict would expand optionality and redundancy.

Naval Service Strength

The challenges facing the combined U.S. Navy, Marines, and Coast Guard in securing the sea lanes are growing. With Houthi attacks in the Red Sea, some vessels now detour thousands of miles to avoid danger. Russia’s war against Ukraine threatens shipments through the Black Sea. In the South China Sea, recent collisions and “blocking maneuvers” by China are just the latest entries in a long list of incidents. Tensions continue to surround Taiwan.

Then there is the uncertain future of deep-sea mining, where China has sprinted to an early dominant lead. At this point, the only thing certain is that mining operations will increase the demand for maritime security. Any comprehensive maritime strategy should consider whether the United States should ratify the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. Not doing so leaves China as the largest funder of the International Seabed Authority that is currently finalizing the rules and regulations of deep-sea mining. The need to protect subsea cables and the receding Arctic ice are also increasing demand on maritime security.

With all these stresses on commercial shipping lanes, this is no time to surrender leadership in securing the high seas. Yet the growing gap in naval ship numbers is concerning. The Pentagon’s recent China power report estimates that the People’s Liberation Army Navy has more than 370 ships, compared with America’s combat-ready fleet of 290 (though America has more carriers and destroyers and superior submarines). The gap will only widen. China’s fleet is expected to grow 21 percent by 2030, while the U.S. Navy’s latest budget submission projects that the U.S. fleet will remain unchanged. When you also consider that the People’s Liberation Army Navy remains mostly concentrated on the western Pacific where is supplemented by a robust coast guard and maritime militia, questions arise as to whether the U.S. Naval Service is scaled to deter.

While Russia has the world’s third-largest navy, its partnership with China (even with joint exercises in the Japan Sea and Bering Strait) is not as robust as America’s alliances. Japan and South Korea combined match Russia’s strength. Australia’s and Japan’s investments in stronger navies reflect the increasing importance of allied nations in maritime power.

The list of America’s maritime vulnerabilities is long. The time available to address them is short. The United States should urgently act to develop and execute a national maritime strategy, one that prioritizes speed and effectiveness — and one that recognizes the value of cooperation with key allies.

Become a Member

Mark Kennedy (U.S. Congress, MN 2001–2007) is director of the Wilson Center’s Wahba Institute for Strategic Competition, a civic leader supporting the secretary of the Air Force, and president emeritus of the University of Colorado

Jeffrey Kucik is a global fellow at the Wahba Institute for Strategic Competition at the Wilson Center and an associate professor at the University of Arizona.

Image: Spc. Joshua Syberg

warontherocks.com · by Mark Kennedy · March 28, 2024

18. Press Release: Evaluation of the DoD’s Military Information Support Operations Workforce

The 50 page (redacted) IG report can be downloaded here:  https://media.defense.gov/2024/Mar/27/2003421651/-1/-1/1/DODIG-2024-068_REDACTED_SECURED.PDF

The focus is on manning, force structure and other personnel issues. There is no discussion of authorities or issues with actual deployment and operations. There is some useful pushback from the USASOC commander and others in response to some of the inaccuracies they note in the report (e.g., cutting all O6 authorizations in PSYOP and deployment to dwell time).

A conclusion that could be drawn from this is that we perhaps should not be cutting PSYOP forces.

NEWS | March 27, 2024

Press Release: Evaluation of the DoD’s Military Information Support Operations Workforce

Inspector General Robert P. Storch announced today that the Department of Defense Office of Inspector General released the “Evaluation of the DoD’s Military Information Support Operations Workforce.”

The evaluation examined the effectiveness of the DoD’s recruitment, training, and retention of personnel conducting Military Information Support Operations (MISO), specifically concerning the Army’s Psychological Operations (PSYOP) career field, the DoD’s primary MISO workforce.

"MISO is a relatively small but very important area within the DoD, crucial to competing with adversaries in the information space," said IG Storch. "Recruiting, training, and retaining professionals in this community must remain a priority."

The report found that Army PSYOP forces face structural and capacity challenges within the active and reserve components. The report also found that these challenges can be traced back to the Army not comprehensively analyzing the issues affecting its active and reserve MISO workforce in over 20 years. Lastly, the report found that the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness has not monitored and reported on the growth and sustainment of the DoD’s overall Information Operations workforce, including Army PSYOP forces, as required by DoD policy. 

As a result of these gaps, Army PSYOP units will remain understaffed and unable to meet a growing global demand for MISO. Moreover, the high operational tempo required of this already under-resourced force risks burnout of Army PSYOP personnel.

The DoD OIG recommended that the U.S. Army Special Operations Command initiate a Capabilities-Based Assessment to learn what changes to the force would improve the Army’s ability to conduct MISO. We also recommended that the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness monitor the accession, promotion, and retention within the Information Operations career force and report their findings annually to the Secretary of Defense. The DoD OIG will continue to monitor the U.S. Army Special Operations Command and the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness’ progress toward full implementation of these recommendations.

19. “A Time for Choosing”: Urgent Action or Continuing Folly (US Alliances)

Excerpt:

Conclusion

Washington and many allies continue to behave as if they are still in the immediate post-Cold War springtime of great expectations. It may be too late to deter a reckoning that decades of indolence and wishful thinking have effectively invited. Recognizing and addressing the threats and structural problems that now beleaguer U.S. global alliances are urgent needs. That recognition and effort must begin in Washington. Ronald Reagan’s famous Cold War speech, “A Time for Choosing,” included a line that fully pertains to Washington and allies today: “We’re at war with the most dangerous enemy that has ever faced mankind in his long climb from the swamp to the stars, and it’s been said if we lose that war, and in so doing lose this way of freedom of ours, history will record with greatest astonishment that those who had the most to lose did the least to prevent its happening.”[33]

Keith B. Payne, “A Time for Choosing”: Urgent Action or Continuing Folly, No. 580, March 26, 2024

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“A Time for Choosing”: Urgent Action or Continuing Folly

https://nipp.org/information_series/keith-b-payne-a-time-for-choosing-urgent-action-or-continuing-folly-no-580-march-26-2024/?mc_cid=3d5331ec49&mc_eid=70bf478f36

Dr. Keith B. Payne

Dr. Keith B. Payne is a co-founder of the National Institute for Public Policy, professor emeritus at the Graduate School of Defense and Strategic Studies, Missouri State University, a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense and former Senior Advisor to the Office of the Secretary of Defense.

Introduction

Washington’s global system of alliances is facing extremely tough internal and external problems. These problems are neither fleeting nor prosaic; they are now structural and will require significant efforts to ameliorate. That harsh reality would matter little if alliances were unimportant to Western security. But they are the West’s key advantage over an aggressive, authoritarian bloc, including a Sino-Russian entente, North Korea and Iran, that seeks to overturn the liberal world order created and sustained by U.S. and allied power. To maintain that advantage, Washington must recognize and respond to those threats, while resisting the usual anti-defense spending/anti-military themes of the “progressive” Left and the seeming neo-isolationism of some on the political Right.

U.S. defense budgets in decline when adjusted for inflation,[1] and a trend within parts of the Republican Party to oppose continuing military aid to Ukraine, are not lost on allies who fear for their security and are ultimately dependent on a seemingly reticent United States for their security. As threat conditions become increasingly severe and obvious, some allies, particularly those who are on the frontlines vis-à-vis Russia, China, and North Korea, understandably are increasingly alarmed.

Evidence of this alarm includes open allied discussions about acquiring independent nuclear capabilities—with the corresponding potential for a cascade of nuclear proliferation. Perhaps most surprising are open German and Japanese discussions of independent nuclear deterrence capabilities.[2] In Japan, the subject is tied directly to the continuing credibility of the U.S. extended nuclear deterrent and has moved from being politically taboo to an open public discussion.[3] In February 2023, a Japanese defense study chaired by former military chief of staff Ryoichi Oriki reportedly suggested that “Japan ease its three nonnuclear principles that prohibit possessing, producing or allowing entry into Japan of nuclear weapons.”[4]

An alternative potential allied response to security threats is to move increasingly toward accommodating Moscow and/or Beijing. As contemporary power balances shift and fear among some allies grows, greater accommodation to China or Russia—and corresponding distance from the United States—may appear the most practicable option. Turkey appears to have been positioning itself between the West and Russia for years, while some allies appear to be serving Russia’s interests from within NATO.[5] In the Indo-Pacific, New Zealand deepens economic, trade, and cultural ties with Beijing.[6]

That some allies will hedge their geopolitical bets by seeking accommodations with Russia and/or China, and by distancing themselves from Washington, was demonstrated recently in statements by French President Macron and the European Commission’s leadership.[7] According to Macron, “strategic autonomy” must now be Europe’s organizing principle;[8] and the French ambassador reportedly has advised Canada to begin distancing itself from the United States, and stated that Ottawa must choose between the United States and Europe.[9] As two prominent European commentators have observed, “… based on global American strategic supremacy, the very idea of autonomous European defense has long been considered detrimental to the vital transatlantic link. However, with global strategic challenges growing fast, this principle is no longer tenable.”[10]

The manifest inconsistency in U.S. behavior important to allies has accelerated this problem. An Israeli analyst described the perception concisely: “The consensus in the region is that the US has abdicated its role as the Superpower vis-à-vis the [Middle East].”[11] As allies respond to the reality of rising threats, if a trend toward increasing allied interest in independent nuclear capabilities and/or distancing themselves from the United States expands, sustaining U.S. global alliances will be problematic, to the degradation of U.S. security.

America’s experience with North Korea over the past two decades is instructive. During the period of unquestioned U.S. military superiority over any potential foe, Washington solemnly and repeatedly declared a nuclear-armed North Korea to be “unacceptable.” Yet, five consecutive administrations, Republican and Democrat, have done nothing effective to prevent North Korea’s deployment of nuclear weapons that can now target much of the world, including the United States. As a result, North Korea is a nuclear power that now must be deterred.[12]

U.S. officials and commentators have repeatedly offered confident assertions that the risk is minimal because the United States can reliably deter North Korea[13]—assertions based on little more than convenience, hope, and shallow guesswork. Simultaneously, Washington has incessantly pleaded with China to help de-nuclearize North Korea—a problem that Beijing has shown no interest in resolving. Mounting South Korean popular interest in independent nuclear capabilities is a direct consequence of this American failure to deal with a threat that Washington has declared, for more than two decades, to be “unacceptable.”

Russia seeks to recover hegemony in much of Europe, starting with Ukraine, and China is on track to be able to take Taiwan by force within a few years.[14] Recent “leaked” Russian nuclear planning documents reveal a corresponding shockingly low Russian threshold for nuclear use,[15] and in 2022, the Central Intelligence Agency reportedly concluded that there is a 50 percent or greater chance that Moscow will use nuclear weapons if facing defeat in Ukraine.[16] This is devastating commentary on the West’s contemporary deterrence position.

In this grim threat context, the fundamental alliance problem is the enduring U.S. preference to look away from stark security challenges and to prioritize non-defense goals. Western allies have unparalleled potential human and material advantages over virtually any combination of foes—Russia’s and China’s combined GDPs, for example, are a fraction of the combined GDPs of Western allies. The United States and allies have the potential to contain the Sino-Russian entente, North Korea and Iran. But they have continually punted in this regard and now confront multiple existential challenges.

Washington’s actions, and more often inaction over many years, are a primary reason that authoritarian states now pose serious military threats to the West’s future. The longer they go unanswered, the more likely it is that today’s threats will be the source of tomorrow’s crises and catastrophes. Whether the allied powers will act in unity and urgency, or ultimately move in different, disparate directions that undercut Western security, is an open question.

Who and What is to Blame?

The United States and allies may, in the foreseeable future, face a reckoning with harsh security realities. The immediate reason for this possible reckoning, of course, is the growing power and aggression of a hostile, authoritarian bloc that seeks to recast the world order, violently if necessary.

However, the United States and allies have facilitated the security challenges they now face. The antecedents to Moscow’s aggression in Europe and China’s belligerent expansionism have been blatantly obvious for well over a decade. These threats would be less significant had Washington taken needed steps over the past three decades. But many political leaders, Republican and Democrat, have made decisions based on convenient illusions, and the severe results of those decisions are increasingly obvious. That is, contemporary challenges, in principle, were largely manageable had Western leaders not been captured by unrealistic expectations regarding Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, and a cooperative, post-Cold War “new world order.” Instead, Washington has facilitated foes’ hostile moves and magnified their significance by its failure to recognize and prepare proactively for obviously mounting dangers; as two serious experts have emphasized, Western “weakness is provocative.”[17]

The U.S. defense budget, defense industrial base and nuclear infrastructure, starved for decades, have not caught up with the great power military threats now confronting the United States and allies.[18] And, for more than a decade beyond any reasonable expectation of Russian or Chinese reciprocity, Washington has continued to pursue antiquated arms control thinking and practices that constrain needed U.S. military preparation and deterrence capabilities. Many in Washington still fail to recognize their culpability in this regard. They have extended the immediate post-Cold War “strategic holiday,” “peace dividend” and fixation on arms control solutions decades longer than prudent.

For example, in an unprecedented threat context, rather than responding urgently to an increasingly dangerous and hostile bloc of states, the Biden Administration’s “grand strategy” appears to prioritize pressing the United States and the world into the progressive political mold fashionable in Washington. As Professor Colin Dueck writes, “If the Biden administration’s grand strategy could be summed up in a single phrase, it would be –progressive transformation at home and abroad.”[19]

Professor Dueck’s apt and jarring assessment of Washington’s focus is confirmed in numerous ways. In response to looming military threats, including the prospect of nuclear war, Washington seems uninterested in correcting course significantly. America now pays more annually to service the national debt than is devoted to national defense. Despite a threat context that is more dangerous than that of the Cold War, the percentage of GDP devoted to defense is roughly half of what it was during the Cold War. And, as currently planned, U.S. defense spending will essentially be flat from 2023 through 2028,[20] and adjusted for inflation, the real buying power of the U.S. defense budget will actually decline.[21] The Commander of Indo-Pacific Command reportedly testified that the administration’s current budget request is $11 billion short of that needed to provide the means identified as necessary to deter conflict with China.[22] At the strategic nuclear force level, by the end of the decade, it appears that Washington will have to retire aging existing forces before their replacements can be deployed. These are not the behaviors of a sensible alliance leader prepared to, or preparing to, address unprecedented security dangers.

To be sure, a lack of serious focus on emerging security threats is not new. Washington’s dramatic drawdown of forces from Europe, for example, began immediately following the collapse of the Soviet Union, and inexplicably occurred even with Russia’s attack on Georgia in 2008 and its first assault on Ukraine in 2014.[23]

Russia and China combine unprecedented nuclear buildups and expansionist geopolitical goals, yet Washington remains mired in some of the most optimistic thinking of the immediate post-Cold War period. For example, the 2022 Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) calls for “urgent” U.S. moves to advance long-standing arms control goals with no prospect for Russian or Chinese reciprocation. In the harsh contemporary threat context, the NPR asserts that “Mutual, verifiable arms control offers the most effective, durable and responsible path to reduce the role of nuclear weapons in our strategy and prevent their use.”[24] The comforting expectation that arms control now is the “most effective” way to prevent Chinese or Russian nuclear employment is otherworldly thinking given Moscow’s and Beijing’s words and deeds over many years—yet it continues in Washington.

In a most disturbing reflection of Washington’s misplaced priorities, John Kerry recently asserted that if Moscow would “make a greater effort to reduce emissions now,” it would “open the door for people to feel better about” Russia’s military invasion of Ukraine. [25]  In fact, a Russian commitment to “reducing emissions” would do nothing to ease Moscow’s crime of invading Ukraine or alter its commitment to violently changing borders in Europe. Similarly, while China and Russia see themselves as in a long-term war with the United States, Washington continues to label engagement with Russia and China as “great power competition,”[26]—a rhetorical obfuscation that prolongs the pretense of a relatively benign threat environment rather than confront stark threat realities.

In contrast to the Biden Administration’s NPR, the near-contemporaneous Congressional Strategic Posture Commission’s 2023 report repeatedly calls for “urgent” U.S. movement to meet looming security threats. The need to call for urgency, and the fact that it has been criticized as being overwrought,[27] is testament to Washington’s decades-long preference for convenient illusions over recognition of rising threats.

In short, the immediate cause of the West’s unprecedented security challenge is a hostile bloc of revisionist, authoritarian states. A deeper cause is the decades-long failure of Washington and allies to recognize and rise to the threat—which could have been managed given their unparalleled combined power potential. Ultimately unrealistic, antiquated U.S. and allied thinking and behavior are responsible for the significance of contemporary security challenges.

Burden Sharing

Some U.S. leaders claim that overly dependent allies who refuse to contribute enough for Western defense are the problem. To be sure, many wealthy allies, such as Holland, Belgium, Germany, Spain and Italy, devote an essentially trivial fraction of their GDP to Western security—preferring to rely on the United States. Their defense efforts are wholly out of sync with the character of threats posed by a hostile Sino-Russian entente.

Washington, however, has been on its own “strategic holiday” for decades and generally has passively indulged allied free riding. U.S. leaders have called on allies for greater defense “burden sharing” for decades. But Washington’s simultaneous actions have, with few exceptions, consistently countenanced allies’ continued indolence.

Washington continually assures allies that the U.S. extended nuclear deterrence umbrella covering them is solid and reliable. The United States can hardly criticize allies for engaging in wishful thinking and indolent behavior when it continually offers “ironclad” assurances. Why expect allies to spend serious national treasure when Washington promises its unfailing protection? Why should allies want to change a security formula that demands so little from them—until, of course, that formula is manifestly unreliable.

U.S. and allied thinking are comparably naïve and self-serving: Washington for seemingly expecting—beyond any logic—that its extended nuclear deterrent promises will continue to be credible absent significant new effort, and allies for imprudently going along for the ride because it is most convenient and inexpensive. Allies may be castigated for their share of this folly, but doing so is not slightly hypocritical, and U.S. finger-wagging will ultimately prove unhelpful without real U.S. commitment and leadership.

A Structural Problem: Extended Nuclear Deterrence Credibility

A credible U.S. extended nuclear deterrent is critical to prevent regional war and is an essential glue that holds the alliance system together. Regarding Finland’s recent joining of NATO, Finnish President Alexander Stubb said that, “I would start from the premise that we in Finland must have a real nuclear deterrent…which comes from the United States.”[28] In the absence of a credible U.S. extended nuclear deterrent, key allies have indicated that they could be compelled to acquire independent nuclear capabilities—which would likely unravel the alliances, unleash a cascade of nuclear proliferation, and cause unpredictable, paranoid responses by Russia and China.

It is important to pull back the curtain on the extended U.S. nuclear umbrella: It is the U.S. and NATO threat to escalate a regional non-nuclear conflict, potentially to a thermonuclear war, in response to an attack on an ally. It includes the U.S. threat that Washington may resort to a level of warfare on behalf of an ally that could escalate to the destruction of both allies and the United States.

When the United States was reasonably well-protected from nuclear attack by wide oceans and defenses, Washington could, in relative safety, issue such strategic nuclear deterrence threats on behalf of allies. However, as the Soviet Union became increasingly capable of targeting the United States with its own strategic nuclear forces, U.S. extended deterrence nuclear threats became increasingly problematic. During the Kennedy Administration, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev asked U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk directly why Moscow should believe that Washington would risk self-destruction in a thermonuclear war on behalf of distant allies. Rusk’s answer was reduced to, “Mr. Chairman, you will have to take into account the possibility we Americans are just [expletive] fools.”[29] This answer did not even try to claim any logical credibility for the U.S. extended deterrent, but that Moscow should fear that Washington might foolishly be self-destructive.

The questions, of course, are: How credible is this ‘we may be fools’ basis for extended deterrence, against which enemies, and in what contexts? In 1979, Henry Kissinger addressed this question directly, telling allies publicly that they should not expect the United States to abide by suicidal U.S. strategic nuclear threats for their security: “Our European allies should not keep asking us to multiply strategic assurances that we cannot possibly mean, or if we do mean, we should not want to execute, because if we execute, we risk the destruction of civilization.”[30]

During the Cold War, Washington undertook numerous steps to restore credibility to the U.S. extended nuclear umbrella. This included maintaining an enormous standing U.S. force in Europe, including over 300,000 troops throughout the 1980s, to help prevent an easy fait accompli that might tempt Soviet aggression, and brandishing approximately 7,000 locally-deployed or deployable, nonstrategic nuclear weapons (NSNW) to buttress the credibility of the U.S. extended strategic deterrence umbrella. The expectation was that conventional forces and NSNW would add credibility to the nuclear umbrella and manifest links to the U.S. strategic nuclear threat of intercontinental missiles and bombers. The United States also developed a deterrence doctrine that planned limited strategic nuclear options in support of extended deterrence, in the expectation that limited U.S. strategic nuclear threats on behalf of allies would be more credible than massive, potentially self-destructive U.S. threats.[31] These theater and strategic moves intentionally added multiple layers to the U.S. extended deterrent in the search for what Herman Kahn called a “not incredible” U.S. extended nuclear deterrent.

Yet, the United States and allies have since minimized or eliminated the multiple theater deterrent layers that reinforced the credibility of the U.S. extended strategic deterrent during the Cold War—and, with few exceptions, have not advanced new and different measures to replace them. The 2001 and 2010 Nuclear Posture Reviews touted U.S. advanced conventional weapons as deterrence tools enabling Washington to reduce the number of, and reliance on, nuclear forces. But the United States has done very little in terms of actually deploying advanced conventional weapons; key allies have noticed. And, while Moscow disdains arms control, expands its nuclear arsenal, and increases its reliance on nuclear weapons,[32] Washington inexplicably continues to prioritize the goals of constraining its strategic and theater capabilities, and reducing reliance on nuclear weapons, as emphasized in the 2022 Nuclear Posture Review. This includes continuing to embrace unmitigated vulnerability to Chinese and Russian strategic missiles, rejecting new NSNW, abiding by arms control agreements that Russia has clearly abandoned, and harboring an enduring aspiration for a No-First-Use nuclear policy that would serve only to further degrade extended nuclear deterrence credibility, as multiple allies have warned for decades. These behaviors reflect a Washington that remains largely stuck in the post-Cold War “strategic holiday,” “peace dividend,” and demonstrably vapid hope that arms control can solve serious force posture problems.

This continuing fundamental lack of Western realism contributes to the declining credibility of the U.S. extended deterrent—a structural problem for the U.S. alliance system given the hostile bloc now confronting the West. The burden for extended nuclear deterrence is largely on the U.S. strategic nuclear triad, which may be insufficiently credible for this purpose without layers of supporting deterrence capabilities because, as Henry Kissinger emphasized in 1979, it connotes a threat Washington “cannot possibly mean” and “should not want to execute.”

Conclusion

Washington and many allies continue to behave as if they are still in the immediate post-Cold War springtime of great expectations. It may be too late to deter a reckoning that decades of indolence and wishful thinking have effectively invited. Recognizing and addressing the threats and structural problems that now beleaguer U.S. global alliances are urgent needs. That recognition and effort must begin in Washington. Ronald Reagan’s famous Cold War speech, “A Time for Choosing,” included a line that fully pertains to Washington and allies today: “We’re at war with the most dangerous enemy that has ever faced mankind in his long climb from the swamp to the stars, and it’s been said if we lose that war, and in so doing lose this way of freedom of ours, history will record with greatest astonishment that those who had the most to lose did the least to prevent its happening.”[33]

[1] Michael J. Boskin and Kiran Sridhar, “Biden’s Budget Neglects the Military,” The Wall Street Journal, March 15, 2024, p. A17, available at https://www.wsj.com/articles/bidens-budget-neglects-the-military-huge-gap-in-american-strength-and-readiness-142ccc30.

[2] See, for example, Eckhard Lübkemeier and Michael Rühle, “Nuklearmacht Europa: Braucht Europa gemeinsame Nukearwaffen? Ein Für and Wider,” Internationale Politick, No. 1 (Januar/Februar 2024), pp. 110-113.

[3] See, for example, Jesse Johnson, “Japan should consider hosting U.S. nuclear weapons, Abe says,” Japan Times, February 27, 2023, available at https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2022/02/27/national/politics-diplomacy/shinzo-abe-japan-nuclear-weapons-taiwan/.

[4] Hiroyuki Akita, “Why nuclear arms debate in South Korea cannot be underestimated: U.S. allies must think outside the box to counter new threats from North Korea,” Nikkei Asia Online (Japan), May 5, 2023, available at https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Comment/Why-nuclear-arms-debate-in-South-Korea-cannot-be-underestimated.

[5] Eric S. Edelman, David Manning, and Franklin C. Miller, “NATO’s Decision Process Has an Achilles’ Heel,” New Atlanticist, March 12, 2024, available at https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/natos-decision-process-has-an-achilles-heel/.

[6] See, for example, Laura Zhou, “China and New Zealand are a ‘force for stability’ in a turbulent world, says Foreign Minister Wang Yi,” South China Morning Post, March 18, 2024, available at https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3255852/china-and-new-zealand-are-force-stability-turbulent-world-says-foreign-minister-wang-yi.

[7] See for example, “Macron Says Europe Should Not Follow U.S. or Chinese Policy Over Taiwan,” Reuters, in, U.S. News and World Report, April 9, 2023, available at https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2023-04-09/macron-says-europe-should-not-follow-u-s-or-chinese-policy-over-taiwan. See also, “After Macron, EU Chief Seeks ‘Independent’ China Policy, Says Abandon US’ ‘Confrontational’ Approach,” Times Now (India), May 1, 2023, available at https://www.timesnownews.com/videos/news-plus/after-macron-eu-chief-seeks-independent-china-policy-says-abandon-us-confrontational-approach-video-99916110.

[8] See Vivienne Machi, Tom Kington, Andrew Chuter, “French visions for an autonomous Europe proves elusive,” Defensenews.com, May 9, 2023, available at https://www.defensenews.com/global/europe/2023/05/09/french-vision-for-an-autonomous-europe-proves-elusive/#:~:text=EUROPE%20and%20WASHINGTON%20%E2%80%94%20After%20Russia,the%20continent%20standing%20alone%20militarily.

[9] Dylan Robertson, “Canada should link with Europe, surpass ‘weak’ military engagement, French envoy,” The Globe and Mail, April 5, 2023, available at https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-canada-should-link-with-europe-surpass-weak-military-engagement-french/.

[10] Maximilian Terhalle and Kees Klompenhouwer, “Facing Europe’s nuclear necessities, Deterrence can no longer be seen as just a bipolar equation — and it’s time NATO addresses this fact,” POLITICO Europe Online, April 22, 2023, available at https://www.politico.eu/article/facing-europe-nuclear-necessities-strategy-vulnerability-war-weapon/.

[11] Shmuel Bar, “Self-perceptions and Nuclear Weapons,” Information Series, No. 558 (July 2023), available at https://nipp.org/information_series/shmuel-bar-self-perceptions-and-nuclear-weapons-no-558-july-13-2023/.

[12] See for example, Timothy W. Martin, “Top U.S. General Sees Changing Nuclear Threat From North Korea,” The Wall Street Journal Online, March 11, 2024, available at https://www.wsj.com/world/asia/top-u-s-general-sees-changing-nuclear-threat-from-north-korea-4788270a.

[13] See, for example, Wolfgang Panofsky, “Nuclear Insecurity: Correcting Washington’s Dangerous Posture,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 86, No. 5 (September/October 2007), pp. 113-114; David E. Sanger, “Don’t Shoot. We’re Not Ready,” The New York Times, June 25, 2006, p. 1; Mike Moore, “Missile Defenses, Relabeled,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Vol. 58, No. 4 (July/August, 2002), p. 22; Joseph Cirincione, “A Much Less Explosive Trend,” The Washington Post, March 10, 2002, p. B-3; Carl Levin, Remarks of Senator Carl Levin on National Missile Defense, National Defense University Forum Breakfast on Ballistic Missile Defense, May 11, 2001, p. 4, available at www.senate.g0v/~levin/newsroom/release.cfm?id=209421; Craig Eisendrath, “Missile Defense System Flawed Technically, Unwise Politically,” Philadelphia Inquirer, May 23, 2001; and, Sen. Joseph Biden, “Why Democrats Oppose Billions More on Missiles” (Letter to the editor), The Wall Street Journal, July 31, 2006, p. A11.

[14] The U.S. Commander in the Indo-Pacific reportedly testified before Congress that Beijing is on track to its goal of being able to invade Taiwan by 2027. See, Bill Gertz, “U.S. Indo-Pacific commander warns of growing danger of war over Taiwan: Aquilino tells lawmakers $11 billion in added funds needed to deter China,” Washington Times Online, Mar. 21, 2024, available at https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2024/mar/21/us-indo-pacific-commander-warns-of-growing-danger-/; Jesse Johnson, “China on track to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027, U.S. commander says,” Japan Times Online (Japan), March 21, 2024, available at https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2024/03/21/asia-pacific/politics/taiwan-china-invasion-2027/#:~:text=The%20top%20U.S.%20military%20commander,a%20single%20day%20this%20year.

[15] See Mark B. Schneider, “The Leaked Russian Nuclear Documents and Russian First Use of Nuclear Weapons,” Information Series, No. 579 (March 18, 2024), available at https://nipp.org/information_series/mark-b-schneider-the-leaked-russian-nuclear-documents-and-russian-first-use-of-nuclear-weapons-no-579-march-18-2024/.

[16] Ronny Reyes, “CIA estimated 50% chance that Russia would nuke Ukraine if it risked losing war: report,” New York Post, March 10, 2024, available at https://nypost.com/2024/03/10/world-news/cia-warned-50-chance-that-russia-would-nuke-ukraine-report/.

[17] Eric Edelman and Frank Miller, “Understanding that Weakness is Provocative is Deterrence 101,” The Dispatch, August 8, 2022, available at https://thedispatch.com/article/understanding-that-weakness-is-provocative/.

[18] For a discussion of frustrated efforts to align the defense budget with threat realities see, Bryant Harris, “A Nearly $1 Trillion Defense Budget Faces Headwinds at Home and Abroad,” Defense News Online, March 7, 2024, available at https://www.defensenews.com/congress/2024/03/07/a-nearly-1-trillion-defense-budget-faces-headwinds-at-home-and-abroad/.

[19] See Colin Dueck, “The Biden Doctrine,” The Caravan, Hoover Institution, March 5, 2024, available at, https://www.hoover.org/research/biden-doctrine. (Emphasis in original).

[20] Congressional Budget Office Report, Long-Term Implications of the 2024 Future Defense Program, October 25, 2023, available at https://www.cbo.gov/publication/59511#:~:text=The%20proposed%20budget%20for%20DoD,2024%20in%20the%20previous%20FYDP.

[21] Elaine McCusker, “Don’t Be Fooled by Biden’s Budget: He’s Cutting Military Spending as Our Needs Grow,” AEI Op-Ed, March 10, 2023, available at https://www.aei.org/op-eds/dont-be-fooled-by-bidens-budget-hes-cutting-military-spending-as-our-needs-grow/.

[22] As reported in, Gertz, “U.S. Indo-Pacific commander warns of growing danger of war over Taiwan,” op. cit.

[23] See, Michael Allen, Carla Martinez Machain, and Michael Flynn, “The US Military Presence in Europe Has Been Declining for 30 Years—the Current Crisis in Ukraine May Reverse That Trend,” The Conversation (January 5, 2022), available at https://theconversation.com/the-us-military-presence-in-europe-has-been-declining-for-30-years-the-current-crisis-in-ukraine-may-reverse-that-trend-175595.

[24] Department of Defense, 2022 Nuclear Posture Review, October 2022, p. 16, available at https://media.defense.gov/2022/Oct/27/2003103845/-1/-1/1/2022-NATIONAL-DEFENSE-STRATEGY-NPR-MDR.PDF.

[25] Quoted in, Sarah Rumpf-Whitten, “John Kerry says people would ‘feel better’ about the Ukraine war if Russia would reduce emissions,” Fox News, March 6, 2024, available at https://www.foxnews.com/politics/john-kerry-says-people-feel-better-about-ukraine-war-russia-reduce-emissions.

[26] 2022 Nuclear Posture Review, op. cit., p. 5.

[27] For example, Harlan K. Ullman, “America’s strategic nuclear posture review is miles off the mark,” The Hill Online, October 30, 2023, available at https://thehill.com/opinion/national-security/4282404-americas-strategic-nuclear-posture-more-deterrence-and-more-weapons/.

[28] Anne Kauranen and Louise Breusch Rasmussen, “NATO’s nuclear deterrent must be real for Finland, says new president,” Reuters, March 1, 2024, available at https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/finland-inaugurates-alexander-stubb-president-nato-era-2024-0301/#:~:text=NATO’s%20nuclear%20deterrent%20must%20be%20real%20for%20Finland%2C%20says%20new%20president,By%20Anne%20Kauranen&text=HELSINKI%2C%20March%201%20(Reuters),fought%20election%20on%20Feb.%2011.

[29] Dean Rusk, As I Saw It (London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1990), p. 228. See also, Arnold Beichman, “How Foolish Khrushchev Nearly Started World War III,” The Washington Times, October 3, 2004, p. B 8.

[30] Henry Kissinger, “The Future of NATO,” in, NATO, The Next Thirty Years, Kenneth Myers, ed. (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1981), p. 8.

[31] See, Keith B. Payne, The Great American Gamble (Fairfax, VA: National Institute Press, 2008), pp. 95-96.

[32] For discussions of increasing reliance see, Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Annual Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community (Washington, D.C.: Office of the Director of National Intelligence, February 6, 2023), p. 14, available at https://www.dni.gov/index.php/newsroom/reportspublications/reports-publications-2023; and, The White House, National Security Strategy (Washington, D.C.: The White House, October 2022), p. 26, available at https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Biden-Harris-Administrations-National-Security-Strategy-10.2022.pdf.

[33] Ronald Reagan, A Time for Choosing, October 27, 1964, available at https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/reagans/ronald-reagan/time-choosing-speech-october-27-1964.

The National Institute for Public Policy’s Information Series is a periodic publication focusing on contemporary strategic issues affecting U.S. foreign and defense policy. It is a forum for promoting critical thinking on the evolving international security environment and how the dynamic geostrategic landscape affects U.S. national security. Contributors are recognized experts in the field of national security. National Institute for Public Policy would like to thank the Sarah Scaife and Smith Richardson Foundations for the generous support that made this Information Series possible.

The views in this Information Series are those of the author(s) and should not be construed as official U.S. Government policy, the official policy of the National Institute for Public Policy or any of its sponsors. For additional information about this publication or other publications by the National Institute Press, contact: Editor, National Institute Press, 9302 Lee Highway, Suite 750 |Fairfax, VA 22031 | (703) 293- 9181 |www.nipp.org. For access to previous issues of the National Institute Press Information Series, please visit http://www.nipp.org/national-institutepress/informationseries/.

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20. America, Iran, and the Patron’s Dilemma

Excerpts;

Given the possibility that a rash decision or escalatory act by one of their clients could trigger a regional war, the patrons should be keen to take steps that would reduce the risk of such a scenario. Both have ways to rein them in, but they will do so only if they believe they can avoid losing face in the process. This requires tacit mutual understandings, which can be achieved through quiet backdoor diplomacy. Encouragingly, senior U.S. and Iranian officials have had indirect talks on at least two occasions since October 7, and their governments have sent messages to each other in other indirect ways as well.

For Iran, the best way forward would be for Qatar—not an ally but a country with which it maintains friendly relations—to successfully mediate the Gaza cease-fire that it has been trying to orchestrate along with the United States and Egypt. There is no indication that Iran is standing in the way of such a goal; on the contrary, Iranian officials know they must not disrupt a Gulf-backed cease-fire if they hope to benefit economically from Iran’s recent rapprochement with Saudi Arabia and the UAE. If and when a cease-fire falls into place, however, Tehran will need to get its local allies to stand down: Hezbollah would have to cease its attacks on Israel, the Houthis to stop their attacks on shipping, and the Iraqi paramilitary groups to suspend their attacks against U.S. interests in Iraq and Syria. Iranian officials might not renounce the strategic goal of pushing the United States out of the Middle East, but it could urge its axis forces to back off for the near term.

For the United States, too, a Gaza cease-fire would be the best way out of its patron’s dilemma. For Israel to agree to one, however, the Biden administration will need to start pulling more levers. Washington needs to demand that Israel pursue its war objectives through a cease-fire and the drafting of a workable day-after plan for Gaza in close coordination with the United States, Arab governments, and Europe. And the United States needs to back up this demand with real actions. The obvious lever, when other inducements don’t work, would be to condition the continued supply of offensive weapons on progress toward ending the war. Likewise, Washington could try to reduce Israeli violence in the West Bank by halting exports of the automatic rifles used by Israeli settlers there.

One of the larger ironies in the current war may be that, as patrons of wayward clients, both the United States and Iran have more in common than they may recognize. Both would benefit from a cease-fire that ends the risk of a regional war. And both would arguably be able to take some credit behind the scenes for backing such a cease-fire and making sure it holds. Of course, it is far from certain when or even whether the patrons will be able to stop this war. But unlike other external powers, at least they have tools to do so. And if they do not use them soon, they may find that the war in Gaza is only a prelude to an even more dangerous conflagration.

America, Iran, and the Patron’s Dilemma

The Backers of Israel and Hamas Didn’t Start the War in Gaza—but They Can End It

By Joost Hiltermann

March 28, 2024

Foreign Affairs · by Joost Hiltermann · March 28, 2024

As has been widely noted, Israeli security officials were caught completely off guard by Hamas’s shocking October 7 attack, a lapse that allowed the rampage to go on for hours before Israeli forces could regain control. But the Israelis were not the only ones unprepared. So, too, were Hamas’s own allies, including its chief patron, Iran. As Iran and other members of its so-called axis of resistance made clear, Hamas had failed to seek approval for—or give them prior notice of—its plans.

But Iranian officials decided they could ill afford to let Hamas struggle for itself, particularly once Israel’s devastating military campaign in the Gaza Strip began to spark outrage across the Middle East. Still, they were wary of provoking a wider war. As a result, Iran, through its axis clients—including Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, and Shiite militias in Iraq and Syria— has tried to walk a fine line between responding to the demand for action and preventing axis responses to the Israeli offensive from spinning out of control. In essence, by acting without coordination with its ostensible overlord, Hamas precipitated a dangerous crisis that has threatened to engulf Tehran as well.

After five months of war in Gaza, the United States is facing an analogous problem. As Israel’s chief patron and ally, the United States has staunchly backed Israel in its determination to root out Hamas in Gaza. Yet the Israeli government has continually defied U.S. demands to act with restraint, causing a humanitarian catastrophe that has already cost more than 30,000 Palestinian lives. Now, Israeli leaders are threatening to go ahead with a major offensive in Rafah, an area in southern Gaza containing more than one million civilians, even as the Biden administration repeatedly states that it opposes such a move.

In its unwillingness to heed Washington’s counsel, Israel risks undermining the U.S. position in the Middle East, exposing the Biden administration to accusations of double standards at a moment when it wants to rally global support for Ukraine. It could even end up drawing the United States itself into a broader military conflict in the region. Such is the fissure between U.S. and Israeli leaders that the United States took the rare step on March 25 of abstaining from, rather than vetoing, a UN Security Council resolution demanding a cease-fire in Gaza.

Although they differ in nature, both of these cases illustrate what might be called the patron’s dilemma. For decades, major global and regional powers ranging from the United States and Russia to Iran and Saudi Arabia have sought local allies and clients to extend their influence and project power in the Middle East. In theory, such patron-client relationships help provide a buffer between major powers, providing plausible deniability for operations that could otherwise escalate. But in arming and supporting these regional dependents, patrons also have to give them significant leeway to pursue their own policies. And amid an armed conflict on the scale of the current war in Gaza, the lack of direct control can lead to incidents that harm the interests of the patrons or even threaten to drag them into direct confrontation with their rivals. As international leaders press for an endgame in Gaza, they will need to unravel the particular risks—and opportunities—that this dynamic has created.

SPOOKY ACTION AT A DISTANCE

Perhaps the most complicated patron relationship in today’s Middle East is the one between Iran and its various local allies. For Iran, supporting an array of regional groups such as Hezbollah and Hamas constitutes what it calls its “forward defense strategy.” The aim is to allow Iran to respond militarily on multiple fronts to any attack or threat against it without necessarily involving Iranian forces. The Israeli government’s awareness, for example, that Hezbollah’s large arsenal of rockets can reach targets throughout Israel has provided Iran with an important insurance policy. But the success of this strategy still requires Iran to decide when and where to activate its clients.

Iran and the axis members are committed to getting the U.S. military to leave the Middle East. But Tehran sees that as a long-term goal, to be accomplished by incrementally making it more difficult—and more locally unpopular—for the United States to maintain its military footprint in the region. Rash actions by Iran’s local allies could upset these dual objectives by creating unpredictable situations, as Hamas’s October 7 attack has vividly shown.

Among the axis groups, Hezbollah is particularly close to Iran: just as Iran needs the group as its forward defense on the Israeli border, so Hezbollah needs Iran’s funding and military support to ensure its dominance in Lebanon. As a result, Hezbollah is unlikely to carry out a full-scale attack on Israel without Iranian approval. Compared with Hamas’s liaison, Hezbollah’s relationship with its patron is more symbiotic. Yet it is doubtful that even Hezbollah would declare unquestioned fealty to Tehran if the latter were to prevent it from operating as it sees fit within the Lebanese environment, whether as a political party that participates in the parliament and in the government or as a military force.

The Houthis, who are embroiled in their own war in Yemen, have a more elastic relationship with their Iranian patrons. As political outcasts for many years in Yemen, they have long looked to Iran for support. On more than one occasion, however, the Houthis have flatly ignored Iran’s strategic guidance. In 2015, for example, after the Houthis seized Sanaa, the Yemeni capital, Tehran advised them against rushing south toward Aden to try to take full control of the country. But they went ahead anyway, getting stranded in the south and eventually forced to withdraw. As Tareq Saleh, commander of Yemen’s Red Sea forces and deputy chairman of the country’s Presidential Leadership Council, told a colleague and me in January at his military headquarters in the Red Sea town of Mokha: “Iran is strategic: it moves step by step. But the Houthis are impatient. They want to move—now.” Such impetuousness can get Iran in trouble.

A Houthi rally in support of Palestinians in Gaza, Sanaa, Yemen, March 2024

Khaled Abdullah / Reuters

In this case, the Houthis were rewarded for their impulsivity. Notably, it was after the Aden offensive that Iran began to provide military aid to the Houthis, allowing them to defend themselves against a Saudi-Emirati intervention while preserving Iran’s influence in Yemen. Moreover, the utter fragmentation of the Houthis’ adversaries—the Saudi-backed forces of the internationally recognized Yemeni government—ensured that the Houthis could maintain control of a large part of Yemen and that Iran could reap steadily growing influence there. Support from Iran grew as Yemen’s war ground on, enabling the Houthis to send drones and missiles into Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. This provided a clear pressure point for Tehran against its regional rivals.

After Iran and Saudi Arabia restored diplomatic relations a year ago, regional tensions receded. The Gaza war has offered the Houthis the chance to up their domestic leverage, this time by launching sustained attacks against commercial shipping in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. In doing so, they have been acting in concert with the other members of the Iranian-backed alliance.

As a Sunni Islamist group, Hamas has had an even looser relationship with Iran. Beginning in 2012, when a popular uprising in Syria began to threaten the regime of President Bashar al-Assad, Hamas broke with the Syrian government and its patron Iran because they were attacking Sunni rebel groups. As a result, Hamas’s leaders were forced to leave Damascus and Iran reduced funding for the group. Hamas’s relations with Tehran were repaired only a few years before the October 7 attacks, after Hamas’s military leaders in Gaza gained preeminence within the group. These leaders renewed Hamas’s relationship with Iran, which began supplying them with funds, weapons, and military training.

For Tehran, the addition of Hamas to the axis meant that it could now exert pressure on Israel from two directions—Lebanon and Gaza—and theoretically even force Israel to fight a two-front war. The tacit understanding, however, was that Hamas would continue to confront Israel in the comparatively limited way it had during the various wars waged in Gaza since the group took control of the territory in 2007. On October 7, it violated that understanding when it decided unilaterally to go for broke, apparently hoping that its axis allies would rush to its aid. Instead, the attack put Iran and Hezbollah in a delicate position: both have struggled to demonstrate support for Hamas and the Palestinians while distancing themselves from Hamas’s actions and avoiding escalation.

CRIMES AND PUNISHMENT

As the war in Gaza has shown, patrons must take special care to keep their clients, be they states like Israel or nonstate groups like Iran’s local allies, from getting out of control. Consider the January attack on a U.S. military outpost in eastern Jordan by Kataib Hezbollah, an Iraqi paramilitary group backed by Iran. As was widely reported, on January 28, the group sent an armed drone into the outpost, killing three U.S. soldiers. Although the incident may have been due to a miscalculation rather than intentional, it was the first time in years that U.S. soldiers have been killed by Iranian-backed groups. The United States struck back, bombing a number of paramilitary facilities in Syria and Iraq and killing over 40 fighters belonging to other Iraqi paramilitary groups (including some not directly supported by Iran), as well as the senior Kataib Hezbollah commander responsible for its Syria operations, Abu Baqir al-Saadi.

In fact, both Iranian and Kataib Hezbollah commanders immediately recognized that the Tower 22 attack had crossed a U.S. red line. Within hours of the incident, the commander of Iran’s Quds Force, Esmail Ghaani, flew into Baghdad to exhort Iran’s client groups in Iraq to halt attacks on U.S. forces. Kataib Hezbollah promptly announced that it was suspending its military operations and, along with like-minded Iraqi groups, withdrew from its positions in Syria. Ghaani’s swift response signaled to Washington that Iran had no desire to escalate the situation; Iran sent a similar message to the Biden administration via Saudi Arabia and likely through other channels as well. Moreover, even as the U.S. killing of Saadi, the Kataib Hezbollah commander, provoked fury in Iraq, axis groups refrained from any retaliation, although Kataib Hezbollah later reversed its earlier decision to suspend operations. Since then, Iraqi groups have resumed attacks in Syria but have clearly observed a red line of not killing Americans.

But this was not the first time that Iran felt compelled to slap Kataib Hezbollah on the wrist. In late 2019, after American forces retaliated against the group for the death of one of their contractors (apparently at the hands of the Islamic State), killing a number of Kataib Hezbollah fighters, the group directed an angry mob of supporters to storm the U.S. embassy in Baghdad. Although they failed to penetrate the compound beyond the reception area, the assault persuaded the Trump administration to kill Qasem Soleimani, Ghaani’s predecessor as axis manager. The drone that killed him at Baghdad International Airport in early 2020 also took the life of Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, Kataib Hezbollah’s leader and the deputy coordinator of Iranian-backed paramilitary groups in Iraq.

Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh at a press conference in Tehran, March 2024

Majid Asgaripour / WANA / Reuters

Significantly, although Iran retaliated against U.S. forces in Iraq for the Soleimani killing, it also expressed its displeasure with Kataib Hezbollah for the unauthorized embassy attack by cutting off the group’s direct access to Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader. This access matters to Shiite Islamist groups like Kataib Hezbollah because, as an Iraqi journalist explained last December to a colleague and me in Baghdad, access to Khamenei, the groups’ murshid, Arabic for spiritual guide, is a rare honor that suggests the importance Tehran attaches to such partnerships.

Iran could take further steps to rein in its clients, including suspending military support. But most of the axis members seem to be well aware of the red lines Iran expects them to observe. In their attacks on shipping in the Red Sea, for example, the Houthis have been careful not to kill U.S. sailors, though this may also be a matter of luck, given the tremendous amount of ordnance they have been firing. Moreover, judging from the persistence of their attacks, it seems clear that the Houthis are not being significantly deterred by U.S. and British strikes. The more plausible explanation for why the Houthis have not targeted U.S. personnel even as they step up their attacks is that Tehran has ordered them not to.

With its October 7 attack, Hamas has gone much further than any other axis group in defying the unspoken rules of its patron. By igniting a ferocious war with Israel, the attack has created a significant rift between Hamas and the axis. Iran and Hezbollah have signaled their dismay at Hamas for failing to alert them of its plan—a reaction no doubt amplified by how badly Hamas appears to have miscalculated the response it would draw from Israel. For their part, Hamas leaders have expressed deep disappointment about the lack of stronger support from the axis, even suggesting that Iran is not interested in achieving real change for the Palestinians. “Iran supports Palestinians morally and spiritually, but not according to Palestinian aspirations,” a Hamas political leader told me in Doha in December. “This reinforces the idea that Palestinians should stand up for themselves.”

The Gaza war has thus landed Tehran in a predicament that is partly of its own making. By arming Hamas to the point that it can launch a powerful military assault on Israel, Iran has lost control of a group it needs for its own forward defense strategy. The war’s outcome is uncertain and may not end in the kind of permanent cease-fire that axis members say would be required for them to stand down. The risk of a wider war therefore remains and is only likely to increase as the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza grows.

THE SORCEROR’S APPRENTICE

Iran is not the only power that must cope with unruly local allies. So must the United States, which has found the current Israeli leadership to be a most obstinate partner. Both the United States and Israel agree on the objective of eliminating Hamas’s ability to threaten Israel, but they diverge sharply on the means. After months of an Israeli air and ground offensive that has laid waste to large parts of Gaza, killed and injured tens of thousands of civilians, and displaced nearly two million people—almost the entire population of the territory—Biden vowed he would have a “come to Jesus” moment with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. But the Israeli leader, whose precarious hold on power depends on the continued support of his right-wing coalition partners, has defiantly dismissed U.S. concerns and strategic guidance, even as his country remains heavily dependent on American weapons and ammunition.

This strained relationship has come to a head over Israel’s threatened offensive on Rafah. Situated in southern Gaza and now swollen with more than one million Palestinians uprooted from other parts of the territory, Rafah is already facing a humanitarian crisis, and for Biden, an Israeli assault on it has become a red line. To demand that Israel take steps to limit harm to the civilian population in Rafah, Biden summoned Israeli officials to Washington to discuss their planned offensive. In theory, this should have been an opportunity for the patron to discipline its client. In reality, however, U.S.-Israeli relations have become much more complicated.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken arriving in Israel for talks, Tel Aviv, March 2024

Evelyn Hockstein / Reuters

Following the United States’ abstention on the UN Security Council cease-fire resolution on March 25—a rare departure from Washington’s usual protection of Israel in this forum—Netanyahu responded by canceling the Israeli delegation’s trip to Washington. It is unclear whether Netanyahu is simply using the threat of an offensive to force Hamas into a cease-fire on Israel’s terms, or indeed intends to send the IDF into Rafah to pursue remaining Hamas battalions that are allegedly dug in there. Either way, the Israeli leader has staunchly defied Biden’s strongly expressed desire for a cease-fire.

This unusual rupture raises the question of what it would take for the United States to use the real leverage that it has on Israel: making the enormous military assistance it routinely provides—and specifically the offensive weapons being used in Gaza—conditional on Israel aligning itself with the U.S. approach to ending the war. The answer may lie partly in the extent to which U.S. support for Israel in Gaza is perceived to affect Biden’s electoral chances in November. But barring such a step, the inability of the United States and European countries to restrain Israel has already had a tangible effect on their world standing. U.S. and EU diplomats, for example, have found their trade and development partners’ open doors suddenly closing. Already, global competitors such as China and Russia have sought to exploit popular anger in Africa, Latin America, and Asia over the perceived double standard in Western responses to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Israel’s prolonged military occupation of Palestinian territories—potentially making it harder for the United States to maintain a unified front against Russia.

The events surrounding the Gaza war could accelerate the decline of American power, in this case aided and abetted by Israel, a recalcitrant proxy intent on pursuing a military solution to its long quest for greater security in an enduringly hostile environment. It is hard to see how Israel can realize this goal, after 76 years of failing to do so, without a negotiated settlement with the Palestinians—an approach the United States has long professed to favor.

A PATRON SOLUTION?

For Iran and the United States, the war in Gaza has raised the still more dangerous risk of direct military confrontation. Both governments have indicated they do not seek such a face-off, at least for now. That is reassuring. Yet there is no such thing as full control in patron-client relationships, and there is no foolproof way to prevent accidents or miscalculations from triggering an all-out regional war. Escalatory cycles in regional standoffs are hard to contain when hawks on both sides urge their leaders to undertake more dramatic retaliation—as when some Republican members of Congress called the Biden administration to seek reprisals against Iran after the Kataib Hezbollah incident.

In turn, the patrons’ local allies must respond to their own publics, particularly if events demand it. For example, if a Hezbollah or Palestinian rocket fired from Lebanon hits an Israeli city and causes mass casualties, Israeli leaders will almost certainly have little choice but to respond with much greater force than they have up to now. Moreover, the displacement of tens of thousands of Israelis and a roughly equal number of Lebanese from their homes on both sides of the Israeli-Lebanese border has created new pressures on the two countries’ leaderships. Populations on both sides demand decisive action—military if it cannot be diplomatic—that would allow those displaced to return in safety.

Awareness of these risks may in part explain the efforts by both Washington and Tehran to gain some distance from their respective partners since October 7. In so doing, both patrons have elevated plausible deniability to a high rhetorical art, signaling their disapproval of their clients’ actions while leaving the underlying relationships unchanged. (Even the United States’ unusual abstention at the UN Security Council should be understood in this way.)

Both Iran and the United States have tools to stop the war.

Given the possibility that a rash decision or escalatory act by one of their clients could trigger a regional war, the patrons should be keen to take steps that would reduce the risk of such a scenario. Both have ways to rein them in, but they will do so only if they believe they can avoid losing face in the process. This requires tacit mutual understandings, which can be achieved through quiet backdoor diplomacy. Encouragingly, senior U.S. and Iranian officials have had indirect talks on at least two occasions since October 7, and their governments have sent messages to each other in other indirect ways as well.

For Iran, the best way forward would be for Qatar—not an ally but a country with which it maintains friendly relations—to successfully mediate the Gaza cease-fire that it has been trying to orchestrate along with the United States and Egypt. There is no indication that Iran is standing in the way of such a goal; on the contrary, Iranian officials know they must not disrupt a Gulf-backed cease-fire if they hope to benefit economically from Iran’s recent rapprochement with Saudi Arabia and the UAE. If and when a cease-fire falls into place, however, Tehran will need to get its local allies to stand down: Hezbollah would have to cease its attacks on Israel, the Houthis to stop their attacks on shipping, and the Iraqi paramilitary groups to suspend their attacks against U.S. interests in Iraq and Syria. Iranian officials might not renounce the strategic goal of pushing the United States out of the Middle East, but it could urge its axis forces to back off for the near term.

For the United States, too, a Gaza cease-fire would be the best way out of its patron’s dilemma. For Israel to agree to one, however, the Biden administration will need to start pulling more levers. Washington needs to demand that Israel pursue its war objectives through a cease-fire and the drafting of a workable day-after plan for Gaza in close coordination with the United States, Arab governments, and Europe. And the United States needs to back up this demand with real actions. The obvious lever, when other inducements don’t work, would be to condition the continued supply of offensive weapons on progress toward ending the war. Likewise, Washington could try to reduce Israeli violence in the West Bank by halting exports of the automatic rifles used by Israeli settlers there.

One of the larger ironies in the current war may be that, as patrons of wayward clients, both the United States and Iran have more in common than they may recognize. Both would benefit from a cease-fire that ends the risk of a regional war. And both would arguably be able to take some credit behind the scenes for backing such a cease-fire and making sure it holds. Of course, it is far from certain when or even whether the patrons will be able to stop this war. But unlike other external powers, at least they have tools to do so. And if they do not use them soon, they may find that the war in Gaza is only a prelude to an even more dangerous conflagration.

• JOOST HILTERMANN is Middle East and North Africa Program Director at the International Crisis Group.

Foreign Affairs · by Joost Hiltermann · March 28, 2024

21. Don’t Betray the Women of Afghanistan

Don’t Betray the Women of Afghanistan

Normalizing Relations With the Taliban Normalizes Female Suffering

By Lisa Curtis and Hadeia Amiry

March 28, 2024

Foreign Affairs · by Lisa Curtis and Hadeia Amiry · March 28, 2024

A human rights calamity is unfolding in Afghanistan. Since retaking power in mid-2021, the Taliban have implemented more extreme policies against women than any other regime in the world. Taliban leaders have issued over 90 edictslimiting women’s rights: they have banned women and girls from attending university or school beyond the sixth grade, restricted their access to health care, prohibited them from leaving home without a male guardian, and revoked many of their social and legal protections. Every new restriction on Afghan women strengthens the Taliban’s dictatorial grip on the entire Afghan population and feeds extremism in a society already occupied by dozens of terrorist groups. Although the Taliban are fighting the terrorist group known as Islamic State Khorasan (ISIS-K), they allow some 20 other terrorist groups to operate freely in Afghan territory.

Yet even though Afghanistan is the only country in the world that prohibits women’s education, some analysts are urging the United States to normalize ties with the Taliban, including by reopening a U.S. embassy in the country. These proponents argue that by doing so, Washington would improve its ability to monitor assistance programs and engage with Taliban leaders in the country, including to press them to moderate their policies. But taking steps to normalize relations with the Taliban before their leaders halt their systematic persecution of women would be a gross betrayal of the millions of women and girls whose lives the United States helped to transform over two decades. During the Taliban’s previous stint in power, from 1996 to 2001, they closed schools to girls, forbade women to work, and targeted women with extreme forms of punishment, including public floggings and executions.

From 2002 to 2021, however, during the U.S.-led NATO mission to stabilize Afghanistan, Afghan women served as cabinet ministers, ambassadors, parliamentarians, diplomats, and journalists, reflecting historic levels of involvement in society. It is fair to say that empowering women represents the best work the United States did in Afghanistan and its most positive legacy. In early 2021, months before the U.S. military withdrawal and the Taliban’s takeover, 2.5 million Afghan girls were attending primary school, and 27 percent of the seats in the Afghan parliament were held by women.

Normalizing relations with the Taliban before they reverse their anti-women policies would amount to pretending as if those two decades of progress never happened. Moreover, allowing the Taliban to crush the lives of half the country’s population would make a joke of American claims of defending human rights worldwide. It would also reveal Washington’s disinterest in adhering to its own legislation: the 2017 Women, Peace, and Security Act codified the United States’ commitment to gender equity and inclusion in security, peacemaking, and peacekeeping, making gender equity an integral part of U.S. foreign policy. The UN is trying to maintain a firm line with the Taliban: ahead of a February UN-sponsored meeting of Afghan Special Representatives from 25 different countries in Doha, the Taliban demanded that all Afghan civil society leaders be disinvited. UN Secretary-General António Guterres was right not to give in to this demand.

But the United States must more fully support UN efforts to promote an inclusive political dialogue that includes Afghan civil society leaders and that places women’s rights at its center. Washington must also expand human rights sanctions against Taliban leaders and work with the UN to officially designate more of them as terrorists. Finally, Washington must sustain its refusal to extend diplomatic recognition to the Taliban regime until it reverses its persecution of women. Washington must not give the Taliban’s repression of women a blank check—especially because the deepening persecution of women will feed other kinds of extremism.

SAME AS THE OLD BOSS

When the Taliban returned to power after the August 2021 U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, their leaders made pledges that they would govern the country differently from the way they did previously by allowing women to work and study. They closed Afghanistan’s schools to girls immediately after they took power but promised to reopen them. A Taliban spokesperson, Zabihullah Mujahid, told reporters that women would be permitted to participate in society “within the bounds of Islamic law,” adding that “when it comes to experience, maturity, and vision, there is a huge difference” between today’s Taliban leaders compared “to 20 years ago.”

In reality, there is no difference when it comes to the treatment of women. Over the past two and a half years, the Taliban have gradually stripped women and girls of their rights, tightened control over their lives, and even sanctioned violence against them. The Taliban started their campaign against women in September 2021 by disbanding the Ministry of Women’s Affairs and replacing it with the Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, whose mandate is to ensure that Afghans follow the new regime’s strict interpretation of Islam. Shortly after that, the Taliban issued orders requiring all professional women to quit their jobs, and in December 2021, they forbade women to travel abroad without a male relative. When Afghan schools were reopened to girls in March 2022, only those 12 years old and younger were allowed to return. Later that year, the Taliban further revealed their true intentions toward women when they announced that women would no longer be permitted to attend university or to work for international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs).

The Taliban are also increasingly encouraging violence against women, both in word and in deed. Official public floggings of women as well as men have become commonplace for what the Taliban deem “moral crimes,” such as adultery, theft, or running away from home. In May 2023, the head of the Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice in Kandahar, Mawlawi Abdulhai Omar, instructed his province’s leaders to ban women from going to cemeteries and health centers on the pretext that women visitors and patients were inappropriately wearing makeup or pretending to be ill.

Omar told the provincial leaders to arrest and punish fathers and brothers for not “correcting” these transgressions in their daughters and sisters. In a culture that already faces the scourge of honor killings, such decrees seem likely to increase the prevalence of domestic violence. In cities and rural areas today in Afghanistan, women cannot walk freely on the streets. Millions of girls cannot receive an education, and hundreds of thousands of women cannot earn an income to help support their families. An increasing number of girls are being forced into marriage, often with much older men, and suicide rates among female Afghans are on the rise as they lose hope for their future.

DEADLY EMBRACE

During a recent trip to Pakistan and Qatar, senior government interlocutors told one of us that the Taliban were unlikely to change their anti-women policies. Nonetheless, the United States must take a principled stand for Afghan women and girls, regardless of the Taliban’s response. It has room to do so, as evidenced by a few strong positions it has taken already. In early December, the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned the minister for the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, Sheikh Mohammad Khalid Hanafi, and the head of Afghanistan’s Academy of Sciences, Sheikh Fariduddin Mahmood; both men are widely believed to be behind the ban on girls’ secondary education.

Aside from limited sanctions, however, the United States has been largely reluctant to actively penalize the Taliban for their persecution of women. Instead, the U.S. government has focused on seeking innovative ways to support Afghan women and girls. In September 2022, for example, the State Department launched the Alliance for Afghan Women’s Economic Resilience, a public-private partnership between the State Department and Boston University that encourages collaborations between leading Afghan women and the U.S. private sector, civil society, and academia to support Afghan women’s access to online education and employment.

While AWER is a laudable effort and sends the message to Afghan women that the world has not completely forgotten about them, it is not enough. Women and girls in Afghanistan may find creative ways to build their skills and learn virtually, but unless the Taliban reverse their discriminatory policies, women will be unable to deploy these skills in Afghan society. In addition to initiatives like AWER, Washington and like-minded governments must put more penalties on the Taliban, such as expanding sanctions on their leaders and curbing those leaders’ ability to travel.

Some commentators argue that Taliban leaders should be encouraged to travel abroad and attend international conferences, despite their harsh policies against women, on the theory that international exposure will soften their policies. But this argument increasingly appears flawed. Taliban leaders have been able to travel and meet frequently with international representatives over the past two and a half years, yet their policies toward women and girls keep getting worse.

NAME AND SHAME

One way that the United States can support the women of Afghanistan is to lead the fight to formally label the Taliban’s policies as “gender apartheid.” The 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court introduced apartheid as a crime for which governments worldwide can be punished. Historically, this crime—described by the ICC as “inhuman acts committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them”—refers to discrimination along racial lines. But UN experts are now pushing for a specific recognition of gender apartheid in the Draft Crimes Against Humanity Convention, which will be discussed in April in the Sixth Committee of the UN General Assembly. If gender apartheid is included, designating the Taliban’s policies as a form of gender apartheid would prompt their classification as a crime against humanity.

In the case of the Taliban’s policies, the designation would be remarkably apt. Banning a group of people—defined by an immutable physical characteristic—from accessing education, employment, and health care; restricting their travel unless they are accompanied by a guardian; imposing special legal punishments on them; and systematically excluding them from public spaces such as gyms and beauty salons is precisely what the anti-Black South African apartheid regime did from the 1960s to the early 1990s. Applying the term to the Taliban’s policies and codifying it as an international crime would also be enormously valuable in practice. It would help galvanize international leaders and NGOs to take the issue more seriously and create a legal obligation to address the systematic oppression of women in Afghanistan.

The gender apartheid designation would also supplement other UN actions aimed at supporting women and girls in Afghanistan. In December 2023, UN Security Council Resolution 2721 called for the establishment of a UN Envoy to Afghanistan. The resolution stipulates that this envoy should have experience with human rights and gender issues. China and Russia abstained from the vote, however, and called on the UN to consult with the Taliban before appointing such an envoy. By establishing a role for an envoy and convening the meeting of Afghan Special Representatives in Doha, the UN has begun directing its attention to the plight of Afghan women. But Beijing’s and Moscow’s disregard for the rights of Afghan women will make this effort a slow, uphill battle.

The UN’s accelerating efforts deserve strong U.S. support. The United States can also increase its engagement with Afghan opposition leaders to show the Taliban that they are not the only game in town. The Taliban took power through force, and they have no real claim to political legitimacy. There are other Afghan voices that can justifiably claim to represent the will of the Afghan people, even if they are currently in exile.

SECONDARY BENEFITS

Because the Taliban are likely to remain in power in the near term, complete disengagement is not the solution. But the United States must show greater willingness to defend Afghan women and stand up for human rights. Aside from being the right thing to do, supporting Afghan women will also help undermine extremist trends in the country, a necessary step given the plethora of terrorist groups that operate in Afghanistan—terrorist groups that appear to be flourishing. The latest UN Sanctions Monitoring Report, released in January 2024, notes that al Qaeda has established eight new training camps in Afghanistan. ISIS-K just claimed responsibility for the March 23 attack in Moscow that killed over 130 people, and the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, which operates within Afghanistan and has been responsible for a rising number of attacks on Pakistani civilians and security personnel, is also gaining strength.

The more the Taliban suppress women’s involvement in society, the greater the likelihood that extremist ideologies will proliferate, driving recruitment for terrorist groups. The Taliban are opening new religious schools and implementing new curricula in public schools that teach young men about its radical form of Islam, thus breeding a new generation of extremists. The best way to reverse such developments is for the United States to aid the international community in its fight to keep women and girls in school and maintain their agency in society.

• LISA CURTIS is Director of the Indo-Pacific Security Program at the Center for a New American Security. She served as Deputy Assistant to the President and Senior Director for South and Central America at the National Security Council from 2017 to 2021.
• HADEIA AMIRY is an Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Center for a New American Security and a Visiting Fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy.

Foreign Affairs · by Lisa Curtis and Hadeia Amiry · March 28, 2024

22. Towed artillery has reached ‘end of the effectiveness,’ Army four-star declares

For all my friends who are the King of Battle.

Excerpts:

“I personally believe that we have witnessed the end of the effectiveness of towed artillery: The future is not bright for towed artillery,” Rainey told an audience today at the Association of the US Army’s Global Force symposium. Looking at large scale operations against threats like China, the US Army instead needs mobile, indirect fires, especially in its lighter Stryker formations, he added.

Rainey, and other Army leaders, have been working on the tactical fires study that grapples with just what mix of artillery capabilities the future arsenal needs. While the four-star general did not provide an in-depth readout of all the options and recommendations included in that document, an ample number of towed cannons appears to be out.

Towed artillery has reached ‘end of the effectiveness,’ Army four-star declares - Breaking Defense

breakingdefense.com · by Ashley Roque · March 27, 2024

Soldiers fire a M777 in 2011. (Laura Buchta/US Army)

GLOBAL FORCE 2024 — US Army Futures Command head Gen. James Rainey today teased some details of the Army’s highly anticipated tactical fires study — and made it clear that towed artillery’s future isn’t bright.

“I personally believe that we have witnessed the end of the effectiveness of towed artillery: The future is not bright for towed artillery,” Rainey told an audience today at the Association of the US Army’s Global Force symposium. Looking at large scale operations against threats like China, the US Army instead needs mobile, indirect fires, especially in its lighter Stryker formations, he added.

Rainey, and other Army leaders, have been working on the tactical fires study that grapples with just what mix of artillery capabilities the future arsenal needs. While the four-star general did not provide an in-depth readout of all the options and recommendations included in that document, an ample number of towed cannons appears to be out.

What’s in, then? Rainey called out the desire to build and field autonomous, robotic cannons that soldiers and special operators can use for entry operations, and, for now, the service “is not wed to any caliber.”

The Army also still needs a “better armored howitzer” that can possibly hit targets 70km away. Earlier this month the service announced that it had halted work on the Extended Range Cannon Artillery (ERCA) platform prototype. That prototype added a 30-foot, 58-caliber gun tube to BAE Systems’ Paladin M109A7 self-propelled howitzer. The goal was to use the modified artillery platform to launch 155-mm rounds out to 70km, an increase from the current max range of up to 30km.

While work on that platform has stopped, the requirement still stands, and the service is continuing work on a mix of new munitions and a supercharged propellant. Army leaders are also looking for companies to offer up existing platforms, with the service hosting an initial industry day next week.

A handful of companies are expected to throw their hat in the ring, and several were on the show floor this week talking about their potential solutions.

BAE Systems, for example, is proposing its M109-52 prototype, which takes the Rheinmetall L52 main gun and integrates it onto an M109A7 howitzer, according to Jim Miller, the company’s vice president of business development for combat mission systems.

Elbit America, meanwhile, is proposing Sigma as a possible candidate, according to Cobb Laslie, the director of howitzer programs. Developed for Israel and slated to be fielded next year, the weapon is a 155mm, 52 caliber self-propelled howitzer with an autoloader.

The pool of contenders may also include South Korea’s Hanwha and Germany’s KMW.

breakingdefense.com · by Ashley Roque · March 27, 2024

23. American Strategy on the Brink

Excerpts:

Yet there is a more fundamental problem at hand, one of a strategy unfit for its purpose. The central premise in Europe, that the U.S. can afford to cut Ukraine loose, is wrong. The Europeans may well fill part of the gap, but the natural friction within European politics speaks against a coherent strategy. And by stepping away from Europe, the U.S. reduces any long-term leverage it has over Europe in the future. At the same time, the U.S. seeks European economic, financial, and political support to contain Chinese expansion and, in the event of war, cut China off from Eurasian commerce.

In the Middle East, the Biden administration is convinced that the crisis can be restricted to Gaza and that Iran’s proxies will simply back down once military operations in the Strip end—as long as the U.S. is seen to take a balanced line toward Israel and act as an “honest broker.” This explains a series of leaks and off-the-record statements that not only express U.S. displeasure with Israeli military operations, but that also warn of an Israeli escalation supposedly designed to save Benjamin Netanyahu’s political future. Never mind that Netanyahu is the least hawkish, most restrained member of the Israeli war cabinet, and the man most sympathetic to Washington’s pressure. And never mind his doubtful political future and thorough unpopularity beyond the core of Likud. The narrative is a public-relations ploy to sow discord in the Israeli government, not a serious diagnosis of strategic preferences.

In Asia, the Biden administration has aggressively and persistently sought a détente with Beijing since the beginning of 2023. Its first attempt was scuppered by the spy-balloon crisis of late January. Its second culminated in the San Francisco summit, a meeting light on specifics and heavy on largely abstract rhetoric. Immediately after William Lai’s victory in Taiwan’s elections in January, President Biden’s first comment emphasized American opposition to Taiwan independence. The message is clear: The Biden administration thinks it can soothe China rhetorically and is largely unwilling to make any moves that might  provoke a Chinese response. Never mind that there is no evidence that Lai has seriously entertained Taiwanese independence as a practical policy position during his career as a front-line politician. Unsurprisingly, he has developed the political good sense to avoid such an obvious provocation while getting on with the business of governing a liberal capitalist democracy of 23 million souls.

The threatened states of the Eurasian Rimland are therefore increasingly at odds with the U.S., not because they wish to leave the American-led coalition or reorient themselves toward the Revisionist Axis, but because they have a better conception of strategy than the Americans do. Ukraine’s leaders understand the need to repel Russian aggression, thereby securing their own future and that of Europe. For all their faults and missteps, Israel’s leadership has recognized the need to prosecute a long-term war against Iran that rolls back Iranian expansion in the Levant, and thereby defends Israel’s survival and reduces the strategic threat that Iran can pose to the U.S. Taiwan’s leaders balance a delicate set of domestic and international considerations, but its policymakers and elected officials recognize the threat that China poses and the dangers of Russian aggression throughout Eurasia.

But the Rimland powers cannot survive without support from the United States.

American Strategy on the Brink – Commentary Magazine

The United States is shirking its responsibilities on the world stage

by Seth Cropsey and Harry Halem

commentary.org · by Seth Cropsey

The Eurasian rimland is nigh-ablaze. The Middle East sits on the brink of large-scale war, which will not end absent a fundamental regional reorganization, and an enormous amount of human suffering inflicted upon Jew, Arab, and Persian alike. On the burning edge of the European continent, the Ukrainian armed forces hold off the Russian onslaught. In Asia, China menaces Taiwan, a legitimately representative democracy of 23 million with only the desire to determine their own fate and live unharassed.

All three instances of ongoing violence stem fundamentally from a crisis in American power. These theaters are afire because Washington refuses to recognize what it is—the center of a loosely democratic system that spans Eurasia and the Americas. Culturally and strategically, the Rimland is being punished for the blindness at its core.

It is not precisely that states of similar ideology are natural allies. Ideology is a nebulous thing. But there are ideological similarities between the modern democracies on the Eurasian Rimland that, in turn, extend to the fundamentals of American strategy. Simply put, the three states within the line of fire—Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan—have all adopted identities that reflect their conscious choices to join the Western camp.

Israel made its choice first by virtue of its founding moment. It came not in 1948, given the socialist character of the Israeli political elite and American unwillingness to assist the nascent Jewish state in its struggle against the Arab alliance, but in 1950, when Israel chose to support U.S.-backed resolutions in the UN General Assembly that condemned Communist aggression against the Republic of Korea. Despite multiple strategic spats between Israel and the U.S., most notably their dustup over the Suez Crisis, Israel never seriously considered reorienting itself toward the Eastern Bloc from then on.

Taiwan made its first real choice not in 1949 but in 1990–1996. The Chinese Civil War gave Taiwan no option but to side with the West, even if Republican Chinese ideology was fundamentally a syncretic mix of Marxism, European nationalism, and what we would now understand as postcolonial grievance. However, Taiwan made the conscious choice to democratize between 1987 and 1996, transforming itself from a one-party authoritarian state complete with a secret police and political detainees into a flourishing multiparty democracy with a dynamic liberal capitalist economy.

Ukraine was a Soviet satellite until 1991, and its politics until 2013 were defined by vacillations between European and Russian orientation. In late 2013, however, Ukraine demonstrated its fundamental desire to be Western, not Russian. Moscow’s demand that Ukraine’s then-president, Viktor Yanukovych, reject a deal with the EU and instead sign a robust economic pact with Russia sparked the Euromaidan protests, which ultimately drove Yanukovych from power. Every year since, Ukraine has tilted even further toward the Western camp, and particularly that of Europe and the European Union. In June 2017, Ukraine gained Schengen Area access, allowing Ukrainian citizens to travel to the EU absent a visa. One year later, in August 2018, Alexander Zakharchenko, the head of the Russian-backed Donetsk People’s Republic, was assassinated by car bomb in a café.

For Ukraine, the contrast could not have been starker. European and Western orientation meant access to European universities and Western financial and economic opportunities. Russian orientation meant at best the oligarchic economy of pre-2014 Ukraine, and at worst the gangsterism of the occupied Donbas. It should have come as no surprise that, when Russian tanks rolled over the border again in 2022, they were met not with flowers but with bullets, bombs, and individual acts of resistance.

Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan are all under direct threat from the anti-American Revisionist Axis consisting of Russia, Iran, and China. These three revisionists are ideologically diverse. The kleptocratic neo-Soviet Russian system bears only superficial ideological similarities to Xi Jinping’s resurrected Maoism or to the Islamist universalism of Khomeinist Iran. However, all three are authoritarian, closed societies with a shared set of economic-material interests. They are simply too large, and too bloated, to survive absent a world around them organized to their economic and commercial benefit. Hence their mutually reinforcing desire to destroy the U.S.-led Eurasian security and economic system.

By conquering Ukraine, Russia would add another 40 million souls to its dominion and position itself to corner the global food market, which would make it a bona fide Eurasian great power. With Taiwan in hand, China would dominate East Asia’s north-south trade lanes, allowing it to coerce Japan, South Korea, and other U.S. partners into its camp economically. Iran, meanwhile, must take Jerusalem to demonstrate its Islamic leadership credentials and, by extension, must eject the U.S. from the Middle East to remove the major obstacle to its influence on the Arabian Peninsula. All three therefore wage offensive wars of conquest against their pro-Western Rimland targets, and all three benefit from each other’s successes.

It is obvious that the U.S. has a distinct interest in defending and supporting all three Rimland powers against the Revisionist Axis.

_____________

Ukraine is the largest country wholly in Europe. Its coastline with Crimea dominates the northern Black Sea, giving it an integral geostrategic role vis-à-vis Turkey and the Middle East’s northern tier. A Western-aligned Ukraine would severely limit Russia’s ability to pressure Europe from its soft Mediterranean underbelly, while providing the U.S. and the West with a major source of food and, in time, critical metals central to future energy technology. Ukraine is not a strategic afterthought, a small country in Russia’s mythic near abroad, but a prize in its own right. Large-scale military-industrial support, along with a well-structured training mission to help Ukrainians fight in a manner that matches their circumstances, is strategically prudent and would help secure Europe from future Russian pressure. In turn, American assistance would provide Washington a legitimate ability to convince Kyiv to modify objectives as needed with a reduced sense of bitterness, thereby stabilizing a third of Eurasia just as China threatens Taiwan more openly.

Israel is the linchpin of any Middle Eastern order favorable to the U.S. The United States’ goal has been, and should remain, to prevent major conflict by supporting restrained, territorially satisfied powers and punishing regional revisionists. Yet the perplexing history of the Middle East, and particularly the reality of Israel’s founding, complicates the situation. Israel, as a non-Muslim, non-Arab power located at the region’s western exit point, is a natural target for any regional revisionist, considering the prevalence of historically pan-Arab and increasingly Islamist ideology. The only way to generate a stable Middle Eastern order is through a partnership with Israel that uses the Jewish state’s uniqueness—namely its psychological commitment to survival and well-designed conscript army—to punish revisionist activity, while positioning the U.S. as the only reasonable interlocutor for any Middle Eastern power that seeks a modicum of peace and stability.

This was the strategy Henry Kissinger pursued throughout his time in office, and it created the Middle East as it was understood until the October 7 attacks. A similar policy today would give Israel the space and time it needs not only to defeat Hamas but also to eject Iranian power from Lebanon and undermine it in Syria. It would also link Iran’s theaters together, punishing Iran for the actions of its proxies in Iraq and Yemen by pressuring it in Syria. This would demonstrate American commitment, credibility, and power to the Gulf States, while also reminding them that Washington is the only international actor with which they can reasonably deal on fundamental geopolitical and economic questions.

The logic for defending Taiwan is equally plain. The debate over Taiwanese defense policy, namely Taiwan’s supposed inability to invest in its own defense, is rather bizarre. One purported solution, a Taiwanese “porcupine” strategy of asymmetric capabilities, would make little difference absent U.S. and allied intervention. Moreover, a Taiwan under Chinese control would be simultaneously a moral tragedy and a strategic calamity. It would allow China to project combat power well into the Philippine Sea, jeopardize Japanese, South Korean, and Philippine security, and compel the U.S. to choose between fighting its way back into the First Island Chain or accepting the Pacific’s division into U.S. and Chinese spheres of influence. The latter would corrode U.S. power throughout Eurasia and ultimately impoverish and undermine the American republic. The natural implication is that the U.S. should take steps today, both openly and privately, to arm Taiwan and to integrate it into a coherent Indo-Pacific defense structure that includes powers such as Japan and Australia that publicly understand the role of Taiwan in their national survival.

When placed alongside the imperatives of U.S. strategy in Europe and the Middle East, this demands a forward-leaning military posture and large-scale defense buildup, with a financial commitment reaching around $1.5 trillion dollars annually or more to finance it.

The U.S., however, is headed in precisely the opposite direction.

_____________

Part of the issue is inexcusable Congressional inaction and party politics. Republicans have tied funding for Ukraine to fundamental modifications in U.S. border policy. While the latter issue demands addressing, the former must take precedence as a question of national policy. Meanwhile, congressional Democrats and the White House have shown no interest in serious compromise. The calculation from the Biden administration seems to be that voters at best will blame Republicans for any strategic reversals in Ukraine, and at worst simply will not care.

Electoral considerations are also relevant. Joe Biden’s approval rating has dropped to under 40 percent, with 58 percent of Americans saying they disapprove of his actions. These are the worst presidential polling numbers since the last two years of the George W. Bush administration. Biden is behind in almost every national head-to-head poll against Donald Trump, who seems poised to clinch the Republican nomination. Although national polling can be misleading, and presidential polling so far removed from the election is questionable, there are unmistakable signs of Biden’s persistent popular weakness in most swing states—Biden is behind in Wisconsin, Michigan, Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada, leading in Pennsylvania, and in Virginia only narrowly. If the election were held tomorrow, he would likely lose by 48 electoral votes, a slim margin to be sure, but greater than John Kerry’s loss in 2004 and Al Gore’s in 2000.

This calculation undeniably influences Biden’s policy toward Iran and China. The White House’s greatest fear is a major regional conflict. A massive Middle Eastern war would inflame the left wing of the Democratic Party even further, while threatening to trigger another inflationary spiral as oil prices spiked and commercial flows through the Suez-Indian Ocean route dried up. An uptick of tensions in the Indo-Pacific, meanwhile, through Chinese pressure against Taiwan, would generate a market panic and potential shipping disruptions. The result would be a supply-chain crisis akin to that of the Covid pandemic alongside rising energy prices, a recipe for concurrent inflation and a recession. Voters would likely hand the White House to Trump. Hence the overriding objective of U.S. policy for the next 10 months will continue along the same path that Biden has followed throughout his presidency, escalation avoidance at almost any price.

Yet there is a more fundamental problem at hand, one of a strategy unfit for its purpose. The central premise in Europe, that the U.S. can afford to cut Ukraine loose, is wrong. The Europeans may well fill part of the gap, but the natural friction within European politics speaks against a coherent strategy. And by stepping away from Europe, the U.S. reduces any long-term leverage it has over Europe in the future. At the same time, the U.S. seeks European economic, financial, and political support to contain Chinese expansion and, in the event of war, cut China off from Eurasian commerce.

In the Middle East, the Biden administration is convinced that the crisis can be restricted to Gaza and that Iran’s proxies will simply back down once military operations in the Strip end—as long as the U.S. is seen to take a balanced line toward Israel and act as an “honest broker.” This explains a series of leaks and off-the-record statements that not only express U.S. displeasure with Israeli military operations, but that also warn of an Israeli escalation supposedly designed to save Benjamin Netanyahu’s political future. Never mind that Netanyahu is the least hawkish, most restrained member of the Israeli war cabinet, and the man most sympathetic to Washington’s pressure. And never mind his doubtful political future and thorough unpopularity beyond the core of Likud. The narrative is a public-relations ploy to sow discord in the Israeli government, not a serious diagnosis of strategic preferences.

In Asia, the Biden administration has aggressively and persistently sought a détente with Beijing since the beginning of 2023. Its first attempt was scuppered by the spy-balloon crisis of late January. Its second culminated in the San Francisco summit, a meeting light on specifics and heavy on largely abstract rhetoric. Immediately after William Lai’s victory in Taiwan’s elections in January, President Biden’s first comment emphasized American opposition to Taiwan independence. The message is clear: The Biden administration thinks it can soothe China rhetorically and is largely unwilling to make any moves that might  provoke a Chinese response. Never mind that there is no evidence that Lai has seriously entertained Taiwanese independence as a practical policy position during his career as a front-line politician. Unsurprisingly, he has developed the political good sense to avoid such an obvious provocation while getting on with the business of governing a liberal capitalist democracy of 23 million souls.

The threatened states of the Eurasian Rimland are therefore increasingly at odds with the U.S., not because they wish to leave the American-led coalition or reorient themselves toward the Revisionist Axis, but because they have a better conception of strategy than the Americans do. Ukraine’s leaders understand the need to repel Russian aggression, thereby securing their own future and that of Europe. For all their faults and missteps, Israel’s leadership has recognized the need to prosecute a long-term war against Iran that rolls back Iranian expansion in the Levant, and thereby defends Israel’s survival and reduces the strategic threat that Iran can pose to the U.S. Taiwan’s leaders balance a delicate set of domestic and international considerations, but its policymakers and elected officials recognize the threat that China poses and the dangers of Russian aggression throughout Eurasia.

But the Rimland powers cannot survive without support from the United States.

The Europeans will struggle to provide Ukraine with a coherent support system, despite their ability to sustain Ukraine through a positional fight. If Trump wins in November, European support may well disintegrate—particularly if he makes good on his alleged promise to remove the U.S. from NATO. No individual European power has the capabilities or will to take the lead, and the EU itself is far too fragmented to serve as a coherent policy organization. Hence while Ukraine is likely to carve out a bloody peace from this war, it and Europe will remain exposed to another Russian assault.

The entirety of Israeli strategy is premised on marrying high-tech U.S.-Israeli weapons with a mass-mobilization conscript army. The current war has already undermined the Israeli economy. A rupture with the U.S. would leave Israel isolated against Iranian aggression, while also ensuring that the Gulf States stayed firmly on the sidelines in the contest for the Middle East.

Taiwan falls absent American support, even if America’s regional allies were to fight in the island republic’s defense. Chinese power is simply too great, and Japan, the Philippines, and Australia too exposed, to withstand Beijing’s onslaught absent sustainment from America.

The Rimland powers cannot make policy for Washington. They cannot help American strategists see sense and impose coherence on a disordered world. The best they can do is survive and hope for a resurgence of American power. The risk is that they may well be living not in the shadow of empire but in the shadow of democratic leadership’s collapse.

Photo: AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky

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commentary.org · by Seth Cropsey

24. The World’s Unpopular Leaders

Not good signs for many of the world's major democracies. Of course only democracies allow such criticism. while the axis of dictators/totalitarians do not allow such public political dissent.

Graphics at the link.

4 Common problems noted: Inflation, Immigration, Inequality, Incumbency

The World’s Unpopular Leaders

Why Biden isn’t alone with his low approval ratings.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/28/briefing/biden-approval-ratings-world-leaders.html

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President Biden with the French president, Emmanuel Macron.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times

By German Lopez

March 28, 2024, 6:27 a.m. ET

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By many measures, President Biden is very unpopular. Since at least World War II, no president has had a worse disapproval rating at this point in his term.

Relative to his international peers, however, Biden looks much better. Many leaders of developed democracies have disapproval ratings even higher than Biden’s, as this chart by my colleague Ashley Wu shows:

Leaders’ disapproval ratings in developed democracies

A chart shows disapproval ratings for leaders in select developed democracies like the U.S., Germany, U.K. and Japan. Most leaders shown have a disapproval rating over 50 percent.

25

50%

75

100

73% disapprove

Olaf Scholz (Germany)

Emmanuel Macron (France)

71

Yoon Suk Yeol (S. Korea)

70

Fumio Kishida (Japan)

70

Rishi Sunak (U.K.)

66

Justin Trudeau (Canada)

59

Joe Biden (U.S.)

54

46

Alexander De Croo (Belgium)

Note: Data was collected from Feb. 26 to March 6, 2024.Source: Morning ConsultBy Ashley Wu

Many world leaders are also up for re-election. More than 60 countries — half of the world’s population — will vote or have voted this year. Most of the countries in the chart above will vote in national or European Union elections in the coming months.

Why are people so upset with their leaders? Some explanations are local, but four global issues have driven much of the public’s anger. Call them the four I’s: inflation, immigration, inequality and incumbency.

1. Inflation

The world has seen a sharp increase in prices over the past few years. As bad as inflation has been in the U.S., it has been worse in European countries more directly affected by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Rising prices anger voters. Your hard-earned money is worth less. “When prices rise, it feels like something is taken away from you,” my colleague Jeanna Smialek, who covers the U.S. economy, has said. And people direct much of that anger toward their leaders.

People also don’t like the solution to inflation. To slow price increases, central banks have raised interest rates. But higher interest rates also make loans, credit card payments and mortgages more expensive. This helps explain why people are so upset even as inflation has fallen.

2. Immigration

The U.S. and Europe have dealt with multiple migration and refugee crises in the past decade. Those crises have fueled anger against the more mainstream political parties that tend to be in charge in developed countries.

More immigration can have advantages, particularly for growing economies and reducing inflation. But for many people, other considerations win out. They worry that immigrants use government resources, take jobs, lower wages and change their country’s culture. Illegal immigration, in particular, upsets them by contributing to a broader sense of chaos and lawlessness.

And they blame their leaders for it. Sometimes, they will support once-fringe, far-right candidates — as happened in the Netherlands and Italy in the last couple years. These politicians often want to shut down most, if not all, immigration.

“There are a lot of people who are not right-wing themselves, but they really care about immigration,” said Sonnet Frisbie, deputy head of political intelligence at the polling firm Morning Consult. “They feel like centrist and center-left parties don’t represent their views.”

3. Inequality

Across the world, the rich have captured a growing share of income. Big companies keep getting bigger. A few individuals have amassed more wealth than entire countries. Many people now believe that the wealthiest have pulled ahead while everyone else has lagged behind (although some economists disagree).

The growing sentiment has contributed to greater distrust of elites, including national leaders. People feel that those in charge have taken advantage of their power to enrich themselves and their friends. That distrust now appears in approval ratings.

4. Incumbency

Incumbents typically have an electoral advantage over challengers. But that advantage can diminish over time. Voters tend to tire of national leaders the longer they’re in power — what political scientists call “the cost of ruling.” Consider that two-term presidents in the U.S. are rarely succeeded by a president of the same party. The cost of ruling “is a remarkably consistent pattern across countries,” said Lee Drutman, a political scientist at New America, a liberal think tank.

Image

Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister.Credit...Matthew Abbott for The New York Times

Many current world leaders, or at least their political parties, have been in power for a while. Japan’s top party has led the country for most of the last seven decades. Leaders or parties in France, Canada and Britain have ruled for seven to 14 years. In the U.S., Democrats have held the White House for 11 of the last 15 years.

The trend is not universal. India’s prime minister is popular after nearly a decade in office. Germany’s chancellor is unpopular despite coming to power a little more than two years ago. Still, the cost of ruling applies more often than not.

The bottom line

Over the past several years, the world has often felt chaotic and uncertain. Many people hoped that the end of the Covid pandemic would bring normalcy. Instead, inflation spiked. Longer-term problems, such as illegal immigration and inequality, persist. National leaders have struggled to address these issues, often despite many years in power. The result is widespread disapproval of the people running the world. And many of them are now at risk of losing their jobs this year.

Related: These maps show where Biden faces protest voters.

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: [email protected]