Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

“Strategic competition is a persistent and long-term struggle that occurs between two or more adversaries seeking to pursue incompatible interests without necessarily engaging in armed conflict with each other."

- Joint Concept for Competing, 10 February 2023

“To accept tragedy means to know that things often go wrong, and often have unintended consequences. Young veterans of Afghanistan and Iraq know this better than much older policy types in Washington, who have never worn a uniform, or reported on a war. That is why the most emotionally sophisticated students I have ever encountered as a teacher have been at military war colleges."

- Robert D. Kaplan, The Tragic Mind – Fear, Fate, and the Burden of Power

"I've had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happened.

- Mark Twain

1. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, April 10, 2023

2. US Is Spying On Zelensky: Here's What's Known So Far From The Leaked Intelligence Files

3. No Money, No Nukes: Time to Bankrupt China's Regime

4. Pentagon leak reinforces what already know: US-NATO in it to win

5. Opinion | An eyewitness reveals how China is brainwashing the Uyghurs

6. What we know about the classified document leak revealing U.S. spy secrets

7. Philippines won’t allow US to use bases for ‘offensive actions’

8. Why do we think Putin won’t use ‘the bomb’?

9. The Pentagon’s Purported Classified-Document Leak: The Biggest Takeaways and Questions So Far

10. The ongoing scandal over leaked US intel documents, explained

11. Biden Administration Weighs Possible Rules for AI Tools Like ChatGPT

12. Wartime Intelligence Leaks Can Sink Allies

13. Why Taiwan matters to the world

14. US and Philippines launch biggest joint drills yet in South China Sea

15. Egypt planned to supply thousands of rockets to Russia amid Ukraine war – report

16. U.S., Chinese Aircraft Carriers Operating Near Taiwan, Chinese Carrier Shandong Launched 80 Fighter Missions in Weekend Drills

17. Renewing Democracy Through Oath Education at the Air Force Academy

18. The Forgotten Reason Ukraine Is Kicking Russia's You Know What

19. How the nation’s Corps of Marines has lost its way

20. Navigating the New Age of Great-Power Competition

21. Japan’s Official Security Assistance: The Sleeping Giant Stirs?

22. State Dept wants ‘cyber assistance fund’ to aid allies and partners against hackers

23. NASA Reveals What Made an Entire Starlink Satellite Fleet Go Down

24. Walter Reed issues 'cease and desist' to Catholic Church before Holy Week

1. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, April 10, 2023

Maps/graphics: https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-april-10-2023

Key Takeaways

Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin is reportedly advancing his political aspirations by seeking to gain control of a Russian political party.
Putin may be unable to satisfy the role of a patron to loyalist figures to the same extent as he had been able to before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
The Russian Foreign Ministry (MFA) directly responded to Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin’s criticisms of its agenda at the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), marking the first time that a Russian government institution has formally responded to Prigozhin’s criticism.
The Russian Foreign Ministry (MFA) attack on Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin is a continuation of the Kremlin’s efforts to discredit and undermine Prigozhin.
Russian milbloggers adamantly decried the charging of Russian military doctor and “Union of Donbas Volunteers” member Yuri Yevich for “discrediting the Russian armed forces,” suggesting that the broad applications of this new law will likely be a growing source of discontent in the pro-war information space.
The Russian State Duma will consider an amendment to the Russian Criminal Code increasing criminal penalties for high treason and terrorist activities on April 13.
Russian Minister of Defense Sergey Shoigu met with Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko in Minsk, Belarus, on April 10.
Russian forces conducted limited ground attacks along the Svatove-Kreminna line.
Russian forces continued to make territorial gains in and around Bakhmut, and continued ground attacks on the Avdiivka-Donetsk City line.
Russian forces continued defensive preparations in Kherson and Zaporizhia oblasts.
Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin criticized Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) prisoner recruitment efforts, likely in an effort to advertise ongoing Wagner volunteer recruitment campaigns.
Wagner forces are reportedly continuing to commit war crimes by beheading Ukrainian servicemen in Bakhmut.
Russian officials and occupation authorities continue to deport children to Russia under the guise of medical, rehabilitation, and voluntary evacuation schemes.

RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, APRIL 10, 2023

Apr 10, 2023 - Press ISW

Download the PDF

Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, April 10, 2023

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

April 10, 7pm 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 map that ISW produces daily by showing a dynamic frontline. ISW will update this time-lapse map archive monthly.

Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin is reportedly advancing his political aspirations by seeking to gain control of a Russian political party. Russian opposition outlet Meduza reported that Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin’s growing cooperation with members of the A Just Russia — For Truth party likely indicates that Prigozhin seeks to gain control over the party.[1] Meduza noted that four members of the party left to form a new movement, with some members citing the rapprochement between party leader Sergey Mironov and Prigozhin as the reason for their exit.[2] ISW has consistently reported on the growing relationship between Mironov and Prigozhin and assessed that Mironov’s advocacy for recognition of Wagner in Russia could trigger further fractionalization within the Kremlin.[3] Two Kremlin sources and one St. Petersburg government insider claimed that Prigozhin is pursuing a leadership position within A Just Russia — For Truth’s St. Petersburg branch to compete with St. Petersburg Governor Alexander Beglov for influence in the city. Meduza’s sources claimed that Prigozhin previously was interested in investing in the “Motherland” political party and may be interested in pursuing a position at the federal level. Mironov, in turn, is likely attempting to revive his political influence and use Prigozhin as a patron for his political ambitions. Meduza’s interlocutors indicated that the Russian Presidential Administration is unlikely to allow Prigozhin to gain control of the A Just Russia — For Truth party due to Prigozhin’s conflict with administration officials and with Beglov.

The Russian Foreign Ministry (MFA) directly responded to Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin’s criticisms of its agenda for Russia’s presidency of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), marking the first time that a Russian government institution has formally responded Prigozhin’s criticism. Prigozhin criticized the MFA’s work in Africa on April 7, claiming that the Russian MFA does “absolutely nothing” and that Wagner forces face “enormous difficulties” when interacting with the MFA and other government institutions in the region.[4] The MFA responded to Prigozhin’s criticism on April 9 and said that it is ready to cooperate with Russian businesses and entrepreneurs to promote Russian businesses abroad and that a number of upcoming events under Russia’s UNSC chairmanship are dedicated to African issues.[5] Prigozhin then responded to the MFA, questioning its ability to solve problems through the UNSC, and published a list of 15 issues that Prigozhin believes require urgent discussion at the UNSC, most of which relate to support for Russia’s actions in Ukraine and Africa.[6]

The Russian MFA’s attack on Prigozhin is a continuation of the Kremlin’s efforts to discredit and undermine Prigozhin. The MFA, other Russian government institutions, and Kremlin affiliates likely seek to shut down any attempts by Prigozhin to garner public or political support. The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) refused to name Wagner forces as participants in the battle of Bakhmut, referring instead to “assault detachments.”[7] Kremlin Spokesperson Dmitry Peskov indirectly accused Prigozhin of deliberately exposing conflicts between the MoD and Wagner.[8] Russian political scientist Aleksey Mukhin — who contributes to the Kremlin-affiliated Valdai Discussion Club and Russian state media — criticized Prigozhin for pursuing political objectives that endanger Wagner forces in Bakhmut.[9] Prigozhin likely criticized the Russian MFA agenda in the UNSC in an effort to portray himself as a capable statesman able to influence foreign affairs and to garner support from the Russian ultranationalist community. Prigozhin continues to attempt to aggrandize himself by exaggerating Wagner forces’ role in Russian successes in Ukraine and using his prominence in the Russian nationalist information space to criticize the Russian government.[10]

Russian milbloggers adamantly decried the charging of Russian military doctor and “Union of Donbas Volunteers” member Yuri Yevich for “discrediting the Russian armed forces,” suggesting that the broad applications of this new law will likely be a growing source of discontent in the pro-war information space. Russian authorities reportedly charged Yevich under the discreditation law because of a lecture on tactical medicine he gave to Rosgvardia employees, which someone reported to the authorities as offering a “negative assessment” of Russian forces.[11] Yevich fought with Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) militias in Donbas after 2014 and was a part of the ”Union of Donbas volunteers” following the full-scale invasion in 2022.[12] Yevich became popular in the pro-war Russian information space for popularizing and advocating for the application of tactical combat medicine on the battlefield.[13] Several pro-war milbloggers and commentators seized on the news of Yevich’s arrest and criticized Russian authorities for targeting someone whom they deem to be a true Russian patriot.[14] Many milbloggers noted that Yevich’s charging will become a carte blanche for Russian authorities to sanction every Russian soldier, volunteer, and patriot and questioned the legitimacy of both the case against Yevich and the law itself.[15] Yevich likely presented an important truth regarding the state of Russian combat medicine to an internal audience and was arrested for it. If the Kremlin uses this law to shut down honest critiques of the performance of Russian forces or the Russian government even during internal discussions it runs a very high risk of repeating the kinds of fundamental errors that led to the failure of the initial Russian plans and campaign in February 2022.

The Russian State Duma will consider an amendment to the Russian Criminal Code increasing criminal penalties for high treason and terrorist activities on April 13.[16] The Russian State Duma Committee on State Construction and Legislation approved amendments to the Russian Criminal Code that would introduce life prison sentences for high treason and increase prison sentences for terrorist activities, including conducting terrorist activities, aiding terrorist activities, sabotaging transport and health infrastructure and, organizing and participating in a terrorist society.[17] The Russian Criminal Code’s definition of treason is likely intentionally vague, including espionage, passing state secrets to foreign governments or their representatives, and providing financial, logistical, consulting, or other assistance to foreign organizations engaged in activities directed against Russian state security.[18] Such legislative manipulations are part of a larger domestic effort to encourage self-censorship and codify conditions for domestic repressions, as ISW has previously reported.[19]

Russian Minister of Defense Sergey Shoigu met with Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko in Minsk, Belarus, on April 10. Shoigu and Lukashenko mainly used the meeting to reiterate boilerplate rhetoric that emphasized the strength of Russian and Belarusian bilateral cooperation and blamed NATO and the collective West for threatening Belarusian territorial integrity.[20] Lukashenko expressed his gratitude that Russia maintains a military presence in Belarus and accused Poland and Lithuania of threatening the Belarusian borders, while Shoigu thanked Lukashenko for providing Belarusian training grounds for the use of Russian troops.[21]

Key Takeaways

Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin is reportedly advancing his political aspirations by seeking to gain control of a Russian political party.
Putin may be unable to satisfy the role of a patron to loyalist figures to the same extent as he had been able to before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
The Russian Foreign Ministry (MFA) directly responded to Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin’s criticisms of its agenda at the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), marking the first time that a Russian government institution has formally responded to Prigozhin’s criticism.
The Russian Foreign Ministry (MFA) attack on Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin is a continuation of the Kremlin’s efforts to discredit and undermine Prigozhin.
Russian milbloggers adamantly decried the charging of Russian military doctor and “Union of Donbas Volunteers” member Yuri Yevich for “discrediting the Russian armed forces,” suggesting that the broad applications of this new law will likely be a growing source of discontent in the pro-war information space.
The Russian State Duma will consider an amendment to the Russian Criminal Code increasing criminal penalties for high treason and terrorist activities on April 13.
Russian Minister of Defense Sergey Shoigu met with Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko in Minsk, Belarus, on April 10.
Russian forces conducted limited ground attacks along the Svatove-Kreminna line.
Russian forces continued to make territorial gains in and around Bakhmut, and continued ground attacks on the Avdiivka-Donetsk City line.
Russian forces continued defensive preparations in Kherson and Zaporizhia oblasts.
Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin criticized Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) prisoner recruitment efforts, likely in an effort to advertise ongoing Wagner volunteer recruitment campaigns.
Wagner forces are reportedly continuing to commit war crimes by beheading Ukrainian servicemen in Bakhmut.
Russian officials and occupation authorities continue to deport children to Russia under the guise of medical, rehabilitation, and voluntary evacuation schemes.

We do not report in detail on Russian war crimes because these activities are well-covered in Western media and do not directly affect the military operations we are assessing and forecasting. We will continue to evaluate and report on the effects of these criminal activities on the Ukrainian military and the Ukrainian population and specifically on combat in Ukrainian urban areas. We utterly condemn 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 push westward into eastern Kharkiv Oblast and northern Donetsk Oblast)

Russian forces conducted limited ground attacks along the Svatove-Kreminna line on April 9 and 10. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces conducted unsuccessful offensive actions northwest of Kreminna near Makiivka and Chervonopopivka (within 21km northwest of Kreminna), and south of Kreminna near Kuzmyne, Dibrova, Bilohorivka, and Verkhnokamianske (all within 3 to 18km south of Kreminna).[22] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces conducted unsuccessful ground attacks near Yampolivka, Torske, Nevske, and Makiivka (all within 14 to 21km west or northwest of Kreminna).[23] The milblogger also claimed that Russian forces gained new positions in the Serebrianska forest area (10km south of Kreminna).[24] Ukrainian Eastern Group of Forces Spokesperson Colonel Serhiy Cherevaty stated on April 9 that seven engagements occurred in the Kupyansk-Lyman direction.[25] Chechen Republic Head Ramzan Kadyrov published footage on April 8 that purportedly shows Chechen ”Akhmat” Special Forces and elements of the 4th Brigade of the 2nd Luhansk People’s Republic (LNR) Army Corps operating near Kreminna and Bilohorivka (10km south of Kreminna).[26] A Russian BARS (Combat Reserve)- affiliated source published footage on April 9 that reportedly shows the BARS-14 Battalion operating on the Svatove-Kreminna line.[27] Several Russian milbloggers posted footage on April 8 and 9 that claims to show Russian Airborne (VDV) units operating near Kreminna.[28]

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

Russian forces continued to make territorial gains in and around Bakhmut on April 9 and 10 but likely continue to suffer significant casualties. Geolocated footage posted on April 9 and 10 shows that Russian forces made marginal advances northwest of Khromove (2km west of Bakhmut), in southwest Bakhmut, and north of Sacco i Vanzetti (15km north of Bakhmut.[29] Ukrainian Spokesperson for the Eastern Group of Forces Colonel Serhiy Cherevaty stated on April 9 that Russian Airborne (VDV) forces began to appear in Bakhmut likely to reinforce conventional, rather than Wagner Group, forces.[30] Ukrainian Ground Forces Commander Colonel General Oleksandr Syrskyi stated on April 10 that Ukrainian forces have exhausted Wagner forces so much that the Russian military command has had to send SPETSNAZ and VDV elements to Bakhmut.[31] Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian forces made advances in northwestern Bakhmut and in central Bakhmut near the railway on April 9 and 10.[32] A milblogger claimed on April 10 that Russian forces made advances in central and southern Bakhmut.[33] Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) Head Denis Pushilin claimed to visit Bakhmut and presented DNR awards to Wagner Group fighters.[34] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian ground attacks in Bakhmut and near Bohdanivka (6km northwest of Bakhmut) and Khromove.[35]

Russian forces continued to conduct ground attacks along the Avdiivka-Donetsk City line on April 9 and 10. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian ground attacks near Avdiivka, Novokalynove (9km north of Avdiivka), Berdychi (7km northwest of Avdiivka), Sieverne (6km west of Avdiivka), Pervomaiske (10km southwest of Avdiivka), Vodyane (6km southwest of Avdiivka), and Marinka.[36] Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian forces made marginal advances near Krasnohorivka (5km north of Avdiivka), Novokalynove, and Novobakhmutivka (9km northwest of Avdiivka).[37] Other Russian milbloggers claimed that fighting continued near Keramik (10km north of Avdiivka), Sieverne, Pervomaiske, and Pobieda (5km southwest of Donetsk City).[38] Geolocated footage posted on April 9 shows that Russian forces made a marginal advance in southwestern Marinka.[39]

A Ukrainian official indicated that the tempo of Russian offensive operations in the Donetsk direction is slowing, and that Russian forces are engaging in defensive preparations. Ukrainian Joint Press Center of the Tavriisk Direction Head Colonel Oleksiy Dmytrashkivskyi stated on April 9 that the tempo of Russian ground attacks has decreased in this sector of the front and that Russian forces are now shelling at a rate one third less than that of February 2023.[40] Dmytrashkivskyi also reported that Russian forces have concentrated 205 battalion tactical groups (BTGs) in the Donetsk direction out of fear of a Ukrainian counteroffensive.[41] These BTGs are unlikely to be at full strength, however.

Russian forces did not conduct any confirmed ground attacks in western Donetsk Oblast on April 9 and 10. A Russian milblogger claimed on April 9 that Ukrainian forces conducted an unsuccessful ground attack near Novosilka (42km northwest of Vuhledar).[42]

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

Russian forces continued defensive preparations in Kherson and Zaporizhia oblasts on April 9 and 10. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces continued building defensive lines and fortifications in the Kherson and Zaporizhia directions on April 9 and 10.[43] Ukrainian Joint Press Center of the Tavriisk Direction Head Colonel Oleksiy Dmytrashkivskyi stated on April 9 that Russian forces are intensively equipping and mining defensive positions in Zaporizhia Oblast and have concentrated 113 battalion tactical groups (BTGs) in this direction out of fear of a Ukrainian counteroffensive.[44] It is however highly unlikely that any of these BTGs are at full strength or operating in a manner consistent with Russian doctrine considering widespread Russian manpower and equipment losses in previous phases of the war. Satellite imagery shows that Russian forces constructed additional fortifications around Vasylivka, Zaporizhia Oblast between March 2 and March 22.[45] A local Kherson Oblast Telegram channel reported on April 10 that Russian forces are attempting to simulate their withdrawal from Nova Kakhovka to mislead Ukrainian troops and disrupt Ukrainian counteroffensive plans.[46]

Russian forces conducted artillery and missile strikes throughout southern Ukraine on April 9 and 10. The Ukrainian General Staff reported on April 10 that Russian forces launched two S-300 missiles at civilian objects in Zaporizhia Oblast over the past day.[47] Ukraine’s Southern Operational Command stated on April 9 that six Russian Su-35 aircraft attacked the Beryslav area of Kherson Oblast with guided aerial bombs and Kh-31 anti-radar missiles on the night of April 8 to 9.[48] Russian forces continued routine shelling of Kherson, Mykolayiv, Zaporizhia, and Dnipropetrovsk oblasts on April 9 and 10.[49] A Russian milblogger posted footage reportedly showing Russian forces using a TOS-1A thermobaric artillery system to strike Ukrainian positions near Ochakiv, Mykolayiv Oblast.[50] Another Russian milblogger noted that artillery units of the 58th Combined Arms Army (Southern Military District) struck Ukrainian positions in Orikhiv, Zaporizhia Oblast on April 8.[51]

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

Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin criticized the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) for its efforts to recruit prisoners, likely in an effort to advertise ongoing Wagner volunteer recruitment campaigns. Prigozhin responded to a media inquiry about Russian MoD recruitment of prisoners on 18-month contracts, stating that Wagner was first to recruit prisoners because it was felt that convict forces would damage the image of the Russian conventional forces.[52] Prigozhin emphasized that Wagner convicts served only for six months. Prigozhin insinuated that the Russian MoD would treat convicts worse than Wagner treated them to further advertise recruitment into Wagner and discredit the MoD’s recruitment efforts. The insinuation seems odd given that Wagner reportedly used convicts in human wave attacks that cost thousands of them their lives. A local Yekaterinburg outlet reported that Wagner established mobile recruitment points in at least eight towns in Sverdlovsk Oblast offering salaries of 240,000 rubles (about $2,940) with bonuses.[53] Prigozhin’s press service also published a recruitment ad for prospective volunteers between 21 and 60 years of age.[54]

Wagner forces are reportedly continuing to commit war crimes by beheading Ukrainian servicemen in Bakhmut. Russian social media users published footage purportedly showing the remains of a head belonging to a Ukrainian serviceman on a spike at an unspecified area in Bakhmut.[55] Social media users recalled similar instances of skulls mounted on spikes in Popasna, Luhansk Oblast, where Wagner troops operated over spring–summer of 2022.[56] The Geneva Convention prohibits the mutilation and despoilment of dead bodies in war.[57]

Russian federal subjects are continuing to expand domestic volunteer recruitment efforts. A Russian online news aggregator reported that Moscow officials launched an online volunteer recruitment website advertising contract service for Moscow residents.[58] Head of the Republic of Bashkortostan Radiy Khabirov stated that the republic is entertaining proposals to form another volunteer motorized rifle regiment and announced the deployment of the “Vatan” volunteer battalion to Ukraine over the upcoming days.[59] A local Khabarovsk Krai outlet reported that the region is recruiting personnel for the “Khabarovsk” and “Kofra“ volunteer battalions.[60] The outlet noted that the Khabarovsk volunteer battalion is open to all civilians with or without military training, whereas the “Kofra” signals battalion is recruiting volunteers with past signals experience or civilian professional experience in the field. Khabarovsk Krai officials are planning to form an infantry battalion with mortar elements and drone operators.

Russian sources complained about the mediocre performance of the Russian “Nevsky” volunteer detachment — complaints that likely apply to other Russian volunteer battalions operating in Ukraine. A Russian milblogger claimed that the Nevsky volunteer detachment — which now calls itself a brigade - conducted mediocre assaults on Ukrainian positions through a minefield without armor or artillery.[61] The milblogger claimed that the detachment has some professional servicemen but that many contract servicemen are leaving their units. The milblogger also published footage showing one Nevsky serviceman accidentally shooting at another Russian serviceman.[62] Nevsky detachment is continuing to recruit personnel for a wide variety of positions.[63]

Russian businessmen and personnel are continuing to exploit the Russian war effort for their benefit. The Moscow City Court canceled the international warrant for Russian businessman Alexander Dagutsy who reportedly transferred $24 million USD abroad after he had reportedly joined the 108th Guards Kuban Cossack Air Assault Regiment.[64] A Russian Telegram channel claimed that Russian military personnel and private military companies are participating in illegal arms exchanges and are selling weapons to locals in Russian border areas.[65]

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

Russian officials and occupation authorities continue to deport children to Russia under the guise of medical, rehabilitation, and voluntary evacuation schemes. The Ukrainian Office of the General Prosecutor issued a notice of suspicion against a Crimea-based businesswoman under accusations that she has helped deport 1,000 Ukrainian children and 64 guardians to Sevastopol, Crimea, under the guise of tourism and voluntary evacuation.[66] Luhansk People’s Republic (LNR) Ambassador to Russia Rodion Miroshnik claimed on April 10 that Russia has returned 10 Ukrainian children and their mothers to Horlivka, Luhansk Oblast, after they reportedly received medical treatment at the Klyazma sanitorium in Moscow Oblast.[67] Ukrainian news outlet Suspilne Novosti on April 10 shared the story of a 16-year-old boy whom Russian forces had illegally transported to a political re-education camp after he had spent two weeks resting at the “Dream” sanatorium in Yevpatoria, Crimea.[68] Suspilne Novosti amplified reports that Russian occupation authorities continue to brainwash Ukrainian children at re-education camps in Russia, coercing them to abandon their Ukrainian identity and instead show pro-Russia sentiment.[69] LNR head Leonid Pasechnik claimed on April 9 that occupation authorities have conducted professional medical evaluations on more than 94,000 Ukrainian children in occupied Luhansk Oblast, thousands of whom Russian occupation officials have since deported to Russia for medical treatment.[70] Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereschuk stated on April 10 that Russia is illegally holding 4,396 deported Ukrainian children in Russia and announced that Ukraine is forming an international coalition to return the children to Ukraine.[71]

Russian federal subjects continue to formalize patronage-like partnerships in an effort to bring the standard of living in occupied territories up to the Russian standard. Russian Minister of Health Mikhail Murashko announced that the Henichesk Central District Hospital in Kherson Oblast will become the leading medical institution in occupied Kherson Oblast. Murashko stated that Krasnodor Krai has allocated 200 million rubles (about $2.5 million) to sponsor repairs and the purchase of modern medical equipment. Murashko set out measures to complete the repair of old and construction of new buildings at the facility by the end of 2023.[72]

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

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

Russian and Belarusian forces continued combat training in Belarus on April 9 and 10. The Belarusian Ministry of Defense (MoD) posted footage and imagery of Belarusian forces conducting exercises as part of an ongoing combat readiness check.[73] The Ukrainian General Staff noted on April 10 that certain unspecified Russian units continue to serve on Belarusian territory but reiterated that there are no signs of the formation of a Russian offensive group in Belarus.[74] The Ukrainian Resistance Center cited Belarusian partisans on April 10 who reported that Russian forces are training with the Belarusian 38th Separate Guards Air Assault Brigade at the Brest training ground in Brest Oblast and that there are growing frictions between Russian and Belarusian forces during training.[75]

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://meduza dot io/feature/2023/04/10/on-hochet-svoyu-partiyu

[2] https://meduza dot io/feature/2023/04/10/on-hochet-svoyu-partiyu

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

[4] https://t.me/Prigozhin_hat/3019

[5] https://t.me/MID_Russia/26900

[6] https://t.me/concordgroup_official/718

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

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

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

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

[11] https://meduza dot io/news/2023/04/10/voennogo-vracha-obvinili-v-diskreditatsii-armii-iz-za-prochitannoy-im-lektsii-dlya-rosgvardii-za-nego-vstupilis-voenkory-i-gubernator

[12] https://theins dot ru/news/260822

[13] https://theins dot ru/news/260822; https://meduza dot io/news/2023/04/10/voennogo-vracha-obvinili-v-diskreditatsii-armii-iz-za-prochitannoy-im-lektsii-dlya-rosgvardii-za-nego-vstupilis-voenkory-i-gubernator; https://t.me/NeoficialniyBeZsonoV/24086; https://t.me/NeoficialniyBeZso...

[14] https://t.me/NeoficialniyBeZsonoV/24086; https://t.me/NeoficialniyBeZso...

[15] https://t.me/strelkovii/4475 ; https://t.me/Topaz_Govorit/4031; https://t.me/pgubarev/611; https://t.me/strelkovii/4493

[16] https://www.interfax dot ru/russia/895213; https://ria dot ru/20230410/gosizmena-1864199735.html

[17] https://www.interfax dot ru/russia/895213; https://ria dot ru/20230410/gosizmena-1864199735.html

[18] https://борисово-адм dot рф/statja-275-gosudarstvennaja-izmena/

[19] https://isw.pub/UkrWar040823

[20] https://president dot gov.by/ru/events/vstrecha-s-ministrom-oborony-rossii-sergeem-shoygu-1681119493; https://t.me/modmilby/25495; https://t.me/modmilby/25490; https://t.me/modmilby/25493

[21] https://president dot gov.by/ru/events/vstrecha-s-ministrom-oborony-rossii-sergeem-shoygu-1681119493; https://t.me/modmilby/25495; https://t.me/modmilby/25490; https://t.me/modmilby/25493

[22] https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid02q1Yxei59Ea9tEdAibR...

[23] https://t.me/wargonzo/11850; https://t.me/wargonzo/11867

[24] https://t.me/wargonzo/11850

[25] https://suspilne dot media/439878-povernenna-deportovanih-ditej-sotni-btr-vid-polsi-boi-za-marinku-ta-bahmut-410-den-vijni-onlajn/?anchor=live_1681043625&utm_source=copylink&utm_medium=ps; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5vvrb1YsqU

[26] https://t.me/RKadyrov_95/3513

[27] https://t.me/russkiy_opolchenec/36289

[28] https://t.me/milinfolive/99064; https://t.me/grey_zone/18103; https://...

[30] https://suspilne dot media/439878-povernenna-deportovanih-ditej-sotni-btr-vid-polsi-boi-za-marinku-ta-bahmut-410-den-vijni-onlajn/; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5vvrb1YsqU

[31] https://suspilne dot media/440451-rosiani-namagautsa-zablokuvati-avdiivku-sili-oboroni-z-dobu-vidbili-40-atak-411-den-vijni-onlajn/

[32] https://t.me/readovkanews/56515; https://t.me/brussinf/5853; https://t...

[33] https://t.me/wargonzo/11867

[34] https://t.me/pushilindenis/3311; https://t.me/readovkanews/56564

[35] https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid02q1Yxei59Ea9tEdAibR... https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid02TaCDz6muubBP5Tn3Hc...

[36] https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid02q1Yxei59Ea9tEdAibR... https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid02Yvu1VvdpxfP4Ey2sNw... https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid02LJyGWQmBBoha7JxjJ9... https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid02TaCDz6muubBP5Tn3Hc...

[37] https://t.me/voenkorKotenok/46690;

[38] https://t.me/wargonzo/11850; https://t.me/readovkanews/56515; https://t.me/wargonzo/11867

[39] https://twitter.com/GeoConfirmed/status/1645175760120840194?s=20; https://twitter.com/antiputler_news/status/1645150589574082560?s=20

[40] https://armyinform.com dot ua/2023/04/09/cherez-strah-pered-kontrnastupom-okupanty-na-zaporizhzhi-intensyvno-oblashtovuyut-ta-minuyut-oboronni-pozycziyi-oleksij-dmytrashkivskyj/

[41] https://armyinform dot com.ua/2023/04/09/cherez-strah-pered-kontrnastupom-okupanty-na-zaporizhzhi-intensyvno-oblashtovuyut-ta-minuyut-oboronni-pozycziyi-oleksij-dmytrashkivskyj/

[42] https://t.me/readovkanews/56554

[43] https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid02LJyGWQmBBoha7JxjJ9...

[44] https://armyinform.com.ua/2023/04/09/cherez-strah-pered-kontrnastupom-ok...

[45] https://twitter.com/bradyafr/status/1645105977656582145

[46] https://t.me/hueviyherson/37748

[47] https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid02Yvu1VvdpxfP4Ey2sNw...

[48] https://www.facebook.com/OperationalCommandSouth/posts/pfbid02Gxgj4dT1n1...

[49] https://t.me/rybar/45607; https://t.me/rybar/45625; https://t.me/khers...

[50] https://t.me/RtrDonetsk/16620

[51] https://t.me/rybar/45607

[52] https://t.me/concordgroup_official/719

[53] https://www.e1 dot ru/text/gorod/2023/04/05/72194627/

[54] https://t.me/concordgroup_official/724

[55] https://twitter.com/666_mancer/status/1645314394224484352; https://vk dot com/wall-168586038_370587; https://archive.is/FUB9V; https://twitter.com/CalibreObscura/status/164...

[56] https://twitter.com/666_mancer/status/1645314394224484352; https://vk dot com/wall-168586038_370587; https://archive.is/FUB9V

[57] https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/customary-ihl/v1/rule113#Fn_28E57177_0...

[58] https://t.me/readovkanews/56567

[59] https://ufa1 dot ru/text/gorod/2023/04/10/72206783/

[60] https://transsibinfo dot com/news/2023-04-10/v-habarovsk-prishla-raznaryadka-o-nabore-voennosluzhaschih-po-kontraktu-2897405; http://publication dot pravo.gov.ru/Document/View/0001202303070007?index=2&rangeSize=1

[61] https://vk dot com/wall-217310531_116; https://t.me/strelkovii/4463

[62] https://vk.com/wall-217310531_116

[63] https://t.me/BTGR_NEVSKIY/202

[64] https://meduza dot io/news/2023/04/09/mosgorsud-otmenil-mezhdunarodnyy-rozysk-figuranta-dela-o-vyvode-za-granitsu-24-millionov-dollarov-obvinyaemyy-otpravilsya-dobrovoltsem-voevat-v-ukrainu

[65] https://t.me/vchkogpu/37685

[66] https://armyinform.com dot ua/2023/04/10/kolaborantczi-yaka-dopomogla-rf-deportuvaty-ponad-tysyachu-ukrayinskyh-ditej-povidomleno-pro-pidozru/; https://t.me/pgo_gov_ua/11142

[67] https://t.me/miroshnik_r/11011

[68] https://suspilne dot media/440985-sob-a-ne-cuv-so-vi-z-ukraini-vi-narodilisa-u-rf-ak-rosia-perevihovue-vikradenih-ukrainskih-ditej/

[69] https://suspilne dot media/440985-sob-a-ne-cuv-so-vi-z-ukraini-vi-narodilisa-u-rf-ak-rosia-perevihovue-vikradenih-ukrainskih-ditej/

[70] https://t.me/glava_lnr_info/942

[71] https://minre.gov dot ua/2023/04/10/formuyetsya-mizhnarodna-koalicziya-dlya-povernennya-ukrayinskyh-ditej-syrit/

[72] https://t.me/VGA_Kherson/8436

[73] https://t.me/modmilby/25455; https://t.me/modmilby/25463 ; https://t....

[74] https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid02q1Yxei59Ea9tEdAibR...

[75] https://sprotyv dot mod.gov.ua/2023/04/10/rosiyany-ta-bilorusy-prodovzhuyut-spilni-navchannya/

US Is Spying On Zelensky: Here's What's Known So Far From The Leaked Intelligence Files | ZeroHedge

ZeroHedge

The highly classified Pentagon documents which were leaked online in recent weeks, but which began being confirmed and reported as authentic by The New York Times and others only in the past few days, contain some embarrassing revelations. This has sent DOJ and US intelligence officials scrambling to discover the source of the leaks.

CNN is confirming Monday based on one of the documents which appeared online that the US has been spying on Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky - a disclosure which has caused officials in Kiev to be "deeply frustrated".

"One document reveals that the US has been spying on Zelensky," CNN reports. "That is unsurprising, said the source close to Zelensky, but Ukrainian officials are deeply frustrated about the leak."

The US intelligence document suggests that American officials have been worried about possible Zelensky decision-making to strike deep into Russian territory, which would escalate the war and potentially bring Russian and NATO into direct clashes:

The US intelligence report, which is sourced to signals intelligence, says that Zelensky in late February "suggested striking Russian deployment locations in Russia’s Rostov Oblast" using unmanned aerial vehicles, since Ukraine does not have long-range weapons capable of reaching that far.

An additional possibility is that the US intelligence community might be monitoring the Ukrainian presidency's office as part of efforts to oversee and account for how the tens of billions in aid sent to Kiev is being utilized.

The Washington Post details that "many of the documents seem to have been prepared over the winter for Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and other senior military officials, but they were available to other U.S. personnel and contract employees with the requisite security clearances."

Leaked document has a legend of US/NATO special forces in Ukraine pic.twitter.com/Po0pRJ6gMx

— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) April 7, 2023

Here are 14 more major revelations contained within the leaked intel document trove based on various media sources:

Locations of CIA recruitment efforts focused on human agents which have access to closed-door conversations of world leaders
Russia's Wagner Group tried to obtain weapons from a NATO member: Turkey. Also, some of the internal future plans of Wagner are apparently known to US intelligence
Details of sensitive satellite technology used to track Russian forces, namely the "LAPIS time-series video" - described as an advanced satellite system, which up until now has been a closely guarded secret
Ukraine battlefield assessments prepared by the Pentagon
The Guardian: "One slide suggested that a small contingent of less than a hundred special operations personnel from NATO members France, America, Britain, and Latvia were already active in Ukraine."
Descriptions of intelligence collection activities by the CIA, NSA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, law enforcement agencies and the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO)
One Feb. 23 review of the battlefield situation in Ukraine’s Donbas forecasts a "grinding campaign of attrition" by Russia that "is likely heading toward a stalemate, thwarting Moscow’s goal to capture the entire region in 2023."
WaPo: "The U.S. intelligence community has penetrated the Russian military and its commanders so deeply that it can warn Ukraine in advance of attacks and reliably assess the strengths and weaknesses of Russian forces."
WaPo: "A single page in the leaked trove reveals that the U.S. intelligence community knew the Russian Ministry of Defense had transmitted plans to strike Ukrainian troop positions in two locations on a certain date in February and that Russian military planners were preparing strikes on a dozen energy facilities and an equal number of bridges in Ukraine."
WaPo: A summary of analysis from the CIA’s World Intelligence Review, a daily publication for senior policymakers, says that Beijing is likely to view attacks by Ukraine deep inside Russian territory as "an opportunity to cast NATO as the aggressor," and that China could increase its support to Russia if it felt the attacks were "significant."
Ukraine's robust Soviet-era air defenses -- which have thus far minimized the participation of Russian aircraft - could run out of ammunition in next several weeks.
A purported CIA intelligence update -- claims Israel's Mossad supported protests against Prime Minister Netanyahu's Supreme Court reform scheme.
One report says internal discussions show that South Korean officials are wary of requests to hand over artillery shells to the United States to replenish American stockpiles, out of concern they'd end up in Ukraine.
Another report says that Ukrainian Air Defense is in peril if it's not reinforced by Western allies

Meanwhile, the expanding breadth of subject matter has many suggesting a US source is responsible. It's being called "a nightmare for the Five Eyes" - and could damage intelligence-sharing relationships between the US and its partner countries.

One aspect of the Pentagon leak not being discussed on state TV is the indication of how deeply Russia’s security and intel services have been penetrated by the US

But former spook Leonid Reshetnikov brought it up today, prompting Olga Skabeyeva to change subject very unsubtly pic.twitter.com/zbiupkuoA9

— Francis Scarr (@francis_scarr) April 10, 2023

The breach could also prove embarrassing for Russia as it deals with the claims that US intelligence has deeply penetrated some key areas of government, such as the Defense Ministry.

"The focus now is on this being a U.S. leak, as many of the documents were only in U.S. hands," former Pentagon official Michael Mulroy told Reuters. As opposed to electronic downloads, it appears most or all of these leaks are in the form of photographs of paper documents.

ZeroHedge

3. No Money, No Nukes: Time to Bankrupt China's Regime

Excerpts:

"The BRI is faltering and crumbling as China has overextended itself because of pressure from Xi Jinping to push it through too rapidly and without adequate contingency provision for the economic downturn caused by Russia's invasion of Ukraine and other factors," China analyst Charles Burton of the Macdonald-Laurier Institute told Gatestone. "We now know that China spent $240 billion on country bailouts from 2008 to 2021, correlating with a drop in Chinese lending for infrastructure projects that are the core of this Belt and Road Initiative. It is clear that China is now overstretched and unable to continue with the BRI overall plan into the foreseeable future."

No Money, No Nukes: Time to Bankrupt China's Regime

by Gordon G. Chang

April 10, 2023 at 5:00 am

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19572/bankrupt-china-regime?utm_source=pocket_saves

America can stop China's nuclear weapons development and other monumental programs.
The Chinese Communist Party needs America for, among other things, money, and the U.S. does not have to provide it.
In reality, China's economy in 2022, after price adjustments, almost certainly contracted, perhaps by as much as 3%.
Exports fell 6.8% year-on-year. More significantly, imports, one of the best reflections of domestic demand, plunged 10.2%.
"Everything is down, whether plane travel, freight, or buying on the Alibaba platforms." — Anne Stevenson-Yang, author of China Alone: Return to Isolation, to Gatestone, April 2023.
China, therefore, needs factory orders from abroad and foreign investment. The American president can crimp both of these lifelines by, among other things, using his authority under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 and by joining or liberalizing free-trade agreements with other countries. For instance, U.S. President Joe Biden could encourage factories to move to the Western hemisphere by making a few fixes to the Dominican Republic-Central America-United States Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA-DR). The American market is the largest in the world, and the president can use it to redirect trade flows.
"We now know that China spent $240 billion on country bailouts from 2008 to 2021, correlating with a drop in Chinese lending for infrastructure projects that are the core of this Belt and Road Initiative. It is clear that China is now overstretched and unable to continue with the BRI overall plan into the foreseeable future." — China analyst Charles Burton of the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, to Gatestone, April 2023.
Municipalities and cities across China have not been able to pay civil servant salaries and promised benefits, and for months there have been protests, even in wealthy cities like Wuhan in Hubei province and Dalian in Liaoning.
There is a lot America can do to stop China's fast buildup of its most dangerous arsenal, and in any case Americans must not under any circumstances fund, with trade and investment, the weapons pointed at them.
President Ronald Reagan bankrupted the Soviet Union by reducing the flow of cash to Moscow. It is now time to bankrupt China.
After all, no money, no nukes.

America can stop China's nuclear weapons development... The Chinese Communist Party needs America for, among other things, money, and the U.S. does not have to provide it. President Ronald Reagan bankrupted the Soviet Union by reducing the flow of cash to Moscow. It is now time to bankrupt China. (Image source: iStock)

"We are probably not going to be able to do anything to stop, slow down, disrupt, interdict, or destroy the Chinese nuclear development program that they have projected out over the next 10 to 20 years," said Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley on March 29 at a hearing of the House Armed Services Committee. "They're going to do that in accordance with their own plan."

Milley is wrong about China's nuclear weapons ambitions. He is, unfortunately, expressing the same pessimism that pervaded the Nixon, Ford and Carter years, when the American foreign policy establishment took the Soviet Union as a given and therefore promoted détente.

America can stop China's nuclear weapons development and other monumental programs.

The Chinese Communist Party needs America for, among other things, money, and the U.S. does not have to provide it.

"The one resource which Xi Jinping's ambition has overreached is cash," Gregory Copley, the president of the International Strategic Studies Association and editor-in-chief of Defense & Foreign Affairs Strategic Policy, told Gatestone. "Beijing cannot, in the short term, provide the cash needed to dominate the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, and other places."

The fundamental problem for the audacious Chinese ruler is that China's economic growth is stumbling. China's official National Bureau of Statistics reported that gross domestic product last year grew 3.0%, well below the regime's announced target of "around 5.5%."

Official statisticians minimized inflation, thereby overstating last year's economic output. In reality, China's economy in 2022, after price adjustments, almost certainly contracted, perhaps by as much as 3%.

Will there be growth now? There was great optimism at the beginning of this year, in part because the economy in 2022 was so weak and a fast rebound seemed likely after the lifting of China's draconian "dynamic zero-COVID" controls in early December.

Beijing's propaganda machine, beginning in December, went into overdrive, predicting a robust economic expansion for this year. Li Keqiang, in one of his last acts as premier, in March announced a GDP growth target of "around 5%." He did not do his successor, Li Qiang, any favors. That target, as low as it is, is unattainable. In any event, the economy stumbled out of the block. From all indications, GDP contracted during the combined January-February period.

During the two months — January and February are combined for reporting purposes to eliminate the distortion caused by the constantly shifting Chinese New Year holiday — trade volume continued its downward trend. Exports fell 6.8% year-on-year. More significantly, imports, one of the best reflections of domestic demand, plunged 10.2%.

Retail sales for the two-month period, Beijing says, increased, but only by 3.5%. That number, as weak as it is, is not consistent with consumer data, however. Anne Stevenson-Yang of J Capital Research points out that airline passenger traffic for January-February was off 23% compared with the same period in 2019, the last pre-Covid year; box office revenue, a closely watched indicator, was down 13% for the January 1-April 4 period, again compared to 2019; and the price of sports shoes has been dropping rapidly on the popular Alibaba sites of Taobao and TMall.

Beijing has been issuing optimistic-looking purchasing managers' indexes (PMIs) for the services sector, but Stevenson-Yang, also the author of China Alone: Return to Isolation, persuasively argues these numbers do not show the true state of economic growth. "The services PMI gives the impression that the Chinese economy is roaring back, but that does not at all appear to be the case," she told Gatestone. "Everything is down, whether plane travel, freight, or buying on the Alibaba platforms."

The dramatic downturn in the all-important property market and the deep pessimism in Chinese society ultimately combine to limit consumer spending, which in turn limits manufacturing output. Weak foreign demand has, as trade numbers show, already dented exports. In sum, the Chinese economy is anemic.

China, therefore, needs factory orders from abroad and foreign investment. The American president can crimp both of these lifelines by, among other things, using his authority under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 and by joining or liberalizing free-trade agreements with other countries. For instance, U.S. President Joe Biden could encourage factories to move to the Western hemisphere by making a few fixes to the Dominican Republic-Central America-United States Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA-DR). The American market is the largest in the world, and the president can use it to redirect trade flows.

Will redirecting trade flows stop China's nuclear weapons buildup? Not all at once. The People's Liberation Army has been taking larger shares of the resources of the Chinese state. Last year, for instance, China's military budget, according to official sources, increased 7.1% while the economy, at least officially, grew only 3.0%. This year, the military is slated to get 7.2% more, and economic growth will again fall short.

In the short term, therefore, China can afford its nukes, but the budget of the Chinese central government is strained because of Xi Jinping's other grand ambitions, such as his building and maintaining an enormous surveillance state — this costs more than the Chinese military — and his Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) worldwide infrastructure-building program.

"The BRI is faltering and crumbling as China has overextended itself because of pressure from Xi Jinping to push it through too rapidly and without adequate contingency provision for the economic downturn caused by Russia's invasion of Ukraine and other factors," China analyst Charles Burton of the Macdonald-Laurier Institute told Gatestone. "We now know that China spent $240 billion on country bailouts from 2008 to 2021, correlating with a drop in Chinese lending for infrastructure projects that are the core of this Belt and Road Initiative. It is clear that China is now overstretched and unable to continue with the BRI overall plan into the foreseeable future."

Sure, China has foreign reserves and gold, but there is a brewing local currency crisis. There is no other explanation for the "oldies" or "silver" protests. Municipalities and cities across China have not been able to pay civil servant salaries and promised benefits, and for months there have been protests, even in wealthy cities like Wuhan in Hubei province and Dalian in Liaoning. In Shenzhen in Guangdong province, teachers in public elementary schools are not getting full salaries.

Localities, dependent on crumbling property revenues, are going broke. Attempts to raise new revenues are now starting a fresh round of demonstrations.

Xi has diverted the state's resources for nuclear weapons. He can do that for a time, but soon the cash will run out. So here is a message for General Milley: There is a lot America can do to stop China's fast buildup of its most dangerous arsenal, and in any case Americans must not under any circumstances fund, with trade and investment, the weapons pointed at them.

President Ronald Reagan bankrupted the Soviet Union by reducing the flow of cash to Moscow. It is now time to bankrupt China.

After all, no money, no nukes.

Gordon G. Chang is the author of The Coming Collapse of China, a Gatestone Institute distinguished senior fellow, and a member of its Advisory Board.

Follow Gordon G. Chang on Twitter

4. Pentagon leak reinforces what already know: US-NATO in it to win

From the Quincy Institute.

Conclusion:

However, it is worth remembering how news of Russian espionage in the United States and Europe was repeatedly used in the years before the war to whip up fear of and hostility to Russia in the West, thereby making it even more difficult to seek diplomatic compromises that might have prevented the Russian invasion. The leaked documents remind us that in this regard there is a strong element of the pot calling the kettle black.

Pentagon leak reinforces what already know: US-NATO in it to win - Responsible Statecraft

responsiblestatecraft.org · by Anatol Lieven · April 10, 2023

QiOSK

Pentagon leak reinforces what already know: US-NATO in it to win

But revelations about American and European boots on the ground is new, and could prove a dangerous and so far unexplained, wrinkle.

April 10, 2023

Pentagon leak reinforces what already know: US-NATO in it to win

The documents on the war in Ukraine leaked from the Pentagon and other U.S. security bodies only confirm what anyone paying attention already knew: that the United States and NATO are massively and critically involved in arming and training Ukraine, and providing detailed intelligence to the Ukrainian armed forces.

Without this help, Ukraine might perhaps be able to stand on the defensive, but it could never hope to launch its planned offensive to recapture the remaining territory lost to Russia. According to the leaked documents, the Pentagon has assessed the most favorable moment for this offensive as mid-May, once the mud created by Spring rains has dried out (and as I can testify from my own trip to Ukraine last month, mud is still a really serious obstacle to movement there).

Nonetheless, the leak provides some interesting granular detail, which with one exception, appears to be genuine. Figures were apparently doctored to make U.S. estimates show higher Ukrainian and lower Russian casualties. But this is a relatively unimportant point, since the documents themselves state that the casualty assessments are of low reliability — as I have found myself in trying to form even a very rough estimate of Ukrainian losses.

The authenticity of the documents has been acknowledged by Pentagon sources, and the Department of Justice has launched an investigation into who was responsible for the leak. Among the details revealed are that nine out of twelve “combat credible” Ukrainian brigades being prepared for the forthcoming offensive are fully trained and equipped by NATO. Training for these troops is being provided not only in the West but by 71 U.S. military personnel who are stationed within Ukraine, together with 97 NATO special operations soldiers.

These numbers are very small, they are not combat units and the leak only confirms what most observers have long assumed. Nonetheless, their presence does obviously create a risk that they will be killed or captured, thereby handing Russia a propaganda victory and creating an impetus to U.S. retaliation and a dangerous cycle of escalation.

It is also important to point out that the American Congress and public, and those of NATO allies, have never been informed that any U.S. and NATO soldiers are on the ground in Ukraine. The French government has denied the suggestion in the documents that French special forces soldiers are present there. This part of the leaked documents raises serious issues of legality and democratic accountability, which Western governments should investigate.

The great success of Ukrainian anti-missile fire against Russian bombardment of Ukrainian infrastructure (to which I can also attest having experienced this in Zaporizhia) has cost the Ukrainians a very large proportion of their Soviet-era S-300 anti-aircraft missiles. The Pentagon documents state that Ukraine may run out of these this month.

This creates a dilemma for the United States, which will either have very quickly to provide Ukraine with many more Patriot missile defense systems — thereby severely depleting its own limited reserves — or risk seeing more Ukrainian infrastructure destroyed; though from my own observations and interviews in Ukraine, the effectiveness of Russia’s bombardment is also seriously limited by the inaccuracy of its missiles, and its apparently limited numbers of heavy ground-attack weapons.

The documents reveal something about the extent and success of U.S. espionage against Russia, especially in the area of signals intelligence. They also hint at U.S. spying against close allies, including South Korea and the United Kingdom. Once again, this is not surprising, given how the United States was once shown to have spied on the private communications of Angela Merkel and other European leaders.

However, it is worth remembering how news of Russian espionage in the United States and Europe was repeatedly used in the years before the war to whip up fear of and hostility to Russia in the West, thereby making it even more difficult to seek diplomatic compromises that might have prevented the Russian invasion. The leaked documents remind us that in this regard there is a strong element of the pot calling the kettle black.

Written by

Anatol Lieven

responsiblestatecraft.org · by Anatol Lieven · April 10, 2023

5. Opinion | An eyewitness reveals how China is brainwashing the Uyghurs

Conclusion:

By bringing her ordeal in the camps to light, Ms. Haitiwaji has helped ensure a culture and people will not, as she fears, “slowly disappear.” But the whole truth is not yet known. It should be thoroughly exposed and China held to account.

Opinion | An eyewitness reveals how China is brainwashing the Uyghurs

The Washington Post · by Editorial Board · April 9, 2023

Much of what the world knows about the catastrophe befalling the Uyghur people, a Turkic Muslim ethnic minority in China’s northwestern region of Xinjiang, comes from satellite imagery and leaked government police files. Over the past five years, they revealed that China has forced more than 1 million Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities into camps to destroy their national identity, language and religion, and to brainwash them into being loyal subjects of the Communist Party of China.

The satellite photos and government documents, including the pathbreaking work of scholar Adrian Zenz, portrayed an expanding chain of bleak prisons surrounded by barbed wire. A few eyewitnesses also came forward with disturbing accounts. China initially denied the camps existed, then said the facilities were for vocational education, which was untrue.

Now, there is a profoundly intimate and chilling first-person account from Gulbahar Haitiwaji, a Uyghur woman who survived more than two years in the camps. In a 2022 memoir written with Rozenn Morgat, “How I Survived a Chinese ‘Reeducation’ Camp,” she depicts a cultural genocide in progress. “China wants to make us disappear, and make us afraid, and make us obey,” she told us last week in an interview while in Washington, where she also testified before Congress.

Ms. Haitiwaji was a petroleum engineer who immigrated to France with her husband and two daughters. But one day in November 2016, she received a strange phone call from the oil company, asking her to return to Xinjiang to sign some papers for her pension. It was a trick. She thought she was returning for two weeks, but she was arrested in January 2017, detained in a jail cell with other Uyghur women and chained to a steel bed for some of the time. She was interrogated by the authorities about a photo they had obtained of her daughter Gulhumar at a protest on behalf of the Uyghurs in Paris. “Your daughter is a terrorist,” they insisted. She denied that; meanwhile, her family in Paris was in the dark, and sick with worry.

She was then transferred to Baijiantan, a camp on the outskirts of the city of Karamay in Xinjiang’s north. The daily routine was unrelenting: Women were forced to memorize and sing party songs and praise Chinese President Xi Jinping. “So this was brainwashing,” she wrote, “whole days spent repeating the same idiotic phrases.” She calculated there were about 200 women in the facility, “trembling old women and teenage girls on the brink of tears. We weren’t terrorists!” They slept on hay mattresses and lived under the constant watch of guards and video cameras. When one closed her eyes from exhaustion, a guard accused her of praying, and dragged her violently from the room. Ms. Haitiwaji did pray, at night, when no one could see her. She recalled saying to herself, “I am innocent, I am innocent, I am innocent.”

Follow Editorial Board's opinionsFollow

But along with the other women, she was constantly accused of being a criminal and pressured to confess in hopes of getting a pardon. “We buckled beneath the weight of this incessant refrain from teachers and warders,” she recalled. “The relentless clockwork of brainwashing finally penetrated even the boldest and most impervious among us.”

In October 2018, she was transferred to a larger camp, one that held more than 500 women. She was put on trial without a lawyer — an obvious sham during which the judge again held up the photo of her daughter at the protest. She was sentenced to seven years of “reeducation.”

Eventually, Ms. Haitiwaji gave a coerced confession before a video camera — “not a word of it was true. It was all lies.” In the video, she denounced Uyghur activists abroad. “Afterward I wept, alone in a cell . . . wracked with guilt.” The method of the camps, she wrote, is “not to kill us in cold blood, but to make us slowly disappear. So slowly that no one would notice. We were ordered to deny who we were. To spit on our own traditions, our beliefs. To criticize our language. To insult our own people. I was made to believe that we, the Haitiwajis, were terrorists.”

Her daughter had begun raising alarms about her fate in France, openly condemning the camps on television. Nearly broken, Ms. Haitiwaji decided to make a deal: She would telephone her family in France and persuade them to drop all Uyghur activism in exchange for her freedom. When she made the calls, the Chinese police scribbled furiously at her side, providing the script. A judge swiftly declared her innocent, and she flew back to France in August 2019.

Her saga reveals not only the harsh repression of the Uyghurs in China but also how China reaches beyond its borders to punish those who disagree with the party-state and its leaders. Freedom House has been tracking this use of transnational repression. Last year, it recorded 79 incidents committed by 20 governments. The most prolific perpetrator continues to be China, the origin country for 30 percent of all recorded incidents of physical transnational repression.

In 2019 and 2020, China closed many smaller reeducation camps and moved detainees into forced labor or incarcerated them with long prison sentences after bogus trials. Both the prisons and high-security facilities were expanded. Other aspects of the cultural genocide of the Uyghurs continue, including separation of parents and children, harsh policies to reduce further the Uyghur birthrate, and widespread political indoctrination and brainwashing.

The Washington Post · by Editorial Board · April 9, 2023

6. What we know about the classified document leak revealing U.S. spy secrets

What we know about the classified document leak revealing U.S. spy secrets

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/what-we-know-about-the-classified-document-leak-revealing-u-s-spy-secrets

Apr 9, 2023 5:45 PM EDT

Transcript

Audio

More details are emerging about an apparent leak of U.S. intelligence documents onto social media. With a Justice Department investigation underway, The Washington Post is reporting that these files, many seemingly from the Pentagon, provide details about the war in Ukraine and how the U.S. allegedly spies on allies and foes. Washington Post reporter Dan Lamothe joins William Brangham to discuss.

Read the Full Transcript

William Brangham:
Good evening, I'm William Brangham. John Yang is away. More details are emerging about how an apparent trove of intelligence documents leaked onto social media sites over the last few months. With the Justice Department investigation already underway, the Washington Post is reporting that these files many seemingly from the Pentagon and highly classified provide details about the war in Ukraine, and how the U.S. allegedly spies on its allies and its foes. It includes details about the near downing of a British spy plane by Russia, near Ukraine last year.
For the latest on this, we are joined now by Dan Lamothe. He covers the Pentagon and the U.S. military for The Washington Post and has been reporting the story. Dan, thanks so much for being here.
Before we get into the content of what these documents say, is there any question as to whether or not these are legitimate intelligence and military documents?
Dan Lamothe, The Washington Post:
There's no question that there are some legitimate military and intelligence documents that have been posted online. The problem has become as we toured through these, some of these, as they have kind of proliferated across the internet have been doctored. So you're sort of trying to sort through what's a real document? What's a real document that's been altered? And whether there might be any fakes in here outright?
William Brangham:
So I touched briefly on some of the things that they reveal, but how would you sort of describe what is the bulk of what's in these documents?
DAN LAMOTHE:
The majority of the documents that I have seen appear to be from probably the same packet of information, many of them are stamped with joint staff. So this would be the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. One of the reasons these documents do spread is because there's a lot of helpful information for staying up to date on current operations. That's OK, so long as it stays within the world of people who has have the clearance to see them.
William Brangham:
As I mentioned, there's details in here about how the Ukrainian military is holding up against the Russian invasion, how the Russians themselves are doing. But there are also details in there about how the U.S. spies on some of its allies and its foes. In particular, what do they reveal in that regard?
Dan Lamothe:
Yes, I mean, there's a number of troubling things in terms of it being out in the open and then even as he sort through how to report this, there's the — there's at least a discussion to be have when do you actually put this into a newspaper or a television broadcast, but we've reached a point where these things have proliferated through Telegram, Twitter, Discord is where the documents seem to have been first uploaded.
So, and then they've also been online for weeks. So they have spread a great deal. So then you — at some point, you need to have an honest conversation out in the open about what these things are, and what kind of problem it presents to having there.
In this case, the you know, the topics range from Iran to North Korea, Hungary, a number of different countries, it references satellite programs, it references signals intelligence. So basically radio in their intercepts, in many ways, things that you don't necessarily want the sources and methods in terms of how this information has been gathered out in the open.
William Brangham:
Can you give us a sense from talking to all of your sources, how big a deal they see this as, I mean, we've had leaks in the past, or WikiLeaks and the Pentagon papers in the Afghan papers. Some of those were retrospective looks, but this is about ongoing current conflicts and crises all over the world, how troubled are administration and military officials about these leaks.
Dan Lamothe:
And to my knowledge, at least, I don't think it's in the same bucket as a WikiLeaks leak or the Edward Snowden or something like that. But it is nonetheless troubling to have some of the stuff in the open, particularly open assessments of Ukraine's combat capabilities, gaps in their capabilities.
You know, and the idea that these have been out and available for weeks, and in some cases, doctored, the doctoring often favorite Russian points of view. So you start wondering, who has viewed them, how they may have shaped their operations around it? And you know, there's a number of troubling consequences that could go with that.
William Brangham:
As I mentioned, the Department of Justice is investigating this leak, what do we know about who might have stolen these and leak them out?
Dan Lamothe:
Very little in terms of the initial source at this point. I mean, the assumption would be the initial source would have had the clearance. But there's also the possibility that the initial source was negligent with the documents as opposed to deliberately putting them online. And they somehow ended up in somebody else's hands.
You know, in terms of the way this might look, anything that's printed out, and the documents that have been uploaded, at least the ones I've seen are basically photographs of printed pages. So, you know, the assumption would be that the U.S. government's that can then go back and look to try and figure out who had printed copies, who may have printed it out that maybe shouldn't have, and kind of tried to backtrack, who would the universe people is that have these printed copies in their hands back in February and March.
William Brangham:
You touched on this a little bit before. But what is the possibility? How concerned are your sources that that the leak of these documents could hurt U.S. interest in the sense that we either are revealing how we gather intelligence or it gives other adversaries the opportunity then to combat that surveillance?
Dan Lamothe:
In terms of the specifics, they've been very careful about talking to — talking about that, and the steps they might take other than acknowledging that they are trying to take a step — take steps to kind of combat that and deal with that.
The other thing is they're going to have to probably have hard conversations with allies and partners. You know, when you're referencing the spine you do on a longtime ally, or, you know, basically there's some acknowledgement here that we're very tracking, closely tracking both Russia and Ukraine, both in terms of what they're doing, but also what they're saying and how they're thinking to the extent we can, you know, like, those are difficult conversations to have with somebody even if you're partnered.
William Brangham:
Dan Lamothe of the Washington Post. Thank you so much for being here.
Dan Lamothe:
Thank you.

7. Philippines won’t allow US to use bases for ‘offensive actions’

I was going to interpret this as meaning yes, no "offensive operations" (e.g., launching missiles, etc) but that it should not preclude logistical support to all operations.

But this statement from the president seems to negate my assessment:

China’s foreign ministry last week said the US strengthening military deployment in the Philippines would only lead to more tension in the region after Manila allowed Washington access to more of its bases.

“China’s reaction was not surprising,” Marcos told reporters on Monday.

“We will not allow our bases to be used for any offensive actions. This is only aimed at helping the Philippines whenever we need help,” Marcos added.

“If no one is attacking us, they need not worry because we will not fight them.”

Philippines won’t allow US to use bases for ‘offensive actions’

President Ferdinand Marcos Jr says military bases accessible to the US would not be used in any ‘offensive action’.

Al Jazeera English

Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr assured China that military bases accessible to the United States would not be used in any offensive action, stressing the arrangement with Washington was designed to boost his country’s defences.

China’s foreign ministry last week said the US strengthening military deployment in the Philippines would only lead to more tension in the region after Manila allowed Washington access to more of its bases.

“China’s reaction was not surprising,” Marcos told reporters on Monday.

“We will not allow our bases to be used for any offensive actions. This is only aimed at helping the Philippines whenever we need help,” Marcos added.

“If no one is attacking us, they need not worry because we will not fight them.”

The Philippines identified last week four more of its bases the US will get access to, almost doubling the number included in its Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA).

The locations of the bases are significant, with three facing north towards Taiwan and one near the disputed Spratly Islands in the South China Sea, where China has built artificial islands equipped with runways and missile systems.

EDCA underlines the strategic importance of the Philippines to the former colonial ruler, the US, coming at a time of growing concern over China’s conduct in the South China Sea and tension over self-ruled Taiwan.

Signed in 2014, it allows the US access to Philippine bases for joint training, pre-positioning of equipment and building of facilities such as runways, fuel storage and military housing, but it is not a permanent presence.

The comments from Marcos came on the heels of China’s third day of war games around Taiwan concluded on Monday, where it simulated “sealing off” the self-ruled island.

China launched the military exercises in response to Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen last week meeting US House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, an encounter it had warned would provoke a furious response.

Marcos’s remarks also come in the run-up to the largest-ever joint military exercises between the Philippines and the US, which will feature for the first time live-fire exercises at sea.

Al Jazeera English

8. Why do we think Putin won’t use ‘the bomb’?

Conclusion:

Putin sees the current war as existential, and epic in its scope. He has declared that Russia is fighting the entire West, with its nuclear states. His people have listened to his arguments and largely support him. And his military is ready and positioned to use nuclear weapons. What evidence do people have that makes them assign low odds to Putin’s using a nuclear weapon?

Why do we think Putin won’t use ‘the bomb’?

BY KEVIN RYAN, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR - 04/10/23 10:00 AM ET

The Hill · by Brad Dress · April 10, 2023

Recently, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Colin Kahl told Congress that the odds Russia would use nuclear weapons are low: “I don’t think they’re likely to do so.” The Washington-based Institute for the Study of War reported in March that “Russian invocations of nuclear threats … do not represent any material Russian intent to employ nuclear weapons.”

Why do we think Vladimir Putin will not use “the bomb” when there is so much evidence that he will?

Russia’s war in Ukraine has created many strategic risks, none more important to America than the possibility of a nuclear weapon. Western leaders wonder what “red lines” Putin might be watching and how to avoid crossing them while supporting Ukraine. But Putin is not waiting for a misstep by the West. He has been building the conditions for nuclear use since early in the war and is ready to use a nuclear weapon whenever he decides. He has done all this in the open, so there can be no doubt that he is serious about the nuclear threat.

In the first three months of 2023, Putin has taken several public steps to make his nuclear threats real. In February, he signed a law “suspending” Russia’s participation in the strategic nuclear arms treaty, START. In March, Putin announced he will “place tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus,” where nuclear capable Iskander missile systems are already deployed. These steps come as Putin and his inner circle continue their threats to use nuclear weapons.

When asked the odds that Putin might use a nuclear weapon in the current struggle, we opine “not likely” or “less than 50 percent.” Similar assessments were wrong about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year. We can’t afford to be wrong about nuclear weapons now.

So far, the threat of a nuclear strike has not been enough to convince the West to withdraw support of Ukraine, limit NATO, or end the so-called meddling in Russia’s near abroad — all demands by Putin. From Putin’s perch, continuing to threaten a nuclear attack without doing it carries perhaps as much risk as doing it.

Besides warning the West many times that he might use a nuclear weapon, Putin and his leadership have, step by step, prepared the Russian people with reasons why he should.

Putin has referenced American nuclear strikes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki several times and equated American goals — to save soldiers’ lives and shorten the war — to Russian goals today.

Official Russian documents spell out when Russia might use nuclear weapons — the so-called “red lines.” Reasons include “aggression with conventional weapons against the Russian Federation, when the very existence of the state is threatened”; or “attacks … against critical governmental or military sites of the Russian Federation, disruption of which would undermine nuclear forces response actions.” Putin has made clear to the Russian people that these lines have been crossed.

Putin has claimed repeatedly that the very survival of Russia is at stake in the war — a clear red line. He has asserted that Crimea and other Ukrainian lands are Russian territory, even going through the ruse of sham annexations. From the Russian perspective, fighting there is on Russian territory (another red line). Russian media have reported strikes by Ukrainian drones deep into Russian territory, including some that hit Russian strategic nuclear bombers — more red lines. All these claims, real and fabricated, establish the pretext for Putin to use nuclear weapons.

Some observers claim we have not yet seen tangible signs of intent to use nuclear weapons. But there are tangible signs.

Last fall, Kyiv officials reported that Russia was firing “nuclear-capable Kh-55 cruise missiles” without their nuclear warheads as part of mass rocket and missile attacks on Ukraine. Some observers suggested they were launched to “decoy” air defenses, a claim that makes little sense. Missiles are valuable to shorthanded Russia. But launching the Cold War-era missiles to ensure their readiness for use in a nuclear strike would be a good reason for what we saw.

FDA needs to protect vulnerable newborns from aluminum toxicity North Carolina’s Medicaid expansion comes with inconvenient truths

Another sign of Russia’s increasing readiness to use nuclear weapons is the recent change in leadership of the war. In January, Putin appointed Chief of the General Staff, Valery Gerasimov, as head of the military operation in Ukraine. Putin also appointed the head of Russia’s ground forces and the head of Russia’s aerospace forces as Gerasimov’s main deputies. Not since the Second World War has the chief of the general staff commanded a military operation for Russia. This underscores Putin’s assertion that Russia is fighting for its survival. But even more worrisome, under Russian doctrine, Gerasimov and his two deputies control all tactical nuclear weapons in ground operations. The three senior-most officers with authority to employ tactical nuclear weapons are now in charge of the war.

Putin sees the current war as existential, and epic in its scope. He has declared that Russia is fighting the entire West, with its nuclear states. His people have listened to his arguments and largely support him. And his military is ready and positioned to use nuclear weapons. What evidence do people have that makes them assign low odds to Putin’s using a nuclear weapon?

Retired Brig. Gen. Kevin Ryan is a senior fellow at Harvard University’s Kennedy School Belfer Center. He served as U.S. defense attaché to Moscow and deputy director for strategy, plans and policy on the Army staff.

The Hill · by Brad Dress · April 10, 2023

9. The Pentagon’s Purported Classified-Document Leak: The Biggest Takeaways and Questions So Far

The Pentagon’s Purported Classified-Document Leak: The Biggest Takeaways and Questions So Far

The U.S. military is coping with the fallout after dozens of secret intelligence documents were posted online

https://www.wsj.com/articles/pentagon-leak-classified-intelligence-documents-takeaways-6dd576b8?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=1

By Nancy A. YoussefFollow

April 11, 2023 5:30 am ET

The U.S. is seeking to assess the damage from an intelligence breach that could be one of the most significant leaks of highly classified U.S. documents in recent history after U.S. officials discovered images of such purported documents circulating online in early April.

The Wall Street Journal wasn’t able to independently authenticate the documents, but they contain enough detail to give them credibility. Defense officials have said they believe some of the documents could be authentic, though some also appear to have been altered.

The unauthorized disclosures appear to provide details about the war in Ukraine, intercepted communications about U.S. allies such as Israel and South Korea, and details of American penetration of Russian military plans, among other topics. Officials have said the leak is likely to have an impact on U.S. national security worldwide. Here’s our guide to the leak:

What classified documents were leaked?

At least 50 documents with Secret and Top Secret classification markings have surfaced so far, and have been viewed by the Journal and a variety of independent intelligence analysts.

A Pentagon spokeswoman has said the department was reviewing and assessing the validity of the photographed documents “that appear to contain sensitive and highly classified material.” She said the U.S. had discussed the matter with allies over the weekend and was weighing the potential national-security impact of the breach.

The leaked documents are photographs of presentations and files that had been printed out on A4 size paper. Some appear to have been folded once and others at least twice.

The documents appear to originate from within the U.S. military and intelligence agencies and include details about the strength of Ukrainian forces, air defenses and military equipment and classified information about arms and support the U.S. has provided to Kyiv in its fight against Russia.

The leaked files also included purported copies of the daily intelligence report provided to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley, Central Intelligence Agency reports on leaders of Israel’s Mossad spy service, and intelligence on discussions within the government of South Korea on sales of artillery ammunition to Kyiv.

The most damaging files, security analysts say, appear to be the roundups of vetted intelligence material compiled in the CIA Operations Center Intelligence Update. They potentially include information on conversations that the U.S. had intercepted within allied governments, such as communications of the leaders of Israel’s Mossad intelligence service and discussions among members of South Korea’s national-security council on whether to sell ammunition that could end up in Ukraine. Even more sensitive is the information that appears derived from the U.S. penetration of the Russian government, such as plans by Russian military intelligence to foment an anti-Western and anti-Ukrainian campaign in Africa.

The leaked files also included purported copies of the daily intelligence report provided to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin.

PHOTO: JOSE LUIS MAGANA/ASSOCIATED PRESS

When and where were they posted?

Sometime in January, an anonymous member of a group numbering just over a dozen began to post the files on the Discord messaging platform. The documents, which appear to have numbered in the hundreds, stayed among the members of the tiny group on Discord until early March, when another user reposted several dozen of them to another group with a larger audience. From there, at least 10 files migrated to a much bigger community focused on the Minecraft computer game.

On April 5, with the U.S. government apparently still unaware, a Russian propaganda account on the Telegram social-media platform posted a crudely doctored version of one of the documents, alongside a few unedited ones.

Discord is cooperating with law enforcement on the leak investigation, a Discord spokesman said.

What does this mean for the war in Ukraine?

While some of the documents are roughly two months old, their disclosure could affect the conduct of the war in Ukraine because they purport to spell out potential battlefield vulnerabilities and the composition of parts of Ukraine’s forces, U.S. officials said.

The alarming assessments in the leaked presentations, if true, shed new light on the urgency with which Kyiv has been lobbying the U.S. and North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies to speed up deliveries of Western-made air-defense systems and to provide Ukraine with Western-made jet fighters, such as F-16s. According to the purported Pentagon presentations, Russia could achieve its goal of air superiority in Ukrainian skies as early as May because Ukraine is running out of antiaircraft missiles. According to a slide dated Feb. 28, Ukraine will have completely depleted its stock of Buk missiles by April 13, and of S-300 missiles by May 3, at current consumption rates. By then, according to a map in another purported Pentagon presentation from Feb. 28, most of Ukraine’s critical national infrastructure outside the Kyiv region and two other areas in southwestern Ukraine will no longer have air-defense cover. The number of unprotected critical sites will soar from six to more than 40, it said.

A likely consequence of the looming air-defense crisis, according to one of the documents, is that Ukraine will lose its ability to mass ground forces near the front lines and to conduct a counteroffensive.

What are U.S. allies saying?

Some U.S. security partners are playing down the impact of the breach on operations covered in the documents. Still, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky reacted to the leak by ordering new measures to clamp down on unauthorized disclosures of military information.

Andriy Chernyak, a spokesman for Ukrainian military intelligence, described the leaked documents as an “operation by Russia’s special services,” but some experts who have studied the documents are doubtful the breach is part of a Russian disinformation campaign.

An official from South Korea’s presidential office said Monday that South Korea’s first priority was to establish the facts, noting that the reports of the intelligence leak hadn’t been confirmed.

Ukrainian service members near the front-line city of Bakhmut.

PHOTO: OLEKSANDR KLYMENKO/REUTERS

How is this different from other intelligence leaks?

This latest suspected leak contains far fewer documents than several previous leaks. But it could have near-term implications because it happened while Ukraine is engaged in major military operations against Russia.

Why is this such a big deal?

U.S. national-security entities have taken steps to prevent a repeat of a 2013 breach, when then National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden left the country with a large number of classified documents, and provided them to journalists. But the latest disclosure shows that a decade after Mr. Snowden leaked a giant cache of top-secret documents about surveillance and other intelligence activities, the U.S. government is still unable to protect against such breaches.

The disclosure not only complicates Ukraine’s spring offensive, it will likely inhibit the readiness of foreign allies to share sensitive information with the U.S. government. And it potentially exposes America’s intelligence sources within Russia and other hostile nations.

Does the Pentagon know who leaked the documents?

The U.S. is considering a range of possibilities over how the breach occurred, including that someone with top-secret security clearance leaked the information or that U.S. intelligence systems were hacked, U.S. officials said April 8.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Justice Department launched a probe into the leak on April 7 at the request of the Defense Department. Such probes usually begin by determining who had access to the documents, current and former officials said, which in this case could be difficult. Potentially hundreds of government employees have security clearances that would give them the ability to view the documents.

Because the documents appear to be images of printed presentation slides, the investigation will likely focus on that possible method of transferring them from a classified system. Classified documents can only be printed on approved systems, which can be tracked.

This explanatory article may be periodically updated.

Write to Nancy A. Youssef at nancy.youssef@wsj.com

10. The ongoing scandal over leaked US intel documents, explained

It is interesting to compare all the "expliners" coming from different media outlets.

The ongoing scandal over leaked US intel documents, explained

What you need to know about those top-secret files that got posted on Discord.

By Jonathan Guyer @mideastXmidwest jonathan.guyer@vox.com Apr 10, 2023, 7:10pm EDT

Vox · by Jonathan Guyer · April 10, 2023

Wolfram Steinberg/picture alliance via Getty Images

Jonathan Guyer covers foreign policy, national security, and global affairs for Vox. From 2019 to 2021, he worked at the American Prospect, where as managing editor he reported on Biden’s and Trump's foreign policy teams.

On Friday, news organizations realized something quite remarkable: A trove of 100 secret US military and intelligence documents had been posted in the far-flung corners of the internet.

The files reveal closely held information about US operations, like a suggestion there are up to 100 NATO special operations officials in Ukraine, and details about casualty counts for both Russia and Ukraine. They indicate that the US has infiltrated Russian intelligence groups and has inside knowledge of hacking attempts on a Canadian pipeline. And they show in some detail what the US has gleaned from spying on partners such as Israel and South Korea.

And most bizarrely, the documents surfaced more than a month earlier on anonymous, decentralized web forums dedicated to gaming, like a Discord channel devoted to Minecraft and after that on 4chan.

The classified files emerged as recently photographed folded documents that may have appeared as daily briefings for the military’s top leaders. If they are authentic, the documents represent a major intelligence breach and offer insights into the US role in defending Ukraine from Russia’s invasion and other major geopolitical arenas.

For now, the documents’ ambiguous provenance, the somewhat surprising platform on which they were first posted, the signs that at least several were doctored, and the inability to independently verify them means it’s difficult to draw sweeping conclusions. The motive for the documents’ publication is obscured by the jokey online exchanges in which they were shared.

But the US government seems to be treating the documents as legitimate. The Justice Department opened an investigation into the leaks, the Defense Department and several other government agencies are together assessing any impact on national security, and Pentagon leaders are angry and scrambling to undo the damage.

Gavin Wilde, a Carnegie Endowment expert who previously worked in the White House and at the National Security Agency, says the documents expose the contradiction between the incredible intelligence-gathering capacity of US agencies and their apparent sloppiness in handling sensitive information. “It’s just the latest indication that the intelligence bureaucracy is both remarkably adept and remarkably inept in this new misinformation environment,” he told me. “The way we think about counterintelligence clearly needs to be more coherent.”

“That’s a paradox to me,” Wilde continued, “that on one hand, these documents appear to show an intelligence community that excels at what it’s charged with doing, while being kind of catastrophically inept at another aspect of what it’s supposed to do. ... It really vexes me that it took over a month for them to gain popular notice.”

What the leaks reveal

The documents, according to several former officials I spoke with, seem to be photographed from a briefing book for a high-level US military leader and perhaps shared with allies. The number of individuals who might have access to such documents, these sources speculated, might number into the hundreds or even low thousands. What was most noteworthy is the scope of the information, which includes a variety of maps that show Ukrainian and Russian positions and in-depth intelligence reports.

“The documents appear — and I want to emphasize appear — to potentially reveal sources and methods,” says Glenn Gerstell, who served as general counsel of the National Security Agency from 2015 to 2020 and now works as an adviser to the consulting firm Beacon Global Strategies.

This may compromise the US’s ability, for example, to spy on Russia.

The breadth and depth of the documents are also important. The documents are current — dated in late February or early March of this year — and cover a wide range of topics, beyond just Ukraine. While 100 documents is a lot, it’s not near the scale of the leaks published by Chelsea Manning or Edward Snowden. Asked if the leak was contained or whether more files were out there, White House spokesperson John Kirby said, “We don’t know. We truly don’t.”

Among other surprising findings, the documents reveal the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad supported protests against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as he pushed for a major judicial overhaul in the country. The Washington Post cites a document that says Mossad leaders “advocated for Mossad officials and Israeli citizens to protest the new Israeli Government’s proposed judicial reforms, including several explicit calls to action that decried the Israeli Government, according to signals intelligence.” Israel has not provided weapons to Ukraine, and a document from February 2023 shows “scenarios that could drive Jerusalem to provide lethal aid” to Ukraine.

The leaked files offer new details about personnel losses in the Russia-Ukraine war, which both sides of the conflict have tried to keep secret. The New York Times says, “One document reports the Russians have suffered 189,500 to 223,000 casualties, including up to 43,000 killed in action,” while another notes that “as of February, Ukraine had suffered 124,500 to 131,000 casualties, with up to 17,500 killed in action.” Pro-Russia accounts on the social media platform Telegram doctored some of those casualty numbers before recirculating the documents.

Several maps show detailed troop movements, the state of Ukrainian and Russian weaponry, and even the “Mud-Frozen Ground Timeline,” by month, which could be helpful in assessing the path of tanks on the battlefield. Some of that information may already be outdated, but given the dates printed on the files, it may give Russia and other US adversaries the ability to reverse-engineer the sources of US intelligence.

“This has the real potential for actually genuinely hurting national security,” says Gerstell. “In prior leaks, people said that, but what they really meant was it was politically embarrassing or awkward or hurt our relationships with allies. And this is a little different.”

Why did these documents get leaked, and what happens now?

It’s not at all clear who the source of the leak might be — a disgruntled US civilian or uniformed official? Someone simply trying to win an argument online? The timing might imply someone who is trying to shape the US and NATO response to an imminent Ukrainian counteroffensive. But that could be meant to box in the Western response to push for unmitigated support, or to embarrass the US, or to show the depth of US assistance to Ukraine on the ground.

Whatever the content of the files, the leak itself is likely to be favorable to Russian President Vladimir Putin in at least two regards: netting a propaganda win and showing valuable insights into how US agencies work.

Though some analysts have argued that its origin is Russian intelligence, it’s not clear why they would want to blow up such a goldmine of a source and publicize inside information. And the hastiness of the files being posted on seemingly arbitrary forums suggests it’s not an influence operation or malevolent intelligence agency. “I cannot comment on this in any way. You and I know that there is in fact a tendency to always blame everything on Russia,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said.

The Biden administration will now be racing to ensure that the leak is plugged. That may result in a major tightening of access, and probably in some cases a blanket shutdown of certain intelligence sharing, perhaps to the detriment of US policymaking as different channels get more siloed. “It will definitely kick off another cycle of caution, where everybody kind of starts to lock things down and start to reassess how much they’re comfortable sharing with each other,” Wilde told me.

In a statement, Discord said that they were cooperating with the investigation and could not provide any additional details.

“This is information that has no business in the public domain,” Kirby told reporters from the White House lectern. “It has no business, if you don’t mind me saying, on the front pages of newspapers or on television. It is not intended for public consumption, and it should not be out there.”

But now that it is out there, it reveals the very human aspects of the high-tech wars the US is engaged in. For all of the advanced weaponry the US is giving Ukraine, this is a war between humans, and when you have a lot of humans with access to highly secret information, there is always the potential for a breach. People make mistakes, and they apparently love to show off their access in posts on platforms like Discord.

Vox · by Jonathan Guyer · April 10, 2023

11. Biden Administration Weighs Possible Rules for AI Tools Like ChatGPT

I hope we can get this right.

Biden Administration Weighs Possible Rules for AI Tools Like ChatGPT

Fears grow over the potential use of artificial intelligence to commit crimes and spread falsehoods

https://www.wsj.com/articles/biden-administration-weighs-possible-rules-for-ai-tools-like-chatgpt-46f8257b?mod=lead_feature_below_a_pos1

By Ryan TracyFollow

April 11, 2023 12:01 am ET

WASHINGTON—The Biden administration has begun examining whether checks need to be placed on artificial-intelligence tools such as ChatGPT, amid growing concerns that the technology could be used to discriminate or spread harmful information.

In a first step toward potential regulation, the Commerce Department on Tuesday put out a formal public request for comment on what it called accountability measures, including whether potentially risky new AI models should go through a certification process before they are released.

The administration’s action comes amid a boom in the use of artificial-intelligence tools that can quickly generate humanlike writing, images, videos and more. ChatGPT, the chatbot from Microsoft Corp.-backed MSFT -0.76%decrease; red down pointing triangle startup OpenAI, has been estimated by some analysts to have reached 100 million users faster than any consumer app in history.

“It is amazing to see what these tools can do even in their relative infancy,” said Alan Davidson, who leads the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, the Commerce Department agency that put out the request for comment. “We know that we need to put some guardrails in place to make sure that they are being used responsibly.”

The comments, which will be accepted over the next 60 days, will be used to help formulate advice to U.S. policy makers about how to approach AI, Mr. Davidson said. He added that his agency’s legal mandate involves advising the president on tech policy, rather than writing or enforcing regulations.

Industry and government officials have expressed concern about a range of potential AI harms, including use of the technology to commit crimes or spread falsehoods.

Children’s safety was top of mind for Sen. Michael Bennet (D., Colo.) when he wrote last month to several AI companies, asking about public experiments in which chatbots gave troubling advice to users posing as young people.

“There are very active conversations ongoing about the explosive good and bad that AI could do,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D., Conn.), in an interview. “This, for Congress, is the ultimate challenge—highly complex and technical, very significant stakes and tremendous urgency.”

Tech leaders including Elon Musk recently called for a six-month moratorium on the development of systems more powerful than GPT-4, the version of OpenAI’s chatbot released about a month ago. They warned that an unfolding race between OpenAI and competitors such as Alphabet Inc.’s Google was occurring without adequate management and planning about the potential risks.

President Biden discussed the topic with an advisory council of scientists at the White House last week. Asked by a reporter whether the technology is dangerous, Mr. Biden said: “It remains to be seen. It could be.”

Bing With AI: Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on Why Search Is Changed Forever

Wartime Intelligence Leaks Can Sink Allies

If Ukraine’s air defenses are now at risk, the U.S. bears some of the blame.

By The Editorial Board

Updated April 10, 2023 6:33 pm ET

https://www.wsj.com/articles/classified-document-leak-russia-ukraine-war-offensive-u-s-intelligence-dfda36c9?mod=hp_opin_pos_1

The leak of classified U.S. documents related to the Ukraine war looks like a debacle at many levels—undermining the confidence of allies in the U.S., revealing how much the U.S. knows about Russia’s military deliberations, and above all betraying the weakness of Ukrainian air defenses.

The source of the leak isn’t known, which is disconcerting on its own. The documents first appeared on social media, and the press hasn’t been able to verify their authenticity. But the obvious alarm among U.S. officials suggests that much of the leaked intelligence is accurate. The Justice Department and Pentagon began a criminal investigation last week, for what that is worth.

The leaks are especially damaging because they disclose secret U.S. judgments about the progress of the war. It’s not the same as betraying the location of troop movements, but it’s close. The disclosure of how much the U.S. knows about Russian military plans could be a death sentence for sources in Russia.

The most troubling leak is that Ukraine’s air defenses could be defeated by May, which would give Russia air superiority and a huge tactical advantage. The Kremlin hoped air dominance would help it achieve an early victory, but Ukrainian air defenses held up well against the initial assaults.

Russia chose to keep its aircraft sorties in Ukraine to a minimum to preserve its expensive air force; instead it has relied on Iranian drones and cruise missiles. This has made it harder for Russia to disrupt Ukrainian convoys and artillery deployments.

But the leaked documents assess that Ukraine is running out of missiles. If Kyiv’s air defenses collapse, Russia will have free rein to attack Ukrainian ground troops and move to capture more Ukrainian territory.

The leak hands Russia vital intelligence that will complicate Ukraine’s decisions for its long-anticipated spring offensive. It may also give new confidence to Vladimir Putin that his forces can outlast Ukrainian forces.

The U.S. in particular has been far too slow in delivering advanced air defenses to Ukraine, which has had to manage mainly with old Soviet-era defenses. President Biden waited until December to authorize the delivery of a single Patriot missile battery to Ukraine, with another coming via Germany. France and Italy are providing their version of the Patriot. But none of these systems has been deployed.

That dereliction may now have serious battlefield consequences. After the leak, the U.S. has an even greater obligation to speed up deliveries of Western air defenses and advanced fighter jets such as F-16s that can defend the skies if Russia unleashes its fighters.

Meanwhile, let’s hope the intelligence leak is a one-time episode. If the leakers have stolen more documents, and this becomes a deluge, more than Ukraine will be in trouble

WSJ Opinion: Biden Says the Afghanistan Mess Began With Trump

Why Taiwan matters to the world

A dangerous rise in tensions with Beijing is a price worth paying to protect a flourishing Asian democracy

Financial Times · by Gideon Rachman · April 10, 2023

Should the US defend Taiwan? This is not an abstract debate. Over the weekend, Beijing simulated bombing raids on the island, while its navy encircled Taiwan.

In response to the steady escalation of Chinese military pressure on the island, President Joe Biden has promised — four times — that the US would defend Taiwan from an attack by China.

For some in America, Biden’s pledges are little short of madness. Doug Bandow of the Cato Institute, a think-tank, complains that “most [American] policymakers are prepared to risk national suicide to protect Taiwan”. Why should war-weary America threaten to fight China, another nuclear-armed power, to defend an island of 24mn people that lies roughly 100 miles off the Chinese coast?

Scepticism about defending Taiwan is even more pronounced in parts of Europe. Flying back from a visit to China last week, President Emmanuel Macron implied that France would not lift a finger to protect the island. Discussing Taiwan, he told Politico that the “great risk” for Europe is getting “caught up in crises that are not ours”.

In reality, few expect European militaries to get directly involved in a conflict over Taiwan. But the attitudes of European politicians such as Macron matter, since they will affect Chinese calculations of the economic and diplomatic costs of any attack.

It would certainly make life easier for Europeans and American leaders if they had no reason to worry about the fate of Taiwan. But the reality is that a forcible Chinese annexation of the island would have profound global consequences that would quickly be felt in Paris, as well as Peoria.

There are three main arguments for sticking up for Taiwan. The first is about the future of political freedom in the world. The second is about the global balance of power. The third is about the world economy. Together they amount to a compelling case to keep Taiwan out of Beijing’s clutches.

The Chinese Communist party argues that one-party rule is the perfect system for China. The US, it insists, should stop trying to promote liberal, democratic values — which are not working well in the west and which would spell disaster for a communitarian culture such as China’s. But Taiwan, a thriving and prosperous society, is living proof that Chinese culture is completely compatible with democracy. Its existence keeps alive an alternative vision for how China itself might one day be run.

Beijing has already crushed aspirations for democracy in Hong Kong. If Xi Jinping were allowed to do the same in Taiwan, autocracy would be entrenched across the Chinese-speaking world. Because China is the emerging superpower of the 21st century, that would have bleak political implications for the world. Those who are cynical about US democracy promotion might enjoy China’s autocracy protection even less.

The idea that mainland China will one day embrace political freedom remains a distant prospect. But the Indo-Pacific region as a whole has several thriving democracies including Japan, South Korea and Australia. They all depend to some extent on a security guarantee from the US.

If China crushed Taiwan’s autonomy, either by invading or by strongarming the island into an unwilling political union, then US power in the region would suffer a huge blow. Faced with a prospect of a new hegemonic power in the Indo-Pacific, the region’s countries would respond. Most would choose to accommodate Beijing by changing their foreign and domestic policies. The desire to avoid giving offence to the prickly new hegemon would quickly restrict freedom of speech and action for China’s neighbours.

The implications of Chinese dominance of the Indo-Pacific would also be global, since the region accounts for around two-thirds of the world’s population and of gross domestic product. If China dominated the region, it would be well on the way to displacing the US as the world’s most powerful nation. The idea that Europe would not be affected by that shift in global power is absurd. Now, more than ever, Europe is dependent on America’s willingness to face down Russia, China’s despotic ally.

Some might argue that abstract notions like “hegemony” matter little to ordinary people. But a quirk of Taiwan’s economic development means that control of the island would quickly have major implications for living standards all over the world.

Taiwan produces over 60 per cent of the world’s semiconductors and about 90 per cent of the most sophisticated ones. The gadgets that make modern life work, from phones to cars and industrial machinery, are run with Taiwanese chips. But the factories that produce them could be destroyed by an invasion.

If Taiwan’s chip factories survived but fell under Chinese control, the economic implications would be huge. Control of the world’s most advanced semiconductors would give Beijing a chokehold over the world economy. As the US has already discovered, replicating Taiwan’s semiconductor industry is much harder than it sounds.

All these considerations — economic, strategic, political — make a compelling case for the US and its allies to protect Taiwan. No one in their right mind wants a war between America and China. But now, as in the past, it is sometimes necessary to prepare for war — to keep the peace.

gideon.rachman@ft.com

Financial Times · by Gideon Rachman · April 10, 2023

14. US and Philippines launch biggest joint drills yet in South China Sea

"Shoulder to shoulder."

US and Philippines launch biggest joint drills yet in South China Sea

More than 17,000 troops are involved in the Balikatan drills, which follow days of military exercises around Taiwan by China

The Guardian · April 11, 2023

The United States and the Philippines have launched their largest combat exercises in decades in waters across the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait, a move that is likely to inflame Beijing.

The annual drills by the longtime treaty allies called Balikatan – Tagalog for shoulder-to-shoulder – will run up to 28 April and involve more than 17,600 military personnel. The drills will include live-fire exercises and a boat-sinking rocket assault.

It will be the latest display of American firepower in Asia, where Washington has repeatedly warned China about its increasingly aggressive actions in the disputed sea channel and against Taiwan. It comes the day after China carried out three days of military exercises near Taiwan, launched in response to President Tsai Ing-wen’s meeting with US House speaker Kevin McCarthy.

The tiny Philippine island on the frontline of the US-China battle for supremacy

The Biden administration has been strengthening an arc of alliances in the Indo-Pacific to better counter China, including in a possible confrontation over Taiwan.

That dovetails with efforts by the Philippines under President Ferdinand Marcos Jr to defend its territorial interests in the South China Sea by boosting joint military exercises with the US and allowing rotating batches of American forces to stay in more Philippine military camps under a 2014 defence pact.

About 12,200 US military personnel, 5,400 Filipino forces and 111 Australian troops are taking part in the exercises, the largest in Balikatan’s three-decade history. America’s warships, fighter jets as well as Patriot missiles, Himars rocket launchers and anti-tank Javelins, will be showcased, according to US and Philippine military officials.

“We are not provoking anybody by simply exercising,” Colonel Michael Logico, a Philippine spokesperson for Balikatan, told reporters ahead of the start of the manoeuvres.

“This is actually a form of deterrence,” Logico said. “Deterrence is when we are discouraging other parties from invading us.”

US and Filipino forces will sink a 200ft (61-metre) target vessel in Philippine territorial waters as part of the live-fire drills, Logico said, as part of a coordinated airstrike and artillery bombardment.

“We will hit it with all the weapons systems that we have, both ground, navy and air,” Logico said.

That location facing the South China Sea and across the waters from the Taiwan Strait will probably alarm China, but Philippine military officials said the manoeuvre was aimed at bolstering the country’s coastal defences and was not aimed at any country.

Washington and Beijing have been on a collision course over the long-seething territorial disputes involving China, the Philippines and four other governments, as well as Beijing’s goal of “reunification” of Taiwan, by force if necessary.

China last week warned against an intensifying US military deployment to the region. Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said in a regular news briefing in Beijing that it “would only lead to more tensions and less peace and stability in the region”.

On Monday, the US 7th Fleet deployed guided-missile destroyer USS Milius within 12 nautical miles of Mischief Reef, a Manila-claimed coral outcrop that China seized in the mid-1990s and turned into one of seven missile-protected island bases in the South China Sea’s hotly contested Spratlys archipelago. The US military has been undertaking such “freedom of navigation” operations for years to challenge China’s expansive territorial claims in the busy seaway.

“As long as some countries continue to claim and assert limits on rights that exceed their authority under international law, the United States will continue to defend the rights and freedoms of the sea guaranteed to all,” the 7th Fleet said. “No member of the international community should be intimidated or coerced into giving up their rights and freedoms.”

The Guardian · April 11, 2023

15. Egypt planned to supply thousands of rockets to Russia amid Ukraine war – report

Excerpts:

The Biden administration has been increasingly troubled by Egypt’s suppression of civil society as the country wades through an ever-intensifying economic crisis.

In September, the US said it would withhold a portion of its more than $1.3 billion annual security payment to Egypt, citing Cairo’s poor human rights record.

Egypt, for its part, has also experienced frustration with US demands placed on Cairo and has likely turned to alternative global powers like Russia in a bid to create greater leverage over the US.

Egypt planned to supply thousands of rockets to Russia amid Ukraine war – report

timesofisrael.com · by ToI Staff and AP Today, 8:13 am Edit

Egypt, a major US ally and recipient of American military and economic aid, was preparing to covertly supply Russia with thousands of rockets for its ongoing war in Ukraine, according to a leaked top-secret Pentagon document cited by the Washington Post on Monday.

A portion of the document, dated February 17, was said to describe conversations between Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi and senior Egyptian military officials on the production of some 40,000 rockets for Russia, as well as the provision of artillery rounds and gunpowder.

In it, the Egyptian leader reportedly instructed an official referenced as Salah al-Dinto to keep the plan secret “to avoid problems with the West,” to which the latter — believed to be Mohamed Salah al-Din, the minister of state for military production — said he would tell workers the rockets were for the Egyptian army.

Salah al-Din, the report said, told Sissi that supplying Russia with the weapons was “the least Egypt could do to repay Russia for unspecified help earlier,” though the details of any earlier collaboration were not mentioned.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has significantly harmed Egypt’s access to Ukrainian wheat, which the north African country relied on for 80 percent of its imports. Subsequently, Cairo has turned to Moscow for help, perhaps indicating a strengthening in relations between the two countries at a time when Russia faces significant isolation from the West.

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The intelligence leak was part of a steady drip of dozens of photographs of highly sensitive US documents that have been found on Twitter, Telegram, Discord, and other sites in recent days, though some may have circulated online for weeks, if not months, before they began to receive media attention.

A wheat field burns after Russian shelling in a few kilometres from Ukrainian-Russian border in the Kharkiv region, Ukraine, Friday, July 29, 2022. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)

The Washington Post said it obtained the referenced document from a trove of images of classified files posted on Discord in February and March.

Ahmed Abu Zeid, a spokesman for Egypt’s Foreign Ministry, was quoted in the report as saying that “Egypt’s position from the beginning is based on noninvolvement in this crisis and committing to maintain equal distance with both sides, while affirming Egypt’s support to the UN charter and international law in the UN General Assembly resolutions.”

“We continue to urge both parties to cease hostilities and reach a political solution through negotiations,” said Abu Zeid.

The apparent leak of highly sensitive US documents — many of them related to the Ukraine conflict — presents a “very serious” risk to US national security, the Pentagon said Monday.

The breach is being investigated by the Justice Department and appears to include secret information on the war in Ukraine as well as sensitive analyses of US allies.

Senator Chris Murphy (Democrat-Connecticut), a member of the Senate Foreign Relations and Appropriations committees, said that “Egypt is one of our oldest allies in the Middle East… If it’s true that Sissi is covertly building rockets for Russia that could be used in Ukraine, we need to have a serious reckoning about the state of our relationship.”

US President Joe Biden meets with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi, Saturday, July 16, 2022, in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

Sarah Margon, director of US foreign policy at the Open Society Foundations once-nominated by the Biden administration for a human rights role in the US State Department, said that if the leaked report proved accurate, the supply of rockets from Cairo to Moscow was “beyond the pale, especially for an ostensibly close US ally.”

The Biden administration has been increasingly troubled by Egypt’s suppression of civil society as the country wades through an ever-intensifying economic crisis.

In September, the US said it would withhold a portion of its more than $1.3 billion annual security payment to Egypt, citing Cairo’s poor human rights record.

Egypt, for its part, has also experienced frustration with US demands placed on Cairo and has likely turned to alternative global powers like Russia in a bid to create greater leverage over the US.

timesofisrael.com · by ToI Staff and AP Today, 8:13 am Edit

16. U.S., Chinese Aircraft Carriers Operating Near Taiwan, Chinese Carrier Shandong Launched 80 Fighter Missions in Weekend Drills

U.S., Chinese Aircraft Carriers Operating Near Taiwan, Chinese Carrier Shandong Launched 80 Fighter Missions in Weekend Drills - USNI News

news.usni.org · by Sam LaGrone, Dzirhan Mahadzir and Heather Mongilio · April 10, 2023

Chinese carrier CNS Shandong (17) operating in the Philippine Sea. JSDF Photo

Both a U.S. and a Chinese carrier strike group are operating near Taiwan as political tensions continue to simmer following a Taiwanese presidential meeting with U.S. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), USNI News has learned.

On Monday, the Nimitz Carrier Strike Group was operating in the vicinity of Taiwan in the Philippine Sea, according to the USNI News Fleet and Marine Tracker.

USS Nimitz (CVN-68) is also operating in the Philippine Sea following a series of exercises with Japanese and Koreans with Exercise Ssang 2023.

“We will not be deterred from operating safely and responsibly in the season skies of the Western Pacific consistent with international law, and in keeping with that the Nimitz carrier strike group and a Marine Amphibious Readiness Group continue to conduct routine operations in the Philippine Sea and will remain in the region,” Chris Meagher, assistant to the secretary of defense for public affairs, told reporters Monday.

The Shandong Carrier Strike Group launched 80 J-15 Flying Shark fighter missions from Friday through Sunday from People’s Liberation Army Navy carrier CNS Shandong (17), according to Japanese officials. Shandong transited the Bashi Channel Wednesday and has since been operating off of Taiwan’s east coast, USNI News previously reported.

Position of carrier Shandong on April 7th (1), April 8th (2), April 9 (3rd). JSDF Image

Two defense officials told USNI News on Monday there have been no reported unsafe interactions between U.S. and fighters from Shandong.

The Shandong CSG was part of Eastern Theatre Command’s Joint Sword drills, which began Saturday and ended on Monday. The drills launched after Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen returned from a U.S. visit which included meeting McCarthy in California. Ground, naval and air elements of all three arms of the PLA simulated carrying out strikes and a blockade of Taiwan during the drills.

As of Monday, there were 12 PLAN warships and more than 90 aircraft operating in the vicinity of Taiwan, according to officials in Taipei.

Taiwan security officials tracked at least four J-15 missions that entered Taiwan’s Air Defense Identification Zone over the weekend, a first for simulating attacks from the east of the island.

The fighters from Shandong had “carried out multiple waves of simulated strikes on important targets,” Chinese officials said in a Monday statement.

In addition to releasing the location and composition of the Shandong CSG from Friday through Sunday, the Joint Staff Office of Japan’s Ministry of Defense also said 80 fighter launches and recovery and 40 helicopter take-offs and landings were conducted by the CSG, according to a Monday statement. Japan Air Self Defense Force fighter aircraft were scrambled in response to the fighter launches. The release also stated that destroyers JS Sawagiri (DD-157) and JS Sazanami (DD-113) shadowed the PLAN CSG.

The location and composition of the Shandong CSG from the release is as follows:

Date and Time Location Composition Friday April 7

Around 8pm

390km south of Miyako Island carrier CNS Shandong (17)

destroyer CNS Jiaozuo (163)

frigate CNS Liuzhou (573)

fleet oiler CNS Chaganhu (905) Saturday April 8

Around 8pm 430km south of Miyako Island carrier Shandong

destroyer Jiaozuo

frigates CNS Xuchang (536) and

Liuzhou

fleet oiler Chaganhu Sunday April 9

Around 8pm 230km south of Miyako Island carrier Shandong

destroyer Jiaozuo

frigates Xuchang and Liuzhou

fleet oiler Chaganhu

Meanwhile, a U.S. guided-missile destroyer sailed past a Chinese artificial island in the South China Sea drawing the ire of Beijing.

USS Milius (DDG-69) conducted its second freedom of navigation operation near the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea in less than a month, further irking the Chinese Communist Party.

Milius conducted the freedom of navigation operation (FONOP) Monday morning, according to a U.S. 7th Fleet release. China, which protested Milius’s transit last month, sent maritime and air assets to monitor the destroyer, according to a Chinese statement.

China claims it has sovereignty over the Spratly Islands and the waters around them, while the United States says those waters are international and can be transited freely.

USS Milius (DDG 69) asserted navigational rights and freedoms in the South China Sea near the Spratly Islands on April 10, 2023. US Navy Photo

“This freedom of navigation operation (“FONOP”) upheld the rights, freedoms, and lawful uses of the sea,” according to the U.S. 7th Fleet statement. “USS Milius demonstrated that Mischief Reef, a low-tide elevation in it its natural state, is not entitled to a territorial sea under international law.”

During Milius’s last FONOP, it sailed near the Parcel Islands and then into the South China Sea, USNI News previously reported. China claimed it chased away the U.S. warship.

news.usni.org · by Sam LaGrone, Dzirhan Mahadzir and Heather Mongilio · April 10, 2023

17. Renewing Democracy Through Oath Education at the Air Force Academy

Conclusion:

Through the Academy Oath Project, cadets learn that as members of the military profession, they are obligated to follow norms that are part of a professional ethos. This ethos includes the bedrock principles of non-partisanship and civilian control of the military. Cadets learn that when they took the oath for the first time, through every promotion and reenlistment, and even after their retirement or separation, they are members of the military profession with responsibilities to uphold those professional norms. Kudos to the 13 cadets from the Air Force Academy classes of 2021 and 2022, now 1st and 2nd lieutenants in the U.S. Air Force for demanding that more be done to prepare them to assume their constitutional responsibilities. Their successors are continuing to make strides to build an oath culture at Air Force Academy and beyond. More support is now needed to institutionalize this effort.

Renewing Democracy Through Oath Education at the Air Force Academy - War on the Rocks

warontherocks.com · by Marybeth Ulrich · April 11, 2023

America is experiencing declining trust in democratic institutions and an erosion of the democratic norms essential to maintaining them. The U.S. military, which historically has enjoyed the status of being the most trusted national institution, has seen its trust levels decline in recent years. Some attribute this to the perceived politicization of the armed forces. Others question whether the military’s professional ethos has been compromised to the point where it has become a political actor that increasingly strays from its nonpartisan ethic. Still others point to the over-representation of veterans in the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol and conclude that the U.S. military may not be relied upon to uphold the rule of law. The status of the American military profession is declining and likely contributing to the armed-forces recruiting shortfalls. One piece of restoring public trust is to examine how we educate servicemembers in the professional norms related to military service in a democracy, starting with their oath to uphold the constitution.

Last fall, James Joyner and Butch Bracknell argued that “this oath is central to maintaining healthy civil-military relations, but it is not enough.” This doesn’t do the oath justice. The oath remains an underutilized tool that, if properly leveraged, could strengthen the democratic ethos essential to preserving the republic. Where the military profession falls short is in its lack of emphasis on educating its members on the meaning of their oaths. We believe that further education can prepare servicemembers to tackle some of the difficult challenges that Joyner and Bracknell lay out in their article.

Become a Member

At the Air Force Academy, we have worked to incorporate oath education into crafting a renewed professional ethos that would keep servicemembers focused on the norms of behavior in a military accountable to elected civilian leaders. Through these efforts, we believe that the military’s current “warrior ethos” can be complemented with an equally important “democracy ethos.” The Air Force Academy’s Oath Project is a cadet-led initiative to improve understanding of the Oath of Office among military students at academies and professional development institutions. This program provides education focused on civil-military norms and the importance of upholding the values inherent in an apolitical military. We encourage military leadership to embrace expansion of the program at other institutions and encourage Congress to support these efforts through increased funding of civil-military education programs.

Creating a Foundational Education

America’s founders gave their citizens a tool to stay focused on preserving the democratic nature of their new republic. When writing the rulebook to govern the nation, the founders set the expectation that those in government and military service to the nation had a special trust to uphold the democratic institutions they had just established in the Constitution. Article 2 of the Constitution requires the president to take an oath of office, and Article 6 requires members of Congress, the federal judiciary, and officers of state legislative, executive, and judicial branches of government to take oaths. With regard to the military, oaths were required at the time of enlistment in the Continental Army. The first act of Congress in 1789 specified the text to be used, which is almost unchanged to this day. The founders were the products of a culture where taking oaths to the monarch was common. What wasn’t common was taking an oath to uphold a document instead of swearing allegiance to a particular individual — even if that individual had been duly elected under the Constitution.

But for the oath to work, the men and women who uphold it also need to understand it. Two years ago, the few cadets at the U.S. Air Force Academy enrolled in a political science civil-military relations elective questioned the adequacy of what they learned about the oath in their pre-commissioning education. Even though they were within months of becoming commissioned as 2nd lieutenants in the U.S. Air Force, at the beginning of the course they could not articulate what it meant “to support and defend the Constitution” beyond understanding that military members must obey the lawful orders promulgated by the military and civilian authorities with command responsibility for them. These cadets expressed the need for more education to be integrated into the totality of the cadet experience to help them comprehend the professional norms required to support the constitutional principles inherent in their military oaths. Cadets solicited the help of distinguished professor Marybeth Ulrich, the instructor of their civil-military relations course visiting from the U.S. Army War College, to start a student-led program dedicated to furthering cadets’ understanding of the Oath of Office. This was the birth of the Academy Oath Project.

The experience of these original 13 cadets in their upper-level civil-military relations course informed their ideas for what should be included in a more comprehensive oath education effort available to all cadets, regardless of academic major. They took stock of what education was occurring and identified gaps. They found that the political science department at the Air Force Academy devotes five lessons to constitutional foundations and civilian control of the military in its “Introduction to American Government and National Security” course, which is a core class that all cadets take in their sophomore year. The course begins with an introduction to the framing of the Constitution and the oath through readings from George Washington’s Newburgh Address. This helps establish the constitutional origins of civilian control of the military and provides background to draw upon when analyzing contemporary political events where the roles of military members and civilian leaders is a stake. The class then continues with Samuel Huntington (excerpts from The Soldier and State), Don Snider (“Dissent, Resignation, and Moral Agency”), and David Barno and Nora Bensahel (The Increasingly Dangerous Politicization of the U.S. Military”) among a host of other readings. Cadets must write a paper that analyzes a case study to glean lessons learned pertaining to civil-military relations.

The learning objectives for these lessons center on the importance of civilian control of the armed forces for a democracy, what it means to be member of the military profession, and the need for a nonpartisan armed forces. These lessons help the cadets understand that military officers are trusted in large part because of the non-politicized nature of the service. A strong background in civil-military relations helps officers understand why military leadership is subordinate to civilian leadership when faced with following orders and making decisions in morally complex situations. Cadets must write a paper that applies the civil-military principles learned in the course to a current civil-military relations issue such as the role of military advice in the withdrawal from Afghanistan, retired flag officers’ partisan behavior, and norms surrounding the seven-year waiting period for retired generals to serve as secretary of defense.

Going Further

However, a few lessons in one course are not enough to lay the foundation needed to develop the professional ethos needed to uphold their oath at difficult decision points in their career when civil-military relations norms will be challenged. A civil-military relations education that integrates themes across the political science, history, law, and leadership core curriculum is needed. Such curriculum reform, when supported and resourced, will take years to achieve. In the meantime, the Academy Oath Project Club provides hands-on experiences for cadets to learn more about the professional norms surrounding military service in a democracy by preparing programs for other cadets and faculty that explain various principles.

For example, the original Academy Oath Project cadets assessed their military training and noted a glaring gap in the lack of any education on the oath of office in basic cadet training. As one of the graduating seniors involved in founding the club noted, “We took the oath of office on our first day at [the U.S. Air Force], but no one explained it to us.” Almost four years from the time he first took the oath, he was lobbying with his fellow cadets from Academy Oath Project to include oath education in basic cadet training. After designing the training under the direction of Professor Ulrich, the cadets enabled their fellow cadets in the direct chain of command of the basic cadets to lead the sessions. The lesson explains the history of the Oath, its link to the preservation of American democratic institutions, its central role in American military professionalism, and the expectation that as members of the profession they will maintain their commitment to the Constitution for life. Cadets meet biweekly through the club to improve programs and plan future projects. In a recent panel, cadets assessed their basic cadet training oath education program and petitioned to move the session to the beginning of the summer training so that the training cadre could discuss the themes introduced throughout basic training. Academy Oath Project cadets are currently developing a workshop to educate upperclassmen responsible for training first year cadets on civil-military relations norms. The club’s faculty and cadets are also in the beginning stages of writing an oath education handbook that could serve as a foundational text for programs and courses seeking to foster a deeper commitment to democratic norms.

In addition, the Academy Oath Project cadets have focused on creating experiential learning opportunities concerning civil-military relations in a democracy. These include planning the Academy’s Constitution Day program; updating the cadet handbook Contrails to include segments and knowledge questions on the oath, Constitution, and the Declaration of Independence; and making a video focused on the Oath of Office to support the athletic department’s National Collegiate Athletic Association civic-education requirement before election day. The hope is that cadets will take these lessons learned with them when the leave the academy and assume leadership roles within the Air Force. The Academy Oath Project Club is providing outreach education through active support of military reenlistments, promotions, and retirements by offering a few words on the importance of the oath during these ceremonies to remind service members that the focal point of military service is one’s obligation to the Constitution.

The club has also reached out to the other academies and some Reserve Officers’ Training Corps units to share their products and ideas. Earlier this year, Professor Ulrich and several cadets from the club traveled to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point to speak to all 1,000 seniors on the Oath of Office and the norms of military service in a democracy. They learned about West Point’s curriculum and visited the lesson on the oath in the core capstone “Officership” course taught out of the Simon Center for the Professional Military Ethic. The Army War College’s Civil-Military Relations Center is facilitating the cooperation between West Point and the Air Force Academy as part of its mission to promote civil-military relations education throughout the professional military education system.

While many oath-takers, civilian and military alike, understand the dos and don’ts of appropriate civil-military relations and norms of service, many do not understand the “why.” Members of the Academy Oath Project, through their participation in the program, are increasing their understanding of the meaning and significance of the oath as well as the responsibilities placed upon those who take an oath to uphold the Constitution. They are learning the nuances of civilian control by developing their own lessons, with faculty help, to explain the constitutional foundations of their professional obligations to obey civilians, while also fulfilling their professional responsibility to provide military expertise to inform political leaders’ decision-making. They researched the principle of nonpartisanship and developed a video that was shown to cadets near election day in which they explained to their peers why partisan behavior undermined support for the military profession. The goal of all these efforts it to provide a strong foundational education in civil-military relations so that if military members find themselves in politically charged situations, they will have the intellectual tools to critically assess the situation without partaking in partisan activities.

Crucial Clarity

Joyner and Bracknell argue that expecting military members to discern whether actions by a president or Congress are constitutional is beyond the scope of even the most educated of officers. We counter that a robust civil-military curriculum that extends from enlisting/commissioning through advanced military education would provide military members with the tools to critically think about the constitutionality of orders and requirements.

As Joyner and Bracknell assert, there is a great amount of ambiguity surrounding the lawfulness of following civilian orders of questionable constitutionality. Education and training will lend some clarity and inform the professional judgment essential to help military members think through their actions in politically fraught situations. Consider a handful of examples. Joyner and Bracknell discuss the tendency for military leaders to engage in political behavior to advance their services’ agendas before Congress. The Academy Oath Project’s lessons stress the importance of limiting military engagement with political actors to the provision of expert military advice. Cadets learn that public advocacy for preferred policies may limit the decision space of political leaders, effectively undermining civilian control. Joyner and Bracknell argue that senior uniformed leaders are political actors involved in the struggle over “who gets what, when, and how.” Oath Project lessons distinguish between the providing input on political matters such as resource allocation, which is within the purview of sound military advice, and providing partisan input aligned with particular ideologies. Joyner and Bracknell point out that creating military policy is a complex process involving all three branches of government. In the face of uncertainty, they note that military leaders sometimes strike out on their own, creating policy. Oath Project training cautions against this, emphasizing the importance of adhering to policy created by democratically elected officials who represent the will of the people.

The vaulted status of the American military profession stems from the public’s recognition of servicemembers’ professional expertise and years of education. A deeper understanding of the national purpose and the commitment to preserve the democratic character of the nation through their oath contributes to military effectiveness and will give U.S. military members an edge in future conflicts waged against autocracies. The Joint Staff’s Officer Professional Military Education Policy, a tool that guides the curriculum of military education institutions, should more deliberately foster the development of a democracy ethos by requiring the teaching of democratic civil-military relations norms at every level. In their article, Joyner and Bracknell call upon Congress to enact stronger laws safeguarding civil-military relations. We suggest that the military profession also has the responsibility to provide a comprehensive civil-military relations education to prepare its members for military service in a democracy. Congress, in its oversight role, can require the services to report on how they are achieving this end. Congress could also prioritize funding of these programs and support initiatives such as Academy Oath Project that provide active learning experiences for service members to internalize democratic norms.

Through the Academy Oath Project, cadets learn that as members of the military profession, they are obligated to follow norms that are part of a professional ethos. This ethos includes the bedrock principles of non-partisanship and civilian control of the military. Cadets learn that when they took the oath for the first time, through every promotion and reenlistment, and even after their retirement or separation, they are members of the military profession with responsibilities to uphold those professional norms. Kudos to the 13 cadets from the Air Force Academy classes of 2021 and 2022, now 1st and 2nd lieutenants in the U.S. Air Force for demanding that more be done to prepare them to assume their constitutional responsibilities. Their successors are continuing to make strides to build an oath culture at Air Force Academy and beyond. More support is now needed to institutionalize this effort.

Become a Member

Dr. Marybeth Ulrich is professor of government at the U.S. Army War College, a Scowcroft National Security Senior Fellow at the U.S. Air Force Academy, a Senior Fellow at the Modern War Institute, and the faculty adviser for the Academy Oath Project.

Dr. Lynne Chandler Garcia is an associate professor at the U.S. Air Force Academy and a member of the faculty advisory board for the Academy Oath Project.

Cadet Sydney Fitch is a senior at the U.S. Air Force Academy and the cadet-in-charge of the Academy Oath Project.

The views represented in this article are those of the authors and do not represent the views of the U.S. Air Force or the Department of the Defense.

Image: Ken Scar

Commentary

warontherocks.com · by Marybeth Ulrich · April 11, 2023

18. The Forgotten Reason Ukraine Is Kicking Russia's You Know What

The Forgotten Reason Ukraine Is Kicking Russia's You Know What

19fortyfive.com · by Stavros Atlamazoglou · April 10, 2023

One Word: Training. More than 13 months into the conflict in Ukraine and the Ukrainian military isn’t only still standing but is getting ready to strike back at the Russian forces.

The Ukrainian military is getting ready to launch a large-scale counteroffensive somewhere on the battlefield in the upcoming weeks.

But to do so effectively, the Ukrainian forces have had to be trained. The United States and its allies have played a key part in that training.

The U.S. Aspect of Training

The U.S. military has trained Ukrainian volunteers for years before the conflict, but the Russian invasion changed the pace and intensity of the training.

The U.S. military started training the Ukrainian military in 2014 after the Russian invasion and annexation of the Crimean Peninsula. At the same time, a low-intensity conflict began in the Donbas, where the Russian military supported pro-Russian separatists who were looking to break away from Ukraine.

The Western militaries have had to do a lot of work. To begin with, until recently, the Ukrainian military didn’t have a non-commissioned officer corps. These are the key men and women that are under the officers but above the rank and file. These are the true leaders of a military force that take the orders and vision from above and turn them into reality.

The majority of this training takes place in Grafenwoehr, Germany. But the U.S. military has been flying a number of Ukrainian troops to the United States for special training on weapons systems. Just last week, the first batch of Ukrainian troops to train on the MIM-104 Patriot air defense system finished its training at Fort Sill, in Oklahoma.

“I think our numbers stand at more than 4,000 Ukrainian soldiers making up two brigades that were trained recently. Now, one of those brigades was for the Bradleys, and one was equipped with the Strykers,” a senior defense official said recently.

In addition to the U.S., the United Kingdom has been providing important training to the Ukrainian forces.

Basic Military vs Combined Arms Training

What the UK and U.S. militaries are doing isn’t easy. On the one hand, they have to turn amateurs into professionals in a very short amount of time, while on the other hand, they have to also train the force that will win the war for Ukraine.

In addition to troops that can hold the line against the Russian assaults but might not be capable of the maneuver warfare that will defeat Russia, the West is also training Ukrainian units that will spearhead the upcoming and other future counteroffensives.

Training these units is harder as they have to be proficient in combined arms warfare, that is, the combination of several different arms, such as armor, artillery, air power, to maximize effectiveness on the ground.

The Russian military has shown great weakness in combined arms warfare. If the Ukrainians can manage to become proficient in it, they have the potential to defeat the Russian forces and liberate the rest of their country.

Expert Biography:

A 19FortyFive Defense and National Security Columnist, Stavros Atlamazoglou is a seasoned defense journalist specializing in special operations, a Hellenic Army veteran (national service with the 575th Marine Battalion and Army HQ), and a Johns Hopkins University graduate. His work has been featured in Business Insider, Sandboxx, and SOFREP.

19fortyfive.com · by Stavros Atlamazoglou · April 10, 2023

19. How the nation’s Corps of Marines has lost its way

How the nation’s Corps of Marines has lost its way

marinecorpstimes.com · by Maj. Gen. James Livingston (retired) · April 10, 2023

The United States Marine Corps is facing irreparable damage from two well intended but ill-conceived concept documents.

One already has devastated its offensive spirit and capabilities. The other is destined to erode the ethos and undermine the special identity of its Marines.

Force Design 2030 and Talent Management 2030 will change how Marines fight and how they see themselves. They will dim the pride that once characterized the Marine Corps in the eyes of the American people. They will erode confidence inside and outside the Corps that United States Marines can locate, close with and destroy the enemy today and in the future.

Marines always have seen themselves as different: America’s shock troops, with one foot on land and the other foot at sea. Marines pride themselves on being the most ready when the nation is least ready; the country’s premier 9-1-1 force, ready to deploy anywhere, anytime, fight any foe and win.

The unintended consequences of aging the Marine Corps

A young force is not only more flexible and less costly, it is best suited for the expeditionary nature of the Marine Corps, this retired Marine writes.

By Col. Warren Parker (retired)

The American people always have seen their Marines as something special – young and energetic, characterized by selfless service, raw courage and dependability.

A refrain often heard on graduation day at the recruit depots is, “I sent you a boy (or girl), you sent me back a man (or woman).”

The national security establishment has seen the nation’s Corps of Marines as ready and eager to fight; just over the horizon but always close enough to show American resolve or respond quickly to any situation, anywhere before it gets out of hand.

During a developing crisis or contingency, the question frequently asked by decision-makers is, “Where are the aircraft carriers and where are the Marines?”

They know Marines can be depended upon to fight and win if called upon.

This trilogy of converging perspectives and expectations has shaped the ethos of America’s Marines, from Tripoli to Afghanistan and on every battlefield, in every skirmish, and during every humanitarian assistance and disaster relief response in between.

Generation after generation of Americans have grown accustomed to the familiar headline, “The Marines have landed and the situation is well in hand.”

But ethos is fragile.

Unlike force structure and equipment, which can be rebuilt if lost, ethos, once extinguished, is gone forever.

Ethos is a state of mind that allows Marines to boast with pride, “The difficult we do right away, the impossible takes a little longer.”

President Ronald Reagan honored all Marines and the special place they hold in America’s conscience when he said: “Some people spend an entire lifetime wondering if they made a difference in the world. But, the Marines don’t have that problem.”

Unfortunately, future Marines will have that problem unless the course presently charted is reversed.

The Marine Corps is being significantly weakened by unwise cuts in its force structure and equipment and reductions in Navy amphibious and maritime prepositioning ships; divestments that undermine its congressionally mandated responsibilities as a combined arms force-in-readiness. And, by personnel management approaches that erode esprit, teamwork and identity.

Consider the following:

• The elimination of all armor, scout sniper platoons in infantry battalions, and bridging coupled with drastic cuts in infantry, cannon artillery, assault amphibious vehicles, aviation, military police, assault beaching and combat service support have crippled Marine Corps capabilities to respond to global crises and contingences across the spectrum of conflict.

These capabilities were sacrificed on the “divest to invest” altar for future, experimental weapons that will only duplicate what other services already have in sufficient numbers.

The Marine air-ground task force, historically the first to arrive on scene with the combat power and sustainment to persist and win “in every clime and place,” is being emasculated to self-fund an essentially one-dimensional coastal defense force.

• The gutting of the maritime prepositioning force and the dramatic reductions in amphibious ships and their readiness to deploy have significantly and adversely impacted Marine Corps forward presence and crisis response.

• The focus away from infantry, youth and shared experiences are destroying the values that make Marines different.

“Every Marine a rifleman” is at best an empty slogan, as infantry skills are devalued to make way for computer and other technical skills.

An older force is seen as preferable to a younger, more adventurous force.

To be blunt, Unites States Marines increasingly are irrelevant to the National Command Authority and to the combatant commanders. It seems the Army’s 18th Airborne Corps has replaced Marines as the nation’s premier 9-1-1 force.

The American people fail to understand why Marines train, look and talk more like the other services. Some Marines may no longer see themselves as a breed apart.

The damage is not irreversible, providing future commandants begin the process to build back essential warfighting capabilities and restore an ethos that values the infantry, an offensive spirit, and combined arms.

Marine Corps Maj. Gen. James Livingston (retired) is a career infantry officer. He was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor while serving as the commanding officer, Company E, 2nd Battalion, 4th Marines during the Battle of Dai Do in Vietnam.

Marine Corps Col. Jay Vargas (retired) is a career infantry officer. He was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor while serving as the commanding officer, Company G, 2nd Battalion, 4th Marines during the Battle of Dai Do in Vietnam.

20. Navigating the New Age of Great-Power Competition

Excerpts:

In this new phase of great-power competition, all countries are confronted with two sets of realities. First, there are few (if any) countries that do not have concerns about some aspects of both U.S. and Chinese behavior. The concerns are not the same for the United States and China, and not every country holds them with the same degree of intensity, but they exist.

Second, China and the United States are geopolitical facts that no country can ignore, and precisely because of their rivalry, dealing with both simultaneously is the necessary condition for dealing with either effectively. Without the United States, dealing with China will take place in an unbalanced environment that will certainly disadvantage any country; without China, the risk of the United States brushing aside a country’s interests or taking the relationship for granted rises considerably.

Faced with these realities, most countries are going to try to maximize their autonomy within the constraints of their specific circumstances. No country will want to align all their interests across all domains in one direction or another. They will try to align different interests in different domains in the most advantageous direction, and their choices are not necessarily going to be confined to only the two great powers, leading them to seek out coalitions and partnerships with a range of actors.

The complexity of twenty-first-century competition provides sovereign states more space to maneuver than did the binary of U.S.-Soviet competition during the Cold War. Of course, states must have the intelligence, agility, and courage to recognize the opportunities to use their agency. In rising to this challenge, they will do well to remember that even if the landscape of modern international relations looks daunting, it fundamentally represents a return to the historical norm.

Navigating the New Age of Great-Power Competition

Statecraft in the Shadow of the U.S.-Chinese Rivalry

By Bilahari Kausikan

April 11, 2023

Foreign Affairs · by Bilahari Kausikan · April 11, 2023

Russian aggression in Ukraine and competition between China and the United States have made the world more uncertain and dangerous. The Ukraine war is likely to be prolonged, and the U.S.-Chinese rivalry seems set to become the defining feature of international relations in the twenty-first century. Policymakers and analysts worry that the future will be riven with divisions, with countries separated into hostile, competitive blocs and geopolitics becoming a zero-sum game.

But as officials around the world grapple with these complex developments, it is crucial that they keep them in proper perspective. States have competed as long as there have been states. They have collaborated, too, but the harsh reality is that competition all too often turns into conflict. The last century was punctuated by periodic spasms of major interstate violence: World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, several wars between Israel and Arab states, China’s invasions of India and Vietnam, and numerous wars in the global South. During the Cold War, the risk of nuclear destruction made direct confrontation between Moscow and Washington too dangerous, but their rivalry sparked many hot conflicts in proxy wars around the world. Even the so-called unipolar moment, when the United States reigned supreme, was not free of conflict; vicious genocidal wars erupted in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, and the United States invaded Iraq and Afghanistan.

The dangers of these times are real but hardly novel. Arguably, the world is returning to its natural state. The war in Ukraine and U.S.-Chinese rivalry conform to established patterns of state behavior. The uncertainties and risks they pose—the possibility of accidents getting out of hand and nuclear escalation, among others—are what U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld termed “known unknowns.” Most countries successfully navigated previous phases of great-power competition, and many of them even grew and prospered under those harsh conditions. If they remain calm and exercise reasonable prudence, there is no reason they cannot do so again.

GET YOUR PRIORITIES STRAIGHT

Russia’s aggression against Ukraine is without question an egregious violation of the fundamental norms of international relations that cannot go unchallenged. But it is hardly exceptional. Ukraine’s suffering is striking only because it is the first war in Europe since the Balkan wars of the 1990s. Similar tragedies have been a daily reality for decades for many people in the global South. For the most part, these conflagrations—for instance, the Iran-Iraq War during the 1980s and the war between Ethiopia and Eritrea in the late 1990s—went unchallenged or were only weakly challenged by those powers, notably the United States and European countries that now fret over threats to the so-called rules-based order. The West even initiated several wars (think of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003) or backed actors in civil wars (think of Western support for anti-regime forces in Syria over the last decade), even though such behavior violated some of the most fundamental norms of international relations: the respect of sovereignty and noninterference in the internal affairs of states.

Obviously, not all violations of the rules-based order have been regarded as unacceptable or treated with equal seriousness. Race and color are seldom discussed in international relations, but it has not escaped the attention of many in the global South that in Ukraine, for the first time since the Balkan wars of the 1990s, white people are killing other white people with the support of other white people instead of white people killing nonwhite people or nonwhite people killing one another, sometimes with the support and encouragement of white people. This may not be the most important factor affecting attitudes toward the Ukraine war in the global South, but it is a factor.

Unfortunately for Ukraine, its war is a sideshow for the United States.

No country can pursue a completely consistent foreign policy. But this particular double standard also explains why support for Ukraine in many countries in the global South is tenuous, as French President Emmanuel Macron warned at the Munich Security Conference in February. The global South may never have much of a battlefield role in Ukraine. But as the war drags on, if the global South’s political and diplomatic support for Ukraine erodes, it may become harder for Western countries to keep Russia isolated.

Unfortunately for Ukraine, its war with Russia is, in truth, a sideshow for the United States. Washington has made clear that it will not get directly involved in the conflict since such an intervention might lead to a dangerous nuclear escalation. But it may also have stayed out of the fight for another reason. Russia’s invasion is certainly an existential threat to Ukraine. It is a serious threat to EU members on the eastern fringes of Europe. But it is not really a threat at all to the United States.

Ukraine is a second-order issue for the United States. The first-order issue is China. U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin has candidly said the United States wants to use Ukraine to weaken Russia so the Kremlin can never invade another country. Left unsaid, however, was the U.S. desire to make strong support for Ukraine an object lesson for Beijing. After all, the Russian invasion came only weeks after Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping met in Beijing and declared that their partnership was one with “no limits” or “forbidden areas.” Although it was certainly not planned that way, the war has made Ukraine an unwitting proxy in U.S.-Chinese rivalry, perhaps the first proxy of the current phase of great-power competition and conflict.

THE FOREST AND THE TREES

This period of great-power competition is not simply a rerun of previous epochs. One of the most intellectually lazy tropes used to describe the U.S.-Chinese rivalry is “a new Cold War.” This characterization fundamentally misrepresents the nature of the competition because it evokes a historical analogy that is only superficially plausible and, in fact, altogether inappropriate.

During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union led two separate systems that were only minimally connected at their margins. Although the prospect of mutual destruction tempered their rivalry and eventually led to détente, both countries fundamentally sought to replace the other’s system with their own. It was an existential struggle between capitalism and communism. In 1956, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev promised a group of Western ambassadors that “we will bury you.” As history played out, it was the Soviet Union that was buried, and today, China is only one of five ostensibly communist systems that survive (the others being Cuba, Laos, North Korea, and Vietnam). No one can any longer seriously hope or fear that communism will defeat capitalism.

Unlike the Cold War adversaries, today’s superpower rivals exist within a single system. Ever since Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping instituted economic reforms beginning in the late 1970s, China and the United States have been progressively and intimately enmeshed with each other and the rest of the world through supply chains of a density and complexity never before seen in history. The very metaphor of a chain understates the complexity because a chain is a simple, linear structure. A more appropriate metaphor is perhaps the root system of a tree leading to its trunk, branches, twigs, and leaves, with the global system comprising a thick forest of trees intertwined with one another across continents.

It is intellectually lazy to describe the U.S.-Chinese rivalry as “a new Cold War.”

That forest was planted and cultivated during the short post–Cold War period of unchallenged American dominance, but it has outlived that era. China and the United States are concerned about how exposed they are to each other. Both countries have tried to temper the vulnerabilities that come with this exposure. Americans and their allies have tried to enhance the resilience of key sectors by diversifying supply chains to reduce dependence on China. For its part, China has tried to become more self-reliant in key technologies and place more emphasis on domestic household consumption (as opposed to exports) to drive its economic growth.

Neither China nor the United States will succeed in these endeavors, at least not to the extent they may hope. Diversifying supply chains and achieving self-reliance are both easier said than done and will take a long time to have any significant effect. Partial bifurcation of the system has already occurred, and there will be further bifurcation, particularly in those areas of technology that have major security implications, such as semiconductors. But apocalyptic scenarios of an exceptionally complex global system dividing cleanly across all sectors into two separate systems (as existed during the Cold War) will not come to pass. The costs to the two great powers and to other countries would simply be too high. Competition between the great powers will certainly contribute to the slowing down of globalization but not its reversal.

Even the closest U.S. ally is never going to cut itself off from China politically or economically. Few if any Western companies are ever going to entirely forswear investing in the Chinese market even if they will be more cautious about transferring technology there. The total volume of U.S.-Chinese trade was more than $690 billion in 2022. This staggering sum does not suggest any significant decoupling despite all the tensions of recent years. For the foreseeable future, China has no real alternative but the West for critical technologies and access to important markets. The countries of the global South are not an adequate substitute. Russia is an albatross around China’s neck, but Beijing has no other partner anywhere in the world of Moscow’s strategic weight that shares its distrust of the West.

Like it or not, China and the United States must accept the risks and vulnerabilities of remaining connected to each other. China and the United States will compete and do so robustly, but they will compete within the single system of which they are both vital parts. The dynamics of competition within a system are fundamentally more complex than those of a binary competition between systems as existed during the Cold War.

A POLICY OF NUANCE

The geopolitics of high-end semiconductors is an illustration. All the most critical nodes in the semiconductor supply chain are held by the United States and its allies and friends, such as Japan, the Netherlands, South Korea, and Taiwan. But China consumes around 40 percent of all chips made around the world. It is hard, perhaps impossible, to completely cut off your own companies and those of your friends and allies from 40 percent of a market without doing them serious damage.

Framed by the imperatives and constraints of this complex interdependence, the current era of competition requires policies created with careful judgment rather than binary decisions. In August 2022, The Wall Street Journal reported that, up to that point, the United States had granted exemptions to most companies that applied to be excluded from U.S. bans on exports of technology to China. The CHIPS and Science Act, which Congress passed that month and which seeks to further restrict technology transfers to China, is unlikely to substantively change the need for a nuanced approach.

Most crucial, competition within a single system is not existential by definition because it is not about one system destroying or replacing another. Instead, competition within a system is about using interdependence as a tool of competition: positioning yourself to continue to benefit from interdependence and mitigating your own vulnerabilities while exploiting your rival’s vulnerabilities.

Interdependence does not erase the possibility of war. But this new kind of complex interdependence considerably raises the costs of conflict and, coupled with nuclear deterrence, reduces the probability of war wielded as an instrument of policy. The prospect of mutually assured destruction kept the peace between the United States and the Soviet Union; mutually assured destruction—now not just nuclear but also economic—will in all probability also keep the peace between the United States and China. The great risk is not war by design but an accident getting out of control, fanned by nationalist narratives into outright war. That risk is highest in a potential conflict over Taiwan.

The United States faces no existential threat anywhere in the world.

Still, that risk does not detract from the fact that the United States faces no existential threat anywhere in the world. Russia is a very dangerous adversary, but even before the Ukraine war, it was on a downward long-term trajectory for economic and demographic reasons, and Putin’s miscalculation in Ukraine has only hastened his country’s decline. Nor is terrorism, whether state sponsored or by nonstate actors, an existential threat to any well-constituted state and certainly not to the United States. China is a formidable peer competitor. Its economy is far more viable than the Soviet economy ever was and far stronger than the post-Soviet Russian economy at its peak. But it, too, should not be considered an existential threat.

Setting aside the question of whether China even has the capacity to replace the existing system with its own, it is hardly in its interest to do so. China is a—possibly the—major beneficiary of the post–Cold War global economy. Beijing may want to displace the United States from the center of the global economy, but that is a different matter from wanting to kick over the table altogether. China’s behavior in the East China and South China Seas and in the Himalayas, where its military has provocatively staked claims to territory, is certainly aggressive and revanchist in its territorial obsessions. But to call China a revisionist power seeking to completely upend international order is to greatly overstate the case.

Equally overstated is the notion that Washington’s rivalry with Beijing and the current war in Ukraine are part of a larger contest between democracy and authoritarianism. U.S. officials often invoke such rhetoric, exhibiting a tendency to focus on the epiphenomenal rather than the essential. This simplistic binary is both inappropriate and ineffective.

It is inappropriate because both democracy and autocracy are protean terms. There are many variants of democracy and many variants of autocracy, and the distinction between them is not as clear-cut as the United States pretends—as a glance at the controversial list of invitees to the Biden administration’s 2021 Summit for Democracy reveals. It is ineffective because not every aspect of every Western variant of democracy attracts unqualified admiration, nor does everyone regard every aspect of every variant of autocracy with total abhorrence. Framing the contest in this way may rally the already converted in the West, but it limits support in the rest of the world.

SCRATCH MY BACK

Without an existential threat, there is no longer any reason for Americans to bear any burden or pay any price to uphold international order. The key priorities of every post–Cold War U.S. administration have been domestic, with the George W. Bush administration an exception forced by the 9/11 attacks, which led his administration into ill-advised adventures in the Middle East. Since then, every president has tried to rectify Bush’s mistakes by disengaging from Middle Eastern entanglements, with limited success until President Joe Biden finally cut through the Gordian Knot in Afghanistan in 2021.

That ruthless move and the domestic focus of all post–Cold War administrations has often been misrepresented as the United States retreating from the world. But it is more accurately understood as the United States redefining the terms of its engagement with the world. Again, this is not entirely new.

Half a century ago, the United States corrected the mistake it had made in Vietnam by withdrawing from direct intervention on the mainland of Southeast Asia, choosing instead to maintain stability throughout the region by assuming the role of an offshore balancer relying primarily on naval and air power. It has been remarkably consistent in that role in East Asia ever since. A shift to an analogous role is now occurring in the Middle East, where the United States is very unlikely to again intervene with large-scale ground forces. But the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet is still in Bahrain, and the U.S. Air Force is still in Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. Sooner or later, a similar shift will occur in Europe, too, perhaps delayed but not diverted by the war in Ukraine.

An offshore balancer is not in retreat but demands more of its allies, partners, and friends to maintain regional equilibrium. In different ways, recent U.S. presidents have all maintained a similar policy. Under Barack Obama, this policy took the form of an emphasis on multilateralism, which is another way of sharing burdens. Donald Trump made crudely transactional, unilateral demands. Biden is more consultative, but he does not consult allies and partners merely for the pleasure of their company. He is doing so to ascertain what they are prepared to do to meet the United States’ concerns.

For those countries that meet U.S. expectations, Biden seems willing to go further than any of his predecessors to provide them with the tools to further common aims. The trilateral security partnership among Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States (AUKUS) has enabled Australia to acquire nuclear-powered submarines, the first time in more than 60 years that the United States has shared such technology. In this sense, Biden’s consultative approach is a more polite form of Trump’s crude transactionalism. If you do not meet expectations, the Biden administration will probably still be polite, but you should not expect to be taken too seriously, as some countries in Southeast Asia, such as Thailand, and more broadly the Association of Southeast Asian Nations as an organization, are beginning to realize.

RETURN TO THE NORM

In this new phase of great-power competition, all countries are confronted with two sets of realities. First, there are few (if any) countries that do not have concerns about some aspects of both U.S. and Chinese behavior. The concerns are not the same for the United States and China, and not every country holds them with the same degree of intensity, but they exist.

Second, China and the United States are geopolitical facts that no country can ignore, and precisely because of their rivalry, dealing with both simultaneously is the necessary condition for dealing with either effectively. Without the United States, dealing with China will take place in an unbalanced environment that will certainly disadvantage any country; without China, the risk of the United States brushing aside a country’s interests or taking the relationship for granted rises considerably.

Faced with these realities, most countries are going to try to maximize their autonomy within the constraints of their specific circumstances. No country will want to align all their interests across all domains in one direction or another. They will try to align different interests in different domains in the most advantageous direction, and their choices are not necessarily going to be confined to only the two great powers, leading them to seek out coalitions and partnerships with a range of actors.

The complexity of twenty-first-century competition provides sovereign states more space to maneuver than did the binary of U.S.-Soviet competition during the Cold War. Of course, states must have the intelligence, agility, and courage to recognize the opportunities to use their agency. In rising to this challenge, they will do well to remember that even if the landscape of modern international relations looks daunting, it fundamentally represents a return to the historical norm.

BILAHARI KAUSIKAN is former Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Singapore.

Foreign Affairs · by Bilahari Kausikan · April 11, 2023

21. Japan’s Official Security Assistance: The Sleeping Giant Stirs?

Can Japan join the arsenal of democracy?

Excerpts:

Nonetheless, OSA represents yet another component of the steady loosening of Japan’s pacifist-isolationist norms, and it reflects the increased feeling of national insecurity among Japanese policymakers and members of the public. For policymakers, OSA appears to be something of a careful and measured toe-dipping exercise to see what the response will be to Japan engaging in more robust security cooperation in the future. Already, the idea of OSA or something similar being offered to Ukraine has been floated, despite this being an ostensible weakening of the guideline that OSA will not be extended where there is a possibility of it “directly relating to any international conflict.”

It also remains to be seen how the OSA framework will work in tandem with some of Japan’s other security initiatives, such as the Free and Open Indo-Pacific framework that has been championed in recent years. If this framework is viewed as successful, it is likely that it will only expand further and deepen Japan’s security role not just within East Asia, but perhaps on the global stage. Japan, a sleeping giant in security terms, is perhaps finally beginning to stir.

Japan’s Official Security Assistance: The Sleeping Giant Stirs?

Tokyo’s new security framework plays to Japan’s existing strengths by deepening existing partnerships, but remains constrained by long-standing norms and sensitivities.

thediplomat.com · by James Kaizuka · April 11, 2023

Japan’s new National Security Strategy (NSS), approved in late 2022 by Prime Minister Kishida Fumio’s administration, continues a long transition from the pacifist isolationism of the post-war era to what academics and advocates of a greater security role alike call “normalization” of the status of Japan’s armed forces.

Written in the context of numerous perceived challenges to Japan’s safety, such as continued North Korean missile testing and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the new NSS was never likely to reverse these long trends. Still, the growing confidence of Tokyo to take steps to defend itself against the hostile environment it perceives for itself is telling of how far the politics of security both in the Japanese political system and in the wider region have come since the publication of the first NSS in 2013.

Official Security Assistance (or OSA) is a new and untested field for Japan. It is a testament to both the possibilities created by the changing security discourse and the constraints it still faces. On the one hand, it promises equipment, supplies, and deepened security cooperation with “like-minded countries” which value peace, stability, and the rule of law, and it specifically cites the enhancement of deterrent capabilities as an objective. It is no stretch to say that such statements would have been unthinkable only a short while ago.

On the other hand, it continues to be bound by the existing Principles on the Transfer of Defense Equipment and Technology, which among other considerations prohibits the transfer of equipment to countries party to an active conflict (excluding Ukraine from the OSA framework), and it emphasizes the word “peace” or derivatives thereof no fewer than 18 times within the course of the three-page Implementation Guidelines document. Considering these contradictions, what can be learned from this new initiative?

Much has been made of the so-called “Gulf War Syndrome” seen in the Japanese political sphere in the aftermath of the eponymous 1991 conflict. Heavily criticized for its “checkbook diplomacy” approach to international security, this period is widely considered to be a turning point in Japanese security discourse. In the following years, other attempts to change the isolationist status quo were met with fierce political and public opposition. In 2003, when Prime Minister Koizumi Junichiro’s administration dispatched the Self-Defense Forces to Iraq, more than half of the public were against it and the opposition even initiated a no-confidence motion. In 2015, when legislation was passed by the administration of Prime Minister Abe Shinzo to allow Japan to engage in collective self-defense, protesters in the tens of thousands arrived outside the National Diet Building.

OSA has thus far seen little or no such opposition. While it is still a fresh initiative and there is, of course, time for such opposition to develop, the immediate reaction has been muted. In Japan’s top daily newspapers, the response has been generally very matter-of-fact and even the Asahi Shimbun has not argued against the principle of OSA, only that it should remain limited to non-lethal aid. A march on Nagatacho has not materialized, nor is it likely to.

This speaks to how far the security discourse has shifted in Japan. Security issues are being discussed with increased openness and acceptance, even among those traditionally opposed to overturning the pacifist norms of post-war Japan. In another example, when Abe, after his resignation but shortly before his murder, raised the possibility of Japan entering into a nuclear-sharing agreement, the response was again muted with Abe receiving remarkably little criticism in a country famed for its “nuclear allergy.” Likewise, the prospect of a “Taiwan Contingency” is raised by politicians not only from the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), but also from opposition parties, with increasing frequency, and the Ukraine crisis has seen policy shift away from soft cooperation with Russia to full engagement with Western allies in opposition to Moscow.

OSA, viewed under these circumstances, seems like an almost inevitable outcome. Decades of slow but consistent melting of old pacifist isolationist norms paired with an increasingly realist-dominated security discourse in Japan has prepared policymaking circles for this shift. In almost all of the country’s political parties there is increasing acceptance of the severity of the security environment.

What’s in a Name?

Of course, this does not mean that making changes to longstanding foreign policy and security norms has become easy for LDP politicians, as has been demonstrated by the recent debate on counterstrike capabilities. Considering this, the name “Official Security Assistance” itself was likely deliberately chosen to evoke the image of Japan’s well-received Official Development Assistance (ODA) programs, which are generally uncontroversial both within and outside of Japan itself.

For the domestic constituency, the conceptualization of OSA as one-sided “assistance,” made on a grant basis to developing countries, is likely to assuage fears over entanglement in external conflicts. This is, of course, backed by the aforementioned guidelines that lethal aid cannot go to countries which are already party to a conflict and that OSA will not be provided where it might directly relate to a conflict, although this latter guideline leaves some room for maneuver, such as whether Japan could provide general purpose non-lethal military equipment to a party in a conflict.

The guidelines further evoke the spirit in which both ODA and the Japanese Self-Defense Forces have been utilized overseas in recent years, discussing humanitarian and disaster relief capacity and international peace cooperation, offering specific assurances that OSA will be provided conforming with purposes and principles of the U.N. Charter. OSA, as such, is depicted as Japan offering a helping hand. By presenting the initiative as almost a natural extension of existing ODA and focusing on the similarities to it, the initiative staves off criticism that it is overly militarized, even if it fundamentally is of a military nature.

This is also likely intended to assuage fears among Japan’s neighbors. In a region renowned for its deep historical sensitivities, where even countries with considerable overlapping security interests such as South Korea have been skeptical of Japanese intentions over its moves to take a more proactive security role, presentation is crucial to success. It is no surprise, therefore, that Japan has chosen as its first four recipients of OSA countries to which it is also a major ODA donor, again showcasing how OSA is a natural extension of assistance rather than a new military initiative. In 2019-2020, OECD data listed Japan as the second-largest bilateral ODA donor to Fiji and the largest bilateral donor to Malaysia, the Philippines, and Bangladesh.

The extension of OSA to these countries first is therefore perhaps designed to raise as few eyebrows as possible since it will be much harder for neighbors to object to an increased level of existing assistance rather than an entirely new security initiative. This is especially so considering the strong emphasis in the official guidelines on humanitarianism and the need to conform with United Nations principles. OSA is not ODA, but it is clearly designed to mimic its appearance to a large degree.

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OSA as Testing Ground

The OSA framework as such remains deeply cautious in its approach. It specifically and deliberately targets only “like-minded countries” and couches itself in the language of assistance rather than outright strategic cooperation or alliance, and it has been formulated in a manner which is sensitive to the needs of both the domestic and international audiences with which the Japanese government must contend.

Nonetheless, OSA represents yet another component of the steady loosening of Japan’s pacifist-isolationist norms, and it reflects the increased feeling of national insecurity among Japanese policymakers and members of the public. For policymakers, OSA appears to be something of a careful and measured toe-dipping exercise to see what the response will be to Japan engaging in more robust security cooperation in the future. Already, the idea of OSA or something similar being offered to Ukraine has been floated, despite this being an ostensible weakening of the guideline that OSA will not be extended where there is a possibility of it “directly relating to any international conflict.”

It also remains to be seen how the OSA framework will work in tandem with some of Japan’s other security initiatives, such as the Free and Open Indo-Pacific framework that has been championed in recent years. If this framework is viewed as successful, it is likely that it will only expand further and deepen Japan’s security role not just within East Asia, but perhaps on the global stage. Japan, a sleeping giant in security terms, is perhaps finally beginning to stir.

GUEST AUTHOR

James Kaizuka

James Kaizuka is a PhD candidate at the University of Leeds, with research specialization in Japanese ODA, Japan-North Korea relations, and Japan-Vietnam relations.

thediplomat.com · by James Kaizuka · April 11, 2023

22. State Dept wants ‘cyber assistance fund’ to aid allies and partners against hackers

State Dept wants ‘cyber assistance fund’ to aid allies and partners against hackers

The special fund is part of a three-part plan floated by Nate Fick, the State Department’s roving ambassador for cybersecurity, to help bolster allied cyber skills before — and during — crises.

breakingdefense.com · by Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.

Nate Fick, the State Department’s Ambassador at Large for Cyberspace and Digital Policy, speaks at an Atlantic Council event on April 6. (Screengrab)

WASHINGTON — The State Department’s roving ambassador for cybersecurity, Iraq combat vet Nate Fick, recently said the department would “push” for a special, flexible fund to assist friendly foreign countries in cybersecurity crises, adding he was optimistic Congress would approve the necessary changes to statute.

“First, we’re making a push for a dedicated cyber assistance fund. We did it after 9/11 for counterterrorism, we should do it now,” he said of the fund last week in the final minutes of an Atlantic Council panel with other senior cyber officials from Justice, Homeland Security, and the White House. “We don’t have the mechanisms in place for rapid, dedicated response. That would help a lot, and I think there’s support for it on the Hill.”

The special fund was part one of three-part plan Fick outlined to “close the gap [in] global demand for capacity building.”

“Second, we need to get beyond flying people around the world to deliver hands-on capacity building,” he said. “That’s necessary, but it’s insufficient. [We can] to deliver scaled capacity building using online tools that we do to complement in-person delivery. So we need to modernize our delivery mechanisms for basic cyber capacity building globally.

“And then third — and this is a lesson I think we saw in Ukraine; we’ve seen it in Albania in the wake of the Iranian cyber attack — there’s a large role for the for the private sector here, where we can play a brokering and introduction kind of role, but they’re not government dollars being used, and we can bring a lot of private sector capacity to bear quickly.”

The State Department did not respond to Breaking Defense’s request for more information about the funding or Fick’s broader plan, but it’s probably no coincidence that all three pillars militate for greater speed. More flexible funding means not having to wait for the congressional appropriations cycle, where even emergency supplemental funds take months to pass and regular budgets take a year, not counting years of prep work within the executive branch. More online training means helping foreign partners get the skills they need without having to wait for an American expert to fly out. And more mobilization of the private sector means the US can facilitate a response from whatever company is quickest, without waiting for government processes at all.

Speed matters because cyber attacks often happen without warning and rapidly evolve even after discovery. Now, it may take weeks or months for hackers to gain access to a system, scout out its weak points, and tailor software to exploit them, but once the groundwork’s laid, a damaging attack or theft of data can take place in seconds. And it’s strategically important to help targets when they’re hurting most, not months after, noted another federal official speaking alongside Fick.

“When people experience cyber attacks, whether it’s companies, whether it’s individuals, whether it’s nation-states, they’re at their most vulnerable,” said Marshal Miller, a former prosecutor who’s now principal associate deputy Attorney General at the Department of Justice. “When we as a government can help those folks at that moment, that’s an incredible relationship-building opportunity.”

The FBI, for example, has “cyber action teams… ready to move to any part of the globe to help an ally or a partner, [such as] recently, Montenegro, Costa Rica, [and] other countries,” Miller continued. “We’ve been able to help them when they’re at their most vulnerable and that’s a great way to not only defend [friends] and disrupt [foes], but also build alliances and relationships.”

Sometimes the US even manages to get in ahead of the crisis, as with the military team US Cyber Command deployed to Ukraine three months before Russia’s February 2022 invasion. But for all the the US already doing, the appetite for such assistance, leader ship and ideas in cyberspace is tremendous, said Fick.

“I was in Brussels on March 2, the day that the [US National Cybersecurity] strategy was released, and I really got a visceral sense of the hunger on the part of our NATO allies and our colleagues across the [European Union]. I spent the entire day fielding very specific, detailed, insightful questions that come only from reading it closely and thinking deeply about it. So make no mistake, our national strategy is of great interest to allies and partners around the world.”

More broadly, “the demand for capacity building and [cyber] literacy support around the world is absolutely overwhelming,” Fick said. “And it takes a bunch of a bunch of different forms… We tend to think of it in terms of technology capacity building; that’s only a piece.

“One of the greatest areas of assistance that we can give allies and partners is actually in the conceptual arena, the cultural arena, the strategic arena,” Fick continued. “Sure, approaches have to be tailored to unique national circumstances, but a lot of what we’ve done across the different parts of the US government can in fact be templated and customized [to fit our allies]. Let’s not reinvent the wheel.”

breakingdefense.com · by Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.

23. NASA Reveals What Made an Entire Starlink Satellite Fleet Go Down

Arrogance?

NASA Reveals What Made an Entire Starlink Satellite Fleet Go Down

The company allegedly ignored warnings of bad space weather brewing.

BYUNIVERSE TODAY AND CAROLYN COLLINS PETERSEN

inverse.com

On March 23, sky observers marveled at a gorgeous display of northern and southern lights. It was a reminder that when our Sun gets active, it can spark a phenomenon called “space weather.” Aurorae are among the most benign effects of this phenomenon.

At the other end of the space weather spectrum are solar storms that can knock out satellites. The folks at Starlink found that out the hard way in February 2022. On Jan. 29 that year, the Sun belched out a class M 1.1 flare and related coronal mass ejection. Material from the Sun traveled out on the solar wind and arrived at Earth a few days later. On Feb. 3, Starlink launched a group of 49 satellites to an altitude only 130 miles above Earth’s surface. They didn’t last long, and now solar physicists know why.

A group of researchers from NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and the Catholic University of America took a closer look at the specifics of that storm. Their analysis identified a mass of plasma that impacted our planet’s magnetosphere. The actual event was a halo coronal mass ejection from an active region in the northeast quadrant of the Sun.

A SOHO image of the coronal mass ejection headed out (lower right from the Sun). Several days later it collided with Earth’s magnetic field, which helped thicken the atmosphere. That produced atmospheric drag, which affected the Starlink satellites.

NASA/SOHO.

The material traveled out at around 690 kilometers per second as a shock-driving magnetic cloud. Think of it as a long ropy mass of material writhing its way through space. As it traveled, it expanded and at solar-facing satellites — including STEREO-A, which took a direct hit from it — made observations. Eventually, the cloud smacked into Earth’s magnetosphere creating a geomagnetic storm.

How Starlink Satellites Experienced the Effects Space Weather

One of the side effects of space weather that can affect satellites is warming in a region called the “thermosphere.” That increased the density of the upper atmosphere over a short amount of time and caused it to swell up. A denser atmosphere causes a phenomenon called “atmospheric drag.” Essentially, the thicker atmosphere slows down anything moving through. It also heats things up.

The atmosphere thickened enough that it affected the newly launched Starlink stations. They started to experience atmospheric drag, which caused them to deorbit and burn up on the way down. It was an expensive lesson in space weather and provided people on Earth with a great view of what happens when satellites fall back to Earth. It was also that could have been avoided if they’d delayed their launch to account for the ongoing threat.

Video captured over Puerto Rico of Starlink satellites plunging through Earth’s atmosphere on February 7, 2022.

How Does Space Weather Work?

The Sun constantly sends a stream of charged particles called the solar wind. This stream varies in density, speed, and temperature. Occasionally, the Sun will also belch out clouds of plasma in what’s called a “coronal mass ejection.” Sometimes it also sends out solar flares. All the material it loses travels away on the solar wind.

During periods when the Sun is more active, those clouds of plasma can come pretty frequently. If they impact Earth, the results can vary from a pretty auroral display all the way to commercial satellite disruptions and power blackouts on the ground. The loss of the Starlink satellites was a particularly massive effect of space weather.

Artist’s impression of the solar wind from the sun (left) interacting with Earth’s magnetosphere (right). Such activity worked to thicken the atmosphere, which worked to drag down the Starlink satellites.

NASA

Current Space Weather Effects

At the moment, the Sun’s activity is increasing as it heads into a period called “solar maximum.” We can expect more auroral displays, along with CMEs and flares. With the strong outbursts come threats to our technology. Obviously, communications and other satellites are in danger. So are astronauts on the International Space Station.

But, the threats aren’t just in space. Earth-based power grids, communication lines, and other technologies are also at risk. For example, when a geomagnetic storm hits, it sets up huge circulating electrical currents between Earth and space. These are called “geomagnetically induced currents.” At the very least, they can short out power lines and grids. When those go down, so do the Internet, computer systems, telephone systems, and other crucial services. The average person would immediately experience a power outage, at the very least. But, airlines, banks, and other systems would be down until power and communications could be restored. There’s a great need to strengthen our technology against solar storms.

Starlink Lessons Learned?

The loss of the Starlink satellites cost the company millions of dollars. The company elected to launch, even though the space weather community warned about the effects of a geomagnetic storm. For years now, solar physicists have been warning about the effects of space weather. Most satellite companies pay attention to reports from such places as the Space Weather Prediction Center. If they get enough warning ahead of time, they can take steps to protect their equipment. Astronauts on the ISS can take shelter until the storm passes. And, power companies and others can follow forecasts of such storms so they can take whatever action is needed in the event of a strong event.

Solar physicists continue to study these solar outbursts in hopes of coming up with a foolproof prediction system. At the moment, when something erupts from the Sun, we get notifications from a fleet of satellites. Those give us minutes to hours of “heads-up” time to prepare for the worst. NASA and other agencies continue to improve solar studies and prediction methods so that companies launching satellites to low-Earth orbit can take steps to protect their investments.

This article was originally published on Universe Today by Carolyn Collins Petersen. Read the original article here.

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24. Walter Reed issues 'cease and desist' to Catholic Church before Holy Week

???

What is going on?

Walter Reed issues 'cease and desist' to Catholic Church before Holy Week

americanmilitarynews.com · by Liz Lawrence · April 10, 2023

The Catholic Archdiocese for Military Services accused Walter Reed National Military Medical Center of denying service members and veterans their constitutional right to practice their religion after it issued a “cease and desist order” to a community of Franciscan Catholic priests and brothers who have “provided pastoral care to service members and veterans at Walter Reed for nearly two decades.”

The order came as Catholics entered Holy Week, the Christian faith’s most sacred days.

According to a news release, the Franciscans’ contract was terminated on March 31, 2023, and was awarded to a secular defense contracting firm “that cannot fulfill the statement of work in the contract.”

As a result, troops and veterans at Walter Reed did not have access to “adequate pastoral care” during Holy Week and won’t have access to it in the future.

“There is one Catholic Army chaplain assigned to Walter Reed Medical Center, but he is in the process of separating from the Army,” the release stated.

Archbishop Timothy P. Broglio condemned the cease and desist order as “an encroachment on the First Amendment guarantee of the Free Exercise of Religion.”

“It is incomprehensible that essential pastoral care is taken away from the sick and the aged when it was so readily available. This is a classic case where the adage ‘if it is not broken, do not fix it’ applies,” he said in a statement. “I fear that giving a contract to the lowest bidder overlooked the fact that the bidder cannot provide the necessary service. I earnestly hope that this disdain for the sick will be remedied at once and their First Amendment rights will be respected.”

Walter Reed said in a statement on Saturday that the center is a “welcoming and healing environment that honors and supports a full range of religious, spiritual, and cultural needs,” Fox News reported.

“Tomorrow, Catholic Easter Services will be provided to those who wish to attend. Services will include a celebration of Mass and the administration of Confession by an ordained Catholic Priest,” the statement said. “For many years, a Catholic ordained priest has been on staff at WRNMMC providing religious sacraments to service members, veterans and their loved ones. There has also been a pastoral care contract in place to supplement those services provided.”

“Currently a review of the pastoral care contract is under review to ensure it adequately supports the religious needs of our patients and beneficiaries,” the statement added. “Although at this time the Franciscan Diocese will not be hosting services on Sunday parishioners of the Diocese while patients at our facilities may still seek their services.”

The Catholic Archdiocese for Military Services acknowledged Walter Reed’s claims that Catholic care was provided during Holy Week, but maintained “that without Catholic priests present at the medical center, service members and veterans are being denied the constitutional right to practice their religion.”

americanmilitarynews.com · by Liz Lawrence · April 10, 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

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Foundation for Defense of Democracies

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

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

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

Access NSS HERE

Company Name | Website

RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, APRIL 10, 2023

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Japan’s Official Security Assistance: The Sleeping Giant Stirs?

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Walter Reed issues 'cease and desist' to Catholic Church before Holy Week