Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

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1. High Cost of Taiwan Invasion Will Dissuade China, Pentagon Official Says

2. Belarus group claims to have blown up an advanced Russian military aircraft, highlighting tensions within one of Putin's closest allies

3. Russia will be out of 'military tools' by spring, Ukraine's top military spy says

4. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, MARCH 3, 2023

5. PNP gets over $3.3 anti-terrorism equipment from US

6. China Increasingly Seen as Antagonist in Diplomatic Talks Around the World

7. Taiwan military to get $619 million U.S. arms boost as China keeps up pressure

8. Taiwan: Will China attack Taiwan? What ChatGPT thinks

9. Blundering Into Baghdad - The Right—and Wrong—Lessons of the Iraq War

10. People Over Robots - The Global Economy Needs Immigration Before Automation

11. Come Test Your Gear Against Russian Forces, Ukrainians Urge US Defense Firms

12. US Artillery Production for Ukraine Limited by Lack of Machine Tools, Army Official Says

13. As US Rushed Troops to Europe, Logistics Staff Faced Problems Supplying Them With Weapons

14. We Have a New National Cybersecurity Strategy. Now What?

15. America Misses the Power Objective

16. Chinese nationals operate nearly every illegal indoor marijuana farm in the largest US county, sergeant says

17. FACT SHEET: President Biden Signs National Security Memorandum to Counter Weapons of Mass Destruction Terrorism and Advance Nuclear and Radioactive Material Security

18. Conspiracy Theories Have a New Best Friend

19. The Deepfake Dangers Ahead

20. [OPINION] Grayzone tactics: A maritime insurgency in the South China Sea?

21. The Importance of Military Communication in Special Operations and Covert Missions

1. High Cost of Taiwan Invasion Will Dissuade China, Pentagon Official Says

"Never assume the enemy will not attack."

High Cost of Taiwan Invasion Will Dissuade China, Pentagon Official Says - USNI News

news.usni.org · by John Grady · March 2, 2023

Taiwanese Marines on Jan. 11, 2023. Taiwan Ministry of National Defense Photo

China will not attempt to invade Taiwan before the end of the decade because it understands the high cost, the senior Pentagon official in charge of Indo-Pacific security said Thursday.

“Deterrence is real; deterrence is strong” today and tomorrow, said Ely Ratner, the assistant secretary for the Indo-Pacific. The United States can likely deter Beijing from attacking the self-governing island 100 miles off the Chinese coast, he said.

Speaking at a Hudson Institute event Thursday, Ratner cited the administration’s position that the Peoples Republic of China “is the only country with the capability and intent to overthrow the international order.”

But in the past year, Washington, its allies and partners have built-up capabilities to “ensure that kind of coercion and bullying” – from threats of attack to interfering with transiting aircraft and shipping – doesn’t succeed, he said.

Ratner termed what’s happening regionally “as a breakthrough year for alliances and partnerships” in countering China’s military and territorial ambitions. He pointed to Japan’s decision to ramp up defense spending and work on counter-strike weapons, the agreement between the U.S. and the Philippines on establishing four new sites in the island republic for U.S. forces and the progress on the technology sharing agreement between Australia, the United Kingdom and the U.S.

He also cited the “new technology dialogue” with India that will lead to more co-development and co-production activities “that make our defense industrial bases more compatible.”

Ratner’s comments come after Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Colin Kahl testified before the House Armed Services Committee this week that he does not think China will attempt to invade Taiwan before 2027.

Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin also does not see an imminent Chinese threat to Taiwan, Pentagon Press Secretary Brig. Gen. Patrick Ryder said Thursday during a press briefing.

Because of the threats from China and North Korea, the U.S. is increasing the number of exercises it conducts in the region. The Marine Corps’ Marine Littoral Regiment formation and the Navy’s distributed forces will be key to increasing regional security and cooperation, he said. Ratner also mentioned steps the U.S. Army has taken to update its mission in the Indo-Pacific and the Air Force’s search for dispersed bases for its operations.

In the near future, Rattner said “you’ll see more capability flowing into the region” from the United States and its allies and partners.

Lindsey Ford, deputy assistant secretary of defense for South and Southeast Asia, mentioned the Indo-Pacific Maritime Domain Awareness Initiative as a way to create a common operating picture for all participants as a starting point on new capabilities that benefit many nations.

Sparked by the May 2022 summit meeting between the leaders of the U.S., Japan, Australia and India, the initiative uses off the shelf hardware and software to provide real-time data from satellites, according to a White House fact sheet on the effort. This extends to ships that have turned off their Automatic Identification Systems (AIS) to hide their illegal fishing, smuggling or drugs and arms trafficking.

Ford said that through the initiative, real-time data on these activities can “be shared multilaterally,” not just by two nations.

“This is exactly the kind of work the Quad should be doing,” she said, referring to the informal security relationship between the U.S., Japan, Australia and India.

This initiative that is now underway in the waters of Southeast Asia and will soon expand to the Pacific Islands, Defense Daily reported last year.

The initiative gives countries that don’t want to be forced to make a choice between the United States and China “the space” to “decide their own interests and choices,” Ratner said.

When asked about the rising number of provocative incidents involving PLA aircraft and military aircraft from allies operating in international airspace, Ratner said, “they’re not picking a fight” to start a conflict. But, he added, “we will not be coerced and bullied” by these incidents. “We will sail, fly and operate” in international waters and air space.

“That is the message privately and publicly” to the Chinese government, Ratner added.

But when Beijing doesn’t want to hear the complaint, “they will turn off” all lines of communication “for an extended period of time,” as they did when the U.S. military show down China’s spy balloon off the South Carolina coast last month.

“This was a surveillance balloon, period. It was part of a broader fleet of capabilities that have flown over 40 countries and five continents,” Ratner said. Military and intelligence analysts are examining the salvage remnants.

“We think [turning off communications after an incident] is destabilizing and dangerous,” he added.

Using another tactic to deflect responsibility, Ford said the Chinese often decry incidents like Philippine fishermen discovering rocket debris in Philippine territorial water as “fake news.”

In response to North Korea’s escalating missile tests, Ratner said the U.S. and South Korea are working more closely together and exercising together so Seoul “will know what our thinking would be” if there is an attack.

“We’re focused on readiness.” That way, “you do [deterrence] with a sense of confidence,” he said.

news.usni.org · by John Grady · March 2, 2023

2. Belarus group claims to have blown up an advanced Russian military aircraft, highlighting tensions within one of Putin's closest allies

Resistance by the Belarussians or special operations by the Ukrainians or a combination of both?

Belarus group claims to have blown up an advanced Russian military aircraft, highlighting tensions within one of Putin's closest allies

Business Insider · by Sinéad Baker

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko at the Novo-Ogaryovo state residence, outside Moscow, Russia, February 17, 2023.Vladimir Astapkovich, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP

Opposition activists in Belarus said they destroyed a Russian military aircraft near Minsk.
The head of a group opposing Belarus' dictator said those behind the attack escaped the country.
Belarus is Russia's closest European ally, and has aided in its invasion of Ukraine.

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Belarus opposition figures said on Monday that they had damaged a Russian military jet that was parked in their country, an unexpected attack within Russia's closest European ally.

The head of Belarusian opposition group BYPOL took responsibility for the attack, with its leader, Aliksandr Azarov, saying on Telegram that it was accomplished using drones. "Those were drones. The participants of the operation are Belarusian," he wrote, according to Reuters.

BYPOL is a group of current and former law enforcement officers who oppose the government led by President Alexander Lukashenko. Lukashenko has been in power since 1994 and is known as "Europe's last dictator."

Azarov said that the people responsible for the attack "are now safe, outside the country."

He told Polish news outlet Belsat, which is aimed at Belarusian citizens, that the operation had been planned for months. The group bought n0n-combat drones that were then reworked for the attack, he said.

The attack, and who is behind it, has not been independently verified.

According to BYPOL, the attack took place on a Russian A-50 surveillance aircraft, which was located at the Machulishchi military airfield near Minsk. The A-50 is an early warning aircraft with command and control capabilities and the ability to track up to 60 targets at a time, according to Reuters.

The group said the plane was so damaged that it would not be able to fly.

Franak Viacorka, an adviser to exiled Belarusian opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, told the BBC that the attack was "creative" and "sophisticated".

"It was very brave because Belarusians are in a situation of the total terror," he said.

Viacorka added on Twitter that the base where the attack happened "was being actively used by Russian army for air attacks on Ukraine."

Belarus has supported Russia's invasion of Ukraine, allowing Russian troops to use the country as a transit point. Russian ballistic missiles have also been launched into Ukraine from Belarus' territory.

Ukraine has repeatedly expressed fears that Belarusian troops will enter the conflict on the side of Russia.

Lukashenko said earlier this month that he will not send soldiers to fight in Ukraine unless his country was attacked, with some officials suggesting he made the promise out of fear of domestic backlash if he became more involved in the war.

The president has faced stronger domestic opposition in recent years, including in 2020 when hundreds of thousands protested the result of a presidential election, when Lukashenko claimed victory but many viewed the result as fraudulent.

Lukashenko's response was to detain thousands of people and launch a brutal crack down on media freedom and human rights organizations in the country. Since then, he has relied even more heavily on Putin for support.

Business Insider · by Sinéad Baker

3. Russia will be out of 'military tools' by spring, Ukraine's top military spy says

Russia will be out of 'military tools' by spring, Ukraine's top military spy says

USA Today · by Kim Hjelmgaard

| USA TODAY

Show Caption

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What we know after one year of Russia’s war in Ukraine

Here's what we know about the state of the war in Ukraine one year after Russia's invasion.

Just the FAQs, USA TODAY

KYIV, Ukraine – Russia will run out of "military tools" to achieve its war aims in Ukraine by the end of the spring, Ukraine's top military intelligence official predicted in a USA TODAY interview.

Maj. Gen. Kyrylo Budanov's forecast comes amid considerable uncertainty about what the next phase of the war will look like as it moves into its second year. For weeks, Ukrainian officials had signaled that Russia was planning a major new offensive to coincide with the one-year anniversary of its invasion of Ukraine on Feb 24. A notable new offensive has yet to materialize.

"Russia has wasted huge amounts of human resources, armaments and materials. Its economy and production are not able to cover these losses. It's changed its military chain of command. If Russia's military fails in its aims this spring, it will be out of military tools," Budanov said in his heavily guarded, fortified Kyiv office, which he shares with two pet frogs, poisonous-gas detecting canaries and a range of ammunitions.

'We need to keep living': What life is like for Ukrainians a year into Russia's invasion

Budanov further predicted that Ukraine and Russia would fight "a decisive battle this spring, and this battle will be the final one before this war ends." He did not provide any specific evidence to back up his claims. And it's important to note that Moscow and Kyiv are involved in an intense information war as well as fighting on the battlefield. Some military experts have cautioned that both sides need to be prepared for a long fight.

"Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has belied many expectations, to say nothing of predictions. Still, this much, at least, can be said with certainty: We are nowhere near the end of this war. Despite mounting calls for a diplomatic settlement, no such breakthrough is on the horizon. Russia and Ukraine both continue to believe they will prevail if they keep fighting. No mediator can break this impasse," Rajan Menon and Benjamin H. Friedman, of the Washington, D.C.-based Defense Priorities think tank, said in a joint statement last week, a year after Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

Still, Budanov's forecast appears to fit with the consensus view among independent military analysts that Russia currently lacks the ammunition, military supplies and sufficient quantities of skilled, organized and motivated soldiers to make significant headway against Ukrainian defensive lines in Ukraine's east, where fighting is heaviest.

"Russia's lost about half of its tanks, its artillery fire is down, it doesn't have a productive base to make a lot of new equipment. And making new equipment isn't easy under sanctions. So it's going to have to take stuff out of storage," said Phillips P. O'Brien, a professor of strategic security studies at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland.

"Ukraine is stronger now than it was on Feb. 24 (last year, the day of the invasion). It's getting better systems. It's integrating a lot of NATO systems. Russia equipment-wise is weaker. It has less-well trained troops, less frontline equipment. The only thing it has more of is soldiers, but I'm not a huge fan of masses of untrained soldiers," he said.

'It's hard, they're holding on': On ground in Ukraine, war depends on U.S. weapons

In late December, the Pentagon assessed that Russia's military would likely run out of its newer stocks of ammunition by early 2023, forcing it to rely on stocks produced during the Cold War. These stocks are less reliable and potentially degraded.

Russia has the world's largest arsenal of nuclear warheads – though Russian President Vladimir Putin has appeared to largely rule out using a nuclear weapon in Ukraine.

Blinken, Lavrov: Said to meet for first time since Russia's invasion of Ukraine

Budanov, 37, is the chief of the Main Directorate of Intelligence of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine. He became Ukraine's top military intelligence official at age 34. He is one of the youngest generals in Ukraine's history, and his name was recently floated by lawmakers as a potential replacement for Oleksiy Reznikov, Ukraine's defense minister. He is also an enigmatic former special forces commander believed to have taken part in a range of classified special operations behind enemy lines.

Some of his previous forecasts for the war's overall trajectory have proved accurate. In an interview with USA TODAY in November 2021, Budanov predicted that Russia late that year would gradually escalate a series of false-flag provocations as a pretext to launch an invasion, sparking an energy crisis, economic turmoil and food insecurity in countries that rely on Ukraine's exports. All of these things later happened.

In this latest interview, conducted in mid-February, Budanov said the war would not end until Ukraine's Crimea region, on the Black Sea, was liberated from Russia. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has also made the return of Crimea and all other territories occupied by Russia to Ukraine a condition of any peace settlement. Former U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said in a recent online forum that losing Crimea, where there is a naval base, to Ukraine would cross a "red line" for Russia and likely risk an escalation of the war.

A year ago today, Russia sent troops into Ukraine hoping to take it over in days. It didn't happen. The fighting is now concentrated in Ukraine's east. But the impact of the war on civilians is immense. Two of my new reports:https://t.co/PnoXSZSa2W https://t.co/VvWEmCmHQg pic.twitter.com/P19Z5sQYiP

— Kim Hjelmgaard (@khjelmgaard) February 24, 2023

In the interview, Budanov dismissed suggestions from influential opinion- and policymakers in the West who claim that by supplying ever-more heavy weapons to Ukraine, NATO risks becoming entangled in a broader war with Russia.

"I apply a different logic when I look at this issue," he said. "This conflict has already grown into an existential war between Russia and the West. Yes, the West is not participating in this war with their militaries. But they are providing us with weapons so we can use them in the fight. This means a Ukrainian victory over Russia is a common victory. And if Ukraine falls – though unlikely – it's a defeat for all of Western civilization."

In recent days, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said China, which has not condemned Russia for its invasion of Ukraine, was considering supplying Moscow with weapons and ammunition. Beijing has already been supplying civilian aid.

"Ukraine is getting stronger, Russia weaker. China can change that," said O'Brien.

Still, Wesley Clark, a retired four-star U.S. general who is a former NATO Supreme Allied Commander, Europe, said in an interview that while China has "substantial military equipment, and a very large force, a lot of that equipment is probably not modernized, especially the army equipment. China's priority has been its naval, air and missile modernization. ... It may not have the masses of new hardware Russia (needs)."

USA Today · by Kim Hjelmgaard

4. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, MARCH 3, 2023

Maps/graphics: https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-march-3-2023

Key Takeaways

Ukrainian forces appear to be setting conditions for a controlled fighting withdrawal from parts of Bakhmut.
Russian officials continued to release limited information about the March 2 incursion in Bryansk Oblast but failed to provide clarity about what actually transpired.
Russian President Vladimir Putin did not address the reported situation in Bryansk Oblast in an emergency meeting with the Russian Security Council according to the meeting’s readout.
Russian authorities continued efforts to portray Russia as the only safe operator of the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP), likely to constrain the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) presence at the ZNPP and compel the de facto recognition of Russian ownership of the ZNPP.
Russian forces continued offensive operations along the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna line.
Russian forces continued ground attacks along the Donetsk Oblast front line as Ukrainian forces appeared to prepare for a controlled withdrawal from at least parts of Bakhmut.
The Kremlin continues efforts to increase government oversight of the Russian defense industrial base (DIB).
Russian occupation authorities continue to prepare occupied territories for the September 10 Russian regional elections.

RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, MARCH 3, 2023

Mar 3, 2023 - Press ISW

Download the PDF

Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, March 3, 2023

Karolina Hird, Grace Mappes, Nicole Wolkov, Layne Philipson, and Frederick W. Kagan

March 3, 7 pm ET

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

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

Ukrainian forces appear to be setting conditions for a controlled fighting withdrawal from parts of Bakhmut. Russian forces have been fighting to take Bakhmut, a city with a pre-war population of roughly 70,000 people, since roughly May 2022 and have suffered devastating casualties in the process. Geolocated footage posted on March 3 confirms that Ukrainian troops have destroyed two critical bridges in the Bakhmut area—one across the Bakhmutivka River in northeastern Bakhmut and one along the Khromove-Bakhmut route just west of Bakhmut.[1] The preemptive destruction of bridges is likely an indicator that Ukrainian troops may seek to inhibit Russian movement in eastern Bakhmut and limit potential westward Russian egress routes out of Bakhmut. Ukrainian Presidential Advisor Oleksandr Rodnyanskyi previously stated on February 28 that Ukrainian forces could choose to pull back from positions in Bakhmut as needed.[2] Rodnyanskyi also noted that Ukraine has fortified the area west of Bakhmut such that even if Ukrainian troops begin to withdraw, Russian forces would not necessarily be able to rapidly take the entire city.[3] If the Ukrainian military command deems it necessary to withdraw from Bakhmut it will likely conduct a limited and controlled withdrawal from particularly difficult sectors of eastern Bakhmut judging from Ukrainian statements and reported Ukrainian actions. ISW will continue to monitor the situation and offer updated assessments of the implications of possible Russian courses of action if and when Ukrainian forces begin to pull back.

Russian officials continued to release limited information about the March 2 incursion in Bryansk Oblast but failed to provide clarity about what actually transpired. Russian State Duma Deputy Alexander Khinshtein claimed on March 2 that a Russian National Guard (Rosgvardia) vehicle ran over a mine while clearing the area near Sushany, Bryansk Oblast, and four personnel sustained minor injuries.[4] Russian authorities previously claimed that the perpetrators mined the area before leaving.[5] The Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) released edited footage of the purported aftermath on March 3 that shows two civilian cars with substantial damage from bullet holes and deceased drivers as well as man-portable military equipment and mines, all supposedly in the Bryansk Oblast border area.[6] The footage largely lacks any identifying features of the area that could verify the FSB’s claims and has not been geolocated. The head of the Russian Volunteer Corps, which claimed responsibility for the incursion, claimed on March 3 that Ukrainian officials greenlit the incursion.[7] The Russian Investigative Committee did not corroborate the Volunteer Corps’ claim, instead announcing that it has initiated an investigation into the actions of “Ukrainian saboteurs.”[8] Russian officials and milbloggers made additional claims accusing Western states of direct involvement in the incursion. The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs claimed that the perpetrators used NATO-provided weapons during the incursion and accused NATO states of being “accomplices” to the operation.[9] State-run media outlet RT amplified a milblogger claim that the Russian Volunteer Corps has indirect affiliations with the UK via the Azov Regiment and accused the UK of involvement.[10] ISW remains unable to confirm any of the Russian or Russian Volunteer Corps’ claims about what actually occurred on the ground.

Russian President Vladimir Putin did not address the reported situation in Bryansk Oblast in the readout of an emergency meeting with the Russian Security Council on March 3. Russian sources widely claimed that Putin held the meeting to discuss anti-terrorist security measures in response to the Bryansk incident, but the readout of the meeting instead recycled a number of tired Kremlin talking points and did not use this platform to introduce any new objectives or means for Russian military operations in Ukraine.[11] Putin did use the speech to outline new, albeit limited, support measures for Russian soldiers serving in Ukraine and announced that all families of soldiers killed in Ukraine will receive the standard insurance coverage provided for by law, a one-time lump sum allowance of 7.4 million rubles (98,143 USD).[12] Putin also called for “appropriate payments” for those wounded in Ukraine in the form of insurance payments and one-time injury payments.[13] Putin continues to use public appearances to expand promises of social support for existing servicemembers, potentially to quell domestic discontent and incentivize those already fighting, but does so instead of articulating specific goals or outlining additional resources or measures to be taken for the future of the war.

Russian authorities continued efforts to portray Russia as the only safe operator of the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP), likely to constrain the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) presence at the ZNPP and compel the de facto recognition of Russian ownership of the ZNPP. Advisor to the head of Russian nuclear energy operator Rosenergoatom, Renat Karchaa, claimed that Ukrainian personnel used a machine gun to fire at the Russian personnel during a rotation of IAEA personnel stationed at the ZNPP on March 2.[14] Karchaa also claimed that the Russian security personnel tripped several mines while escorting the IAEA personnel. The IAEA has not corroborated Karchaa’s claim, instead characterizing the March 2 personnel rotation as “successful” after previously delaying the rotation for over a month due to security concerns.[15] IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi reported that the final remaining backup power line to the ZNPP was damaged for the third time in a week on March 1, which the IAEA contingent at the ZNPP characterized as “likely because of shelling on the other side of the Dnipro River.”[16] Ukrainian nuclear energy operator Energoatom reported on March 3 that Russian forces have established machine gun firing positions and erected sandbag fortifications at ZNPP facilities.[17] ISW has extensively reported on Russian efforts to militarize the ZNPP, including prior footage confirming that Russian forces have stored military equipment, including ammunition, armored personnel carriers, anti-aircraft guns, and other armaments on the ZNPP grounds.[18]

Key Takeaways

Ukrainian forces appear to be setting conditions for a controlled fighting withdrawal from parts of Bakhmut.
Russian officials continued to release limited information about the March 2 incursion in Bryansk Oblast but failed to provide clarity about what actually transpired.
Russian President Vladimir Putin did not address the reported situation in Bryansk Oblast in an emergency meeting with the Russian Security Council according to the meeting’s readout.
Russian authorities continued efforts to portray Russia as the only safe operator of the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP), likely to constrain the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) presence at the ZNPP and compel the de facto recognition of Russian ownership of the ZNPP.
Russian forces continued offensive operations along the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna line.
Russian forces continued ground attacks along the Donetsk Oblast front line as Ukrainian forces appeared to prepare for a controlled withdrawal from at least parts of Bakhmut.
The Kremlin continues efforts to increase government oversight of the Russian defense industrial base (DIB).
Russian occupation authorities continue to prepare occupied territories for the September 10 Russian regional elections.

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

Russian Main Effort—Eastern Ukraine (comprised of two subordinate main efforts)
Russian Subordinate Main Effort #1—Capture the remainder of Luhansk Oblast and push westward into eastern Kharkiv Oblast and encircle northern Donetsk Oblast
Russian Subordinate Main Effort #2—Capture the entirety of Donetsk Oblast
Russian Supporting Effort—Southern Axis
Russian Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts
Activities in Russian-occupied Areas

Russian Main Effort—Eastern Ukraine

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

Russian forces continued offensive operations along the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna line on March 3. Western media reported that Ukrainian officials have ordered the mandatory evacuation of vulnerable civilians from Kupyansk due to Russian shelling of the area.[19] A Russian source claimed that Russian troops have advanced in the Synkivka area (8km north of Kupyansk) and amplified claims made by Luhansk People’s Republic (LNR) officer Andrey Marochko that civilians are leaving Kupyansk en masse in advance of Russian offensive operations near the city.[20] Ukrainian Luhansk Oblast Head Serhiy Haidai reported that Ukrainian forces struck a Russian equipment column near Svatove on the night of March 2 to March 3, causing Russian forces to suffer substantial equipment losses in the area.[21] Haidai also noted that Russian forces in the Kreminna area are increasingly resorting to using heavy equipment such as BMPT Terminators because they have been unsuccessful in conducting effective small-group attacks.[22] A Russian milblogger posted footage reportedly of elements of the 76th and 98th Guards Airborne (VDV) Divisions in the Kreminna area and claimed that BARS-13 (Combat Reserve) elements are also active on this sector of the front.[23] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces conducted unsuccessful offensive actions near Bilohorivka (10km south of Kreminna).[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 continued ground attacks in and around Bakhmut as Ukrainian forces appeared to prepare for a controlled withdrawal from at least parts of the city on March 3. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian troops repelled attacks on Bakhmut itself; north of Bakhmut near Vasyukivka (13km north); and northwest of Bakhmut near Dubovo-Vasylivka (6km northwest), Orikhovo-Vasylivka (10km northwest), Hryhorivka (10km northwest), and Bohdanivka (8km northwest).[25] Geolocated footage posted on March 3 shows Ukrainian forces destroying a bridge across the Bakhmutivka River in northeastern Bakhmut and another bridge across the Khromove-Bakhmut route west of Bakhmut, suggesting that Ukrainian troops may be preparing to conduct a controlled withdrawal from parts of Bakhmut.[26] Russian and Ukrainian sources amplified a video posted by a Ukrainian soldier who says that his unit received the order to immediately withdraw from Bakhmut and move into a new combat zone.[27] Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin claimed that Wagner forces have almost entirely encircled Bakhmut and that Ukrainian troops can only feasibly withdraw along one remaining road (likely in reference to the Khromove-Bakhmut route).[28] Russian milbloggers claimed that clashes are ongoing in northern Bakhmut near the AZOM industrial plant and within urban areas of southern and eastern Bakhmut.[29] One Russian source claimed that Wagner forces broke through Ukrainian defenses in Ivanivske (5km west of Bakhmut along the T0504 Kostiantynivka-Chasiv Yar-Bakhmut road) and are threatening the western outskirts of Bakhmut from the Ivanivske area.[30] There is no corroboration of this claim.

Russian forces continued ground attacks in the Avdiivka-Donetsk City area on March 3. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian troops conducted unsuccessful attacks on Avdiivka itself and in the Avdiivka area near Krasnohorivka and Kamianka, as well as on the southwestern outskirts of Donetsk City near Marinka and Pobieda.[31] Geolocated footage posted on March 3 indicates that Russian forces have made incremental advances on the northwestern outskirts of Donetsk City near Vodyane.[32] Russian sources continued to report on Russian efforts to seize the remainder of western Marinka.[33]

Russian forces did not conduct any confirmed ground attacks in western Donetsk Oblast on March 3. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces continued unspecified offensive operations in the Vuhledar direction (30km west of Donetsk City).[34] A Russian source claimed that Russian forces are continuing positional battles in the dacha area southeast of Vuhledar, and another Russian milblogger posted footage reportedly of 40th Naval Infantry Brigade elements assaulting Ukrainian positions near Vuhledar.[35]

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

Russian forces continued to conduct routine fire west of Hulyaipole and in Kherson, Mykolaiv, and Dnipropetrovsk oblasts on March 3.[36] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces in the Zaporizhia and Kherson directions attempted to improve their tactical positions in order to resume future potential offensive operations.[37]

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

The Kremlin continues efforts to increase government oversight of the Russian defense industrial base (DIB). Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree on March 3 allowing for the “external management” of defense enterprises under martial law.[38] The decree states that the Russian government can suspend the powers of shareholders and management bodies in enterprises supplying the DIB in the event of a disruption in military supplies. The decree also states that the Ministry of Industry and Trade would determine the new management of the company and called for the creation of a working group under the Military Industrial Commission to deal with such companies. Russian authorities have repeatedly stated that they do not plan to announce martial law throughout the country and have only introduced martial law in occupied Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhia, and Kherson oblasts.[39] This decree will likely allow the Russian government greater oversight and direct access to defense enterprises in occupied areas of Ukraine, thus allowing the Kremlin to conduct crypto-nationalization of critical industries.

The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) is reportedly continuing to recruit convicts out of prison to fight in Ukraine. Independent Russian news outlet Vyerstka reported on March 2 that Russian courts started deferring labor sentences en masse for Russian prisoners in Moscow, Saratov, Perm, Amur, and the Jewish Autonomous oblasts if prisoners agreed to fight in Ukraine.[40] The MoD’s efforts to recruit convicts indicate that the Russian MoD is seeking to recreate the Wagner Group’s penal recruitment model to sustain force generation efforts, while simultaneously cutting Wagner off from its main recruitment base.[41] Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin announced on February 9 that Wagner had completely stopped recruiting prisoners.[42]

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

Russian occupation authorities continue to prepare occupied territories for the September 10 Russian regional elections. Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) Head Denis Pushilin claimed on March 3 that residents of occupied Donetsk Oblast will take part in the September 10 Russian regional elections and will elect 90 deputies of the DNR People's Council and 435 deputies to serve in 20 municipalities throughout occupied Donetsk Oblast.[43] Pushilin claimed that 12 members of the DNR Election Commission met for the first time on March 2 to discuss the elections of the counting commission, chairman, deputy chairman, and secretary of the DNR Election Commission.[44] Pushilin announced that the participants elected Vladimir Vysotsky as Chairman of the Election Commission.[45] Pushilin thanked the leadership of the Russian Central Election Commission for its support in the election efforts in occupied Donetsk Oblast.[46]

Russian occupation authorities continue to use medical infrastructure to integrate occupied areas in the Russian medical system. Luhansk People’s Republic (LNR) Head Leonid Pasechnik claimed on March 2 that his administration opened the LNR Territorial Fund of Compulsory Medical Insurance, the first such fund in occupied territories, and stated that the organization is a necessary step to fully integrate occupied Luhansk Oblast into the Russian healthcare system.[47] Pasechnik claimed that the LNR Territorial Fund of Compulsory Medical Insurance will make payments for medical care provided, monitor the quality of care provided, and protect the rights of the insured.[48] Pasechnik noted that a Russian federal law published on March 1 mandates that all residents in occupied Luhansk Oblast receive free medical care.[49]

Russian officials and occupation authorities continue to bring Ukrainian children to Russia to participate in youth programs in an effort to consolidate societal control in occupied territories. LNR Head Leonid Pasechnik claimed on March 3 that children of occupied Holubivka, Luhansk Oblast, arrived in Irkutsk, Siberia, to participate in the Russian youth program “The Future is Ours,” an organization that ostensibly seeks to promote a healthy lifestyle and prevent the use of synthetic drugs.[50] Pasechnik claimed that Holubivka children will go on excursions, attend classes, and participate in interesting events.[51] ISW continues to assess that Russian authorities are using the cover of youth programs to forcibly deport Ukrainian children to Russia.

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

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

Russian forces continue troop and equipment rotations in Belarus. Independent Belarusian monitoring group The Hajun Project reported on March 2 that at least two Russian cargo trains bearing at least 17 T-62M tanks departed from Baranavichy, Brest Oblast for Smolensk Oblast in Russia.[52] The Hajun Project also reported that new Russian forces have arrived in Belarus for training and to replace trained forces that left Belarus to deploy to combat zones.[53]

The current status of the Russian Aerospace Forces Beriev A-50 airborne early warning and control plane (previously deployed to the Machulishchi Air Base in Minsk, Belarus) remains unclear as of March 3. Belarusian media circulated footage of the A-50 taking off from the airfield on March 2 in order to prove that the plane is still operational despite claims of a Belarusian partisan attack against the aircraft.[54] The Belarusian Hajun Project, however, noted on March 3 that a Russian Aerospace Force MiG-31K took off from the Machulishchi airfield without the A-50.[55] The Hajun Project noted that the absence of the A-50 likely means that the probability of Russian forces launching Kinzhal missiles at Ukraine from Belarusian airspace is slightly decreased.[56] ISW is unable to verify this assessment.

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

[1] https://twitter.com/WarMonitors/status/1631576765150666752; https://twi...

[2] https://edition.cnn.com/europe/live-news/russia-ukraine-war-news-02-28-2...

[3] https://edition.cnn.com/europe/live-news/russia-ukraine-war-news-02-28-2...

[4] https://t.me/readovkanews/53938

[5] https://t.me/readovkanews/53961; https://t.me/boris_rozhin/79566

[6] https://t.me/readovkanews/53961; https://t.me/boris_rozhin/79566; http...

[7] https://www.ft.com/content/c4ffe9b8-a3f5-4f33-a420-effe32754bbf?sharetyp...

[8] https://t.me/readovkanews/53986

[9] https://t.me/readovkanews/53973

[10] https://t.me/wargonzo/11223; https://t.me/rt_special/3121

[11] https://kremlin dot ru/events/president/news/67903

[12] https://kremlin dot ru/events/president/news/67903

[13] http://kremlin dot ru/events/president/news/67903

[14] https://tass dot ru/proisshestviya/17188747

[15] https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/pressreleases/update-149-iaea-director-g... https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign...

[16] https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/pressreleases/update-149-iaea-director-g...

[17] https://t.me/energoatom_ua/12173;

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

[19] https://edition.cnn.com/europe/live-news/russia-ukraine-war-news-03-3-23... https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/ukraine-orders-evacuation-of-kupiansk...

[20] https://t.me/readovkanews/53942; https://t.me/readovkanews/53952

[21] https://t.me/serhiy_hayday/9569

[22] https://t.me/serhiy_hayday/9569

[23] https://t.me/wargonzo/11222

[24] https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid0n6aoAeQvW3oDCxkGZzg...

[25] https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid0n6aoAeQvW3oDCxkGZzg...

[26] https://twitter.com/WarMonitors/status/1631576765150666752; https://twi...

[27] https://twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1631596509878730757; https://t...

[28] https://t.me/concordgroup_official/546; https://t.me/kommunist/16162; ... https://t.me/sashakots/38729; https://twitter.com/NOELreports/status/16...

[29] https://t.me/rybar/44181;https://t.me/readovkanews/53971; https://t.me/...

[30] https://t.me/readovkanews/53971

[31] https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid0n6aoAeQvW3oDCxkGZzg...

[32] https://twitter.com/SerDer_Daniels/status/1631542839346618368; https://twitter.com/PauliusZaleckas/status/1631592454083280896

[33] https://t.me/mod_russia/24532; https://t.me/rybar/44181; https://t.me/...

[34] https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid0hScfSR4wjSCXoAAeNc3...

[35] https://t.me/milinfolive/97586; https://t.me/readovkanews/53942

[36] https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid0n6aoAeQvW3oDCxkGZzg... https://t.me/Yevtushenko_E/2735; https://t.me/Yevtushenko_E/2736; https://t.me/Yevtushenko_E/2737

[37] https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid0n6aoAeQvW3oDCxkGZzg...

[38] https://www.rbc dot ru/politics/03/03/2023/6401df7b9a7947d74cf59359; http://publication.pravo dot gov.ru/Document/View/0001202303030004?index=0&rangeSize=1; https://meduza dot io/news/2023/03/03/putin-podpisal-ukaz-o-vneshnem-upravlenii-v-kompaniyah-kotorye-budut-sryvat-gosoboronzakaz-pri-voennom-polozhenii

[39] https://meduza dot io/news/2023/03/03/putin-podpisal-ukaz-o-vneshnem-upravlenii-v-kompaniyah-kotorye-budut-sryvat-gosoboronzakaz-pri-voennom-polozhenii

[40] https://t.me/svobodnieslova/1511; https://verstka dot media/voyna-osvobozhdaet-ot-nakazaniya

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

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

[43] https://t.me/pushilindenis/3227

[44] https://t.me/pushilindenis/3227

[45] https://t.me/pushilindenis/3227

[46] https://t.me/pushilindenis/3227

[47] https://t.me/glava_lnr_info/823

[48] https://t.me/glava_lnr_info/823

[49] https://t.me/glava_lnr_info/823

[50] http://irkipedia dot ru/content/budushchee_za_nami_akciya; https://t.me/glava_lnr_info/832

[51] https://t.me/glava_lnr_info/832

[52] https://motolko.help/en-news/belarusian-hajun-military-activity-on-the-t...

[53] https://motolko.help/en-news/belarusian-hajun-military-activity-on-the-t...

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

[55] https://t.me/Hajun_BY/6533

[56] https://t.me/Hajun_BY/6533

PNP gets over $3.3 anti-terrorism equipment from US

https://www.sunstar.com.ph/article/1954874/manila/local-news/pnp-gets-over-33-anti-terrorism-equipment-from-us

MANILA. The Philippine National Police receives over $3.3 million worth of equipment from the Office of Anti-Terrorism Assistance Program of the Diplomatic Security Services of the United States Embassy on Wednesday, March 1, 2023. (Photo from NCRPO)

THIRD ANNE PERALTA-MALONZO

March 02, 2023

- A A +

THE Philippine National Police (PNP) received on Wednesday, March 1, 2023, over $3.3 million worth of equipment from the Office of Anti-Terrorism Assistance Program of the Diplomatic Security Services of the United States Embassy, to help boost the country’s counter-terrorism capability.

The donated equipment include 31 bomb suits, 37 digital SCANX, 40 X-ray sources, 10 Explosives Ordnance Division bomb suit batteries, 33 high-risk search techniques kits, 13 seeker-e kits, and seven pick-up Ford Ranger trucks.

The equipment was turned over by Ambassador of the United States of America to the Philippines MaryKay Carlson to the Regional Explosives Ordnance Disposal and Canine Unit (Recu) of the National Capital Region Police Office (NCRPO) in Camp Bagong Diwa, Taguig City.

PNP Logistics and Support Service director Major General Ronaldo Olay said these donation will significantly enhance the PNP’s capabilities in detecting, preventing, and responding to terrorist threats in the country.

"We are extremely grateful for this donation, which will undoubtedly be a game-changer in our ability to fulfill our mission to keep our communities safe from terrorism and other forms of criminality. This donation also highlights the strong partnership between the Philippine National Police and the American embassy, and we are deeply appreciative of this gesture of support from our American allies," Olay said.

Carlson said the donated equipment stresses the US government’s commitment to supporting the Philippines in its fight against terrorism.

“The United States remains steadfast in its friendship and commitment to the Government of the Philippines, and we are very proud of our continuing partnership in the fight against terrorism. I am confident that working together, we will be able to deter, interdict, and prevent acts of terrorism,” she said.

Colonel Albert Magno, acting director of the PNP EOD/K9 Group, the end-user of the donated equipment, assured the public that the equipment will be put to good use in serving the Filipino people and protecting them from the threat of terrorism. (SunStar Philippines)

6. China Increasingly Seen as Antagonist in Diplomatic Talks Around the World

How can this be exploited? What is the most effective way to use this in an influence campaign?

China Increasingly Seen as Antagonist in Diplomatic Talks Around the World

The New York Times · by Edward Wong · March 3, 2023

News Analysis

Tensions over China arise in many gatherings of global leaders and diplomats, as Beijing increasingly plays a spoiler role, often siding with Russia.

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A worker moving a Chinese national flag before the opening session of the G20 foreign ministers’ meeting in New Delhi on Thursday.Credit...Manish Swarup/Associated Press

March 3, 2023, 7:50 a.m. ET

NEW DELHI — When the top diplomats of four major Asia-Pacific nations met here in the Indian capital on Friday to discuss issues in the region, one had a direct message for the behemoth whose shadow loomed over the talk.

China must “act under the international institutions, standards and laws” to avoid conflict, Yoshimasa Hayashi, the foreign minister of Japan, said on a public panel that included his counterparts from the United States, India and Australia.

That request is one that every official on that stage has made on many occasions. Although Russia’s war in Ukraine has dominated diplomatic dialogue around the globe this past year, the dilemma of dealing with an increasingly assertive China is ever-present — and for many nations, a thornier problem than relations with Moscow. They subscribe to the framing that President Biden and his aides have presented: China is the greatest long-term challenge, and the one nation with the power and resources to reshape the American-led order to its advantage.

At the heart of this predicament is the fact that the United States and its allies maintain deep trade ties with China even as their security concerns and ideological friction with the nation’s leader, Xi Jinping, and the Chinese Communist Party escalate.

The U.S. secretary of state, Antony Blinken, left; Japan’s foreign minister, Yoshimasa Hayashi; Australia’s foreign minister, Penny Wong; and India’s foreign minister, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar at a panel discussion in New Delhi on Friday.

For President Biden and his aides, that tension came into sharp focus in recent weeks after a Chinese spy balloon began drifting over the continental United States, and when, in their telling, they came across intelligence that China is considering sending weapons to Russia for its war. That prospect has prompted American diplomats and those from allies and partners to deliver warnings to Chinese counterparts, including here in New Delhi.

The anxieties over both China and Russia’s increasingly discordant roles on the world stage were perhaps wrapped into a lament on Thursday by Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India that “multilateralism is in crisis today.”

The State of the War

An Unexpected Meeting: Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken and Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov of Russia spoke face-to-face for the first time since Moscow’s invasion during a Group of 20 summit.
Reinforcing Bakhmut: Kyiv is sending reinforcements to the devastated city in eastern Ukraine, leading more troops into a bloody crucible where Russian forces have gradually tightened their grip.
A Rout for Russia’s Tanks: A three-week fight near the town of Vuhledar in southern Ukraine produced the biggest tank battle of the war so far, and a stinging setback for the Russians.
Softening Support: With U.S. public support for arming Ukraine waning, proponents of more aid fear that growing taxpayer fatigue could undercut the war effort.

“Global governance has failed in both its mandates” of preventing wars and fostering international cooperation, he said in a video address to a conference of top diplomats from the Group of 20 nations, made up of the world’s major economies, including China and Russia.

The four Asia-Pacific countries represented on the panel one day later at the Raisina Dialogue form the Quad partnership, which was revived in 2017 after many years of dormancy and has gained momentum since, mainly because of shared strategic concerns over China. But in a sign of the delicate balance they are trying to strike in relations with Beijing, the diplomats took pains to stress in their public comments that the Quad is not a security or military organization. Mr. Hayashi was the sole panelist to mention China, and only after being prompted by the panel’s moderator.

Their joint statement, released after private meetings, did not mention China, although many points in it, including the issue of “peace and security in the maritime domain,” are obviously aimed at Chinese policies.

At the earlier Group of 20 conference, the foreign minister of China, Qin Gang, joined the foreign minister of Russia, Sergey V. Lavrov, in playing the role of spoiler.

Sergey Lavrov, Russia’s minister of foreign affairs, at the G20 Summit in Indonesia last year.

Together, they opposed two paragraphs in a proposed consensus communiqué, the first of which directly criticized Russia’s war in Ukraine. Even though the leaders of the Group of 20 had approved the same two paragraphs in a consensus document at a meeting last year in Bali, Indonesia, China has dug in with Russia to sabotage both this week’s communiqué and a similar one proposed at a G20 finance ministers’ conference in late February in Bengaluru, India.

The second paragraph in the communiqué that they objected to did not mention Russia or Ukraine. It simply said that all the nations agreed to uphold United Nations principles on international humanitarian law, “including the protection of civilians and infrastructure in armed conflicts” and forbidding “the use or threat of use of nuclear weapons.”

Some diplomats privately expressed surprise that China opposed a reiteration of such basic principles, a move that forced the conference to issue a lower-level chair’s statement. Mr. Qin’s stance seemed to validate concerns that his government was willing to side with Russia in a growing number of diplomatic venues — including at the United Nations Security Council — to undermine policies or actions that the vast majority of nations endorse.

“Russia and China were the only two countries that made clear that they would not sign on to that text,” Antony J. Blinken, the U.S. secretary of state, said pointedly at a news conference on Thursday night. He added that he agreed with Mr. Modi “that there are real challenges to the multilateral system.”

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken during a news conference on the sidelines of the G20 foreign ministers’ meeting in New Delhi on Thursday.

He noted, too, that at the U.N. Security Council, “we have two countries in particular that tend to block the attempted actions of the council to address some of the most urgent global concerns.”

Mr. Blinken has also expressed skepticism over a push by Beijing for peace negotiations in the war in Ukraine, saying Chinese officials are merely creating a smoke screen to buy Russia more time to press its assault.

Chinese officials say they will happily cooperate with countries in the international system, and that it is the United States fanning the flames of division with its “Cold War mentality.”

China is ready to work with other Group of 20 nations to both “stay committed to solidarity and cooperation” and “play a bigger role in addressing major global economic and financial challenges,” said Mao Ning, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, at a news conference in Beijing on Thursday as the meetings in New Delhi began.

After Mr. Blinken’s critical remarks, Ms. Mao said Friday that Mr. Qin had urged the Group of 20 nations to engage in “real multilateralism” and avoid “power politics and camps of confrontation.” She added that the G20 was an inappropriate venue for discussing Ukraine, and criticized the Quad partnership as a “closed small circle.”

Ms. Mao also lashed out at an announcement by the U.S. Commerce Department on Thursday that it was restricting trade with 28 Chinese entities that American officials accused of violating U.S. sanctions, including certain bans on nuclear and missile technology sales. That move, Ms. Mao said, showed the United States was going to great lengths to “suppress Chinese enterprises.”

The Biden administration has broadened an effort begun by the Trump administration to hobble Chinese companies that the U.S. government views as potential national security threats, including Huawei, China’s most important communications technology company. Last October, Mr. Biden announced sweeping restrictions on selling advanced semiconductors and semiconductor manufacturing equipment to China, in what aides called an effort to end China’s access to “foundational technologies.”

The Biden administration is pushing two allies, Japan and the Netherlands, to also impose further limits on sales of semiconductor manufacturing equipment to China. That subject might have come up when Mr. Blinken met in New Delhi with his Dutch and Japanese counterparts. The move is another manifestation of the Biden administration’s belief that China can be constrained only by getting allies and partners on the same page.

Mr. Lavrov and Qin Gang met on the sidelines of the G20 foreign ministers’ meeting in New Delhi on Thursday.

And Mr. Blinken warned China on Thursday night of economic penalties if it went ahead with giving weapons to Russia: “We have sanctions authorities of various kinds,” he said.

For world leaders, those irrepressible tensions are more evidence that the international system is cleaving into blocs, and that Mr. Modi’s urgent plea to diplomats this week was falling on deaf ears: “Focus not on what divides us, but on what unites us.”

Olivia Wang contributed research from Hong Kong.

The New York Times · by Edward Wong · March 3, 2023

7. Taiwan military to get $619 million U.S. arms boost as China keeps up pressure

What is the flash to bang time for these deliveries - e.g., how long does it take from the time of the announcement for them to receive the equipment and then fully field it to operational forces who are trained and ready to employ it?

Taiwan military to get $619 million U.S. arms boost as China keeps up pressure

Reuters · by Ben Blanchard

TAIPEI, March 2 (Reuters) - The United States has approved the potential sale of $619 million in new weapons to Taiwan, including missiles for its F-16 fleet, as the island reported a second day of large-scale Chinese air force incursions nearby.

The arms sales are likely to further sour already tense ties between Washington and Beijing, which has repeatedly demanded such deals stop, viewing them as unwarranted support for democratically governed Taiwan, an island China claims as its own territory.

The Pentagon said on Wednesday the U.S. State Department has approved the potential sale to Taiwan of arms and equipment that includes 200 anti-aircraft Advanced Medium Range Air-to-Air Missiles (AMRAAM) and 100 AGM-88B HARM missiles that can take out land-based radar stations.

"The proposed sale will contribute to the recipient's capability to provide for the defence of its airspace, regional security, and interoperability with the United States," it said in a statement.

Taiwan's defence ministry said the missiles would help "effectively defend the airspace to deal with threats and provocations from the Communist military" and would bolster defence stockpiles.

Raytheon Technologies (RTX.N) and Lockheed Martin (LMT.N) are the principal contractors, it added. China has sanctioned both companies for selling Taiwan weapons.

Taiwan has complained for the past three years or so of stepped-up Chinese military activities near the island as Beijing seeks to assert its sovereignty claims.

Taiwan reported on Thursday a second day of large-scale Chinese air force incursions into its air defence identification zone, with its defence ministry saying that during the last 24 hours it had spotted 21 aircraft.

China has said its activities in the area are justified as it seeks to defend its territorial integrity and to warn the United States against "colluding" with Taiwan, despite the anger this causes in Taipei.

Taiwan's defence ministry said the aircraft, 17 J-10 fighters and four J-16 fighters, had flown into the southwestern corner of Taiwan's air defence identification zone, according to a map the ministry released.

The J-10s, an older model that entered service two decades ago, flew closer to the Chinese coast than Taiwan's, while the J-16s, a much newer and more advanced fighter, flew northeast of the Taiwan-controlled Pratas Islands, the map showed.

The lightly defended Pratas are strategically located at the top of the South China Sea, and many of China's fly-bys happen nearby.

Taiwan's forces monitored the situation, including sending up its own planes, the ministry added, using the normal phrasing for its response to such Chinese incursions.

The ministry on Wednesday reported 19 Chinese aircraft flying in Taiwan's air defence zone.

None of the aircraft crossed the sensitive median line of the Taiwan Strait, which has served as an unofficial barrier between the two sides, but which China's air force has been flying over almost daily since staging war games near Taiwan last August.

Taiwan last reported a large median line crossing of Chinese aircraft on Friday, when 10 planes were involved.

China has not commented on recent activities near Taiwan. In January, China said it staged combat drills around the island to "resolutely counter the provocative actions of external forces and Taiwan independence separatist forces".

No shots have been fired and the Chinese aircraft have been flying in Taiwan's ADIZ, not in its territorial airspace.

The ADIZ is a broader area Taiwan monitors and patrols that gives it more time to respond to any threats.

Taiwan's government has repeatedly offered talks with China, but says the island will defend itself if attacked and that only the Taiwanese people can decide their own future.

Reporting by Ben Blanchard and Yimou Lee; Editing by Muralikumar Anantharaman and Gerry Doyle

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Reuters · by Ben Blanchard

8. Taiwan: Will China attack Taiwan? What ChatGPT thinks

The responses seeme similar to those I received when asking about the potential for north Korean collapse. Although a data point of two it seems like every response might begin with this standard caveat: "a complex and uncertain one" which is exactly how we described north Korean instability and collapse in the 1990s. You could start every national security issue response with that phrase.

Taiwan: Will China attack Taiwan? What ChatGPT thinks - Times of India

timesofindia.indiatimes.com · by TIMESOFINDIA.COM / Mar 3, 2023, 15:53 ISTShareAA+Text SizeSmallMediumLarge

NEW DELHI: When Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, analysts were quick to compare the situation to what may happen if China decided to take military action against Taiwan.

China views democratically-governed Taiwan as its own and has long taken a carrot and stick approach to the island, threatening it with the prospect of military action while reaching out to those it believes are amenable to Beijing's point of view.

Beijing has never renounced the use of force to gain control of what it calls its "sacred" territory, and has over recent years ramped up pressure on Taiwan to accept Chinese sovereignty, including the staging of regular military exercises near the island.

Timesofindia.com asked artificial intelligence-powered (AI) chatbot ChatGPT whether China would attack Taiwan.

Noting that the issue depends on many factors, such as political will, military capabilities, international reactions and economic consequences, the chatbot highlighted that there has been increased air and naval incursions into Taiwan's air defense identification zone by China.

ChatGPT also said that any invasion by China would require a massive amphibious and airborne operation across the 180-km-wide Taiwan Strait, which is defended by Taiwan's armed forces and US-made weapons systems. It further said that any invasion by the CCP would face strong resistance from Taiwan's population of 23 million people, who are mostly opposed to unification with China.

Full response by ChatGPT:

The question of whether China will invade Taiwan is a complex and uncertain one that depends on many factors, such as political will, military capabilities, international reactions and economic consequences.
China considers Taiwan as a renegade province that must be reunified with the mainland by force if necessary. Taiwan, officially the Republic of China (ROC), regards itself as a sovereign state that has never been part of the People's Republic of China (PRC). The two sides have been separated since 1949 after a civil war.
China has been increasing its military pressure on Taiwan in recent years, especially under President Xi Jinping, who has vowed to achieve reunification within his lifetime. China has conducted frequent air and naval incursions into Taiwan's air defense identification zone (ADIZ) and territorial waters, as well as cyberattacks and disinformation campaigns against Taiwan's government and society.
However, invading Taiwan would not be easy or risk-free for China. It would require a massive amphibious and airborne operation across the 180-kilometer-wide Taiwan Strait, which is defended by Taiwan's armed forces and US-made weapons systems. It would also face strong resistance from Taiwan's population of 23 million people, who are mostly opposed to unification with China.
Moreover, invading Taiwan would trigger a severe international backlash from the United States and its allies, who have pledged to support Taiwan's security and democracy. The US has not ruled out using military force to defend Taiwan if China attacks it. A war over Taiwan could also devastate the global economy by disrupting trade flows and supply chains in the region.
Therefore, while China has the power to take Taiwan by force, it would cost an enormous amount of blood and treasure for both sides. The best outcome for peace and stability in the region would be a peaceful resolution of the cross-strait dispute through dialogue and cooperation.

timesofindia.indiatimes.com · by TIMESOFINDIA.COM / Mar 3, 2023, 15:53 ISTShareAA+Text SizeSmallMediumLarge

9. Blundering Into Baghdad - The Right—and Wrong—Lessons of the Iraq War

I usually read everything by Hal Brands.

Excerpts:

The “no more Iraqs” mindset carries other dangers, as well. In an ideal world, Washington would surely love to abandon an unstable Middle East. Yet it cannot because it still has important interests there, from counterterrorism to ensuring the smooth functioning of the global energy market. A stubborn resistance to Middle Eastern wars might help avoid future quagmires. Or as Obama discovered, it might lead to episodes in which violent upheaval builds, U.S. interests are threatened, and Washington intervenes later, from a worse position and at a higher price.

The truth is that stupid comes in many flavors. It includes unwise interventions and hasty withdrawals, too little assertiveness as well as too much. If the Iraq war teaches anything, it is that U.S. strategy is often a balancing act between underreach and overreach and that there is no single formula that can allow the United States to avoid one danger without courting the other.

The war also teaches the importance of learning and adapting after initial mistakes. It is not unusual in the U.S. experience: the real American way of war is to start slowly and make lots of deadly errors. When debacles turn into victories, as was the case in the U.S. Civil War, both world wars, and many other conflicts, it is because Washington eventually masters a steeper learning curve than the adversary while gradually bringing its tremendous might to bear. The nice thing about being a superpower is that even the most tragic and harmful blunders are rarely fatal. How one recovers from mistakes that inevitably occur in war thus matters a great deal.

But learning any lessons from Iraq requires taking the messy history of that war seriously. Accusations that neoconservatives, the foreign policy “blob,” or the Israel lobby are to blame for American misadventures are echoes of the charges that bankers, merchants, and the British drew Washington into World War I. These arguments may be ideologically convenient, but they do not reveal much about why the United States behaves as it does—and how intelligent, well-meaning policymakers sometimes go so badly astray. Good history offers no guarantee that the United States will get the next set of national security decisions right. But bad history surely increases the odds of getting them wrong.

Blundering Into Baghdad

The Right—and Wrong—Lessons of the Iraq War

By Hal Brands

March/April 2023

Foreign Affairs · by The Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict With China · February 28, 2023

“The whole horrible truth about the war is being revealed,” wrote the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr in 1923, just five years after World War I had ended. “Every new book destroys some further illusion. How can we ever again believe anything?” Americans had once hoped that the Great War would make the world safe for democracy. But by the 1920s, a darker interpretation held sway. Revisionist scholars argued that the Allies were just as responsible for starting the war as the Germans were. They contended that the conflict had simply empowered one set of voracious empires at the expense of another. Most damningly, they claimed that Washington’s war was rooted in avarice and lies—that the United States had been dragged into an unnecessary conflict by financiers, arms manufacturers, and foreign interests. “The moral pretensions of the heroes,” Niebuhr went on, “were bogus.”

In fact, the supposed revelations about World War I were not quite what they seemed. Although the origins of the conflict are endlessly contested, they were grounded primarily in the tensions created by a powerful, provocative Germany. Corporate greed did not drive Washington to war. Instead, issues such as freedom of the seas and outrage at German atrocities spurred it to enter the fight. American intervention was hardly fruitless: it helped turn the tide on the Western front and prevented Germany from consolidating a continental empire from the North Sea to the Caucasus. But amid the disillusion sown by a bloody war and an imperfect peace, more cynical interpretations flourished—and indelibly influenced U.S. policy.

In the 1920s, jaded views of the last war informed the United States’ decision to reject strategic commitments in Europe. In the 1930s, concerns that “merchants of death” had pulled the country into war encouraged the passage of strict neutrality laws meant to keep it out of future conflicts. Leading isolationists, such as Charles Lindbergh and Father Charles Coughlin, channeled this warped interpretation of World War I when they argued that selfish minorities and shadowy interests were once again scheming to draw the United States into war. These dynamics made it harder for the United States to do much more than watch as the global order collapsed. Views of wars past invariably shape how the United States approaches threats present. In the interwar era, historical revisionism in the world’s leading democracy abetted geopolitical revisionism by totalitarian predators.

The Iraq war left a lasting mark on the American psyche.

When seemingly good wars go bad, Americans often conclude that those wars were pointless or corrupt from the get-go. Since the U.S. invasion of Iraq, in 2003, many observers have viewed that conflict as Niebuhr once viewed World War I. There is now a bipartisan consensus that the war was a terrible mistake based on faulty premises, which indeed it was. But many critics go further, peddling what can only be called conspiracy theories: that the war was the work of a powerful pro-Israel lobby or a nefarious cabal of neoconservatives, that President George W. Bush deliberately lied in order to sell a conflict he was eager to wage, or that the United States intervened out of lust for oil or other hidden motives.

These are not the rantings of a lunatic fringe. In 2002, in the run-up to the invasion, Barack Obama, then a state senator in Illinois, labeled the coming conflict a “dumb war” motivated by the Bush administration’s bid to “distract” Americans from economic problems and “corporate scandals.” As president, Donald Trump called the invasion the “single worst decision ever made,” blaming greedy defense contractors and trigger-happy generals for U.S. military misadventures in the Middle East. Other critics have offered more judicious explanations of the war’s origins. But in many quarters, “Iraq” is still synonymous with deception and bad faith.

Twenty years after the U.S. invasion, the passage of time has not obscured the fact that the war was a tragedy that took a heavy toll on the United States and an even heavier toll on Iraq. If World War I was, in retrospect, a war whose benefits surely outweighed its costs for the United States, the Iraq war was one Washington should never have fought. But as Melvyn Leffler shows in a new book, Confronting Saddam Hussein, the war was an understandable tragedy, born of honorable motives and genuine concerns. One might add that it was an American tragedy: the war was not the work of any cunning faction but initially enjoyed broad-based, bipartisan support. Finally, Iraq was an ironic tragedy: the U.S. failure in a war often portrayed as the epitome of American hubris was ultimately a result of, first, too much intervention and, then, too little.

The United States will not have a healthy foreign policy until it properly understands its sad, complex saga in Iraq. A generation after the march on Baghdad, not the least of the lingering challenges of the Iraq war is getting its history, and thus its lessons, right.

MISSION NOT ACCOMPLISHED

No serious observer can dispute one early judgment on Iraq: it was a debacle. The Bush administration decided to confront Saddam Hussein in 2002–3 to eliminate what it viewed as a growing and, after 9/11, intolerable threat to American security. The aim was to topple a brutal tyranny that was a fount of aggression and instability in the Middle East through a brief, low-cost intervention. Very little went according to plan.

Victory over Saddam’s regime gave way to raging insurgency and gruesome civil war. The military and economic costs spiraled upward. Between 2003 and 2011, over 4,000 U.S. service members were killed in operations tied to Iraq and over 31,000 wounded. As for the number of Iraqis killed, no one knows for sure, but researchers have estimated a death toll between 100,000 and 400,000 over the same period. Meanwhile, the credibility of the war effort crumbled when Saddam’s suspected weapons of mass destruction stockpiles turned out mostly not to exist. The U.S. reputation for competence suffered from the deficient planning and serial misjudgments—the failure to adequately prepare for a vacuum of authority after Saddam’s fall, the deployment of too few troops to stabilize the country, the ill-advised disbanding of the Iraqi army, and many others—that marred the subsequent occupation and fueled the ensuing chaos. And rather than strengthening the U.S. geopolitical position, the conflict weakened it almost everywhere.

The war intensified a sectarian maelstrom in Iraq and throughout the Middle East while freeing a theocratic Iran to expand its influence. By turning Iraq into a cauldron of violence, the invasion revived al Qaeda and the broader jihadist movement that had been pummeled after 9/11. Foreign fighters flocked to Iraq for the chance to kill American soldiers. Once there, they created new terrorist networks and gained valuable battlefield experience. The war also caused a painful rift with key European allies; it consumed American energies that might have been applied to other problems, from North Korea’s nuclear program to Russian revanchism and the rise of China.

A U.S. Army officer posing after a battle at the Baghdad airport, April 2003

Scott Nelson / Getty Images

Yet critiques of the war have become so hyperbolic that it can be difficult to keep the damage in perspective. One prominent commentator, David Kilcullen, even deemed the war comparable to Hitler’s doomed invasion of the Soviet Union. True, the human toll was devastating, but for the U.S. military, it amounted to roughly one-quarter of the deaths that American forces suffered in the bloodiest year of the Vietnam War. Once U.S. forces belatedly got a grip on the insurgency in 2007–8, Iraq became a death trap for the jihadists that had flocked there. Much of the worst damage to U.S. alliances had been patched up by Bush’s second term or simply overtaken by new challenges. By 2013, with U.S. troops gone from Iraq, the Middle East blunder that most preoccupied many European countries was Obama’s decision not to intervene in Syria after Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons against his own people. Overall, the Iraq war dented American power but hardly destroyed it. In the early 2020s, the United States is still the world’s preeminent economic and military actor, and it has more trouble keeping countries out of its unparalleled alliance network than bringing them in.

Where the war did leave a lasting mark was on the American psyche. A taxing, long-mismanaged intervention undermined domestic confidence in U.S. power and leadership. It elicited calls for retrenchment not simply from Iraq or the Middle East but also from the world. By 2014, the percentage of Americans saying that the United States should “stay out of world affairs” was higher than at any time since polling on that question began. By 2016, the year the country elected a president who revived the isolationist slogan “America First,” 57 percent of respondents in a Pew Research Center survey agreed that Washington should mind its own business. This Iraq hangover was all the more painful because it made the United States strategically sluggish just as the dangers posed by great-power rivals were growing. If Vietnam had, as Henry Kissinger put it in his memoirs, “stimulated an attack on our entire postwar foreign policy,” here, history was indeed repeating itself.

STEPPING BACK IN TIME

How the United States got into this mess is the subject of Confronting Saddam Hussein. No one is better suited to answer the question than Leffler, a widely admired diplomatic historian. His landmark study of the early Cold War, A Preponderance of Power, is a model of how to criticize policymakers’ errors while recognizing their achievements and comprehending the excruciating pressures they felt. Good history demands empathy—seeing the world through the eyes of one’s subjects even when one disagrees with them—and Leffler’s work is suffused with it.

Confronting Saddam Hussein is the most serious scholarly study of the war’s origins, relying on interviews with key policymakers and the limited archival material that has been declassified. Leffler aims to understand, not condemn. His thesis is that the Iraq war was a tragedy, but one that cannot be explained by conspiracy theories or allegations of bad faith.

As Leffler demonstrates, before 9/11, U.S. officials believed the problem posed by an unrepentant, malign Iraq was getting worse, but they showed little urgency in addressing it. After 9/11, long-standing concerns about Saddam’s weapons programs, his ties to terrorists, and his penchant for aggression intersected with newer fears that failing to deal with festering problems, particularly those combining weapons of mass destruction and terrorism, could have catastrophic consequences. Amid palpable insecurity, Bush brought matters to a head, first by threatening war in a bid to make Saddam verifiably disarm, and then—after concluding this coercive diplomacy had failed—by invading. “Fear, power, and hubris,” Leffler writes, produced the Iraq war: fear that Washington could no longer ignore simmering dangers, the power that an unrivaled United States could use to deal with such dangers decisively, the hubris that led Bush to think the undertaking could be accomplished quickly and cheaply.

Leffler’s book is no whitewash. The bureaucratic dysfunction that impeded searching debate before the invasion and competent execution thereafter is on display. So is the failure to scrutinize sketchy intelligence and flawed assumptions. The sense of purpose that motivated Bush after 9/11, combined with his visceral antipathy to Saddam—who was, after all, one of the great malefactors of the modern age—brought moral clarity, as well as strategic myopia. Bush and his close ally, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, “detested Saddam Hussein,” and “their view of his defiance, treachery, and barbarity” powerfully shaped their policies, Leffler notes. But none of this criticism is news in 2023, so Leffler’s real contribution is in exploding pernicious myths about the conflict’s origins.

CORRECTING THE RECORD

One myth is that Iraq was effectively contained circa 2001, so the ensuing invasion addressed an imaginary challenge. In truth, the Iraq problem—how to handle a regime that Washington had defeated in the Gulf War of 1990–91 but remained a menace to international stability—seemed all too real. Saddam had kicked out UN weapons inspectors in 1998; as the accompanying sanctions regime eroded, Iraq increased funding for its Military-Industrial Commission fortyfold. The regime cultivated myriad terrorist groups, in the Palestinian territories, Egypt, and other Middle Eastern countries. Saddam had secretly destroyed his stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons but not the infrastructure for developing them. The decadelong effort to contain Saddam was draining U.S. resources, while the supporting U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia became an al Qaeda recruiting bonanza. The U.S. global image also suffered from exaggerated claims about the damage economic sanctions were inflicting on Iraqi citizens.

Saddam posed a growing threat, if not an imminent one. This is why, as the political scientist Frank Harvey has demonstrated, any U.S. administration would have felt pressure to resolve the Iraq problem after 9/11. It is also why any responsible critique of the war has to take seriously the perils of not removing Saddam from power—for example, the prospect that he eventually might have used force against his neighbors again or that his ambitions might have interacted explosively with those of a nuclearizing Iran.

Leffler also rebuts the “rush to war” thesis, which holds that Bush had been itching to invade Iraq before 9/11. No senior policymaker was then envisioning anything like a full-on invasion, and Bush’s attention was elsewhere. Even Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, who favored a long-term effort to remove Saddam’s regime, “was not supporting a military invasion, or the deployment of U.S. ground forces” in early 2001, Leffler writes. After 9/11 dramatically increased U.S. sensitivity to all threats, Bush gradually became convinced of the need to confront Saddam, but it was only in early 2003—after Iraq continued its cat-and-mouse game with inspectors readmitted because of U.S. pressure—that he reluctantly concluded that war was inevitable.

The Iraq war was not foisted on the United States by conflict-craving zealots.

Nor was the war the brainchild of powerful neoconservatives bent on a radical democracy-promotion agenda. In truth, those nearest the center of decision—Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Vice President Dick Cheney, and especially Bush himself, who rightly emerges from Leffler’s book as the key actor—were hardly neoconservatives. Rumsfeld and Cheney might be better described as conservative nationalists. Bush himself had campaigned against nation-building missions and called for a “humble” foreign policy when running for president. Officials closer to the neoconservative movement, such as Wolfowitz, had little influence on Iraq policy. When Wolfowitz sought to focus the administration on Iraq just after 9/11, “Bush shunted his advice aside,” Leffler writes. There is no evidence, he argues, that Wolfowitz significantly influenced Bush’s view of the issue. The depiction of “an inattentive chief executive, easily manipulated by neoconservative advisers,” adds Leffler, is simply wrong. True, the idea that democratizing Iraq would have a constructive regional effect was a reinforcing motive for war, and one that Leffler underplays. But Bush didn’t pursue democracy promotion because the neocons wanted it—he did so because the traditional U.S. strategy for defanging defeated tyrannies is to turn them into pacific democracies.

Of course, the challenge Iraq posed was less severe than Bush believed because Saddam had quietly divested himself of chemical and biological weapons stockpiles in the mid-1990s. Yet the “Bush lied, people died” critique falls flat: as Leffler shows, every major U.S. policymaker sincerely believed that Saddam’s weapons programs were more advanced than they were because this was the consensus of the intelligence community. (Moreover, the stockpiles were not totally nonexistent, although they were far smaller and less potent than the intelligence community believed. U.S. forces in Iraq ultimately discovered roughly 5,000 chemical warheads, shells, and bombs, all made before 1991.) As two official investigations concluded, the intelligence was flawed because of bad analysis—and Saddam’s effort to deter his enemies by pretending to possess weapons he did not have—rather than deliberate politicization. Bush and his aides were overzealous in presenting the available evidence, but they were not lying.

Nor did they need to. What is often forgotten now is just how popular a more assertive Iraq policy was. During Bill Clinton’s presidency, the Iraq Liberation Act, which made it U.S. policy “to support efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein,” passed Congress in 1998 with overwhelming support. In 2002, the authorization for war won 77 votes in the Senate and 296 in the House. “We have no choice but to eliminate the threat,” Senator Joe Biden declared at the time. “This is a guy who is an extreme danger to the world.” The Iraq war was not foisted on the country by ideological cliques or conflict-craving zealots. It was a war the United States chose in an atmosphere of great fear and imperfect information—and one that, for all its horrors, might have yielded a winning outcome after all.

AMERICA WALKS AWAY

War, the French statesman Georges Clemenceau remarked, is a series of catastrophes that results in a victory. Indeed, if the invasion of Iraq was a mistake, that does not mean the war was lost from that point on. Leffler’s account ends with the botched handling of the initial occupation. But after three years of catastrophe, in late 2006, the Bush administration finally came to grips with the chaos engulfing Iraq, fashioning a new counterinsurgency strategy and supporting it with the deployment of roughly 30,000 badly needed troops.

As detailed empirical work by the scholars Stephen Biddle, Jeffrey Friedman, and Jacob Shapiro demonstrates, this “surge” provided security in key areas and bolstered an uprising of Sunni tribes against jihadists that had overrun their communities. Violence plummeted; al Qaeda in Iraq was brought to the verge of defeat. There was political progress, with the emergence of cross-sectarian electoral coalitions. Had events stayed on this trajectory, they might have resulted in an Iraq that was a relatively stable, democratic, and reliable potential U.S. partner in the broader war on terror; Americans might now view the conflict as a costly victory rather than a costly defeat.

Yet sustaining that trajectory would have required sustaining the U.S. presence in Iraq. Bush’s successor had made his name opposing the war, had long argued that the conflict was lost, and had campaigned on a promise to end it, in part so his administration could focus on the “necessary war” in Afghanistan. Once in office, Obama did not immediately withdraw U.S. forces from Iraq. But after the failure of a desultory effort to negotiate an agreement that would keep a modest stabilization force there beyond 2011, U.S. personnel withdrew in December of that year. Even before that, the Obama administration had pulled back from intensive, hands-on management of Iraq’s complex political scene.

The conviction that Iraq was a dumb war helped deprive Washington of a chance to win it.

The diplomatic and legal intricacies of the episode were considerable, but studies by journalists, scholars, and participants show that Obama probably could have had a longer-term U.S. presence had he wanted one. Withdrawal had devastating consequences. The pullout removed shock absorbers between Iraqi political factions and left Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki free to indulge his most sectarian instincts. It helped a nearly vanquished al Qaeda in Iraq reemerge as the Islamic State (also known as ISIS) while denying Washington the intelligence footprint that would have provided greater early warning of the threat. It ultimately contributed to a catastrophic collapse of Iraqi security and a terrorist rampage across a third of the country, which led to another U.S. military intervention and caused many of the same baleful consequences—distraction from other priorities, revitalization of the global jihadist movement, increased Iranian influence in Iraq, global doubts about Washington’s competence and judgment—that Obama rightly argued Bush’s war had caused.

As ISIS advanced to within an hour’s drive from Baghdad in 2014, another angry debate erupted over whether the U.S. withdrawal was to blame. It is impossible to say with certainty, and even an educated guess depends on the size and composition of the force one assumes the United States would have left behind. Yet it seems likely that a force of 10,000 to 20,000 troops (the number that U.S. and Iraqi officials considered plausible when negotiations began), combined with greater political engagement to dampen sectarian tensions after Iraq’s disputed elections in 2010, would have had several constructive effects. It would have shored up Iraqi capabilities, buoyed the self-confidence of Iraqi forces, mitigated the politicization of the country’s elite Counter Terrorism Service, and provided a combination of reassurance and leverage in dealing with the difficult Maliki. If nothing else, a U.S. presence of that size would have given Washington the ability and foreknowledge required to carry out counterterrorism strikes before ISIS had gained critical momentum.

What is undoubtedly true is that by pulling back from Iraq, militarily and diplomatically, the United States lost its ability to preserve the fragile but hopeful trends that had emerged there. The conviction that Iraq was a dumb war, a lost war, helped deprive the United States of a chance to win it.

IRAQ’S LONG SHADOW

What lessons should the United States draw from its Iraq saga? Obama offered the pithiest answer: “Don’t do stupid shit.” Washington should avoid wars of regime change and occupation, limit military involvement in the Middle East, and accept that hard problems must be managed rather than solved. That is the same message conveyed, less colorfully, in the Biden administration’s National Security Strategy, released in October 2022.

At first glance, who can argue? The Iraq war shows the difficulties associated with toppling hostile regimes and implanting democratic alternatives. The complexities of such missions are often greater, and the price higher, than they initially seem. Indeed, the arc of U.S. involvement in Iraq—invading the country, then underinvesting in its stabilization, then withdrawing prematurely after things had turned around—may show that these missions require a mix of patience and commitment that even a superpower struggles to muster.

The trouble is that the same maxim, if applied in earlier eras, would have precluded some of the United States’ greatest foreign policy successes, such as the post–World War II transformation of Japan and Germany. In the same vein, a long-term nation-building program, underpinned by U.S. troops, helped produce the South Korean miracle; post–Cold War interventions in Panama and the Balkans succeeded far more than they failed. Ambitious military campaigns do not always end in sorrow. Some have backfired; some have helped produce the remarkably vibrant, democratic world we inhabit today.

The conviction that Iraq was a dumb war helped deprive Washington of a chance to win it.

The “no more Iraqs” mindset carries other dangers, as well. In an ideal world, Washington would surely love to abandon an unstable Middle East. Yet it cannot because it still has important interests there, from counterterrorism to ensuring the smooth functioning of the global energy market. A stubborn resistance to Middle Eastern wars might help avoid future quagmires. Or as Obama discovered, it might lead to episodes in which violent upheaval builds, U.S. interests are threatened, and Washington intervenes later, from a worse position and at a higher price.

The truth is that stupid comes in many flavors. It includes unwise interventions and hasty withdrawals, too little assertiveness as well as too much. If the Iraq war teaches anything, it is that U.S. strategy is often a balancing act between underreach and overreach and that there is no single formula that can allow the United States to avoid one danger without courting the other.

The war also teaches the importance of learning and adapting after initial mistakes. It is not unusual in the U.S. experience: the real American way of war is to start slowly and make lots of deadly errors. When debacles turn into victories, as was the case in the U.S. Civil War, both world wars, and many other conflicts, it is because Washington eventually masters a steeper learning curve than the adversary while gradually bringing its tremendous might to bear. The nice thing about being a superpower is that even the most tragic and harmful blunders are rarely fatal. How one recovers from mistakes that inevitably occur in war thus matters a great deal.

But learning any lessons from Iraq requires taking the messy history of that war seriously. Accusations that neoconservatives, the foreign policy “blob,” or the Israel lobby are to blame for American misadventures are echoes of the charges that bankers, merchants, and the British drew Washington into World War I. These arguments may be ideologically convenient, but they do not reveal much about why the United States behaves as it does—and how intelligent, well-meaning policymakers sometimes go so badly astray. Good history offers no guarantee that the United States will get the next set of national security decisions right. But bad history surely increases the odds of getting them wrong.

HAL BRANDS is Henry A. Kissinger Distinguished Professor of Global Affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He served as a civilian adviser in the U.S. Defense Department from 2015 to 2016. He is a co-author of The Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict With China.

Foreign Affairs · by The Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict With China · February 28, 2023

10. People Over Robots - The Global Economy Needs Immigration Before Automation

People are more important than hardware applies to more than USSOCOM.

That said we cannot hang on to legacy jobs just for the sake of those legacy jobs. Rather, the work force must continue to evolve and innovate and people must continue to be educated and trained for new jobs.

But even as we innovate we are going to need more workers for new types of work and if we do not have a sufficient flow influx of immigrants we will have labor shortages.

Immigration is the key to continued US prosperity and national security in my opinion.

Excerpts:

Political obstacles stand in the way of the orderly cross-border movement of people to work. Countries are stuck in a Catch-22. Politicians are reluctant to create the laws, policies, and regulations that would allow labor mobility programs to flourish until such programs have been demonstrated to be safe, effective, and beneficial. But existing wage differentials between rich and poor countries, as well as the undeniable demand for workers, means that the movement of people happens anyway, but without legal sanction and with the complicity of employers. Invariably, such movement is unsafe, migrants are exploited and abused, and they cannot easily return home. As a result, the very idea of labor mobility is tainted.

It may seem paradoxical, but the pitfalls of labor mobility in the present are reasons to facilitate even more movement, only through legal and well-devised channels. The benefits of allowing people to move where their labor is needed are huge for all concerned. Rich and democratic societies need to stop blindly pursuing technological advances that economize on precisely what is abundant around the world. Wealthy countries have created strong incentives for their firms and innovators to choose machines over people. It is time to make the bet on a future built by and for people.

People Over Robots

The Global Economy Needs Immigration Before Automation

By Lant Pritchett

March/April 2023

Foreign Affairs · by Lant Pritchett · February 28, 2023

We live in a technological age—or so we are told. Machines promise to transform every facet of human life: robots will staff factory floors, driverless cars will rule the road, and artificial intelligence will govern weapons systems. Politicians and analysts fret over the consequences of such advances, worrying about the damage that will be done to industries and individuals. Governments, they argue, must help manage the costs of progress. These conversations almost always treat technological change as something to be adapted to, as if it were a force of nature, barreling inexorably into the staid conventions and assumptions of modern life. The pace of change seems irrepressible; new technologies will remake societies. All people can do is figure out how best to cope.

Nowhere is this outlook more apparent than in the discussion of automation and its impact on jobs. My local grocery store in rural Utah has hung, with no apparent sense of irony, a sign proclaiming the company’s support for U.S. workers above a self-checkout machine, a device that uses technology to replace the labor of an employee with the labor of the customer. Much ink has been spilled in explaining how automation threatens some low-skilled workers and what governments should do to help: for instance, countries could support retraining initiatives, revamp education systems, or invest in redistributive schemes. At the same time, many governments hope that machines can save their economies from the consequences of demographic decline and aging. Techno-optimists argue that the United States and many other wealthy countries need automation to make up for dwindling working-age populations and looming gaps in workforces. Happily, they suggest, the advance of technology will sweep aside the troubles of demography.

But these debates and arguments miss a very simple point. As seismic as it may seem, technological change is not a natural force but the work of human beings. Of course, technology has radically improved human lives: no one wants to live without electricity, flush toilets, or (in Utah) central heating. In other cases, however, it is new policies, and not new technologies, that societies need most.

Automation is often a solution in search of a problem. It is a choice people have made, not an inevitability and certainly not a necessity. For instance, the United States faces a scarcity of truck drivers. The American Trucking Association has estimated that in 2021 there were 80,000 fewer drivers than the total needed and that, given the age of current drivers, over a million new ones will have to be recruited in the coming decade. To deal with this deficit, many tech moguls, including Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, have invested in the research and development of self-driving vehicles, technology that would reduce the demand for drivers. For Bezos, such technology makes corporate financial sense; Amazon relies on low shipping costs to keep its prices down. But it does not make wider economic sense because millions of people would be happy to drive trucks in the United States—they just need to be allowed to work in the country.

Automation is not inevitable; it is a choice.

There is no global scarcity of people who would like to be long-haul truck drivers in the United States, where the median wage for such work is $23 per hour. In the developing world, truck drivers make around $4 per hour. Yet firms cannot recruit workers from abroad even at the higher wage because of restrictions on immigration, so business leaders in the United States are impelled to choose machines over people and eradicate jobs through the use of technology. But if they could recruit globally, they would have less incentive to destroy those jobs and replace people with machines. The implacable fact of national borders steers businesses toward investing in technology that does not respond to global scarcities—and that no one really needs.

What is true for truck driving is also true for many other industries in the rich industrial world that require nonprofessional workers in specific work environments. A 2021 report by the financial services company Mercer estimated that, by 2025, the United States would face a shortage of some 660,000 home health aides, lab technicians, and nursing assistants.

Barriers to migration encourage a terrible misdirection of resources. In the world’s most productive economies, the capital and energies of business leaders (not to mention the time and talents of highly educated scientists and engineers) get sucked into developing technology that will minimize the use of one of the most abundant resources on the planet: labor. Raw labor power is the most important (and often the only) asset low-income people around the world have. The drive to make machines that perform roles that could easily be fulfilled by people not only wastes money but helps keep the poorest poor.

To be sure, some social and political concerns regarding the cross-national movement of economic migrants are legitimate, including those about how such flows of people would be managed, affect current domestic workers, and create social tensions. Advocates are also right to worry about how migrant workers would be protected from exploitation. From the perspective of individual firms and industries, it is easier to figure out how to get artificial intelligence to drive a truck than it is to lower the bureaucratic barriers of immigration restrictions.

But choosing devices over people is a mistake. It leads the world to miss out on the real economic and humanitarian gains that would come from letting people move to where they are needed instead of trying to invent machines that can supplant humans. The refusal to allow people to cross national borders as economic migrants, especially to engage in jobs that require just core labor skills, massively distorts the trajectory of technological change in ways that make everybody, especially the world’s poor, worse off.

RISE OF THE MACHINES

A popular view in the West holds that the governments of wealthy societies do not need to bring more workers into their countries. If anything, they can comfortably raise barriers as technological progress destroys so-called low-skill jobs. But this is just not the case.

Some technological changes are driven by progress in basic science. Often, discussions of the future of labor assume that the path and the pattern of technological change are already determined and that the effects on jobs and workers are just natural consequences of the inevitable progress of science. But economists have developed increasingly nuanced understandings of how technological change has reshaped labor markets and wages and how innovation is a consequence—not just a cause—of the costs that firms face.

For decades, economic and policy discussions about labor markets and technology had tended to focus on how shifts in wages reflected the skills of workers, where “skill” was treated as synonymous with “cognitive skill,” with a worker’s level of formal education as a rough proxy for cognitive skill. The standard analysis was that advances in information and communications technology have helped boost the incomes of highly educated workers and reduced those of all less-educated, low-skilled workers. But that is not what happened: although the wages of the highly skilled have risen in the United States since 1979 relative to those in the broad middle of earners, the wages in traditionally low-wage occupations also rose in percentage terms more than those in the middle—and over some periods by as much as those at the top.

Research by the economists David Autor, David Dorn, and others shows that the demand for various occupations in response to technology does not change in a simple linear relationship with worker skill but depends on the nature of the tasks that that worker must perform. Jobs in service occupations, such as food preparation, cleaning and janitorial work, maintenance, in-person health assistance, and security, involve manual and nonroutine tasks. Many manual nonroutine tasks are very difficult to either automate or offshore, as they require the direct physical presence of the worker, and so these jobs remain in demand, and their wages have remained robust even in the wake of technological advances.

Driverless forklifts at a warehouse in Roosendaal, Netherlands, November 2022

Piroschka van de Wouw / Reuters

Undoubtedly, truly revolutionary changes have occurred in how people communicate, seek information, organize and process data, and entertain themselves. But the notion that the rapid technological change in some sectors of the economy in recent decades has accelerated the transformation of the entire economy is wildly off the mark. In fact, the growth of economic productivity in industrial countries by the standard measure of growth of “total factor productivity” (which assesses productivity by dividing total production, or output, by its costs, or inputs) has been considerably slower in recent decades than it was between the early twentieth century and 1970. Nearly every developed country has experienced a substantial deceleration in productivity growth since 1980.

Meanwhile, the supply of workers for manual, nonroutine tasks has markedly decreased in rich industrialized countries, thanks to dramatically lowered fertility and rising levels of education. The number of open jobs is increasingly out of sync with the number of domestic candidates available to fill those jobs. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Outlook Handbook forecasts that, between 2021 and 2031, the occupational categories that require less than a college degree and for which existing median earnings are less than $40,000 will see a net rise of more than five million new jobs, with home health and personal care aides adding around 924,000 jobs and cooks adding 419,000. But according to UN demographic projections, the number of people between the ages of 20 and 40 in the United States (not factoring in any migration) will fall by more than three million in the same period. The medium-term demographic future of the native born in the rich industrial world is already clear: by the 2040s, there will be millions too few native-born people in developed countries available to perform all the essential, nonroutine, manual tasks in the economy.

The more than trillionfold increase in computing power over the last century has radically changed those occupations in which people did routine and repetitive tasks. The African American women who made the moon landing possible (and were made famous in the movie Hidden Figures) worked for NASA as “computers,” busily making numerous calculations that machines can now make in an instant. There are no more human computers, and machines called computers are just markedly more effective than humans at computing. But for many tasks, no increase in computing power will make them more appropriate for machines to perform. Machines are not better at personal care, machines are not better cooks, and machines will not necessarily be better than people at driving trucks.

If self-driving trucks eventually proliferate on American roads, it will not be evidence of the relentless march of scientific progress. Rather, their use will be a demonstration of something else entirely: the consequences of barriers to the movement of labor that create massive private financial incentives that, in turn, drive powerful people and corporations to undertake enormous investments of scarce human resources in technological innovation—with the wider result of replacing people with machines. Ultimately, U.S. firms opt for automation because it is far easier to solve even very hard technical problems, such as those that self-checkout machines and driverless vehicles attempt to solve, than it has been for countries to address the social and political obstacles that prevent them from allowing foreigners to do those jobs.

PRIDE OF PLACE

The arbitrary facts of birth, nationality, and citizenship profoundly affect people’s lives. Where people are born and where they can move fundamentally shape how much money they can earn over the course of their life. Restricting the movement of people across borders creates a massive price differential between equally productive workers.

In research I did with co-authors, we looked at the earnings of workers born and educated in 42 different countries. We compared the earnings of those who remained in their home countries with those who worked in the United States. We adjusted these earnings for the differences in the price of goods and services between countries to take into account discrepancies in purchasing power. The wage differential for equally productive workers between the 42 countries we studied and the United States ranged from two to ten times as much in the United States, averaging around four times as much. Such proportions are evident across occupations (including those of waiters and truck drivers) and across education and skill levels.

This gulf in the wages of equally productive people in different countries is the largest policy-induced price distortion in the world today (and probably in all of human history). Barriers to migration generate an artificial scarcity of labor. Many industries in the United States struggle to find workers at labor costs they can afford. That deficit spurs companies to search for solutions through automation and other technologies that are unnecessary and inefficient.

Experience shows that letting more workers into a country would indeed change patterns of innovation. The United States has run this experiment before, in reverse. In the middle of the twentieth century, the United States allowed the seasonal migration of agricultural guest workers from Mexico under the rubric of the Bracero Program. The government eventually slowed the program and finally stopped it entirely in 1964. Researchers compared the patterns of employment and production between those states that lost Bracero workers and those that never had them. They found that eliminating these workers did not increase the employment of native workers in the agricultural sector at all. Instead, farmers responded to the newly created scarcity of workers by relying more on machines and technological advances; for instance, they shifted to planting genetically modified products that could be harvested by machines, such as tomatoes with thicker skins, and away from crops such as asparagus and strawberries, for which options for mechanized harvesting were limited.

Necessity may be the mother of invention, but false necessity is the mother of dumb inventions. Prohibition in the early twentieth century banned the importation, production, transportation, and sales of alcoholic beverages in the United States. These restrictions were an enormous boon to illegal distillers of moonshine, who saw demand for their booze explode. But their product needed to be shipped to thirsty drinkers. Just hiding flasks in boots (the origin of the term “bootlegger”) was insufficient. To transport more moonshine, people built “moonshine runners”: vehicles that could speedily carry heavy shipments of moonshine without drawing attention. The development of moonshine runners required technological savvy and innovation, but they still represented a dumb invention. The banning of a perfectly ordinary economic transaction—buying alcohol—led not to better liquor trucks but to the innovation of making a liquor truck look like a regular vehicle, which was a pure waste of time and talent.

THE PATH OF LEAST RESISTANCE

Proponents of barriers to migration insist that they are necessary to protect the wages of current citizens, but that is not true. There have been times in the past century when governments were concerned that their country could not provide sufficient jobs for their citizenry, but the shifting demographics of the rich industrial world have changed that logic completely. For the foreseeable future, the challenge will be finding enough workers to fill available jobs. Even countries that have traditionally not welcomed immigrants, such as Japan, are now aggressively recruiting workers from abroad. They can do so with the knowledge that immigrants do not necessarily hurt the wages of natives. A 2017 National Academy of Sciences review found that the net impact of immigration on the average wages of domestic workers in the United States was either zero or, more likely, slightly positive. In economic terms, migrants are not substitutes for the typical U.S. worker, but complements, so that more migrants actually raise the average wage of citizens. Having more assistants, for instance, does not lower but rather raises the wages of skilled workers, such as nurses, by freeing more of their time for tasks that need their unique skills. Of course, some particularly disadvantaged U.S. workers may compete directly for jobs with migrants, but limitations on migration are neither an effective nor an efficient way to help those native workers. Programs such as the Earned Income Tax Credit are a vastly more cost-effective means of buttressing the wages of domestic workers. I have done calculations to show that, even under more pessimistic assumptions about the negative impact of migrants on the wages of disadvantaged native workers, only a modest increase in the EITC is required to completely offset those losses—and it is a tiny fraction compared with the economic loss that would result from banning migrants in the first place.

The main economic losers from the restrictions rich countries place on labor mobility are the world’s poor. Decades of well-intentioned development programs and aid initiatives cannot equal the benefit of permitting a person in a poor country to work in a wealthier, more productive one. If they want to help the world’s poor, citizens of rich countries should understand that all the worthy development projects, antipoverty programs, and foreign aid to poor countries have an inconsequentially small effect compared with the benefits of just letting people move to the rich countries that need them and work for the going wage justified by their productivity.

For instance, a widely cited 2015 paper published in Science considered the effects of an antipoverty program that transferred livestock across six poor countries, with the goal of increasing the income of chronically poor households. The program spent $4,545 per household in its first two years. By the third year, annual household consumption was higher by just $344 on average across five of the six countries where the program produced positive results—Ethiopia, Ghana, India, Pakistan, and Peru. (In Honduras, nearly all the livestock died.) And, given that so many attempts through similar projects to raise the incomes of the poor had failed, this modest gain of $344 in annual household consumption by spending $4,545 was regarded by the authors as a major success.

False necessity is the mother of dumb inventions.

By contrast, my research suggests that workers without a high school degree would make, on average, as much as $13,119 more per year in the United States than would their counterparts in the five countries studied. Even if ten percent of the wage differential is absorbed in the travel costs of moving back and forth for a year, allowing the same low-skilled workers to be employed in the United States, rather than consigning them to their home country, would produce a boost in income 35 times larger than that enabled by an effective, well-designed, and well-implemented antipoverty program.

The phenomenon of global poverty today is not one of “poor people” but of people trapped in “poor places,” unable to leave because of barriers limiting their movement. The derisive caricature of poverty has it that people are poor because they lack “human capital,” but the reality is that the massive expansion of education in the developing world since the 1950s means that the average adult in Haiti today has had more schooling than the average adult in France had in 1970. But Haiti is a chaotic and low-productivity place to use any type of capital, including human capital; hence, most Haitians who have escaped poverty have done so by leaving their country. Some may fret about “brain drain,” the spurious notion that a poor country will be further immiserated by losing its best and brightest overseas. The principal attraction of arguments regarding “brain drain” seems to be that the words rhyme, as there has never been any evidence that outward migration in general has harmed a country’s prospects. It is worth remembering that many of the richest countries in the world today—including Denmark, Italy, Norway, Spain, and Sweden—had some of the highest emigration rates in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Wage differentials create a deep desire to traverse national borders. Between 2015 and 2017, Gallup asked people around the world whether they would move permanently to another country if they could and, if so, to which country they would move. From these samples, one can estimate that around 750 million people would choose to leave their home countries permanently if they could (and even more people would be willing to move temporarily). Based on the survey, 158 million additional migrants would want to come to the United States; Australia, Canada, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom would each receive around 30 million more migrants. This is not to say that these countries should or would accommodate so many migrants, but it does suggest that there is no shortage of people ready to come and work in rich countries.

The restrictions on mobility that create labor scarcity in rich countries perpetuate poverty for millions of people who are willing and able to work productively—but are prohibited from doing so. And the scarcity propels businesses to invest wastefully in technology that need not exist. Automation, in other words, is not inevitable but driven by the artificial scarcity of labor. Companies perceive a financial incentive to choose machines over people. Without such an incentive, businesses and households would make different choices. Walmart is not making you ring up your own purchases on self-checkout machines because it thinks you always had a hankering to work for the company but because it cannot find all the workers it needs at viable costs. And households, too, can make different decisions that benefit everyone involved. Research in Singapore shows that highly skilled women are much more likely to be in the labor force when care workers are available to take up tasks in the home. The availability of home aide workers also allows the elderly to stay out of institutionalized care longer and leads to greater quality of life at a much lower cost.

DOORS IN THE WALLS

It would be no small thing, of course, to figure out how countries could realize the potential of available labor in the world. The major mechanisms for global cooperation—chiefly those institutions that emerged after World War II, such as the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank—set in motion the globalization of markets for goods and capital. But they did not put in place any meaningful infrastructure to support and promote the movement of labor. Money and shipping containers flowed freely across borders, but people did not.

Today, every country unilaterally sets whatever restrictions it wants on the entry of foreign nationals. Belying the facile right-wing talking point that the United States maintains “open borders” or similarly dubious claims that the world is “flat,” all rich countries have transformed their borders into cliffs, with the threshold for legal entry high and often altogether unreachable. At great expense and with mixed results, countries enforce these restrictions. In 2022, the United States allotted $26 billion to border enforcement, more than it has devoted in most years to its international development agency, USAID.

Instead of funneling resources into the quixotic pursuit of job-killing technology, countries should pursue international cooperation with regard to labor mobility. The potential gains for the countries from which people emigrate, the migrants themselves, and the countries that receive migrants are enormous. Rich countries should allow more people to live and work in their countries not out of altruism but to reckon with a growing demographic necessity.

Harvesting oranges in Lake Wales, Florida, April 2020

Marco Bello / Reuters

The solution is the creation of a global mechanism for labor mobility. It should recruit workers fairly without excessive costs and, based on reliable information and contracts, place them in jobs that suit their abilities, protect them from abuse while they are away from their home countries, and, with time-limited mobility agreements, facilitate their orderly return home. Larger flows of economic migrants will require an industry to handle the key functions of recruitment, training, placement, protection, and return. The trucking industry, the health-care industry, and the hospitality industry cannot be expected to manage the international movement of labor to meet their needs. Instead, the task of moving people must be taken up by a globally connected and networked group of organizations and individuals. Of course, such an industry should be carefully regulated and monitored, as the risks of abuse are immense. But a well-functioning, ethical global industry that moves workers can be a huge force for good by matching people who want jobs with the enterprises that need them.

Global associations already cooperate with industry and governments to produce positive outcomes in the movement of people and things. Look up from reading this article, and you will see items around you that moved about the world as part of the 11 billion tons of maritime freight shipped every year. Or if reading online, don’t look up; your device is almost certainly one of those items. Over 4.5 billion airline passengers traveled around the world in 2019, with only 283 fatalities. (My thinly populated home state of Utah alone had 320 traffic deaths in 2022.) Safe worldwide travel on airlines has been created and supported by governments, international associations, and industry groups. Similarly, in 2018, 1.4 billion tourists traveled internationally, supported by a wide variety of industries and industry associations that facilitate such a massive movement of people safely and reliably.

Political obstacles stand in the way of the orderly cross-border movement of people to work. Countries are stuck in a Catch-22. Politicians are reluctant to create the laws, policies, and regulations that would allow labor mobility programs to flourish until such programs have been demonstrated to be safe, effective, and beneficial. But existing wage differentials between rich and poor countries, as well as the undeniable demand for workers, means that the movement of people happens anyway, but without legal sanction and with the complicity of employers. Invariably, such movement is unsafe, migrants are exploited and abused, and they cannot easily return home. As a result, the very idea of labor mobility is tainted.

It may seem paradoxical, but the pitfalls of labor mobility in the present are reasons to facilitate even more movement, only through legal and well-devised channels. The benefits of allowing people to move where their labor is needed are huge for all concerned. Rich and democratic societies need to stop blindly pursuing technological advances that economize on precisely what is abundant around the world. Wealthy countries have created strong incentives for their firms and innovators to choose machines over people. It is time to make the bet on a future built by and for people.

LANT PRITCHETT is Research Director of Labor Mobility Partnerships, RISE Research Director at the Blavatnik School of Development at the University of Oxford, and a former World Bank economist.

Foreign Affairs · by Lant Pritchett · February 28, 2023

11. Come Test Your Gear Against Russian Forces, Ukrainians Urge US Defense Firms

Excerpts:

Some 31 percent, or $23.5 billion, of the $78.8 billion that the United States has awarded to Ukraine has been in the form of weapons and other pieces of military equipment. But most U.S. contractors have been reluctant to send support personnel into the country. Exceptions include IT contractors such as Palantir.

The operators said U.S. weapons makers have an opportunity to refine products in Ukraine against a real, high-tech adversary.

“This is the right time to test all equipment in Ukraine because it will be combat-proofed” one said. Compared to previous conflicts such as Iraq and Afghanistan, “This is totally different way of war which we have right now.”

Come Test Your Gear Against Russian Forces, Ukrainians Urge US Defense Firms

That’s just one request by special operators at a SOF conference in Florida.

defenseone.com · by Patrick Tucker

FORT WALTON, Florida–U.S. defense manufacturers should bring their gear to Ukraine to try it out against an enemy that is more agile than generally perceived, Ukrainian special operators said at a SOF conference.

At least in the electronic spectrum, the war in Ukraine is constantly changing as both sides develop new ideas and countermeasures daily, the operators said, inviting U.S. firms to test their equipment in real battle zones.

This is the “right time,” one Ukrainian military official said, “to find weaknesses and to determine solutions and how to deal with Russian [electronic warfare] systems. Because, in the future, you will have the same problem.”

That’s hardly all that Ukrainians at the Special Air Warfare Symposium here said they’d like to have as their fight against Russian invaders moves into its second year. Beyond the requests for fighter jets and ATACMS missiles that get the headlines, they want attack helicopters and smaller items such as jam-resistant drones, electronic warfare equipment, and newer night vision goggles.

They also urgently want satellite communications options beyond the Starlink terminals produced by Elon Musk’s SpaceX company. Though Starlink continues to provide invaluable service, the terminals have various tactical limitations. Their connection speeds are very uneven in combat zones, and they can’t be used at all in occupied areas, a second operator said. As well, Russian forces have been aggressively targeting the terminals’ signals; as a result, Ukrainian forces rarely use them in combat, they said. Finally, they want satcom gear that doesn’t rely on the mercurial Musk.

Another ask: drones that can withstand Russian electromagnetic-warfare attacks.

“We have different types of drones but…but the company cannot make mass production in a short period of time. And because of changing tactics and Russian equipment, you're always a little bit behind. So in order to be competitive with them, it should be faster” one operator said.

Russian EW has limited Ukrainian drones to the L5 frequency band, and “we don’t know when they will create the jamming even for this,” they said.

They also want directional antennas to protect drone operators from being detected by Russian forces. Currently, they use a small device to hide drone operators from Russian signal detectors and often place the antenna far away from the operator. “But you can not completely hide the emission of the antenna,” they said.

They also requested Western attack helicopters and advanced night vision systems for their pilots. “We extremely need attack helicopters,” said one.

They described the difficult job Ukrainian helicopter pilots have evading advanced Russian jets. They said Ukrainian helicopters have difficulty evading Russian jets. “The problem is they can see us from the range of 450 kilometers,” the operator said. The Russians will “let us approach closer and they start shooting from the range 300 kilometers. From 300 kilometers until they hit our helicopters, it's approximately 40 to 45 seconds.”

They said they had developed countermeasures for this, flying in erratic patterns. But better helicopters, such as Black Hawks and Apaches, would better enable that sort of maneuvering.

Some 31 percent, or $23.5 billion, of the $78.8 billion that the United States has awarded to Ukraine has been in the form of weapons and other pieces of military equipment. But most U.S. contractors have been reluctant to send support personnel into the country. Exceptions include IT contractors such as Palantir.

The operators said U.S. weapons makers have an opportunity to refine products in Ukraine against a real, high-tech adversary.

“This is the right time to test all equipment in Ukraine because it will be combat-proofed” one said. Compared to previous conflicts such as Iraq and Afghanistan, “This is totally different way of war which we have right now.”

Sam Skove contributed to this post.

defenseone.com · by Patrick Tucker

12. US Artillery Production for Ukraine Limited by Lack of Machine Tools, Army Official Says

I hope Ukraine has been a wake-up call for our defense industrial base.

US Artillery Production for Ukraine Limited by Lack of Machine Tools, Army Official Says

The U.S. has enough raw materials, but the heavy equipment used to make artillery shells aren’t easy to buy.

defenseone.com · by Sam Skove

A lack of machine tools is constraining the United State's ability to ramp up ammunition transfers to Ukraine, Assistant Secretary of the Army for Acquisition, Logistics, and Technology Douglas Bush said March 3.

The timeline for acquiring new machine tools “are often the long poles in the tent on getting capacity increased,” he said, speaking at an event held by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “These machines are the size of buildings. You don’t just go buy it from a parking lot somewhere.”

U.S. and allied production of artillery ammunition has emerged as a key problem in supplying Ukraine, which burns through thousands of shells a day fighting Russia’s invasion. Ukraine may lose the war if it doesn’t receive enough supplies, European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrel said Feb. 20.

Bush also flagged raw material stockpiles as a potential problem down the road for ammunition production.

The U.S. already maintains large stockpiles of some key raw materials, such as the precursor chemicals for explosives, Bush said. But how much of other raw materials the U.S. should keep in reserve is an open question. “The issue is really stockpiling, Bush said, “It’s really a question of how much you can afford to do.”

The U.S. has no shortage of raw materials used for artillery shell manufacture, Bush added, citing more than adequate supplies of steel.

Bush also pointed to allied production capabilities as potentially taking the stress off of U.S. manufacturing, noting Polish interest in manufacturing the Javelin—an anti-tank guided missile—and Australian interest in manufacturing precision-guided munitions.

The U.S. has already supplied large amounts of artillery ammunition to Ukraine, sending more than a million 155mm rounds, according to research by Mark Cancian, a senior advisor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. The ammunition feeds artillery pieces donated to Ukraine by the U.S. and NATO allies. On Friday, the Department of Defense announced another tranche of military aid to Ukraine that includes 155mm artillery rounds.

U.S. officials said in April 2022 that they were ramping up production of 155mm shells, the most common caliber of the U.S. and NATO-ally artillery guns sent to Ukraine. Production is set to rise to 20,000 shells per month by spring 2023, and 40,000 per month by 2025, Secretary of the Army Christine Wormuth said.

Even that rate, though, may not be enough to support Ukraine and keep U.S. inventories prepped for other wars across the globe. “This could become a crisis,” Cancian wrote.

defenseone.com · by Sam Skove

13. As US Rushed Troops to Europe, Logistics Staff Faced Problems Supplying Them With Weapons

Lessons learned. Rehearsals for the future.

As US Rushed Troops to Europe, Logistics Staff Faced Problems Supplying Them With Weapons

U.S. logisticians beat the clock to supply equipment for a snap deployment, but soldiers reported maintenance issues with vehicles and missing equipment.

defenseone.com · by Sam Skove

As Russian troops pressed into Ukraine in February 2022, U.S. logistics crews in Germany were hustling to do something unprecedented: pull enough arms, vehicles, and other supplies from prepositioned storage to outfit an entire Army brigade combat team that was being rushed from its stateside base to Europe. They pulled it off faster than anyone thought possible—but with hiccups that provide lessons for future deployments, the Defense Department’s inspector general found.

More than 10 percent of the material issued in Germany to the 1st Armored Brigade Combat Team, or ABCT, was less than fully ready for use, forcing costly cannibalization and paperwork, according to a Feb. 27 report by the IG.

Still, the Army’s 405th Army Field Support Brigade delivered the gear in just half the time expected, drawing kudos from Army Chief of Staff Gen. James McConville. The service’s Sustainment Command, including the 405th, had brought the Army to “an incredible level of readiness,” he said on March 8, 2022.

The problem of supplying U.S. forces in Europe has gained importance since the Russian invasion. The U.S. positions military equipment in Europe so that troops coming from the United States don’t have to waste time transferring material. The program is particularly helpful for units with heavy equipment. The 1st ABCT equipment includes heavy vehicles such as the M1 Abrams tank, Bradley fighting vehicles, Paladin self-propelled artillery, and support vehicles such as the M88 recovery vehicle, used for towing damaged tanks off the battlefield.

The prepositioned stocks are “essential” to defending Europe, said Elvira Loredo, an associate program director at the RAND Corporation, amid a drawdown of U.S. troop numbers in Europe since the end of the Cold War. Troop levels in Germany, the hub of U.S. forces in Europe, declined from over 248,000 in 1989 to fewer than 36,000 in 2021.

The 405th Brigade began communicating with the 1st ABCT in mid-December to coordinate equipment transfers from storage in Mannheim and Dulmen.

Logistics units had never before issued equipment to a full brigade combat team. The 405th estimated they would need 75 days, but managed to deliver the equipment 39 days ahead of schedule, the inspector general report said, citing 405th Army Field Support Brigade commanders.

The unit used everything it could to move the equipment, including commercial trucks, German rail lines, U.S. military heavy equipment transporters, and German military trucks, according to the report.

The prepositioned stocks allowed the unit to deploy mostly with individual soldier equipment and a small number of vehicles, a 3rd Infantry Division spokesperson told Defense One.

What the unit received, though, was not always up to snuff. Issued equipment had operational-readiness rates below 90 percent, according the Inspector General report, which cited vehicle maintenance as a key issue.

Some equipment was functioning but lacked important components. More than 60 percent of M88 recovery vehicles were missing secondary equipment, which forced 1ABCT to cannibalize “multiple other M88 vehicles to create working M88s,” the report said.

Other problems cropped up as well. Much of the equipment was not ready for combat, the report said, citing multiple 1st ABCT officials. Making equipment combat-ready requires replacing vehicle fuel, installing batteries, and making quick-fix repairs. Vehicles were issued without certifications for hazardous cargo, as required for European roads, leading 1st ABCT to certify the vehicles at a cost of $5.8 million.

At least part of the problem, the report said, was that the vehicle storage requirements set by the U.S. Army Sustainment Command laid out generic inspection times, rather than the more rigorous inspection times based on each equipment piece’s technical manual.

Even these less-rigorous standards were physically impossible for the 405th to meet. Per the standards, the vehicles should be regularly exercised on special tracks. Neither supply center had these tracks.

Workers for the 405th were aware of the issue, with one contracting officer telling the Inspector General’s investigators that the vehicles “always” have maintenance faults, especially if not exercised for two to four years. Another 405th employee said that the basic standards laid out by the Sustainment Command did not reveal problems a more thorough inspection would find.

Mannheim will get an exercise track by 2028 as part of a $650 million upgrade, the report stated. Commanders from Supply Command, Sustainment Command, and the 405th Brigade agreed to implement the Inspector General’s recommendations for improving equipment maintenance and distribution.

A lack of data in the inspector general’s report makes it impossible to assess exactly how things went wrong, said RAND’s Loredo.

“It might have been that the equipment was not being kept at the level required by the contract,” she said. “Or the contractor did not have sufficient time or resources to prepare the equipment for issue.”

Large exercises in Europe, such as DEFENDER-Europe, would not have exposed any issues, she added, distinguishing between the many months-long planning timeline for exercises and rapid deployments.

The outcome wasn’t “too bad,” said Mark F. Cancian, a senior advisor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, noting the speed at which the equipment was released.

Keeping such equipment at a high level of readiness is expensive, Cancian said, and Europe likely faded as a priority amid wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“When the Cold War ended, the idea that you would have to rapidly pull equipment out of storage in Europe just didn’t seem very likely,” he said.

defenseone.com · by Sam Skove

14. We Have a New National Cybersecurity Strategy. Now What?

Plans (strategy) are nothing - planning (strategizing) is everything (from Ike). If this strategy simply goes on the shelf then we have failed.

Excerpts:

The National Cybersecurity Strategy is an important step in the development of a more robust and forward leaning cybersecurity posture. It is also an inflection point for the Office of the National Cyber Director, which drafted the document and which Congress designed to lead the federal government in combating cyber threats. The document reflects the strong legacy of the inaugural NCD, Chris Inglis and gives the new acting NCD, Kemba Walden, the lead on implementing the strategy’s numerous important tasks over the next two years.

In its last pages, the strategy pledges to incorporate lessons from past and future cyber incidents, to use data to assess the effectiveness of its implementation and invest to achieve its goals. Of all the promises and commitments in the document, this last one will be the most important.

Implementation is where the rubber meets the road – where resources must be spent, workforces deployed, bureaucratic battles fought – all against the backdrop of ongoing incidents. But without effective implementation, this strategy will become just another well written paper.

We Have a New National Cybersecurity Strategy. Now What?

thecipherbrief.com

March 3rd, 2023 by Rear Adm. (Ret.) Mark Montgomery, Samantha F. Ravich, |

Rear Adm. (Ret.) Mark Montgomery is a senior director at the Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation (CCTI) at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, where he is also a senior fellow. He directs CSC 2.0, which works to implement the recommendations of the congressionally mandated Cyberspace Solarium Commission, where he previously served as executive director. Follow him on Twitter @MarkCMontgomery

View all articles by Rear Adm. (Ret.) Mark Montgomery

Dr. Samantha Ravich is the chair of the Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation at the Foundation for Democracies. She is a distinguished advisor to CSC 2.0, having previously served as a commissioner on the congressionally mandated Cyberspace Solarium Commission, and is also a member of the U.S. Secret Service’s Cyber Investigation Advisory Board.

View all articles by Samantha F. Ravich

OPINION — The new National Cybersecurity Strategy is clear and concise, laying out the case for a more robust and engaged approach to defending our national critical infrastructure from a growing list of threats in cyberspace. Implementing it is the next big challenge.

The document articulates priorities and affirms for our allies and adversaries alike, that we will defend our interests and values in cyberspace. The key to long-term improvements in national cyber resilience, however, is not just the articulation of policy. It will be in the implementation and resourcing of the guidance laid out in the strategy.

The new strategy is consistent with, and expands on, the work of the Cyberspace Solarium Commission (on which we both served), and it is informed by three additional years of attacks on our nation’s security, prosperity and democracy by nation-state and criminal actors.

This administration cut its cyber teeth on responses to Russia’s years-long, sophisticated cyber espionage campaign against the U.S. government through U.S. software company SolarWinds and China’s vast espionage effort exploiting Microsoft vulnerabilities to target the private sector. Then, came criminal ransomware attacks against U.S. critical infrastructure and the discovery of a dangerous vulnerability at the heart of the software in millions of devices around the world.

These experiences informed the strategy as it identified key operational objectives: building more resilient national critical infrastructure, kick-starting under-performing public-private collaboration, investing in federal IT network security, improving the security of the overall cyber ecosystem, imposing costs on hostile actors, and developing the cyber capabilities of our international partners.

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To begin to address critical infrastructure resilience challenges, the strategy lays out a strong argument for regulating or incentivizing the cybersecurity of key industries that currently lack specific guidelines and standards. The White House calls out the need to shift the cybersecurity burden to those “most capable and best-positioned to reduce risks for all of us” like cloud service providers. At the same time, the strategy acknowledges what industry has long been saying: there is too much confusion around whom industry should call if and when they need cybersecurity assistance, information, and guidance. The strategy commits the government to harmonizing existing regulations in sectors where there are already too many straws stirring the drink.

Critical infrastructure resilience requires partnership, and the strategy acknowledges that the federal government has not been a steady partner. The strategy alludes to the inconsistent performance of federal agencies working with private sector counterparts. Through this strategy, the administration is pledging to improve the capabilities and commitment of these sector risk management agencies. The Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency, meanwhile, will need to step up into its national coordination and risk management roles.

To promote collaboration that strengthens critical infrastructure resilience, the strategy affirms a need for speed. Collaboration at the speed of data between government agencies and among the federal government, state and local partners, and the private sector creates a shared understanding of the threat landscape. In short, the strategy effectively endorses the Joint Collaborative Environment recommendation issued by the Cyberspace Solarium Commission and championed by former Representative Jim Langevin (D-RI) over the past two years. This nod, plus a directive in the annual defense bill for the National Security Agency to study a cyber threat information collaboration environment, may give the proposal the boost it needs to get over the finish line.

Shifting from the domestic to the international sphere, the strategy emphasizes expanding cyber capacity building support to less mature allies and partners and increasing cyber cooperation with more developed allies and partners. Capacity building and collaboration are critical to U.S. military and economic interests – as demonstrated most vividly by the efficacy of Ukraine’s cyber defenders against Russia’s onslaught.

The State Department has multiple programs to fund cyber capacity building. U.S. Cyber Command’s “hunt forward” operations, meanwhile, see Americans working side-by-side with foreign cyber operators to excise malicious actors from the networks of partners and allies. These programs will need more resources to implement the vision behind the new strategy.

The strategy also endorses the continued application of a defend forward strategy. Persistently pursuing operations in cyberspace (and in other diplomatic, legal, and economic lanes) with the intent of disrupting adversary malicious cyber activity, has been key to reducing cyber threats to our nation. When coupled with the operational guidance in National Security Presidential Memorandum 13, it has given U.S. operators the ability to impose costs on adversaries in cyberspace.

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The National Cybersecurity Strategy is an important step in the development of a more robust and forward leaning cybersecurity posture. It is also an inflection point for the Office of the National Cyber Director, which drafted the document and which Congress designed to lead the federal government in combating cyber threats. The document reflects the strong legacy of the inaugural NCD, Chris Inglis and gives the new acting NCD, Kemba Walden, the lead on implementing the strategy’s numerous important tasks over the next two years.

In its last pages, the strategy pledges to incorporate lessons from past and future cyber incidents, to use data to assess the effectiveness of its implementation and invest to achieve its goals. Of all the promises and commitments in the document, this last one will be the most important.

Implementation is where the rubber meets the road – where resources must be spent, workforces deployed, bureaucratic battles fought – all against the backdrop of ongoing incidents. But without effective implementation, this strategy will become just another well written paper.

Read more expert-driven national security insights, perspective and analysis in The Cipher Brief

Find out more about public-private sector engagement on cyber via The Cyber Initiatives Group

15. America Misses the Power Objective

Conclusion:

America’s primary geopolitical interest should be to maintain the political pluralism of Eurasia, not foster a closer relationship between the two most powerful Eurasian countries.

America Misses the Power Objective

By Francis Sempa

March 04, 2023

https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2023/03/04/america_misses_the_power_objective_885319.html

The ideology that drives U.S. policy in Ukraine is eroding our strategic position abroad.

On February 20, President Biden made a “surprise” visit to Kyiv, where he announced another half-billion dollars in aid to Ukraine, and stated, “Kyiv stands, Ukraine stands, Democracy stands.” “Americans stand with you,” Biden told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, “and the world stands with you.” Biden further remarked that U.S. support for Ukraine is “not just about freedom in Ukraine, it’s about freedom of democracy at large.”

What’s lacking in all of this rhetoric is a reasoned assessment of U.S. national interests in the outcome of the Ukraine War. Some supporters of increased U.S. involvement on Ukraine’s side claim that if we do not stop Putin in Ukraine, some NATO ally will be next—a revival of the “domino theory” and the “lessons of Munich” that contributed significantly to our increased involvement in the Vietnam War. The notion of Putin’s Russia, which has an economy the size of Italy’s and whose armed forces are having a difficult time holding on to two eastern provinces of Ukraine, sweeping across the European plain to the English channel is a fantasy.

Contrast eastern Europe with the western Pacific, where American interests are clearly geopolitical in nature. China has the second-largest economy in the world, a huge reserve of manpower, a strong and ever-growing military power at both the conventional and nuclear levels (including, according to the Pentagon, more ICBM missile silos than the U.S.), and a geopolitical program that seeks to unite huge portions of the Eurasian landmass against the United States. China’s economic and political influence extends across Central Asia and into Africa and the Middle East via the Belt and Road Initiative. Its naval power extends from the East and South China Seas, through the South Sea, and into the Indian Ocean, where it has developed ports called the “String of Pearls” that threaten to outflank southern India.

One of America’s top Air Force Generals recently revealed in a leaked memo that China’s Central Military Commission under the leadership of President Xi held a “war council” last October related to Taiwan. And, China recently launched what is being called a “surveillance balloon” across America’s heartland, which U.S. fighters belatedly shot down off the coast of South Carolina after it had traversed the Aleutian Islands, parts of Alaska, Canada, and much of the continental United States. Naval War College Professor James Holmes called this a Chinese “trial balloon” designed to gauge U.S. reaction to this blatant invasion of its airspace. Senator Tom Cotton remarked that the balloon should have been shot down or captured once it was discovered over the Aleutians. American leaders, Holmes writes, need to recognize that China is at war with us all of the time. In the tradition of Sun Tzu and Mao Zedong, China views peacetime as nothing more than “war without bloodshed.”

Most troubling of all is the strategic partnership between the two Eurasian giants, which is only gaining strength in response to the foreign policy of the Biden Administration. Therein lies America’s strategic dilemma of pursuing our interests or our values.

The two motives of U.S. foreign policy—interests or values—sometimes coincide but often clash. Henry Kissinger, among others, has written about this foreign policy dilemma, most profoundly in his book Diplomacy. Kissinger says that given America’s peculiar domestic political evolution, a foreign policy that ignores one or the other of these motives will eventually lose the support of the American people and therefore become politically unsustainable.

Historically when U.S. policymakers have been faced with the dilemma, they have chosen geopolitics over liberal values, even as they have cloaked that choice with value-laden rhetoric. Consider two examples. During the First World War, President Woodrow Wilson publicly promoted the idea of peace without annexations and national self-determination for all peoples, even as he secretly countenanced Great Britain and France carving-up territories in the Middle East. And, during the Second World War, President Franklin Roosevelt publicly promoted the Four Freedoms and a postwar world where peace would be enforced by the United Nations, even as he provided massive aid and military supplies to Stalin’s Soviet regime, the very antithesis of freedom and peace. In both examples, geopolitical interests trumped liberal values but the rhetoric of liberal values persisted.

However, one looks in vain to find an American president from George Washington through Theodore Roosevelt who thought it necessary to couch geopolitical interests in the language of liberal values. The late Angelo Codevilla made this the principal theme of his last book America’s Rise and Fall Among Nations. Codevilla highlighted the foreign policy wisdom of George Washington and John Quincy Adams, statesmen who never confused geopolitical interests with liberal values, and who never thought it necessary to disguise hardheaded realism with soft-headed rhetoric.

That notion changed in the early twentieth century, when the Progressive Movement introduced and promoted the idea that human nature was perfectible. There is no doubt that George Washington, John Quincy Adams and every other nineteenth century president would have ridiculed this idea as ahistorical and unempirical. When the idea of human perfectibility was translated into foreign policy, the ideology of “democratism” emerged, which held that Western values were universal and should be spread throughout the globe.

Democratism led to related ideas that human rights were universal and that American foreign policy should work to bring about an earthly Utopia. As Robert Nisbet noted in his masterful book The Present Age, “Ever since [Woodrow] Wilson, with only rarest exceptions, American foreign policy has been tuned not to national interests but to national morality.” This idea grew in strength after World War II and perhaps reached its apogee during the presidency of Jimmy Carter. Carter, at least initially, made human rights the centerpiece of his foreign policy, though he applied it more vigorously to America’s allies (the Shah in Iran, Somoza in Nicaragua) than her enemies (the Soviet Union, Cuba). But democratism’s most vigorous champion was President George W. Bush, who reacted to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, by launching a crusade for democracy in the Middle East and southwest Asia.

Beyond launching failed wars based on values over interests, the Bush administration supported the further expansion of NATO towards Russia’s borders, including public support for the admission of Georgia and Ukraine to the Western alliance. Bush appeared to be oblivious to traditional notions of spheres of influence, and appeared to be equally oblivious to Russian history. Bush’s successors only compounded the problem by expanding NATO further. A comparison of maps of Europe in 1990 and 2022 reveals the geography of NATO expansion as viewed from Russia, showing, with the lone exception of Belarus, hostile and potentially hostile countries in an arc stretching from Scandinavia to the Balkans and Turkey.

The most strategically significant consequence of America’s unbounded democratism in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century has been to push Russia into the arms of China. The old Sino-Soviet bloc split in the 1960s due to internal rivalries. Richard Nixon’s diplomacy exploited and widened that split. Now, the bloc has effectively reformed—not based on ideology but on geopolitical rivalry with the United States. As Alexander Korolev points out in the feature article in The Diplomat, that Sino-Russian strategic partnership stems not only from the cordial relationship between Xi Jinping and Putin, but from long-term structural trends that have been building since the end of the Cold War. These trends are based on geopolitics, not values. Korolev write that America’s antagonism toward both China and Russia “further contributes to the consolidation of China-Russia alignment” because “[c]onfrontation with both China and Russia results in a convergence of the two countries’ views of the U.S. as their greatest security threat.” Washington’s hostile approach to both Eurasian great powers is a strategic error.

The Biden administration has framed both the Ukraine War and China’s actions in the South China Sea as part of a broader ideological competition between democratic and autocratic powers. Somehow, the country that once sided with Josef Stalin to defeat Hitler, and sided with Mao Zedong to help bring down the Soviet empire, is loath to even consider ending or at least softening its hostility to Putin’s Russia in order to lessen China’s strategic threat. This is the triumph of democratism and liberal values over geopolitical interests.

Unfortunately, we have been the author of our current strategic dilemma. We have suffered the fate of other great nations who, after achieving victories in great conflicts—in America’s case, the Cold War—approached the rest of the world with hubris and arrogance. During the previous three decades, our foreign policy has helped fuel China’s rise, pushed Russia closer to China, and overextended our commitments and resources in peripheral conflicts that did little or nothing to enhance our security. We have forgotten the wise counsel of perhaps America’s greatest geopolitical thinker Nicholas Spykman, who cautioned:

The statesman who conducts foreign policy can concern

himself with values of justice, fairness, and tolerance only

to the extent that they contribute to or do not interfere

with the power objective. They can be used instrumentally

as moral justification for the power quest, but they must be

discarded the moment their application brings weakness.

The search for power is not made for the achievement of

moral values; moral values are used to facilitate the

attainment of power.

America’s primary geopolitical interest should be to maintain the political pluralism of Eurasia, not foster a closer relationship between the two most powerful Eurasian countries.

Francis P. Sempa writes on foreign policy and geopolitics. His Best Defense columns appear at the beginning of each month.

16. Chinese nationals operate nearly every illegal indoor marijuana farm in the largest US county, sergeant says

An interesting claim.

Chinese nationals operate nearly every illegal indoor marijuana farm in the largest US county, sergeant says

Yahoo · by Jon RaaschMarch 2, 2023, 9:15 AM·3 min read

Chinese and Mexican nationals operate almost all illegal marijuana growing operations in the United States' largest county, the leader of a local marijuana enforcement team told Fox News.

"When most people talk about gangs, they think about the typical Southern California gangbangers," Sgt. Rich Debevec of the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Marijuana Enforcement Team said. "And that's not the way it is."

"Mostly what we deal with are either Mexican nationals or Chinese nationals as our two largest groups of people that we deal with," he continued. "I would estimate 85% are non-citizens."

WATCH MORE FOX NEWS DIGITAL ORIGINALS HERE

San Bernardino County, the largest county in the U.S., has grappled with illegal marijuana growing operations for years due to the vast amount of available farmland. The San Bernardino County marijuana enforcement team has served over 2,100 search warrants and seized over $1 billion in cannabis plants and processed cannabis since 2020, Debevec told Fox News.

A resident of a home is detained and led out of his home for questioning by an Operation Hammer Strike deputy with the San Bernardino County Sheriffs Department as other deputies remove 316 pounds of marijuana found at the residence.

The enforcement team this week busted an illegal grow with over 5,000 plants, an operation estimated to be worth over $8 million per year, according to Debevec. Indoor-grown cannabis is the best quality and sells for the highest price, he said.

READ ON THE FOX NEWS APP

"My best estimate is probably 97 to 98% of all of our indoor marijuana cultivations are run by Chinese nationals," Debevec told Fox News. "Back in 2019, we got involved in a yearlong investigation where we were able to prove that Chinese nationals were bringing in money from China, purchasing houses in the Chino, Ontario area and turning them into marijuana cultivations."

Three men that year were arrested on federal charges, with authorities accusing them of using money wired from China to purchase homes in San Bernardino County and convert them to illegal marijuana grow operations. The multi-million dollar grow operations distributed cannabis illegally throughout California and Nevada, authorities said.

Debevec suspects Mexican cartels are involved in similar schemes.

CA EXPANDS AMERICA’S LARGEST ILLEGAL MARIJUANA ERADICATION PROGRAM

Sgt. Debevec with the San Bernardino County Sheriffs Department enters a home suspected of distributing marijuana.

"I believe that there are Mexican cartels that are funding the marijuana grows," Debevec said. "They're probably funneling the money up into California to purchase the property, to fund all the infrastructure for the marijuana grow, whether it be greenhouses, chemicals, generators, whatever it takes to run the operation."

But he added: "We have not been able to definitively prove that any particular cartel is involved."

Still, Debevec said immigration is a "huge" issue when it comes to illegal cannabis growing operations. Many individuals caught by the enforcement team, he said, have Mexican IDs or Chinese passports.

Enforcement operations span from raiding farms, to trailers, to suburban homes – some with hidden underground growing bunkers. The small enforcement team is tasked with patrolling an area with more land than Switzerland.

Sgt. Debevec handling seized cannabis from a raid in San Bernardino County.

Despite the challenge, the enforcement team has cut the amount of illegal grow operations from 1,300 to around 400 over the last two years, Debevec said.

As the county has ramped up enforcement, Illegal cannabis operations in the area are on a downward trend.

"You can see that you can see these growers from miles away, and that's why citizens report them to us," Debevec told Fox News. "So far we've been pretty successful."

To watch Debevec's full interview, click here.

Yahoo · by Jon RaaschMarch 2, 2023, 9:15 AM·3 min read

17. FACT SHEET: President Biden Signs National Security Memorandum to Counter Weapons of Mass Destruction Terrorism and Advance Nuclear and Radioactive Material Security

FACT SHEET: President Biden Signs National Security Memorandum to Counter Weapons of Mass Destruction Terrorism and Advance Nuclear and Radioactive Material Security | The White House

whitehouse.gov · by The White House · March 2, 2023

Today, President Biden signed National Security Memorandum (NSM) 19 to Counter Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) Terrorism and Advance Nuclear and Radioactive Material Security worldwide. This comprehensive new strategy advances several of President Biden’s most enduring national security priorities: protecting our nation and the international community from the existential threats posed by WMD terrorism and preventing non-state actors from using chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear weapons.

Although significant progress has been made in the reduction and elimination of WMDs, and weapons usable materials around the world, we must remain vigilant and drive further progress to mitigate the range of challenges posed by WMD terrorism at home and abroad, including those posed by new and emerging technologies. Reducing, eliminating, and securing radioactive and nuclear materials are the most effective means to prevent their acquisition and use, and through the implementation of policies and priorities detailed in this NSM, the United States will advance efforts to prevent WMD terrorism.

This NSM integrates, in a systematic way, U.S. policies to counter the use of chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear weapons by non-state actors, sets out unified priorities for Departments and Agencies across the Federal government, and affirms the Biden-Harris Administration’s commitment to work with state, local, tribal, international, and private sector partners on preventing, mitigating, and responding to WMD terrorism threats. It establishes the first comprehensive policy for securing radioactive materials, which present continuing domestic and global risk, along with new domestic guidelines for the management and security of nuclear material by prioritizing efforts to protect and permanently dispose of weapons-usable materials of greatest concern and transition from high-activity radioactive sources to alternative technologies when technically and economically feasible.

In addition to addressing risks posed by existing weapons useable materials, the policies in this NSM anticipate and proactively address the emerging nature of threats and implications of on‑and-over-the-horizon technologies that could be used to develop, acquire, or employ WMD. The Biden-Harris Administration is committed to managing the benefits of emerging technology for future peaceful applications with the proliferation risks of these technologies, and has established forward-looking U.S. policies that support enduring clean energy and nuclear material security goals while aggressively seeking to reduce the future production and accumulation of weapons usable materials worldwide.

This policy outlines goals in three ambitious lines of effort:

Counter WMD Terrorism: Combatting all stages of WMD terrorism requires constant vigilance against an ever-changing threat landscape. This NSM sets out a comprehensive plan for Departments and Agencies across the Federal government to ensure that the U.S. Government is able to prevent, mitigate, and respond to WMD terrorist attacks. This is one of the most enduring challenges to our national security, and we cannot take on this fight alone. To counter the use of chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear weapons by non-state actors at home and abroad, it is necessary to involve the broadest range of partners—including state, local, tribal, and territorial counterparts; private sector partners; and foreign governments—in our work to defeat the threat of WMD terrorism. This NSM also serves as our call to action to disrupt and hold accountable those who provide material, financial, or other support to non-state actors seeking WMD capabilities.

To counter WMD terrorism in the United States and around the world, it is the policy of the United States to:

Prevent non-state actors from acquiring WMD and related materials;
Detect and disrupt WMD terrorism threats;
Deter and prevent actors from supporting WMD terrorism;
Degrade and eliminate WMD-related capabilities of non-state actors;
Enhance resilience and recovery from WMD terrorism events;
Enhance capabilities to anticipate and manage emerging technology that could enable WMD terrorism threats;
Build domestic partner capabilities to counter WMD terrorism; and
Enhance international collaboration to counter WMD terrorism.

Advance Nuclear Material Security: The peaceful uses of nuclear technology provide considerable economic, medical, and environmental benefits. However, the storage, transportation, processing, and use of highly enriched uranium, separated plutonium, and other weapons-usable nuclear material globally present persistent national security risks to the United States. Successful mitigation of nuclear risks requires an integrated approach that combines efforts to eliminate weapons-usable nuclear material through removal or disposition, the maintenance of robust physical security and nuclear material accountancy for existing materials, efforts to counter the theft, diversion, smuggling, and other illicit use of nuclear materials, and an urgent focus on addressing the challenges posed by emerging technologies that may add to the accumulation of weapons usable nuclear materials globally.

To improve nuclear material security and prevent any act of nuclear terrorism, it is the policy of the United States to:

Minimize the production and retention of weapons-usable nuclear materials to only those quantities required to support vital national security interests;
Refrain from the use of weapons-usable nuclear material in new civil reactors or for other civil purposes unless that use supports vital U.S. national interests;
Focus civil nuclear research and development on approaches that avoid producing and accumulating weapons-usable nuclear material and enable viable technologies to replace current civil uses of these materials;
Dispose of nuclear material that is in excess to national security or civil needs in a safe and secure manner;
Promote safe nuclear material management policies and best practices internationally and encourage adoption of analogous policies with international partners and organizations;
Enable multilateral institutions’ nuclear material security activities so they are adequately supported and responsive; and
Ensure national and international capabilities to identify, mitigate, and respond to nuclear material security threats.

Advance Radioactive Material Security: As with nuclear materials and technology, the peaceful uses of radioactive materials provide considerable benefits, although the storage, transportation, processing, and use of radioactive materials globally present a security risk that must be addressed through collective and continuous efforts. Millions of sources are in use worldwide every day, with thousands also disused and in storage, many of which lack disposition options (including final disposal, and other management options such as reuse, recycle, or return to supplier) for disused sources, or lack safe and secure long-term storage. Minimizing the use of these materials where technically and economically feasible alternatives exist reduces risk in our collective national security, health, and economic interest.

In order to reduce the threat of radiological terrorism, it is the policy of the United States to:

Maintain robust security for all high-activity radioactive sources during their lifecycle for all sources that cannot be replaced;
Encourage the replacement of source-based devices with non-radioisotopic alternative technologies, where technically and economically feasible, and continue support for research and development of alternative technologies;
Permanently dispose of or recycle disused and unwanted high-activity radioactive sources;
Maintain consistent standards for the transportation security of radioactive materials;
In keeping with regulatory requirements, apply mitigation measures in case of physical security failures;
Support and coordinate efforts to locate and secure lost or stolen radioactive materials and return them to regulatory control;
Support improvements to state-level and end-user capacities for, commitment to, and implementation of long-term stewardship approaches that ensure these materials will be tracked and secured from theft or diversion; and
Promote U.S. radioactive materials management policies and best practices internationally and encourage adoption of analogous policies, both with individual partner states and through multilateral organizations.

Together with our domestic and international partnerships, these policies will continue to advance longstanding efforts to prevent proliferation and to counter and reduce threats of WMD terrorism at home and abroad.

###

whitehouse.gov · by The White House · March 2, 2023

18. Conspiracy Theories Have a New Best Friend

Excerpts:

Preparing for such deepfake campaigns, Horvitz said, will require a variety of strategies, including media-literacy efforts, enhanced detection methods, and regulation. Most promising might be creating a standard to establish the provenance of any piece of media—a log of where a photo was taken and all the ways it has been edited attached to the file as metadata, like a chain of custody for forensic evidence—which Adobe, Microsoft, and several other companies are working on. But people would still need to understand and trust that log. “You have this moment of both proliferation of content and muddiness about how things are coming to be,” says Rachel Kuo, a media-studies professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Provenance, detection, or other debunking methods might still rely largely on people listening to experts, whether it be journalists, government officials, or AI chatbots, who tell them what is and isn’t legitimate. And even with such silicon chains of custody, simpler forms of lying—over cable news, on the floor of Congress, in print—will continue.

Framing technology as the driving force behind disinformation and conspiracy implies that technology is a sufficient, or at least necessary, solution. But emphasizing AI could be a mistake. If we’re primarily worried “that someone is going to deep-fake Joe Biden, saying that he is a pedophile, then we’re ignoring the reason why a piece of information like that would be resonant,” Alice Marwick, a media-studies professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, told me. And to argue that new technologies, whether social media or AI, are primarily or solely responsible for bending the truth risks reifying the power of Big Tech’s advertisements, algorithms, and feeds to determine our thoughts and feelings. As the reporter Joseph Bernstein has written: “It is a model of cause and effect in which the information circulated by a few corporations has the total power to justify the beliefs and behaviors of the demos. In a way, this world is a kind of comfort. Easy to explain, easy to tweak, and easy to sell."

The messier story might contend with how humans, and maybe machines, are not always very rational; with what might need to be done for writing history to no longer be a war. The historian Jill Lepore has said that “the footnote saved Wikipedia,” suggesting that transparent sourcing helped the website become, or at least appear to be, a premier source for fairly reliable information. But maybe now the footnote, that impulse and impetus to verify, is about to sink the internet—if it has not done so already.

Conspiracy Theories Have a New Best Friend

Generative AI programs like ChatGPT threaten to revolutionize how disinformation spreads online.

By Matteo Wong

The Atlantic · by Matteo Wong · March 2, 2023

History has long been a theater of war, the past serving as a proxy in conflicts over the present. Ron DeSantis is warping history by banning books on racism from Florida’s schools; people remain divided about the right approach to repatriating Indigenous objects and remains; the Pentagon Papers were an attempt to twist narratives about the Vietnam War. The Nazis seized power in part by manipulating the past—they used propaganda about the burning of the Reichstag, the German parliament building, to justify persecuting political rivals and assuming dictatorial authority. That specific example weighs on Eric Horvitz, Microsoft’s chief scientific officer and a leading AI researcher, who tells me that the apparent AI revolution could not only provide a new weapon to propagandists, as social media did earlier this century, but entirely reshape the historiographic terrain, perhaps laying the groundwork for a modern-day Reichstag fire.

The advances in question, including language models such as ChatGPT and image generators such as DALL-E 2, loosely fall under the umbrella of “generative AI.” These are powerful and easy-to-use programs that produce synthetic text, images, video, and audio, all of which can be used by bad actors to fabricate events, people, speeches, and news reports to sow disinformation. You may have seen one-off examples of this type of media already: fake videos of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky surrendering to Russia; mock footage of Joe Rogan and Ben Shapiro arguing about the film Ratatouille. As this technology advances, piecemeal fabrications could give way to coordinated campaigns—not just synthetic media but entire synthetic histories, as Horvitz called them in a paper late last year. And a new breed of AI-powered search engines, led by Microsoft and Google, could make such histories easier to find and all but impossible for users to detect.

Even though similar fears about social media, TV, and radio proved somewhat alarmist, there is reason to believe that AI could really be the new variant of disinformation that makes lies about future elections, protests, or mass shootings both more contagious and immune-resistant. Consider, for example, the raging bird-flu outbreak, which has not yet begun spreading from human to human. A political operative—or a simple conspiracist—could use programs similar to ChatGPT and DALL-E 2 to easily generate and publish a huge number of stories about Chinese, World Health Organization, or Pentagon labs tinkering with the virus, backdated to various points in the past and complete with fake “leaked” documents, audio and video recordings, and expert commentary. A synthetic history in which a government weaponized bird flu would be ready to go if avian flu ever began circulating among humans. A propagandist could simply connect the news to their entirely fabricated—but fully formed and seemingly well-documented—backstory seeded across the internet, spreading a fiction that could consume the nation’s politics and public-health response. The power of AI-generated histories, Horvitz told me, lies in “deepfakes on a timeline intermixed with real events to build a story.”

Read: AI search is a disaster

It’s also possible that synthetic histories will change the kind, but not the severity, of the already rampant disinformation online. People are happy to believe the bogus stories they see on Facebook, Rumble, Truth Social, YouTube, wherever. Before the web, propaganda and lies about foreigners, wartime enemies, aliens, and Bigfoot abounded. And where synthetic media or “deepfakes” are concerned, existing research suggests that they offer surprisingly little benefit compared with simpler manipulations, such as mislabeling footage or writing fake news reports. You don’t need advanced technology for people to believe a conspiracy theory. Still, Horvitz believes we are at a precipice: The speed at which AI can generate high-quality disinformation will be overwhelming.

Automated disinformation produced at a heightened pace and scale could enable what he calls “adversarial generative explanations.” In a parallel of sorts to the targeted content you’re served on social media, which is tested and optimized according to what people engage with, propagandists could run small tests to determine which parts of an invented narrative are more or less convincing, and use that feedback along with social-psychology research to iteratively improve that synthetic history. For instance, a program could revise and modulate a fabricated expert’s credentials and quotes to land with certain demographics. Language models like ChatGPT, too, threaten to drown the internet in similarly conspiratorial and tailored potemkin text—not targeted advertising, but targeted conspiracies.

Big Tech’s plan to replace traditional internet search with chatbots could increase this risk substantially. The AI language models being integrated into Bing and Google are notoriously terrible at fact-checking and prone to falsities, which perhaps makes them susceptible to spreading fake histories. Although many of the early versions of chatbot-based search give Wikipedia-style responses with footnotes, the whole point of a synthetic history is to provide an alternative and convincing set of sources. And the entire premise of chatbots is convenience—for people to trust them without checking.

If this disinformation doomsday sounds familiar, that’s because it is. “The claim about [AI] technology is the same claim that people were making yesterday about the internet,” says Joseph Uscinski, a political scientist at the University of Miami who studies conspiracy theories. “Oh my God, lies travel farther and faster than ever, and everyone’s gonna believe everything they see.” But he has found no evidence that beliefs in conspiracy theories have increased alongside social-media use, or even throughout the coronavirus pandemic; the research into common narratives such as echo chambers is also shaky.

People buy into alternative histories not because new technologies make them more convincing, Uscinski says, but for the same reason they believe anything else—maybe the conspiracy confirms their existing beliefs, matches their political persuasion, or comes from a source they trust. He referenced climate change as an example: People who believe in anthropogenic warming, for the most part, have “not investigated the data themselves. All they’re doing is listening to their trusted sources, which is exactly what the climate-change deniers are doing too. It’s the same exact mechanism, it’s just in this case the Republican elites happen to have it wrong.”

Of course, social media did change how people produce, spread, and consume information. Generative AI could do the same, but with new stakes. “In the past, people would try things out by intuition,” Horvitz told me. “But the idea of iterating faster, with more surgical precision on manipulating minds, is a new thing. The fidelity of the content, the ease with which it can be generated, the ease with which you can post multiple events onto timelines”—all are substantive reasons to worry. Already, in the lead-up to the 2020 election, Donald Trump planted doubts about voting fraud that bolstered the “Stop the Steal” campaign once he lost. As November 2024 approaches, like-minded political operatives could use AI to create fake personas and election officials, fabricate videos of voting-machine manipulation and ballot-stuffing, and write false news stories, all of which would come together into an airtight synthetic history in which the election was stolen.

Read: The difference between speaking and thinking

Deepfake campaigns could send us further into “a post-epistemic world, where you don’t know what’s real or fake,” Horvitz said. A businessperson accused of wrongdoing could call incriminating evidence AI-generated; a politician could plant documented but entirely false character assassinations of rivals. Or perhaps, in the same way Truth Social and Rumble provide conservative alternatives to Twitter and YouTube, a far-right alternative to AI-powered search, trained on a wealth of conspiracies and synthetic histories, will ascend in response to fears about Google, Bing, and “WokeGPT” being too progressive. “There’s nothing in my mind that would stop that from happening in search capacity,” Renée DiResta, the research manager of the Stanford Internet Observatory, who recently wrote a paper on language models and disinformation, says. “It’s going to be seen as a fantastic market opportunity for somebody.” RightWingGPT and a conservative-Christian AI are already under discussion, and Elon Musk is reportedly recruiting talent to build a conservative rival to OpenAI.

Preparing for such deepfake campaigns, Horvitz said, will require a variety of strategies, including media-literacy efforts, enhanced detection methods, and regulation. Most promising might be creating a standard to establish the provenance of any piece of media—a log of where a photo was taken and all the ways it has been edited attached to the file as metadata, like a chain of custody for forensic evidence—which Adobe, Microsoft, and several other companies are working on. But people would still need to understand and trust that log. “You have this moment of both proliferation of content and muddiness about how things are coming to be,” says Rachel Kuo, a media-studies professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Provenance, detection, or other debunking methods might still rely largely on people listening to experts, whether it be journalists, government officials, or AI chatbots, who tell them what is and isn’t legitimate. And even with such silicon chains of custody, simpler forms of lying—over cable news, on the floor of Congress, in print—will continue.

Framing technology as the driving force behind disinformation and conspiracy implies that technology is a sufficient, or at least necessary, solution. But emphasizing AI could be a mistake. If we’re primarily worried “that someone is going to deep-fake Joe Biden, saying that he is a pedophile, then we’re ignoring the reason why a piece of information like that would be resonant,” Alice Marwick, a media-studies professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, told me. And to argue that new technologies, whether social media or AI, are primarily or solely responsible for bending the truth risks reifying the power of Big Tech’s advertisements, algorithms, and feeds to determine our thoughts and feelings. As the reporter Joseph Bernstein has written: “It is a model of cause and effect in which the information circulated by a few corporations has the total power to justify the beliefs and behaviors of the demos. In a way, this world is a kind of comfort. Easy to explain, easy to tweak, and easy to sell.”

The messier story might contend with how humans, and maybe machines, are not always very rational; with what might need to be done for writing history to no longer be a war. The historian Jill Lepore has said that “the footnote saved Wikipedia,” suggesting that transparent sourcing helped the website become, or at least appear to be, a premier source for fairly reliable information. But maybe now the footnote, that impulse and impetus to verify, is about to sink the internet—if it has not done so already.

The Atlantic · by Matteo Wong · March 2, 2023

19. The Deepfake Dangers Ahead

Excerpts:

Ultimately, it is the public that will have to distinguish information sources operating in good faith from those designed to manipulate. Many democracies struggle with media literacy, but Finland offers a promising example. There, media literacy is folded into the school curriculum starting in preschool, and libraries have become centers for adult media-literacy instruction. Finland now ranks first in the world for resilience against misinformation.

It is in the nature of democracy that no single policy can effectively quell the proliferation of disinformation. To deal with the problem, free societies will need a combination of efforts and, in contrast to China’s Ministry of Truth approach, should give priority to preserving open discourse and respecting the discernment of citizens. The key is to begin this process before deepfakes seep into our information ecosystems and overwhelm them. Once they do, mistrust and confusion will be much harder to contain.

The Deepfake Dangers Ahead

AI-generated disinformation, especially from hostile foreign powers, is a growing threat to democracies based on the free flow of ideas

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-deepfake-dangers-ahead-b08e4ecf?reflink=share_mobilewebshare

By Daniel Byman, Chris Meserole And V.S. Subrahmanian

Feb. 23, 2023 9:58 am ET

Bots, trolls, influence campaigns: Every day we seem to be battling more fake or manipulated content online. Because of advances in computing power, smarter machine learning algorithms and larger data sets, we will soon share digital space with a sinister array of AI-generated news articles and podcasts, deepfake images and videos—all produced at a once unthinkable scale and speed. As of 2018, according to one study, fewer than 10,000 deepfakes had been detected online. Today the number of deepfakes online is almost certainly in the millions.

We can hardly imagine all the purposes that people will find for this new synthetic media, but what we’ve already seen is cause for concern. Students can have ChatGPT write their essays. Stalkers can create pornographic videos featuring images of the people they are obsessed with. A criminal can synthesize your boss’s voice and tell you to transfer money.

Deepfakes risk leading people to view all information as suspicious.

Deepfakes pose not only criminal risks but also threats to national security. To stoke divisions in the U.S. in 2020, Russia used conventional means of propaganda, deploying fake news about vaccination and real but selectively chosen imagery of destruction from Black Lives Matter protests. Deepfake technology will take such efforts to a new level, allowing the creation of a convincing alternate reality. In 2022, for example, Russia released a crude deepfake of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky calling on Ukrainians to put down their arms.

Imagine what might be done as the technology grows more sophisticated. Jihadists seeking to mobilize recruits could show convincing clips of French President Emmanuel Macron denigrating Islam. A Chinese invasion of Taiwan could begin with a deepfake of a Taiwanese naval commander telling forces under his command to allow Chinese forces to pass unmolested. Troops fighting a war might despair after reading thousands of divisive or provocative Facebook posts ostensibly by fellow soldiers but in fact generated by ChatGPT. The scale, speed and verisimilitude of such information warfare threatens to overwhelm the ability of militaries and intelligence services to guard against it.

Even the most ingenious fake detectors will have their limits, because breakthroughs in detection will almost certainly be used to improve the next generation of deepfake algorithms.

Domestically, deepfakes risk leading people to view all information as suspicious. Soldiers might not trust actual orders, and the public may think that genuine scandals and outrages aren’t real. A climate of pervasive suspicion will allow politicians and their supporters to dismiss anything negative that is reported about them as fake or exaggerated.

China’s powerful cyberspace administration has already anticipated such concerns. In January, Beijing began enforcing ambitious new regulations on deepfake content, ranging from strict rules requiring that synthetic images of people be used only with those people’s consent to more Orwellian prohibitions on “disseminating fake news.”

Democratic societies need to start addressing the potential harms of deepfakes as well, but we can’t do it the same way China does. We need a response that preserves the free flow of ideas and expression, the exchange of information that allows citizens to determine what is fake and what is real. Disinformation is dangerous precisely because it undermines the very notion of truth. Bans like Beijing’s play into this problem by making the discernment of truth and falsity a government prerogative, susceptible to politics and brute enforcement.

The options for democracies are complicated and will have to blend technical, regulatory and social approaches. Intel has already begun work on the technical side. Last November, the company’s researchers proposed a system called FakeCatcher that claimed 96% accuracy in identifying deepfakes. That number is impressive, but given the sheer volume of synthetic material that can be churned out, even a 99% accurate detector would miss an unacceptable volume of disinformation. Moreover, governments will have the services of highly skilled programmers, which means that their deepfakes are likely to be among the least detectable. Even the most ingenious detectors will have their limits, because breakthroughs in detection will almost certainly be used to improve the next generation of deepfake algorithms.

There is a workaround that may help detectors stay ahead of this cycle, and it is related to a technique that social-media companies are already exploring. Developers of detection technology can focus less on the video or image itself than on how it is being used by creating algorithms that analyze metadata and context. Social media platforms currently deploy these sorts of tools to detect fake accounts used for what some platforms call “coordinated campaigns of inauthentic behavior”—a term that covers the efforts of Iran, Russia and other malicious actors to sow disinformation or discredit specific public figures. Such an algorithm for deepfakes would be able to distinguish a Renoir-style deepfake painting of a loved one, say, from a deepfake showing a nude celebrity or drugged-out political figure.

The U.S. government and other democracies can’t tell their people what is or isn’t true, but they can insist that companies that produce and distribute synthetic media at scale make their algorithms more transparent. The public should know what a platform’s policies are and how these rules are enforced. Platforms that disseminate deepfakes can even be required to allow independent, third-party researchers to study the effects of this media and monitor whether the platforms’ algorithms are behaving in accordance with their policies.

Deepfakes are going to change the way a lot of institutions in democracies do business. The military will need very secure systems for verifying orders and making sure that automated systems can’t be triggered by potential deepfakes. Political leaders responding to crises will have to build in delays so that they can make sure the information before them isn’t false or even partially manipulated by an adversary. Journalists and editors will have to be leery of shocking news stories, doubling down on the standard of verifying facts with multiple sources. Where there is doubt, an outlet might mark some news with bright “this information not verified” warnings.

Ultimately, it is the public that will have to distinguish information sources operating in good faith from those designed to manipulate. Many democracies struggle with media literacy, but Finland offers a promising example. There, media literacy is folded into the school curriculum starting in preschool, and libraries have become centers for adult media-literacy instruction. Finland now ranks first in the world for resilience against misinformation.

It is in the nature of democracy that no single policy can effectively quell the proliferation of disinformation. To deal with the problem, free societies will need a combination of efforts and, in contrast to China’s Ministry of Truth approach, should give priority to preserving open discourse and respecting the discernment of citizens. The key is to begin this process before deepfakes seep into our information ecosystems and overwhelm them. Once they do, mistrust and confusion will be much harder to contain.

Messrs. Byman, Meserole and Subrahmanian are co-authors (with Chongyang Gao) of a new Brookings Institution research report, “Deepfakes and International Conflict,” from which this essay is adapted.

Appeared in the February 25, 2023, print edition as 'The Deepfake Dangers Ahead'.

20. [OPINION] Grayzone tactics: A maritime insurgency in the South China Sea?

Excerpts:

“The first basic need for an insurgent is an attractive cause, [in which]the insurgents has a formidable, if intangible, asset that he can progressively transform into a concrete strength..”

Here lies the dream’s weakness: its benefits China exclusively, no “rallying cause” for Southeast Asia, and living in a “surveillance state” holds no attraction at all. Xi’s insurgency has a flaw, and it can be overcome if the region works together.

[OPINION] Grayzone tactics: A maritime insurgency in the South China Sea?

MAR 2, 2023 12:01 PM PHT

ROMMEL JUDE G. ONG

rappler.com · March 2, 2023

'Xi Jinping's insurgency has a flaw, and it can be overcome if the region works together'

Grayzone operations is integral to the Chinese Communist Party’s maritime strategy in the South China Sea; and it continues to defy any political, naval, or legal solution. Former Associate Chief Justice Antonio Carpio’s points at the risk, if this remains unaddressed:

“ At stake is the survival of the legal order enshrined in the 1945 UN Charter, that no state shall use armed force to settle a dispute with another state but must use only peaceful means to settle such dispute…. [We]must prevent China from overturning this fundamental principle, [otherwise], we will go back to the ‘might is right’ order that prevailed before.”

Hunter Stires of the US Naval War College, depicts grayzone tactics as a “maritime insurgency,” involving:

“[a] campaign to undermine and ultimately overturn the prevailing regime of international law that governs the conduct of maritime activity in the South China Sea. [It…] is a ‘battle of legal regimes,’ a political contest of wills that manifests itself in a duel between two competing systems of authority—the U.S.-underwritten system of the free sea, versus the Chinese vision of a closed, Sinocentric, and unfree sea.”

Revisiting David Galula’s scholarly work, entitled “Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice,” an insurgency is:

“…a protracted struggle conducted methodically, step by step, in order to attain specific intermediate objectives leading to the overthrow of the existing order.”

Given this, Xi Jinping’s “China Dream” emerges as a “global insurgency” with an ambiguous end-goal; waged now, but culminating in 2049 during the CCP’s 100th anniversary. Xi’s various policies and programs, would likely be synchronized through his Global Development Initiative, and Global Security Initiative. Galula further posits on the dynamics between “insurgents” and “counterinsurgents” (in our case referring to the CCP and like-minded democracies):

“…[promoting] disorder is the legitimate objective of the insurgents. It helps to disrupt the economy, …to produce discontent; …undermine the strength and authority of the counterinsurgents. [It] is cheap to create, and hard to prevent.”

Towards this end, China arose from the post-Nixon years as the global supply chain’s hub, established the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, entrenched itself in the United Nations, infiltrated the digital world through TikTok, and, lobbied for the adoption of Huawei’s 5G network. All these were to supplant the West’s influence in the geo-political arena; the global economy; among international institutions; in space, cyber, and technology; and, in the cognitive domain. Galula further warned that:

“[once]the insurgents has succeeded in acquiring geographical bases, he becomes ipso facto a strong promoter of order within his own area, in order to show the difference between the effectiveness of his rule and the inadequacy of his opponents.”

He was prescient. In the South China Sea, it has eight occupied isles and features within the Spratly’s Island Group, and maintains bases in Hainan and the Paracels. It enabled its navy, coast guard, and fisheries militia to coerce adjacent coastal states, including the Philippines, using its domestic laws to justify encroachment within our EEZ.

The CCP desires the acquiescence of Southeast Asia as modern day tributary-states. Over time, it successfully drove a wedge among ASEAN member-states, employed influence operations to coopt the its political and economic elites, and tried to use the ASEAN-China Code of Conduct negotiations to oust the US from the region. Galula warned of the impact on the “people”(referring to Southeast Asia):

“… [if] the insurgents manages to disassociate people from counterinsurgents, to control it physically, to get its active support, he will win the war because, in the final analysis, the exercise of political power depends on the tacit or explicit agreement of the population, or at worst, on its submissiveness.”

The tendency to hedge relations with the US and China, underscores the efficacy of the latter’s sharp power in compelling ASEAN to submit. In our case, Duterte’s “appeasement policy” allowed China to challenge the exercise of sovereignty and sovereign rights within our own waters. However, this will not convert Southeast Asia into “firm believers” of Xi’ dream. Galula elucidates:

“The first basic need for an insurgent is an attractive cause, [in which]the insurgents has a formidable, if intangible, asset that he can progressively transform into a concrete strength..”

Rear Admiral Rommel Jude Ong (Ret.) is currently Professor of Praxis at Ateneo School of Government. He was formerly the Vice Commander of the Philippine Navy.

rappler.com · March 2, 2023

21. The Importance of Military Communication in Special Operations and Covert Missions

A view from South Africa.

The Importance of Military Communication in Special Operations and Covert Missions – CityLife

citylife.capetown

Exploring the Role of Cyber Security in Maintaining Secure Military Communications on Special Operations and Covert Missions

The increased reliance of the military on digital communications has made cyber security a critical component in protecting Special Operations and Covert Missions. The challenge is heightened by the need to ensure that communication remains secure while also allowing for flexibility and mobility. To meet this challenge, militaries have implemented several measures, including dedicated networks with restricted access; hardened encryption protocols; network segmentation; strict user authentication processes; continuous monitoring of all activities within sensitive networks, as well as system logs from across all connected devices.

These measures are designed to protect both operational data and personnel information from malicious actors who could use it for their own purposes or use it against mission objectives by disrupting communications or accessing classified materials. Additionally, these systems must be able to detect any attempts at infiltration so that they can prevent unauthorized access before damage occurs.

To further protect Special Operations missions in particular – which often require frequent changes in location – militaries have developed specialized approaches such as deploying mobile “airgaps” on-site which act like miniature private networks that allow only authorized users onto them using secure authentication protocols such as biometrics or multi-factor identification methods without leaving a traceable footprint behind them once deployed again elsewhere . This allows for secure communication between command centers located anywhere around the world without having to worry about interception via satellite intercepts etc., thus increasing situational awareness amongst mission teams even when operating under extreme conditions far away from home base . Moreover , advanced technologies like quantum cryptography help provide an unprecedented level of protection against eavesdropping due its ability to instantly detect any attempt at tampering with encrypted messages being sent over long distances .

Ultimately , maintaining robust cyber security procedures is essential if special operations forces hope stay one step ahead of adversaries through effective strategic planning and operational executions during covert missions since every bit of data transmitted over digital channels needs reliable protection lest it falls into enemy hands leading up potentially disastrous outcomes ..

Examining the Necessity of Effective Communication Strategies for Successful Special Operations and Covert Missions

The success of any special operations or covert mission depends heavily on effective communication strategies. Without the right planning and execution, even the most sophisticated plans can easily unravel. This is why it is so essential for military and intelligence personnel to implement strong communication protocols before launching their operations.

One of the primary goals in setting up a successful mission must be establishing reliable channels between all involved parties as well as having backup systems if needed. It is also important to ensure that all information sent over these lines remains secure from external interference or interception, which requires robust encryption measures such as end-to-end encryption technology applied at both ends of each transmission link. In addition, having an efficient system for monitoring these transmissions will help identify any potential security threats in real time and prevent them from disrupting ongoing activities or missions objectives should they arise unexpectedly during operation deployment phase .

Realizing this need for secure communications early on can save precious resources – both human capital and financial investments – later down the line when things don’t go according to plan due to lack of proper coordination between teams operating in tandem environments such us those found with Special Operations Forces (SOF). Furthermore, it allows SOF members greater flexibility while executing their respective tasks without compromising operational secrecy thus making them more effective overall by eliminating unnecessary risks associated with traditional open source methods still employed by many organizations today when dealing with highly sensitive projects like those run through covert channels .

Finally , implementing robust yet versatile communication strategies tailored specifically towards meeting individual operational requirements helps create an environment conducive towards achieving successful outcomes no matter what challenges may arise during active duty engagements regardless whether they are being conducted domestically within US borders or abroad outside its jurisdiction limits . Doing this ensures that everyone involved understands what needs doing , how it needs doing , who should do it , when exactly it needs getting done & why exactly its being done : All points essential for ensuring smooth running & trouble free deployments every single time!

Analyzing How Advanced Technologies Have Improved Military Communication Tactics on Special Operations and Covert Missions

In recent years, advanced technologies have revolutionized the way special operations and covert missions are communicated. These advancements have resulted in improved tactics that allow for more effective communication, greater security and increased efficiency.

To begin with, the development of secure wireless networks has enabled military personnel to communicate with one another without fear of interception or disruption from hostile forces. This technology is used extensively on special operations and allows for fast transmission of information as well as seamless coordination between units involved in a mission. Additionally, these networks use strong encryption algorithms which effectively protect sensitive data during transmission over distances up to several kilometers away from their source location. Furthermore, this form of communication offers an added layer of protection against eavesdropping by outside parties due to its unique frequency hopping capability which changes frequencies rapidly while transmitting data packets securely at high speeds over long distances without sacrificing quality or latency levels; thus ensuring that no third party can gain access or interfere with transmissions sent using this technology..

Another advancement in tactical communications lies within satellite-based systems such as Global Positioning System (GPS) receivers which provide real-time positioning information along with other navigation aids such as speedometers or altimeters depending on specific requirements needed by operators conducting a mission abroad; enabling them to accurately plot their course through rugged terrain while avoiding detection at all costs if needed be . GPS also provides invaluable intelligence gathering capabilities allowing teams deployed overseas to track targets accurately even when operating out range from any base station – providing an extra layer security since signals transmitted cannot be intercepted easily due those devices being located far away from any potential line-of sight adversary threat . In addition , GPS receivers also come equipped various additional features like night vision mode , thermal imaging capabilities & enhanced weather forecasting tools making it easier for teams carrying out risky missions behind enemy lines where visibility may sometimes become limited .

Finally , drone surveillance has drastically transformed the way military personnel communicate during covert missions ; offering unprecedented situational awareness & live video feeds directly into command centers back home keeping commanders informed about every little detail taking place at frontline locations whether they’re deep underwater inside submarines monitoring enemy movements around disputed territories via aerial drones flying overhead – Thanks cutting edge technologies like Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs); Special Forces now able conduct reconnoitering activities undetected whilst simultaneously relaying crucial intel obtained right back home instantly giving strategists an upper hand against adversaries saving lives both on ground & aboard vessels patrolling waters further down offshore safeguarding borders protecting citizens living nearby shores alike !

Overall then it’s clear that advances in tactical communications have greatly improved upon traditional methods utilized by armed forces doing reconnaissance work overseas enabling better overall performance when executing specialized tasks involving high stakes risks associated normally associated complex clandestine activities requiring utmost secrecy coupled top notch precision accuracy order succeed time again !

Understanding How Visual Communicative Tools Enhance Coordination During Special Ops & Covert Missions

Special ops and covert missions require seamless coordination between multiple personnel in order to achieve success. Visual communicative tools can provide an ideal platform for such operations, allowing teams to communicate quickly and accurately without compromising their safety or the secrecy of their mission.

When used properly, these visual tools can allow personnel on the ground to share information with one another as well as with higher command centers more efficiently than verbal communication alone could ever allow. For instance, they provide a fast-moving team with up-to-date images from intelligence sources or instantaneously relay critical information about enemy movements that are vital for carrying out successful operations.

These visual communicative systems also make it possible for commanders in different parts of the world—even those separated by large distances—to view real time data simultaneously so that all participants remain informed throughout a mission’s duration at any given moment regardless of location or physical distance apart from one another. This capability is especially important during special ops and covert missions where accuracy is essential but time lost waiting for updates would be a luxury no team can afford due its life threatening implications; therefore providing them an edge over traditional methods of communication which tend to not be reliable enough under high stakes situations like this one because they rely on manual inputs instead automated ones provided by technology based solutions such as these mentioned above .

Visual communications have revolutionized how special ops teams operate while keeping them safe during difficult assignments away from home base locations and combat zones alike; making it easier then ever before coordinate activities among members who may otherwise never meet face–to–face due security concerns associated within certain countries around world where law enforcement agencies vary greatly regarding access sensitive areas often targeted by operatives involved this type work . This has enabled military organizations everywhere come up creative ways utilize tool successfully complete even most dangerous tasks imaginable knowing full well that whatever happens there will always someone back headquarters monitoring progress every step way meaning both parties stay connected much better rate than before thanks advancements made recent times when comes technological capabilities available average user today .

Investigating Potential Risks Faced When Using Traditional Forms of Communication for Special Ops &Covert MissionS

Special operations and covert missions are highly sensitive tasks that require secure communication between personnel. Traditional forms of communication, such as verbal or written messages, can be easily infiltrated by adversaries, thus posing a serious risk to both the mission and those involved.

Verbal messages are particularly vulnerable to interception as they cannot be hidden from view or soundproofed from unwanted listening devices. For instance, conversations over telephone lines may be tapped into by enemies with access to the right technology; likewise face-to-face meetings in public places may also put operatives at risk of being heard by individuals who shouldn’t have access to classified information.

Written correspondence is less likely than verbal communications to suffer immediate eavesdropping but still poses significant risks if not handled properly. Written notes sent through postal services must pass through multiple hands before reaching their destination; any one person along this route could read its contents without detection if they possess sufficient knowledge on security measures taken against traditional mail delivery systems (e.g., checking for signs of tampering). Electronic mail is similarly subjectible infiltration via sophisticated cyberattacks that intercept data while it’s in transit across networks – an especially dangerous prospect given how much sensitive material special ops teams typically handle remotely via email exchanges during ongoing missions abroad..

Therefore, it is critical for governments and organizations utilizing traditional approaches for communicating about special operations or covert activities understand the potential risks associated with them so appropriate countermeasures can be implemented – such as employing encryption protocols when sending emails – in order reduce these threats significantly when planning procedures involving high levels of secrecy .

citylife.capetown

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Foundation for Defense of Democracies

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

V/R

David Maxwell

Senior Fellow

Foundation for Defense of Democracies

Phone: 202-573-8647

Personal Email: d avid.maxwell161@gmail.com

Web Site: www.fdd.org

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Subscribe to FDD’s new podcast, Foreign Podicy

FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.

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

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

Access NSS HERE

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The Deepfake Dangers Ahead

AI-generated disinformation, especially from hostile foreign powers, is a growing threat to democracies based on the free flow of ideas

[OPINION] Grayzone tactics: A maritime insurgency in the South China Sea?

The Importance of Military Communication in Special Operations and Covert Missions – CityLife

Exploring the Role of Cyber Security in Maintaining Secure Military Communications on Special Operations and Covert Missions

Examining the Necessity of Effective Communication Strategies for Successful Special Operations and Covert Missions

Analyzing How Advanced Technologies Have Improved Military Communication Tactics on Special Operations and Covert Missions

Understanding How Visual Communicative Tools Enhance Coordination During Special Ops & Covert Missions

Investigating Potential Risks Faced When Using Traditional Forms of Communication for Special Ops &Covert MissionS

Blundering Into Baghdad