Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

“I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become the wounded person.’

- Walt Whitman

“It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.”

- Voltaire

Characteristics of the American Way of War (3 of 13)

3. Ahistorical. As a future-oriented, still somewhat "new" country, one that has a founding ideology of faith in, hope for, and commitment to, human betterment, it is only to be expected that Americans should be less than highly respectful of what they might otherwise be inclined to allow history to teach them. A defense community led by the historically disrespectful and ill-educated, is all but condemned to find itself surprised by events for which some historical understanding could have prepared them. History cannot repeat itself, of course, but, as naval historian Geoffrey Till has aptly observed, "The chief utility of history for the analysis of present and future lies in its ability, not to point out lessons, but to isolate things that need thinking about.... History provides insights and questions, not answers."

As Sam Sarkesian, John Collins, and Max Boot, among others, have sought to remind us, the United States has a rich and extensive history of experience with irregular enemies. Moreover, that experience was by no means entirely negative. The trouble was and, until very recently, has remained, that such varied experience of irregular warfare was never embraced and adopted by the Army as the basis for the development of doctrine for a core competency. Rephrased, the Army improvised and waged irregular warfare, sometimes just regular war against irregulars, when it had to. But that task was always viewed officially as a regrettable diversion from preparation for "real war." Real war, of course, meant war against regular peers, the kind of war that Europeans waged against each other.

To be brutal, the U.S. Army has a fairly well-filled basket of negative experience with irregular enemies. If the institution is willing to learn, and to regard COIN as a necessary enduring competency to be achieved through an adaptable transformation, past errors all but demand to be recognized. As we have sought to insist throughout this monograph, COIN warfare is not a black art. Rather, its principles and priorities are well-known and noncontroversial. All that is necessary is for the soldier to be willing and able to learn from history, recent American history at that. Unfortunately, the first and truest love of the U.S. defense community is with technology, not with history. That great American strategic theorist, Bernard Brodie, explained for all time why history should not be neglected. He reminded those in need of reminding that "the only empirical data we have about how people conduct war and behave under its stresses is our experience with it in the past, however much we have to make adjustments for subsequent changes in conditions."66 An Army struggling to adapt to the unfamiliar and unwelcome challenges of irregular warfare cannot afford to be ahistorical, let alone antihistorical.

Colin Gray, 2006

1. 2023 ANNUAL THREAT ASSESSMENT OF THE U.S. INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY

2. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, MARCH 8, 2023

3. Pentagon Blocks Sharing Evidence of Possible Russian War Crimes With Hague Court

4. U.S. Probes Whether Pro-Ukraine Group Had Role in Nord Stream Explosions

5. Australia to Buy U.S. Nuclear-Powered Submarines in Naval Expansion

6. Is America’s China Policy Too Hawkish?

7. The first 72 hours: How an attack on Taiwan could rapidly reach Australia

8. Hidden cost of funding for US special ops raises flags at Senate

9. TikTok could be a valuable tool for China if it invades Taiwan, FBI director says

10. Opinion | What would a win in Ukraine look like? Retired Gen. Jack Keane explains.

11. Opinion | From the Trenches in Ukraine, We Know Our Enemy Is in Shock

12. China wants to avoid escalation with U.S., U.S. spy chief says

13. China has become a tough target for U.S. spies

14. Studying Ukraine war, China's military minds fret over US missiles, Starlink

15. The Language of War: Why the talk about kinetic and non-kinetic warfare?

16. Major Russian missile barrage slams targets across Ukraine

17. China is right about US containment

18. Taiwan Warming to Hosting US Ammo Storage Facilities

19. 9 Army units to deploy on summer rotations that include Europe, Korea and the Middle East

20. Biden taps 7th Fleet commander Thomas for information warfare post

21. What TikTok withholds is as concerning as what it posts, Nakasone says

22. Philippines launches strategy of publicizing Chinese actions

23. The US Military Needs to Create a Cyber Force ByJames Stavridis

24. Analysis | The U.S.-China rift is only growing wider

25. 'We Were Ignored': Veterans and Troops Detail Horrors of Afghanistan Evacuation as House Investigation Begins

26. A Biden Doctrine for Taiwan

27. Green Beret Cold Weather Training | SOF News

28. Did US raise a false flag on Nord Stream blasts?

1. 2023 ANNUAL THREAT ASSESSMENT OF THE U.S. INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY

The 40 page assessment is at this link: https://www.odni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/ATA-2023-Unclassified-Report.pdf

The 2 page north Korea assessment is below.

I get that the assessment and is abbreviated unclassified summary for the public but I am a little disappointed in that while the assessment does summarize the major threats - e.g., regional and global objectives, military capabilities, WMD, and cyber it does not address the nature of the Kim family regime, its long term objectives, and strategy of the regime. It does not address information and influence operations (nK propaganda), it does not address the potential for regime instability and collapse. It does not address the regime's political warfare and blackmail diplomacy strategy and how its pursuit of advanced military capabilities supports those two strategies.

Below the ODNI assessment is an outline of a talk I gave this week to summarize the north Korean threat.

2023 ANNUAL THREAT ASSESSMENT OF THE U.S. INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY

https://www.odni.gov/index.php/newsroom/reports-publications/reports-publications-2023/item/2363-2023-annual-threat-assessment-of-the-u-s-intelligence-community

Date: March 8, 2023

This annual report of worldwide threats to the national security of the United States responds to Section 617 of the FY21 Intelligence Authorization Act (Pub. L. No. 116-260). This report reflects the collective insights of the Intelligence Community (IC), which is committed every day to providing the nuanced, independent, and unvarnished intelligence that policymakers, warfighters, and domestic law enforcement personnel need to protect American lives and America’s interests anywhere in the world.

Download the report.

Published in Reports and Publications 2023

NORTH KOREA

REGIONAL AND GLOBAL OBJECTIVES AND ACTIVITIES

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is continuing efforts to enhance North Korea’s nuclear and conventional capabilities targeting the United States and its allies, which will enable periodic aggressive actions to try to reshape the regional security environment in his favor. Kim probably is attempting to secure North Korea’s position in what he perceives to be an international environment conducive to his brutal authoritarian system, as demonstrated by North Korea’s repeated public support for Beijing and Moscow’s foreign policy priorities.

 Kim almost certainly views nuclear weapons and ICBMs as the ultimate guarantor of his autocratic rule and has no intention of abandoning those programs, believing that over time he will gain international acceptance as a nuclear power. In 2022, Kim reinforced that position by testing multiple ICBMs intended to improve North Korea’s ability to strike the United States and revising his country’s nuclear law, underscoring the nuclear forces as the backbone of North Korea’s national defense.

 North Korea is using its nuclear-capable missile program to try to establish strategic dominance over South Korea and U.S. forces in the region by pursuing missiles probably aimed at defeating missile defenses on the peninsula and the region and issuing threats to militarily respond to any perceived attacks against its sovereignty.

 Since September 2022, North Korea has timed its missile launches and military demonstrations to counter U.S.–South Korea exercises probably to attempt to coerce the United States and South Korea to change their behavior and counteract South Korean President Yoon’s hardline policies toward the North. Pyongyang probably wants the alliance to decrease the pace and scale of the exercises with the ultimate goal of undermining the strength of the alliance.

 North Korea increasingly will engage in illicit activities, including cyber theft and exporting UN proscribed commodities, to fund regime priorities such as the WMD program.

MILITARY CAPABILITIES

North Korea’s military will pose a serious threat to the United States and its allies by continuing to invest in niche capabilities designed to provide Kim with a range of options to deter outside intervention, offset enduring deficiencies in the country’s conventional forces, and advance his political objectives through coercion.

 North Korea’s COVID-19 restrictions and reliance on the Korean People’s Army (KPA) to enforce and execute some pandemic countermeasures probably have caused overall KPA combat readiness to decline in the near term, but key units probably will remain capable of executing their wartime missions.

Kim is continuing to prioritize efforts to build an increasingly capable missile force designed to evade U.S. and regional missile defenses. Kim probably will continue to order missile tests—from cruise missiles through ICBMs, and HGVs—to validate technical objectives, reinforce deterrence, and normalize Pyongyang’s missile testing. To support development of these new missile systems, North Korea continues to import a variety of dual-use goods in violation of UN sanctions, primarily from China and Russia.

WMD

Kim remains strongly committed to expanding the country’s nuclear weapons arsenal and maintaining nuclear weapons as a centerpiece of his national security structure. Public statements have reinforced North Korea’s intent to enhance its ability to threaten both South Korea and the U.S. homeland.

 North Korea probably is preparing to test a nuclear device to further its stated military modernization goals to facilitate “tactical nuclear operations.” In September 2022, North Korea codified a law reaffirming its self-proclaimed status as a nuclear power, establishing open-ended conditions for nuclear use, command and control, and rejecting denuclearization.

North Korea’s CBW capabilities remain a threat, and the IC is concerned that Pyongyang may use such weapons during a conflict or in an unconventional or clandestine attack.

CYBER

North Korea’s cyber program poses a sophisticated and agile espionage, cybercrime, and attack threat. Pyongyang’s cyber forces have matured and are fully capable of achieving a range of strategic objectives against diverse targets, including a wider target set in the United States

 Pyongyang probably possesses the expertise to cause temporary, limited disruptions of some critical infrastructure networks and disrupt business networks in the United States.

North Korea’s cyber program continues to adapt to global trends in cybercrime by conducting cryptocurrency heists, diversifying its range of financially motivated cyber operations, and continuing to leverage advanced social engineering techniques.

 In one heist in 2022, Pyongyang stole a record $625 million from a Singapore-based blockchain technology firm.

Beyond Pyongyang’s cybercrime efforts, cyber actors linked to North Korea have conducted espionage efforts against a range of organizations, including media, academia, defense companies, and governments in multiple countries. North Korea continues to conduct cyber espionage to obtain technical information almost certainly intended to advance Pyongyang’s military and WMD programs.

My assessment

1. Common assumptions about the threat. – nature, objectives, strategy of the KFR

ROK White Paper – names nK threat
Political Warfare, Blackmail Diplomacy, Pursuit of Advanced Warfighting Capabilities.
Survival of the regime – through domination of the peninsula
Understanding the threat forms the basis of policy and strategy

Note: The way to counter provocations is to ensure that Kim does not achieve the effects he desires by conducting the provocation.

2. Need for an external threat to justify sacrifice and suffering of the Korean people in the north

3. WMD

Deterrence – threat to US

First use – achieve quick victory
Warfighting
Support to blackmail diplomacy
Support to political warfare - subvert ROK and alliance – e..g, missiles tests to drive ROK to go nuclear – alliance friction
Note positive aspect of nuclear discussions – ROK committed to doing what is necessary for its own defense

4. Conventional Threats

Quantity as a quality all its own.
Obsolete military equipment – but always surprised when they show us well maintained equipment
WTC but reports of scaled back training due to food shortage
No open source reporting of any signs of mobilization or preparations for attacks

5. nk information operations - supports PW/BD - and domestic propaganda to control population - Active subversion of the South and of the alliance

6. Potential Instability

COVID paradox – draconian population and resources control measures.

Indicators of breakdown of military chains of control
Corruption
No safety valve/relief mechanism – (no Sunshine Policy and loss of market activity due to regime crackdown.

7. Asymmetric capabilities- (provocations, proliferation, nuclear program, missile, cyber, and SOF) subversion of ROK, and global illicit activities.

8. Peninsula Nexus – 2,3 economic, nuclear powers, huge military presence, what happens on the peninsula will have global effects - support to China and Russia and vice versa

9. The “Big 5” for the Korean Peninsula

1. War - must deter, and if attacked defend, fight, and defeat the nKPA.

2. Regime Collapse - must prepare for the real possibility and understand it could lead to war and both war and regime collapse could result in resistance within the north.

3. Human Rights and Crimes Against Humanity - (gulags, external forced labor, etc) must focus on as it is a threat to the Kim Family Regime and undermines domestic legitimacy - it is a moral imperative and a national security issue. KJU denies human rights to remain in power.

4. Asymmetric threats (provocations, proliferation, nuclear program, missile, cyber, and SOF) subversion of ROK, and global illicit activities.

5. Unification - the biggest challenge and the solution.

We should never forget that north Korea is master of denial and deception in all that it does from military operations to strategy to diplomatic negotiations.

10. Big 8 Contingencies

1. Provocations to gain political and economic concessions

2. nk Attack – execution of the nK campaign plan to reunify the peninsula by force

3. Civil War/Chaos/Anarchy

4. Refugee crisis

5. Humanitarian Assistance/Disaster relief

6. WMD, loss of control – seize and secure operations

7. Resistance to foreign intervention (e.g., insurgency)

8. How to handle the nKPA during regime collapse short of war

2. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, MARCH 8, 2023

Maps/graphics: https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-march-8-2023

Key Takeaways

Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin announced on March 8 that Russian forces captured all of eastern Bakhmut, a claim consistent with available visual evidence
Russian forces remain unlikely to exploit a breakthrough beyond Bakhmut if Russian forces capture the city.
The Kremlin may be attempting to establish a new Russian government-controlled armed formation billed as a volunteer unit through the Russian state-owned energy company Gazprom.
A US official denied that US intelligence assessed that a pro-Ukrainian group sabotaged the Nord Stream pipelines in September 2022.
German and Polish officials announced that Germany and Poland will deliver 28 Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine in March 2023, which will bolster Ukraine’s capabilities to conduct a counteroffensive amidst high Russian tank losses.
Russian forces continued to conduct ground attacks on the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna line.
Russian forces continued offensive operations around Bakhmut on March 8 but have not succeeded in completing a turning movement around the city.
Russian forces continued offensive operations along the outskirts of Donetsk City.
Russian sources claimed that Ukrainian forces landed on the Dnipro River Delta islands for the third consecutive day.
The Kremlin is doubling down on reviving volunteer recruitment campaigns throughout Russia and occupied Ukraine.
Russian hospitals are continuing to form new medical centers in Russia in an effort to maximize the capacity for overfilling hospitals in occupied territories to treat wounded Russian servicemen.

RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, MARCH 8, 2023

Mar 8, 2023 - Press ISW

Download the PDF

Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, March 8, 2023

Kateryna Stepanenko, Riley Bailey, Grace Mappes, George Barros, Layne Philipson, and Mason Clark

March 8, 7:45 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.

Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin announced on March 8 that Russian forces captured all of eastern Bakhmut, a claim consistent with available visual evidence.[1] ISW assessed on March 7 that Ukrainian forces completed a controlled withdrawal from eastern Bakhmut across the Bakhmutka River.[2] A prominent Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces control between 45 to 52 percent of Bakhmut as of March 7.[3] This figure is reasonable; ISW assesses that Russian forces now occupy at least 50 percent of Bakhmut as of March 8. Russian forces will likely intensify attacks in northwestern and southwestern Bakhmut (north from Opytne and south from Yahidne, respectively) to circumnavigate the Bakhmutka River.

Russian forces remain unlikely to rapidly exploit a breakthrough beyond Bakhmut if Russian forces capture the city. Prigozhin implied on March 8 that the Russian Ministry of Defense used the Wagner Group to bear the brunt of high-intensity attritional urban warfare in Bakhmut and may discard the Wagner Group after capturing Bakhmut so conventional Russian units can continue to attack.[4] Prigozhin did not provide an assessment of the likelihood of success of future Russian offensive operations beyond Bakhmut. ISW has not observed any indicators that the Russian military has a well-equipped and prepared reserve force to advance beyond Bakhmut. Most observed Russian units in Donbas are already engaged in offensive operations, including Russian airborne (VDV) elements that joined the Russian offensive in Bakhmut in January 2023.[5] ISW continues to assess that the Russian offensive in eastern Ukraine will shortly culminate if Russian forces capture Bakhmut, as the Russian military does not have the combat power or reinforcements necessary to exploit a breakthrough near Bakhmut.[6] NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg stated on March 8 that the Russian capture of Bakhmut would not “necessarily reflect any turning point of the war.”[7]

US Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines stated on March 8 that Russian President Vladimir Putin likely recognizes the Russian military’s current limited capability to sustain a short-term offensive and may pursue a protracted war.[8] Haines stated on March 8 that Putin is likely only temporarily focused on pursuing short-term military objectives in Ukraine and may believe that prolonging the war will increase the likelihood of achieving his strategic goals. ISW has previously assessed that Putin maintains maximalist war goals in Ukraine despite Russian forces’ currently limited capabilities to achieve these goals.[9] Haines stated that Russia will increasingly struggle to maintain its current tempo of operations in Ukraine without conducting full mobilization and securing adequate ammunition to mitigate Russia’s current shortage. Haines noted that Russian forces are suffering high losses to take Bakhmut, which Haines characterized as “not particularly strategic,” supporting ISW’s prior assessments that a Pyrrhic tactical victory in Bakhmut would not further Russia’s operational or strategic battlefield aims.[10] ISW previously assessed on January 15 that the Kremlin was preparing for a strategically decisive effort in 2023 while simultaneously preparing for a protracted war.[11]

The Kremlin may be attempting to establish a new Russian government-controlled armed formation billed as a volunteer unit through the Russian state-owned energy company Gazprom. A prominent Russian milblogger stated that Gazprom subsidiary Gazprom Neft is forming a volunteer formation analogous to Russian Combat Army Reserve (BARS) units.[12] The milblogger originally claimed that Gazprom Neft is forming a private military company (PMC) and is actively deploying unspecified elements to occupied Donetsk Oblast before later issuing a correction that the Gazprom Neft formation is a volunteer unit, not a PMC. The milblogger claimed Gazprom Neft’s recruitment campaign generated interest in Donetsk City given that the company is offering 400,000 rubles (approximately $5,260) salary per month and additional compensation for performance bonuses.[13] The milblogger added that this offered salary is twice the amount offered by the Wagner Group, noting that a volunteer in the Gazprom Neft formation can—with bonuses—earn up to 600,000 rubles (about $7,890) per month. Gazprom Neft may be attempting to compete with Wagner for recruits from Donetsk Oblast given that Wagner is also conducting its own recruitment campaign in the area.[14]

The Russian government previously authorized Gazprom Neft to create a private security organization (not a PMC) on February 6 to protect Russian energy infrastructure.[15] Ukrainian intelligence previously noted that the creation of the Gazprom Neft private security company aligns with an assessed Kremlin effort to sideline Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin and mitigate the Kremlin’s dependency on Wagner Group forces.[16] A Russian milblogger also rhetorically questioned when the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) will become “jealous” of the new Gazprom Neft formations and cut off their access to ammunition—likely referencing the Russian MoD’s conflict with Prigozhin.

A US official denied on March 8 that US intelligence assessed that a pro-Ukrainian group sabotaged the Nord Stream pipelines in September 2022. US National Security Council (NSC) spokesperson Andrienne Watson stated on March 8 that the NSC is unable to confirm the New York Times March 7 report that US officials reviewed unverified intelligence suggesting a pro-Ukrainian group conducted the attack.[17] Watson stated that the anonymous claims in the report did not come from downgraded intelligence shared by the US government and that sources were not authorized to speak on the US government’s behalf.[18]

German and Polish officials announced that Germany and Poland will deliver 28 Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine in March 2023, which will bolster Ukraine’s capabilities to conduct a counteroffensive amidst high Russian tank losses. German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius announced on March 8 that Germany will deliver 18 Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine by the end of March, and Polish Defense Minister Mariusz Błaszczak announced that Poland will deliver 10 more tanks by the end of the week.[19] These tanks, though below the quantities that the Ukrainian military needs, will augment Ukraine’s capabilities to conduct counteroffensive operations, particularly due to the degraded state of Russian armored units. Dutch open-source group Oryx reported that it verified Russian losses of over 1,000 T-72 tank variants in Ukraine as of March 8.[20] Oryx verified 1,079 destroyed Russian tanks and 549 captured Russian tanks as of February 24, and estimated on February 9 that Russian forces had committed roughly 3,000 tanks to the war in Ukraine.[21]

Key Takeaways

Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin announced on March 8 that Russian forces captured all of eastern Bakhmut, a claim consistent with available visual evidence
Russian forces remain unlikely to exploit a breakthrough beyond Bakhmut if Russian forces capture the city.
The Kremlin may be attempting to establish a new Russian government-controlled armed formation billed as a volunteer unit through the Russian state-owned energy company Gazprom.
A US official denied that US intelligence assessed that a pro-Ukrainian group sabotaged the Nord Stream pipelines in September 2022.
German and Polish officials announced that Germany and Poland will deliver 28 Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine in March 2023, which will bolster Ukraine’s capabilities to conduct a counteroffensive amidst high Russian tank losses.
Russian forces continued to conduct ground attacks on the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna line.
Russian forces continued offensive operations around Bakhmut on March 8 but have not succeeded in completing a turning movement around the city.
Russian forces continued offensive operations along the outskirts of Donetsk City.
Russian sources claimed that Ukrainian forces landed on the Dnipro River Delta islands for the third consecutive day.
The Kremlin is doubling down on reviving volunteer recruitment campaigns throughout Russia and occupied Ukraine.
Russian hospitals are continuing to form new medical centers in Russia in an effort to maximize the capacity for overfilling hospitals in occupied territories to treat wounded Russian servicemen.

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 to conduct ground attacks on the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna line on March 8. Geolocated footage posted on March 8 shows that Wagner Group forces made marginal territorial advances east of Spirne (25km southeast of Kreminna).[22] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces conducted unsuccessful operations northwest of Svatove near Hryanykivka (54km northwest) and around Kreminna near Nevske (19km northwest), Bilohorivka (12km south), Spirne, Vyimka (26km south), and Fedorivka (33km southwest).[23] Ukrainian Luhansk Oblast Head Serhiy Haidai reported battles near Stelmakhivka (15km west of Svatove), Novoselivske (15km northwest), and Kuzemivka (13km northwest).[24] A Russian source claimed that Ukrainian tactical groups probed Russian defenses near Hryanykivka.[25] A Russian source claimed that Russian forces made unspecified advances towards Kirovsk (17km west of Kreminna) and conducted ground attacks near Kreminna towards Nevske, Makiivka (22km northwest), and Bilohorivka.[26]

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

Russian forces continued offensive operations around Bakhmut on March 8 but have not succeeded in completing a turning movement around the city. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces continued storming Ukrainian positions in Bakhmut and conducted unsuccessful offensive operations within 11km north of Bakhmut near Berkhivka, Dubovo-Vasylivka, Orikhovo-Vasylivka, and Bohdanivka as well as within 6km southwest of Bakhmut near Ivanivske and Klishchiivka.[27] A Russian milblogger claimed that Wagner Group fighters advanced towards Zaliznianske (10km north of Bakhmut) and Hryhorivka (9km northwest of Bakhmut).[28] Geolocated footage published on March 8 indicates that Russian forces have likely advanced closer to a section of the T0504 highway in southwestern Bakhmut.[29]

Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin and several Russian milbloggers claimed on March 8 that Russian forces control all of Bakhmut east of the Bakhmutka River, as ISW assessed on March 7.[30] Russian milbloggers claimed that Wagner fighters continued attempts to advance in the northern and southern parts of Bakhmut and that Ukrainian forces are continuing to withdraw individual units from the city.[31] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces semi-encircled Ukrainian forces along the western banks of the Bakhmutka river in Bakhmut and that Ukrainian forces will not be able to withdraw from these areas without suffering heavy losses.[32] Russian milbloggers claimed on March 7 that Russian forces are interdicting all remaining Ukrainian ground lines of communications (GLOCs) into Bakhmut, including country roads between Chasiv Yar (11km west of Bakhmut) and Khromove (2km west of Bakhmut).[33] A Russian milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces conducted counterattacks near Ivanivske (6km west of Bakhmut) and towards Klishchiivka (6km southwest of Bakhmut) on March 7.[34] The Ukrainian General Staff’s reporting of Russian offensive actions near Klishchiivka, a settlement Russian forces have controlled since at least early January 2023, may indicate that Ukrainian forces have pushed Russian forces further away from the T0504 highway, although ISW has not seen any visual confirmation that Ukrainian forces have done so. A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces also advanced towards Stupochky (11km west of Bakhmut).[35]

Russian forces may be increasing the pace of offensive operations northwest of Bakhmut. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces conducted more than 30 assaults near Orikhovo-Vasylivka (11km northwest of Bakhmut), roughly thirty percent of the total Russian offensive operations that the General Staff reported in Ukraine on March 8.[36] The reported high pace of Russian assaults around Orikhovo-Vasylivka is likely too far northwest of Bakhmut to effectively aid in the attempted Russian turning movement around Bakhmut, given Orikhovo-Vasylivka is over eight km from the closest Ukrainian supply route through Khromove. Prominent Russian milbloggers are increasingly discussing the possibility of Ukrainian counteroffensives in the Bakhmut area, with some referencing Minkivka (14km northwest of Bakhmut) as a potential area where Ukrainian forces may start these operations.[37] Russian forces may be conducting a high pace of operations well northwest of Bakhmut to spoil future Ukrainian counterattacks that could relieve pressure on Ukrainian forces in Bakhmut.

Russian forces continued offensive operations along the outskirts of Donetsk City on March 8. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces conducted unsuccessful offensive operations within 17km north of Avdiivka near Kamianka and Oleksandropil and within 36km southwest of Avdiivka near Sieverne, Pervomaiske, Nevelske, Vodyane, Marinka, and Novomyhailivka.[38] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces conducted more than 20 offensive assaults near Marinka (27km southwest of Avdiivka), roughly a fifth of the total Russian offensive operations that the General Staff reported in Ukraine on March 8.[39] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces conducted assaults near Pobieda (32km southwest of Avdiivka) and Krasnohorivka (21km southwest of Avdiivka) as well as towards Ukrainian fortified areas near Avdiivka from Spartak (4km south of Avdiivka) and Opytne (3km south of Avdiivka).[40] Another milblogger claimed that Russian forces are conducting positional offensive operations near Avdiivka.[41] Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian forces resumed offensive operations in the direction of Krasnohorivka (9km north of Avdiivka) and captured Vesele (7km north of Avdiivka), although ISW has not observed any visual confirmation of these claims.[42] Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian forces intend to pressure Ukrainian forces in Avdiivka from the north in the direction of Vesele and from the south in the direction of Vodyane (8km southwest of Avdiivka), where the Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) 1st Slavic Brigade is reportedly attempting to advance.[43] Russian forces have increased their tempo of offensive operations north of Avdiivka in recent weeks, likely as part of a tactical shift similar to changing Russian tactics in assaults on Marinka. Russian forces have increasingly sought in recent weeks to pressure Ukrainian forces to leave Marinka through assaults on the north and south of the settlement, instead of continuing costly frontal assaults on heavily defended Ukrainian positions. Russian forces do not currently have the necessary combat power in the Avdiivka area to advance on Avdiivka from the north and south and are highly unlikely to do so unless they deploy significant reinforcements to the area.

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

Russian sources claimed that Ukrainian forces landed on the Dnipro River Delta islands for the third consecutive day on March 8.[44] A Russian source claimed on March 8 that Russian forces fired on Ukrainian positions on the Dnipro River Delta islands and that positional battles are ongoing on the island.[45] Ukraine’s Southern Operational Command reported on March 7 that Ukrainian forces destroyed a Russian ammunition depot on Velykyi Potemkin Island just southwest of Kherson City.[46]

Russian sources claimed on March 8 that Ukrainian forces conducted a UAV strike against Enerhodar, Zaporizhia Oblast, starting a fire in a field.[47] Russian sources claimed that the fire spread over four hectares of land, threatening a power line that supports Enerhodar and local infrastructure.[48] A Russian source claimed that the fire does not threaten the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP), however.[49] Ukrainian Mariupol Mayor Advisor Petro Andryushenko implied on March 8 that pro-Ukrainian actors may have conducted strikes that started the fire.[50] ISW has extensively reported on Russian forces’ militarization of the ZNPP and the surrounding area.[51]

Russian forces continued routine strikes against areas west of Hulyaipole and in Kherson, Dnipropetrovsk, and Mykolaiv oblasts on March 8.[52]

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

The Kremlin is doubling down on reviving volunteer recruitment campaigns throughout Russia and occupied Ukraine. Kremlin Spokesperson Dmitry Peskov reported that Russian President Vladimir Putin met with Zaporizhia Oblast Occupation Head Yevgeny Balitskyi on March 7 to discuss the security and legal status of the Sudoplatov volunteer battalion among other topics pertaining to the occupied region.[53] The Sudoplatov volunteer battalion is reportedly based out of occupied Zaporizhia Oblast and has Serbian, Turskish, and Scandinavian recruits. Balitskyi announced on March 6 that he planned to specifically ask Putin to resolve legal and bureaucratic problems that complicate the procurement of weapons and military equipment for volunteer units.[54] Balitskyi added that he would ask Putin to “get involved from his position because everyone understands that battalions are needed and that volunteers are needed.”[55] The official readout did not disclose Putin’s response to Balitskyi’s requests, but the Kremlin’s increasing public interactions with the topic of volunteer recruitment indicate that Putin is embracing this effort—likely to avoid declaring mobilization. The Kremlin barely acknowledged similar volunteer recruitment movements over the summer of 2022, and Putin’s direct recognition of problems with the volunteer recruitment campaign is likely an attempt to incentivize more Russians to enlist. These appearances suggest that the Kremlin hopes to restore public trust in enlistment by appearing to resolve persistent legal, financial, and social problems with the original volunteer recruitment campaign in the summer of 2022.

The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) appears to be renewing its competition with Wagner Group for recruits. The Russian government approved rules for issuing veteran certificates to volunteers, which would allow combat participants to apply for state benefits.[56] These rules only apply to “citizens who joined volunteer formations created by decision of the authorities to assist in the fulfillment of tasks assigned to the Russian Armed Forces” during the war in Ukraine.[57] Russian opposition outlet Meduza observed that while the Russian MoD denotes Wagner as a voluntary force, Wagner mercenaries are not legally covered by such provisions because they were not officially created by the Kremlin.[58] ISW previously assessed that Wagner operates as a quasi-official armed formation, which receives supplies from the Kremlin but is not legally tied to the Kremlin to nominally maintain its covert operations.[59] It is unclear how such rules will apply to other irregular formations such as the Russian Combat Army Reserve (BARS-2021) initiative, which the Russian General Staff originally created but then later haphazardly offloaded to quasi-official ultranationalist networks.[60]

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine continues to drain Russian federal subjects’ budgets. Governor of Primorsky Krai Oleg Kozhemyako stated on March 7 that his administration has spent more than four billion rubles (approximately $52.6 million) to support Russian servicemen and their families as of January 10.[61] Kozhemyanko claimed that Primorsky Krai spent 2.2 billion rubles on military equipment and supplies, while the rest went into different financial compensations. While ISW cannot independently verify Kozhemyako’s claims, it is very likely the Kremlin continues to heavily tap into regional budgets to finance its war. Primorsky Krai also had one of the most active volunteer recruitment campaigns over the summer of 2022 to reinforce the 155th Naval Infantry Brigade. ISW previously assessed that it costs a federal subject around $1.2 million per month to pay the salaries for a volunteer unit of 400 men receiving a monthly salary of $3,000, let alone sustain the unit.[62]

Members of the Russian ultranationalist community complained that Russian military officials are continuing to disregard the crucial role that Russian civil society and volunteer crowdfunding efforts play in procuring drones and quadcopters for the Russian war effort in favor of corruption schemes.[63] Some Russian milbloggers argued that the Russian MoD is not delivering on its advertised domestically produced drones and or developing new drones.[64]

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 withhold social benefits from Ukrainians refusing to obtain Russian passports in occupied territories. The Ukrainian Resistance Center reported on March 8 that Russian forces are ceasing social benefits payments to civilians in occupied territories if they do not obtain Russian passports.[65] The Center amplified Russian-appointed Zaporizhia Oblast occupation officials’ claims that Ukrainians in occupied Zaporizhia Oblast must not only obtain Russian passports but also denounce their Ukrainian citizenship, even though Russian law allows dual citizenship.[66] Luhansk Oblast Head Serhiy Haidai stated on March 8 that Russian occupation authorities are not paying workers in occupied Luhansk Oblast who do not present Russian documents.[67] The Ukrainian Resistance Center stated that the Kremlin intends to issue passports to 80 percent of residents in occupied territories before the planned September 2023 local elections.[68]

Luhansk Oblast Head Serhiy Haidai stated on March 8 that Russian occupation authorities are not paying workers who moved from Russia to occupied Luhansk Oblast the amounts they had been promised.[69] ISW has consistently reported that Russian occupation authorities have promised high salaries to incentivize Russian citizens to work in occupied territories in an effort to staff industries that struggle to retain the necessary personnel to maintain operations.

Russian hospitals are continuing to form new medical centers in Russia in an effort to treat wounded Russian servicemen that cannot be treated in overfilled hospitals in occupied Ukraine. A Russian milblogger claimed on March 8 that the Moscow-based Voronovskoe Medical Center will construct a new hospital in Moscow Oblast to treat wounded Russian servicemen and Ukrainian civilians in Ukraine as hospitals in occupied territories consistently remain overfilled and understaffed.[70] Russian occupation officials may use medical treatment schemes to deport more Ukrainian civilians to Russia, however.

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.

Nothing significant to report.

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

[1] https://t.me/concordgroup_official/564

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

[3] https://t.me/boris_rozhin/79924

[4] https://t.me/concordgroup_official/565; https://t.me/concordgroup_official/566

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

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

[7] https://www.barrons.com/news/bakhmut-may-fall-in-coming-days-nato-chief-... https://www.rferl.org/a/ukraine-nato-bakhmut-fall/32308660.html

[8] https://www.nytimes.com/live/2023/03/08/world/russia-ukraine-news/the-us...

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

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

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

[12] https://t.me/voenkorKotenok/45904; https://t.me/voenkorKotenok/45911

[13] https://t.me/voenkorKotenok/45904

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

[15] https://ria dot ru/20230206/okhrana-1850151290.html

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

[17] https://twitter.com/NSC_Spox/status/1633484265064132610?s=20

[18] https://twitter.com/NSC_Spox/status/1633484265064132610?s=20

[19] https://twitter.com/BMVg_Bundeswehr/status/1633415431489822720?cxt=HHwWg... https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/poland-says-it-will-send-10-more-le...

[20] https://twitter.com/RomanObens/status/1633154700303298564

[21] https://www.oryxspioenkop.com/2022/02/attack-on-europe-documenting-equip...

[22] https://t.me/ngu_war_for_peace/9109; https://twitter.com/blinzka/status... https://twitter.com/SerDer_Daniels/status/1633481487101091842

[23]https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid02FNbzX8ysjqbJLgxhMk... https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid0DjvK6eXSGtmfresPJDf...

[24] `https://t.me/luhanskaVTSA/9131; https://t.me/serhiy_hayday/9591

[25] https://t.me/rybar/44359

[26]https://www.facebook.com/Thebaltimorewashingtoninternationalpenshow/post...

[27]https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid0DjvK6eXSGtmfresPJDf...

[28] https://t.me/wargonzo/11287

[29] https://twitter.com/herooftheday10/status/1633365143496146944; https://twitter.com/PauliusZaleckas/status/1633496084394770432

[30] https://t.me/concordgroup_official/565 ; https://t.me/kommunist/16251;... ; https://t.me/rybar/44365 ; https://t.me/brussinf/5728 ; . https://t.me/milchronicles/1635 ; https://t.me/brussinf/5730; https...

[31] https://t.me/milchronicles/1635 ; https://t.me/brussinf/5728 ; htt...

[32] https://t.me/rybar/44367

[33] https://t.me/rybar/44359 ; https://t.me/voenkorKotenok/45903; https... ;

[34] https://t.me/voenkorKotenok/45903; https://t.me/boris_rozhin/79924

[35] https://t.me/wargonzo/11287

[36]https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid0DjvK6eXSGtmfresPJDf...

[37] https://t.me/rybar/44367 ; https://t.me/voenkorKotenok/45903; https:/...

[38]https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid02FNbzX8ysjqbJLgxhMk...

[39]https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid0DjvK6eXSGtmfresPJDf...

[40] https://t.me/wargonzo/11287; https://t.me/wargonzo/11288

[41] https://t.me/rybar/44370

[42] https://t.me/rybar/44370 ; https://t.me/voenkorKotenok/45912 ; https...

[43] https://t.me/voenkorKotenok/45912 ; https://t.me/milinfolive/97771 ; https://t.me/rybar/44370

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

[45] https://t.me/boris_rozhin/79955

[46]https://www.facebook.com/sergey.khlan/posts/pfbid09RcLGu2tcXaYVhVr7qKqHo...

[47] https://t.me/energodar_ru/5084; https://t.me/voenkorKotenok/45916; htt...

[48] https://t.me/energodar_ru/5084; https://t.me/voenkorKotenok/45916; htt...

[49] https://t.me/energodar_ru/5084

[50] https://t.me/andriyshTime/7455

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

[52] https://t.me/gachi_defence/7961; https://t.me/zoda_gov_ua/17281; https...

[53] https://t.me/vrogov/8030; https://tass dot ru/politika/17215631; https://tass dot ru/politika/17202615

[54] https://tass dot ru/politika/17202615

[55] https://tass dot ru/politika/17202615

[56] https://meduza dot io/news/2023/03/07/pravitelstvo-rf-utverdilo-pravila-vydachi-dobrovoltsam-udostovereniya-veterana-boevyh-deystviy-ono-pozvolit-im-poluchat-lgoty; static.government dot ru/media/files/2MNbSDPZ5RZDuFCUpmDjxljtdRRqgC25.pdf

[57] https://t.me/meduzalive/79880

[58] https://t.me/meduzalive/79880

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

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

[61] https://tass dot ru/obschestvo/17208941; http://notes.citeam.org/mobi-mar-6-7#o91t

[62] https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-volunteer-units-an...

[63] https://t.me/MedvedevVesti/13299; https://t.me/rybar/44371 ; https://t.me/NeoficialniyBeZsonoV/23034

[64] https://t.me/MedvedevVesti/13299; https://t.me/NeoficialniyBeZsonoV/230...

[65] https://sprotyv.mod dot gov.ua/2023/03/08/vorog-perestane-platyty-soczdopomogu-meshkanczyam-tot-yakshho-ti-ne-otrymayut-pasport-rf/

[66] https://sprotyv.mod dot gov.ua/2023/03/08/vorog-perestane-platyty-soczdopomogu-meshkanczyam-tot-yakshho-ti-ne-otrymayut-pasport-rf/

[67] https://t.me/luhanskaVTSA/9125; https://t.me/luhanskaVTSA/9126

[68] https://sprotyv.mod dot gov.ua/2023/03/08/vorog-perestane-platyty-soczdopomogu-meshkanczyam-tot-yakshho-ti-ne-otrymayut-pasport-rf/

[69] https://t.me/luhanskaVTSA/9125; https://t.me/luhanskaVTSA/9126

[70] https://t.me/epoddubny/15113

Pentagon Blocks Sharing Evidence of Possible Russian War Crimes With Hague Court

The New York Times · by Charlie Savage · March 8, 2023

President Biden has not acted to resolve a dispute that pits the Defense Department against other agencies.

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Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III objected to giving the International Criminal Court evidence on Russian war crimes.Credit...Michael A. McCoy for The New York Times

March 8, 2023, 1:43 p.m. ET

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon is blocking the Biden administration from sharing evidence with the International Criminal Court in The Hague gathered by American intelligence agencies about Russian atrocities in Ukraine, according to current and former officials briefed on the matter.

American military leaders oppose helping the court investigate Russians because they fear setting a precedent that might help pave the way for it to prosecute Americans. The rest of the administration, including intelligence agencies and the State and Justice Departments, favors sharing the evidence with the court, the officials said.

President Biden has yet to resolve the impasse, officials said.

The evidence is said to include details relevant to an investigation the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Karim Khan, began after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine a year ago. The information reportedly includes material about decisions by Russian officials to deliberately target civilian infrastructure and to abduct thousands of Ukrainian children from occupied territory.

In December, Congress modified longstanding legal restrictions on American help to the court, allowing the United States to assist with its investigations and eventual prosecutions related to the war in Ukraine. But inside the Biden administration, a policy dispute over whether to do so continues to play out behind closed doors.

The National Security Council convened a cabinet-level “principals committee” meeting on Feb. 3 in an attempt to resolve the dispute, the officials said, but Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III continued to object. Mr. Biden has not yet made a decision, the officials said.

Most of the people who described the internal dispute did so on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive deliberations.

But Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, who helped push Congress to ease the restrictions last year on aiding the International Criminal Court, confirmed the parameters of the dispute and blamed the Defense Department for its reluctance.

The State of the War

Bakhmut: A Ukrainian official claimed that Russia’s Wagner mercenary group has been forced to use more of its professional recruits in the embattled city to replace its depleted supply of enlisted prisoners. The Ukrainian military sees an opportunity in that.
Nord Stream Pipelines: The sabotage in September of the pipelines has become one of the central mysteries of the war. A Times investigation offers new insight into who might have been behind it.
Action in the Skies: Against the odds, Ukraine’s helicopter brigades are using aging vehicles to fight a better equipped adversary.

“D.O.D. opposed the legislative change — it passed overwhelmingly — and they are now trying to undermine the letter and spirit of the law,” Mr. Graham said. “It seems to me that D.O.D. is the problem child here, and the sooner we can get the information into the hands of the I.C.C., the better off the world will be.”

Representatives at the Pentagon, State Department, Justice Department, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined to comment or did not respond to requests for comment.

Adrienne Watson, a spokeswoman for the National Security Council, provided a statement that did not address the Pentagon’s opposition to sharing evidence. But she said the government “supports a range of investigations to identify and hold accountable those who are responsible” for Russian war crimes, including through Ukrainian prosecutors, the United Nations “and the International Criminal Court, among others.”

“Russian forces have been committing war crimes and crimes against humanity in Ukraine, and the Ukrainian people deserve justice,” she said, adding, “We are also working to expose Russia’s atrocities in Ukraine so the world can see what Russian forces are doing.”

The International Criminal Court was created two decades ago as a standing venue to investigate war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity under a 1998 treaty called the Rome Statute. In the past, the United Nations Security Council had established ad hoc tribunals to address atrocities in places like the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda.

Many democracies joined the International Criminal Court, including close American allies like Britain. But the United States has long kept its distance, concerned that the tribunal could someday try to prosecute Americans.

What we consider before using anonymous sources. Do the sources know the information? What’s their motivation for telling us? Have they proved reliable in the past? Can we corroborate the information? Even with these questions satisfied, The Times uses anonymous sources as a last resort. The reporter and at least one editor know the identity of the source.

Learn more about our process.

Administrations of both parties have also taken the position that the court should not exercise jurisdiction over citizens from a country that is not a party to the treaty, like the United States and Russia — even when the alleged war crimes take place in the territory of a country that did, like Ukraine and Afghanistan.

The International Criminal Court was created two decades ago as a standing venue to investigate war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity.Credit...Dmitry Kostyukov for The New York Times

President Bill Clinton signed the Rome Statute in 2000 but, calling it flawed, did not send it to Senate for ratification. In 2002, President George W. Bush essentially withdrew that signature. Congress, for its part, enacted laws in 1999 and 2002 that limited what support the government could provide the court.

Still, by the end of the Bush administration, the State Department declared that the United States accepted the “reality” of the court and acknowledged that it “enjoys a large body of international support.” And the Obama administration took a step toward helping the court by offering rewards for the capture of fugitive warlords in Africa the court had indicted.

In 2017, however, the top prosecutor for the court at the time tried to investigate the torture of terrorism detainees during the Bush administration as part of a larger look at the Afghanistan war. In response, the Trump administration imposed sanctions on court personnel, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo denounced it as corrupt.

A thaw returned in 2021, when the Biden administration revoked those sanctions and Mr. Khan, newly appointed as prosecutor, dropped the investigation. Then Russia invaded Ukraine last year, prompting a bipartisan push to hold President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and others in his military chain of command to account — and setting off debates inside the administration and in Congress about whether and how to help the court.

In late December, lawmakers enacted two laws aimed at increasing the chances that Russians will be held accountable for war crimes in Ukraine.

One was a stand-alone bill expanding the jurisdiction of American prosecutors to charge foreigners for war crimes committed abroad. The other, a provision about the International Criminal Court embedded in the large appropriations bill Congress passed in late December, received little attention at the time.

But that provision was significant. While the U.S. government remains prohibited from providing funding and certain other aid to the court, Congress created an exception that allows it to assist with “investigations and prosecutions of foreign nationals related to the situation in Ukraine, including to support victims and witnesses.”

Despite that legal change and Congress’s signal of support, the Pentagon has stood firm that the United States should not help the International Criminal Court investigate Russians for their actions in Ukraine since Russia is not a party to the treaty that established the court.

That resistance has attracted criticism both inside and outside the executive branch. Some legal specialists contend that there is scant benefit to hewing to that position because the rest of the world essentially rejects that interpretation.

They argue that the United States would win more support over a hypothetical attempt to prosecute an American by using a narrower argument: that under the treaty, the court should only be used for countries that lack functioning investigative court systems capable of addressing serious international crimes by their citizens, and the United States does not qualify.

John Bellinger, a former top lawyer for the National Security Council and the State Department in the Bush administration, argued that if the court does ever try to prosecute an American, “we will have more allies who agree with the narrower argument than the broader argument.” The Pentagon, he added, should reconsider the potential advantages of helping the court.

“I also think the Department of Defense needs to look at the I.C.C. not purely in defensive terms — how it might screw us — but how can we use the I.C.C., the successor to the Nuremberg tribunals, as a tool to investigate and prosecute Russian war crimes,” Mr. Bellinger added.

Mr. Graham said that the rest of the government had signed off on sharing the evidence and was frustrated by the Pentagon. He noted that he had spoken about the matter with Attorney General Merrick B. Garland, who reiterated his commitment to helping Ukrainian prosecutors pursue Russian war crimes during a visit to Lviv last week.

Pentagon leaders, Mr. Graham said, “have raised their concerns, and they are not illegitimate, but I think on balance what we did in the legislation is the way to go and I want them to honor what we did.”

“We did this with the administration,” he added. “It was a collaborative effort.”

The New York Times · by Charlie Savage · March 8, 2023

4. U.S. Probes Whether Pro-Ukraine Group Had Role in Nord Stream Explosions

U.S. Probes Whether Pro-Ukraine Group Had Role in Nord Stream Explosions

Western officials no longer suspect Russia of ordering alleged attack against undersea gas pipelines

https://www.wsj.com/articles/in-nord-stream-probe-german-investigators-search-boat-that-may-have-carried-explosives-379505f9

By Bojan PancevskiFollow

, William BostonFollow

and Vivian SalamaFollow

Updated March 8, 2023 7:09 pm ET

U.S. officials are investigating the possibility that a pro-Ukrainian group was responsible for last year’s attack on the Nord Stream natural-gas pipeline in the Baltic Sea, a senior U.S. official said, while Germany said its investigators have searched a ship in connection with the sabotage.

The assessment by U.S. intelligence that a pro-Ukrainian group could have been responsible isn’t definitive, the senior official said. But it adds to the growing sense among investigators in the U.S. and Europe that neither Russian-government nor pro-Russian operatives were behind the sabotage.

The U.S. official said that investigators had no indication that the alleged perpetrators were linked to the government of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and that U.S. intelligence officials are focused on potential nonstate actors as the possible culprits.

Ukrainian officials denied any involvement in the explosions. Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Mr. Zelensky, said his country had no reason to carry out such an attack because it didn’t advance any of Ukraine’s core interests.

Mr. Podolyak said Russia benefits most from such an attack, because Moscow can use it as a false flag to blame Ukraine and deepen rifts in the Western alliance backing Kyiv.

“We certainly have nothing to do with this,” he said of the incident. “Neither our president, nor our government, intelligence agencies or society have anything to do with this. What’s more, these statements about a pro-Ukrainian group are odd, especially as the nationality of its members isn’t specified.”

The New York Times first reported that investigators were looking into the possibility pro-Ukrainian groups had attacked the pipeline.

The Nord Stream and Nord Stream 2 pipelines, built to transfer gas from Russia to Europe, were damaged in explosions in September, sparking several international investigations into the cause of the blasts. At the time, both pipelines were filled with natural gas but weren’t in use. Russia had stopped gas supplies through Nord Stream and Germany had halted certification of Nord Stream 2 days before Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.

Damage to the Nord Stream gas pipeline in the Baltic Sea after a September explosion.

PHOTO: TROND LARSEN/TT VIA ZUMA PRESS

Sweden, Denmark and Germany, the three countries closest to the site of the blasts, started investigations after the incident. While the investigators quickly determined that the blasts were the result of sabotage, they have yet to reach a conclusion on who might be responsible.

Initially, German officials said they believed Russia was the most likely culprit, in part because the explosions had left a single strand of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline intact. Russia had been pushing Germany to certify Nord Stream 2 so that it could start operating. The explosions left it as the only direct natural-gas link between Germany and Russia.

Despite these initial suspicions, the investigations never ruled out Ukraine, according to people familiar with the probes. In the U.S., the administration fears that a conclusion that pro-Ukrainian operatives sabotaged the pipeline could rattle the NATO alliance, and in particular Germany’s relationship with Ukraine, the official said.

Between June and July 2022, months before the Nord Stream attack, the Central Intelligence Agency sent out a warning to its German counterpart, the BND, as well as other European services, that a group might be preparing an attack on the pipeline, according to intelligence officials familiar with the notification.

The warning included information about three Ukrainian nationals who were trying to rent out ships in countries bordering the Baltic Sea, including Sweden, these officials said.

As early as October, U.S. officials such as CIA chief William Burns and national security adviser Jake Sullivan were considering the possibility—among others—that Ukraine was behind the attack, according to a person who spoke with both men at the time, without saying on what this assessment was based. The CIA declined to comment. A spokeswoman for the National Security Council on Wednesday disputed as inaccurate the characterization of Mr. Sullivan.

Germany’s federal prosecutor general, Peter Frank, who is overseeing the investigation in that country, said the same month that he had no evidence of Russian involvement.

By February, German officials had all but ruled out a Russian sabotage operation, although they maintained that the investigation was still considering all possibilities, according to two officials familiar with the probes.

The U.S. doesn’t think Russia sabotaged the pipeline, a U.S. official said this week, while cautioning that the investigations are continuing.

While neither Russia nor Ukraine would have an obvious motive for ordering the raid—or one sufficient to offset the potential diplomatic risks—Western experts said both had the capacity to conduct such an operation. A former Ukrainian intelligence chief who had been involved in organizing special operations abroad echoed the assessment, saying that Ukraine was capable of conducting the raid.

Any evidence of official Ukrainian involvement in the Nord Stream blast would be politically damaging for Kyiv’s partners in Europe, especially for Germany, one of Ukraine’s largest military supporters. While recent surveys show a majority of the German public still supports Ukraine against Russia’s invasion, voters have become increasingly concerned about the conflict spilling over into Western Europe and would favor a quick resolution.

The Swedish, Danish and German investigators have been sharing their findings among themselves and with the U.S., according to several officials.

Germany’s federal prosecutor, responsible for investigations into serious crimes against national security such as terrorism, said Wednesday that between Jan. 18 and 20, investigators searched a ship that they had found “in connection with a suspicious ship rental.”

Baltic Sea Bubbles Up Amid Nord Stream Pipelines’ Mysterious Leaks

Australia to Buy U.S. Nuclear-Powered Submarines in Naval Expansion

Deal set to be announced at meeting of Biden and leaders of Australia and U.K.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/australia-to-buy-u-s-nuclear-powered-submarines-in-naval-expansion-1bd94418

By Michael R. GordonFollow and Nancy A. YoussefFollow

Updated March 8, 2023 9:20 pm ET

The U.S. will speed up Australia’s acquisition of nuclear-powered submarines by arranging for Canberra’s first few subs to be built in the U.S., according to people familiar with the still-confidential plan.

The arrangement is part of a multifaceted plan to be announced Monday in San Diego at a meeting attended by President Biden, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.

The plan to sell up to five U.S. Virginia-class submarines to Australia is intended as a stopgap to provide the country with nuclear-powered subs by the mid-2030s.

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Submarine production would later shift to Britain and Australia, which would produce a sub with a new design that would incorporate American technology, the people said.

Other facets of the plan call for the U.S. to step up its port visits to Australia in coming years and to establish the capability to rotate American attack subs through Perth, Australia, by 2027.

All three countries would invest heavily in upgrading the defense industrial base, and Australia might even make a contribution to expanding U.S. capacity to construct submarines.

The White House and the Australian Embassy in Washington declined to comment on the plan.

The alliance is called Aukus, an acronym for Australia, the U.K. and the U.S. In addition to collaborating on nuclear-submarine technology, the countries intend to cooperate on artificial intelligence, autonomous systems, hypersonic missiles and undersea technologies, among other areas, the people said. The submarine will be the centerpiece of the Monday meeting.

U.S. officials argue that the Aukus deal will result in more-capable Australia and British submarines and, thus, help preserve the Western lead over China in undersea military technology.

They add that it will strengthen the alliance between the three countries as the Pentagon undertakes a major defense transformation to deal with China’s growing military strength.

The Wall Street Journal reported in September that Australia was in talks to buy Virginia-class submarines from the U.S. under an arrangement to expedite the country’s acquisition of nuclear-powered subs.

Nuclear-powered submarines are far more capable than their conventional counterparts because they can operate stealthily underwater over great distances and long periods. The nuclear-powered subs for Australia would only carry conventional weapons.

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is expected to attend the announcement of the submarine deal.

PHOTO: ROHAN THOMSON/BLOOMBERG NEWS

Australia has six diesel-electric Collins-class subs, but they will be phased out in coming years. Under the Aukus plan, Australia is expected to buy at least eight nuclear-powered subs.

The Virginia-class submarines that Australia would buy might be a mix of attack submarines already operated by the U.S. and ones that would be manufactured from scratch.

The details remain to be determined, and some officials say that Australia might buy as few as three subs.

The Aukus deal has been controversial among some U.S. lawmakers because it would provide submarines to Australia that would otherwise have gone to the U.S. Navy, which has been struggling to boost its own fleet of attack subs.

But the plan calls for a major investment to boost the U.S. capacity to produce submarines.

“I think it is a force multiplier,” said Rep. Joe Courtney, a Connecticut Democrat whose district includes the submarine manufacturer General Dynamics Electric Boat. “Don’t count out the U.S. industrial base to grow and take on more work.”

Building a nuclear submarine is a lengthy process. Though the Navy has budgeted for two attack submarines a year, the U.S. had been producing them at the lesser rate of 1.5 annually during that period, based on the latest figures provided by the Congressional Budget Office, said Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Hudson Institute. It takes roughly six years to build a sub, Mr. Clark said.

“If the Aukus announcement isn’t matched by a generational investment in our submarine industrial base, it’s nearly pointless,” a congressional aide said.

Sen. Roger Wicker of Mississippi, the ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said he supported the Aukus plan, but added that the Biden administration needed to do much more to strengthen the U.S. defense industrial base.

The agreement “is a historic step forward which will advance our trilateral cooperation with Australia and the United Kingdom in the Indo-Pacific by strengthening the fleet of one of our leading Pacific allies and sending a strong signal to China,” Mr. Wicker said in a statement to The Wall Street Journal.

“However, the Biden administration has never asked Congress for the type of generational investment of resources, authorities, and political capital in our submarine industrial base to meet our own Navy’s submarine requirements, let alone additional requirements,” Mr. Wicker said.

Reuters earlier reported parts of the deal.

Biden administration officials said that substantial spending on the defense industrial base is now being planned.

In his 2024 fiscal budget plan, Mr. Biden is expected to call for a defense budget of more than $835 billion, according to people familiar with the matter. That is a higher recommended defense budget than last year’s request, against a backdrop of the continuing conflict in Ukraine and rising tensions with China.

Numerous other steps are being planned to strengthen cooperation between the allies. Five Australian personnel were accepted last year into the U.S. nuclear propulsion program, and several other Australians have been accepted into the British Navy’s nuclear courses. Australian ship workers are expected to come to the U.S. for training.

The decision to have U.S. submarines operate from Perth will provide Canberra with an opportunity to learn how to support nuclear-powered subs.

U.S. officials say that such an arrangement will hold strategic advances for the American military as Guam, which has a major U.S. Navy port, is within range of Chinese missiles.

Peter Dean, who was a senior adviser to a recent Australian government review of its military, said any nuclear-powered submarine operated by Australia would increase the nation’s deterrent effect and create more dilemmas for any potential adversaries, possibly dissuading a rival from aggressive moves.

“There is a proliferation of submarines in the Indo-Pacific region, and to be able to maintain competitiveness, Australia needs to make the step up into this technology,” Mr. Dean, now foreign-policy and defense director at the University of Sydney’s U.S. Studies Centre, said of nuclear-powered submarines. “It’s all about deterrence. The hope is you have them so you never have to use them.”

Mike Cherney contributed to this article.

Write to Michael R. Gordon at michael.gordon@wsj.com and Nancy A. Youssef at nancy.youssef@wsj.com

Appeared in the March 9, 2023, print edition as 'Deal Will Hasten Nuclear Subs to Australia'.

6. Is America’s China Policy Too Hawkish?

Excerpts:

The problem with the tone of the current debate, according to Cornell University professor and former State Department advisor Jessica Chen Weiss, is that policymakers are locked in an escalatory spiral. Anyone who seeks to diverge from the consensus is accused of having sympathy for the other side.

...

FP: You know, Jessica, since you’ve left government, you’ve become a sort of rallying figure for the argument that you’re making—basically a call for a more nuanced and moderate debate on China policy. Are you finding that people in power in America and elsewhere are responding to what you’re saying?

JCW: So many people have come forward. I’ve heard individually from people inside and outside the administration that they appreciate this call to think about what it is that we’re competing for. Where is this all going? And if we don’t like where this trajectory is pointing, what might we do today to imagine and work toward a different future?

And so I think that there really is appetite for this discussion. I hope that collectively we can come together across partisan party lines to identify what is the future that we want to be leading rather than solely thinking about trying to outcompete China. The frank reality is that we are among each other’s largest trading partners, and we’re not going to be able to meet our own objectives in the areas of decarbonization or the green energy transition without continuing to utilize some degree of inputs from China and Chinese companies. We’re just too integrated to be completely pulled apart. And so this idea that we are just going to defeat the other doesn’t really square with the reality that we exist in.

Is America’s China Policy Too Hawkish?

Jessica Chen Weiss on why she thinks competition with China is consuming U.S. foreign policy—and what the United States needs to do about it.

By Ravi Agrawal, the editor in chief of Foreign Policy.

Is America’s China Policy Too Hawkish?

Foreign Policy · by Ravi Agrawal · March 8, 2023

There’s a rare bipartisan consensus in Washington that China’s rise must be countered in the strongest way possible. Democrats and Republicans seemingly compete over who can be tougher on Beijing.

The problem with the tone of the current debate, according to Cornell University professor and former State Department advisor Jessica Chen Weiss, is that policymakers are locked in an escalatory spiral. Anyone who seeks to diverge from the consensus is accused of having sympathy for the other side.

Weiss, a China specialist, worked on the State Department’s policy planning staff in 2021 and 2022. Since then, she has widely published her concerns, been cited in Foreign Policy articles, and been the subject of a New Yorker profile. Are her warnings valid? Is she accurately assessing the nature of China’s challenge? And if she is, how should policymakers adapt?

To find out, I interviewed Weiss on FP Live. Subscribers can watch the full interview on the video box atop this page. What follows is a condensed and edited transcript.

Foreign Policy: Let’s start with the obvious: What exactly worries you about America’s China policy?

Jessica Chen Weiss: The concern is that there are really two muscles here. One is the one that wants to outcompete and beat China, and then there is the one that asks “What do we stand for? What are we trying to achieve?” In my view, the former is really dominating our efforts and crowding out an affirmative, inclusive vision of the future that we’re trying to create.

I want to give the Biden administration credit for its China strategy, in which the first two pillars—invest at home, and align with our allies and partners—are essential components of success.

Compete, which represents the third pillar, really needs more work or it’s going to continue to veer toward conflict and will continue to place strain on the international order. Ultimately, it could potentially erode U.S. leadership. It’s good that the Biden administration is no longer trying to transform China, as National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan has written. That’s impractical and likely counterproductive.

Competition as a framework is silent on what it is that we are competing for and what is in and out of bounds as we try to compete. It means we’re frequently reactive. It means we’re frequently having trouble prioritizing which of the many things that one could react to is a real threat and needs to be addressed. It means that if you want to accomplish anything, whether you’re a politician or a bureaucrat, you tend to frame it in terms of countering or competing with China, and that creates incentives to just get even more hawkish rather than carefully assessing the shape of the challenge and the costs and benefits of different policy responses.

FP: How did we get here? I ask this because China’s rise isn’t exactly new.

JCW: It really began under the Obama administration as China became much more aggressive abroad and repressive at home, and that occasioned the beginnings of this rebalance in U.S. foreign policy, more towards deterrence and, remaining engaged, but nonetheless increasingly hedging against a more aggressive China.

It was really under the Trump administration that the U.S. assessment became especially extreme with words like the United States feeling that it was being “raped” by China and that [the] two were in an existential struggle. That really changed the terms of the conversation and made it very difficult in the context of our polarized politics.“The current escalation, this tit-for-tat spiral that we’re in, serves nobody.”

When the Biden administration came into office, they had very little space to undo some of the more counterproductive measures that the Trump administration had put in place, because that would potentially open them up to being seen as unnecessarily soft on China and make it harder to do things like get key nominees confirmed.

FP: One could argue that the Biden administration has deployed more sober rhetoric than the previous administration, but the policies from both were certainly designed to hurt. Which of the two matter more, policy or rhetoric?

JCW: Both contribute and matter a lot because the rhetoric is oftentimes what the other side uses to point to as evidence of a much more hostile intent, even if the actions may or may not keep pace with those threats.

The behavior is ultimately what I think both sides look to, to see whether the threats, but also the assurances of the other side, are credible. Both sides in this atmosphere of intense distrust look toward the preparations that each side is taking, whether that is to stand on principle or to prepare for a potential conflict and sees that as evidence and its determination to use those capabilities for ill.

FP: Which U.S. policies specifically are counterproductive?

JCW: The tariffs are one such example, hurting American consumers and businesses as much as they are helping. They don’t seem to be moving the needle in terms of China’s economic practices that we continue to find objectionable.

Another area where I’m very concerned are the efforts to protect research security and look at all potential students and scholars as potential spies. That was the language of the previous administration, even though the policies were a little bit more targeted to screen for potential ties to entities that had affiliation with the Chinese military. The Biden administration has changed that language.

However, in talking with Chinese American or American scholars of Chinese origin or descent today, they feel that the climate is worse, that the Biden administration is just as determined, if not more, to prosecute. That’s creating a broader chilling effect here, and we are not seizing the opportunity to reverse some of the damage, to attract and retain talent from around the world.

FP: I’d like you to address a general critique of the argument you’ve been making. Several scholars say that there simply isn’t a basis for the cooperation you advocate for, because there’s no evidence that Beijing wants to reciprocate.

JCW: I have two ways of responding to that. The first is that we have to try, because the alternative is to take an increasingly fatalistic attitude toward the possibility of a crisis or conflict that would devastate the global economy, possibly lead to the deaths of many on the island of Taiwan, and tens of thousands of casualties on both sides.

The second is that, yes, it’s hard to find evidence on the Chinese side to reciprocate, but you might also from Beijing’s perspective look at the United States and say they see very little evidence that there’s anybody in the United States that’s interested in allowing China to become a respected equal on the world stage. This is a problem that requires thoughtful people to test the proposition of a more potentially moderate foreign policy on the part of Beijing. This is not about accommodating China. This is about finding ways reciprocally to reduce tensions in ways that wouldn’t require either side to fundamentally make concessions or even relinquish competition for decades to come. But the current trajectory that we are collectively on serves nobody’s interest. It is only raising the temperature and bringing forward a potentially avoidable crisis.

FP: Do the Chinese have a nuanced understanding of the shifts in American policy you’ve been describing from the Obama presidency through the Trump years and now to the Biden administration?

JCW: It’s something that they do track. There’s a tendency to privilege the most extreme voices on both sides. They tend to underweight those who take a more moderate, less zero-sum approach.

There is widespread recognition in China that domestic politics in the United States is leading to an increased tendency to stand tough against Beijing, and part of that then also leads to unconditional support for Taiwan. That’s one of the more dangerous dynamics that we are seeing today.

Part of the challenge here is creating an environment in which debate on both sides doesn’t come at the cost of perceived resolve, and once the relationship becomes increasingly adversarial, I think you’re going to continue to see that dynamic. For example, Representative Mike Gallagher at the opening hearing of the select committee hearing last week described this as an existential struggle on the seas, and that the [Chinese Communist Party (CCP)] posed a threat to life as we know it in the 21st century. But he also said that the CCP is counting on its friends in the United States to push back against their efforts. That is creating a framework in which anybody who wants to engage in a more rational, measured debate over China’s intentions and U.S. policy responses, is likely to be smeared or marginalized as somebody who is sympathetic to the CCP.

FP: Let’s flip the headline question we began with. Is China too consumed by competition with the United States?

JCW: I think it is. It is also one of the problems of the dynamic that we’ve described, where each side is increasingly engaged in going around the world, thwarting each other.

The burden is on decision-makers on both sides of the Pacific to put forward a more fulsome vision of an inclusive order where the two sides could agree to not necessarily always be engaged in trying to counter or undermine the other.

FP: Are there areas where Beijing perceives threats from the United States that may actually not be that scary?

JCW: The Chinese Communist Party believes that the United States is both intent on containing China—using Taiwan to that effect—and undermining the CCP. But the Biden administration is not intent on undermining the CCP or necessarily using Taiwan to that end. There are people who are quite outspoken here in the United States, some of whom, not too long ago, held power, in the Trump administration. It’s not paranoia, but we have to look at the balance of voices and what is the current constellation.

Right now, we do have a window of opportunity with the leadership in the United States and the Biden administration wanting competition without conflict and where you have in the Chinese leadership, at least currently with acute domestic problems, a genuine interest in stabilizing the relationship.“The current trajectory that we are collectively on serves nobody’s interest. It is only raising the temperature and bringing forward a potentially avoidable crisis.”

The current escalation, this tit-for-tat spiral that we’re in, serves nobody. The challenge here, on both sides, is breaking out of the mindset that deterrence is just about threats and threatening punishment. It’s not just about capabilities and hitting each other as hard as they can. It’s also about making those punishments conditional, which implies an assurance that if Washington doesn’t escalate or if Beijing doesn’t escalate, that both sides can expect a better outcome. And right now, that effort to invest in the credibility of threat is coming at the expense of the credibility of those assurances, and that is feeding this cycle. And that’s on Beijing as much as it is on Washington to make those kind of choices clear.

FP: What do other large countries like India or Indonesia or Nigeria think about the U.S.-China relationship right now?

JCW: Other countries around the world have been pretty clear in saying that they don’t want to choose between the United States and China, and they worry about a future in which the United States and China are simply measuring success in terms of defeating or getting the best of the other. That’s one of the reasons why I’ve suggested that the lodestar for U.S. policy has to be what we want rather than what we fear.

None of our allies and partners, let alone the rest of the world, want to see this relationship continue to spiral. Ultimately, if the Unites States is to forge a broader coalition, we need to ultimately make clear what it is that we are standing for because prioritizing competition and maintaining, as Jake Sullivan said, an absolute rather than a relative lead over China, will introduce more friction between the United States and its allies and partners and the rest of the world.

This framing of global politics as being a struggle between autocracies and democracies makes it harder to build this more inclusive coalition, including one that tackles challenges that exist inside of autocracies. Governance is something that all leaders can want, regardless of the regime type in which they happen to lead. That framing also makes it harder to prevent competition from becoming more conflictual, pushing China and Russia closer together, for example, rather than encouraging limits to their cooperation.

FP: When you look at how U.S. politicians have been talking about Taiwan, and the broader U.S. policy on Taiwan, what’s your sense of what’s going wrong?

JCW: My sense here is that things are going wrong in part because there’s been this premium placed on symbolism over substance and the belief that to deter Beijing from attacking Taiwan is not only to marshal the capabilities, but also to talk tough.

The challenge here is that deterrence requires more than just threats. It requires credible assurances that we remain committed in the United States to maintaining the status quo. And that, of course, if China escalates it would pay significant costs. But also that if they don’t escalate, they don’t need to fear that the United States is headed inexorably toward recognizing Taiwan as an independent state.

What’s really crucial to recognize is that it’s not just military factors that are going to shape [Chinese President] Xi Jinping’s calculus. Despite being an authoritarian leader, Xi also faces potentially acute pressure domestically from other elites in the Politburo, but also online and in the public potentially to take decisive measures where the CCP is perceived to be on the cusp of “losing” Taiwan from their perspective. It’s critical that we deter, rather than provoke Beijing over Taiwan if we want to maintain the peace and stability that has served us all, and not least the people of Taiwan, for decades.

FP: How best should Washington deter Beijing? How do you raise the costs in a way that doesn’t lead us to war over Taiwan?

JCW: Across the spectrum there are a lot of different things that we are and should continue doing. One of those is increasing the resilience of the U.S. military posture in the region, in coordination with allies and partners. It’s about increasing Taiwan’s resilience to economic coercion, including deepening economic as well as cultural ties to Taiwan, so that they don’t feel like there is no choice here, that that they have international support, but that we also be very clear that there are limits and that the United States would remain willing to accept any outcome that is peacefully arrived at without coercion, because it’s that prospect for some eventual evolution that could lead you to something that Beijing could call a reunification. That pathway has to exist, otherwise there’s nothing left in Beijing’s mind other than the military option, and that’s what we want to prevent.

As Ryan Hass and Jude Blanchette have argued, the best solution is no solution. We need to kick the can down the road, and that means threading the needle between things that substantively and meaningfully enhance the resilience of Taiwan’s defense and its economy. But it also means avoiding things like high profile visits that really make the island no safer today than it was before. If anything, the opposite: Polling shows the majority of residents in Taiwan think [then-U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Nancy] Pelosi’s visit brought more costs to Taiwan’s security than it brought benefits.

FP: But what you’re suggesting and proposing here would delay, not prevent, a potential war over Taiwan.

JCW: If you delay something in perpetuity, you’ve effectively prevented it.

FP: If you could advise policymakers watching this discussion on how to adapt U.S. policy towards China, what would you tell them?

JCW: I would suggest that we need to stand up a much more robust mechanism for evaluating the costs to Americans of many of the policies ostensibly designed to protect the United States. And oftentimes it’s phrased as, “We can run faster.” But increasingly, I think we’re trying to slow Beijing down.

My big concern is that efforts that we were taking to slow Beijing down are slowing ourselves down in the process. To me, the most urgent things that we need to do is to ensure that the United States remains committed to being a more inclusive democracy where diverse voices are heard and respected rather than a place in which we are increasingly so afraid that we hunker down, we squash dissenting views as unpatriotic or disloyal, and we become a shell of ourselves or repeat some of the abuses of the past.

Every time there has been an effort to compete with or counter an enemy that has been seen as existential, we’ve ended up undertaking policies here at home—from the internment of Japanese Americans to the hate crimes against Muslim and Sikh Americans—that have ended up doing more to undermine democracy than the adversary in the first place. So that is the most important thing that we could do, separate from the importance of continuing to assess very carefully the extent of China’s intentions, its capabilities, and the best U.S. policy response.

FP: You know, Jessica, since you’ve left government, you’ve become a sort of rallying figure for the argument that you’re making—basically a call for a more nuanced and moderate debate on China policy. Are you finding that people in power in America and elsewhere are responding to what you’re saying?

JCW: So many people have come forward. I’ve heard individually from people inside and outside the administration that they appreciate this call to think about what it is that we’re competing for. Where is this all going? And if we don’t like where this trajectory is pointing, what might we do today to imagine and work toward a different future?

And so I think that there really is appetite for this discussion. I hope that collectively we can come together across partisan party lines to identify what is the future that we want to be leading rather than solely thinking about trying to outcompete China. The frank reality is that we are among each other’s largest trading partners, and we’re not going to be able to meet our own objectives in the areas of decarbonization or the green energy transition without continuing to utilize some degree of inputs from China and Chinese companies. We’re just too integrated to be completely pulled apart. And so this idea that we are just going to defeat the other doesn’t really square with the reality that we exist in.

Foreign Policy · by Ravi Agrawal · March 8, 2023

7. The first 72 hours: How an attack on Taiwan could rapidly reach Australia

Excerpts:

But why would China use its limited resources to attack Australia instead of focusing solely on seizing Taiwan? Because of the strategically crucial role Australia is expected to play for the United States in the conflict.

“Our geography means we are a southern base for the Americans for what comes next,” Ryan says. “That’s how they’re seeing us. They want our geography. They want us to build bases for several hundred thousand Americans in due course like in World War II.”

Jennings says Americans would defend Taiwan by fighting from bases in Australia.

“America has a strategy called dispersal, which means when there’s a hint of a crisis, the Air Force gets out of Guam, the marines get out of Okinawa. Why? Because they know there is a high chance they will be obliterated. Where do they come? They come here. One risk our government is very concerned about is the phone rings, and it’s the US President asking for 150,000 Americans to be in the Northern Territory by next Tuesday.”

Ryan says as many as 200,000 US troops could descend on northern Australia.

The first 72 hours: How an attack on Taiwan could rapidly reach Australia

The Sydney Morning Herald · by Peter Hartcher, Matthew Knott · March 7, 2023

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Within 72 hours of a conflict breaking out over Taiwan, Chinese missile bombardments and devastating cyberattacks would begin pummelling Australia. For the first time since World War II, the mainland would be under attack. Meanwhile, 150,000 American troops would descend on the Top End seeking refuge from the immediate conflict zone.

These are the scenarios Peter Jennings, a former deputy secretary for strategy in the Defence Department, says the nation needs to prepare for.

“As I think of a conflict over Taiwan, what I’m thinking about is something that very quickly grows in scale and location,” says Jennings, who led the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) for a decade after leaving the Defence Department. “That matters to Australia. It could very quickly find its way down to our shores.”

While historian Geoffrey Blainey famously argued Australia suffered from the “tyranny of distance”, the nation’s geographical isolation has often been a blessing. The major conflicts of recent years – Afghanistan, Iraq, Ukraine – have taken place in distant lands, allowing Australians to feel secure in their southern sanctuary.

Distance is no longer equivalent to safety

That could all change in a war between China and the US. Five defence experts assembled by The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age for Red Alert, a special review of Australia’s national security, agree such a conflict could break out within three years and would almost certainly involve Australia.

Jennings believes Japan’s strategy in World War II – in which it launched deadly aerial raids on northern Australia to isolate the country from the US – offers a guide for how China may approach a war over Taiwan.

“Distance is no longer equivalent to safety from our strategic perspective,” he says. In the first three days of a war, he says Beijing would be tempted to target Australian military bases with a long-range intercontinental ballistic missile attack to minimise our usefulness in the conflict.

“If China seriously wants to go after Taiwan in a military sense, the only way they can really contemplate quick success is to pre-emptively attack those assets that might be a threat to them. That means Pine Gap goes,” he says, referring to the top secret US-Australian base in the Northern Territory that the US uses to detect nuclear missile launches.

“It means our naval bases go, it means our air bases go very quickly.”

Jennings knows he is breaking a powerful unwritten rule in Australia: don’t mention the war. Critics will accuse him of fearmongering.

“It is a real national taboo to think about the likelihood of a conflict in anything other than the most remotely theoretical perspective,” he says.

He counters that we will sleepwalk into disaster unless we openly discuss unpalatable scenarios.

The Red Alert panellists all agree the ultimate reason for maintaining a well-armed defence force is not to fight wars, but to prevent conflict by deterring would-be attackers.

Lavina Lee, a foreign policy expert at Macquarie University, agrees we need to smash the taboo. She urges Australia to confront “the possibility that we might go to war and what would happen either way. We should talk about what the world would look like if we win and what it would look like if we lose.”

The biggest danger the nation faces is “complacency rather than alarmism”, she says.

Take Australia’s military bases. These facilities – especially those shared with or controlled by the US – are obvious targets for an adversary.

But retired Army major general Mick Ryan says Australians would be scandalised if they knew just how poorly prepared our defence assets were for a potential attack.

“Like most other Western militaries, we believe in the cult of the offensive, so we have underinvested in defensive capabilities,” Ryan says. “Our bases are absolutely undefended.”

Says Jennings: “No Australian defence facilities are protected beyond sort of hired contract guards, and there is no plan to move our own forces quickly in a crisis.”

‘Old, rickety and stuck together with Blu Tack’

Ryan says he would expect China to unleash a blizzard of cyberattacks on our communication systems, and potentially the electricity grid, if a war breaks out. The aim would be to sow confusion, degrade national cohesion and delay decision-making by upending everyday life.

Jennings agrees Chinese cyberattacks on Australian critical infrastructure – electricity and gas distribution, ports, airports, communications networks – would be a logical first step in a conflict. He doubts any of them could withstand a serious attack.

Australia’s critical infrastructure is “old, rickety and is kind of stuck together with Blu Tack,” he says.“It will be thoroughly penetrated by Chinese malware really to shut the place down. The implications of that should remind us just how quickly we will sort of erode from an orderly civilisation.”

Pine Gap, a satellite surveillance base south-west of Alice Springs.Credit:Defence.gov.au

Alan Finkel, Australia’s former chief scientist, warns: “Airlines in particular can be taken down very, very easily. Electricity, probably less so in a sense, because most of our generators are not that sophisticated in terms of cyber. They will be [more sophisticated] five to 10 years from now. Things like the telephone network and airlines are very obvious targets.”

Lesley Seebeck, former head of the Australian National University’s Cyber Institute, says that “the state of our critical infrastructure has just been let lie. There’s no sense of investing for the future.” Once the chief information officer at the Bureau of Meteorology, she says: “I know that from my time at the BOM it was just creaking, it was knitted together, it barely kept up a lot of the time.”

But China’s attacks on Australia would not necessarily be limited to cyber. Ryan says there is a strong agreement among military strategists that a war over Taiwan would “involve strikes on US bases, on fuel and munitions holdings, ships across the region, including our own country potentially”.

Another possibility: China could lay mines to blow up vessels travelling in and out of Australia, a tactic that could devastate the nation by cutting it off from critical supply routes. Ninety per cent of Australia’s fuel is imported and much of it arrives on tankers that transit through the South China Sea – an inevitable hotspot in any war over Taiwan. Australia has only enough fuel on hand to last 61 days, according to the International Energy Agency, the lowest of any member state.

As the panellists write in their joint communique: “Australia has many vulnerabilities. It has long and exposed connections to the rest of the world – sea, air and undersea – yet is incapable of protecting them. So its dependency on imports of essentials – including fuel, pharmaceuticals, electronics and weaponry – could be a fatal weakness in a crisis. This was exposed in World War II yet remains unaddressed.”

‘Get out of Guam’

But why would China use its limited resources to attack Australia instead of focusing solely on seizing Taiwan? Because of the strategically crucial role Australia is expected to play for the United States in the conflict.

“Our geography means we are a southern base for the Americans for what comes next,” Ryan says. “That’s how they’re seeing us. They want our geography. They want us to build bases for several hundred thousand Americans in due course like in World War II.”

Jennings says Americans would defend Taiwan by fighting from bases in Australia.

“America has a strategy called dispersal, which means when there’s a hint of a crisis, the Air Force gets out of Guam, the marines get out of Okinawa. Why? Because they know there is a high chance they will be obliterated. Where do they come? They come here. One risk our government is very concerned about is the phone rings, and it’s the US President asking for 150,000 Americans to be in the Northern Territory by next Tuesday.”

Ryan says as many as 200,000 US troops could descend on northern Australia.

U.S. Marines conduct a simulated amphibious assault of exercise Talisman Sabre 19 in Bowen, Australia.Credit:Lance Cpl. Tanner D. Lambert

“The big challenge,” he says, “is how do we develop the infrastructure for that many people arriving that quickly. Because it doesn’t exist at the moment. It’s going to be a massive national challenge.”

‘Defensive posture and absorbing punishment’

The Australian Defence Force (ADF) also lacks the capacity to strike back if it comes under attack from a foreign power. “I think the most depressing thing about the ADF now is that for $46-$47 billion a year, we get very little high explosive on target,” Mick Ryan says.

A report released last year by ASPI on the nation’s long-range strike capacities detailed the problem bluntly. “Currently, the ADF doesn’t have a strike system that can pose a credible deterrent,” wrote defence experts Marcus Hellyer and Andrew Nicholls. “Arguably, the ADF currently has no long-range land-strike capability.”

This has dire implications for a potential war with China. “Without striking range, we’re simply adopting a defensive posture and absorbing punishment,” they warn.

Lee says now is the time to address issues we’d rather ignore. “Do we have the capabilities now to make a sufficient contribution to US force protection in the region? Will we have sufficient long-range strike capabilities to keep our adversaries at bay when we need it? And what sacrifices might need to be made domestically now, in order to deter China from using force to seize Taiwan in the first place?”

No-one can know for certain how a future war, including over Taiwan, will play out. But it’s the job of the nation’s policymakers to plan for dire scenarios as well as desirable ones.

Of the three branches of the military, Jennings argues only the Royal Australian Air Force is up to scratch. The Navy, he says, is a “generation-and-a-half behind where it should be”, and the Army is struggling to define its purpose.

As proof, he points to last May’s budget, where the Morrison government scrapped plans to buy the MQ-9 Reaper, an armed drone the US Air Force says has a unique capability to perform strike missions, gather information, and track high-value targets. Drones have played a crucial role in recent wars, such as Afghanistan and Ukraine, yet Australia has shunned them until now.

“That was nuts,” Jennings says of the decision to reallocate the money to the Australian Signals Directorate. “We are the only front-rank military in the world not to have an armed drone in service.”

Mick Ryan faults the ADF with being too focused on acquiring “big, heavy, expensive manned platforms” – think frigates, submarines, aerial bombers – and ignoring cheaper unmanned systems like drones and autonomous vehicles. “The ADF has been extraordinarily resistant to autonomous systems,” he says. “We’re a long way behind the rest of the world and there are lots of Australian companies that can do this.“

‘A large power acting like a middling one’

The panellists stress that Australia’s vulnerabilities are not only physical, but psychological. “Why do we keep calling ourselves a middle power?” asks an exasperated Lee. “What we do matters. We might not be able to change China’s objectives, but we can alter its cost calculations and behaviour and constrain its options. In this sense, the danger is complacency rather than alarmism.”

RAAF Base Tindal, Northern Territory.Credit:Pfc. Matthew Mackintosh / Department of Defence

According to the Lowy Institute, Australia is already more powerful in the Asia-Pacific than more populous nations, such as Indonesia and South Korea. Soon we could vault over Russia to become the fifth most powerful country in the region. Yet we still think of ourselves as a geopolitical bit player punching above our weight.

“We are actually a large power that acts like a middling one,” says Ryan. “For me the threat is that as a country, we still have a cultural cringe when it comes to strategic thinking. We still defer to Big Brother as we were taught to do as a colony. We like copying the Americans. What it means is we haven’t developed our own ability to conduct critical strategic thinking across a range of different institutions to address complex problems.”

Seebeck – who has spent most of her life in the national capital as an academic, public servant and consultant – says: “Canberra is the worst place in the world to do some of this stuff from. It’s isolated, it’s middle class, it’s fat, dumb and happy. It’s self-referential.”

Finkel, a successful entrepreneur before he became a go-to government adviser, cautions against too much criticism of Australia. The nation has world-class universities, a strong economy and a strong democracy. The problem, he says, is “we don’t do things quickly. And whatever threats are coming, they’re not, with great respect to everyone here, going to be exactly as planned. We need the ability to react to the unknowns… What works during peacetime isn’t going to be appropriate for conflict.”

Passing the Zelensky test

So, are our nation’s leaders up to it? Jennings is dubious. “I have no faith that as a group of people we have the capacity to gear ourselves to deal with the high-level threat environment that we’re talking about here,” he says.

Pointing to the ADF’s repeated failures to invest in the right military equipment to protect the nation, he says: “We need to get to a point where we can say it’s all broken, and we have to rethink it, probably with a whole different bunch of people to do it for us.”

As a veteran defence policy insider, he includes himself on the list of the culpable.

Ryan says the coming years will require a fundamentally different, less risk- averse style of leadership from Australia’s decision-makers.

“How many Australian leaders would pass the ‘Zelensky test’?” he asks, referring to Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky. “How many could get out there and say, ‘I don’t need a ride, I need ammunition’ and put themselves and the government at risk to make the right decisions, not the one that’s well tested in the polls? … We’re going to have to make decisions about risk and leadership and creativity and strategy that we haven’t been capable of making since World War II.”

It didn’t always appear obvious that Zelensky – a former comedian who played a fictional president on television – would himself pass the test until Russia invaded his country.

You only know what people are made of when they are tested by a crisis, and that moment could arrive far sooner than we’d like.

Tomorrow: The taboos we must confront to defend Australia

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Peter Hartcher is political editor and international editor of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.Connect via email.

Matthew Knott is the foreign affairs and national security correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.Connect via Twitter or Facebook.

The Sydney Morning Herald · by Peter Hartcher, Matthew Knott · March 7, 2023

8. Hidden cost of funding for US special ops raises flags at Senate

This was not done on General Fenton's watch. While I mostly disagree with Senator Warren's policies, she does have a point. When you read the Unfinanced Requirement (UFR) justification as she did, you have to ask yourself if it is required to be in conformance with regulation and policy and if it is in fact necessary for the safety of military personnel you do have to ask why was it not funded as a priority? Yes this "gaming of the system" takes place. (the old joke is that the Air Force would build a new base and first fund the golf course and then ask for additional money for a runaway).

However, in USSOCOM's defense the requirement may well have been funded in USSOCOM's budget request but then DOD removed it and chose not to fund it. For USSOCOM it was still a requirement, but DOD may have chosen not to fund it. Therefore it became an unfunded requirement. Of course the USSOCOM commander cannot throw DOD under the bus at a Senate hearing. Again, I do not know any more of the facts other than the exchange between Senator Warren and General Fenton. But there is often more to the story that is not revealed in public testimony.

Hidden cost of funding for US special ops raises flags at Senate

courthousenews.com · by Benjamin S. Weiss

WASHINGTON (CN) — Just days before the Department of Defense will unveil its spending plan for the 2024 fiscal year, Senator Elizabeth Warren told the general who heads the U.S. Special Operations Command that programs like his are “gaming the system” to squeeze extra cash out of government coffers.

Warren noted that the Special Operations Command has a history of omitting essential programs when it submits its annual budget request, only to come back with requests for extra funding in a legally mandated, supplemental list of items known as unfunded priorities.

“They take costs that should be part of the base budget request,” the Massachusetts Democrat said, “and put them on a wish list, daring Congress not to fund them, and that way they can boost their overall budget allocation.”

As an example, Warren pointed to the Special Operations Command's unfunded priorities list for the 2023 fiscal year, in which it requested around $8 million to upgrade explosive resistance capabilities at one of its armaments facilities to meet safety standards. Warren questioned why a project of that nature, designed to protect the health and safety of soldiers, was not included in the command’s full budget request.

In 2023, the Special Operations Command requested a total of around $656 million in unfunded priorities, Warren said. The 2023 National Defense Authorization Act, signed into law in December by President Joe Biden, authorized around $250 million of that request.

“I wasn’t born yesterday,” Warren said. “I get what’s happening here.”

General Bryan Fenton — who has been in charge of the command since August — told the senator that the spending plan “will be reflective of my priorities, that are aligned with the national defense strategy.”

Fenton appeared this morning before the Senate Armed Services Committee as the Biden administration and its executive agencies, including the Defense Department, are expected to publish their 2024 budget requests Thursday.

In her recent push for the agency to do away with unfunded priorities requests, Warren wrote in a Jan. 31 letter to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin that such funding avenues “have become wasteful and inefficient tools that increase spending beyond DoD’s core priorities.”

Warren in December also introduced bipartisan legislation alongside Senator Angus King, a Maine Independent, and Senator Mike Braun, an Indiana Republican, that, if made law, would have repealed the law requiring federal agencies to submit unfunded priorities lists.

Several Republican members of the Senate’s military panel meanwhile expressed different concerns Tuesday.

Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas called it troubling that Thursday’s budget request could include “a reduction in budget or forces.”

Iowa Senator Joni Ernst echoed this, saying that she was “very concerned” about Special Operations’ top line.

Cotton forecast bipartisan support for increased Special Operations funding in the event the command’s proposed budget is slashed. “I think you can count on many members of this committee, probably in both parties, to try to make sure that our special operations forces have the resources they need," he told Christopher Maier, the assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict.

Maier declined to comment on the specifics of the agency's upcoming spending plan but told Cotton that “the priorities we have identified are represented in that budget.”

“No one wants to see a decrease in personnel or budget,” Fenton said. “No. 1, that would not reflect our requirements, and No. 2, we would be forced at some point to make hard choices. You’ll see me give you the best Special Operations Command for the budget we get.”

The U.S. Special Operations Command oversees special forces activities among the Army, Marine Corps, Navy and Air Force. The command was founded by Congress as part of the 1987 National Defense Authorization Act.

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9. TikTok could be a valuable tool for China if it invades Taiwan, FBI director says

Video at the link: https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/08/tech/tiktok-china-taiwan-fbi/

Perhaps the Chinese government has never asked for data because they do not have to. Companies automatically provide it. And it is an interesting argument to say there is no propaganda on Tik Tok because users do not expect it on the platform.

Excerpts:

TikTok CEO Shou Chew said this week that the Chinese government has “never asked us for US user data” and the company would not provide it if the government did ask. Chew also said that “misinformation and propaganda has no place on our platform, and our users do not expect that.”

TikTok could be a valuable tool for China if it invades Taiwan, FBI director says | CNN Business

CNN · by Sean Lyngaas · March 8, 2023

New York CNN —

The Chinese government could use TikTok to control data on millions of people and harness the short-form video app to shape public opinion should China invade Taiwan, FBI Director Christopher Wray told the Senate Intelligence Committee Wednesday.

Wray responded affirmatively to questions from Republican Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, the panel’s ranking member, on whether TikTok would allow Beijing widespread control over data and a valuable influence tool in the event of war in the Taiwan Strait.

“The most fundamental piece that cuts across every one of those risks and threats that you mentioned that I think Americans need to understand is that something that’s very sacred in our country —the difference between the private sector and public sector — that’s a line that is nonexistent in the way that the CCP [Chinese Communist Party] operates,” Wray told Rubio in the hearing.

Rubio, the top Republican on the Senate panel, argued that TikTok presents “a substantial national security threat for the country of a kind that we didn’t face in the past.”

Wray’s comments come a day after Gen. Paul Nakasone, head of the US National Security Agency, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that he worried TikTok could censor videos to shape public opinion in a way that threatens US national security interests.

It’s the latest in a full-court press from US officials to sound the alarm about TikTok’s alleged security risks as Congress weighs giving the Biden administration more authority to address the alleged threat posed by the platform, up to and including banning the app in the United States

TikTok CEO Shou Chew said this week that the Chinese government has “never asked us for US user data” and the company would not provide it if the government did ask. Chew also said that “misinformation and propaganda has no place on our platform, and our users do not expect that.”

The company has taken voluntary steps to wall off US user data from the rest of its global organization, including by hosting that data on servers operated by the US tech giant Oracle. The company is also negotiating a possible agreement with the Biden administration that could allow TikTok to continue operating in the United States under certain conditions.

In a statement this week, a TikTok spokesperson said a US government ban would stifle American speech and would be “a ban on the export of American culture and values to the billion-plus people who use our service worldwide.”

– CNN’s Brian Fung and Catherine Thorbecke contributed to this report.

CNN · by Sean Lyngaas · March 8, 2023

10. Opinion | What would a win in Ukraine look like? Retired Gen. Jack Keane explains.

Excerpts:

So, victory depends on President Biden’s willingness to give Ukraine capabilities we are withholding?

To succeed at conventional combined arms warfare, you need tanks, armored vehicles carrying infantry soldiers, massive amounts of artillery, air defense systems that are going to protect this force from intrusion, coordinated artillery fire and air support. Those are the ingredients to be successful. And if you don’t have those ingredients, you cannot take the territory that you want to take in the time that you want to take it.

The United States is a master at how to conduct combined arms conventional warfare. … We can put together a plan and a strategy on how to succeed against the Russians. … And the Ukrainians, my God, they are so coachable. They are quick learners. They are fierce fighters. They have all the elements that are necessary to succeed. They just need a strategy that we can help them put together with the right equipment to do that, and we can roll these Russians up. I’m absolutely convinced of it. But there doesn’t appear to be a stomach for it.

Opinion | What would a win in Ukraine look like? Retired Gen. Jack Keane explains.

The Washington Post · by Marc A. Thiessen · March 6, 2023

Opinion What would a win in Ukraine look like? Retired Gen. Jack Keane explains.

Columnist|

March 6, 2023 at 6:30 a.m. EST

Retired four-star Gen. Jack Keane knows how to win wars. A former vice chief of staff of the Army, Keane is the intellectual author of the 2007 “surge” strategy that turned around the war in Iraq. My American Enterprise Institute colleague Danielle Pletka and I recently interviewed Keane on our podcast. We asked him what winning in Ukraine would look like and how it could be accomplished.

For this week’s column, I’m highlighting some of Keane’s most insightful comments. The transcript below has our truncated questions, with Keane’s answers edited for style and clarity. You can listen to the entire interview here.

You say victory is achievable in Ukraine, defined as driving Russia out of all the territory it has unlawfully seized — including Crimea. How?

Keane: [Russia’s] conventional ground forces’ ability to conduct “combined armed” attack — that means a maneuver, artillery and support, and air support, all coordinated — they just can’t do it. The elements of their conventional ground forces have all either sustained high casualties or have literally been defeated.

The Ukrainians, through the use of HIMARS [High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems], have been able to deplete — not extinguish, but deplete — these forces significantly. … So, we assessed that while [the Russians will] make some tactical gains, they will, in a matter of weeks, culminate [their offensive]. …

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That will allow the Ukrainians to conduct an offensive operation that will likely begin somewhere around May, June. … They would have liked to have started this offensive a number of weeks ago … [but] they couldn’t do that because they didn’t have tanks, they didn’t have enough armored vehicles, they didn’t have enough mobility to do that. And yet the Russians were very, very vulnerable to that kind of an exploitation. …

We do calculate that if [the Ukrainians are] able to continue this offensive and we get the proper weapons to them, over time, yes, they can penetrate and go through the Zaporizhzhia oblast, go down on an axis dealing with Melitopol and get to the southern coast — but more significantly, [they can] sever the east-west main supply route that is the land bridge to Crimea. And then [they can] bring forward long-range missiles and rockets to begin to pummel the [Russian] bases in Crimea, the military bases and depots that are providing significant support to the Russians. And then, eventually, [they can] also use ground maneuver, combined arms to be able to move into Crimea.

Hopefully, by that time, we would have given them a couple of things that are necessary. One is ATACMS [Army Tactical Missile Systems], long-range missiles that go 194 miles vs. the 50 or so miles that the HIMARS give, and also advanced fighters like the F-16s. … [With those capabilities] the Ukrainians do have the opportunity to retake their territory, yes.

So, victory depends on President Biden’s willingness to give Ukraine capabilities we are withholding?

To succeed at conventional combined arms warfare, you need tanks, armored vehicles carrying infantry soldiers, massive amounts of artillery, air defense systems that are going to protect this force from intrusion, coordinated artillery fire and air support. Those are the ingredients to be successful. And if you don’t have those ingredients, you cannot take the territory that you want to take in the time that you want to take it.

The United States is a master at how to conduct combined arms conventional warfare. … We can put together a plan and a strategy on how to succeed against the Russians. … And the Ukrainians, my God, they are so coachable. They are quick learners. They are fierce fighters. They have all the elements that are necessary to succeed. They just need a strategy that we can help them put together with the right equipment to do that, and we can roll these Russians up. I’m absolutely convinced of it. But there doesn’t appear to be a stomach for it.

If Biden gave them those capabilities, could this help Ukraine retake its territory before the second anniversary of the Russian invasion?

If we had everything there, yes, I think we could.

Why isn’t Biden providing the weapons they need to prevail?

I think many of us have real concerns that the administration and the Department of Defense and others in the national security team have permitted the threat of escalation by [Vladimir] Putin to be a major guidepost to when they provide weapons systems to the Ukrainians. And I think the Ukrainians are very frustrated because they haven’t received these weapons systems, and particularly advanced systems, on time. Initially, we say no, and then a couple of months later, we say yes. … And this has been going on now for an entire year.

And it’s really unfortunate, and I think what happened is their fear, their absolute fear of escalation, has been a major policy decision, and [so the administration has] provided the support piecemeal in the sense of slow-rolling Ukraine’s capability. And it’s really quite unfounded, because [despite] all of the weapons that we’ve given that have increased their capability to prosecute the war, there has been no escalation from Russia. Therefore, I think the policy is misguided.

For the life of me, I don’t understand why we would permit Russia, who has obviously a nuclear arsenal, and they’re threatening the potential use of nuclear weapons, to let that be a veto for our use of conventional weapons to support the Ukrainians’ fight to free their people. I think the alarm bells that [signals] to China, who also has nuclear weapons, to Iran, who is in pursuit of them, and also to North Korea, who has nuclear weapons and is a belligerent power who wants to flaunt those weapons, it is absolutely the wrong signal. …

When I look at the Russian generals, I just instinctively know that they’re not going to make any recommendation to Putin to use tactical nuclear weapons inside Ukraine. They know full well that they can’t protect their forces from the hazards of a nuclear tactical weapon going off there. This is not the Soviet Union army. This is a Russian army that hasn’t trained for that and doesn’t have the protection for it. It makes no sense to have that continuing to be U.S. policy.

What is the fallout of not preventing this war?

I think if we had given the Ukrainians much of what we are doing now, it’s possible we could have deterred Putin. … [We spent] the eight years of the Obama administration tolerating Putin’s annexing Crimea and moving into the eastern part of Ukraine, declaring a red line in Syria over the use of chemical weapons and [then] doing nothing about it, doing nothing about the situation in Ukraine. And then the Biden administration comes in, and Putin puts 70,000 troops on the border. And he did that for what reason? He wanted to see Biden’s reaction. [And] Biden ... stop[s] the shipment of [U.S.] arms to Ukraine ... And what message does Putin get from that?

And then you add to that the incredible unconditional surrender of Afghanistan, and I think you put all that together, and, yes, they come to the conclusion that the United States is a declining power. It doesn’t have the same political will and spine to stand up to adversaries.

What lesson would China take from a Western failure in Ukraine?

President Xi [Jinping] is looking right at this. If he sees the United States walking away, and NATO, after committing the moral will and political will of NATO to Ukraine surviving and defeating Russia, and then [showing] a lack of political will walking away from that? I think that [would] just validate what he has been saying for 10 years — that the United States is a declining power, and he fully intends to replace it as the world’s global leader.

What do you say to critics who say we’re spending too much on Ukraine?

One hundred billion dollars, yes, that is a significant amount of money. But it’s a small part of [a roughly] $6 trillion budget. What a return on investment of $100 billion we’re getting, for stopping Russian aggression. If we’re able to succeed in that, that will literally make President Xi think twice before likely going into Taiwan. When he sees that American geopolitical stand, taken in concert with allies, it will send a huge message. I think Iran will get the same.

Some Americans on the right say Biden cares more about Ukraine’s borders than our own.

Some of these arguments are significantly irrational. For example, “We shouldn’t fund the war in Ukraine when we have such a problem on our border.” …

Does anybody believe, if we pulled the funding from the war in Ukraine today and said we’re not going to do it anymore, that the Biden administration is going to solve the problem on the southern border? They’re finally going to enforce the laws? They’re finally going to change the policy? Are they finally going to have a coherent policy to stop fentanyl, and to deal with the cartels? … [We have seen] the DNA of this administration, and these things are not mutually exclusive.

What will happen if China does start providing Russia with military aid?

I was really pleasantly surprised by the E.U., who stood up and said that they want no part of that, and, “This will be a red line for us.” And I think if [China does] provide this lethal aid, it will bring the United States and Europe much closer together in opposing China.

If Putin is not defeated, what will he do?

Putin has said time and time again his major objective is returning to the Russian empire. … He wants the former Soviet republics that are now part of NATO to come back into that empire. He will do it by force, and he’s threatened it. … I think he’s dead serious.

Now listen: His military is in bad shape. It’s not something where, if the war ended tomorrow, Putin is going to be able to mount up in six months or a year, and conduct an invasion of a Baltic state, or a Bulgaria or Romania. Those are the most vulnerable. Moldova is something he could take in a [matter] of weeks, but they’re not NATO-aligned. … I don’t believe for a minute that Putin has given up on that goal. … He doesn’t even believe [Ukraine] is a country. [He sees it as] it belongs to Russia. … I think we should take him seriously.

The Washington Post · by Marc A. Thiessen · March 6, 2023

11. Opinion | From the Trenches in Ukraine, We Know Our Enemy Is in Shock

Always pay attention to the troops on the ground at the tip of the spear.

Opinion | From the Trenches in Ukraine, We Know Our Enemy Is in Shock

The New York Times · by Yegor Firsov · March 7, 2023

Guest Essay

From the Trenches in Ukraine, We Know Our Enemy Is in Shock

March 7, 2023

A Ukrainian serviceman in a trench not far from Bakhmut, in the Donetsk region, in January.

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Mr. Firsov is a medic and rifleman in the Ukrainian Army.

An infantryman’s least favorite weather is a temperature of 35 degrees Fahrenheit and pouring rain, when the trench floods with knee-deep, near freezing water. Surviving in such conditions is truly an art, and it’s at these moments in particular that a trench has a special energy. Here people fight for their lives, for every manifestation of it. Here communion with God is sincere and more frequent than in any church.

Near the front lines everyone fits up his trench like it’s his little home away from home. There are sleeping bags, ammunition and food, of course. But people also keep books and affix drawings by their children to the walls.

Sometimes enemy forces are close enough that we can see them without binoculars. Sometimes they’re a few hundred feet away. Our task is to “hold the fort,” and in this common expression lies the main idea of war: not to yield your land to the enemy. So when shelling starts, a soldier cannot just take cover; he must also make sure the enemy does not move forward. As a rule, that’s exactly what happens: When the enemy begins to shell, its infantry starts to advance.

One day our positions were bombarded with 120-millimeter mortars for several hours. When the barrage started, it was terrifying. First, there was the sound of the exit — as the projectile flies out of the launcher. Then there was the wait of a couple of seconds and the vibration of its arrival.

The trench shook.

Soil fell from above.

The sound of the explosion deafened us for several seconds.

If you felt all of that, it means that this time you were lucky. The bomb landed at least 30 feet away. You cross yourself. The next exit may be yours.

With each explosion, fragments of steel scatter like sharp darts in all directions. A large fragment of a 120-millimeter mortar round is about half the size of the palm of your hand, and heavy. It can punch through a bulletproof vest.

But the small, almost invisible pieces of shrapnel that get into the body are worse. That’s why we — I am a medic as well as a rifleman — have to carefully examine the wounded and palpate them all over, so as not to miss an insidious shrapnel wound that could cause internal bleeding.

If a large caliber projectile hits near the trench, soldiers can get buried and a comrade nearby must dig them out before they suffocate. An explosion felt from underground feels even more unpleasant than on the surface: The blast wave creates a vacuum and it puts pressure on the ears. It feels like a slight concussion. We are taught to sleep with our arms around our machine guns. If you get buried, you’d better have it in your hands when you crawl out from under the ground.

The shelling can go on for several hours, and by the time it has finished you no longer feel fear. The body gets used to it. You think that maybe now you are immune to it. You leave the trench and the sun is shining and birds are singing, as if you dreamed these horrors.

Then you hear another barrage being fired and there’s the fear again.

At the front line, emotions run the gamut. The adrenaline makes the eyes of some of the men almost glow. In others, the life seems to fade away. They stop being afraid but they also stop rejoicing. I’ve met soldiers with nothing but emptiness and indifference in their eyes. Soldiers in the trenches care deeply for one another, but the level of tension is so high that usually nobody cries when someone is injured or killed.

Ukrainian servicemen near the frontline town of Bakhmut on March 2.

But these are extremes. For the most part, humans are creatures that get used to everything. Often during the shelling, the guys make jokes and tell funny stories. Humor is very helpful for dealing with stress.

In peacetime, “courage” and “bravery” are empty words. Here, those words reveal their true meaning. Anyone can be afraid. But the courageous master their fear and do not let others give in to it.

Our front depends on such people. They inspire confidence and faith in victory. Quite often these people are unremarkable — some skinny young guy or an older man. Not supermen. In civilian life, such a person could sit across from you on the subway, come to fix your plumbing or lay tiles on your floor and you would not even notice him. Here, he suddenly reveals his full potential.

We know our enemy is in shock. We hear it on the radio intercepts. “How come? We hit them with everything we can, burn everything clean and their infantry is still holding out?!”

For a people who will burrow into the ground to survive, freedom is even more important than life.

Yegor Firsov is a medic and rifleman in the Ukrainian defense forces. He was a member of the Ukrainian Parliament from 2014 to 2016. This essay was translated by Valentyna Marchenko from the Ukrainian.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.

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The New York Times · by Yegor Firsov · March 7, 2023

12. China wants to avoid escalation with U.S., U.S. spy chief says

Video at the link. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/china-wants-avoid-escalation-us-spy-chief-says-rcna73990

Excerpts;

Xi also wants “to message his populace and regional actors that the U.S. bears the responsibility for any coming increase in tensions,” Haines said.

The Chinese Communist Party “represents both the leading and most consequential threat to U.S. national security and leadership globally,” Haines said, adding that Beijing was “our most serious and consequential intelligence rival.”

U.S. officials and China experts have voiced concern about a lack of regular high-level dialogue between Beijing and Washington, saying a breakdown in communications raises the risk of an unintended collision or crisis.

The intelligence community’s latest report on global threats , which was released earlier Wednesday, said Chinese leaders would look to try to divide the U.S. and its allies but also reduce friction with the U.S. when it suited Beijing’s agenda.

China wants to avoid escalation with U.S., U.S. spy chief says

China is increasingly challenging the U.S. economically, technologically and militarily around the world and “remains our unparalleled priority,” said Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines.

NBC News · by Dan De Luce

China wants to avoid an escalation of tensions with the United States and believes it benefits from a more stable relationship with Washington, even as it seeks to bolster its global economic and military power, U.S. intelligence chief Avril Haines told lawmakers on Wednesday.

Despite recent sharp criticism of the U.S. by Chinese President Xi Jinping, “we assess that Beijing still believes it benefits most by preventing a spiraling of tensions and by preserving stability in its relationship with the United States,” Haines, director of national intelligence, told a hearing of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

China is increasingly challenging the United States, economically, technologically, politically and militarily around the world and “remains our unparalleled priority,” said Haines.

Haines and other intelligence officials appeared at the hearing as part of an annual assessment from the intelligence community on global threats facing the United States.

Xi’s speech this week at a Chinese Communist Party congress, in which he accused Washington of trying to prevent Beijing’s rise, likely “reflects growing pessimism in Beijing about China’s relationship with the United States” as well as worries about the trajectory of China’s domestic economic development and innovation challenges, Haines said.

Xi also wants “to message his populace and regional actors that the U.S. bears the responsibility for any coming increase in tensions,” Haines said.

The Chinese Communist Party “represents both the leading and most consequential threat to U.S. national security and leadership globally,” Haines said, adding that Beijing was “our most serious and consequential intelligence rival.”

U.S. officials and China experts have voiced concern about a lack of regular high-level dialogue between Beijing and Washington, saying a breakdown in communications raises the risk of an unintended collision or crisis.

The intelligence community’s latest report on global threats , which was released earlier Wednesday, said Chinese leaders would look to try to divide the U.S. and its allies but also reduce friction with the U.S. when it suited Beijing’s agenda.

“As Xi begins his third term as China’s leader, the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) will work to press Taiwan on unification, undercut U.S. influence, drive wedges between Washington and its partners, and foster some norms that favor its authoritarian system,” the report said. “At the same time, China’s leaders probably will seek opportunities to reduce tensions with Washington when they believe it suits their interests.”

To bolster its public image, China also is waging an increasingly “aggressive” campaign to influence U.S. opinion and policy makers, focusing on state and local officials who they believe “are more pliable than their federal counterparts,” the report said.

China has been laser-focused on achieving dominance in key technologies and the rivalry between Beijing and Washington will likely be shaped by which side was able to gain the upper hand in that technological competition, senators from both parties said at the hearing.

“While America was focused for two decades on counterterrorism, China was racing to overtake the U.S. in a range of emerging and foundational technologies such as advanced wireless communications, semiconductors, quantum, synthetic biology, next-generation energy, artificial intelligence, and in key upstream inputs like critical minerals,” said Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the Democratic chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

On Tuesday, Beijing’s new foreign minister said the U.S. and China are heading toward inevitable “confrontation and conflict” unless Washington changes course.

China has dismissed accusations from Washington that it’s considering providing lethal aid to Russia and charged the United States with stoking a potential conflict by selling fighter jets and other weapons to Taiwan.

Haines said there was “deepening collaboration” between China and Russia but did not say Beijing had made a decision to supply weapons and ammunition to Moscow.

China was “increasingly uncomfortable” about the non-lethal assistance it was providing Russia and appeared to be avoiding a high-profile public role, Haines said, without offering more details.

Asked by Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, about China possibly arming Russia, Haines said “that is a very real concern” and “how much assistance they’re providing is something we watch very carefully and we’d be happy to talk to you about that in closed session.”

Russian forces are suffering ammunition and personnel shortages and morale problems, and it was unlikely Russia would be able to capture large swathes of territory this year, Haines said. But Russian President Vladimir Putin appeared ready to press on with the war, betting that his forces could prevail over the long term, she said.

“We do not foresee the Russian military recovering enough this year to make major territorial gains, but Putin most likely calculates that time works in his favor, and that prolonging the war including with potential pauses in the fighting, may be his best remaining pathway to eventually securing Russian strategic interests in Ukraine, even if it takes years,” she said.

Haines also warned that the effects of climate change would aggravate risks to national security and intensify or trigger “domestic or cross-border geopolitical flashpoints.”

NBC News · by Dan De Luce

13. China has become a tough target for U.S. spies

Has become? Hasn't it always been a tough target?

Videos at the link: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/china-tough-target-us-spies-rcna73725?utm_source=pocket_saves

China has become a tough target for U.S. spies

The U.S. has yet to fully recover from a catastrophic setback in which an informant network inside China was unmasked and dismantled. At least 20 were executed.

NBC News · by Dan De Luce

With Washington and Beijing locked in a tense superpower rivalry, the United States faces a daunting task in discerning the intentions of leaders in a country where power is increasingly concentrated and surveillance widespread, former American intelligence officials said.

Reliable information about decision-making in China is in high demand in Washington amid fears Beijing could opt to arm Russian forces waging war in Ukraine or try to seize control of Taiwan by force.

But under President Xi Jinping’s rule, China has become an elusive target for U.S. intelligence agencies, according to five former senior intelligence officials and congressional aides.

Xi’s tightening grip on power, his government’s vast electronic surveillance apparatus, a crackdown on dissent in Hong Kong, and a strict three-year Covid lockdown have all made intelligence gathering exceedingly difficult, former officials said. Some of the officials spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitive nature of the topic.

Top leaders in China issue stark warning to the White House

March 7, 202302:16

Moreover, the U.S. has yet to fully recover from a catastrophic setback in which a network of intelligence informants inside China was unmasked and dismantled.

The episode represented one of the most significant intelligence breaches in American history, NBC News previously reported. The Chinese penetrated clandestine communications and used that knowledge to arrest and execute at least 20 CIA informants, according to multiple current and former government officials.

“It was a horrible, devastating loss to the intelligence community,” a former intelligence official said. “Lives were lost.”

Top intelligence officials are due to testify Wednesday and Thursday at annual congressional hearings on global threats facing the U.S., and China will likely dominate much of the discussion.

Until even a decade ago, China’s collective leadership, with power more diffused among different factions and individuals, offered up an array of possible intelligence targets and a more fluid political environment.

“There was a wider circle of people that intelligence agencies might target. It’s a much more centralized, tight system now,” said a former senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with the matter.

“The risk of being surprised is greater.”

The consolidation of power under Xi combined with three years of a stringent anti-Covid policy “has made getting authoritative information out of the system very difficult,” said Chris Johnson, president of China Strategies Group, a political risk consultancy.

“Then, more broadly, the expansion of their surveillance and monitoring capability over the years makes that very, very challenging,” said Johnson, a former senior China analyst at the CIA.

In short, he said, “it’s a b----.”

If Xi were to die suddenly, U.S. intelligence agencies likely would have no clear idea who might succeed him, former intelligence officers and analysts said.

“That’s how closed the system is, because we simply don’t know,” said Dennis Wilder, who served as the CIA’s deputy assistant director for East Asia and the Pacific from 2015 to 2016.

“The inner ring is difficult to penetrate,” said Wilder, now a research fellow for the Initiative for U.S.-China Dialogue on Global Issues at Georgetown University.

The CIA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence did not respond to requests for comment.

William Burns, director of the CIA, was asked in an interview last month with CBS News if the U.S. had a window into Xi’s thinking and decision-making, and he said that was “always the hardest question for any intelligence service” in an authoritarian system “where power is consolidated so much in the hands of one man.”

Burns added that “it’s something we work very hard at, and try to provide the president with the best insights that we can.”

'Not a black box'

Some former intelligence officials and regional experts are more optimistic about America’s ability to read China, as they say Xi and other senior communist officials often state publicly the goals and objectives of the regime.

“China is not an intelligence black box,” one former national security official said. “Far from it. In examining his speeches and directives, intelligence analysts have long assessed that Xi sought to displace the U.S. as the world’s dominant power and to replace the U.S.-led order with one reflective of China’s values and interests.”

Burns and other top Biden administration officials recently chose to publicly divulge intelligence reporting that suggested China was considering supplying weapons to Russia in its war in Ukraine.

CIA Director William Burns speaks at the agency's headquarters in Langley, Va., July 8, 2022.Susan Walsh / AP file

The disclosure “shows there is some insight into what is going on in the upper echelons of the Chinese government,” said Mollie Saltskog, a senior intelligence analyst at The Soufan Group, a global intelligence and security consultancy.

The initial intelligence suggesting that China was contemplating such a move was gleaned from Russian government officials, NBC News reported previously. U.S. officials then corroborated the information from other sources of intelligence and with allies, a current and former U.S. official said.

Report suggests Covid likely originated from lab leak in Wuhan

Feb. 27, 202302:36

China has denied it is considering sending lethal aid to Russia, dismissing the U.S. accusation as “disinformation.”

U.S. officials say they have exposed and disrupted Chinese attempts at spying inside the U.S. over the past several years. The first Chinese intelligence officer to be extradited to the U.S., Yanjun Xu, was sentenced last year to 20 years in prison after he was convicted of economic espionage against GE Aviation and other aviation companies.

U.S. intelligence leaders have vowed to treat China as their top priority. In 2021, the CIA announced a new center focused on gathering intelligence about China. The China Mission Center “will further strengthen our collective work on the most important geopolitical threat we face in the 21st century, an increasingly adversarial Chinese government,” Burns said in announcing the move.

Designs on Taiwan

China has long refused to rule out seizing control of Taiwan by force if necessary, but some senior U.S. military commanders have warned that the People’s Liberation Army is poised and even likely to launch an invasion within the next several years.

Some former intelligence officials and China experts disagree, arguing that there is a clear distinction between China’s military capabilities and the intentions of its political leaders -- and that Xi’s plans remain uncertain.

The increasingly tough rhetoric from Washington runs the risk of pushing China into more aggressive action instead of preventing it, former officials said.

China’s new foreign minister, Qin Gang, said Tuesday the U.S. and China are heading toward inevitable “confrontation and conflict” unless Washington changes course.

The intelligence challenge posed by China and the increasingly hostile atmosphere clouding U.S.-China relations underscore the need for more dialogue between the two superpowers to avoid an unintended collision, former intelligence officials said.

The Biden administration has cited the need to bolster America’s competitiveness and to rally allies and partners to counter China, but “you’ve got to talk to the Chinese too,” said Johnson, the former CIA analyst. “You’ve got to talk to them.”

Communication channels, particularly between the Chinese and the U.S. militaries, have withered as relations have deteriorated. The breakdown in communication was on full display when a Chinese surveillance balloon traversed the U.S. last month, with the Chinese rebuffing a phone call from Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin.

Ely Ratner, assistant secretary of defense for Indo-Pacific security affairs, called the lack of communication “destabilizing and dangerous,” and said that “we think we both ought to be doing a better job of managing it.”

“These are the kinds of times that we need to be talking about what our intentions are, what our perspectives are,” he said.

NBC News · by Dan De Luce

14. Studying Ukraine war, China's military minds fret over US missiles, Starlink

Ukraine can teach us a lot if we pay attention. Hopefully it will teach us more than it is teaching CHina.

Studying Ukraine war, China's military minds fret over US missiles, Starlink

Reuters · by Eduardo Baptista

BEIJING/HONG KONG, March 8 (Reuters) - China needs the capability to shoot down low-earth-orbit Starlink satellites and defend tanks and helicopters against shoulder-fired Javelin missiles, according to Chinese military researchers who are studying Russia's struggles in Ukraine in planning for possible conflict with U.S.-led forces in Asia.

A Reuters review of almost 100 articles in more than 20 defence journals reveals an effort across China's military-industrial complex to scrutinise the impact of U.S. weapons and technology that could be deployed against Chinese forces in a war over Taiwan.

The Chinese-language journals, which also examine Ukrainian sabotage operations, reflect the work of hundreds of researchers across a network of People's Liberation Army (PLA)-linked universities, state-owned weapons manufacturers and military intelligence think-tanks.

While Chinese officials have avoided any openly critical comments about Moscow's actions or battlefield performance as they call for peace and dialogue, the publicly available journal articles are more candid in their assessments of Russian shortcomings.

China's defence ministry did not respond to a request for comment about the researchers' findings. Reuters could not determine how closely the conclusions reflect the thinking among China's military leaders.

Two military attaches and another diplomat familiar with China's defence studies said the Communist Party's Central Military Commission, headed by President Xi Jinping, ultimately sets and directs research needs, and that it was clear from the volume of material that Ukraine was an opportunity the military leadership wanted to seize. The three people and other diplomats spoke to Reuters on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to discuss their work publicly.

A U.S. defence official told Reuters that despite differences with the situation in Taiwan, the Ukraine war offered insights for China.

"A key lesson the world should take away from the rapid international response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine is that aggression will increasingly be met with unity of action," said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the topic's sensitivity, without addressing concerns raised in the Chinese research about specific U.S. capabilities.

STARLINK GAZING

Half a dozen papers by PLA researchers highlight Chinese concern at the role of Starlink, a satellite network developed by Elon Musk's U.S.-based space exploration company SpaceX, in securing the communications of Ukraine's military amid Russian missile attacks on the country's power grid.

"The excellent performance of 'Starlink' satellites in this Russian-Ukrainian conflict will certainly prompt the U.S. and Western countries to use 'Starlink' extensively" in possible hostilities in Asia, said a September article co-written by researchers at the Army Engineering University of the PLA.

The authors deemed it "urgent" for China - which aims to develop its own similar satellite network – to find ways to shoot down or disable Starlink. SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment.

The conflict has also forged an apparent consensus among Chinese researchers that drone warfare merits greater investment. China has been testing drones in the skies around Taiwan, a self-ruled democracy that Beijing has vowed to bring under its control.

"These unmanned aerial vehicles will serve as the 'door kicker' of future wars," noted one article in a tank warfare journal published by state-owned arms manufacturer NORINCO, a supplier to the PLA, that described drones' ability to neutralise enemy defences.

While some of the journals are operated by provincial research institutes, others are official publications for central government bodies such as the State Administration of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defence, which oversees weapons production and military upgrades.

An article in the administration's official journal in October noted that China should improve its ability to defend military equipment in view of the "serious damage to Russian tanks, armored vehicles and warships" inflicted by Stinger and Javelin missiles operated by Ukrainian fighters.

Collin Koh, a security fellow at Singapore's S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, said the Ukrainian conflict had provided impetus to long-standing efforts by China's military scientists to develop cyber-warfare models and find ways of better protecting armour from modern Western weapons.

"Starlink is really something new for them to worry about; the military application of advanced civilian technology that they can't easily replicate," Koh said.

Beyond technology, Koh said he was not surprised that Ukrainian special forces operations inside Russia were being studied by China, which, like Russia, moves troops and weapons by rail, making them vulnerable to sabotage.

Despite its rapid modernisation, the PLA lacks recent combat experience. China's invasion of Vietnam in 1979 was its last major battle – a conflict that rumbled on until the late 1980s.

Reuters' review of the Chinese journals comes amid Western concern that China may be planning to supply Russia with lethal aid for its assault on Ukraine, which Beijing denies.

TAIWAN, AND BEYOND

Some of the Chinese articles stress Ukraine's relevance given the risk of a regional conflict pitting China against the United States and its allies, possibly over Taiwan. The U.S. has a policy of "strategic ambiguity" over whether it would intervene militarily to defend the island, but is bound by law to provide Taiwan with the means to defend itself.

U.S. Central Intelligence Agency Director William Burns has said that Xi has ordered his military to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027, while noting that the Chinese leader was probably unsettled by Russia's experience in Ukraine.

One article, published in October by two researchers at the PLA's National Defence University, analysed the effect of U.S. deliveries of high-mobility artillery rocket systems (HIMARS) to Ukraine, and whether China's military should be concerned.

"If HIMARS dares to intervene in Taiwan in the future, what was once known as an 'explosion-causing tool' will suffer another fate in front of different opponents," it concluded.

The article highlighted China's own advanced rocket system, supported by reconnaissance drones, and noted that Ukraine's success with HIMARS had relied on U.S. sharing of target information and intelligence via Starlink.

Four diplomats, including the two military attaches, said PLA analysts have long worried about superior U.S. military might, but Ukraine has sharpened their focus by providing a window on a large power's failure to overwhelm a smaller one backed by the West.

While that scenario has obvious Taiwan comparisons, there are differences, particularly given the island's vulnerability to a Chinese blockade that could force any intervening militaries into a confrontation.

Western countries, by contrast, are able to supply Ukraine by land via its European neighbours.

References to Taiwan are relatively few in the journals reviewed by Reuters, but diplomats and foreign scholars tracking the research say that Chinese defence analysts are tasked to provide separate internal reports for senior political and military leaders. Reuters was unable to access those internal reports.

Taiwanese Defence Minister Chiu Kuo-cheng said in February that China's military is learning from Russia's invasion of Ukraine that any attack on Taiwan would have to be swift to succeed. Taiwan is also studying the conflict to update its own battle strategies.

Several articles analyse the strengths of the Ukrainian resistance, including special forces' sabotage operations inside Russia, the use of the Telegram app to harness civilian intelligence, and the defense of the Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol.

Russian successes are also noted, such as tactical strikes using the Iskander ballistic missile.

The journal Tactical Missile Technology, published by state-owned weapons manufacturer China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation, produced a detailed analysis of the Iskander, but only released a truncated version to the public.

Many other articles focus on the mistakes of Russia's invading army, with one in the tank warfare journal identifying outdated tactics and a lack of unified command, while another in an electronic warfare journal said Russian communications interference was insufficient to counter NATO's provision of intelligence to the Ukrainians, leading to costly ambushes.

A piece published this year by researchers at the Engineering University of the People's Armed Police assessed the insights China could glean from the blowing-up of the Kerch Bridge in Russian-occupied Crimea. The full analysis has not been released publicly, however.

Beyond the battlefield, the work has covered the information war, which the researchers conclude was won by Ukraine and its allies.

One February article by researchers at the PLA Information Engineering University calls on China to preemptively prepare for a global public opinion backlash similar to that experienced by Russia.

China should "promote the construction of cognitive confrontation platforms" and tighten control of social media to prevent Western information campaigns from influencing its people during a conflict, it said.

Reporting by Eduardo Baptista in Beijing and Greg Torode in Hong Kong; additional reporting by Idrees Ali and Phil Stewart in Washington. Editing by David Crawshaw.

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Reuters · by Eduardo Baptista

15. The Language of War: Why the talk about kinetic and non-kinetic warfare?

A lot of food for thought. This really focuses on cyber and not on the other non-kinetic means.

Excerpts:

In this post I consider how this kinetic/non-kinetic dichotomy, and other developments in the language used to describe contemporary conflict reflect an attempt to find a place for activities which can be hostile and hurtful but not necessarily lethal alongside those which are unambiguously lethal. As the most prominent of these is cyberattacks I conclude with an assessment of their limited impact in the Russo-Ukraine war.

...

When this concern about a grey zone began to surface over the last decade, usually with reference to Iran and China as well as Russia, the point was not that the activities undertaken in this zone were non-violent, as in many cases they clearly were not. What was significant about them was that they could be undertaken covertly, or at least with some level of deniability, and, most importantly, that they could be sustained, possibly indefinitely, without spilling over into an open conflict that might escalate into all-out war. The UK’s 2021 Integrated Review stated that:

‘Technology will create new vulnerabilities to hostile activity and attack in domains such as cyberspace and space, notably including the spread of disinformation online. It will undermine social cohesion, community and national identity as individuals spend more time in a virtual world and as automation reshapes the labour market.’

...

Despite the expectation that cyberattacks would play a major role the practice was therefore far less impressive. Why was this?

First, it takes time to prepare these attacks. It is necessary to get to know the target systems and infiltrate them (increasing the risk of detection as this is done). The Viasat attack might have taken a year of preparation. Nor is it that easy to switch the same cyber weapons from target to another.

Second, when cyber weapons are effective it is not always easy to control their effects. There may have been some concern in Moscow about the political impact of malware spreading, although Moscow seems to be more relaxed in this regard now. In 2017 the NotPetya virus disabled some 500,000 computers in Ukraine alone, but also spread quickly, hitting Russia’s state-owned oil company Rosneft as well as badly hitting Maersk, the Danish shipping company.

Third it is skilled work, The reported loss of up to 10 percent of IT specialists leaving Russia during 2022 and the demands of mobilization will not have helped.

Lastly, and most importantly, having suffered from these attacks from 2014 Ukraine had invested in security and resilience. With the help of governments and international companies it was able to cope. Cyfirma, a company advising on cyber security, explains what was done:

,,,

The basic conclusion still must be that cyberattacks have yet to demonstrate the potential claimed for them. Where they have had an impact this has been in a supporting role. As noted, from last September they played a part in the attacks on Ukrainian civil infrastructure, along with missiles and drones. But it was the ‘kinetic’ missiles and drones that made it difficult for Ukraine to keep the lights on and people warm. Put crudely rather than trying to work out how to penetrate a network involved with energy transmission, which might turn out to have effective defences or backup, it was simpler to blast the electricity station.

This war has been dominated by firepower, by systems that kill people and destroy things. That remains the main business of war, which other capabilities support but do not displace. I suspect that is why the term ‘kinetic’ is in vogue, because in its quasi-scientific simplicity it captures war’s core and inescapable character. But that is why it is also redundant. Kinetic war is not a distinctive type. It is all war.

The Language of War

Why the talk about kinetic and non-kinetic warfare?

Lawrence Freedman

1 hr ago

samf.substack.com · by Lawrence Freedman

In discussions of contemporary war, including the current one between Russia and Ukraine, one can find many references to ‘kinetic warfare’. This is a term that entered the military lexicon quite recently. A kinetic war is normally described as one involving the use of lethal force, though that might be thought to be a natural feature of all wars and not just a special sort. This raises the interesting question of what might constitute a ‘non-kinetic war’. In this post I consider how this kinetic/non-kinetic dichotomy, and other developments in the language used to describe contemporary conflict reflect an attempt to find a place for activities which can be hostile and hurtful but not necessarily lethal alongside those which are unambiguously lethal. As the most prominent of these is cyberattacks I conclude with an assessment of their limited impact in the Russo-Ukraine war.

Military Language and Concepts

The language military professionals use to talk about war reflects their need to manage its inherent complexity and chaos, often cloaking naturally brutish and vicious activities in technical terminology, a role ‘kinetic’ performs. In this they are perhaps not different from other professions, for example medicine, where ways must also be found to discuss deeply unpleasant subjects dispassionately, without constantly dwelling on their full human meaning. The tranquilising effect of the language is not helped by the military propensity for acronyms, especially when referring to weapons systems, which can make conversations bewildering, especially for those who don’t know their ATACMS from their HIMARS (Army Tactical Missile System which can be fired from the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System).

By and large it has been possible to talk about the Russo-Ukraine war without resorting to the more arcane military terminology. While the detail of specific encounters may be hard to grasp the core challenges faced by both sides are not. The range and detail of the combat images available on social media has shown fighting resembling that of the world wars, including soldiers hiding in trenches as the shells come in or tanks trying to avoid mines as they cross fields, and often failing to do so. Generals of earlier times viewing all of this would soon recognise what was going on and readily engage on such matters as the relative strength of the defence over the offence, the possibilities for manoeuvre and encirclement against the hard slog of attrition, and the vulnerability of supply lines to interdiction. They might note how the influence of the Prussian theorist Carl von Clausewitz (1780-1831) can still be felt in the discussion of decisive battles (the scale of the defeat necessary to persuade the enemy to give up), friction (why military operations rarely proceed as planned), centres of gravity (the point at which if you hit the enemy hard it is most likely to collapse), and the culminating point (when an army on the offensive becomes exhausted and can advance no further).

Where lasting innovation has come in military language it tends to be because of the impact of new types of weapons or modes of warfare. The most obvious example of this came with the arrival of nuclear weapons in 1945. This was a transformational moment as the focus shifted from fighting wars to deterring them, leading to the generation of a whole set of new concepts – such as ‘first and second strikes’ and ‘assured destruction.’ The language of deterrence and escalation is present as we try to work out where Putin has his red lines and how far he is prepared to go if he thinks they are being crossed.

The Digital Age

The same conceptual clarity has been lacking when discussing all those developments associated with the digital age. This has also been transformational but has yet to generate an accompanying and generally agreed framework for describing and evaluating its impact. This is in part because the changes have been incremental, not sudden and stark as with the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. The microchip was invented in the 1950s and the circuits printed upon them have become progressively more complex since. Computers have moved from performing basic calculations faster than humans to outthinking humans in a whole range of areas with the promise of more to come with the advance of artificial intelligence.

An additional factor is that digitisation, with its fast networks and ease of communication, is ubiquitous, promising greater efficiency in all human affairs, and not just warfare. One consequence of this ubiquity is that it creates new dependencies and so new vulnerabilities, as bad actors, from criminals to hostile states, see opportunities to disrupt and manipulate. This has opened the possibility of conducting conflict away from the battlefield, mounting ‘cyberattacks’, attacking societies directly rather than first having to defeat their armed forces.

A third issue is that digital age systems do not replace all that has gone before. They must work with the systems of the ‘industrial age’ - the platforms for carrying weapons and moving them to places where they can be fired to the greatest effect, such as artillery and tanks, aircraft and warships. The digital age systems do not so much replace those of the industrial age as render them more effective so that they can offer greater precision over longer-range, facilitated by the speed with which information about the operating environment, including enemy positions, can be gathered, assessed, and disseminated.

These developments were thrown into stark relief during the 1991 Gulf War leading to talk of a ‘revolution in military affairs’ but this soon appeared hyperbolic and premature, especially after 9/11 when the big fight was not against a ‘peer competitor’ but against ruthless terrorists. The big counterinsurgency campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan drew attention to challenges quite different to those faced in conventional warfare against regular armies, requiring a sophisticated understanding of local politics and culture.

Then in 2014 the first Russian moves against Ukraine involved such a wide range of capabilities – from regular forces to sponsored militias to cyberhackers to social media propagandists – that it was no longer claimed that there was one capability central to modern warfare but that instead it involved the coming together of lots of different types of capabilities. The most popular adjective to capture this feature was ‘hybrid’. When this term was first introduced in 2006, with Israel’s fight against Hezbollah in the Lebanon in mind, it was about the combination of regular and irregular forces that was highlighted. Then it seemed as if the Russian leadership had developed a whole new theory of conflict around mixing and matching different capabilities. Although this claim that was later judged to have been exaggerated, it was still the case that Russia was actively exploring the possibilities of attacks exploiting digital networks.

A variety of activities could be covered under this ‘cyber’ heading. They largely corresponded to familiar ‘behind the front lines’ activities - sabotage, propaganda, subversion, and espionage. As commonly discussed in the West, cyberattacks were closest to sabotage – interfering with administrative networks or power supplies – and propaganda – using social media to spread fake news and false narratives. From the Russian perspective subversion and espionage loomed large, both defensively and offensively, reflecting a view of the fragility of all socio-political systems including their own. Moscow was both convinced that Western governments were stirring up disaffected Russians and also that it could undermine these same governments by spreading alarm and despondency amongst their populations. These non-traditional forms of warfare seemed to appeal to Russia, because of their interest in finding ways of hurting others while still claiming innocence. Prior to 2022 it was often argued that it suited Russia better to work in this murky ‘grey zone’, avoiding both the risks of war and the rules of peace.

Hybrid and Multi-Domain

When this concern about a grey zone began to surface over the last decade, usually with reference to Iran and China as well as Russia, the point was not that the activities undertaken in this zone were non-violent, as in many cases they clearly were not. What was significant about them was that they could be undertaken covertly, or at least with some level of deniability, and, most importantly, that they could be sustained, possibly indefinitely, without spilling over into an open conflict that might escalate into all-out war. The UK’s 2021 Integrated Review stated that:

‘Technology will create new vulnerabilities to hostile activity and attack in domains such as cyberspace and space, notably including the spread of disinformation online. It will undermine social cohesion, community and national identity as individuals spend more time in a virtual world and as automation reshapes the labour market.’

In 2016 the European Union adopted its own definition of ‘hybrid threats’ (not quite war), which detached these various unconventional activities from standard military operations:

‘While definitions of hybrid threats vary and need to remain flexible to respond to their evolving nature, the concept aims to capture the mixture of coercive and subversive activity, conventional and unconventional methods (i.e. diplomatic, military, economic, technological), which can be used in a coordinated manner by state or non-state actors to achieve specific objectives while remaining below the threshold of formally declared warfare. There is usually an emphasis on exploiting the vulnerabilities of the target and on generating ambiguity to hinder decision-making processes. Massive disinformation campaigns, using social media to control the political narrative or to radicalise, recruit and direct proxy actors can be vehicles for hybrid threats.’

So ‘hybrid’ came to refer to all mischief-making in this grey zone, so long as it stayed below the threshold of full-scale war.

But it could also be seen in other phrases that have been used in recent decades to convey a more holistic approach in which the desired result requires bringing together a range of capabilities – ‘network-centric’, ‘effects-based’, ‘full spectrum’ and ‘multi-domain’. In discussing ‘multi-domain operations’ the US Army warned how:

‘China and Russia exploit the conditions of the operational environment to achieve their objectives without resorting to armed conflict by fracturing the U.S.’s alliances, partnerships, and resolve. They attempt to create stand-off through the integration of diplomatic and economic actions, unconventional and information warfare (social media, false narratives, cyber-attacks), and the actual or threatened employment of conventional forces. By creating instability within countries and alliances, China and Russia create political separation that results in strategic ambiguity reducing the speed of friendly recognition, decision, and reaction. Through these competitive actions, China and Russia believe they can achieve objectives below the threshold of armed conflict.’

This led to the argument that the United States should also be able to compete ‘in all domains short of conflict’, spanning the ‘competition continuum,’ although the Army’s own contribution on close examination look a lot like a combination of traditional deterrence and war-fighting operations.

Some analysts argue that it might even be possible for the West’s enemies to gain some decisive advantage without ever having to resort to open warfare. Victory might be gained as computer networks crashed and collective minds were turned. Thus Richard Harknett and Max Smeets concluded in an article published a year ago:

‘Cyber operations and campaigns can be pivotal in world affairs by independently … supporting the maintenance or alteration of the balance of power … without having to resort to military violence.’

The idea that states or groups can consider themselves to be at war without actually engaging in acts of war is not new. It was once the case that war had a clear legal status. A war would start with a formal declaration, which would have implications for neutrals as well as the belligerents, and normally end with an equally formal cessation of hostilities and possibly a treaty, which would confirm who had won and lost. Somewhat ironically, when in 1928 states nobly agreed to renounce war as an act of policy those determined on aggression simply used other words to describe the situation – ‘incident’, ‘emergency’, ‘police action’, ‘intervention’ and so on. Putin is continuing in this tradition with his talk of a ‘special military operation’.

We have also become used to the possibility that the line between the states of peace and war can be blurred – that there can be periods of growing antagonism in which states seek to hurt each other without descending into full-scale violence. Such a condition might even involve low-level violence, for example border skirmishes and incursions, without further escalation. After all for 45 years international affairs was defined by a ‘Cold War’ between the US and Soviet led blocs.

When wars were declared this would lead to the start of ‘hostilities.’ In war as in peace there might be sabotage, propaganda, subversion, and espionage as well as economic measures and diplomacy, but these would now be ancillary to war’s most distinguishing feature - the use of purposive violence. What has happened over recent decades is that these ancillary activities have come to be seen as being as important, and, in some circumstances even more important, than the violence. They need to be attended to while a conflict is stuck in the grey zone and also after the transition into open war. To ensure this happens these activities have acquired their own institutional presence, and command structures. Much effort now goes into working out how all these activities can be properly coordinated so that they reinforce each other rather than work at cross purposes.

Kinetic and non-Kinetic War

This backdrop helps explain current references to ‘kinetic war.’

Kinetic energy is the energy of motion (from the Greek word kinesis which means motion). An object’s motion is a function of its mass and the force working on it, which gives it speed. More mass and velocity equate to more kinetic energy, which is released when one object collides with another object. This is obviously a feature of bullets, shells, rockets, bombs, and so on, once they have been shot, launched, or dropped. This is why a kinetic war refers to one dominated by the use of firepower to kill or wound people and destroy things.

In principle ‘kinetic’ is an unnecessary qualifier to ‘war’. It has come into use because of the spread of the idea that there might be wars that do not involve fighting. Other than that, it is not an obvious way to describe the normal, bloody business of warfare. It has the hallmarks of a euphemism, a way of describing war without mentioning its pain and horror. When the term first began to be noticed in 2002, Timothy Noah observed how it was objectionable to both doves and hawks.

‘To those who deplore or resist going to war, “kinetic” is unconscionably euphemistic, with antiseptic connotations derived from high-school physics and aesthetic ones traceable to the word’s frequent use by connoisseurs of modern dance. To those who celebrate war (or at least find it grimly necessary), “kinetic” fails to evoke the manly virtues of strength, fierceness, and bravery.’

The term is therefore interesting less because of what it describes but because it implies a different sort of war –non-kinetic – that achieves the objectives normally associated with war but without employing the normal methods.

What then is non-kinetic war? In physics, potential energy is stored within an object by virtue of its position relative to other objects. Only when they are acted upon to produce motion do they acquire kinetic energy. So strictly speaking the proper contrast with kinetic warfare is potential or latent warfare, that is one for which preparations have been made and can be threatened. On this basis a very good example of non-kinetic warfare would be nuclear deterrence. The weapons do not have to be used to have an effect; the thought of the potential energy that might be released suffices.

In all of this we can see a possible meaning of non-kinetic war as referring to a struggle for advantage that might take place before the outbreak of full-scale war, except that it is quite specific. To make any sense of the term it must refer to a high-level of conflict that is essentially non-violent. It has been used to refer to the application of the softer forms of power, such as those aspects of counterinsurgency warfare intended to win over the ‘hearts and minds’ of the local population, for example by building roads, schools, and hospitals. But in counterinsurgency theory these soft measures still had to work with the harder forms of power. It was not an alternative to fighting the insurgents. To win hearts and minds it was also essential to keep people safe from being attacked and demonstrate that the enemy could be defeated.

The normal contrast is with cyberattacks and information campaigns. As we have seen these are now regularly highlighted as effective ways of damaging opponents and rivals in the grey zone while still having a vital complementary role to play once open war breaks out. These methods could only lead to a form of truly ‘non-kinetic’ war if in some way they meant that the enemy could be defeated without death and destruction. This has always seemed unlikely. If the effects were drastic, with transportation and energy systems crashing, or communities turned against each other, the effects would be extremely violent, in the same way that blockades or economic sanctions that truly bite cannot be considered truly non-violent because of their harmful effects on the target population.

In some recent discussions cyber weapons are presented as having serious benefits compared to the kinetic. One artillery shell can at best destroy one target and often many are needed to do so. The effects are permanent and cannot be reversed. To get greater effects a greater volume of shells will be needed, and there is then the risk of the stockpiles running out before the war aims can be achieved. By contrast cyber weapons can be used in the grey zone, and against many targets all at once, and they can be used over and over again. While they can do permanent damage their effects are often reversible. On the downside these effects are not always predictable and may be limited, and because they are often used covertly their meaning can be ambiguous to the victim.

Cyberattacks in the Current War

The current war provides us with an opportunity to evaluate the comparative merits of the kinetic and the cyber. Compared with pre-war expectations cyber has had a limited impact. But this is emphatically not because of a lack of Russian effort. The head of the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre has described the Russian cyber campaign to be ‘probably the most sustained and intensive…. on record.’ In the weeks before the war began a major effort was made to wipe out Ukrainian government networks, deleting data so that systems were unable to function. On 24 February, according to NATO, Russia ‘successfully deployed more destructive malware . . . than the rest of the world’s cyberpowers combined typically use in a given year.’ As of late June, Microsoft claimed to have detected ‘eight distinct malware programs—some wipers and some other forms of destructive malware—against 48 different Ukrainian agencies and enterprises.’ They have used a significant number of all the destructive malware variants known to exist.

The most important attack came one hour before Russian troops crossed the border, when the Viasat satellite communications network was disrupted by Russian military intelligence. Jon Bateman (whose detailed research on all aspects of this issue is invaluable) describes this as ‘the marquee cyber event of the war so far’. According to Viasat, Russian hackers launched a ‘targeted denial of service attack [that] made it difficult for many modems to remain online.’ They also executed ‘a ground-based network intrusion . . . to gain remote access to the trusted management segment’ of the network. There they issued ‘destructive commands’ to ‘a large number of residential modems simultaneously.’ Some equipment was quickly restored but Viasat had to ship tens of thousands of modems to replace those that stayed offline. Rescue came in the form of Starlink terminals, with levels of connectivity that have proved to be resilient.

The attack on Viasat was only one of a number of efforts to jam Ukrainian communications, interfering with links between the central command and front line soldiers. Once the initial offensives faltered this Russian effort lost its focus. Moreover, it was also struggling with the same problems that had afflicted its conventional military operations: underestimation of Ukrainian defences. There was soon an evident disconnect between the tempo of the Russian offensive and the Ukrainian counters, and the management of the sabotage, propaganda and intelligence-collecting operations, conducted by the spy agencies, the FSB and GRU. Despite the talk of hybrid operations, these were not well synchronised.

During 2022 there were 2,100 cyberattacks against Ukrainian organizations, of which some 600 were before the start of the war. Of these more than 300 were against the security and defence sector, over 400 attacks against civil society (commercial, energy, financial, telecommunications and software sectors) with another 500 aimed at government groups. From September when Russia began a systematic campaign against Ukraine’s critical infrastructure, using missiles and kamikaze drones, this also became the focus of Russia’s cyber strikes. These included an unsuccessful effort aimed at an electrical substation that would have disrupted power for millions of Ukrainians.

Despite the expectation that cyberattacks would play a major role the practice was therefore far less impressive. Why was this?

First, it takes time to prepare these attacks. It is necessary to get to know the target systems and infiltrate them (increasing the risk of detection as this is done). The Viasat attack might have taken a year of preparation. Nor is it that easy to switch the same cyber weapons from target to another.

Second, when cyber weapons are effective it is not always easy to control their effects. There may have been some concern in Moscow about the political impact of malware spreading, although Moscow seems to be more relaxed in this regard now. In 2017 the NotPetya virus disabled some 500,000 computers in Ukraine alone, but also spread quickly, hitting Russia’s state-owned oil company Rosneft as well as badly hitting Maersk, the Danish shipping company.

Third it is skilled work, The reported loss of up to 10 percent of IT specialists leaving Russia during 2022 and the demands of mobilization will not have helped.

Lastly, and most importantly, having suffered from these attacks from 2014 Ukraine had invested in security and resilience. With the help of governments and international companies it was able to cope. Cyfirma, a company advising on cyber security, explains what was done:

‘Many crucial services were transferred to data centers outside of the country, beyond the reach of Russian fires. Ukraine’s military, contrary to many Russian units, had prepared alternative means of communication. Amazon helped in developing cloud-based backups of essential government data, putting essentially the whole government “into a box”. Or more precisely suitcase-sized solid-state hard drives, called Snowball Edge units. Critical infrastructure and economic information, more than 10 million gigabytes of data, including information from 27 Ukrainian ministries, have been flown out the country and put into cloud.’

NATO provided access to its repository of known malware, Britain provided firewalls and forensic capabilities, the US pledged large but publicly undisclosed assistance, the EU digital governance powerhouse Estonia offered help based on its long term success in the digitalization of the economy. Western assistance did not stop with governments and militaries though, besides the aforementioned help from Amazon, Microsoft alone pledged $400m in free help, being quickly followed by other companies from the industry, providing tools and know-how. Cyber officials have, however, noted that the cooperation has been far from one sided. Marcus Willett, a former head of cyber issues for GCHQ was quoted stating that ‘…the Ukrainians taught the US and the UK more about Russian cyber-tactics than they learned from them.’

It is of course always unwise to generalise from one experience, although this was an area in which Russia supposedly excelled. It may well be that a cyber offensive mounted by the US and its allies would be more effective. As far as we know Russia has not suffered serious attacks, other than from the hacktivist group Anonymous which has run a crowdsourced campaign against Russia. They have hacked: printers to beat censorship by printing anti-government messages; hosting servers to attack Russian websites and services; Smart TVs, internet streams, news sites and TV channels to broadcast banned images and information about the war; and companies that still do business in Russia. The impact of these acts is unclear although the Kremlin can’t have been pleased, not least because it reveals their potential vulnerability to more sophisticated attacks from their enemies in the future.

The basic conclusion still must be that cyberattacks have yet to demonstrate the potential claimed for them. Where they have had an impact this has been in a supporting role. As noted, from last September they played a part in the attacks on Ukrainian civil infrastructure, along with missiles and drones. But it was the ‘kinetic’ missiles and drones that made it difficult for Ukraine to keep the lights on and people warm. Put crudely rather than trying to work out how to penetrate a network involved with energy transmission, which might turn out to have effective defences or backup, it was simpler to blast the electricity station.

This war has been dominated by firepower, by systems that kill people and destroy things. That remains the main business of war, which other capabilities support but do not displace. I suspect that is why the term ‘kinetic’ is in vogue, because in its quasi-scientific simplicity it captures war’s core and inescapable character. But that is why it is also redundant. Kinetic war is not a distinctive type. It is all war.

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samf.substack.com · by Lawrence Freedman

16. Major Russian missile barrage slams targets across Ukraine

Major Russian missile barrage slams targets across Ukraine

AP · by HANNA ARHIROVA and ELENA BECATOROS · March 9, 2023

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Russia unleashed “a massive rocket attack” that hit critical infrastructure and residential buildings in 10 regions of Ukraine, the country’s president said Thursday, with officials reporting at least six deaths in the largest such night-time attack in three weeks.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy described the barrage that came while many people slept as an attempt by Moscow “to intimidate Ukrainians again.”

“The occupiers can only terrorize civilians. That’s all they can do,” Zelenskyy said in an online statement.

The war has largely ground to a battlefield stalemate over the winter. The Kremlin’s forces started targeting Ukraine’s power supply last October in an apparent attempt to demoralize the civilian population. The barrages later became less frequent, with analysts speculating Russia may have been running low on ammunition. The last massive barrage took place on Feb. 16.

U.S. intelligence doesn’t believe Russia can make major territorial gains in Ukraine this year due to its large numbers of casualties, its inability to replenish its stocks of weapons and ammunition, and poor leadership and morale, Avril Haines, the director of national intelligence, told a U.S. Senate committee Wednesday. That may persuade Russian President Vladimir Putin to prolong the war, she said.

Russia-Ukraine war

The latest missile attack left almost half of consumers in Kyiv without heating, with temperatures at around 9 degrees Celsius (48 Fahrenheit) amid a spring thaw.

In southern Ukraine, the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, which is occupied by Russian forces, lost power as a result of the missile attacks, according to nuclear state operator Energoatom.

It is the sixth time that Europe’s largest nuclear plant has been in a state of blackout since it was taken over by Russia months ago, forcing it to rely on diesel generators that can run the station for 10 days. Nuclear plants need constant power to run cooling systems and avoid a meltdown, and fears remain about the possibility of a catastrophe at Zaporizhzhia.

The head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog expressed alarm at the latest blackout, saying he was “astonished by the complacency” of the organization he leads, the International Atomic Energy Agency.

“What are we doing to prevent this happening? We are the IAEA, we are meant to care about nuclear safety,” he told its board of directors in a meeting Thursday, according to an IAEA statement.

“Each time we are rolling a dice,” he said. “And if we allow this to continue time after time then one day our luck will run out.”

The agency has placed teams of experts at all four of Ukraine’s nuclear power plants to reduce the risk of severe accidents.

Air raid sirens wailed through the night across Ukraine, including the capital, Kyiv, where explosions occurred in two western areas of the city. Defense systems were activated around the country.

Overall, Russia launched 81 missiles and eight exploding Shahed drones, according to Ukraine’s chief commander of the armed forces, Valerii Zaluzhnyi. Thirty-four cruise missiles were intercepted, as were four drones, he said.

Viktor Bukhta, a 57-year-old resident of a damaged residential building in Kyiv’s Sviatoshynski district, where officials said three people were wounded and apartment windows were shattered, said a missile landed nearby at about 6.45 a.m..

“We went into the yard. People were injured, they helped, first aid kits were handed out from the cars,” he told The Associated Press. “Then the cars caught fire. We tried to extinguish them with car fire extinguishers. And I got a little burnt.”

Kyiv’s city administration said the capital was attacked with both missiles and exploding drones. Many were intercepted but its energy infrastructure was hit.

Smoke could be seen rising from a facility in Kyiv’s Holosiivskyi district and police had cordoned off all roads leading to it.

The alarm in Kyiv was lifted just before 8 a.m., with the air raid sirens falling silent after some seven hours.

Private electricity operator DTEK reported that three of its power stations had been hit. There were no casualties, but the company said equipment was severely damaged.

Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, was left without running water and heating after 15 missiles hit the region, mayor Ihor Terekhov told the Ukrainian public broadcaster.

Terekhov added that electricity shortages also disrupted mobile communications and public transport in the city, as all trams and trolleybuses ground to a halt.

Five people were killed in the Lviv region after a missile struck a residential area, Lviv Gov. Maksym Kozytskyi said. Three buildings were destroyed by fire, and rescue workers were combing through rubble looking for more possible victims, he said.

A sixth person was killed and two others wounded in multiple strikes in the Dnipropetrovsk region that targeted its energy infrastructure and industrial facilities, Gov. Serhii Lysak said.

In the south, Odesa Gov. Maksym Marchenko said residential buildings were hit and several power lines were damaged in strikes on his region. He said six missiles and one drone were shot down.

Ukrainian Energy Minister Herman Halushchenko condemned the missile strikes as “another barbaric massive attack on the energy infrastructure of Ukraine,” saying in a Facebook post that facilities in Kyiv, Mykolaiv, Kharkiv, Zaporizhzhia, Odesa, Dnipropetrovsk and Zhytomyr regions had been targeted.

Ukrainian Railways reported power outages in certain areas, with 15 trains delayed.

Preventive emergency power cuts were applied in Kyiv, Dnipropetrovsk, Donetsk and Odesa regions, supplier DTEK said. Klitschko said 40% of consumers in Kyiv were without heating because of the emergency power cuts. Water supplies were uninterrupted, he said.

___

Follow AP’s coverage of the war in Ukraine: https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine

AP · by HANNA ARHIROVA and ELENA BECATOROS · March 9, 2023

17. China is right about US containment

An interesting thought experiment.

This is where a study of Kennan would pay dividends. There is no endgame to today’s cold war. Unlike the USSR, which was an empire in disguise, China inhabits historic boundaries and is never likely to dissolve. The US needs a strategy to cope with a China that will always be there.

If you took a snap poll in Washington and asked: one, are the US and China in a cold war; and two, how does the US win it, the answer to the first would be an easy “yes”; the second would elicit a long pause. Betting on China’s submission is not a strategy.

Here is another way to look at it. The US still holds more of the cards. It has plenty of allies, a global system that it designed, better technology and younger demographics. China’s growth is slowing and its society is ageing faster. The case for US resolve and patience is stronger today than it was when Kennan was around. Self-confident powers should not be afraid to talk.

China is right about US containment

But encircling Beijing is not a viable long-term strategy

EDWARD LUCE

Financial Times · by Edward Luce · March 8, 2023

Here is a thought experiment. If Taiwan did not exist, would the US and China still be at loggerheads? My hunch is yes. Antagonism between top dogs and rising powers is part of the human story.

The follow-up is whether such tensions would persist if China were a democracy rather than a one-party state. That is harder to say but it is not obvious that an elected Chinese government would feel any less resentful of the US-led global order. It is also hard to imagine the circumstances in which America would willingly share the limelight.

All of which suggests that loose talk of a US-China conflict is no longer far-fetched. Countries do not easily change their spots: China is the middle kingdom wanting redress for the age of western humiliation; America is the dangerous nation seeking monsters to destroy. Both are playing to type.

The question is whether global stability can survive either of them insisting that they must succeed. The likeliest alternative to today’s US-China stand-off is not a kumbaya meeting-of-minds, but war.

This week, Xi Jinping went further than before in naming America as the force behind the “containment”, “encirclement” and “suppression” of China. Though his rhetoric was provocative, it was not technically wrong. President Joe Biden is still officially committed to trying to co-operate with China. But Biden was as easily blown off course last month as a weather balloon. Washington’s panic over what is after all 19th-century technology prompted Antony Blinken, the US secretary of state, to cancel a Beijing trip that was to pave the way for a Biden-Xi summit.

Washington groupthink drove Biden’s overreaction. The consensus is now so hawkish that it is liable to see any outreach to China as weakness. As the historian Max Boot points out, bipartisanship is not always a good thing.

Some of America’s worst blunders — the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin resolution that led to the Vietnam war, or the 2002 Iraq war resolution — were bipartisan. So is the new House committee on China, which its chair, Mike Gallagher, says will “contrast the Chinese Communist party’s techno-totalitarian state with the Free World”. It is probably safe to say he will not be on the hunt for contradictory evidence.

A big difference between today’s cold war and the original one is that China is not exporting revolution. From Cuba to Angola and Korea to Ethiopia, the Soviet Union underwrote leftwing insurgencies worldwide.

The original idea of containment, laid out in George Kennan’s 1947 Foreign Affairs essay, The Sources of Soviet Conduct, was more modest than the undeclared containment that is now US policy. Kennan’s advice was twofold: to stop the expansion of the Soviet empire; and to shore up western democracy. He counselled against the use of force. With patience and skill the USSR would fold, which is what eventually happened.

Today’s approach is containment-plus. When Xi talks of “suppression”, he means America’s ban on advanced semiconductor exports to China. Since high-end chips are used for both civil and military purposes, the US has grounds for denying China the means to upgrade its military. But the collateral effect is to limit China’s economic development.

There is no easy way round this. One possible side-effect will be to accelerate Xi’s drive for “made in China” technology. The Chinese president has also explicitly declared Beijing’s goal of dominating artificial intelligence by 2030, which is another way of saying that China wants to set the rules.

The one positive feature of today’s cold war compared with the last one — China and America’s economic interdependence — is thus something Biden wants to undo. Decoupling is taking on an air of inevitability.

When Xi refers to “encirclement”, he is thinking about America’s deepening ties to China’s neighbours. Again, Xi mostly has himself to blame.

Japan’s shift to a more normal military stance, which includes a doubling of its defence spending, probably worries China the most. But America’s growing closeness to the Philippines and India, and the Aukus nuclear submarine deal with Australia and the UK, are also part of the picture. Add in increased US arms transfers to Taiwan and the ingredients for Chinese paranoia are ripe. How does this end?

This is where a study of Kennan would pay dividends. There is no endgame to today’s cold war. Unlike the USSR, which was an empire in disguise, China inhabits historic boundaries and is never likely to dissolve. The US needs a strategy to cope with a China that will always be there.

If you took a snap poll in Washington and asked: one, are the US and China in a cold war; and two, how does the US win it, the answer to the first would be an easy “yes”; the second would elicit a long pause. Betting on China’s submission is not a strategy.

Here is another way to look at it. The US still holds more of the cards. It has plenty of allies, a global system that it designed, better technology and younger demographics. China’s growth is slowing and its society is ageing faster. The case for US resolve and patience is stronger today than it was when Kennan was around. Self-confident powers should not be afraid to talk.

edward.luce@ft.com

Financial Times · by Edward Luce · March 8, 2023

18. Taiwan Warming to Hosting US Ammo Storage Facilities

Would we have to fight our way to the ammo depots?

Excerpts:

Although Taiwan’s hosting of US ammunition storage facilities would be certain to enrage China, a key foreign policy figure of Taiwan’s largest opposition party, the Kuomintang (KMT), displayed a supportive stance towards the idea, which is particularly notable, given that the KMT is far more China-friendly than the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DDP) and usually seeks avoiding provoking China.

“If Washington is thinking of increasing the inventory of munitions in Taiwan, it reflects a concrete security commitment to help Taiwan’s self-defense,” Alexander C. Huang, the KMT’s representative to the US, told Asia Sentinel. “The possible acquisitions and arrangements need to be discussed based on Taiwan’s defense concept and mutual interest.”

Confirmation of the talks comes two months after Japanese daily Nikkei reported that Japanese defense officials are weighing a plan to build dozens of ammunition and weapons depots on far-flung southwestern islands in preparation for a potential Taiwan crisis. Japan has about 1,400 ammunition storage facilities nationwide, but 70 percent are located in the country's northernmost main island of Hokkaido, more than 2,000 km away from Japanese islands in the East China Sea. One proposal would build nearly 70 ammunition storage facilities within the next five years. The new depots are to be located in the Nansei Islands, which include Okinawa and extend toward Taiwan from the southern tip of Japan's southernmost main island of Kyushu.

Taiwan Warming to Hosting US Ammo Storage Facilities

Russia's invasion of Ukraine spurs Washington to add new sites closer to where combat is expected

By: Jens Kastner

asiasentinel.com · by Asia Sentinel

By: Jens Kastner

Taiwan’s defense minister Chiu Kuo-cheng, during recent parliamentarian questioning, has confirmed that Taiwan and the US have opened talks on establishing a "contingency stockpile" of US munitions on the island, a move that would effectively elevate Taiwan to the same status as Washington’s NATO and major non-NATO allies.

Chiu’s confirmation comes against the backdrop of recent war games by the US-based Center for Strategic International Studies (CSIS) demonstrating that the US would quickly run out of a key weapon — Long Range Anti Ship Missiles (LRASM) — while trying to stop a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. It also comes amid concerns over the high-intensity warfare exposing the Ukrainian armed forces' lack of a widely-spread network of ammunition storage facilities.

Although Taiwan’s hosting of US ammunition storage facilities would be certain to enrage China, a key foreign policy figure of Taiwan’s largest opposition party, the Kuomintang (KMT), displayed a supportive stance towards the idea, which is particularly notable, given that the KMT is far more China-friendly than the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DDP) and usually seeks avoiding provoking China.

“If Washington is thinking of increasing the inventory of munitions in Taiwan, it reflects a concrete security commitment to help Taiwan’s self-defense,” Alexander C. Huang, the KMT’s representative to the US, told Asia Sentinel. “The possible acquisitions and arrangements need to be discussed based on Taiwan’s defense concept and mutual interest.”

Confirmation of the talks comes two months after Japanese daily Nikkei reported that Japanese defense officials are weighing a plan to build dozens of ammunition and weapons depots on far-flung southwestern islands in preparation for a potential Taiwan crisis. Japan has about 1,400 ammunition storage facilities nationwide, but 70 percent are located in the country's northernmost main island of Hokkaido, more than 2,000 km away from Japanese islands in the East China Sea. One proposal would build nearly 70 ammunition storage facilities within the next five years. The new depots are to be located in the Nansei Islands, which include Okinawa and extend toward Taiwan from the southern tip of Japan's southernmost main island of Kyushu.

According to the Nikkei report, Japan would struggle to keep its defense forces armed in a prolonged conflict, with the Kyushu and Okinawa regions, which are nearest Taiwan, holding fewer than 10 percent of the stockpiles.

“Ukraine may be the East Asia of tomorrow,” Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said in January after meeting US President Joe Biden, calling security concerns in Europe and East Asia “inseparable.”

“The situation around Japan is becoming increasingly severe with attempts to unilaterally change the status quo by force in the East China Sea and South China Sea, and the activation of North Korea’s nuclear and missile activities,” he added.

Meanwhile, the US-led alliance seems to be moving to get ammo storage closer to Taiwan’s southern flank, as suggested by an announcement by the US. and the Philippines in February of four new sites at which US personnel will be able to access Philippine military facilities under the existing Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA).

The EDCA, a bilateral defence pact that was signed in 2014, grants the US complete operational control of the listed locations. Media reports cited anonymous Philippine military sources as suggesting that two or three of the new sites will be in the northern provinces of Cagayan and Isabela, which are close to Taiwan.

“It's possible that there will be a munitions depot, but right now the specific EDCA sites have not been firmed up from Philippine side, and the type of facility in the EDCA site obviously will have to be subject of another discussion between both parties,” Rommel Ong, a retired Philippine rear admiral and currently a professor at the Ateneo School of Government, told Asia Sentinel.

Collin Koh, a Research Fellow at the Institute of Defense and Strategic Studies in Singapore, pointed out that the pre-positioning of military materiel along the First Island Chain (which includes Japan, Taiwan and the Philippines) would fit the ongoing patterns of building the resilience of US forces in the theater through dispersal of personnel and materiel. While these locations would be within targeting range of PLA strike capabilities, especially its missile arsenal, this helps the US forces to distribute vital stockpiles beyond just one basket when these ammo pre-positioning plans are seen altogether.

“The forces can deploy more quickly in-theater and enter combat operations more rapidly with the ammo stockpiles ready, and of course, the stockpiles, depending on how large they are, would be vital in sustaining the forces in-theater in times of a high-intensity conflict,” Koh said.

“The war in Ukraine, if anything, has amply highlighted how quickly ammo stockpiles can be burned through by high-intensity, high-tempo combat operations,” he added.

asiasentinel.com · by Asia Sentinel

19. 9 Army units to deploy on summer rotations that include Europe, Korea and the Middle East

9 Army units to deploy on summer rotations that include Europe, Korea and the Middle East

Stars and Stripes · by Corey Dickstein · March 8, 2023

A M1A2 Abrams tank from the 2nd Armored Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division operates during training at the Army’s National Training Center at Fort Irwin, Calif., on Feb. 27, 2023. The 3rd ID’s 2nd ABCT will deploy in the summer to Europe, the Army announced Wednesday, March 8, 2023. (Corey Dickstein/Stars and Stripes)

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Nine Army units are slated for overseas deployments in the summer as part of “regular troop rotations” to Europe, Korea and the Middle East, the Pentagon announced Wednesday.

The bulk of the troops deploying to Europe will come from Fort Stewart, Ga., while units from Fort Bliss, Texas, and Fort Bragg, N.C., will join them on the rotations meant to strengthen NATO partnership and deter Russian aggression. Units from Fort Drum, N.Y., Fort Hood, Texas, and Fort Sill, Okla., will deploy to the Middle East. A brigade from Fort Carson, Colo., will head to South Korea.

From Fort Stewart, the 3rd Infantry Division’s headquarters, its sustainment brigade and its 2nd Armored Brigade Combat Team will deploy to Europe to train alongside NATO partners in Poland, Latvia and other eastern flank countries for about nine months, Army officials said. The division headquarters and sustainment brigade will replace the 4th Infantry Division’s headquarters and sustainment brigade. The 2nd ABCT will replace the 2nd Armored Brigade Combat Team of the 1st Cavalry Division.

Also going to Europe will be the 1st Armored Division’s 2nd Armored Brigade Combat Team from Fort Bliss, which will replace the 1st Infantry Division’s 2nd Armored Brigade Combat Team.

Fort Bragg’s 525th Expeditionary Military Intelligence Brigade will also deploy to Europe, replacing the 504th Expeditionary Military Intelligence Brigade, according to the Army.

The deployments will keep U.S. troops in Europe at about 100,000, which the Pentagon has maintained on the Continent since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon has tapped the 10th Mountain Division’s 2nd Infantry Brigade Combat Team from Fort Drum for a deployment to the Middle East in support of Operation Inherent Resolve, the mission to ensure the defeat of the Islamic State. That brigade will replace the 37th Infantry Brigade Combat Team, an Ohio National Guard brigade that has been serving in Kuwait, Iraq and Syria.

Also deploying to the Middle East is Fort Sill’s 31st Air Defense Artillery Brigade headquarters, which will replace the 11th Air Defense Artillery Brigade headquarters in the region. Fort Hood’s 13th Expeditionary Sustainment Command will also deploy to the Middle East to replace the 143rd Expeditionary Sustainment Command, a Reserve unit from Florida.

The Pentagon will send the 4th Infantry Division’s 2nd Stryker Brigade Combat Team from Fort Carson to South Korea. It will replace the 2nd Infantry Division’s 2nd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, which was the Army’s first Stryker brigade to serve a rotation to South Korea under a policy shift from rotating tank-heavy brigades to the Korean Peninsula in favor of the more infantry-centric Stryker units.

Corey Dickstein

Corey Dickstein covers the military in the U.S. southeast. He joined the Stars and Stripes staff in 2015 and covered the Pentagon for more than five years. He previously covered the military for the Savannah Morning News in Georgia. Dickstein holds a journalism degree from Georgia College & State University and has been recognized with several national and regional awards for his reporting and photography. He is based in Atlanta.

Stars and Stripes · by Corey Dickstein · March 8, 2023

20. Biden taps 7th Fleet commander Thomas for information warfare post

Biden taps 7th Fleet commander Thomas for information warfare post

c4isrnet.com · by Colin Demarest · March 8, 2023

WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden nominated Vice Adm. Karl Thomas, commander of the U.S. Navy 7th Fleet in Japan, to become a top information warfare official.

Thomas was tapped to be the next deputy chief of naval operations for information warfare, N2/N6, and director of naval intelligence, according to a U.S. Department of Defense announcement made March 8. The Senate received the nomination two days prior, according to congressional records.

Information warfare is a fusion of offensive and defensive electronic capabilities and cyber operations. It combines data collection, awareness and manipulation to gain an advantage — before, during and after battles.

Should senators confirm Thomas, he will succeed Vice Adm. Jeffrey Trussler, who took the post in June 2020. Exactly where Trussler is headed is not immediately clear.

The fleet Thomas commands is dedicated to the Indo-Pacific, an area the Biden administration considers critical to international stability, financial well-being and military readiness. The fleet regularly works alongside friendly forces from Australia, South Korea, New Zealand and more. Its area of operations spans more than 124 million square kilometers.

US Navy mulls adding info warfare specialists on more submarines

The service years ago made information warfare commanders fixtures of carrier strike groups.

Thomas in August said unsafe intercepts of U.S. and allied aircraft by China have become increasingly common in the region.

While overall interactions remain “professional,” he said at a briefing in Singapore, according to Navy Times, there has been an uptick in risky behavior.

“There’s things that are understood and the normal rules-based international order of how you professionally operate,” Thomas said at the time. “And then there’s things that are provocative. And it’s the provocative nature of the intercepts that’s got our attention, and we’re trying to understand it.”

About Colin Demarest

Colin Demarest is a reporter at C4ISRNET, where he covers military networks, cyber and IT. Colin previously covered the Department of Energy and its National Nuclear Security Administration — namely Cold War cleanup and nuclear weapons development — for a daily newspaper in South Carolina. Colin is also an award-winning photographer.

21. What TikTok withholds is as concerning as what it posts, Nakasone says

What TikTok withholds is as concerning as what it posts, Nakasone says

c4isrnet.com · by Colin Demarest · March 8, 2023

WASHINGTON — What TikTok doesn’t tell you in its digital feed is at least as concerning as how its posts can influence opinion, according to the leader of both U.S. Cyber Command and the National Security Agency.

Gen. Paul Nakasone told the Senate Armed Services Committee on March 7 that while the organizations he oversees are wary of the popular Chinese-owned app’s data collection, its tightly tailored algorithms and its international reach, what TikTok withholds can be just as damaging.

“TikTok concerns me, for a number of different reasons,” said Nakasone, whose teams are tasked with protecting U.S. defense networks and tending to cryptographic standards and intelligence. “It’s not only the fact that you can influence something, but you can also turn off the message, as well, when you have such a large population of listeners.”

The short-form video-sharing app, free to download, has more than 100 million users in the U.S. alone.

The Pew Research Center in October found about one-quarter of U.S. adults under 30 regularly get news from TikTok. Users of the app, however, are “far less likely” than users of Twitter or Facebook to seek out news there, the center said.

“This is a means upon which, you know, you receive information or don’t receive information,” Nakasone said. “I always look at that, in terms of being able to measure that risk.”

US Cyber Command developing own intelligence hub

The center was previously teased by CYBERCOM’s director of intelligence, Brig. Gen. Matteo Martemucci.

While other apps and websites harvest and sell user details — and have been criticized for promoting inflammatory or racist content — U.S. government officials have singled out TikTok over fears of its Chinese ties. Sen. Eric Schmitt, a Missouri Republican, on Tuesday told Nakasone he agrees with his concerns and thinks TikTok is “a Chinese AI weapon aimed directly at the United States of America.” The general did not respond.

TikTok is owned by ByteDance, an internet-technology juggernaut with research-and-development centers across the world. It has previously said it doesn’t share information with the Chinese government. U.S. defense officials consider China a top national security threat.

TikTok Chief Executive Officer Shou Zi Chew is slated to testify before the House Energy and Commerce Committee this month. He is expected to be interrogated over “consumer privacy and data security practices, the platforms’ impact on kids, and their relationship with the Chinese Communist Party,” according to a public notice.

The scheduled hearing follows a wave of U.S. government action, both state and federal, taken against TikTok.

Last week, the House Foreign Affairs Committee advanced a bill 24-16 to ban TikTok over the objections of the panel’s top Democrat, Rep. Gregory Meeks of New York. And on Tuesday, a bipartisan group of 12 senators introduced legislation that would empower the Commerce Department to restrict or ban hardware and software, among other technologies, if they are deemed hazardous to national security.

“Today, everybody is talking about TikTok and the ability of that platform to be used by the Communist Party both to take on data, but also, potentially, as a malign influence and propaganda tool,” Sen. Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat, said at a press conference. “What we’re trying to deal with here is the risk of insecure information and communication technologies, ICT.”

Defense News reporter Bryant Harris contributed to this article.

About Colin Demarest

22. Philippines launches strategy of publicizing Chinese actions

Yes. Good for the Philippines.

Regonizie, Understand, EXPOSE, and Attack the enemy's strategy with a superior political warfare strategy and information.

Excerpts:

Raymond Powell, a retired U.S. Air Force colonel who has studied China’s strategies, praised the Philippine coast guard’s efforts to publicize China’s actions in the South China Sea but warned that the Philippine government would come under Chinese pressure to “stop making so much trouble, stop releasing things.”

China claims virtually all of the South China Sea, putting it on a collision course with other claimants such as the Philippines, Vietnam and Malaysia.

Despite friendly overtures to Beijing by former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte and his successor, Marcos Jr., who visited Beijing and met President Xi Jinping in January, tensions have persisted, resulting in a strengthening of the military alliance between the Philippines and the U.S.

Philippines launches strategy of publicizing Chinese actions

militarytimes.com · by Jim Gomez, The Associated Press · March 8, 2023

MANILA, Philippines — The Philippine coast guard has launched a strategy of publicizing aggressive actions by China in the disputed South China Sea, which has countered Chinese propaganda and sparked international condemnation that has put Beijing under the spotlight, a Philippine official said Wednesday.

Manila’s coast guard has intensified patrols in the disputed waters and taken extra efforts to document and publicize assertive Chinese behavior in the strategic waterway, including a Feb. 6 incident in which a Chinese coast guard ship aimed a military-grade laser that briefly blinded some crew members on a Philippine patrol boat off a disputed reef.

A return to the Philippines

The longtime ally could again host U.S. naval forces in the not-too-distant future.

The coast guard protested and released a video of the incident, which sparked alarm in the Philippines, the United States and some other Western countries. President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. summoned China’s ambassador to Manila and later said the Philippine military has shifted its focus from fighting Muslim and communist insurgents and other internal threats to external defense amid long-seething South China Sea territorial disputes.

“I’d like to emphasize that the best way to address Chinese ‘gray zone’ activities in the West Philippine Sea is to expose it,” coast guard Commodore Jay Tarriela said, referring to China’s use of ostensibly civilian fishing and research vessels to perform military tasks to avoid a military response from rival claimant states.

Tarriela used the Philippine name for the stretch of the South China Sea close to its western coast. He spoke at a Manila forum about China’s “gray zone” operations in the disputed sea.

The Philippine coast guard’s role as a mouthpiece against Chinese aggression “allows like-minded states to express condemnation and reproach which puts Beijing in a spotlight,” he said. “Chinese actions in the shadows are now checked, which also forced them to come out in the open or to publicly lie.”

Tarriela said Manila’s outrage over the laser-pointing incident prompted China, including its ambassador to Manila, to explain its position when asked about the incident at news conferences.

Chinese officials said the Philippine patrol vessel trespassed into Chinese territory and that the Chinese coast guard acted “professionally and with restraint” and used a harmless laser to track the Philippine boat’s movement.

By making public unedited coast guard videos and photographs of such Chinese actions, “we can once again reshape public opinion to weigh things objectively based on facts and not just propaganda,” Tarriela said.

The U.S. State Department reacted to the incident by saying that China’s “dangerous operational behavior directly threatens regional peace and stability” and “undermines the rules-based international order.” It renewed a warning that it would defend the Philippines, a treaty ally, if Filipino forces, aircraft and ships come under attack in the South China Sea.

Raymond Powell, a retired U.S. Air Force colonel who has studied China’s strategies, praised the Philippine coast guard’s efforts to publicize China’s actions in the South China Sea but warned that the Philippine government would come under Chinese pressure to “stop making so much trouble, stop releasing things.”

China claims virtually all of the South China Sea, putting it on a collision course with other claimants such as the Philippines, Vietnam and Malaysia.

Despite friendly overtures to Beijing by former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte and his successor, Marcos Jr., who visited Beijing and met President Xi Jinping in January, tensions have persisted, resulting in a strengthening of the military alliance between the Philippines and the U.S.

23. The US Military Needs to Create a Cyber Force ByJames Stavridis

CYBERCOM is not enough?

The US Military Needs to Create a Cyber Force

Online attacks are growing in both number and danger, and a new branch of the armed forces is the best way to protect against them.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-03-08/the-us-needs-a-seventh-branch-of-the-military-cyber-force?leadSource=uverify%20wall&SToverlay=2002c2d9-c344-4bbb-8610-e5794efcfa7d&sref=hhjZtX76

ByJames Stavridis

March 8, 2023 at 7:00 AM EST

Two disturbing incidents roiled the cyber seas last week, one foreign and one domestic. They both strengthen the case — which was already convincing, and which I have been making for almost a decade now — for the creation of a US Cyber Force.

The first incident was yet another cyberattack on a NATO member, Albania, by Iran. It was part of an ongoing Iranian campaign to attack Albania, a small Muslim nation of only about three million in the Balkans. The attacks have included zeroing out personal bank accounts, unmasking government and police informants, and degrading command-and-control networks. Iran conducts the attacks because Albania is not prosecuting an anti-Iranian group, the Mujahedeen Khaleq, that has a large presence in Albania.

Analysis | The U.S.-China rift is only growing wider

The Washington Post · by Ishaan Tharoor · March 8, 2023

You’re reading an excerpt from the Today’s WorldView newsletter. Sign up to get the rest free, including news from around the globe and interesting ideas and opinions to know, sent to your inbox every weekday.

Last month, the Chinese Foreign Ministry published a 4,000-word tract titled “U.S. Hegemony and Its Perils.” The document, which was sent out by the Chinese Embassy to journalists in Washington, including Today’s WorldView, purported to present the “relevant facts” of a near-century of American interference and meddling on the world stage. It’s a catalogue of grievances that casts the United States as a hypocritical superpower, advancing its own self-interests on the pretext of high-minded values, while leaving a trail of abuse and harm in its wake.

Whatever the validity of these historical claims, the real Chinese animus is about the present. “Clinging to the Cold War mentality, the United States has ramped up bloc politics and stoked conflict and confrontation,” the document warned, echoing the near-constant refrain from Chinese officials about current U.S. policy.

Just weeks prior, there had been glimmers of rapprochement between the two countries. The United States and China were readying for talks that would, in the White House’s words, help set “guardrails” on a rocky yet vital relationship. Chinese President Xi Jinping, it appeared, wanted to embark on his third term in power with a spirit of pragmatism, and had set about softening his country’s conspicuously aggressive “wolf warrior” foreign policy.

Then a Chinese spy balloon came along and floated over the United States before getting shot down over the Atlantic Ocean. The incident seemed to close the window for a diplomatic opening and led to Secretary of State Antony Blinken scrapping a major trip to China. The days since have only seen a hardening of lines between Washington and Beijing.

The pall over U.S.-China ties grew darker this week with official comments from Xi and Foreign Minister Qin Gang. On Monday, the Chinese president called out the United States as a rival power seeking to stymie China’s growth. The remarks, made to China’s top political advisory body during an annual legislative session, represented an unusually explicit public riposte of the United States by the Chinese leader.

“Western countries — led by the U.S. — have implemented all-round containment, encirclement and suppression against us, bringing unprecedentedly severe challenges to our country’s development,” Xi said.

The next day, Qin picked up the baton, pointing a finger at Washington’s supposed collision course with Beijing. “If the United States does not pump the brakes and continues to go down the wrong road, no number of guardrails will be able to stop [the relationship] from running off-road and flipping over, and it is inevitable that we will fall into conflict and confrontation,” he said at a news conference on the sidelines of China’s rubber-stamp parliament.

White House national security spokesman John Kirby appeared to brush off Beijing’s rhetoric at a briefing Tuesday, indicating that there had been no real change in the status quo. “We seek a strategic competition with China. We do not seek conflict,” he told reporters. “We aim to compete and we aim to win that competition with China, but we absolutely want to keep it at that level.”

Yet elsewhere in Washington, China may see a more hostile view. Last week, the new House select committee on China convened, trotting out a panel of experts who are mostly hawks on China while entertaining talk of effectively “decoupling” the world’s two largest economies. Matthew Pottinger, a former Trump administration official, told the lawmakers that they should acknowledge that China has been waging a form of a Cold War against the United States and that they themselves should not shy away from viewing the challenge posed by Beijing in such terms.

The Chinese Communist Party “should be thought of as a hungry shark that will keep eating until its nose bumps into a metal barrier. Sharks aren’t responsive to mood music,” Pottinger said in his written testimony. “But nor do they take it personally when they see divers building a shark cage. For them it’s just business. It’s what they do. The more resolutely and unapologetically we take steps to defend our national security, the more that boundaries will be respected and the more stable the balance of power is likely to be.”

More striking, perhaps, than this strident language is the bipartisan backing for this sort of approach toward China. In a capital marred by bitter polarization, there’s genuine consensus on the perceived threat posed by China. But a lack of rigorous high-level foreign policy debate may prove to be a problem, some analysts argue.

“This isn’t an evidence-driven exercise to identify America’s long-term interests and how China relates to them,” a former U.S. official told Washington Post columnist Max Boot, referring to the House committee. “It is a propaganda exercise that Beijing would find easily recognizable.”

For now, flash points abound. The United States and China see themselves at odds over the war in Ukraine, where the latter may yet choose to supply the flagging Russian war machine with lethal aid. Such a move will trigger an angry reaction from the United States and its allies, but Qin and other Chinese officials pointed to a supposed double standard, noting the United States’ long record of weapons sales to Taiwan. Tensions over the island democracy have spiked over the course of the war in Ukraine, while China’s relations with Europe have also soured as it continues to help prop up Russia’s sanctioned economy.

Critics of Beijing’s widely derided peace plan for Ukraine see in some of its proposals — such as an end to Western military assistance to Kyiv — a template for the future conditions China may need to launch a successful invasion of Taiwan. “If Taiwan, like Ukraine, can draw on extended external military equipment, training, and real-time intelligence support, all bets are off,” wrote Craig Singleton, senior China fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, referring to the prospects of a Chinese amphibious invasion. “And so, Beijing remains focused on degrading the ability of international actors to inject strategic risk into Chinese decision-making, as well as on exploiting cleavages among U.S. allies.”

Other experts argue Washington needs to lower the temperature with China for its and Taiwan’s own sake. “Efforts to reduce Beijing’s sense of urgency over Taiwan could help limit the degree of China-Russia alignment, strengthening the overall U.S. strategic position,” wrote Jessica Chen Weiss, a China scholar at Cornell University. “And Taiwan needs more time to muster the resources and political will to develop an asymmetric, whole-of-society defense.”

Ultimately, Xi and Qin’s remarks this week were as much political as they were geopolitical. Faced with a slumping economy battered by the pandemic, Xi and his cadres are attempting a sweeping overhaul of China’s financial system and government bureaucracy.

“Xi Jinping’s comment about containment may heighten tensions with the United States, but he is mainly speaking to a domestic audience,” Andrew Collier, managing director of Hong Kong-based Orient Capital Research, told the New York Times. “He’s trying to foster the country’s high-tech firms both for economic growth and to handle decoupling at a time when China is facing severe economic headwinds. Beating the nationalist drum is a politically savvy way to achieve these goals.”

The Washington Post · by Ishaan Tharoor · March 8, 2023

25. 'We Were Ignored': Veterans and Troops Detail Horrors of Afghanistan Evacuation as House Investigation Begins

These wounds will never heal.

'We Were Ignored': Veterans and Troops Detail Horrors of Afghanistan Evacuation as House Investigation Begins

military.com · by Rebecca Kheel · March 8, 2023

Service members and veterans who helped evacuate Afghans in August 2021 testified in harrowing detail about their experiences Wednesday during the first hearing of the GOP-controlled House Foreign Affairs Committee's investigation into the Biden administration's chaotic exit from America's longest war.

Among the witnesses was Sgt. Tyler Vargas-Andrews, a still-serving Marine Corps sniper, who previously told The Washington Post he believes he identified the suicide bomber who killed 13 U.S. troops outside the Kabul airport but was denied approval to shoot him before the attack. On Wednesday, Vargas-Andrews, fighting to talk through tears, recounted the attack, which left him with an amputated leg and arm.

"Plain and simple, we were ignored," Vargas-Andrews said about his and others' efforts to get approval to shoot the person they suspected to be the suicide bomber. "My body was overwhelmed from the trauma of the blast. My abdomen had been ripped open. Every inch of my exposed body except for my face took ball bearings and shrapnel."

Also testifying Wednesday was Aidan Gunderson, a former Army specialist who served as a medic deployed to the Hamid Karzai International Airport during the Afghanistan withdrawal. He described seeing "blood-saturated, dusty clothing and head scarves smolder[ing]" in the middle of the runway that "covered the dead bodies" of Afghans who fell from a U.S. C-17 Globemaster III after clinging to the landing gear while it was taking off.

After the suicide bombing on Aug. 26, 2021, Gunderson recalled that "an injured Marine with bloodsoaked pants squeeze my hand as tightly as he could and looked into my eyes, yelling, 'I don't want to die.'"

"I reassured him that he would be fine, but as they carried him inside, I did not know if he would survive," testified Gunderson, who noted he was born a year before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks that sparked the war. "Departing on Aug. 31 on one of the last flights out of the country, I was relieved to be headed home, but I wondered how the horror I just witnessed changed me, how it would change us all. I can assure you that it has."

Wednesday's hearing served as an emotional public kickoff to an investigation Republicans had vowed would be a priority in their House majority.

Last year, while Republicans were in the minority, now-House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Mike McCaul, R-Texas, released an "interim" report that criticized President Joe Biden for the withdrawal. But the report was based largely on open-source information and lacked much new info. Now in the majority, Republicans are hoping to compel the Biden administration to deliver Congress long-sought documents about the withdrawal.

Ahead of the hearing, GOP committee staff said the session was intended to be a "reminder why this investigation is so important" by listening to service members and veterans personally involved in and affected by the evacuation.

In addition to Vargas-Andrews and Gunderson, the committee heard from three veterans who lead groups that worked from the United States to get their Afghan interpreters and other allies onto evacuation flights: Francis Hoang of Allied Airlift 21, David Scott Mann of Task Force Pineapple, and Peter Lucier of Team America Relief.

The Biden administration has cast the evacuation as a success since 120,000 people, including 76,000 Afghans, were airlifted out. But tens of thousands of Afghans who helped the U.S. military and so are eligible to immigrate to the U.S. were left behind, while the veterans who helped with the evacuation effort say they continue to suffer mental scars because of their experience. And the Aug. 26 suicide bombing that killed 11 Marines, one sailor and one soldier -- as well as at least 170 Afghan civilians -- was one of the single deadliest days for U.S. forces of the entire war.

While several of the witnesses Wednesday asked lawmakers to avoid partisanship in the investigation, and several committee members said they agreed the topic was too important to be marred by partisanship, speeches from members during the session largely retread well-worn partisan talking points: Republicans blasting Biden for failing to plan for the collapse of Kabul, and Democrats blaming the Trump administration for negotiating the deal with the Taliban that set the stage for the withdrawal.

"It is often referred to like Schindler's List," McCaul said Wednesday about the evacuation. "If you're on the list, you made it out alive. If you weren't, you didn't. What happened in Afghanistan was a systemic breakdown of the federal government at every level and a stunning, stunning failure of leadership by the Biden administration."

Committee ranking member Gregory Meeks, D-N.Y., acknowledged that "mistakes were made along the way," but stressed that "evacuation did not happen in a vacuum," pointing to the Trump administration's deal with the Taliban.

The veterans at Wednesday's hearing described the gut-wrenching messages they received from Afghans during and since the evacuation and the emotional price those messages have exacted on them.

Mann, a retired Army Green Beret, said a former Navy SEAL in Task Force Pineapple received one message on encrypted messaging app Signal that read: "My daughter has been trampled. I know we are going to miss our chance to escape, but she's unconscious and barely breathing. It's okay, my friend. Thank you for trying."

Mann, his voice cracking, also described a Green Beret veteran friend who died by suicide a few months ago after "the Afghan abandonment reactivated all the demons that he managed to put behind him from our time in Afghanistan together."

Meanwhile, Gunderson and Vargas-Andrews detailed the disorder and horror they witnessed on the ground in Kabul.

"We heard around-the-clock gunshots and screams," Gunderson said. "The gunfire was either the Taliban executing someone or a warning shot used for crowd control."

Vargas-Andrews said the Taliban routinely executed civilians in view of U.S. service members and that he and others "communicated the atrocities to our chain of command" but that "nothing came of it."

Vargas-Andrews also said he witnessed Afghans who were turned away from the airport try to "kill themselves on the razor wire" surrounding the airport because "they thought this was merciful compared to the Taliban torture they faced."

Vargas-Andrews said he has not been interviewed in any Pentagon investigations into the withdrawal.

"It makes me feel like my service is not valued to this country, by the government," he said.

Still, he recounted at least one instance he said makes him feel like his time in Kabul mattered. A young girl with a tear-stained face and her toddler brother had squeezed their way through the crowd holding a baby with a blue and purple face. Vargas-Andrews found a medic who resuscitated the baby while the girl tugged on his uniform begging for her father. While standing atop an SUV, Vargas-Andrews held the girl up and asked whether she saw her dad. After a few minutes, she pointed to a man in the crowd of hundreds carrying a family's-worth of luggage on his head, and the man started crying when he spotted her.

"I let the troops down there at the opening of the gate … know to help get this guy through," Vargas-Andrews said. "For me, that was a moment that my personal injury was worth it. And I know those three little kids have a life of freedom and opportunity now."

At the end of the hearing, McCaul asked others who were involved with the evacuation to submit their stories to the committee.

-- Rebecca Kheel can be reached at rebecca.kheel@military.com. Follow her on Twitter @reporterkheel.

military.com · by Rebecca Kheel · March 8, 2023

26. A Biden Doctrine for Taiwan

Excerpts:

Those countermeasures need to start flowing now. As Rep. Mike Gallagher, chair of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, argues, “Surging hard power to the Indo-Pacific before the shooting starts and clearing the nearly $20 billion backlog of foreign military sales to Taiwan will give our friends confidence and our enemies pause.”

Unlike Ukraine, bordered by four NATO members, Taiwan is hundreds of miles from the nearest U.S. base. And Beijing has trained its missile arsenal on the approaches to Taiwan. This is part of Beijing’s anti-access/area-denial strategy (A2/AD), which is designed to dissuade the U.S. from intervening in the event of an invasion of Taiwan. Yet A2/AD can cut both ways. RAND details how Washington could forge a “U.S. A2/AD strategy” by knitting together partner nations in an anti-ship missile network. That network could be augmented by mobile, nimble ground units equipped with high-precision missilery, and by what Gallagher calls an “anti-navy” of land-based missile systems stretching from Japan’s southern islands to Australia and Alaska.

There’s risk in all this. But World War I reminds us there’s greater risk in leaving defense guarantees opaque. World War II reminds us that defense guarantees without adequate defense spending don’t deter aggressors. Cold War I reminds us that making the necessary investments to deter war is far less costly than waging war. And Russia’s rampage through Ukraine reminds us that helping free nations harden their territory against invasion is preferable to helping them try to claw it back.

A Biden Doctrine for Taiwan

By Alan Dowd

March 09, 2023

https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2023/03/09/a_biden_doctrine_for_taiwan_886227.html

On at least four occasions, President Joe Biden has pledged to defend Taiwan if the island democracy is attacked. This apparent shift from “strategic ambiguity”—Washington’s long-held deliberately vague stance on Taiwan’s security—to what’s been termed “strategic clarity” is the right course of action. But Biden’s words have been inadequately explained—in fact, they’ve been explained away by after-the-fact staff clarifications—and inadequately bolstered by actions.

Why

It's important to highlight why this change is necessary.

First, Xi has vowed “complete reunification of the motherland” and warned that “we make no promise to abandon the use of force.”

These words are deeply problematic. Taiwan has never been ruled by the PRC, so “reunification” is inaccurate. Beijing is misusing the word to legitimize plans to annex Taiwan and delegitimize Taiwan’s sovereignty. As for Xi’s willingness to use force, the forcible takeover of Taiwan would trigger a cascade of terrible consequences—the loss of life and liberty in Taiwan, the loss of much of the Free World’s capacity to produce semiconductors and microchips, the expansion of Beijing’s geographic reach, the collapse of the U.S. alliance system in the Indo-Pacific.

Second, Xi’s regime is using military exercises to tighten the noose around Taiwan.

On a single day last year, Beijing deployed 71 fighter and bomber aircraft into Taiwan’s air defense identification zone. In 2022, Taiwan weathered 1,737 of these PRC incursions. These provocations have continued into 2023.

“It looks like a rehearsal,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin concludes. The CIA recently revealed that Xi ordered his military to be ready to take Taiwan by 2027.

If Xi chooses war, it won’t be a fair fight. According to the Pentagon, PRC assets based near Taiwan include: 416,000 troops, 52 amphibious ships, 700 fighter aircraft, 250 bombers/attack aircraft and 218 warships. The PRC also has some 1,600 missiles opposite Taiwan. Taiwan has 88,000 troops total; 126 navy and coastguard vessels total; 300 fighter aircraft total; zero amphibious ships; and zero bombers.

Beijing’s military buildup around Taiwan is just a microcosm of its wider military expansion. Beijing has built the world’s largest navy; expanded its nuclear arsenal; exploded military spending; claimed much of the South China Sea; and erected illegal, militarized islands to back up those claims.

How

If Biden is serious about deterring Beijing and defending Taiwan, he needs to underscore that seriousness with remarks delivered in a serious manner. How a president says something can be as important as what is said.

Like President James Monroe, President Harry Truman and President Ronald Reagan, Biden could enunciate his policy shift in a formal statement to Congress (written or spoken). Or he could choose an apt anniversary (December 2023 marks the 200th anniversary of the Monroe Doctrine) or a place of historical relevance (Berlin, more on that below).

Speechwriters could craft the right words, but the essence of a Biden Doctrine would sound something like this: “Any military attack on Taiwan by the People’s Republic of China—including any attempt to interfere with Taiwan’s access to international waterways or international airspace, or any attempt to interfere with international access to Taiwan’s waterways or airspace—would be regarded as an attack on the vital interests of the United States and would be repelled by any means necessary.”

Biden need not define exactly what those means might entail, but he needs to make it clear to Xi that America will not allow Taiwan to go the way of Crimea or Hong Kong.

Like Truman and Reagan, Biden would need to bring his doctrine to life with classified policy directives. Congress could help by adding legislative muscle. A bipartisan reorientation of Taiwan policy may seem impossible in a bitterly divided Washington, but as Sen. John Cornyn recently pointed out: “If there’s one thing that seems to unify Republicans and Democrats today, it’s addressing the China threat.” Indeed, the House recently voted 365-65 to create the Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party. In addition, Congress and the president have agreed to strengthen Taiwan’s defenses.

But more is needed. Under the Taiwan Relations Act (TRA), neither side of the Taiwan Strait knows what Washington would do in the event of war. The TRA pledges America will provide Taiwan “capacity…to resist any resort to force or other forms of coercion.” There’s nothing in these lawyerly words that guarantees Taiwan’s security. The Taiwan Invasion Prevention Act (TIPA), which was introduced in the last Congress, offered a pathway toward deterrence by authorizing the use of force “to secure and protect Taiwan against…direct armed attack.” Legislation along the lines envisioned by TIPA (and expressed by Biden) would help limit what Churchill called “temptations to a trial of strength.”

If, as Henry Kissinger concludes, America and China are in “the foothills of a cold war,” then Taiwan is this century’s West Berlin: a tiny outcrop of freedom under threat. Yes, Taiwan is relatively remote; yes, it’s in the crosshairs of a military juggernaut; yes, that juggernaut has conventional advantages in-theater. But each of these factors applied in West Berlin, which President John Kennedy called “a defended island of freedom.” It remained free only because it was defended.

What

That brings us to what needs to be done to resource a Biden Doctrine.

President Theodore Roosevelt, who advocated speaking softly and carrying a big stick, warned about the danger of doing the opposite by pointing out “the extreme unwisdom and impropriety of making promises that cannot be kept.” TR counseled, “If there is no intention of providing and keeping the force necessary to back up a strong attitude, then it is far better not to assume such an attitude.”

To date, Biden’s welcome words about defending Taiwan haven’t been reinforced by actions.

Given what Vladimir Putin is doing, given what Xi is planning to do, given that Cold War 2.0 is upon us, America should shift toward Cold War levels of defense spending. The Pentagon’s budget represents 3.2 percent of GDP. The average during Cold War I was twice that.

Taiwan’s defense spending as a share of GDP is barely 2 percent. Taiwan is working to allocate 2.4 percent of GDP to defense this year. But countries under similar threat are doing more: Israel invests 5.2 percent of GDP in defense, Poland 3 percent, South Korea 2.8 percent. Japan is doubling defense outlays.

How Taipei invests in defense is as important as how much it invests. What’s been termed “a porcupine defense”—one that would make an invasion so painful as to dissuade Beijing from even attempting it—would focus on antiship missiles, “smart” naval mines, drones capable of swarm attacks, shoulder-launched antiaircraft missiles, VSTOL fighter-bombers capable of operating without runways, nondigital communications operable amidst cyberattack, a military (and citizenry) trained for small-unit operations.

These are the kinds of countermeasures that have bled Putin’s army. Indeed, Xi must be convinced that attempting in Taiwan what Putin has attempted in Ukraine will lead not to victory parades and an ascendant legacy, but to his troops in body bags, his military hardware in flames, his invasion force and international standing in tatters.

Those countermeasures need to start flowing now. As Rep. Mike Gallagher, chair of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, argues, “Surging hard power to the Indo-Pacific before the shooting starts and clearing the nearly $20 billion backlog of foreign military sales to Taiwan will give our friends confidence and our enemies pause.”

Unlike Ukraine, bordered by four NATO members, Taiwan is hundreds of miles from the nearest U.S. base. And Beijing has trained its missile arsenal on the approaches to Taiwan. This is part of Beijing’s anti-access/area-denial strategy (A2/AD), which is designed to dissuade the U.S. from intervening in the event of an invasion of Taiwan. Yet A2/AD can cut both ways. RAND details how Washington could forge a “U.S. A2/AD strategy” by knitting together partner nations in an anti-ship missile network. That network could be augmented by mobile, nimble ground units equipped with high-precision missilery, and by what Gallagher calls an “anti-navy” of land-based missile systems stretching from Japan’s southern islands to Australia and Alaska.

There’s risk in all this. But World War I reminds us there’s greater risk in leaving defense guarantees opaque. World War II reminds us that defense guarantees without adequate defense spending don’t deter aggressors. Cold War I reminds us that making the necessary investments to deter war is far less costly than waging war. And Russia’s rampage through Ukraine reminds us that helping free nations harden their territory against invasion is preferable to helping them try to claw it back.

Alan W. Dowd is a senior fellow with the Sagamore Institute Center for America’s Purpose.

27. Green Beret Cold Weather Training | SOF News

Green Beret Cold Weather Training | SOF News

sof.news · by SOF News · March 9, 2023

Story by Spc. Kimberly Gonzalez, 10th SFG(A).

10th Special Forces Group (Airborne) Green Berets and enablers conducted cold weather training (CWT) from Feb. 5th to the 10th, in Montana.

“This training exercise is split up into two phases, the first three weeks is us getting comfortable in a cold weather environment,” said a team sergeant with 10th SFG (A). “The phase we are in right now is the winter warfare course (WWC) which focuses on tactical movement using snowmobile and skis.”

Montana has over 147,000 square miles that provides an extreme cold weather environment and land to conduct training. Some of the training exercises conducted during this time were avalanche rescue exercises, snowmobile maneuvers and ambush drills. Inclement weather was also a natural obstacle, which Soldiers needed to be prepared for while operating in austere conditions.

During the training, the Green Berets worked with other allied countries’ special forces and shared different ideas and tactics to become a more efficient and lethal force. Being in the mountains during the winter can cause different types of challenges a Soldier may not usually face.

Without warning, an avalanche can happen; knowing how to avoid or rescue someone safely is essential. Our Green Berets learned how to use a beacon to find someone under the snow. They practiced different techniques to shovel snow that requires the least amount of energy and time.

“This gives us an opportunity to shake up our techniques, figure out what’s good, what’s bad and then make corrections in a safe environment to make ourselves better prepared for the future,” said the team sergeant.

While conducting operations in a cold weather environment, moving through deep snow can be difficult. To maneuver through this obstacle the Soldiers needed to be able to operate a snowmobile. They learned how to get a snowmobile out of the snow if it were to get stuck in soft areas. Soldiers also were able to get hands on experience with all the functions and maintenance required for them. Getting acquainted with new equipment helps Soldiers be more confident in performing their tasks.

“We spent the last 20 years focusing on Iraq and Afghanistan which is the exact opposite of wintry snow conditions,” said the team sergeant. “Getting our Soldiers out here and used to living and working in the cold is probably the biggest challenge for everyone.”

After getting comfortable with maneuver and rescue techniques, the Green Berets conducted range operations, which are slightly different from controlled ranges due to equipment they usually do not wear. They practiced adjusting themselves on skis and using ski poles to stabilize their weapons as they performed various combat drills such as react to contact and react to ambush.

“These training exercises enable our teams to rehearse extended long-range patrols in the Arctic and spend weeks in extreme cold weather climates,” said a Detachment Commander with 10th SFG (A). “Focusing on maintaining Arctic dominance in, not only in the U.S., but with our partners in the North shows that we have a strong multinational presence.”

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Photo: A 10th Special Forces Group (Airborne) Green Beret practices snowmobile maneuvers during cold weather training at Montana on Feb. 6, 2023. These exercises are designed to properly and safely maneuver snowmobiles in dangerous areas. (U.S. Army photo by Spc. Kimberly Gonzalez)

This story by Spc. Kimberly Gonzalez was first published on February 27, 2023 by the Defense Visual Information Distribution Service. DVIDS content is in the public domain.

sof.news · by SOF News · March 9, 2023

28. Did US raise a false flag on Nord Stream blasts?

Excerpts:

Disclaimer here: In my 54 years in the news business, I have generally avoided asking spooks for help. I have nothing against them and realize they are colleagues of sorts, but I can recall only a couple of cases when I sought their help. They have their jobs and I have mine. I certainly don’t rush to get their version of events whenever something happens. I assume their version is whatever their agencies have told them should be their version so I prefer to spend my time getting my own version from more direct sources.

That may help to explain why the New York Times piece bothers me. The reporters – maybe the spooks are their beat and they have to get along, or else? – seem overeager to peddle Washington’s version.

Ukraine and its allies have been seen by some officials as having the most logical potential motive to attack the pipelines. They have opposed the project for years, calling it a national security threat because it would allow Russia to sell gas more easily to Europe.

I’d advise checking your wallet if you hear from your pipe-smoking spook source that “officials who have reviewed the intelligence said they believed the saboteurs were most likely Ukrainian or Russian nationals or some combination of the two. US officials said no American or British nationals were involved.”

Did US raise a false flag on Nord Stream blasts?

New York Times and German media chip at Seymour Hersh’s version that US Navy divers – not Ukrainians – destroyed the pipelines

asiatimes.com · by Bradley K. Martin · March 9, 2023

Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh said an odd thing on March 7 when TASS asked him to compare his version of the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipeline explosions (US Navy divers did it, he had reported February 8) with a newly released version from the New York Times and German media that points to non-governmental Ukrainians as culprits.

“I don’t want to get into it,” Hersh replied to the Russian wire service. “You should decide for yourself. It’s up to you.” The TASS reporter persisted, asking if Hersh thought the New York Times account had come in response to Hersh’s own investigation. He gave the same reply, saying people should come to their own conclusions.

That was pretty clever. Read both versions and you may conclude that they could fit together to point to a plausible account of how, as war raged over Ukraine, three pipelines supplying Germany’s gas supply from Russia were blown up before Vladimir Putin could use their existence to try to lure Germany out of the pro-Ukraine camp. Before the war, over half of Germany’s gas imports came from Russia.

Assemble a whole from the two versions and you might come up with this: On US President Joe Biden’s orders, US government covert types put together and with Norwegian help carried out the operation (that’s Hersh’s story); to avoid detection, they left some clues pointing elsewhere, to Ukrainians or “pro-Ukrainians” – the main clue mentioned so far being that the yacht from which the divers worked could be traced back to a yacht-rental company in Poland, a company owned by Ukrainians.

The German media account

What you might end up suspecting is a false flag.

Die Zeit, a leading German newspaper that is part of a media investigative consortium that talked with officials in several countries to put together its narrative, acknowledges the possibility thusly: “Even if traces lead to Ukraine, the investigators have not yet been able to find out who commissioned the suspected group of perpetrators. In international security circles, it is not ruled out that it could also be a false flag operation.”

The paper hastens to add that investigators “have apparently not found evidence that confirms such a scenario.” But “the nationalities of the perpetrators are apparently unclear” since they used “professionally forged passports.”

Die Zeit narrows the gang down to “a team of six people. It is said to have been five men and one woman.” Functionally, they were “a captain, two divers, two diving assistants and a doctor.”

Like the New York Times, the German media outlets suggest that the demolition crew consisted of Ukrainian civilians from a non-governmental “commando” force opposed to the Russian invasion.

There’s no point in asking for a smoking gun at this point. His critics point out that Hersh – who has acknowledged he opposed NATO expansion into the former Soviet Union and who is not known to be a fan of allied efforts to help Ukraine fight the war – based his own account on a single unnamed US government source. Likewise, the German media organizations that make up the investigative consortium name no sources.

Die Zeit reports that “a Western secret service is said to have sent a tip to European partner services in the autumn, shortly after the destruction,” talking about Ukrainian commando responsibility for the destruction. “After that, there are said to have been further intelligence indications that a pro-Ukrainian group could be responsible.”

A Kremlin spokesperson on March 8 was having none of it, telling journalists that “Western media reports which exonerate NATO state actors from involvement in the explosions that ruptured the Nord Stream 1 and 2 gas pipelines have the hallmarks of a synchronized misinformation campaign.”

The Hersh version

Hersh’s version is that US Navy divers, “operating under the cover of a widely publicized mid-summer NATO exercise known as BALTOPS 22, planted the remotely triggered explosives that, three months later, destroyed three of the four Nord Stream pipelines, according to a source with direct knowledge of the operational planning.”

Remarkable for its detail, the Hersh account claims that “Biden’s decision to sabotage the pipelines came after more than nine months of highly secret back-and-forth debate inside Washington’s national security community about how to best achieve that goal. For much of that time, the issue was not whether to do the mission, but how to get it done with no overt clue as to who was responsible.”

The debate and preparations proceeded from December 2021 when Russia was marshaling its troops, preparing to strike Ukraine from Belarus and Crimea, Hersh writes. “As long as Europe remained dependent on the pipelines for cheap natural gas, Washington was afraid that countries like Germany would be reluctant to supply Ukraine with the money and weapons it needed to defeat Russia,” he notes.

Seymour Hersh in a file photo. Image: Screengrab / Youtube

The interagency task force thus assembled “was initially skeptical of the CIA’s enthusiasm for a covert deep-sea attack. There were too many unanswered questions. The waters of the Baltic Sea were heavily patrolled by the Russian navy, and there were no oil rigs that could be used as cover for a diving operation,” Hersh writes.

“‘It would be a goat fuck,’ the agency was told. Throughout ‘all of this scheming,’ the source said, ‘some working guys in the CIA and the State Department were saying, “Don’t do this. It’s stupid and will be a political nightmare if it comes out.”’

“Nevertheless, in early 2022, the CIA working group reported back to [national security adviser Jake] Sullivan’s interagency group: ‘We have a way to blow up the pipelines.’ What came next was stunning. On February 7, less than three weeks before the seemingly inevitable Russian invasion of Ukraine, Biden met in his White House office with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who, after some wobbling, was now firmly on the American team. At the press briefing that followed, Biden defiantly said, ‘If Russia invades … there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.’”

Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland gave a similar warning, Hersh says, and lower-ranking officials were concerned by what they viewed as their seniors’ indiscretion.

The operation was headquartered in Norway, whose navy, Hersh says,

was quick to find the right spot, in the shallow waters of the Baltic sea a few miles off Denmark’s Bornholm Island. The pipelines ran more than a mile apart along a seafloor that was only 260 feet deep. That would be well within the range of the divers, who, operating from a Norwegian Alta-class mine hunter, would dive with a mixture of oxygen, nitrogen and helium streaming from their tanks, and plant shaped C4 charges on the four pipelines with concrete protective covers. It would be tedious, time consuming and dangerous work, but the waters off Bornholm had another advantage: there were no major tidal currents, which would have made the task of diving much more difficult.

As cover, Hersh writes, the Americans had Sixth Fleet planners add to the annual naval maneuvers, already scheduled for that time and place, a research and development exercise involving “NATO teams of divers planting mines, with competing teams using the latest underwater technology to find and destroy them…. The C4 explosives would be in place by the end of BALTOPS22.”

After a decent interval of three months,

on September 26, 2022, a Norwegian Navy P8 surveillance plane made a seemingly routine flight and dropped a sonar buoy. The signal spread underwater, initially to Nord Stream 2 and then on to Nord Stream 1. A few hours later, the high-powered C4 explosives were triggered and three of the four pipelines were put out of commission….

In the immediate aftermath of the pipeline bombing, the American media treated it like an unsolved mystery. Russia was repeatedly cited as a likely culprit, spurred on by calculated leaks from the White House – but without ever establishing a clear motive for such an act of self-sabotage, beyond simple retribution…. No major American newspaper dug into the earlier threats to the pipelines made by Biden and Undersecretary of State Nuland.

Fact-checkers and Hersh

Critics found what they said were some errors in Hersh’s version. Here is Wikipedia on that:

Hersh wrote that NATO General Secretary Jens Stoltenberg had been cooperating with US intelligence services since the Vietnam War and has been cleared ever since. At the time the Vietnam War ended, Stoltenberg was 16 years old, and he had participated during the peak of the Anti-Vietnam War demonstrations in Norway. In 1985, Stoltenberg was part of the Workers’ Youth League in Norway, when the Labor Party was working to withdraw Norway from NATO.

Hersh’s article said the US divers who planted the explosives had operated from a Norwegian Alta-class minesweeper. The Norwegian Defence Forces said no Norwegian Alta-class mine sweepers had participated in BALTOPS 22 and were not in the vicinity of the explosions during the exercise.

Regarding Hersh’s allegations against the Norwegian P-8 Poseidon surveillance plane, Lieutenant Colonel Vegard Norstad Finberg of the Norwegian armed forces said the Norwegian P-8 Poseidon surveillance plane is a brand new plane that has never been in an operational operation, and has only flown test flights in Norwegian airspace, and has never been over the Baltic Sea….

In the German Bundestag, members of parliament from the government disputed Hersh’s credibility and urged that public discussion of the topic be minimized for security reasons; opposition members of parliament from AfD and Die Linke initiated a parliamentary debate on February 10 about Hersh’s allegations, with Die Linke MP Sevim Dağdelen arguing that the government seemed uninterested in clarifying the truth about the bombings.

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg gives a press conference during a NATO summit at the North Atlantic Treaty Organization headquarters in Brussels on June 14, 2021. Photo: AFP / Olivier Hoslet

If the divers’ platform wasn’t an Alta-class minesweeper, then was it a yacht rented from a Ukrainian-owned company in Poland – the vessel the German media/European intel account mentions?

The German account tells us that the saboteurs on their rented yacht proceeded to the dive location on September 6, 2022, from the German Baltic Sea port of Rostock after loading their equipment aboard there from a delivery truck. Rostok’s a long day’s sail (325 nautical miles) from Gdynia, the major Polish port on the Baltic (in case that’s where, in Poland, the Ukrainian-owned yacht rental company is situated).

The New York Times

Disclaimer here: In my 54 years in the news business, I have generally avoided asking spooks for help. I have nothing against them and realize they are colleagues of sorts, but I can recall only a couple of cases when I sought their help. They have their jobs and I have mine. I certainly don’t rush to get their version of events whenever something happens. I assume their version is whatever their agencies have told them should be their version so I prefer to spend my time getting my own version from more direct sources.

That may help to explain why the New York Times piece bothers me. The reporters – maybe the spooks are their beat and they have to get along, or else? – seem overeager to peddle Washington’s version.

Ukraine and its allies have been seen by some officials as having the most logical potential motive to attack the pipelines. They have opposed the project for years, calling it a national security threat because it would allow Russia to sell gas more easily to Europe.

I’d advise checking your wallet if you hear from your pipe-smoking spook source that “officials who have reviewed the intelligence said they believed the saboteurs were most likely Ukrainian or Russian nationals or some combination of the two. US officials said no American or British nationals were involved.”

Would you credit “US officials who have reviewed the new intelligence” and who say that “the explosives were most likely planted with the help of experienced divers who did not appear to be working for military or intelligence services”?

After all that Seymour Hersh has told you?

Well, at least they have a policy at the New York Times on when they can emulate Seymour Hersh (born 1937, a real veteran with a record) and stick to anonymous sources:

Do the sources know the information? What’s their motivation for telling us? Have they proved reliable in the past? Can we corroborate the information? Even with these questions satisfied, The Times uses anonymous sources as a last resort. The reporter and at least one editor know the identity of the source.

Whew. What a relief.

Bradley K Martin is a veteran foreign correspondent.

asiatimes.com · by Bradley K. Martin · March 9, 2023

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

Company Name | Website

2023 ANNUAL THREAT ASSESSMENT OF THE U.S. INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY

RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, MARCH 8, 2023

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Did US raise a false flag on Nord Stream blasts?