Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

"Try to understand everyone, scorn no one, don't believe anything blindly."

- Albert Einstein

“At least once every human should have to run for his life, to teach him that milk does not come from supermarkets, that safety does not come from policeman, that ‘news’ is not something that happens to other people. He might learn how his ancestors lived, and that he himself is no different – in the crunch his life depends on his agility, alertness, and personal resourcefulness.

- Robert Heinlein

"The general public has long been divided into two parts; those who think that science can do anything and those who are afraid it will."

- Thomas Pynchon

1. Billy Waugh, 93, ‘Godfather of the Green Berets,’ Is Dead

2. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, April 14, 2023

3. Opinion | What Are America and China Fighting About, Anyway?

4. Document Leaks Indicate Extent of U.S. Electronic Snooping

5. The Critical Minerals Club (China)

6. Leaked documents show officials were aware of additional Chinese spy balloons: report

7. Misinformation Defense Worked in 2020, Up to a Point, Study Finds

8. China Is Studying Russia’s Economic Playbook for Conflict

9. Leaked secret documents detail up to four additional Chinese spy balloons

10. State Dept cyber bureau plans to add tech experts to every embassy by next year

11. The Narcissists Who Endanger America

12. Helping Ukraine Can Deter China

13. Our Rotten Military Promotion System

14. Accountability for Biden's Botched Afghan Withdrawal?

15. How much of a threat does Russia's Pacific fleet pose to the US?

16. TikTok Is Too Popular to Ban

17, PLA Freezes out Pentagon, Sustains Military-to-Military Relations with U.S. Allies

18. The Biggest American Porn Site Got Bought and the Entire Thing Is Super-Sketch

19. China expands wartime military draft to include veterans and college students

20. 'Digital Prison Camp' -- Putin Signs Electronic Conscription Bill Into Law

21. Taiwan highly vulnerable to Chinese air attack, leaked documents show

22. Alien motherships: Pentagon official floats a theory for unexplained sightings

23. Russia’s commando units gutted by Ukraine war, U.S. leak shows

24. This Agency’s Declassification Work Could Be a Model for Others

1. Billy Waugh, 93, ‘Godfather of the Green Berets,’ Is Dead

It is good to see the New York Times recognize this great American hero.

Billy Waugh, 93, ‘Godfather of the Green Berets,’ Is Dead

The New York Times · by Richard Sandomir · April 14, 2023

He was a Special Forces soldier during the Vietnam War then worked for the C.I.A., tracking Osama bin Laden in Sudan and fighting in Afghanistan after 9/11.

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Billy Waugh in Vietnam in 1970. “He was just one of those guys who wanted to be on the edge of the empire,” a former supervisor said. Credit...via Jason Hardy

April 14, 2023, 12:45 p.m. ET

Billy Waugh, a near-legendary covert operative who honed his skills in unconventional warfare during the Vietnam War, helped the C.I.A. hunt down the terrorists Carlos the Jackal and Osama bin Laden, and, in his 70s, fought in Afghanistan, died on April 4. He was 93.

His death was confirmed in a statement on Twitter by the Army’s First Special Forces Command, which lauded him as having “inspired a generation of special operations.” It did not say where he died.

The service website Military.com, using the colloquial name for Special Forces made famous during the Vietnam War, called Mr. Waugh “the unparalleled godfather of the Green Berets” for his long years of service and numerous missions with them. The New York Times once described him as a “former C.I.A. paramilitary officer who seems to have cut quite a swashbuckling path through the ‘back alleys,’ as they say, of half the world.”

“He was just one of those guys who wanted to be on the edge of the empire, as far as he could get, living large and defending his country,” Cofer Black, a former C.I.A. counterterrorism chief, who supervised Mr. Waugh, said in a phone interview.

Mr. Waugh, a well-known, colorful and blunt-spoken figure in the intelligence community, was a Special Forces veteran by the time he first arrived in Laos in 1961, in the early days of the Vietnam War, as part of a United States military advisory mission called White Star.

Over parts of a decade in Southeast Asia, he helped train counterinsurgency forces in South Vietnam and Laos. He participated in parachute drops to the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which required jumping from aircraft at altitudes of 20,000 feet or more, he said, free-falling in the nighttime to the lowest possible height before popping the chute, to avoid enemy detection.

And he served with the innocuously named Studies and Observations Group of the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, a clandestine unit that ran reconnaissance and rescue missions in South and North Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.

“There was no rest at SOG, only war recon, rescue, sleep,” Mr. Waugh told Annie Jacobsen in her 2019 book, “Surprise, Kill, Vanish: The Secret History of C.I.A. Paramilitary Armies, Operators and Assassins.”

In June 1965, Mr. Waugh, then a master sergeant, was nearly killed when his team was overwhelmed by North Vietnamese forces in Binh Dinh Province, along the South Vietnam coast. He was shot in the knee, foot, ankle and forehead in a rice paddy. Thinking he was dead, North Vietnamese forces stripped him naked.

“I drifted in and out of consciousness, my body perforated with gunshot wounds, leeches feasting on every open wound with one thought jabbing at my semi-lucid brain,” he wrote in his 2005 autobiography, “Hunting the Jackal.” “Damn, my military career is finished. I’ll never see combat again.”

He was saved by two soldiers, one of them his commander, Capt. Paris Davis. Despite his own gunshot wounds, to an arm and a leg, Captain Davis helped Mr. Waugh crawl to a helicopter.

Those actions by Captain Davis earned him the Medal of Honor, which was belatedly presented to him by President Biden in 2021. Mr. Waugh received the Silver Star.

Mr. Waugh at home in Niceville, Fla., in 2005. After the 9/11 attacks, at age 71, he pleaded to be sent to Afghanistan. He was.Credit...Bill Kaczor/Associated Press

In a summary of the battle that he wrote in 2016, Mr. Waugh recalled Captain Davis’s heroism, saying, “I only have to close my eyes to vividly recall the gallantry.”

William Dawson Waugh was born on Dec. 1, 1929, in Bastrop, Texas, a small city southeast of Austin, to John and Lillian Waugh. His father was a railroad brakeman who died when Billy was about 10; his mother was a substitute teacher.

Meeting two local soldiers who had been wounded in World War II inspired Billy, at 15, to hitchhike to Los Angeles to enlist in the Marines; he had heard that he could join them at that age. But he got only as far as Las Cruces, N.M., where, penniless and without identification, he was arrested. He called his mother, who wired him bus fare home.

“When I got there,” he wrote in “Hunting the Jackal,” “my mother gave me a lengthy lecture and a firm belt whipping. Also, a clear set of orders: Get back in school, or else.”

He enlisted in the Army in 1948 but did not taste combat until he joined the fighting in the Korean War three years later. He rose from private first class to infantry platoon sergeant. “I learned what made men tick, and what combat was all about,” he wrote. “For the first time in my military life, I felt completely at home.”

After his Korean service, he was transferred to Germany, stationed in the Bavarian town of Bad Tolz, where he lobbied successfully to join the elite Special Forces.

He retired from the Army in 1972, with the rank of sergeant major, and worked for two years for the United States Postal Service, sorting mail, which bored him.

Then a call came in 1977 to return to action in a murky assignment — training Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s Libyan commandos in infantry tactics — and he jumped at the chance. It wasn’t a C.I.A. job, but one organized by a former agency officer, Edwin Wilson, who would later serve nearly 22 years in prison for selling explosives to Libya before his sentence was overturned.

After the Libyan mission, Mr. Waugh became an independent contractor for the C.I.A. In Sudan in 1991 and ’92, he watched and photographed bin Laden, who, long before he masterminded the 9/11 attacks, was already on the agency’s radar as the founder of Al Qaeda. Mr. Waugh sometimes jogged past bin Laden’s compound.

“At the time,” he wrote, “bin Laden was not considered an especially high-level assignment, and Khartoum was so completely saturated with miscreants and no-good bastards that my hunting wasn’t limited to this one tall Saudi exile.”

Still, as he told the MacDill Air Force Base website in 2011, he came within 30 meters of bin Laden. “I could have killed him with a rock,” he said.

He also tracked down and monitored Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, better known as Carlos the Jackal, taking photographs of him at his apartment in Sudan before French intelligence agents captured him in 1994.

Mr. Waugh boasted that he could have killed Carlos as well. Mr. Black, who was the C.I.A. station chief in Khartoum, didn’t think he was serious.

“Billy was larger than life,” Mr. Black said in the phone interview. “I remember him stating that. ‘Yes, fine, Billy, that’s not your job.’ Sometimes he went off the reservation. He could be a force multiplier, but he could also be a force pain in the ass.”

After 9/11, Mr. Waugh, who was then 71, lobbied to be sent to Afghanistan.

“Billy got a folding chair and set it up opposite the entrance to my office and told my office manager, ‘I’m going to sit here until Cofer talks to me,’” said Mr. Black, who was director of the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorist Center at the time.

Eventually, they talked. Mr. Waugh was still quite fit, and the next day, Mr. Black agreed to send him to Afghanistan, reasoning that his experience in unconventional warfare might help a young commander there.

During two months on Team Romeo, a combined Special Forces and C.I.A. unit whose mission was to root out Taliban soldiers and Al Qaeda terrorists, Mr. Waugh acted as a liaison between the soldiers and the C.I.A. operatives, advised Afghan troops and patrolled defenses.

“I was cold, filthy and stinky,” he wrote about his final days with the team, “but I was one of roughly 150 men who can say they conducted combat on the ground in Afghanistan during the initial — and pivotal — phase of Operation Enduring Freedom.”

He had a wife, Lynn Waugh, who could not be reached. Information on his survivors was not immediately available.

If some of Mr. Waugh’s stories sounded too wild to be true, Ms. Jacobsen and Tim Keown, who collaborated with Mr. Waugh on “Hunting the Jackal,” said that after-action reports and interviews with military personnel familiar with his service had helped them corroborate his accounts.

“For someone whose life was lived in the shadows,” Mr. Keown said in a phone interview, “he was very good about documentation.”

The New York Times · by Richard Sandomir · April 14, 2023

2. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, April 14, 2023

Maps/grpahics: https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-april-14-2023

Key Takeaways

The Kremlin is likely attempting to portray Russia as an equal defense partner with China ahead of Chinese Defense Minister Li Shangfu’s visit to Moscow from April 16 to 18.
The Kremlin is likely hoping to make itself more attractive to China by launching Russian Pacific Fleet exercises to project Russia’s naval power in the Pacific.
The Kremlin also likely intends to use the Pacific Fleet’s combat readiness checks to attempt to deter further Japanese support for Ukraine ahead of the G7 meeting from May 19 to 21.
Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin is setting information conditions to exploit a Russian military failure if the planned Ukrainian counteroffensive is successful.
Former Russian officer and ardent nationalist Igor Girkin denied speculations that he is facing charges in St. Petersburg for the discreditation of the Russian Armed Forces – a denial that likely further indicates his protection by unknown siloviki patrons.
Russian elite forces are diluting their combat effectiveness with poorly trained mobilized personnel and volunteers due to high causalities sustained in Ukraine.
Russian President Vladimir Putin will likely host his annual June press conference in early June 2023.
The Russian State Duma is intensifying its efforts to censor of Russian cultural figures who fled Russia and criticize the war, likely aimed at encouraging domestic self-censorship.
Russian forces continued limited offensive operations in the Kreminna area as Ukrainian forces targeted rear areas in Luhansk Oblast.
Russian forces continued to advance in Bakhmut and conduct ground attacks along the Avdiivka-Donetsk City line.
Russian forces continue to endanger the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP) amidst continued Russian efforts to establish control over the ZNPP.
The Kremlin reportedly continues to use private military companies (PMCs) and nationalist networks to support its force generation campaigns.
Russian security personnel continue to arrest Ukrainian citizens under allegations that they associate with claimed illegal formations.

RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, APRIL 14, 2023

Apr 14, 2023 - Press ISW

Download the PDF

Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, April 14, 2023

Riley Bailey, Kateryna Stepanenko, George Barros, Grace Mappes, Layne Philipson, and Frederick W. Kagan

April 14, 8pm 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.

The Kremlin is likely attempting to portray Russia as an equal defense partner with China ahead of Chinese Defense Minister Li Shangfu’s visit to Moscow from April 16 to 18. The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) announced on April 14 that Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu will meet with Li to discuss bilateral defense cooperation as well as issues of regional and global security.[1] Chinese Foreign Affairs Minister Qin Gang stated on April 14 that China will not sell weapons to Russia and will regulate the export of items to Russia that have dual civilian and military uses.[2] Qin‘s comments represent a continuation of China’s efforts to rhetorically downplay its support for Russia and demonstrate that there are limits to the ”no limits” partnership that Russia and China declared before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.[3] ISW assessed that Putin was unable to secure the no-limits bilateral partnership with China that he likely hoped for when Chinese President Xi Jinping visited Moscow from March 20 to 22.[4]

The Kremlin is likely hoping to make itself more attractive to China by launching Russian Pacific Fleet exercises to project Russia’s naval power in the Pacific. The Russian Ministry of Defense announced on April 14 that the Russian military raised the Pacific Fleet of the Eastern Military District (EMD) to the highest level of combat readiness for combat readiness checks.[5] Russian Chief of the General Staff, Army General Valery Gerasimov, also stated that elements of the Pacific Fleet will conduct combat exercises.[6] The Russian Pacific Fleet’s combat readiness checks are likely meant to signal to China that Russia supports Chinese security objectives in the Pacific and that Russia remains an equal military partner that can operate as a Pacific power despite the degradation of Russian military power in Ukraine.

The Kremlin also likely intends to use the Pacific Fleet’s combat readiness checks to attempt to deter further Japanese support for Ukraine ahead of the G7 meeting from May 19 to 21. Shoigu stated on April 14 that Russian forces declared that combat readiness checks are intended to work out methods to prevent enemy forces from deploying in the southern part of the Sea of Okhotsk and to repel a landing on the southern Kuril and Sakhalin islands, both signals to Japan (which claims part of the archipelago that the Soviet Union seized at the end of World War II).[7] Russia‘s Eastern Military District (EMD) recently deployed a battery of Bastion coastal defense missile systems to Paramushir Island in the northern portion of the Russian-occupied Japanese Kuril Islands, which ISW assessed was likely a warning to Japan about further supporting Ukraine.[8] Russia likely intends to use military posturing in the north Pacific to raise fears about military escalation with Japan in an increased effort to prevent Japan from further supporting Ukraine when it hosts the G7 meeting in Hiroshima. Russia has employed similar information operations and demonstrative actions against the West aimed at preventing further Western security assistance to Ukraine by stoking concerns about escalation, although these efforts have never presaged any real escalation.[9]

The Russian military is in no position to threaten Japan at this time. ISW previously reported that elements of the 40th and 155th Naval Infantry Brigades of the Pacific Fleet suffered heavy losses near Vuhledar, Donetsk Oblast in early 2023 and in late 2022, with the 155th being reconstituted as many as eight times in the past year.[10] The Pacific Fleet likely lacks the available combat power in the Pacific region to posture in a way that would be truly threatening to Japan or suitable for Russia power projection attempts that would be able to convince China that it is an equal military power.

It is noteworthy that Prigozhin – one of most extreme thought leaders among Russia’s pro-war faction – considers that Russia can incur a defeat in Ukraine and that such a defeat in the short run would actually benefit Russia.

Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin is setting information conditions to exploit a Russian military failure if the planned Ukrainian counteroffensive is successful. Prigozhin published an essay on April 14 in which he argues that Ukraine’s coming counteroffensive is more likely to succeed than fail.[11] Prigozhin warned that a selfish Russian “deep state” (which he defines as “a community of near-state elites that operate independently of the political leadership of the state and have close ties and their own agenda”) is currently in crisis due to the Russian military’s failures to secure a victory quickly.[12] Prigozhin accused members of this deep state embedded in the Russian bureaucracy of deliberately sabotaging Russian success in the war because they seek to resume their privileged lives of comfort.[13] Prigozhin stated that these Russian deep state "internal enemies” will push the Kremlin to “make serious concessions” tantamount to “betraying Russian interests,” including even possibly returning occupied Ukrainian territory to Ukraine over the course of a few years.[14]

Prigozhin explicitly rejected the notion of any negotiations to end the war and urged Russians to continue fighting, even if it results in Russia’s temporary defeat. Prigozhin stated that Russia must ignore the Russian deep state’s temptations to cut Russian losses and settle.[15] Prigozhin stated the Russian military cannot stop fighting now despite current Russian territorial gains because the Ukrainian state has transformed, and unoccupied Ukraine is now politically opposed the Kremlin. Prigozhin stated that Russia must continue to fight relentlessly in Ukraine regardless of how adverse conditions become. He stated that any scenario in which Russia faces defeat will result in a groundswell of “radical national feelings” in Russia that will serve as the catalyst for a reinvigorated Russian patriotism and enable the Russian nation to undergo the baptism by fire necessary to emerge victorious and defeat Ukraine.[16] Prigozhin’s essay is thematically and logistical consistent with his previous stated effort to transform Wagner Group into a hardline ideological elite parallel military organization to advance Russian interests.[17]

The Russian nationalist discourse about the acceptability of Russia suffering defeat in Ukraine deviates from some Western assertions of the need to preserve Russia from humiliation and allow Russia to “save face.” Prigozhin’s argument that the Kremlin must resist the temptation to settle and instead remain committed to winning in Ukraine is not compatible with the idea that the Kremlin must be given a way to save face lest it conduct a massive, possibly nuclear, escalation.[18] It is noteworthy that Prigozhin – one of most extreme thought leaders among Russia’s pro-war faction – considers that Russia can incur a defeat in Ukraine and that such a defeat in the short run would actually benefit Russia. Prigozhin’s comments, together with those of other radical pro-war voices, highlight the priority that the pro-war community places on galvanizing Russian society and energizing it for a long fight against the West. That agenda is not advanced by courting thermonuclear destruction.

Former Russian officer and ardent nationalist Igor Girkin denied speculations that he is facing charges in St. Petersburg for the discreditation of the Russian Armed Forces – a denial that likely further indicates his protection by unknown siloviki patrons. A Russian news aggregator claimed on April 14 that a Novosibirsk resident asked the St. Petersburg Investigative Committee to investigate Girkin’s social media content for discreditation of Russian forces – a crime punishable by a fine of up to five million rubles ($65,530), up to five years of correctional or forced labor, or up to seven years in prison.[19] Girkin denied receiving a criminal charge notice, claiming that he will not alter his behavior and is not intimidated by authorities.[20] Girkin denied receiving any charges from the Russian Ministry of Interior (MVD) and hypothesized that the MVD could ”theoretically” investigate him for discreditation.[21] Girkin added that if someone has the ”political will” then he could be framed for humanitarian aid fraud. Girkin noted that everyone will soon find out if the “authorities are ready to stop [him].”[22] Girkin’s response is consistent with his ruthless criticisms of the Kremlin and may indicate that he likely continues to benefit from some protection from within the Russian force structures – the siloviki. Girkin has every reason to believe that he would be convicted without such protection, as his vitriolic assaults on the Russian military’s performance in Ukraine almost self-evidently violate the discreditation law.

Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin may be attempting to apply pressure on Girkin’s patronage networks by responding to accusations against Girkin. Prigozhin stated that Girkin would not be recruited into Wagner as Wagner is no longer recruiting prisoners – likely implying that Girkin would remain in prison for his behavior.[23] While it is unclear if Prigozhin or Wagner-affiliated figures are involved in sparking an investigation against Girkin, it is notable that the complaint was filed in St. Petersburg - a city where Prigozhin has connections and a city where Prigozhin is attempting to push his political aspirations.[24] Girkin is reportedly based out of Moscow, which makes the St. Petersburg venue of the complaint more unusual.[25] Prigozhin and Girkin have a history of personal attacks and feuds, and Prigozhin may want to expose or strain Girkin’s patronage networks, which are allowing him to be unscathed despite ongoing censorship measures in Russia. ISW also previously assessed that Prigozhin and Girkin are likely competing for influence and patronage within the pro-war faction, and a public investigation into Girkin might burden Girkin’s patrons as they attempt to deflect or quash these accusations.[26]

Russian elite forces are diluting their combat effectiveness with poorly trained mobilized personnel and volunteers due to high causalities sustained in Ukraine. The Washington Post reported that leaked classified US intelligence documents revealed that Russia’s 22nd Separate Guards Special Purpose (SPETSNAZ) Brigade (Main Directorate of the Russian General Staff) and two other unspecified SPETSNAZ brigades suffered an estimated 90-95% attrition rate in Ukraine.[27] The Washington Post also reported that the 346th SPETSNAZ Brigade lost almost its entire complement, with only 125 servicemen remaining active out of 900 initially deployed.[28] These high casualty rates suggest that Russia’s most elite forces - Airborne and SPETSNAZ forces - are likely no longer elite. Russian forces have recently deployed elements of airborne brigades and SPETSNAZ formations to frontline areas in Ukraine that operate as volunteer battalions or that are almost entirely comprised of mobilized personnel.[29] It is highly unlikely that mobilized personnel or volunteers received training on how to conduct aerial landing operations and special forces operations, which would suggest that these Russian Airborne Forces (VDV) and SPETSNAZ elements do not differ markedly from other combat ineffective Russian formations staffed by mobilized personnel or volunteers.

Russian President Vladimir Putin will likely host his annual June press conference in early June 2023. Kremlin Spokesperson Dmitry Peskov announced on April 14 that the Kremlin expects to hold the “Direct Line with Vladimir Putin,” a live forum at which Putin addresses questions from the Russian public, on an unspecified date likely in June 2023.[30] Putin cancelled his “Direct Line” in 2022 due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, as well as in 2020 due to COVID-19.[31] Putin notably cancelled his annual address to the Russian Federal Assembly in December 2022 and regurgitated boilerplate rhetoric at his annual New Year’s speech, indicating that Putin was uncertain of his ability to shape the Russian information space amidst criticism of the Russian military’s performance in the war.[32] This year’s event will likely be highly filtered to support Putin’s current rhetorical lines and avoid exposing any challenges to the Kremlin or to Russia’s conduct of the war in Ukraine.

The Russian State Duma is intensifying its efforts to censor Russian cultural figures who fled Russia and criticize the war, likely aimed at encouraging domestic self-censorship. Russian State Duma Vice Speaker Pyotr Tolstoy announced on April 14 that the State Duma has created a working group to find a “fair solution” to prevent these cultural figures as well as designated foreign agents from receiving income from creative endeavors in Russia.[33] Tolstoy claimed that some deputies are making “radical proposals...because it’s not worth making money in a country that you hate.” Prior Duma proposals included withholding state funding, royalty payments, advertising revenue and copyrights, and confiscating the property of Russians who fled.[34] State Duma Vice Speaker Irina Yarovaya chairs the committee, and other members include Tolstoy and the chairs of the State Duma committees for Security and Anti-Corruption, State Building and Legislation, Information Policy, Information Technology and Communications, and Culture.[35] Measures that punish Russians abroad or foreign agents for criticizing the war in Ukraine also demonstrate to domestic audiences the range of punishments they may also suffer for airing their own criticisms.

Key Takeaways

The Kremlin is likely attempting to portray Russia as an equal defense partner with China ahead of Chinese Defense Minister Li Shangfu’s visit to Moscow from April 16 to 18.
The Kremlin is likely hoping to make itself more attractive to China by launching Russian Pacific Fleet exercises to project Russia’s naval power in the Pacific.
The Kremlin also likely intends to use the Pacific Fleet’s combat readiness checks to attempt to deter further Japanese support for Ukraine ahead of the G7 meeting from May 19 to 21.
Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin is setting information conditions to exploit a Russian military failure if the planned Ukrainian counteroffensive is successful.
Former Russian officer and ardent nationalist Igor Girkin denied speculations that he is facing charges in St. Petersburg for the discreditation of the Russian Armed Forces – a denial that likely further indicates his protection by unknown siloviki patrons.
Russian elite forces are diluting their combat effectiveness with poorly trained mobilized personnel and volunteers due to high causalities sustained in Ukraine.
Russian President Vladimir Putin will likely host his annual June press conference in early June 2023.
The Russian State Duma is intensifying its efforts to censor of Russian cultural figures who fled Russia and criticize the war, likely aimed at encouraging domestic self-censorship.
Russian forces continued limited offensive operations in the Kreminna area as Ukrainian forces targeted rear areas in Luhansk Oblast.
Russian forces continued to advance in Bakhmut and conduct ground attacks along the Avdiivka-Donetsk City line.
Russian forces continue to endanger the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP) amidst continued Russian efforts to establish control over the ZNPP.
The Kremlin reportedly continues to use private military companies (PMCs) and nationalist networks to support its force generation campaigns.
Russian security personnel continue to arrest Ukrainian citizens under allegations that they associate with claimed illegal formations.

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 continued limited offensive operations in the Kreminna area on April 14. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces conducted unsuccessful offensive operations south of Dibrova (5km southwest of Kreminna) and near Bilohorivka (12km south of Kreminna).[36] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces unsuccessfully tried to advance towards Torske (16km west of Kreminna) and Nevske (18km northwest of Kreminna), and that heavy fighting is ongoing near Makiivka (22km northwest of Kreminna).[37]

Russian sources claimed that Ukrainian forces are continuing to target rear areas in Luhansk Oblast. Former Advisor to Luhansk People’s Republic (LNR) Head Rodion Miroshnik claimed that Ukrainian forces struck Rubizhne (6km east of Kreminna) and Troitske (53km northeast of Kupyansk) with 14 HIMARS rockets on the evening of April 13.[38] A Russian milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces are striking Russian military assets in rear areas in preparation for counteroffensive operations in the area and speculated that Ukrainian forces will increase sabotage activities in rear areas in Luhansk Oblast.[39]

Russian sources claimed that Ukrainian forces continued reconnaissance activity along the Kupyansk-Svatove line on April 14. The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) claimed that Russian forces repelled five Ukrainian sabotage and reconnaissance groups near Vilshana (13km northeast of Kupyansk), Tymkivka (18km east of Kupyansk), and Krokhmalne (20km northwest of Svatove).[40]

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 advance in Bakhmut on April 14. Geolocated footage showed that Wagner Group forces made marginal gains in northwestern Bakhmut and advanced in southwestern Bakhmut.[41] Russian milbloggers claimed that Wagner forces cleared Rose Alley park in northwestern Bakhmut and advanced in several areas in central Bakhmut, including across an unspecified section of rail track on April 13.[42] A Russian milblogger claimed on April 14 that Russian forces attacked Predtechnyne and Wagner Group forces continued assaults in Bakhmut, near Khromove (2km west of Bakhmut), and near Bohdanivka (6km northwest of Bakhmut).[43] A Wagner-affiliated milblogger claimed that Russian forces do not control the T0504 Bakhmut-Ivanivske-Chasiv Yar highway despite prior milblogger claims to the contrary.[44] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian ground attacks in Bakhmut, northwest of Bakhmut near Bohdanivka, and southwest of Bakhmut near Predtechyne.[45] A Republic of Tatarstan outlet reported that the 2nd Battalion of the ”Veterany” Separate Air Assault Brigade is operating on one of the Bakhmut flanks.[46]

Russian forces continued to conduct ground attacks on the Avdiivka-Donetsk City line on April 14. Geolocated footage published on April 14 shows that Russian forces have advanced to the eastern outskirts of Nevelske (8km west of Donetsk City).[47] Russian milbloggers claimed on April 13 that Russian forces advanced near Novokalynove (10km north of Avdiivka), Opytne (3km southwest of Avdiivka), and Kruta Balka (3km northeast of Avdiivka).[48] A milblogger claimed on April 14 that Russian forces conducted ground attacks near Novomykhailivka, Pobieda, Sieverne, and Marinka.[49] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian ground attacks near Novokalynove, Sieverne (5km west of Avdiivka), Pervomaiske (11km southwest of Avdiivka), and Marinka (27km southwest of Avdiivka).[50]

Russian forces did not conduct any confirmed or claimed ground attacks in western Donetsk Oblast on April 14.[51] A Russian milblogger claimed that the Russian 40th Naval Infantry Brigade is still operating near Vuhledar as of April 14.[52]

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

Russian forces continue to endanger the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP) amidst continued Russian efforts to establish control over the ZNPP as of April 14. International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director Rafael Grossi stated on April 14 that the ZNPP’s dependency on a single power line continues to pose a major risk and that IAEA representatives regularly report shelling near the ZNPP.[53] Grossi reported that two landmines detonated near the perimeter of the ZNPP on April 8 and 12.[54] Grossi reported that Russian officials are preparing to transfer one of the ZNPP’s two remaining reactors currently in hot shutdown mode to a cold shutdown mode and that the Kakhovka Reservoir is currently two meters above the minimum required for cooling at the ZNPP.[55] Grossi reported that one third of the ZNPP’s original staff have left and that the remainder having either signed contracts with Russian state energy company Rosenergoatom or retained their employment with Ukrainian State energy company Enerhoatom.[56] A Russian source reported on April 14 that the ”SahaBootur” Russian Airborne (VDV) Battalion comprised mainly of mobilized personnel from Yakutsk, Republic of Sakha deployed to the Enerhodar area.[57]

Russian sources claimed that Ukrainian forces continue to target Russian rear areas in Zaporizhia Oblast. Russian milbloggers claimed that Ukrainian forces struck Melitopol with an unspecified munitions on April 14 and that Russian air defenses in Melitopol intercepted a Ukrainian drone on April 13.[58]

Russian forces reportedly continue to maintain a military presence on the Kinburn Spit in Mykolaiv Oblast as of April 13. Russian state outlet Pravda reported on April 13 that the “Terek” Cossack volunteer battalion is operating on the Kinburn Spit.[59]

Russian forces continued routine fire west of Hulyaipole and in Kherson Oblast on April 14.[60]

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

A Russian volunteer who previously served in the “Troy” special forces detachment revealed to Russian independent outlet Novaya Gazeta Europe that the Kremlin continues to use private military companies (PMCs) and nationalist networks to support its force generation campaigns.[61] The volunteer recounted that he originally signed a contract with an unnamed Russian PMC during the start of mobilization in September 2022 after reading a recruitment ad on Telegram, and noted that he had wanted to serve in the war but was disinterested in signing a contract with the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD). Novaya Gazeta observed that the volunteer likely enlisted into the Redut PMC based on his month-long training at the Trigulay Training Ground in Tambov Oblast, which the Redut PMC uses to train volunteers. This training ground, however, belongs to the 16th Special Purpose (SPETSNAZ) Brigade of the Main Directorate of the Russian General Staff. The volunteer noted being completely blindsided when he was directed to operate within the "Troy” detachment, implying that volunteer service within a PMC was more appealing because volunteers had more control over their deployments than volunteers who had signed contracts directly with the Russian MoD. Novaya Gazeta previously reported that Redut has ties with the Russian MoD and is responsible for the recruitment of the ”Veterany” battalion and the ”Don” Cossack Brigade.[62] The ”Troy” battalion formed in mid-2014 in Donetsk Oblast where it operated as a special forces reconnaissance company and frequently got into altercations with the Donetsk People’s Republic’s (DNR) units that deemed the battalion to be full of ”fake paratroopers.” The volunteer revealed that the “Troy” battalion operated in the Svatove area of operations since December 2022 with only half of the unit having prior military experience. The volunteer noted that he heard that the Russian MoD disbanded the “Troy” battalion to incorporate volunteer units into the conventional forces. The volunteer noted that the Russian military command was protecting the volunteer units unlike their negligent treatment of the mobilized personnel.

Novaya Gazeta’s interview with the Russian volunteer uncovers several key observations about the Russian volunteer recruitment movement. The interview reinforces the ISW’s assessment that the Russian MoD is not effective in directly attracting recruits due to its reputation, making Russian PMCs more appealing to recruits.[63] The Russian MoD is likely using MoD-affiliated PMCs to mislead recruits into signing military contracts, effectively transferring PMC personnel into Russian military under the recent efforts to professionalize the military. The interview indicates that Russian elite units such as airborne (VDV) or SPETSNAZ forces are likely reinforced by volunteers and mobilized personnel and are no longer fully or even mainly composed of professionals or specialists, calling into question their status as “elite” units. A Russian milblogger also observed that Russia needs to change its recruitment system because it does not account for recruits’ expertise.[64] Russia may even be creating or misrepresenting SPETSNAZ or VDV volunteer units to attract recruits regardless of their inexperience with special forces or VDV operations to brand such recruitment as enlistment into prestigious elite units.

Russian officials are continuing to expand their volunteer recruitment campaigns across Russia and in occupied Ukraine. Advisor to the Republic of Bashkortostan Head Artur Yumaguzhin reportedly formed the “Salavat Yulaev” Operational Battalion.[65] Mariupol Mayor Advisor Petro Andryushenko amplified reports of Mariupol residents receiving advertisements to sign military contracts with the Russian Armed Forces.[66] Russian Crimea Occupation Head Sergey Aksyonov met with representatives of the Russian Volunteer Society for Assistance to the Army, Aviation, and Navy of Russia (DOSAAF) and pledged to allocate 15 million rubles (about $182,325) to expand the program.[67] ISW previously reported that DOSAAF has ties to Wagner Group’s recruitment efforts.[68] A Republic of Tatarstan outlet reported that 15 fighters of the BARS-13 ”Russkiy Legion” unit (Russian Combat Army Reserve) deployed to Ukraine on April 14.[69] The owner of the Lobayev Arms precision grade rifle ammunition manufacturer, Vladimir Lobayev claimed that local officials such as Krasnodar Krai Duma official Tozlyan Armenak are continuing to purchase weapons for an unnamed Cossack BARS unit.[70]

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 security personnel continue to arrest Ukrainian citizens on allegations that they associate with a Crimean Tatar volunteer battalion. Russian sources claimed on April 14 that the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) arrested two alleged members of the Noman Chelebidzhikhan Volunteer Battalion in Sevastopol, Crimea.[71] The Noman Chelebidzhikan Volunteer Battalion is an armed resistance formation established in 2016 to oppose Russia’s annexation of Crimea and is banned in Russia. Crimean news outlet Crimean Realities reported on April 14 that Russian security forces have detained dozens of Ukrainian citizens throughout the past year on accusations that they participated in the Crimean Tatar volunteer battalion.[72]

Russian Federation Commissioner for Childrens’ Rights Maria Lvova-Belova claimed on April 14 that delays in returning Ukrainian children from Russia to Ukraine were due to changes in frontline hostilities.[73] Lvova-Belova claimed on April 14 that all Ukrainian children who had not previously returned from “vacations” in Krasnodar Krai have now returned to their families.[74] Lvova-Belova continued to claim that parents from occupied territories voluntarily sent their children to southern Russia at the end of summer 2022 and that both Russian and Ukrainian volunteer organizations are assisting to reunite Ukrainian children with their parents.[75] ISW continues to assess that Russian officials use vacation and rehabilitation schemes to deport Ukrainian children to occupied Crimea and Russia.

Russian occupation authorities continue to prepare for preliminary elections in occupied territories. Zaporizhia Oblast occupation head Yevgeny Balitsky announced on April 14 that he applied to participate in preliminary voting in the All-Russian United Russia Party, which will take place from May 22-28.[76] Zaporizhia Oblast occupation deputy Vladimir Rogov claimed on April 13 that occupation officials will launch local elections to select members of the legislative assembly and that those individuals will propose their candidates for governor of occupied Zaporizhia Oblast.[77]

A Russian source claimed on April 14 that occupation law enforcement in Mariupol arrested two individuals suspected of conducting an attack on Mariupol occupation police chief Mikhail Moskvin on March 27.[78]

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.

Belarusian maneuver elements continue conducting exercises in Belarus. The Belarusian Ministry of Defense announced on April 14 that unspecified elements of Belarus’ Western Operational Command (about 6,000 personnel) are preparing to undergo combat readiness checks and a brigade tactical exercise after receiving equipment drawn from storage.[79]

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.

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

[18] https://telegra dot ph/Tolko-chestnyj-boj-nikakogo-dogovornyaka-04-14

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[25] https://www.dp dot ru/a/2023/04/14/sk-peterburga-poprosili-p

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[28] https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/04/14/leaked-docum...

[29] https://rt-online dot ru/stali-armiej-podderzhki/ ; https://ysia dot ru/bojtsy-yakutskogo-otryada-sahabootur-stali-geroyami-federalnogo-telekanala/ ; https://novayagazeta dot eu/articles/2023/04/12/podsumki-i-ikh-patrony

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[31] https://meduza dot io/news/2023/04/14/v-gostinom-dvore-otmenili-vse-meropriyatiya-v-nachale-iyunya-v-svyazi-s-gosudarstvennoy-neobhodimostyu-skoree-vsego-rech-idet-o-pervoy-za-dva-goda-pryamoy-linii-s-putinym;

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[33] https://meduza dot io/news/2023/04/14/v-gosdume-sozdali-rabochuyu-gruppu-chtoby-nayti-spravedlivoe-reshenie-kak-lishit-dohoda-v-rossii-inoagentov-i-artistov-s-antivoennoy-pozitsiey; https://tass dot ru/obschestvo/17526791; https://ria dot ru/20230414/kultura-1865314747.html

[34] https://www.moscowtimes dot ru/2023/01/25/v-gosdume-predlozhili-lishit-uehavshih-artistov-avtorskih-otchislenii-a31793; https://www.forbes dot ru/forbeslife/483662-v-gosdume-predlozili-sozdat-spisok-artistov-dla-zapreta-na-ucastie-v-gosproektah; https://t.me/vv_volodin/631

[35] https://meduza dot io/news/2023/04/14/v-gosdume-sozdali-rabochuyu-gruppu-chtoby-nayti-spravedlivoe-reshenie-kak-lishit-dohoda-v-rossii-inoagentov-i-artistov-s-antivoennoy-pozitsiey; https://tass dot ru/obschestvo/17526791; https://ria dot ru/20230414/kultura-1865314747.html

[36] https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid0y1NTW5AkVXwWPeeR7nE...

[37] https://t.me/wargonzo/11929

[38] https://t.me/miroshnik_r/11052

[39] https://t.me/notes_veterans/8956

[40] https://t.me/mod_russia/25641

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[44] https://t.me/grey_zone/18212

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[46] https://rt-online dot ru/stali-armiej-podderzhki/

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Opinion | What Are America and China Fighting About, Anyway?

The New York Times · by Thomas L. Friedman · April 14, 2023

Thomas L. Friedman

What Are America and China Fighting About, Anyway?

April 14, 2023, 1:00 a.m. ET

Credit...Damir Sagolj/Reuters

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Opinion Columnist

TAIPEI, Taiwan — I just returned from visiting China for the first time since Covid struck. Being back in Beijing was a reminder of my first rule of journalism: If you don’t go, you don’t know. Relations between our two countries have soured so badly, so quickly, and have so reduced our points of contact — very few American reporters are left in China, and our leaders are barely talking — that we’re now like two giant gorillas looking at each other through a pinhole. Nothing good will come from this.

The recent visit by Taiwan’s president, Tsai Ing-wen, to the United States — which prompted Beijing to hold live-fire drills off Taiwan’s coast and to warn anew that peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait is incompatible with any move by Taiwan toward formal independence — was just the latest reminder of how overheated this atmosphere is. The smallest misstep by either side could ignite a U.S.-China war that would make Ukraine look like a neighborhood dust-up.

That’s one of the many reasons I found it helpful to be back in Beijing and to be able to observe China again through a larger aperture than a pinhole. Attending the China Development Forum — Beijing’s very useful annual gathering of local and global business leaders, senior Chinese officials, retired diplomats and a few local and Western journalists — reminded me of some powerful old truths and exposed me to some eye-popping new realities about what’s really eating away at U.S.-China relations.

Hint: The new, new thing has a lot to do with the increasingly important role that trust, and its absence, plays in international relations, now that so many goods and services that the United States and China sell to one another are digital, and therefore dual use — meaning they can be both a weapon and a tool. Just when trust has become more important than ever between the U.S. and China, it also has become scarcer than ever. Bad trend.

More personally, being back in Beijing was also a reminder of how many people I’ve come to know and like there over three decades of reporting visits — but please don’t tell anyone in Washington that I said that. There’s something of a competition today between Democrats and Republicans over who can speak most harshly about China. Truth be told, both countries have so demonized the other of late that it is easy to forget how much we have in common as people. I can’t think of any major nation after the United States with more of a Protestant work ethic and naturally capitalist population than China.

Being back was also a reminder of the formidable weight and strength of what China has built since opening to the world in the 1970s, and even since Covid hit in 2019. China’s Communist Party government has a stronger grip than ever on its society, thanks to its police state surveillance and digital tracking systems: Facial recognition cameras are everywhere. The party crushes any challenge to its rule or to President Xi Jinping. These days, it is extremely difficult for a visiting columnist to get anyone — a senior official or a Starbucks barista — to speak on the record. It was not that way a decade ago.

Beijing has become an increasingly livable city in recent years. Credit...Mark Schiefelbein/Associated Press

That said, one should have no illusions: The Communist Party’s hold is also a product of all the hard work and savings of the Chinese people, which have enabled the party and the state to build world-class infrastructure and public goods that make life for China’s middle and lower classes steadily better.

Beijing and Shanghai, in particular, have become very livable cities, with the air pollution largely erased and lots of new, walkable green spaces. As my Times colleague Keith Bradsher reported in 2021, Shanghai had recently built 55 new parks, bringing its total to 406, and had plans for nearly 600 more.

Keith, one of the handful of American reporters who lived in mainland China through nearly three years of stringent “zero Covid” policies, also pointed out to me that some 900 cities and towns in China are now served by high-speed rail, which makes travel to even remote communities incredibly cheap, easy and comfortable. In the last 23 years America has built exactly one sort-of-high-speed rail line, the Acela, serving 15 stops between Washington, D.C., and Boston. Think about that: 900 to 15.

I say this not to argue that high-speed trains are better than freedom. I say this to explain that being in Beijing reminds you that China’s stability is a product of both an increasingly pervasive police state and a government that has steadily raised standards of living. It’s a regime that takes both absolute control and relentless nation-building seriously.

For an American to fly from New York’s J.F.K. into Beijing Capital International Airport today is to fly from an overcrowded bus terminal to a Disney-like Tomorrowland. It makes me weep for all the time we have wasted these past eight years talking about a faux nation builder named Donald Trump.

China has connected hundreds of cities via high-speed rail, helping the government earn support from the people.

On my first day in Beijing, I had a conversation with a young Chinese woman, a college student. Her first question, alluding to a book I wrote, was: “Mr. Friedman, is the world still flat?”

I explained why I thought it was flatter than ever by my definition — which was that because of steady advances in connectivity and digitization, more people can compete, connect and collaborate on more things for less money from more places than ever. During my time in Beijing, I was struck at how educated Chinese people seem to be more connected, and able to get around digital firewalls, than before.

I could see the woman wasn’t totally convinced by my explanation, so we moved on to other subjects. And then she dropped this: “I just used ChatGPT.”

I said, “You used ChatGPT from Beijing, and you’re asking me if the world is still flat?”

Indeed, a story making the rounds in Beijing is that many Chinese have begun using ChatGPT to do their ideology homework for the local Communist Party cell, so they don’t have to waste time on it.

It’s funny, though — just when you start to worry about the state of J.F.K. Airport, and all the stories in recent years that China was going to bury us in the race to A.I., an American team, OpenAI, comes up with the world’s leading natural language processing tool that enables any user to have humanlike conversations, ask any question and get deep insights in every major language, including Mandarin.

China got an early jump on A.I. in two realms — facial recognition technology and health records — because there are virtually no privacy restrictions on the government’s ability to build huge data sets for machine learning algorithms to find patterns.

But generative A.I., like ChatGPT, gives anyone, from a poor farmer to a college professor, the power to ask any question on any subject in his or her own language. This could be a real problem for China, because it will have to build many guardrails into its own generative A.I. systems to limit what Chinese citizens can ask and what the computer can answer. If you can’t ask whatever you want, including what happened in Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989, and if your A.I. system is always trying to figure out what to censor, where to censor and whom to censor, it will be less productive.

“ChatGPT is prompting some people to ask if the U.S. is rising again, like in the 1990s,” Dingding Chen, a Chinese political scientist, told me and Keith.

It’s for all of these reasons that weighing the shifting power relationship between America and China has become such a popular pastime among elites in both of our countries. For instance, through social media, many Chinese got to see parts of the March 23 hearing on Capitol Hill where members of Congress questioned — or, actually, berated, harangued and constantly interrupted — TikTok’s chief executive, Shou Chew, claiming TikTok’s videos were damaging American children’s mental health.

Hu Xijin, one of China’s most popular bloggers, with almost 25 million followers on Weibo, China’s equivalent of Twitter, explained to me just how insulting Chinese found that hearing. It was widely and derisively commented about online in China.

(All that said, YouTube has been banned from China since 2009, so we’re not the only ones frightened by popular apps. I say we trade: We’ll accept TikTok if Beijing will let in YouTube.)

“I understand your feeling: You have been in the first place for a century, and now China is rising, and we have the potential to become the first — and that is not easy for you,” Hu said to me. But “you should not try to stop China’s development. You can’t contain China in the end. We are quite smart. And very diligent. We work very hard. And we have 1.4 billion people.”

Before the Trump presidency, he added: “We never thought China-U.S. relations would ever become so bad. Now we gradually accept the situation, and most Chinese people think there is no hope for better relations. We think the relationship will be worse and worse and hope that war will not break out between our two countries.”

Credit...Thomas Peter/Reuters

It was repeated conversations like these that got me started asking American, Chinese and Taiwanese investors, analysts and officials a question that has been nagging at me for a while: What exactly are America and China fighting about?

A lot of people hesitated when I asked. Indeed, many would answer with some version of “I’m not sure, I just know that it’s THEIR fault.”

I’m pretty sure I’d get the same answer in Washington.

The best part of this trip has been uncovering the real answer to that question and why it stumps so many people. It’s because the real answer is so much deeper and more complex than just the usual one-word response — “Taiwan” — or the usual three-word response — “autocracy versus democracy.”

Let me try to peel back the layers. The erosion in U.S.-China relations is a result of something old and obvious — a traditional great-power rivalry between an incumbent power (us) and a rising power (China) — but with lots of new twists that are not always visible to the naked eye.

The old and obvious aspect is that China and America are jostling to acquire the most economic and military clout to shape the rules of the 21st century in ways most advantageous to their respective economic and political systems. And one of those disputed rules, which America has acknowledged but not endorsed, is China’s claim to Taiwan as part of “One China.”

Because that “rule” remains in dispute, we will continue to arm Taiwan to deter Beijing from seizing the island, crushing its democracy and using it as a jumping off point to dominate the rest of East Asia, and China will keep pushing for reunification — one way or another.

One of the twists, though, is that this standard-issue great-power rivalry is occurring between nations that have become as economically intertwined as the strands of a DNA molecule. As a result, neither China nor America has ever had a rival quite like the other.

America knew how to deal with Nazi Germany, an economic and military peer, but a country with which we were not deeply economically intertwined. America knew how to deal with the Soviet Union, a military peer but nowhere near our economic peer, and a country with which we were not economically intertwined at all.

Ditto China. For several thousand years China saw itself as situated in the middle of the world — hence it referred to itself as Zhong Guo, the Middle Kingdom — protected by mountains, deserts and seas on all sides, and often dominating states around it, while fiercely preserving its own culture. That was until the 19th century, when it began to be repeatedly ravaged by stronger foreign powers: Britain, France, Russia and Japan.

But in modern times, China, like America, has never had to deal with a true economic and military peer with which it was also totally intertwined through trade and investment.

How intertwined? Americans’ favorite device is an iPhone assembled mostly in China, and until recently the favored foreign destination of Chinese college students — some 300,000 of them today — is America. That makes for some weird scenes, like watching one country shoot down another country’s intelligence balloon just after the two countries in 2022 set a record in annual bilateral trade.

Another new twist, and a reason it’s hard to define exactly what we’re fighting about, has a lot to do with how this elusive issue of trust and the absence of it have suddenly assumed much greater importance in international affairs.

This is a byproduct of our new technological ecosystem in which more and more devices and services that we both use and trade are driven by microchips and software, and connected through data centers in the cloud and high-speed internet. When so many more products or services became digitized and connected, so many more things became “dual use.” That is, technologies that can easily be converted from civilian tools to military weapons, or vice versa.

In the Cold War it was relatively easy to say that this fighter jet is a weapon and that that phone is a tool. But when we install the ability to sense, digitize, connect, process, learn, share and act into more and more things — from your GPS-enabled phone to your car to your toaster to your favorite app — they all become dual use, either weapons or tools depending on who controls the software running them and who owns the data that they spin off.

Today, it’s just a few lines of code that separate autonomous cars from autonomous weapons. And, as we’ve seen in Ukraine, a smartphone can be used by Grandma to call the grandkids or to call a Ukrainian rocket-launching unit and give it the GPS coordinates of a Russian tank in her backyard.

This, too, leads to more weird twists. I am thinking of how a number of U.S. armed forces branches have banned TikTok from government-issued smartphones and computers. This is surely the first time that the Pentagon has banned an app that is mostly known for sharing dance moves. But there is a real fear that TikTok’s highly addictive algorithm is dual use and could be repurposed by the Chinese intelligence service to amass data on our youth — more than 150 million Americans have downloaded the app, the company says — to scramble their brains, spread disinformation or collect information that could one day be used for blackmail.

And the twists just keep on coming. For the first 30 or so years after Beijing opened up to trading with the world, starting around 1978-79, China largely sold America what I call “shallow” goods — shoes, socks, shirts and solar panels.

Meanwhile, America and the West tended to sell China what I call “deep goods” — goods that went deep into their systems and were dual use — namely software, microchips, bandwidth, smartphones and robots. China had to buy our deep goods because, until relatively recently, it could not make many itself.

As long as most of what China sold us was shallow goods, we did not care as much about its political system — doubly so because it seemed for a while as if China was slowly but steadily becoming more and more integrated with the world and slightly more open and transparent every year. So, it was both easy and convenient to set aside some of our worries about the dark sides of its political system.

But then, about eight years ago, we got a knock on our door and there was a Chinese salesman. He said: “Hi, my name is Mr. Huawei and I make 5G telephone equipment better than anything you have. I’m starting to install it all over the world, and I’d like to wire America.”

What America essentially told this Huawei salesman, as well as other rising Chinese high-tech firms, was this: “When Chinese companies were just selling us shallow goods, we didn’t care if your political system was authoritarian, libertarian or vegetarian; we were just buying your shallow goods. But when you want to sell us ‘deep goods’ — goods that are dual use and will go deep into our homes, bedrooms, industries, chatbots and urban infrastructure — we don’t have enough trust to buy them. So, we are going to ban Huawei and instead pay more to buy our 5G telecom systems from Scandinavian companies we do trust: Ericsson and Nokia.”

China is exporting more and more “deep goods” to the rest of the world, in part thanks to the telecom company Huawei.Credit...Qilai Shen/Bloomberg

The role of trust in international relations and commerce took one more great leap for another reason: As more and more products and services became digitized and electrified, the microchips that powered everything became the new oil. What crude oil was to powering 19th- and 20th-century economies, microchips are for powering 21st-century economies.

So today, the country or countries that can make the fastest, most powerful and most energy efficient microchips can make the biggest A.I. computers and dominate in economics and military affairs.

But here’s the rub: Because the physics of making advanced logic chips has become so complex — a human hair is about 90,000 nanometers thick and the world’s best mass producer of advanced chips in the world is now making 3-nanometer transistors — no one country or company can own the whole supply chain. You need the best from everywhere, and that supply chain is so tightly intertwined that each company has to trust the others intimately.

China doesn’t need to look far for that lesson. It is on display right across the Straits of Taiwan, at the world’s greatest chip-making company, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, better known as TSMC.

After I left Beijing, I came to Taiwan, where I spent an afternoon with the leaders of TSMC at their headquarters in Hsinchu Science Park, a 90-minute drive south of Taipei, the capital. When you ask them what is the secret that enables TSMC to make 90 percent of the world’s most advanced logic chips — while China, which speaks the same language and shares the same recent cultural history, makes zero — their answer is simple: “trust.”

TSMC is a semiconductor foundry, meaning it takes the designs of the most advanced computer companies in the world — Apple, Qualcomm, Nvidia, AMD and others — and turns the designs into chips that perform different processing functions. In doing so, TSMC makes two solemn oaths to its customers: TSMC will never compete against them by designing its own chips and it will never share the designs of one of its customers with another.

“Our business is to serve multiple competitive clients,” Kevin Zhang, senior vice president for business development at TSMC, explained to me. “We are committed not to compete with any of them, and internally our people who serve customer A will never leak their information to customer C.”

But by working with so many trusted partners, TSMC leverages the partners’ steadily more complex designs to make itself better — and the better it gets, the more advanced designs it can master for its customers. This not only requires incredibly tight collaboration between TSMC and its customers, but also between TSMC and its roughly 1,000 local and global critical suppliers.

“Our customers are very demanding,” added Zhang. “Their products each have unique requirements.” They each “tell us what they want to do, and together we figure out how TSMC will design the process to make it.” As the physics of chip making gets more and more extreme, “the investment from customers is getting bigger and bigger, so they have to work with us more closely to make sure they harvest as much [computing power] as they can. They have to trust you.”

China also has a foundry, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation, which is partly state-owned. But guess what? Because no global chip designers trust SMIC with their most advanced designs, it is at least a decade behind TSMC.

It’s for these reasons that the erosion in U.S.-China relations goes beyond our increasingly sharp disagreements over Taiwan. It is rooted in the fact that just when trust, and its absence, became much bigger factors in international affairs and commerce, China changed its trajectory. It made itself a less trusted partner right when the most important technology for the 21st century — semiconductors — required unprecedented degrees of trust to manufacture and more and more devices and services became deep and dual use.

Why did China lose our trust?

After the period of China’s isolation and internal turmoil under Mao Zedong ended with his death in 1976, a successor, Deng Xiaoping, made a 180-degree turn away from Maoism. Deng established a much more collective leadership for China and term limits for the top leaders and put pragmatism — whatever will drive economic growth — above Communist ideology, while hiding China’s growing strength.

In the era of Deng and his successors — in the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s — Beijing forged strong economic and educational ties with the U.S., which ushered China into the World Trade Organization, on the condition that China gradually phase out its mercantilist practice of funding state-owned industries and that it gradually open itself to more foreign investment and ownership, as much as the world opened itself to China’s exports.

But after Xi Jinping took over as China’s paramount leader in 2012, he seemed to be alarmed at how China’s openness toward the world, its consensus approach to leadership and its rush down a semi-capitalist path had led to runaway corruption inside both the Communist Party and the People’s Liberation Army, to a degree that was hurting the party’s legitimacy.

So Xi centralized power into his own hands, crushed all the fiefs that had been created by different leaders of different government agencies and sectors of the economy, re-injected the authority of the Communist Party into every corner of business, academia and society and deployed pervasive surveillance technologies. All together, this reversed what seemed like China’s steady march toward more openness — and even a somewhat freer press.

Xi also basically shifted away from Deng’s unabashed unleashing of the private sector, focusing instead on building national economic champions that could dominate all the key industries of the 21st century — from A.I. to quantum computing to aerospace — and making sure Communist Party cells were in their management and in their work forces. And when American trade officials said, “Hey, you need to live up to your W.T.O. commitments to restrict state-funding of industries,” China basically said, “Why should we live by your interpretation of the rules? We are now big enough to make our own interpretations. We’re too big; you’re too late.”

Combined with China’s failure to come clean on what it knew about the origins of Covid-19, its crackdown on democratic freedoms in Hong Kong and on the Uyghur Muslim minority in Xinjiang, its aggressive moves to lay claim to the South China Sea, its increasing saber rattling toward Taiwan, its cozying up to Vladimir Putin (despite his savaging of Ukraine), Xi’s moves toward making himself president for life, his kneecapping of China’s own tech entrepreneurs, his tighter restrictions on speech and the occasional abduction of a leading Chinese businessman — all of these added up to one very big thing: Whatever trust that China had built up with the West since the late 1970s evaporated at the exact moment in history when trust, and shared values, became more important than ever in a world of deep, dual-use products driven by software, connectivity and microchips.

As that happened, it started to matter a lot more to Western nations generally and the U.S. in particular that this rising power — which we were now selling to or buying from all sorts of dual-use digital devices or apps — was authoritarian.

As the people of Hong Kong tried to defend their democratic freedoms, the Chinese government cracked down.Credit...Vincent Yu/Associated Press

Beijing, for its part, argues that as China became a stronger global competitor to the U.S. — in deep goods like Huawei 5G — the U.S. simply could not handle it and decided to use its control over advanced semiconductor manufacturing and other high-tech exports from America, as well as from our allies, to ensure China always remained in our rearview mirror. So Beijing came up with a new strategy, called “dual circulation.” It said: We will use state-led investments to make everything we possibly can at home, to become independent of the world. And we will use our manufacturing prowess to make the world dependent on our exports.

Chinese officials also argue that a lot of American politicians, led by Trump but echoed by many in Congress, suddenly seemed to find it very convenient to put the blame for economic troubles in the U.S.’s middle class not on any educational deficiencies, or a poor work ethic, or automation or the 2008 looting by financial elites, but on China’s exports to America. As Beijing sees it, China not only became America’s go-to boogeyman, but in their frenzy to blame Beijing for everything, members of Congress started to more recklessly promote Taiwan’s independence.

A senior administration official told me that Xi told President Biden at their summit in Bali in November, in essence: I will not be the president of China who loses Taiwan. If you force my hand, there will be war. You don’t understand how important this is to the Chinese people. You’re playing with fire.

Nevertheless, it’s clear to me that at some level Chinese officials now understand that, as a result of their own aggressive actions in recent years on all the fronts I’ve listed, they have frightened both the world and their own innovators at precisely the wrong time.

I say that because of how often senior Chinese officials tell every foreign leader and visiting Western business executive they meet today that China is “open” and eager for foreign investment. The reality is, it has to be more open to foreign direct investment because China’s provinces desperately need capital to compensate for all the money each local government spent controlling Covid and because many of them are running out of land to sell for state-owned factories to raise money.

I also don’t think it was an accident of timing that Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba and sort of the Steve Jobs of China, suddenly reappeared a few weeks ago in state-controlled media after having suddenly disappeared from public view in 2020. Ma had vanished after a disagreement with state regulators, who thought he was getting too big and independent. His disappearance sent shock waves through China’s start-up community and curbed investments.

I have no problem saying that I would like to live in a world where the Chinese people are thriving, alongside all others. After all, we are talking about more than one out of six people on the planet. I don’t buy the argument that we are destined for war. I believe that we are doomed to compete with each other, doomed to cooperate with each other and doomed to find some way to balance the two. Otherwise we are both going to have a very bad 21st century.

I have to say, though, Americans and Chinese remind me of Israelis and Palestinians in one respect: They are both expert at aggravating the other’s deepest insecurities.

China’s Communist Party is now convinced that America wants to bring it down, which some U.S. politicians are actually no longer shy about suggesting. So, Beijing is ready to crawl into bed with Putin, a war criminal, if that is what it takes to keep the Americans at bay.

Americans are now worried that Communist China, which got rich by taking advantage of a global market shaped by American rules, will use its newfound market power to unilaterally change those rules entirely to its advantage. So we’ve decided to focus our waning strength vis-à-vis Beijing on ensuring the Chinese will always be a decade behind us on microchips.

I don’t know what is sufficient to reverse these trends, but I think I know what is necessary.

If it is not the goal of U.S. foreign policy to topple the Communist regime in China, the U.S. needs to make that crystal clear, because I found a lot more people than ever before in Beijing think otherwise.

And by the way, in today’s fused world, the notion that China can economically collapse and America still thrive is utter fantasy. And the notion that the Europeans will always be with us in such an endeavor, given the size of China’s market, may also be fanciful. Note French President Emmanuel Macron’s bowing and scraping in Beijing last week.

As for China, it can tell itself all it wants that it has not taken a U-turn in recent years. But no one is buying it. China will never realize its full potential — in a hyper-connected, digitized, deep, dual-use, semiconductor-powered world — unless it understands that establishing and maintaining trust is now the single most important competitive advantage any country or company can have. And Beijing is failing in that endeavor.

In his splendid biography of the great American statesman George Shultz, Philip Taubman quotes one of Shultz’s cardinal rules of diplomacy and life: “Trust is the coin of the realm.”

Never has that been truer than today, and never has China been more in need of embracing that truth.

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

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The New York Times · by Thomas L. Friedman · April 14, 2023

4. Document Leaks Indicate Extent of U.S. Electronic Snooping

Excerpts:

While the Central Intelligence Agency and its human spies often garner the headlines, the NSA is widely believed to be the largest intelligence agency in staff and budget. Those numbers are classified. By some estimates, 60% or more of the material in the president’s daily intelligence briefing is based on signals intelligence.

It couldn’t be determined whether the unauthorized revelations of U.S. eavesdropping prowess would affect the political debate in Congress over reauthorizing Section 702 powers. But advocates said it couldn’t hurt.

“Members of Congress will look at how rich and detailed this information is and think it’s eye-popping,” Mr. Gerstell said. “But one unintended effect of this leak is that it might make clear to them just how important FISA is.”

Document Leaks Indicate Extent of U.S. Electronic Snooping

Classified material shows U.S. eavesdrops on allies as well as enemies

https://www.wsj.com/articles/document-leaks-indicate-extent-of-u-s-electronic-snooping-63b10387?mod=hp_lead_pos1

By Warren P. Strobel

Updated April 15, 2023 7:53 am ET

WASHINGTON—The classified documents that investigators say were leaked by a junior member of the Massachusetts Air National Guard indicate the extent to which U.S. spy agencies rely on clandestinely intercepted communications to keep tabs on their adversaries and allies alike.

In vivid examples, the documents track foreign governments’ military movements, diplomatic efforts and clandestine weapons sales, as well as debates in friendly capitals and more.

The powerful eavesdropping program that enables some of that intelligence gathering is due to lapse at the end of the year. To persuade Congress to renew the program, Biden administration officials had been debating whether to declassify intelligence formally to show how the tool protects the U.S.

The alleged leaker might have forced the issue.

How Classified Documents Are (Supposed to Be) Handled

The Critical Minerals Club

The United States and allies aim to sidestep reliance on China for the materials needed for clean tech and advanced defense gear.

By Christina Lu

Foreign Policy · by Christina Lu · April 14, 2023

U.S. lawmakers are scrambling to weaken China’s grip on the critical mineral supply chains that are key to the global energy transition, as escalating tensions stoke fears of strategic vulnerabilities and potential geopolitical disruptions.

While decades of investments have allowed Beijing to dominate the processing and refining of key critical minerals, worsening U.S.-China relations have sparked a new push to redraw the map. Desperate to disentangle from China, Washington has been joining forces with allies to secure new supplies, part of a broader realignment as countries increasingly forge new trade ties alongside geopolitical lines, rather than the bottom line.

“The globalization 1.0 of the last 50 years was about finding economic value through distributed production and sourcing at best cost from overseas,” said Kevin Book, the managing director of ClearView Energy Partners, a consultancy. “The 2.0 version is about values-driven economics, and that is a very big change, one that we cannot underscore enough—but it’s also a change that’s slow to happen.”

This shift is apparent in the rush for critical minerals, which are essential to the lithium-ion batteries that power electric vehicles (EVs) and other green technology. Global demand is primed to explode: By 2050, clean energy technology could require billions of tons of these minerals as inputs, according to the World Bank. Other critical minerals include cobalt, used in jet engines, and the rare earth elements that are used in everything from wind turbines to missile guidance systems. China overwhelmingly commands these minerals’ processing and refining markets and controls some 77 percent of the world’s EV battery manufacturing capacity.

To reduce its reliance on Beijing in the coming decades, Washington is focusing on aligning with allies, including through the Mineral Security Partnership (MSP), an initiative that is designed to bolster supply chain security with Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Japan, South Korea, and other members. Outside of the MSP, the Biden administration is also pursuing new trade deals and is reportedly in discussions with the European Union for a new critical minerals club.

“This is a major move away from a fundamental faith in the ability of market mechanisms to adequately supply the raw materials and the manufactured goods that are necessary for energy transitions,” said Cullen Hendrix, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. “This is obviously a much more interventionist kind of stance than had been pursued in the past.”

In the United States, one of the most concerted pushes came from the Inflation Reduction Act, the Biden administration’s sweeping climate, health, and tax bill designed to accelerate the shift away from fossil fuels. The act offers tax credits if a sizable proportion of the EV batteries’ mineral inputs are sourced from the United States or a free trade partner. The guidelines sparked fierce pushback after excluding governments that have not signed free trade deals with Washington—including Japan, the European Union, and top critical mineral producers such as Indonesia, the Philippines, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Washington is now working to bring these countries into the fold. It appears to have found a way to circumvent the trade challenge, recently inking a critical mineral trade agreement with Tokyo that would allow Japanese companies to qualify under Inflation Reduction Act provisions. That deal could serve as a model for other partnerships: British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is reportedly pushing for a similar agreement, while nickel-rich Indonesia has proposed signing an agreement that mirrors Washington’s pact with Japan.

Rattled by the Inflation Reduction Act, Brussels and Washington are also negotiating a similar trade deal that could later pave the way for the wider critical minerals buyers club that European officials have championed. Separately, Brussels is also reportedly planning to form a central buying agency for critical minerals.

China has manipulated the trade in rare earths in the past, such as when it cut off exports to Japan in 2010, and is reportedly mulling a new export ban for specific kinds of rare earth magnet technology. But a big part of the reason why European countries are eager to diversify away from China is their experience with Russia. After Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Moscow weaponized Europe’s heavy reliance on Russian natural gas imports—offering a stark lesson on the risks of overdependence.

“In Europe, we have learned very hard the lesson of being too dependent on energy from Russia and see how that could be weaponized,” said Cecilia Malmstrom, a former European commissioner for trade currently at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. “Now everybody’s very keen to avoid that situation.”

Beyond Europe, the United States has focused on deepening relationships with the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Zambia, which are rich in cobalt and copper, respectively, with the three countries signing a memorandum of understanding on electric vehicle battery value chains last December. In Tanzania, Washington is also involved in the development of a critical minerals processing facility.

Still, even as momentum builds, there are more questions than answers about how these efforts will pan out. As lawmakers continue to hammer out new agreements behind closed doors, it remains unclear how they align with global trading rules and what this momentum means for countries that lack free trade agreements with the United States. Engineering supply chains isn’t as simple as finding new mines, either; it involves an entire ecosystem of processing, refining, and manufacturing capabilities.

“It’s not at all clear how you go about changing dramatically a global supply chain in practice,” said Morgan Bazilian, the director of the Payne Institute at the Colorado School of Mines and a former lead energy specialist at the World Bank. While diplomacy and initiatives like the MSP are deeply useful, he said, such action “does not overnight or even within the course of a decade change these things dramatically.”

China spent decades building out its industry, and experts warn that wrestling new supply chains will be an expensive and arduous uphill battle that the United States is only just beginning. But U.S. lawmakers appear to be gearing up for the long haul.

“If you look at where supply chains are, where they’re growing fastest [is] still China,” said Joseph Majkut, the director of the Energy Security and Climate Change Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “There’s a lot to be done to match that growth and to develop not just the factories, but the human capital, the intellectual property, [and] the long-standing political and economic relationships that let that supply chain grow.”

“You can’t build Rome in a day,” he added, “and you can’t build a critical minerals supply chain six months after you pass a big climate bill.”

Foreign Policy · by Christina Lu · April 14, 2023

6. Leaked documents show officials were aware of additional Chinese spy balloons: report

Leaked documents show officials were aware of additional Chinese spy balloons: report

BY JARED GANS - 04/14/23 8:34 PM ET

The Hill · · April 15, 2023

U.S. officials knew about additional Chinese spy balloons beyond the one that traveled across the United States in January and February, according to a report from The Washington Post.

The Post reported on Friday that the intelligence community also continued to have questions about the balloon after shooting it down in the Atlantic Ocean as it had sensors and antennas that the government had not identified more than a week after.

The reporting was based on documents that the Post obtained from the classified documents leaked online recently that shared a wide range of U.S. intelligence and national security information. The suspected leaker, a member of the Massachusetts Air National Guard, was arrested in connection with the leak on Thursday and charged with violating the Espionage Act.

The Post reported that the balloon that was shot down was one of at least three that intelligence agencies know of. One of the other two flew over a U.S. carrier strike group in the Pacific Ocean and the other crashed in the South China Sea, according to a top-secret document.

The document did not mention launch dates for the balloons.

Intelligence agencies refer to the balloon that traveled across the country before being shot down as Killeen-23. The documents the Post reviewed also mention balloons referred to as Bulger-21 and Accardo-21, but they do not make clear if these are the ones that flew over the carrier and crashed into the sea, respectively.

A document produced by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) states that Bulger-21 carried surveillance equipment while circumnavigating the world from December 2021 to May 2022. Accardo-21 carried similar equipment and a “foil-lined gimbaled” sensor.

The document includes an image that seems to connect Bulger-21 to one of six Chinese companies that the U.S. sanctioned in February for supporting the Chinese government’s spy balloon program, the Post reported.

It states that Killeen-23 contained a parabolic dish, multiple unidentified sensors and a possible mast antenna, but the government does not have any “imagery collections of the bottom of the Killeen-23 payload to analyze for an optical sensor.”

Another document states that Killeen-23’s entry into U.S. airspace likely surprised parts of the Chinese government, as information about the incident was “heavily stovepiped” in the Chinese military.

Fungal outbreak tied to Michigan paper mill leaves at least 1 dead, 12 hospitalized Protesters interrupt DeSantis speech at New Hampshire fundraising event

The Defense Department and Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined to comment to the Post on the report.

Republicans criticized the Biden administration over its delay in shooting down the balloon from February, arguing that it allowed China to continue spying on the U.S. The administration has said it took steps to limit the balloon’s capabilities while flying and wanted to avoid potentially harming anyone on the ground with falling debris.

But NBC reported earlier this month that the balloon was still able to gather some intelligence from sensitive military sites despite the administration’s efforts to block it.

The Hill · by Rebecca Beitsch · April 15, 2023

7. Misinformation Defense Worked in 2020, Up to a Point, Study Finds

We need a very broad type of cyber civil defense. It must start with self defense. We must learn to defend ourselves against misinformation and especially disinformation.

Excerpts:

Still, nearly 68 million people in the United States checked out websites that were not credible, visiting 1.5 billion times in a month in 2020, the researchers estimated. That included domains that are now defunct, such as theantimedia.com and obamawatcher.com. Some people in the study visited some of those sites hundreds of times.

As the 2024 election approaches, the researchers worry that misinformation is evolving and splintering. Beyond web browsers, many people are exposed to conspiracy theories and extremism simply by scrolling through mobile apps such as TikTok. More dangerous content has shifted onto encrypted messaging apps with difficult-to-trace private channels, such as Telegram or WhatsApp.

...

Mr. Hancock said that misinformation should be taken seriously, but that its scale should not be exaggerated. The Stanford study, he said, showed that the news consumed by most Americans was not misinformation but that certain groups of people were most likely to be targeted. Treating conspiracy theories and false narratives as an ever-present, wide-reaching threat could erode the public’s trust in legitimate news sources, he said.

“I still think there’s a problem, but I think it’s one that we’re dealing with and that we’re also recognizing doesn’t affect most people most of the time,” Mr. Hancock said. “If we are teaching our citizens to be skeptical of everything, then trust is undermined in all the things that we care about.”

Misinformation Defense Worked in 2020, Up to a Point, Study Finds

The New York Times · by Tiffany Hsu · April 13, 2023

Nearly 68 million Americans still visited untrustworthy websites 1.5 billion times in a month, according to Stanford researchers, causing concerns for 2024.

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When Americans went to the polls in 2020, a far smaller portion had visited websites containing false and misleading narratives than in 2016, according to Stanford researchers.Credit...Alyssa Schukar for The New York Times

Tiffany Hsu, based in San Francisco, writes about misinformation and the attempts to combat it.

April 13, 2023, 11:00 a.m. ET

Not long after misinformation plagued the 2016 election, journalists and content moderators scrambled to turn Americans away from untrustworthy websites before the 2020 vote.

A new study suggests that, to some extent, their efforts succeeded.

When Americans went to the polls in 2020, a far smaller portion had visited websites containing false and misleading narratives compared with four years earlier, according to researchers at Stanford. Although the number of such sites ballooned, the average visits among those people dropped, along with the time spent on each site.

Efforts to educate people about the risk of misinformation after 2016, including content labels and media literacy training, most likely contributed to the decline, the researchers found. Their study was published on Thursday in the journal Nature Human Behaviour.

“I am optimistic that the majority of the population is increasingly resilient to misinformation on the web,” said Jeff Hancock, the founding director of the Stanford Social Media Lab and the lead author of the report. “We’re getting better and better at distinguishing really problematic, bad, harmful information from what’s reliable or entertainment.”

“I am optimistic that the majority of the population is increasingly resilient to misinformation on the web,” said Jeff Hancock, the lead author of the Stanford report.Credit...Ian C. Bates for The New York Times

Still, nearly 68 million people in the United States checked out websites that were not credible, visiting 1.5 billion times in a month in 2020, the researchers estimated. That included domains that are now defunct, such as theantimedia.com and obamawatcher.com. Some people in the study visited some of those sites hundreds of times.

As the 2024 election approaches, the researchers worry that misinformation is evolving and splintering. Beyond web browsers, many people are exposed to conspiracy theories and extremism simply by scrolling through mobile apps such as TikTok. More dangerous content has shifted onto encrypted messaging apps with difficult-to-trace private channels, such as Telegram or WhatsApp.

The Spread of Misinformation and Falsehoods

Deepfakes: Meme-makers and misinformation peddlers are embracing artificial intelligence tools to create convincing fake videos on the cheap.
Cutting Back: Job cuts in the social media industry reflect a trend that threatens to undo many of the safeguards that platforms have put in place to ban or tamp down on disinformation.
A Key Case: The outcome of a federal court battle could help decide whether the First Amendment is a barrier to virtually any government efforts to stifle disinformation.
A Top Misinformation Spreader: A large study found that Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast had more falsehoods and unsubstantiated claims than other political talk shows.

The boom in generative artificial intelligence, the technology behind the popular ChatGPT chatbot, has also raised alarms about deceptive images and mass-produced falsehoods.

The Stanford researchers said that even limited or concentrated exposure to misinformation could have serious consequences. Baseless claims of election fraud incited a riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. More than two years later, congressional hearings, criminal trials and defamation court cases are still addressing what happened.

The Stanford researchers monitored the online activity of 1,151 adults from Oct. 2 through Nov. 9, 2020, and found that 26.2 percent visited at least one of 1,796 unreliable websites. They noted that the time frame did not include the postelection period when baseless claims of voter fraud were especially pronounced.

That was down from an earlier, separate report that found that 44.3 percent of adults visited at least one of 490 problematic domains in 2016.

The shrinking audience may have been influenced by attempts, including by social media companies, to mitigate misinformation, according to the researchers. They noted that 5.6 percent of the visits to untrustworthy sites in 2020 originated from Facebook, down from 15.1 percent in 2016. Email also played a smaller role in sending users to such sites in 2020.

Other researchers have highlighted more ways to limit the lure of misinformation, especially around elections. The Bipartisan Policy Center suggested in a report this week that states adopt direct-to-voter texts and emails that offer vetted information.

Social media companies should also do more to discourage performative outrage and so-called groupthink on their platforms — behavior that can fortify extreme subcultures and intensify polarization, said Yini Zhang, an assistant communication professor at the University at Buffalo.

Professor Zhang, who published a study this month about QAnon, said tech companies should instead encourage more moderate engagement, even by renaming “like” buttons to something like “respect.”

“For regular social media users, what we can do is dial back on the tribal instincts, to try to be more introspective and say: ‘I’m not going to take the bait. I’m not going to pile on my opponent,’” she said.

A QAnon flag on a vehicle headed to a pro-Trump rally in October. Yini Zhang, a University of Buffalo professor who published a study about QAnon, said social media companies should encourage users to “dial back on the tribal instincts.”Credit...Brittany Greeson for The New York Times

With next year’s presidential election looming, researchers said they are concerned about populations known to be vulnerable to misinformation, such as older people, conservatives and people who do not speak English.

More than 37 percent of people older than 65 visited misinformation sites in 2020 — a far higher rate than younger groups but an improvement from 56 percent in 2016, according to the Stanford report. In 2020, 36 percent of people who supported President Donald J. Trump in the election visited at least one misinformation site, compared with nearly 18 percent of people who supported Joseph R. Biden Jr. The participants also completed a survey that included questions about their preferred candidate.

Mr. Hancock said that misinformation should be taken seriously, but that its scale should not be exaggerated. The Stanford study, he said, showed that the news consumed by most Americans was not misinformation but that certain groups of people were most likely to be targeted. Treating conspiracy theories and false narratives as an ever-present, wide-reaching threat could erode the public’s trust in legitimate news sources, he said.

“I still think there’s a problem, but I think it’s one that we’re dealing with and that we’re also recognizing doesn’t affect most people most of the time,” Mr. Hancock said. “If we are teaching our citizens to be skeptical of everything, then trust is undermined in all the things that we care about.”

The New York Times · by Tiffany Hsu · April 13, 2023

8. China Is Studying Russia’s Economic Playbook for Conflict

Excerpts:

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has demonstrated two particularly relevant facets of U.S. strategy. The first is U.S. support of Ukraine, primarily in the form of military backing via weapons shipments and logistical assistance, as well as in broader political and economic terms. Such support has been maintained over the course of the prolonged conflict, with the United States and its NATO allies sustaining and even increasing various forms of aid for Ukraine over the past year. This has served to slow down and even reverse some of Russia’s territorial gains, while proving to Moscow that Western solidarity with Ukraine is not easily broken.

...

In this context, it is notable how China has ramped up its economic and diplomatic ties with select non-Western states over the course of the past year. Take, for example, China’s recent mediation of the Saudi Arabia-Iran diplomatic agreement reached on March 10, which itself was preceded by months of Beijing’s diplomatic engagement with Riyadh and Tehran that included economic deals with both countries. China has also further expanded energy ties with Russia over the past year, with Xi holding a high-profile meeting with Putin last month to tout such ties.

...

Whether or not China chooses to pursue the military option on Taiwan, Beijing is taking a page out of the Russian playbook to cultivate economic and diplomatic ties outside of the United States and its allies to better prepare itself for any scenario. Planning does not mean an invasion, or even a coercion attempt, is inevitable, and there are plenty of factors that may constrain Beijing from pulling the trigger. But Chinese diplomatic efforts may nevertheless offer hints about the course of any future moves against its neighbor.

China Is Studying Russia’s Economic Playbook for Conflict

Moscow’s efforts to deflect Western intervention may be applied to Taiwan.

By Eugene Chausovsky, a senior analyst at the Newlines Institute.

Foreign Policy · by Eugene Chausovsky · April 14, 2023

As tensions flare between China and the United States over Taiwan, most recently over Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen’s meeting with U.S. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy in California on April 5, there are growing concerns about the potential for conflict. Such fears have been elevated by Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in the face of U.S. opposition, a war that Beijing has been closely observing for its own purposes. Like Russia in Ukraine, China sees the United States as the chief force stopping it getting what it wants on this issue.

There have been countless studies over the lessons that Beijing could draw from the Ukraine conflict and apply to its own potential military intervention in Taiwan. But instead of focusing solely on the military dimension of Russia’s war in Ukraine, there is a more subtle—and perhaps more important—element of Moscow’s strategy in the conflict that China could be adapting in its efforts to absorb Taiwan. This element concerns the use of selective economic and diplomatic statecraft to counter any U.S.-led resistance, and Beijing is wasting no time in applying such lessons from the war in Ukraine to build up its own leverage over Taiwan.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has demonstrated two particularly relevant facets of U.S. strategy. The first is U.S. support of Ukraine, primarily in the form of military backing via weapons shipments and logistical assistance, as well as in broader political and economic terms. Such support has been maintained over the course of the prolonged conflict, with the United States and its NATO allies sustaining and even increasing various forms of aid for Ukraine over the past year. This has served to slow down and even reverse some of Russia’s territorial gains, while proving to Moscow that Western solidarity with Ukraine is not easily broken.

Chinese President Xi Jinping has to take into account the potential for U.S. military support for Taiwan in aiding Taiwanese resistance in the event that Beijing tries to take the island by military means. But the Chinese government also has to take into account the potential military, economic, and diplomatic support to Taiwan from other countries allied with the United States, including regional allies such as Japan and Australia.

A protracted conflict would be a nightmare for China, not least because seizing an island is more of an all-or-nothing deal than a land invasion. Indeed, Taiwanese officials have themselves drawn this connection, with Taiwanese Defense Minister Chiu Kuo-cheng stating that “the Russia-Ukraine war has brought great lessons” for the Chinese, who “will definitely seek speed.”

But the second element of U.S. strategy—the attempted isolation of Russia from the international system, especially economically—has been much more complicated and less successful. While the United States and European Union have passed sanctions against Russia and have diversified away from Russian energy imports, most non-Western countries have not followed suit. Indeed, countries like China, India, the Gulf states, and even NATO member Turkey have increased economic and especially energy ties with Russia since the conflict began early last year. This has enabled the Kremlin to prevent an economic or political collapse and to sustain its war effort in Ukraine, while avoiding the type of global isolation and repudiation of Russia that the United States and its allies were hoping to achieve.

Russia’s economic pivot did not come suddenly. Indeed, Moscow began concertedly expanding its economic and diplomatic ties eastward nearly a decade ago, dating back to its initial foray into Ukraine in the beginning of 2014. That was the true start of the Ukrainian conflict, in which Russia responded to the ouster of a pro-Moscow government in Kyiv in the Euromaidan revolution with its annexation of Crimea and support of a separatist rebellion in Eastern Ukraine.

Following these events and the subsequent diplomatic fallout between Moscow and the West, Russia ramped up its economic engagement with China, expanding ties in the energy sphere and launching the massive Power of Siberia pipeline to send natural gas exports eastward. Russia intervened militarily in the Syrian civil war on behalf of the Assad regime, which placed Moscow at the seat of many diplomatic tables in the Middle East. Russia expanded security ties with states across Africa and Latin America, opportunistically building relationships with governments outside of the pro-Western paradigm.

As a result of all this diplomatic, economic, and security legwork, Russia now finds itself much less isolated than the United States or West would like it to be, despite its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. While Moscow has few direct supporters of its Ukrainian war effort outside of states like Belarus and Iran, most countries outside the West are not willing to sacrifice their economic or security ties with Russia despite such calls from the United States, whatever their view may be on the Ukrainian conflict itself. Consequently, Moscow has greater room for maneuver on the Ukrainian front, despite its military setbacks and persistent pressure from the United States and its allies.

It is this part of Russia’s playbook on Ukraine that may prove particularly relevant for Beijing. Taking into account the constraints and blowback of an outright military invasion of Taiwan, China could instead seek to achieve its objectives related to Taiwan in more subtle ways, whether through direct economic pressure, maritime interdictions, or manipulating Taiwan’s supply chain via cargo inspections and port redirection. And while an outright military invasion of Taiwan could have tremendous costs for Beijing, Russia’s war in Ukraine has shown that this does not necessarily make such an action prohibitive.

In any such scenario, the Russian case has proven to China that it is useful to have a constellation of countries that would be at the very least neutral in the event of any type of intervention in Taiwan. And here, China has already laid much groundwork with its global economic and diplomatic outreach, encapsulated by its “Go Out” policy initiated near the turn of the century and the Belt and Road Initiative launched in 2013. Such efforts by China certainly had their own myriad economic and political motivations beyond the Taiwan issue, but Beijing has now seen from the Ukrainian conflict that they could have the added benefit of keeping many countries on the sidelines in the event of any type of a Taiwanese intervention. Even among Western countries, Beijing is probably happy at the aftermath of French President Emmanuel Macron’s visit to Beijing, in which he echoed Chinese talking points on Europe’s divergence from America.

In this context, it is notable how China has ramped up its economic and diplomatic ties with select non-Western states over the course of the past year. Take, for example, China’s recent mediation of the Saudi Arabia-Iran diplomatic agreement reached on March 10, which itself was preceded by months of Beijing’s diplomatic engagement with Riyadh and Tehran that included economic deals with both countries. China has also further expanded energy ties with Russia over the past year, with Xi holding a high-profile meeting with Putin last month to tout such ties.

It may be no coincidence that such countries are key energy providers to Taiwan, with Saudi Arabia serving as the island’s largest oil exporter and Russia serving as a major provider of coal and natural gas supplies. One measure that China could take is to leverage its relationships with these energy suppliers in order to pressure Taiwan, which is critically dependent on imports for 98 percent of its energy supply (and associated semiconductor production). In both cases, Beijing may be able to count on Moscow and Riyadh’s neutrality in the event of an intervention in Taiwan, or perhaps even their cooperation on efforts to redirect Taiwan-bound energy shipments through Chinese ports as a means to further constrain Taipei’s room for maneuver.

Whether or not China chooses to pursue the military option on Taiwan, Beijing is taking a page out of the Russian playbook to cultivate economic and diplomatic ties outside of the United States and its allies to better prepare itself for any scenario. Planning does not mean an invasion, or even a coercion attempt, is inevitable, and there are plenty of factors that may constrain Beijing from pulling the trigger. But Chinese diplomatic efforts may nevertheless offer hints about the course of any future moves against its neighbor.

Foreign Policy · by Eugene Chausovsky · April 14, 2023

9. Leaked secret documents detail up to four additional Chinese spy balloons

Images at the link: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/04/14/chinese-spy-balloon-leaked-documents/

Excerpts:

But the NGA document is notable as much for what it doesn’t say, reflecting the government’s possible lack of insight, at least in mid-February, into the balloons’ capabilities. The government recovered debris from the balloon’s crash site in the Atlantic Ocean, but has declined to say how much of the payload it recovered.

The leaked NGA document notes that Killeen-23 contained a parabolic dish measuring 1.2 meters in diameter, several unidentified sensors, and a possible mast antenna. The document says that the government has “no imagery collections of the bottom of the Killeen-23 payload to analyze for an optical sensor.”

The lack of detailed conclusions about the balloon’s surveillance capabilities raises questions about the decision to let it fly over the United States before shooting it down, an action the Defense Department justified at the time as an opportunity to collect additional intelligence.

Engineers at the National Space Intelligence Center, which is affiliated with the Space Force, assessed that the solar panels on Killeen-23 could generate upward of 10,000 watts of solar power, more than enough to operate any surveillance capability, including synthetic aperture radar, according to the document.

Leaked secret documents detail up to four additional Chinese spy balloons

THE DISCORD LEAKS | One balloon flew over a U.S. carrier strike group in the Pacific, and another circumnavigated the globe with sophisticated surveillance technology

By Evan Hill, Cate Cadell, Ellen Nakashima and Christian Shepherd

April 14, 2023 at 6:40 p.m. EDT

The Washington Post · by Evan Hill · April 14, 2023

U.S. intelligence agencies were aware of up to four additional Chinese spy balloons, and questions lingered about the true capabilities of the one that flew over the continental United States in January and February, according to previously unreported top secret intelligence documents.

The Chinese spy balloon that flew over the United States this year, called Killeen-23 by U.S. intelligence agencies, carried a raft of sensors and antennas the U.S. government still had not identified more than a week after shooting it down, according to the document allegedly leaked to a Discord chatroom by Jack Teixeira, a member of the Massachusetts Air National Guard.

The balloon was one of at least three, including another that flew over a U.S. carrier strike group in a previously unreported incident and a third that crashed in the South China Sea, a second top secret document stated, though it did not provide specific information for launch dates.

One of the three documents, produced by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and dated Feb. 15 — 10 days after the Air Force shot down the balloon that flew over the United States — contains the most detailed government assessment to date of Killeen-23 and two balloons from previous years, labeled Bulger-21 and Accardo-21. It was not clear from the documents if Bulger-21 and Accardo-21 were the same balloons that flew over the carrier strike group and crashed.

The Discord Leaks

Dozens of highly classified documents have been leaked online, revealing sensitive information intended for senior military and intelligence leaders. In an exclusive investigation, The Post also reviewed scores of additional secret documents, most of which have not been made public.

Who leaked the documents? Jack Teixeira, a young member of the Massachusetts Air National Guard, was arrested Thursday in the investigation into leaks of hundreds of pages of classified military intelligence. The Washington Post reported that the individual who leaked the information shared documents with a small circle of online friends on the Discord chat platform.

What do the leaked documents reveal about Ukraine? The documents reveal profound concerns about the war’s trajectory and Kyiv’s capacity to wage a successful offensive against Russian forces. According to a Defense Intelligence Agency assessment among the leaked documents, “Negotiations to end the conflict are unlikely during 2023.”

What else do they show? The files include summaries of human intelligence on high-level conversations between world leaders, as well as information about advanced satellite technology the United States uses to spy. They also include intelligence on both allies and adversaries, including Iran and North Korea, as well as Britain, Canada, South Korea and Israel.

What happens now? The leak has far-reaching implications for the United States and its allies. In addition to the Justice Department investigation, officials in several countries said they were assessing the damage from the leaks.

1/5

End of carousel

Bulger-21 carried sophisticated surveillance equipment and circumnavigated the globe from December 2021 until May 2022, the NGA document states. Accardo-21 carried similar equipment as well as a “foil-lined gimbaled” sensor, it says.

A U.S. official speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence said the government naming convention for such balloons is alphabetical, from A to Z. It appears that the balloons are named after notorious criminals, including Tony Accardo, James “Whitey” Bulger, and Donald Killeen.

Annotating what appear to be detailed photos of the balloon that flew over the United States, presumably taken from a U-2 spy plane, intelligence analysts assessed that it could generate enough power to operate “any” surveillance and reconnaissance technology, including a type of radar that can see at night and through clouds and thin materials.

The overflight of the carrier strike group will raise questions in Congress, where Republicans seized on the spy balloon issue to accuse President Biden of failing to deter Chinese espionage.

The Pentagon and Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined to comment.

The incursion of the spy balloon into U.S. airspace in late January likely caught elements of China’s government by surprise, according to a third document that relies on intercepted communications. Knowledge of the incursion was likely “heavily stovepiped” within the Chinese military, which lacks “strong senior” oversight of the surveillance balloon program, the document assessed, adding that some in the Chinese government viewed their Foreign Ministry’s response as poor for allowing the crisis to be “sensationalized.”

The Washington Post obtained the documents from a trove of images of classified files posted on Discord, a group chat service popular with gamers. The document is part of a new tranche that has not been previously reported.

The leaked NGA document contains an image taken by Bulger-21 that appears to directly connect such a balloon to Eagles Men Aviation Science and Technology Group, one of six Chinese companies sanctioned by the United States in February for supporting the spy balloon program.

What the documents show

This document is part of the leaked classified material that was circulated in a Discord chatroom and obtained by The Washington Post. The Post informed the Defense Department that this document would be published with this story.

“Synthetic aperture radar”

The spy balloon that overflew the continental U.S. in February had sophisticated reconnaissance capabilities, including "synthetic aperture radar," which can see at night and penetrate clouds, topsoil, and thin materials.

Bulger-21 commercial vendor image

An earlier, unreported Chinese spy balloon, called Bulger-21 by U.S. intelligence agencies, circumnavigated the globe from 2021 to 2022 and has links to a now-sanctioned manufacturer: Eagles Men Aviation Science and Technology Group.

Spy plane photos of Chinese balloon over the U.S. reveal new details

Close spy plane photographs of the balloon payload reveal a parabolic dish, sensors and solar panels that can generate up to 10,000 watts of power. But other technical details remained a mystery to intelligence agencies, even days after the shoot down.

What the documents show

“Synthetic aperture radar”

Bulger-21 commercial vendor image

Spy plane photos of Chinese balloon over the U.S. reveal new details

What the documents show

“Synthetic aperture radar”

Bulger-21 commercial vendor image

Spy plane photos of Chinese balloon over the U.S. reveal new details

What the documents show

“Synthetic aperture radar”

Bulger-21 commercial vendor image

Spy plane photos of Chinese balloon over the U.S. reveal new details

synthetic aperture radar

China’s military has operated a vast surveillance balloon project for several years, partly out of Hainan province off China’s south coast, U.S. officials have previously told The Post.

But the NGA document is notable as much for what it doesn’t say, reflecting the government’s possible lack of insight, at least in mid-February, into the balloons’ capabilities. The government recovered debris from the balloon’s crash site in the Atlantic Ocean, but has declined to say how much of the payload it recovered.

The leaked NGA document notes that Killeen-23 contained a parabolic dish measuring 1.2 meters in diameter, several unidentified sensors, and a possible mast antenna. The document says that the government has “no imagery collections of the bottom of the Killeen-23 payload to analyze for an optical sensor.”

The lack of detailed conclusions about the balloon’s surveillance capabilities raises questions about the decision to let it fly over the United States before shooting it down, an action the Defense Department justified at the time as an opportunity to collect additional intelligence.

Engineers at the National Space Intelligence Center, which is affiliated with the Space Force, assessed that the solar panels on Killeen-23 could generate upward of 10,000 watts of solar power, more than enough to operate any surveillance capability, including synthetic aperture radar, according to the document.

Synthetic aperture radar, or SAR, sends pulses of microwaves at the Earth to create images. Unlike traditional optical sensors, this allows SAR to return images at night and to penetrate clouds, smoke, topsoil, ice and snow. SAR has also been shown to penetrate thin materials, including tarps, revealing objects beneath.

The amount of power the Chinese balloon could generate was “humongous,” said Paul Byrne, an associate professor at Washington University in St. Louis and a specialist in remote sensing. It was about 100 times that generated by balloons such as Google’s Loon, which provides internet service, and nearly twice that generated by some orbital SAR satellites.

But the SAR data the balloon could have acquired would not have been much different from that of a satellite, Byrne said, which suggests it probably carried another imaging system, such as a camera, that would gain an advantage. The document notes that Bulger-21 carried a “full motion video payload with a capability to zoom.” Balloons offer a “potent way to conduct” surveillance, Byrne said, because they can gain higher-resolution data and their launch is “quieter” than putting a satellite into space.

Chinese military researchers have for years written about the advantages of deploying SAR capabilities on “near space” vehicles. An article published in the official newspaper of the Chinese military, the PLA Daily, in September 2020 described how airships and balloons could be loaded with radar and photoelectric surveillance equipment to detect targets for strikes.

The leaked NGA document also contains a close-up image of an “unidentified structure” measuring about .75 meters in diameter protruding from the top of Killeen-23, the purpose of which is unclear.

A photograph in the document described as a “commercial vendor image” from Bulger-21 contains the logo of the Eagles Men Aviation Science and Technology Group and text that says Static Stratospheric Constellation System in Chinese, a reference to networks of balloons that could operate as an alternative to satellite-based communications and observation.

It was unclear where the image was obtained or what system it described, but it appeared to be the first direct link between the sanctioned company and a spy balloon.

The Post was unable to confirm images of Bulger-21 in cached versions of the Eagles Men company website, which was taken down shortly after the company was sanctioned.

Neither document gives a name or date for the balloon that flew over the U.S. carrier strike group. The Nimitz Carrier Strike Group was positioned in the western Pacific in January and February, according to public government information. The government notified Congress in February of several previous incursions into U.S. airspace by Chinese spy balloons, including near Texas, Florida, Hawaii and Guam.

The Defense Department declined to comment about the overflight of the carrier strike group.

Pei-Lin Wu in Taipei, Taiwan, contributed to this report.

The Washington Post · by Evan Hill · April 14, 2023

10. State Dept cyber bureau plans to add tech experts to every embassy by next year

At first I misinterpreted the headline and thought how do embassies function without tech experts to manage the embassies' IT systems and protect their networks. But of course they have those.

But the intent of Nate Fick is to have personnel assigned who understand cyber issues and technology.

Excerpts:

Beyond increasing the State Department’s capacity to address these emerging policy issues, the bureau is also looking to set international norms and standards around emerging technology and to help allies defend against cyber threats.

To support that mission, the bureau is calling on Congress to create an “assistance fund” that would allow the department to support cyber, digital and emerging tech projects with allied nations.

“The basic need here is a dedicated mechanism that can move quickly enough to be useful, given the pace of cyber threat actors, and our current assistance mechanism is set up to do other things,” Fick said. “It’s not architected to move at this pace, it doesn’t have the kind of flexibility that you need to address cyber issues.”

The proposed fund would operate differently than most of the international aid the State Department controls, since most of that funding isn’t able to support another nation’s military or law enforcement organizations.

“That’s a challenge in the cybersecurity space, when those are exactly the organizations that own those capabilities in partner countries where we may want to go help out,” Fick said.

...

The White House released its Blueprint for a “Bill of Rights” late last year. The Defense Department and intelligence community have also set out policies on the ethical use of AI.

“We’re not starting from zero, there’s a lot there. I would say the challenge is more one of harmonization. There are a lot of disparate efforts. How do you pull them together in a way that is going to be both broad and inclusive, and also effective?” Fick said.

Meanwhile, the bureau is also working on an international cybersecurity and digital policy strategy mandated under the NDAA.

“Throughout the creation [and] the drafting of the National Cybersecurity Strategy, we had always thought about that fifth pillar — the international pillar, as kind of like an API we would plug a more robust international strategy into. So that’s now what we’re doing,” Fick said.

State Dept cyber bureau plans to add tech experts to every embassy by next year | Federal News Network

federalnewsnetwork.com · April 12, 2023

The State Department’s Bureau of Cyberspace and Digital Policy is on a mission to give diplomats across the world greater access to experts in emerging technology.

Ambassador at Large for Cyberspace and Digital Policy Nathaniel Fick told reporters Wednesday that the bureau plans to put a trained cyber and digital officer in every embassy around the world by the end of next year.

“We’ll have somebody in every embassy globally who has some basic training...

The State Department’s Bureau of Cyberspace and Digital Policy is on a mission to give diplomats across the world greater access to experts in emerging technology.

“We’ll have somebody in every embassy globally who has some basic training and understanding of these issues,” Fick said at a Defense Writers Group event.

In an effort to elevate these skills across the diplomatic workforce, the Foreign Service this week created a new skill code for personnel who work on cyber, digital and emerging tech issues.

Federal News Network's CX Exchange: Join us over two afternoons, April 26 and 27, where we will explore the technology, policy and processes that underpin agency efforts to serve the public, businesses and the government’s own workforce more effectively.

“What it means is if a Foreign Service officer spends a couple of years in a designated technology tour, he or she gets credit for that in their record. That’s the first step towards incentivizing people to seek out these jobs,” Fick said.

In addition to the Foreign Service recognizing diplomats for prior work in cybersecurity and emerging technology, the skill code will eventually allow the department to have a better headcount of personnel with these in-demand skills.

Fick said the new skill code also demonstrates the cross-cutting role cybersecurity and emerging tech have in other policy areas, and could potentially serve as a core competency for many senior leadership roles.

“I can imagine a future where every credible candidate to be a chief of mission, every future U.S. ambassador anywhere in the world, has to have some demonstrated understanding of technology issues, and a willingness to engage on that,” he said. “You can’t practice East Asian diplomacy without tech diplomacy, you can’t do human rights work without tech, you can’t do climate diplomacy without tech. So we have to infuse that into the culture of the place and reward people for working on it.”

The bureau, a year after its creation, has about 115 personnel, and is looking to make about 30 additional hires. The bureau, under the latest National Defense Authorization Act, has the ability to make 25 excepted civil service hires.

Fick said that expedited hiring authority allows the bureau to make “an end-run around a lot of the bureaucracy of the hiring process,” in order to bring in top talent from the private sector.

“We need people with technology experience and expertise, but also people with commercial sensibility,” Fick said. “You need to go sit with companies and develop joint plans and not be viewed as the fed. You’ve got to be able to sit down and actually have that discussion and understand what works and what doesn’t work in a commercial context. That excepted hiring authority is a huge advantage in that regard.”

The department’s Foreign Service Institute now offers a course in cyber and digital policy. Fick said that FSI has been oversubscribed with personnel taking the course, and expects similar interest in future courses offered both in London and Arlington, Virginia.

The Narcissists Who Endanger America

Leaked classified documents, a 21-year-old airman, and the weakness that is hardest for the U.S. national-security community to spot

By Tom Nichols

This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.

The Atlantic · by Tom Nichols · April 14, 2023

The FBI yesterday arrested Jack Teixeira, a 21-year-old Massachusetts Air National Guard employee, for posting highly sensitive Pentagon documents online. Teixeira, at this point, seems to have had no reason for spilling national secrets to a chat group other than that he wanted to show off, impress his friends, and establish himself as an important person in a small community of digital gamers. This, from the available reporting, seems different from the cases of other young people who compromised national security, including Reality Winner, Chelsea Manning, and, of course, Edward Snowden.

But all of these cases—as well as the notorious cases of much older people who betrayed their country, such as Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen—are bound by the common thread of narcissism. Teixeira, if early reports prove accurate, might be the dorkiest of these cases, but make no mistake: The damage he is alleged to have caused so far looks to be immense, all because he reportedly wanted to be the boss among a clique of online pals.

Brainless bragging so far seems to apply in Teixeira’s case. But my assertion about betrayal and narcissism will infuriate those who see Winner and Snowden as noble whistleblowers who should have been honored rather than persecuted. Winner, they might note, suffered for her choices (and got a far stiffer sentence than most of the January 6 insurrectionists did). Snowden fled—or, as his apologists would argue, had to flee—to Russia to remain beyond the reach of an American state determined to punish him for revealing government misconduct.

Juliette Kayyem: I oversaw the Massachusetts Air National Guard. I cannot fathom how this happened.

The romanticized versions of these stories fail to account for the various shades of narcissistic behavior on display in all these cases, and especially in the most recent breaches. I am not here to argue the case for or against any of these people, but for the record, I think Snowden was (and is) a traitor, Winner was naive and foolish, and Manning was, mostly, a victim. All did serious damage to this nation. For most of my adult life, in positions in the U.S. Senate and the Defense Department, I held a security clearance; I would not have made the same choices, and I deplore theirs.

Despite their various justifications, however, the crimes both of self-proclaimed do-gooders and avowed traitors are not that different from those Teixeira is alleged to have committed. They are the product of a protracted epidemic of narcissism, and if the U.S. national-security community does not find a way to protect classified information from this malady, it’s going to happen again.

To be fair, intelligence organizations are not exactly blind to the problem. Intelligence professionals use the acronym MICE to explain the four main reasons why people betray their country: Money, Ideology, Compromise, and Ego. Money is always an issue, which is why people in deep financial difficulty will often be flagged as a risk and even have their clearances suspended. Some ideologies, especially those centered around anti-government grievances, can be dangerous. Compromising information can lead people to hide their own secrets by betraying their nation’s secrets instead.

But that last category, ego, can be the weakness that is hardest to spot. No urine test flips positive for a dangerous narcissist. No bank statement reveals a deficit of principle or a surplus of self-regard. Polygraphs are of arguable reliability, and clearly neither deter nor even discover some people willing to take risks. At higher levels, clearance holders have to pass psychological examinations, but narcissism can look a lot like ambition and self-confidence, just as expressions of high principle and rectitude can mask self-serving rationalizations.

Tom Nichols: The narcissism of the angry young men

Of course, betrayal sometimes has all of these issues at work. The CIA turncoat Ames, for example, was finally caught in the 1990s in part due to investigations into his finances, but for years, he was also a disgruntled and passed-over operative with a drinking problem who used to zip around in a Jaguar. (It’s never the ones you suspect.) Hanssen, the FBI traitor who gave up so much dangerous material that he could have faced the death penalty, was something of a weirdo: a devout Catholic who secretly taped sex with his wife, went to men’s clubs to convert strippers, and was such a dark and strange presence that his co-workers dubbed him “the Mortician” and “Dr. Death.” But with his Russian handlers, he was “Ramon,” a hero and a swashbuckler.

Even the legendary British mole, Kim Philby, was an upper-class rake, an elite dandy who nonetheless professed to the end of his life—perhaps sincerely—that he was a loyal Soviet Marxist. But he was also an egotistical charmer, a user, and a liar, as those who knew him later came to understand, with painful clarity.

Snowden, for his part, vacillated between hard-right views and anti-government gripes, but underneath it all was a young man who, for most of his life, had been invisible and who yearned for recognition. Online, he called himself “The True HOOHAH,” a military-style moniker. (He tried to join the Army Special Forces, but washed out.) He apparently considered male modeling. At one point, he chose a new digital avatar, “Wolfking Awesomefox.” He finally found the importance he craved by stealing hundreds of thousands of documents (materials he later admitted he had not read or vetted) and instantly became an international celebrity.

The Winner and Manning cases are sadder stories, songs with different lyrics but the same music. Winner was convinced that she had the responsibility to tell the world about Russian attempts to interfere in American politics. (She had no background in such matters; she was hired as a linguist.) Manning, a lonely misfit in the Army, found an online friendship with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, and handed over thousands of documents that she herself had no hope of understanding.

Narcissism, as I’ve written elsewhere, is on the rise, in the United States and around the world. It is destroying many of the social and political norms that sustain a democratic nation, and especially those that guide public service. People consumed by concerns over their social status, as Teixeira seemed to be, or who will mortgage national security for companionship and approval, as Manning did, or who—in the case of of Snowden and Winner—think of themselves as the ultimate arbiters of the social good, are all menaces to national security, no matter what their reasons.

Read: Should intelligence whistleblowers be protected?

What can be done to mitigate these risks? First, implement the easiest and most obvious fix: Slash the number of security clearances. Far too many people who don’t need them are carrying risky clearances, mostly because of outdated Cold War rules. I was one: When I was a professor at the U.S. Naval War College, I had to hold a SECRET clearance because of a Defense Department rule that people who train or educate American military officers need a clearance, even if they’re not working with restricted documents. My clearance gave me access to classified materials if I wanted to read them, and classified events if I wanted to attend them, but I didn’t need one to do my job and neither do a lot of other people who can access classified material for no useful purpose.

Next, change the hidebound and tangled clearance process that looks for easily identifiable human frailties such as adultery and substance abuse, but somehow overlooks the dangers of narcissism. I do not have a precise set of prescriptions for how to go about this—but I hope that more attention to social-media postings and online chatroom activity become a standard part of a background check. The process sometimes seems to zero in on measurable problems rather than less tangible personality flaws. When I was asked, for example, about colleagues by investigators—a common part of the clearance and re-clearance process—I was always struck by how much they centered on such concrete things as money or infidelity.

Meanwhile, each year as a federal employee, I had to sit through hours of training about how to protect information, which included how to spot more nebulous “insider threats.” We were told to be watchful for anger, behavioral changes, foreign contacts, financial irregularities, and outbursts about American policies. And each year, I would ruefully tote up all the senior government officials I would have gladly reported, including former President Donald Trump and retired General Michael Flynn, men who checked nearly every “insider threat” box on the list. Nonetheless, it was a reminder of the importance of supporting and protecting patriotic whistleblowers—especially the ones who might face the wrath of vengeful bureaucrats and politicians.

But while all of these risk factors are important, most people, even burdened with their human failings, are not going to reveal America’s secrets. If we’re going to stop the next reckless narcissist—whether it’s a swaggering adolescent jerk or a self-styled crusader—the U.S. national-security establishment is going to need sharper instincts, and must start confronting the one vice that unites them all.

Yes, we need to know who is in deep financial straits, or who harbors a secret grudge against America. But mostly, we need to inquire more closely into who among us will betray our country for fame, for approval, or because they somehow think that our laws and classifications are for less enlightened citizens than themselves. Unlocking that one secret is crucial to protecting our national security in a new age of narcissism.

The Atlantic · by Tom Nichols · April 14, 2023

12. Helping Ukraine Can Deter China

Excerpts:

Myth 1: Military assistance to Ukraine is hurting our Indo-Pacific posture.

Myth 2: Europe isn’t shouldering enough of the Ukraine burden.

Myth 3. Our actions toward Ukraine won’t help deter China.

Russia’s brutal war against Ukraine is approaching a critical turning point. As the Russian offensive grinds down in the Donbas, Ukraine is preparing for a major counteroffensive with the intent to liberate all of its territory. We must help Ukraine win—the future of a Europe whole, free, and at peace hangs in the balance—as do hopes of deterring Chinese moves against Taiwan.

Helping Ukraine Can Deter China

Beijing is watching the war as closely as we are—and us, too.

by IGOR KHRESTIN AND DAVID J. KRAMER APRIL 14, 2023 5:30 AM

thebulwark.com · by Igor Khrestin and David J. Kramer · April 14, 2023

The best way the United States can deter China from military aggression in Asia is to help Ukraine defeat Russia.

The West’s cohesive response and Ukraine’s determined resistance to Russia’s latest unprovoked invasion have given Beijing pause regarding the potential use of force against Taiwan. American assistance to Ukraine doesn’t distract from a more significant threat from the People’s Republic of China, as some commentators have argued. The Ukraine fight is the China fight.

Countering China on a European battlefield may seem counterintuitive, but by helping Ukraine successfully repel an assault from a rapacious Russia and by imposing strict sanctions on Moscow for what it has done to Ukraine, we are deterring an authoritarian and revanchist China from taking similar actions toward Taiwan and other vulnerable Asian nations. Halting assistance to Ukraine would risk significantly weakening our chances of containing authoritarian ambitions, whether they come from Moscow or Beijing.

Proponents of the misguided “China first” argument claim that the United States has limited resources and should focus on the China threat, leaving Europe to shoulder the burden for the Ukraine fight. It’s a question of “tradeoffs,” Elbridge Colby, former deputy assistant secretary of defense in the Trump administration, and Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, asserted recently.

Podcast · April 13 2023

Mark Hertling: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Gamer

The military runs on young soldiers, and sometimes, chatroom braggarts who want to share classified…

In fact, it isn’t, but such thinking promulgates a series of myths that don’t withstand scrutiny—or even common sense. Dangerously, it also gives fringe politicians a convenient excuse to peddle falsehoods and score political points.

Myth 1: Military assistance to Ukraine is hurting our Indo-Pacific posture.

It’s true that future contingencies in Asia require us to bolster our defense industrial base. However, what we have so far given Ukraine for a land war—armored vehicles, howitzer shells, and artillery pieces—aren’t the items that would be required for a possible air and sea conflict with China. None of the equipment sent to Ukraine came from the pipeline of weapons bound for Taiwan, as Hudson Institute scholars Peter Rough and Mike Watson note.

Consistent underinvestment in our Indo-Pacific capabilities goes back years and should be addressed urgently. But as Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently testified, this year’s Pentagon budget for the Pacific Deterrence Initiative is up 40 percent from last year. This is a welcome development that should be sustained, but not come at the expense of helping Ukraine.

Myth 2: Europe isn’t shouldering enough of the Ukraine burden.

It’s true that Germany and other European nations are still derelict in their defense spending commitments and need to do much more to get their degraded post-Cold War militaries into shape. (There are some exceptions, especially in the Baltic and Nordic regions.) But Russia’s invasion has brought a sea change on the continent. Germany effectively ended its decades-long dependence on Russian energy, removing a major source of disagreement with Washington. Berlin is the top continental provider of military, financial, and humanitarian assistance to Kyiv, while also allocating over $100 billion for revamping its own armed forces, though the commitment to follow on this announcement remains to be seen.

In the meantime, Poland and the Baltic States are punching well above their weight and spending prodigiously to help Ukraine. The U.K. has done its share, too. For the United States to abandon these allies now would be a calamity not only for Ukraine, but for the entire post-Cold War alliance system that the United States helped build and which continues to serve our national security interests. It would undermine NATO, granting Vladimir Putin a major victory and sending the wrong signal to Beijing.

Myth 3. Our actions toward Ukraine won’t help deter China.

It’s true that the United States must take seriously Beijing’s consistent threats to “reunify” Taiwan with the mainland through whatever means necessary—and plan accordingly. Xi Jinping is strident on this point, asking China’s armed forces to be ready to do so by 2027.

But intent doesn’t equal capability. Concerted actions by the United States and our allies to repel Russia in Ukraine have given Beijing second thoughts with regard to its military’s shortcomings in a Taiwan scenario. “The United States should build upon the template it is now creating during the ongoing Ukraine crisis, sharpen it, and apply it to the Indo-Pacific region,” Charles Edel, with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, has testified.

The American withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 likely contributed to Putin’s thinking that the United States was disengaging from the world and he could get away with an invasion of his neighbor without paying a steep price. Abandoning Ukraine and its European allies would send a similar signal to Chinese leaders, raising the risk of a Taiwan contingency.

Russia’s brutal war against Ukraine is approaching a critical turning point. As the Russian offensive grinds down in the Donbas, Ukraine is preparing for a major counteroffensive with the intent to liberate all of its territory. We must help Ukraine win—the future of a Europe whole, free, and at peace hangs in the balance—as do hopes of deterring Chinese moves against Taiwan.

thebulwark.com · by Igor Khrestin and David J. Kramer · April 14, 2023

13. Our Rotten Military Promotion System

Heees' ... back.... (Scheller)

I guess rule followers are bad.

Excerpts:

The military should develop warfighting games pitting leaders against each other. Make it truly free play. F-16 pilot against F-16 pilot, infantry officer against infantry officer, logistician against logistician, and so on. The winner must demonstrate performance through action, not assessment through the eyes of a boss. The winner receives preferential treatment for promotion. Furthermore, the next Secretary of Defense must be more aggressive in building a system of incentives for promotion based on performance, not time. Any military member should be able to ‘try out’ for higher ranks during the wargame competition. Move talented leaders up more quickly. This will do more for retaining talent than all other initiatives.

If the military builds a true performance-based system, it is more likely the leaders of the organization will be empowered by their judgment than by the assessments and opinions of their superiors. Hopefully, the next Sgt Vargas-Andrews never receives the answer, “I don’t know.” Performers make decisions. People pleasers and rule followers wait for the answer from a superior.

Can the military incentivize performance over career progression? I believe it can, but leadership must fundamentally change the system of incentives prioritizing career progression over junior service member’s sacrifices. This starts with new leadership demonstrating the same courage expected from the troops on the ground.

Our Rotten Military Promotion System

By Stuart Scheller

April 15, 2023

https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2023/04/15/our_rotten_military_promotion_system_893993.html

A Marine sniper serving during the Afghanistan evacuation recently gave testimony to the House Foreign Affairs Committee on the Afghanistan evacuation. His pain was palpable. A revelation worth examining was his identification of the possible suicide bomber prior to the incident. After the sniper, Sgt Vargas-Andrews, confirmed the target with multiple agencies, he asked his Battalion Commander, LtCol Whited, for permission to shoot. The answer from Whited, one in which Vargas-Andrews said he’ll never forget, was, “I don’t know.”

Not found in the media or Congressional testimony is that Whited, a former peer of mine, corroborated this version of events in his formal statement for the military’s investigation. When speaking to the investigating officer, General Curtis, on 5 October 2021, Whited stated, “[We had] a description of a person of interest. We watched him for hours… It bothers me still that we lost track of him, and never heard anything back from higher about him.”

The obvious indecision in Kabul on 26 August 2021 has a much deeper undercurrent. Since World War II, the American military promotion system hasn’t evolved with the needs of today’s challenging security environment. Current military professionals are conditioned, above all else, to please superiors for continued advancement. Said another way, when promotion is the mission, it will always be more important than troop welfare. “I don’t know” is another way of saying, “The risk to force isn’t as great as the risk to my career.”

This understanding leads to an obvious question: Can the military incentivize performance over career progression?

Predictably, without changes to the military system, the lessons of the past will consistently need to be re-learned. In some depressing ways, the Afghanistan evacuation was executed incrementally better than the 1983 Beirut operation; Vargas-Andrews at least had bullets in his gun. The Marines standing post in Beirut weren’t allowed to insert magazines into their weapons. Those Marines were forced to watch a vehicle IED drive past their security post and kill 220 Marines. General officers from the Beirut incident later testified to Congress that negligent discharges into the city were more of a risk than providing Marines on post the lethal force required for protection.

Unfortunately, like the unnecessary loss of life during the Afghanistan evacuation, general officers following the 1983 Beirut incident were also absolved of responsibility. In fact, General Alford Gray, who commanded the division of the attacked Marine unit, later went on to become the Commandant of the Marine Corps. Similarly, General Farrell Sullivan, the officer who LtCol Whited “never heard back from,” was promoted in billet upon his return the states. Despite General Berger, the Commandant of the Marine Corps, stating on 1 September 2021 that he wanted an “honest, open critique, or a commission… that cracks open the options available [for the Afghanistan evacuation,]” an internal military panel never materialized. This may be for many reasons. Yet an objective analysis must acknowledge that General Farrell Sullivan, who both the sniper and battalion commander waited on for engagement approval, also previously served as the battalion executive officer in 2002 while General Berger commanded 3/8. Again, never underestimate the importance of relationships and pleasing a boss in the antiquated military system.

Compounding the general officer’s inability to hold themselves accountable, Congress, enamored of the military officer, also fails to provide accountability even after listening to long lists of inexcusable mistakes. While Congress controls the DoD budget, they demonstrate an unwillingness to use the budget as a tool for influence. Why? Asking tough questions is less risky than being painted as ‘anti-military’ for standing in the way of the DoD budget. In other words, there are fewer risks to career advancement within the current model. Sound familiar?

It is also worth noting that most Americans apolitically believe President Biden mishandled the Afghanistan evacuation. But most Republicans only selectively remember President Reagan strengthening the military. President Reagan made the decision to send Marines to Beirut, and Reagan, much like Biden, was too afraid to hold senior military leaders accountable for their failures.

A commander in chief is unlikely to fire a general for military failure if it reflects poorly on the president’s decision making. If the lists from the 1983 Beirut operation, the Afghanistan evacuation, and the numerous other in-between examples aren’t enough to justify the relief of a general officer, self-serving incentives dictate that military officers should consistently default towards career protecting decisions.

The underlying reason for this “I don’t know” or “I was just following the orders I was given” culture is the current promotion system. In every branch of service, officer promotions are based solely on subjective evaluations from a boss. While most people want to believe that military commanders evaluate subordinates based strictly on occupational performance, anyone who has served knows that impressing a boss for a top evaluation requires substantially more finesse than job performance. Military professionals are hyper aware that during some critical billets, it only takes one bad evaluation to end a career. Thus, the secret to a military career is more about pleasing a boss, than demonstrating objective performance.

The House Armed Forces Committee renewed investigation into the Afghanistan evacuation may continue illustrating shortfalls by senior military leaders. But without a mechanism to change the culture of the military, current people-pleasing incentives will ultimately dictate the future actions of military professionals.

I believe the military must move to a performance-based promotion system now. Americans can no longer afford the unnecessary loss of life of their sons and daughters based on antiquated systemic career progression incentives. The next Secretary of Defense should make this a focus above all other initiatives. A boss’s assessment may be a factor in promotion, but occupational performance must be more important.

The military should develop warfighting games pitting leaders against each other. Make it truly free play. F-16 pilot against F-16 pilot, infantry officer against infantry officer, logistician against logistician, and so on. The winner must demonstrate performance through action, not assessment through the eyes of a boss. The winner receives preferential treatment for promotion. Furthermore, the next Secretary of Defense must be more aggressive in building a system of incentives for promotion based on performance, not time. Any military member should be able to ‘try out’ for higher ranks during the wargame competition. Move talented leaders up more quickly. This will do more for retaining talent than all other initiatives.

If the military builds a true performance-based system, it is more likely the leaders of the organization will be empowered by their judgment than by the assessments and opinions of their superiors. Hopefully, the next Sgt Vargas-Andrews never receives the answer, “I don’t know.” Performers make decisions. People pleasers and rule followers wait for the answer from a superior.

Can the military incentivize performance over career progression? I believe it can, but leadership must fundamentally change the system of incentives prioritizing career progression over junior service member’s sacrifices. This starts with new leadership demonstrating the same courage expected from the troops on the ground.

Stuart Scheller is a former LtCol, USMC and author of Crisis of Command: How We Lost Trust and Confidence in America’s Generals and Politicians

14. Accountability for Biden's Botched Afghan Withdrawal?

Excerpts:

What’s more disturbing is that this tragedy could have been prevented. Marine Sgt. Tyler Vargas-Andrews testified before the House Foreign Affairs Committee that U.S. intelligence had a description of the two terrorists planning the suicide attack.

While on duty, Sgt. Vargas-Andrews saw the couple matching the description of the suspected bombers from his sniper tower. With a clear opportunity for engagement, he requested permission to engage. The message he got back is chilling: “Do not engage.”

Eventually the suspect disappeared, and later that day 13 of our servicemembers and 170 Afghans were killed in a suicide bombing. Forty-five more soldiers, including Sgt. Vargas-Andrews, were maimed. This was negligence of the highest order. But John Kirby had the arrogance to stand before the American people and claim the mission a success. Maybe he should stand before the families and loved ones of the 58 American casualties and tell them how proud he is of this botched withdrawal.

Someone must answer for the decisions that cost a nation its freedom and 13 American servicemembers their lives—and that person is our Commander-in-Chief.

Despite the failures of this administration during our withdrawal from Afghanistan, I want veterans of the War on Terror to know that your service to our country was not in vain. We kept America safe for 20 years, and Americans are alive today because of your sacrifices. Thank you for everything you did for our country and God bless you.

Accountability for Biden's Botched Afghan Withdrawal?

By Rep. Mark Green

April 15, 2023

https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2023/04/15/accountability_for_bidens_botched_afghan_withdrawal_893990.html

Nineteen months ago, the last U.S. soldier was lifted out of Afghanistan, but hundreds of Americans were left behind in a country overrun by the Taliban and abandoned by President Biden. Yet in a recent press conference, Pentagon Spokesperson John Kirby had the audacity to state that he was proud of the withdrawal from Afghanistan. This followed the release of a report from the Biden administration that lays the blame for this withdrawal at the feet of President Trump, taking little to no responsibility. This is a sign of failed leadership.

President Biden seems to forget that a year and a half ago millions of Americans, our allies, and our adversaries saw the botched Afghanistan withdrawal with their own eyes. Plastered across our television sets were tragic images of Afghans giving up their infants to complete strangers in hopes of saving them from the tyrannical rule of the Taliban. Others were so desperate for freedom that they tried climbing onto American aircraft during take-off, eventually plummeting to their deaths. One Afghan was even found crushed within the wheel well of an outbound aircraft.

Despite the desperation of Afghan citizens to escape Taliban rule, even to the point of death, this president saw fit to leave hundreds of his own countrymen behind. This botched withdrawal won’t just be a stain on this administration for all-time, but Kabul will be remembered with Saigon as one of the worst military evacuations in American history. In turn, our adversaries from China and Russia to Iran and North Korea are emboldened. This is extremely dangerous.

There must be accountability. Unfortunately, President Biden has been seeking to avoid accountability for himself and for this administration. In fact, in his press conference on the report, Kirby stated, “For all this talk of chaos, I just didn’t see it, not from my perch.” I wonder if Mr. Kirby would be comfortable saying that to the families of the 13 servicemembers murdered by a suicide bomber during the evacuation.

How do we know this report is about the Biden administration making excuses instead of taking responsibility for its failures? The 12-page summary fails to mention the abandonment of Bagram Air Base. Instead of keeping this pivotal airbase, U.S. forces deserted it in the middle of the night. This decision emboldened the Taliban, demoralized the Afghan government and military, made it harder for U.S. allies to evacuate after the fall of Kabul, and allowed the Taliban to free thousands of prisoners being held there, including senior al Qaeda operatives.

It is far past time to hold this administration accountable ourselves, because clearly it isn’t going to take responsibility for its own decisions. Many may wonder why this accountability hasn’t happened yet. The answer is simple; when Democrats controlled the House of Representatives, they refused. This was a dereliction of duty. Keeping the executive branch in check is one of Congress’ most important responsibilities. It shouldn’t matter if the president in office is Republican or Democrat—we should always be willing to fulfill our oversight duty as the people’s representatives. Despite this Constitutional obligation, Democrats refused to call this administration to account, even after finding out that President Biden left behind at least $7 billion in military equipment that is now turning up in various conflict zones.

This is why Republicans made a promise to the American people when we took control of the House: we will have “a government that’s accountable.” And that’s what the Foreign Affairs Committee sought to do in its hearing titled: “During and After the Fall of Kabul: Examining the Administration’s Emergency Evacuation from Afghanistan.” The American people deserve answers, and we are working overtime to get them.

When the last helicopters left the rooftops of Kabul, President Biden told the American people that only one-hundred American citizens remained in the country. The reality was much worse. Thanks to volunteer veteran groups who risked their lives to save their fellow countrymen, we now know that the Biden administration left over 1,000 Americans behind in Afghanistan.

The thought of leaving Americans behind goes against every fiber of my being. The Ranger Creed states, “I will never leave a fallen comrade to fall into the hands of the enemy and under no circumstance will I ever embarrass my country.” Because of President Biden’s failed leadership, our country did not live up to this creed, and we are still red in the face because of it.

It is unconscionable that President Biden would leave American citizens behind and abandon our Afghan allies that had helped us through the war. For two decades, these Afghans guided our troops through dangerous territories, gave us vital intel, and aided our soldiers. For the Taliban, they are primary targets. In total, this administration abandoned tens of thousands of Afghan military personnel and interpreters that we promised to give sanctuary. What does it say to our allies around the world that we abandoned our Afghan allies to the Taliban? With the rise of nations with larger and more powerful militaries, we need our allies to trust that we will keep our word.

There are also 13 American families who will never see their loved ones again because of this president’s ineptitude. 13 U.S. servicemembers were killed and 45 were wounded after a member of ISIS, released by the Taliban from Bagram prison, detonated a suicide bomb at the Kabul airport. Among the servicemembers killed was U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Ryan C. Knauss, a native of Corryton, Tennessee. He was just 23 years old. Tennesseans now, and forever, will keep his memory with us and honor his service to our nation. And when we fight for accountability in Washington, his face will be in front of our eyes.

What’s more disturbing is that this tragedy could have been prevented. Marine Sgt. Tyler Vargas-Andrews testified before the House Foreign Affairs Committee that U.S. intelligence had a description of the two terrorists planning the suicide attack.

While on duty, Sgt. Vargas-Andrews saw the couple matching the description of the suspected bombers from his sniper tower. With a clear opportunity for engagement, he requested permission to engage. The message he got back is chilling: “Do not engage.”

Eventually the suspect disappeared, and later that day 13 of our servicemembers and 170 Afghans were killed in a suicide bombing. Forty-five more soldiers, including Sgt. Vargas-Andrews, were maimed. This was negligence of the highest order. But John Kirby had the arrogance to stand before the American people and claim the mission a success. Maybe he should stand before the families and loved ones of the 58 American casualties and tell them how proud he is of this botched withdrawal.

Someone must answer for the decisions that cost a nation its freedom and 13 American servicemembers their lives—and that person is our Commander-in-Chief.

Despite the failures of this administration during our withdrawal from Afghanistan, I want veterans of the War on Terror to know that your service to our country was not in vain. We kept America safe for 20 years, and Americans are alive today because of your sacrifices. Thank you for everything you did for our country and God bless you.

Mark Green is a U.S. representative for Tennessee and a former physician, business owner, and combat veteran of Afghanistan and Iraq, where he served three tours of duty. He is chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee and serves on the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

15. How much of a threat does Russia's Pacific fleet pose to the US?

Excerpts:

On its own, Russia’s Pacific Fleet would not last long in a conflict with the U.S. Navy, Shugart told Task & Purpose. However, the United States would face a much more serious threat if it had to fight both the Russian and Chinese navies in the Pacific.

“That makes what would already be a pretty challenging situation much more challenging by the addition of that extra margin of vessels that the Pacific Fleet could add, in particular, the ability for it to have some relatively quiet nuclear submarines – much quieter than the Chinese – that could be roaming around creating lots of trouble behind the lines for us.”

Russia’s Pacific Fleet has practiced with China’s People’s Liberation Army Navy for years, and the combination of Russia’s stealthy nuclear-powered submarines and China’s silent-running electric diesel boats – all of which would be armed with anti-ship missiles – would pose a formidable challenge to the United States and its allies, said James Holmes, the J. C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island.

“I suppose the way to compare the Russian Pacific Fleet to the PLA [People’s Liberation Army] Navy would be to say it’s rather like the JMSDF [Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force] to the U.S. Navy: a capable junior partner that could stretch out the major adversary across wide geographic space, attenuate the adversary’s strength at any given place, and basically make things tough on the adversary,” Holmes told Task & Purpose. “So, I would look at the fleet more as a supplement to the PLA Navy than a standalone competitor.”

How much of a threat does Russia's Pacific fleet pose to the US?

The Russian navy has been active in the Pacific during the war in Ukraine.

BY JEFF SCHOGOL | PUBLISHED APR 14, 2023 4:52 PM EDT

taskandpurpose.com · by Jeff Schogol · April 14, 2023

Russia has launched a surprise inspection of its Pacific Fleet, and a video posted on Twitter shows some of Russia’s ships in the Pacific going underway for military exercises.

The U.S. military has long been focused on China’s Navy and other armed forces as its primary challenge in the Indo-Pacific region, but Russia’s naval drills serve as a reminder that it can project combat power in the Pacific Ocean as well.

The Defense Department declined to provide any information about the age and capabilities of Russian ships, submarines, and aircraft that operate in the Pacific.

“While we routinely monitor Russian naval activity around the world, we are not able to provide intelligence assessments of their disposition or capabilities,” said Army Maj. Charlie Dietz, a Pentagon spokesman.

Russia has spent many years modernizing its Pacific Fleet since it fell into disrepair in the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s dissolution, according to Indo-Pacific expert Blake Herzinger, a research fellow at the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney, Australia.

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The Russian naval forces in the Pacific are now a mix of old and new vessels that include modern nuclear-powered and diesel submarines and older vessels that have been retrofitted with anti-ship cruise missiles, Herzinger told Task & Purpose.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev visits Russian Pacific Fleet flagship missile cruiser Varyag on November 16, 2009 in Singapore. (Konstantin Zavrazhin/Getty Images)

“The balance of power still heavily favors the United States, especially when considering its alliance relationships, but the Pacific is a region of importance to Moscow and the Pacific Fleet has received commensurate attention in recent years,” Herzinger said.

Although not as large as Russia’s Northern Fleet, which patrols the Arctic and Atlantic Oceans, the Russian fleet in the Pacific includes some modern surface ships and submarines that give it the ability to do considerable damage to an adversary, said Katarzyna Zysk, a Russian military expert and a senior fellow with the Atlantic Council think tank in Washington, D.C.

In 2008, Russia launched an effort to modernize its military that has focused on its nuclear deterrence capabilities, including replacing old ballistic missile submarines, said Zysk, a professor of international relations and contemporary history at the Norwegian Institute for Defence Studies.

Now Russia has deployed four Borei-class nuclear-powered submarines, its newest ballistic missile submarines, to the Pacific, Zysk told Task & Purpose. Russia’s Pacific Fleet also has one Yasen-class attack submarine, and it is expected to receive another one. Those attack boats, which can carry cruise missiles, have proven to be very hard for the U.S. Navy and NATO partners to detect,

Even though Russia has focused on its war in Ukraine for more than a year, Russia’s Pacific Fleet has conducted “provocative and pretty far distant operations,” including joint military exercises with the Chinese navy, said retired Navy Capt. Brent Sadler, the senior fellow for naval warfare and advanced technology at the Heritage Foundation think tank in Washington, D.C.

“The Russian Pacific Fleet has been very active working with the Chinese in driving around the Japanese islands to send a strategic message throughout this war in Ukraine,” Sadler told Task & Purpose. “It’s basically telling the United States and Japan and everyone else: ‘While we may be involved in a land war in Europe, our navy is still very active in the Pacific.”

Russian nuclear submarine Yuri Dolgorukiy (NATO reporting name: SSBN “Borei”, or “Dolgorukiy”) is seen during the Navy Day Military parade July 27, 2014 in Severomorsk. (Sasha Mordovets/Getty Images)

The Russians are also increasingly sending their more modern surface ships and diesel submarines to the Pacific, said Sadler, whose book U.S. Naval Power in the 21st Century: A New Strategy for Facing the Chinese and Russian Threat is set to be released next month.

Some Russian warships from the Pacific that deployed to the Mediterranean Sea to deter NATO have since returned to their homeports, including the Slava-class cruiser Varyag, the flagship for Russia’s Pacific Fleet, Sadler said.

However, the reason those ships are returning to the Pacific is not part of a shift in Russian strategy, Sadler said. Rather, Russia has been unable to sustain larger warships for long periods of time at their naval base in Tartus, Syria.

While Russia maintains a potent naval force in the Pacific, China has the largest navy in the world with roughly 340 ships and submarines, and is expected to grow to 400 ships by 2025 and 440 ships by 2030, according to the Defense Department’s most recent report on Chinese military power. By comparison, the U.S. Navy has a total of 294 ships, and that number is expected to fall to 291 vessels by fiscal year 2028, according to the service’s budget documents.

Russia’s Pacific Fleet has between one-eighth and one-tenth the size of China’s People’s Liberation Army Navy, and China has dozens of newer destroyers and cruisers, said retired Navy Capt. Thomas Shugart, a military innovation expert with the Center for a New American Security think tank in Washington, D.C.

Chinese and Russian flag is seen on board of China’s missile destroyer Hefei arrives at St Petersburg to take part in a ship parade marking Russian Navy Day in St. Petersburg, Russia, 27 July 2017. (Sergey Mihailicenko/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)

On its own, Russia’s Pacific Fleet would not last long in a conflict with the U.S. Navy, Shugart told Task & Purpose. However, the United States would face a much more serious threat if it had to fight both the Russian and Chinese navies in the Pacific.

“That makes what would already be a pretty challenging situation much more challenging by the addition of that extra margin of vessels that the Pacific Fleet could add, in particular, the ability for it to have some relatively quiet nuclear submarines – much quieter than the Chinese – that could be roaming around creating lots of trouble behind the lines for us.”

Russia’s Pacific Fleet has practiced with China’s People’s Liberation Army Navy for years, and the combination of Russia’s stealthy nuclear-powered submarines and China’s silent-running electric diesel boats – all of which would be armed with anti-ship missiles – would pose a formidable challenge to the United States and its allies, said James Holmes, the J. C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island.

“I suppose the way to compare the Russian Pacific Fleet to the PLA [People’s Liberation Army] Navy would be to say it’s rather like the JMSDF [Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force] to the U.S. Navy: a capable junior partner that could stretch out the major adversary across wide geographic space, attenuate the adversary’s strength at any given place, and basically make things tough on the adversary,” Holmes told Task & Purpose. “So, I would look at the fleet more as a supplement to the PLA Navy than a standalone competitor.”

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taskandpurpose.com · by Jeff Schogol · April 14, 2023

16. TikTok Is Too Popular to Ban

This week on both cable news and streaming services I saw a TikTok "commercial" that highlighted a National Guardsman and how he uses TikTok to make military life better. The timing of this was perfect given the other Air National Guardsman in the news this week.

You can view it at the TikTok website at the link below (I googled it). You do not need the app. But go to the link at your own risk.

https://www.tiktok.com/@tiktok/video/7221199914028584238

Since starting @itsjonlynch on TikTok, this Air National Guardsman has been sharing valuable resources and benefits to countless active duty service members, veterans, and their families.

Excerpts:

I grant that the Chinese government puts itself in exactly that position all the time. YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook are all banned inside the country. Internet search terms are censored. Text messages are monitored. Even TikTok doesn’t operate inside China. But what Beijing does is hardly an argument in favor of our banning TikTok, because emulating authoritarian censorship plays to China’s strengths, not our own.

Passing comprehensive user-privacy legislation on all social-media companies operating in the U.S. would be a good idea. Shutting down one of Americans’ favorite apps is not. We don’t need to become more like China. And we don’t need to become less like America.

TikTok Is Too Popular to Ban

And outlawing the app would be un-American.

By James Surowiecki

The Atlantic · by James Surowiecki · April 14, 2023

“An enormous threat.” “An unacceptable national security risk.” “A spy balloon in your phone.” These are descriptions—from members of Congress and American regulators—not of a hidden piece of malware or a computer virus, but of the Chinese social-media app TikTok. Most U.S. citizens know TikTok as the place where they can watch people do stupid dances or post clips of themselves cooking. But many government officials view the app as a Trojan horse, a device that will enable the Chinese Communist Party to insinuate itself into American life and subvert national security. And that has led civil servants and elected representatives to call on the U.S. government to cut off Americans’ access to TikTok, the app’s enormous popularity with them notwithstanding.

The efforts to ban TikTok go back to the summer of 2020, when President Donald Trump, citing his powers under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, issued an executive order prohibiting any American from participating in any transaction with the app. That order was struck down in the courts. But the impulse behind it hasn’t gone away. In January, Republican Senator Josh Hawley introduced a bill to ban TikTok from the U.S., and last month, Democrat Mark Warner and Republican John Thune introduced another Senate bill, the RESTRICT Act, which would empower the president to impose tight restrictions on “technology from foreign adversaries”—very much including TikTok.

What has the video-sharing platform done to merit this treatment? Well, the concern is not so much what it’s done as what it might do—or, perhaps more accurately, what the Chinese government might make it do. The company’s critics accuse it of collecting hoards of private information about its users, including data not only from within the app but from other apps as well. This information might, in theory, involve compromising material that could be used to blackmail U.S. citizens. The critics also point to the possibility of the Chinese government’s using the site as a propaganda outlet, swaying opinions by feeding American viewers certain clips.

In fact, little if any evidence suggests that TikTok’s data-collection practices are meaningfully different from—or any more invasive than—those of other social-media companies. To the extent that those practices are problematic invasions of privacy, the logical remedy would surely be to impose industry-wide standards. But for TikTok’s critics, those similarities pale next to the key difference between TikTok and its competitors: It’s a Chinese company—which means it could be legally required to hand over data to the Chinese government. TikTok insists that it has moved all of its American-user data to U.S. servers, but no one seems to believe that this would really make a difference if Beijing applied serious pressure to TikTok’s parent company. And so national security, we’re told, demands that TikTok be shut down in the U.S.

If TikTok were just a technology company, banning U.S. customers from doing business with it would be well within the government’s powers, as well as in line with similar actions the government has taken in the past. But TikTok isn’t just, or even primarily, a technology company. It’s a media platform, so banning it would be far more consequential. Cutting off Americans’ access to one of their favorite sources of information and entertainment would be legally and constitutionally dubious. Worse still, it would be wrong on the merits.

Any TikTok ban would have to contend with the Berman amendments, a series of changes to the International Emergency Economic Powers Act that prohibit the president from using sanctions to restrict the exchange of “information or informational materials,” including via electronic media. And then there are First Amendment considerations. As a foreign-owned company, TikTok itself does not itself enjoy that constitutional protection, but the U.S. Supreme Court has long held that the First Amendment protects the right of Americans to “receive and consider” information and ideas, no matter their source. In 1965, for instance, the Court struck down a federal law that imposed controls on “Communist political propaganda” that was “printed or otherwise prepared in a foreign country,” declaring unconstitutional the government’s attempt to “control the flow of ideas to the public.”

On top of this, a TikTok ban would be more problematic than limiting the flow of communist propaganda from abroad, because most of the content Americans consume on TikTok is generated by, yes, other Americans. Even if you think it should be permissible for the government to prevent Americans from reading, say, The Pyongyang Times, domestic measures blocking access to Bernie Sanders clips or a video of a guy skateboarding to Fleetwood Mac would be a remarkably far-reaching intrusion into Americans’ lives. Although content creators could migrate to other platforms, and users would find ways to circumvent the ban, such government action would radically curtail Americans’ right to receive and consider information and ideas.

Congress has the power, of course, to adjust the Berman amendments to allow itself to shut TikTok down within the United States. And the Supreme Court could decide that a TikTok ban is justified on national-security grounds. The real issue, though, is not whether the government can shut down TikTok; it’s whether it should. The national-security concerns may be legitimate, but even given the government’s compelling interest in limiting the Chinese government’s access to Americans’ data, any regulations it puts in place should be narrowly tailored to achieve that goal alone. Preventing Americans from using TikTok entirely is the opposite of that—and doing so would put the government in the position of deciding what content Americans are allowed access to and what they’re not.

I grant that the Chinese government puts itself in exactly that position all the time. YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook are all banned inside the country. Internet search terms are censored. Text messages are monitored. Even TikTok doesn’t operate inside China. But what Beijing does is hardly an argument in favor of our banning TikTok, because emulating authoritarian censorship plays to China’s strengths, not our own.

Passing comprehensive user-privacy legislation on all social-media companies operating in the U.S. would be a good idea. Shutting down one of Americans’ favorite apps is not. We don’t need to become more like China. And we don’t need to become less like America.

The Atlantic · by James Surowiecki · April 14, 2023

17. PLA Freezes out Pentagon, Sustains Military-to-Military Relations with U.S. Allies

Conclusion:

In spite of an intensifying U.S.-China strategic rivalry, the U.S. and China sustained extensive military-to-military interaction up until very recently. Military-to-military exchange has greatly atrophied over the past year, with the Chinese side ignoring U.S. offers to resume dialogue and unilaterally closing off long-standing dialogue mechanisms. At the same time that the PLA has frozen out the U.S. military, it has sustained or sought to reinvigorate military-to-military exchanges with key U.S. allies such as France, Australia and Japan. As Washington seeks to resume its own regular military-to-military communications with Beijing, it must nevertheless also be aware of the PRC’s efforts to use military diplomacy as part of its broader efforts to sow division between the U.S. and its allies in Europe and Asia.

PLA Freezes out Pentagon, Sustains Military-to-Military Relations with U.S. Allies

Publication: China Brief Volume: 23 Issue: 7

By: John S. Van Oudenaren

April 14, 2023 04:02 PM Age: 18 hours

jamestown.org · by John S. Van Oudenaren · April 14, 2023

At the conclusion of French President Emmanuel Macron’s April 5-7 state visit to the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the two sides released a joint statement laying out 51 priorities for “opening new prospects in bilateral relations” and “fostering momentum in China-EU relations” (PRC Ministry of Foreign Affairs [FMPRC], April 7). While much of the joint statement focuses on deepening economic ties, strengthening cultural exchanges and enhancing cooperation on transnational challenges such as climate change, the document also addresses global security issues and bilateral military-to-military relations. The section on “jointly promoting world security and stability” lists eight shared priorities, including, strengthening the UN Security Council, preventing nuclear conflict, supporting non-proliferation regimes, restoring peace in Ukraine and promoting a diplomatic resolution of the Iran nuclear issue. Although the statement does not explicitly mention the PRC’s recently launched Global Security Initiative (GSI), the points made therein echo many of its key organizing principles and lend weight to General Secretary Xi Jinping’s efforts to position the PRC as a leader in international security affairs (China Brief, March 3). In addition to reaffirming both sides’ willingness to promote the “continuous development” of the China-France strategic partnership, the joint statement also notes that both sides have “agreed to deepen exchanges on strategic issues,” with a specific emphasis on enhancing dialogue between the “People’s Liberation Army [PLA] Southern Theater Command and the French Armed Forces in the Pacific, in order to strengthen mutual understanding on international and regional security issues” (FMPRC, April 7).

In his role as Chairman of the Central Military Commission (CMC), Xi has emphasized the importance of military diplomacy as a key element of China’s overall foreign policy. According to recent congressional testimony by the director of the U.S. National Defense University’s Center for the Study of Chinese Military Affairs, Philip Saunders, high-level delegation visits, dialogues and other military-to-military exchanges advance both the operational and strategic aims of PLA diplomacy (USCC.gov, January 26) Strategically, high-level exchanges with foreign militaries support overall Chinese foreign policy and the PRC’s efforts to foster a favorable international security environment. Operationally, such interactions provide opportunities for intelligence gathering on both friendly and rival militaries. Indeed, throughout Xi’s tenure, many of the PLA’s senior-level visits, dialogues and international academic exchanges have occurred with the militaries of the U.S. and its NATO and Indo-Pacific allies. [1] However, as geopolitical tensions between the U.S. and China have escalated, Beijing has responded to perceived U.S. provocations, in particular Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan last August and the spy balloon crisis in early February, by halting established military dialogue mechanisms and greatly curtailing US-China military communication.

While Beijing has sought to condition the resumption of military-to-military dialogue based on changes in U.S. behavior, Washington remains eager to reopen communication mechanisms without preconditions (NetEase, March 9). For example, following his November meeting with then Chinese Defense Minister Wei Fenghe, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin “emphasized the need to responsibly manage competition and maintain open lines of communication” and stressed the importance of “substantive dialogue” focused on “reducing strategic risk, improving crisis communications, and enhancing operational safety” (Defense.gov, November 22, 2022). Over the first quarter of 2023, however, U.S.-China military-to-military relations have been curtailed, even as the PLA continues or even deepens its engagement with the militaries of U.S. allies in Europe and Asia. Such a situation presents a dilemma for the U.S. On the one hand, allies and partners share and can reinforce U.S. concerns over China’s increasingly assertive behavior in Asia and beyond. On the other hand, if Beijing continues to freeze military diplomacy with the U.S., while sustaining or even expanding military-to-military engagement with other NATO countries and U.S. allies in the Indo-Pacific region, this could widen the threat perception gap on China between Washington and some U.S. allies, particularly in Europe, that the PRC is not so much a military rival but an economic competitor-cum-security partner. If such perceptions become further engrained, this could weaken the unity and resolve of the U.S. and its allies to deal with China as a military challenge and strategic competitor.

U.S.-China Military-to-Military Relations on the Rocks

After U.S. Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan last August, Beijing issued eight “countermeasures” (反制措施) against the U.S., which included canceling phone calls between military commanders as well as U.S.-China Defense Policy Coordination Talk and Military Maritime Consultative Agreement Mechanism meetings. Notably, the five non-military countermeasures taken were described as “suspending” (暂停) efforts to address transnational challenges, including counter-narcotics cooperation and climate change talks, which implies these discussions could resume at some point (FMPRC, August 5, 2022). By contrast, the PRC announced it was “canceling” (取消)the military dialogues. According to a PLA international relations researcher familiar with U.S.-China defense talks, the “cancellation” of military talks indicates there “is no possibility to get them resumed” (China Daily, August 7, 2022). Nevertheless, limited high-level U.S.-China military-to-military interaction still occurred following these cancellations. Last November, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin met with then PRC Defense Minister Wei Fenghe on the sidelines of the ASEAN Defense Ministers’ Meeting-Plus in Cambodia (PRC Ministry of National Defense (MND), November 22, 2022).

Any momentum toward restoring high-level military-to-military communications dissipated earlier this year as a result of the scandal surrounding the PLA surveillance balloon that overflew North America before being downed off the coast of South Carolina by the U.S. Air Force on February 4 (China Brief, February 13). According to MND spokesperson Tan Kefei, the “U.S. side proposed a call between the defense chiefs of both countries” to discuss the spy balloon situation, but Beijing rejected the offer to talk and castigated the U.S. “use of force” against the airship, which “violates international law and sets a bad precedent” (MND, February 9). While diplomatic contact between Washington and Beijing has resumed in the two and a half months since the spy balloon incident, military-to-military channels of communication remain largely closed off. In a recent interview, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Indo-Pacific Security Affairs Ely Ratner acknowledged the deep freeze: “Some of our working-level dialogues that are meant to manage the [political-military] part of this, our [Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for China] Michael Chase’s dialogues as well as some of the operational dialogues INDOPACOM holds with the [PLA], they have turned all of that off for now. And we think that’s destabilizing and dangerous, and we think we both ought to be doing a better job of managing” (Breaking Defense, March 2).

The recent curtailment in U.S.-China military-to-military engagement has not been paralleled by a reduction in the PLA’s interactions with the U.S.’s NATO or Asian allies. As one popular Chinese military blog notes, in February, the PLA sent a delegation to Brussels for consultations with the European Union and to visit NATO headquarters, which shows that PLA diplomacy is no longer focused on reflexively opposing NATO, but rather seeks to divide the U.S. from the other NATO countries (NetEase, March 9; Sohu, February 27).

Military-to-Military Engagement with U.S. Allies Continues

In February, China and Japan held their first security dialogue in four years. The meeting was hosted in Toyko with the Chinese side represented by Vice Foreign Minister Sun Weidong and Deputy Director of the Central Military Commission Office for International Military Cooperation (OIMC) Zhang Baoqun (Guancha, February 23). As Kenneth W. Allen and Chad Sbragia explain, the OIMC is the lead CMC organization responsible for foreign military exchange and cooperation and the overall management and coordination of the PLA’s foreign affairs (China Brief, November 18, 2022). A month after the China-Japan security dialogue, the two sides announced the completion of a direct telephone link as part of the air and maritime liaison mechanisms. The PRC MND stated that the establishment of a direct link will strengthen bilateral “defense communication channels, enhance the capabilities of both sides to manage and control maritime and air crises and help to maintain regional peace and stability” (CCTV, March 31).

In March, the PRC Ministry of National Defense and the Australian Department of Defense convened the eighth defense coordination dialogue, discussing mutual areas of concern and holding consultations on promoting practical exchanges and cooperation between the two militaries (China Military Online, March 22). In February, the European Union and China held their 13th annual consultations on security and defense, chaired by the European External Action Service’s Managing Director for Common Security and Defense Policy and the Deputy Director of the OIMC (European External Action Service, February 22). As noted, China and France have agreed, in their joint statement, to intensify strategic dialogue and military-to-military exchange. The China-France Defense Strategy Consultation, which is organized by the CMC’s Joint Staff Department on the Chinese side and last convened virtually for its 16th iteration in January 2022, will likely serve as a channel for continued high-level military-to-military engagement between Beijing and Paris (MND, January 13, 2022).

Conclusion

In spite of an intensifying U.S.-China strategic rivalry, the U.S. and China sustained extensive military-to-military interaction up until very recently. Military-to-military exchange has greatly atrophied over the past year, with the Chinese side ignoring U.S. offers to resume dialogue and unilaterally closing off long-standing dialogue mechanisms. At the same time that the PLA has frozen out the U.S. military, it has sustained or sought to reinvigorate military-to-military exchanges with key U.S. allies such as France, Australia and Japan. As Washington seeks to resume its own regular military-to-military communications with Beijing, it must nevertheless also be aware of the PRC’s efforts to use military diplomacy as part of its broader efforts to sow division between the U.S. and its allies in Europe and Asia.

John S. Van Oudenaren is Editor-in-Chief of China Brief. For any comments, queries, or submissions, please reach out to him at: cbeditor@jamestown.org.

Notes

[1] For a detailed breakdown of recent PLA senior-level military diplomacy, see Kenneth W. Allen, “The PLA’s Military Diplomacy in Advance of the 20th Party Congress (Part One),” China Brief, September 9, 2022.

jamestown.org · by John S. Van Oudenaren · April 14, 2023

18. The Biggest American Porn Site Got Bought and the Entire Thing Is Super-Sketch

Yes I hesitated sending this out. It just feels so unsavory. But this appears to be a national security issue.

THE TRIAD

The Biggest American Porn Site Got Bought and the Entire Thing Is Super-Sketch

Did a foreign intelligence service just make a play for Pornhub?

https://thetriad.thebulwark.com/p/the-biggest-american-porn-site-got?publication_id=87274&post_id=114656113&isFreemail=true

JONATHAN V. LAST

APR 15, 2023

Every week I highlight three newsletters.

If you find value in this project, do two things for me: (1) Hit the Like button, and (2) Share this with someone.

Most of what we do in Bulwark+ is only for our members, but this email will always be free for everyone. Sign up to get it now. (Just select the “free” option at the bottom.)

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1. Pornhub

It is strange to me how reluctant the tech press is to cover the adult side of the internet. For instance, OnlyFans is a Ghost Unicorn: A tech company that has to be worth a billion dollars—yet seems to exist only in the shadows of business journalism.

Which is weird. Silicon Valley is not a hotbed of Puritanism.

Another big, under-covered tech business story is the sale of Pornhub.

I’m not sure how to classify Pornhub—the YouTube of porn, maybe? Anyway, this gigantic company with a massive global userbase got sold and . . . [crickets].

Which is especially weird since the buyer is—what do the kids say?—sus?

Evan Armstrong wrote about the sale at Every last week. I’m going to let him set the table for you so you have a sense of how big Pornhub is:

I would argue that Pornhub (and by proxy its parent company MindGeek) is one of the most important websites in the world. Pornhub had over 2B visits last year and 100M+ daily active users. . . .

Whoever owns this website will not only have a direct influence over the state of sex trafficking globally but will also hold the emails, credit card numbers, and most private browsing habits of tens of millions of people.

I’ve gotta tell you: If I ran a foreign intelligence service and I was fishing for material I could leverage to extort information and/or influence, Pornhub would be an extremely promising pond. It’s a kompromat candy store.

And this store was just purchased. By who?

Here’s Armstrong again:

On March 16th, Pornhub announced it had been bought by—get this—“Ethical Capital Partners.” It’s like the Medellin Cartel getting bought by “Totally Not Crime LLC.” . . .

When you take a look at the employees of ECP, the transaction gets even weirder. According to their LinkedIn profiles, only one employee has ever worked in finance before. None of them have worked in technology. None of them have publicly worked at ECP itself for longer than six months. The fund's leader Rocco Meliambro supposedly made his money in the cannabis industry.

The firm's advisors are also unconventional. Some are sex work academics, some are more typical board members. One advisor brags about how she can crush watermelons with her thighs. . . .

Not only are the employees and advisors involved baffling, but the fund isn’t registered in U.S. or Canadian investment registration databases. Canada doesn’t require private equity funds to register, but many funds still do for the sake of transparency. Ethical Capital Partners did register as a business in Ontario in 2021, so it technically exists, but it’s unclear where the money came from. . . .

So in summary:

a fund that feels fake
staffed with complete technology and finance noobs
bought a company with money that came from somewhere they won’t disclose

This sort of thing happens all the time in private transactions. But it has never happened in a case with one of the most important websites in the world! We should know more!

But hold on. It gets weirder.

Because in 2021, a group which included some of the current folks from Ethical Capital Partners tries to buy Pornhub, which at the time was doing a shade less than $500m a year in revenue with $186m in EBITDA

That attempt failed to reach consummation. You should read the whole thing by Armstrong.

Ultimately Armstrong concludes that the most likely explanation here is that Ethical Capital Partners put up a very small percentage of the purchase price and that the rest of the money came from foreign funds.

That could mean anything. It could be totally on-the-level. Or the money could have deep ties to China Russia some foreign government. And in return, this government could pretty easily get access too [gestures broadly] all of the blackmails.

19. China expands wartime military draft to include veterans and college students

China expands wartime military draft to include veterans and college students

foxnews.com · by Caitlin McFall , Fox News Staff | Fox News

Video

Gen. Jack Keane: China using 'intimidation and coercion' to repress US allies

Fox News senior strategic analyst Gen. Jack Keane (Ret.) stresses the importance of America maintaining strong military relationships with allies, arguing the U.S. cannot oppose China alone.

Beijing this week announced revisions to its conscription policy and said that should China enter a state of war, veterans and educated college students can expect to be on top of the list to be drafted.

China has positioned these changes as a necessary step to modernize the People's Liberation Army (PLA) and to bolster its combat effectiveness.

However, adding the nation's most educated as priority draftees runs counter not only to traditional Western conscription practices, but China’s as well.

Chinese honor guard arrive for the welcoming ceremony for French President Emmanuel Macron and China's President Xi Jinping in Beijing on April 6, 2023. (LUDOVIC MARIN/AFP via Getty Images)

CHINA SANCTIONS US LAWMAKER FOR HIS VISIT TO TAIWAN, CLAIMING HE VIOLATED 'ONE CHINA' PRINCIPLE

"It fits into the context of PLA modernization," Heino Klinck, former deputy assistant secretary of defense for East Asia and military attaché to China, told Fox News Digital. "The PLA has historically been a military based on conscripts from the countryside. I think Chinese President Xi Jinping is trying to further bolster his communist bona fide by ensuring that all segments of Chinese society are a part of the national military buildup."

Several of China's top universities already have military departments included in their institutions where students can combine their studies with military training.

One top official in China’s Central Military Commission told a PLA newspaper this week that colleges and universities play an essential role in recruiting and that there is a particular interest in female and male students or graduates with a background in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

China also plans to instate a new standardized recruitment processes that will implement steps to improve the physical, mental and political assessments of recruits.

Ultimately, Beijing hopes to "provide institutional guarantees for consolidating national defense and building strong armed forces" by "recruiting more high-caliber soldiers," according to a government announcement Wednesday.

Chinese honor guard arrive for the welcoming ceremony for French President Emmanuel Macron and China's President Xi Jinping in Beijing on April 6, 2023. (LUDOVIC MARIN/AFP via Getty Images)

CHINA'S DEFENSE MINISTER SET TO MEET WITH RUSSIAN COUNTERPART, OTHER MILITARY OFFICIALS IN MOSCOW

Klinck explained that the revisions to China's conscription policies were not necessarily a surprise, though their timing has prompted some pause for concern.

"I don’t know what’s worse: that they are tone-deaf or are they intentionally messaging?" he questioned.

The announcement came just days after top U.S. lawmakers traveled to Taiwan in a show of "deterrence" against Chinese aggression, which occurred simultaneously with a trip by Taiwanese president Tsai Ing-wen to the U.S., where she met with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.

Beijing responded by launching large-scale combat exercises around Taiwan that simulated sealing off the island — similar to drills it launched last year after then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi traveled to Taipei.

Klinck described the conscription announcement as "arrogant" and noted his concern that Beijing is "recklessly making policy announcements with a total disregard to how the international community will interpret them."

"The Chinese are usually pretty good when it comes to messaging and consistency," he added. "I think that this is once again an indication that we should not anticipate the Chinese Communist Party softening its stance on Taiwan, softening its stance on the South China Sea or any other contentious geopolitical issue of concern."

It is unclear how many fighting-age men China’s latest policy changes would add to its more than 2 million-strong ranks, or how its army could hold up to top militaries like the U.S.

A boat moves through the water at the 68-nautical-mile scenic spot, the closest point in mainland China to the island of Taiwan, in Pingtan in southeastern China's Fujian Province on Aug. 5, 2022. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)

Western defense officials have warned that Beijing plans to invade Taiwan by 2027, and last year President Biden raised eyebrows after he said he would send boots on the ground to defend the island from a Chinese attack.

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"The U.S. needs to speak softly and carry a big stick," Klinck advised regarding U.S.-Chinese relations. "We need to be very clear that we want a positive relationship with China, but on mutually beneficial terms."

"It cannot be a relationship where we want it more than the Chinese do. And any attempt to engage with the Chinese at all costs is not in our national interests," he added.

Caitlin McFall is a Reporter at Fox News Digital covering Politics, U.S. and World news.

foxnews.com · by Caitlin McFall , Fox News Staff | Fox News

20. 'Digital Prison Camp' -- Putin Signs Electronic Conscription Bill Into Law

'Digital Prison Camp' -- Putin Signs Electronic Conscription Bill Into Law

Breitbart · by Breitbart London · April 15, 2023

MOSCOW (AP) – Russian President Putin on Friday signed a bill allowing authorities to issue electronic notices to draftees and reservists amid the fighting in Ukraine, sparking fears of a new wave of mobilization.

Russia’s military service rules previously required the in-person delivery of notices to conscripts and reservists who are called up for duty. Under the new law, the notices issued by local military conscription offices will continue to be sent by mail but they would be considered valid from the moment they are put on a state portal for electronic services.

In the past, many Russians avoided the draft by staying away from their address of record. The new law closes that loophole in an apparent effort to create a tool for quickly beefing up the military ahead of a widely anticipated Ukrainian counteroffensive in the coming weeks.

Recipients who fail to show up for service would be prohibited from leaving Russia, would have their driver’s licenses suspended and would be barred from selling their apartments and other assets.

The bill signed into law by Putin was published on the official register of government documents.

Kremlin critics and rights activists denounced the legislation as a step toward a “digital prison camp” that gives unprecedented powers to the military conscription offices.

Lyudmila Narusova, the widow of former St. Petersburg mayor Anatoly Sobchak, was the only house member who spoke against the measure when the Federation Council, the upper house of parliament, considered the bill Wednesday.

Narusova, whose late husband was Putin’s mentor, charged that the bill contradicts the country´s constitution and various laws, and strongly objected to its hasty approval.

The swift enactment of the law fueled fears of the government initiating another wave of mobilization following the one that Putin ordered in the fall.

Putin Propagandist Says Ukraine No Longer Needed, Will 'Cease to Exist' https://t.co/GsdAKqzvoR

— Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) April 10, 2023

Russian authorities deny that another mobilization is being planned. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said this week that the measure was needed to streamline the outdated call-up system in view of the flaws that were revealed by last fall´s partial mobilization.

“There was a lot of mess in military conscription offices,” he said. “The purpose of the bill is to clean up this mess and make the system modern, effective and convenient for citizens.”

Putin announced a call-up of 300,000 reservists in September after a Ukrainian counteroffensive that pushed Russian forces out of broad areas in the east.

The mobilization order prompted an exodus of Russian men that was estimated to number in the hundreds of thousands.

Observers say the new law appears to give authorities a mechanism for quickly beefing up the ranks in preparation for a new Ukrainian attack.

“A possible reason is that they see that the Ukrainians are getting ready for an offensive,” said Abbas Gallyamov, a former Putin speechwriter turned Kremlin critic who has left Russia.

Gallyamov has been labeled a “foreign agent” by the Russian authorities, a designation that implies additional government scrutiny and carries strong pejorative connotations aimed at undermining the recipient´s credibility. He also has been put on a wanted list for criminal suspects.

Gallyamov said the law could fuel smoldering discontent but would be unlikely to trigger protests.

“On the one hand, there is a growing discontent and reluctance to fight, but on the other hand there is a fear of escalating repressions,” he said. “People are put before a difficult choice between going to battle and dying, or landing in prison if they protest.”

Russia has Trained Belarussian Pilots to Deploy Nuclear Weapons, Defence Ministry Claims https://t.co/zcYutffUjV

— Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) April 14, 2023

Follow Breitbart London on Facebook: Breitbart London

Breitbart · by Breitbart London · April 15, 2023

21. Taiwan highly vulnerable to Chinese air attack, leaked documents show

This should not be a surprise.

Taiwan highly vulnerable to Chinese air attack, leaked documents show

Troubling details raise questions about U.S. intelligence agencies’ ability to detect a pending invasion and the island’s capacity to defend itself

By Ellen Nakashima, Christian Shepherd and Cate Cadell

April 15, 2023 at 6:00 a.m. EDT

The Washington Post · by Ellen Nakashima · April 15, 2023

Taiwan is unlikely to thwart Chinese military air superiority in a cross-strait conflict, while tactics such as China’s use of civilian ships for military purposes have eroded U.S. spy agencies’ ability to detect a pending invasion, according to leaked Pentagon assessments that contain troubling details about the self-governed island’s ability to fend off war.

The assessments state that Taiwan officials doubt their air defenses can “accurately detect missile launches,” that barely more than half of Taiwan’s aircraft are fully mission capable and that moving the jets to shelters would take at least a week — a huge problem if China launched missiles before Taiwan had a chance to disperse those planes.

The classified documents addressing a potential conflict suggest China’s air force would have a much better shot at establishing early control of the skies — a strategy that Taipei itself believes will underpin an attack — than Russia did in Ukraine.

The Discord Leaks

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The document leak, which first came to authorities’ attention last week, has provided extensive insight into U.S. intelligence activities worldwide. Many of the several hundred assessments that have surfaced thus far date to February and March; they first appeared on the Discord messaging platform before spreading elsewhere online. Both the Pentagon, where many of the materials appear to have originated this year, and the Justice Department are investigating the security breach.

The FBI arrested its primary suspect, 21-year-old member of the Massachusetts Air National Guard Jack Teixeira, on Thursday afternoon.

The revelations about Taiwan’s readiness come as U.S.-China relations are at their lowest point in decades and concerns continue to grow about a potential conflict between Taipei and the People’s Liberation Army, China’s fast-modernizing military that is roughly 14 times the size of its neighbor’s force.

One assessment notes that the PLA’s modernization, its heightened operations tempo and the use of civilian ferries in exercises in the Eastern Theater Command near Taiwan are “eroding” the U.S. intelligence community’s ability to detect abnormal activity and preparations for “an attack on Taiwan.”

Another assessment takes aim at Taiwan’s military and civilian preparedness. It says the island’s current doctrine of firing two air defense missiles per target “would be strained under high-volume PLA fires” from China’s short-range ballistic missile system, dispersed across multiple moving launch platforms. Taiwanese airmen train for shooting at single unmoving targets.

Moreover, Pentagon analysts note, Taiwan’s missile warning drills are highly scripted and inadequate for steeling civil authorities and the public for “a real-world event.”

Though far from a comprehensive analysis of China’s capabilities and Taiwan’s vulnerabilities, the documents collectively paint a grimmer picture of Taiwan’s overall readiness. They also serve as a warning to policymakers that China’s aggression is becoming more intense even as its intentions become less predictable.

A spokesperson for the Office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff declined to comment. Taiwan’s Defense Ministry said in a statement that it “respects outside opinions about its military preparedness” and that its defense systems are “carefully constructed based on enemy threats.” The ministry added: Taiwan’s response to recent Chinese military exercises showed that officers are “absolutely capable, determined and confident” in ensuring security.

CIA Director William J. Burns has said Chinese President Xi Jinping has directed that his military be capable of seizing Taiwan by the PLA’s centennial in 2027. But that doesn’t necessarily mean he will deploy troops then or at any other time, Burns hastened to add, saying he believes Xi and his military leadership have doubts about whether an invasion would be successful. The Russians’ experience in Ukraine has “probably reinforced some of those doubts as well,” Burns told CBS’ “Face the Nation” in February.

Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in November that the Pentagon is working to make sure that Taipei can defend itself and that the U.S. military is prepared should the island be invaded.

Milley pointed out that the Chinese military hasn’t seen combat since the 1970s and would be playing a “very, very dangerous game” if it attacks Taiwan. Subduing the 23 million people there and negotiating mountainous terrain would be extremely difficult, he said, and drew parallels to the Russian invasion of Ukraine — an ongoing conflict that has left hundreds of thousands of soldiers and civilians dead or wounded.

Indeed, China’s ability to mount an amphibious attack would be hampered by limited options for delivering gasoline to its fuel-hungry landing brigade, according to one of the leaked documents. That would make it difficult to sustain a foothold on Taiwan, creating an opportunity for the United States and Taiwan to thwart an invasion at an early stage, the assessment noted.

Securing the Port of Taipei would be China’s best refueling option, it said. But both sides would face challenges: The PLA has not practiced seizure operations. Taiwan has no plans for sabotaging such an attempt.

One Chinese official familiar with PLA aims in the Eastern Theater told The Washington Post recently that the country “has the ability to swiftly defeat Taiwan in the air and sea — that is not in question.” But, the official continued, “the United States shows every day that it is willing to meddle in Chinese affairs. We need to prepare for the scenario [of U.S. intervention on Taiwan’s behalf], and that is clear in the operations being conducted now.”

The official called recent drills near Taiwan “simply a deterrent” and important to improving morale and “mental readiness” — particularly of pilots. “Our military is developing quickly, and the technology is advancing quickly,” the official said. “This creates problems ensuring [pilots] have appropriate experience. So there needs to be practical training.”

Yet as difficult as an assault on Taiwan would be for China, Pentagon intelligence analysts have detected a number of deficits in Taipei’s planning.

One concern is that officials might withhold air defense systems early in a conflict to save them for later. Independent analysts consider such a delay problematic since China has almost 40 air bases within striking range of Taiwan. Thomas Shugart, an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, has said many of those bases have hardened shelters to limit damage from weapons and many of the shelters are covered to make it difficult for satellites to detect where aircraft are parked. The PLA has built more than 800 covered air shelters within roughly 900 miles of Taiwan over the last decade, Shugart noted.

The assessments prepared by the Pentagon’s Joint Staff intelligence directorate state that Taiwan’s air defense units lack a “common operating picture,” meaning an ability to see where all units are at a given time. They also lack compatible secure radios. Targets are not deconflicted, raising the risk of multiple units firing on the same target.

In an oblique criticism, one document says Taiwan’s air defense commanders “may hesitate to engage manned aircraft due to fear of escalation, even with first strike orders or imminent air threats.''

“We can’t fire the first shot,” explained Chang Yan-ting, a retired Taiwan Air Force deputy commander. “We are not allowed to throw a punch until we get hit. In any emergency, we are bound hand and foot because we set advanced limits on ourselves about when to respond.”

Taiwan’s expansion of Air Force conscription in 2024, part of broad combat readiness reforms that extended compulsory military service to one year from four months, is “unlikely to significantly improve” its air defense effectiveness without addressing several issues, according to the leaked documents.

While air superiority is critical for a successful invasion of Taiwan, it alone will not win a war, said Matt Pottinger, a deputy national security adviser under President Donald Trump. Still, he said, Taiwan’s shortcomings in air defenses require urgent steps by its leaders, the United States and Japan to ramp up capabilities to repel Chinese aircraft and missile-launchers. Pottinger, like other experts interviewed for this story, was speaking generally and had not seen the leaked documents.

China’s intensifying military activity around Taiwan is undermining the intelligence community’s ability to accurately track what is normal and what is escalatory, raising the risk of accidents and miscalculation, the assessments warn. Beijing has carried out “large-scale military exercises simulating amphibious assaults, blockades, air raids and joint fire power strikes” twice within the last eight months, most notably after the visit of then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) to Taiwan in August, when it launched ballistic missiles over the island and sent dozens of jets across the unofficial sea border between the two jurisdictions.

The most recent activity — following this month’s meeting between Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) in California — wasn’t as bellicose. Should future exercises get significantly larger, that would make judgments about China’s intentions more difficult, said Joel Wuthnow, a senior research fellow at National Defense University.

“You need to have a fairly high level of confidence that you’re facing use of force and also time to make critical political decisions if you’re the United States,” Wuthnow said. “If you have ambiguities or doubts as well as a compressed timeline, it could potentially complicate your ability to mobilize your own forces, which is a huge challenge, because the United States needs to mobilize across the huge expanse of the Pacific Ocean. Reduced warning could make it difficult to get there on time.”

Distance is a significant complicating factor in a defense-of-Taiwan scenario, experts agree.

“We cannot get there quickly,” said Oriana Skylar Mastro, a fellow at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and at the American Enterprise Institute. “It’s basically submarines and U.S. aircraft that are going to be operating from the southwest islands of Japan and eventually from bases in the northern Philippines. If China takes out those bases, the United States doesn’t have a lot of options.”

Unlike Ukraine, “there is no situation under which Taiwan can defend itself without direct military intervention from the United States,” Mastro said. “Taiwan has to be able to hold out long enough for the United States to get enough forces in theater.”

Behind the scenes, the U.S. government has pushed Taiwan to bolster its defenses — particularly with nonconventional arms such as anti-ship missiles and other advanced weaponry that are more likely to survive a Chinese attack. In response, Taipei is buying U.S.-made Harpoon anti-ship missiles, Stinger antiaircraft missiles and High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS).

In the event of a conflict, however, one assessment expects that China will “very likely” use its space capabilities to disable U.S. satellites in an effort to deprive the United States of useful intelligence. It also may rely on satellites for long-range strikes on U.S. ships, subs and jets spread across the vast Pacific, the document states.

If China were able to successfully disable the U.S. satellites, “it would make any effort to support Taiwan bloodier,” said Dean Cheng, a nonresident senior fellow with the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies. “More ships would be sunk. More pilots would be lost. More bombs would go off target. Our forces would not be able to coordinate nearly as well.”

The assessment underscores the wide array of Chinese space weaponry, such as roving antisatellite missile launchers and lasers, that could by used to “deter, disrupt, delay, and, if necessary, defeat” a U.S. intervention to aid Taiwan. The bottom line, according to the document, is that China considers such capabilities “critical for deterring the U.S. from entering a conflict, impairing the U.S. if deterrence fails, and enabling its own war-fighting capabilities.”

Dan Lamothe in Washington and Vic Chiang in Taipei contributed to this report.

The Washington Post · by Ellen Nakashima · April 15, 2023

22. Alien motherships: Pentagon official floats a theory for unexplained sightings

DEFENSE

Alien motherships: Pentagon official floats a theory for unexplained sightings

One astronomy professor called the notions “highly questionable” and “odd.”

https://www.politico.com/news/2023/04/14/pentagon-ufo-alien-object-00092108

The paper explains that interstellar objects such as the cigar-shaped “Oumuamua” that scientists spotted flying through the galaxy in 2017 “could potentially be a parent craft that releases many small probes during its close passage to Earth." | M. Kornmesser/NASA

By LARA SELIGMAN

04/14/2023 01:06 PM EDT

Updated: 04/14/2023 04:12 PM EDT

The official in charge of a secretive Pentagon effort to investigate unexplained aerial incursions has co-authored an academic paper that presents an out-of-this-world theory: Recent objects could actually be alien probes from a mothership sent to study Earth.

In a draft paper dated March 7, Sean Kirkpatrick, head of the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, and Harvard professor Avi Loeb teamed up to write that the objects, which appear to defy all physics, could be “probes” from an extraterrestrial “parent craft.”

It’s unusual for government officials, especially those involved in the nascent effort to collect intelligence on recent sightings, to discuss the possibility of extraterrestrial life, although top agency officials don’t rule it out when asked.

After Loeb posted it online, the paper gained notoriety from a post on Military Times and has also circulated among science-focused news outlets.

More than half of the five-page paper is devoted to discussing the possibility that the unexplained objects DoD is studying could be the “probes” in the mothership scenario, including most of the page-long introduction. One section is titled: “The Extraterrestrial Possibility” and another “Propulsion Methods.”

Kirkpatrick’s involvement in the academic paper demonstrates that the Pentagon is open to scientific debate of the origins of UFOs, an important signal to send to the academic world, experts said. But they add that his decision to attach his name to a theory considered in most academic circles to be highly unsubstantiated also raises questions about AARO’s credibility.

The paper goes on to compare the probes to “dandelion seeds” that could be separated from the parent craft by the sun’s gravitational force. It examines the physics of how the smaller craft could move through the Earth’s atmosphere to reach the surface, where they could be spotted by humans.

The paper notes that the “probes” could use starlight to “charge their batteries” and the Earth’s water as fuel. It also speculates on the motive for aliens to send exploratory probes to Earth.

“What would be the overarching purpose of the journey? In analogy with actual dandelion seeds, the probes could propagate the blueprint of their senders,” the authors write. “As with biological seeds, the raw materials on the planet’s surface could also be used by them as nutrients for self-replication or simply scientific exploration.”

The authors acknowledge that they do not know for sure that there are any functioning extraterrestrial crafts near Earth. But the Galileo Project, Loeb’s privately funded academic effort to look for UFOs, intends to investigate this possibility, they write.

The AARO team at the Pentagon was created last year to replace a task force within the Office of Naval Intelligence previously looking into UFOs. AARO was established by Congress to serve as the focal point for the governmentwide investigation into hundreds of reports of “unidentified aerial phenomena,” including many that appear to perform highly advanced maneuvers.

Kirkpatrick is a respected science and intelligence professional, with more than two decades of experience studying physics and working in the defense intelligence space. He has held top positions in DoD, U.S. Space Command, the National Security Council, and across the intelligence agencies, winning several awards for his work. Before his current position, his most recent assignment was as chief scientist at DIA’s missile and space intelligence center.

But experts said his attachment to the paper has the potential to undermine the credibility of the office.

“It’s a fine line because there’s ‘being open to speculative ideas’ like this, but that can be translated into an actual supporting of this possibility, and I think that’s where there needs to be more clarity,” said Alejandro Rojas, a board member of the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies, a think tank exploring unidentified aerial phenomena, and head of content and research for Enigma Labs, a start-up using machine learning to investigate UFO data.

“It does look like [DoD is] supporting some really wild ideas which thus far are felt to be unsubstantiated.”

DoD did not respond to repeated requests to comment on the draft paper.

The paper came about after Kirkpatrick contacted Loeb last fall, saying he was going to be in the Boston area and wanted to meet, Loeb said in an interview. During their meeting, Kirkpatrick urged the professor to write a paper about the phenomena, but the two did not end up collaborating until earlier this year.

Loeb, a Harvard professor who served as the chair of the university’s Astronomy Department for almost decade, has drawn headlines in recent years for suggesting that Oumuamua was actually an alien spaceship. Loeb was chair of the department until 2020, and currently directs a number of initiatives, including the Galileo Project, and serves on a variety of boards and councils including the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology at the White House.

Loeb acknowledged that there is no evidence to back up the notion that the unknown aircraft are alien probes. The Galileo Project does not receive funding from DoD, and he has no access to classified information, he said.

But he said the fact that Kirkpatrick came to him “out of the blue” suggests that “there is something out there they don’t understand, and scientists could potentially help.”

“It’s perfectly legitimate when you face the unknown to consider what your imagination allows you to consider, and then get data that rules it out or rules it in,” Loeb said.

The paper is focused on the objects DoD is studying. It is titled “Physical Constraints on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena” and notes Kirkpatrick’s affiliation with the Pentagon under the heading. The paper’s abstract posits that the objects appear to defy the laws of physics: At the speeds they are moving, scientists would expect to see “a fireball.” The fact that there is no fireball or other typical “signatures” implies “inaccurate distance measurements (and hence derived velocity).”

The purpose of the paper is to urge investigators to examine the objects “exhaustively before concluding the laws of physics are being broken,” Rojas said. It shows Kirkpatrick “is open to looking at the ET possibility, but needs stronger arguments if they are to claim laws of physics are being broken.”

David Jewitt, a professor of astronomy at the University of California Los Angeles, said some of the claims in the paper, which has not been peer-reviewed, are “highly questionable.”

He called the fact that Kirkpatrick is a co-author on the paper “odd.”

“The Air Force is very good at bombing things, but as far as their research on UFOs, I think I’d trust them about as far as I can throw them,” Jewitt said, noting that in 1948, an Air Force pilot crashed while pursuing a UFO that turned out to be Venus.

Questions remain 75 years after mysterious Fort Knox UFO incident, downe...

FORT KNOX, Ky. — His 2,867 flight hours, much of it in combat, and Distinguished Flying Cross and four Air Medal...

“It’s not clear that the Air Force and military capabilities are best suited to the study of aliens.”

Others, however, argued that DoD should explore all possibilities, no matter how seemingly far fetched.

In a statement, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) noted that the co-authors are both highly respected in their fields: Kirkpatrick is an expert in “scientific and technical intelligence” while Loeb has authored hundreds of scientific papers on astrophysics and cosmology. She said she has “confidence in the scientific rigor of their work.”

Gillibrand, who has urged DoD to study the UFO issue more seriously, also warned that stigmatizing the issue could limit the U.S. government’s understanding of the issue.

“Stigma against discussion of this topic can prevent the military from better understanding potential threats to our airspace or collection risks from our adversaries,” Gillibrand said. “De-stigmatizing and standardizing reporting is essential to characterizing what is in our airspace.”

23. Russia’s commando units gutted by Ukraine war, U.S. leak shows

Russia’s commando units gutted by Ukraine war, U.S. leak shows

THE DISCORD LEAKS | Russia’s clandestine spetsnaz forces have been put to use alongside the infantry, suffering massive numbers of dead and wounded

Updated April 14, 2023 at 3:31 a.m. EDT|Published April 14, 2023 at 2:00 a.m. EDT

The Washington Post · by Alex Horton · April 14, 2023

The war in Ukraine has gutted Russia’s clandestine spetsnaz forces, and it will take Moscow years to rebuild them, according to classified U.S. assessments obtained by The Washington Post.

The finding, which has not been previously reported, is among a cache of sensitive materials leaked online through the messaging platform Discord. U.S. officials attributed their assessments to Russian commanders’ overreliance on the specialized units, which have been put to use as part of front-line infantry formations. Those formations, like the Ukrainians, have suffered massive numbers of dead and wounded.

Typically, spetsnaz personnel are assigned the sorts of stealthy, high-risk missions — including an apparent order to capture Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky — for which they receive some of the Russian military’s most advanced training. But when Moscow launched its full-scale invasion last year, senior commanders eager to seize momentum and skeptical of their conventional fighters’ prowess deviated from the norm, ordering elite forces into direct combat, according to U.S. intelligence findings and independent analysts who have closely followed spetsnaz deployments.

The rapid depletion of Russia’s commando units, observers say, shifted the war’s dynamic from the outset, severely limiting Moscow’s ability to employ clandestine tactics in support of conventional combat operations. U.S. officials believe that the staggering casualties these units have sustained will render them less effective, not only in Ukraine but also in other parts of the world where Russian forces operate, according to the assessments, which range in date from late 2022 to earlier this year.

The hollowing of these units appears to be evident in satellite imagery featured among the leaked materials. Before-and-after photos — showing a base used by the 22nd Separate Spetsnaz Brigade in southern Russia, according to the document — reveal that “all but one of five Russian Separate Spetsnaz Brigades that returned from combat operations in Ukraine in late summer 2022 suffered significant losses.”

The slide includes two overhead images, one taken in November 2021, months before the invasion began, and another captured a year later. The former shows a bustling motor pool teeming with vehicles; the latter reveals what U.S. officials concluded is a state of extreme depletion months after the brigade’s return home with fewer than half of the Tigr tactical vehicles it had before the deployment. The 22nd and two other spetsnaz brigades suffered an estimated 90 to 95 percent attrition rate, the assessments say.

Compounding Russia’s problems is the loss of experience within its elite forces. Spetsnaz soldiers require at least four years of specialized training, the U.S. documents say, concluding that it could take as long as a decade for Moscow to reconstitute these units.

The documents do not say how many spetsnaz troops are estimated to have been killed or wounded in Ukraine, but the materials, citing intelligence intercepts, assess that one unit alone — the 346th — “lost nearly the entire brigade with only 125 personnel active out of 900 deployed.”

U.S. intelligence analysts tracked every spetsnaz unit that returned home to southern Russia from Ukraine — except for one: the 25th Spetsnaz Regiment. Severe personnel and equipment losses, the documents say, “could explain why there is no clear [intelligence] signature of their return to garrison.”

The Discord Leaks

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The U.S. government assessments dovetail with analysts’ observations. Rob Lee, a Russia military expert and senior fellow with the Foreign Policy Research Institute, said that because Russia’s motorized rifle infantry soldiers proved ineffective, commanders have sought to compensate by pushing elite airborne units, naval infantry and spetsnaz to the front, including in the failed bid to capture Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, and for campaigns in the east and south.

There was an immediate consequence to that strategy, Lee said. Russian commanders, having burned through the best-trained fighters, forfeited the valuable skills those troops possess, including intelligence gathering and reconnaissance, from the start of the invasion through last fall.

“That affected the rest of the war because Russia lost all these key capabilities up front that they couldn’t easily replace — both equipment-wise and talent-wise,” he said. “That affected what they could and couldn’t do.”

Just days into the war, spetsnaz troops arrived in the eastern city of Kharkiv in small numbers and without much support from conventional troops, Lee said. Many of them were killed or captured, he noted. Several of their specialized vehicles were destroyed, videos and photos show.

A similar situation played out in Mariupol in the south, Lee said, and in the eastern Donbas region, where fighting often took place in wooded areas where regular Russian motorized rifle units had difficulty operating. Spetsnaz forces have also operated in the coal-mining town of Vuhledar in the Donetsk region, Lee said, where Ukrainian and Russian forces have battled each other for months.

A soldier who served in Vuhledar with Ukraine’s 72nd Mechanized Brigade told The Post that while he could not confirm his unit faced spetsnaz, that was probably the case because they carried advanced body armor along with high-end night vision and thermal optics. Those enemy troops operated in small units, this soldier said, conducting traditional reconnaissance and infantry missions. He spoke on the condition of anonymity citing the sensitivity of recent operations.

The apparent death of a spetsnaz brigade commander in Vuhledar in February further illustrates the scope of problems facing Russia, Lee said. If such a senior military leader “is that far forward, there is probably something not quite right. Either losses are too heavy in that unit, or they’re being used in a way they’re not supposed to be used,” he added.

Russia’s expenditure of its elite troops will have cascading effects, the documents say, including a loss of some ability to train paramilitary groups in unconventional warfare tactics, “which Russia has used to advance its interests abroad.”

It’s clear that spetsnaz troops are a finite resource that can’t be easily replenished, Lee said. What’s not clear is whether conventional Russian commanders have learned from what’s happened in Ukraine or how best to use these elite forces. “It’s going to be a while before there is a full understanding of how they are adapting,” he said.

There are signs online of the 22nd Separate Spetsnaz Brigade’s activity in Ukraine. One video from last summer appears to show members of the unit’s sniper section moving through buildings, using high-end equipment out of reach for many Russian regulars.

Other images lack the same bravado. Photos purporting to show a young captain in the 22nd, Alexei, circulated in March 2022 along with images of a granite memorial to soldiers killed before the war was even two months old. Alexei’s name is inscribed at the top.

Samuel Oakford in Washington, Anastacia Galouchka in Kyiv, Ukraine, and Evan Hill in New York contributed to this report.

The Washington Post · by Alex Horton · April 14, 2023

24. This Agency’s Declassification Work Could Be a Model for Others

This Agency’s Declassification Work Could Be a Model for Others

A new paper, based on consultations with government officials and others, looks at what the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency has done in recent years.

defenseone.com · by Courtney Bublé

One intelligence agency's attack on overclassification can be a model for the federal government, according to a new paper.

A key contributor to the government’s overclassification problem––condemned by advocates, lawmakers and even some government officials for hurting transparency, national security, and democracy––are its several thousand classification guidebooks, which are often vague and confusing, according to the nonprofit Nonproliferation Policy Education Center, which recently published a paper on this. This often leads to the practice of “don’t declassify, just say no, then, overclassify, just to be ‘safe.’” However, the group found that the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, an intelligence and combat support agency, was able to consolidate and streamline its declassification process.

“Other national security agencies can replicate this success,” said the nonprofit in a post about the paper that was based on consultations with staff from the military, federal agencies and Congress as well as senior retired officials, outside government advisers, academics and other experts. “It is imperative they do so. Unless we reduce the number of subjective, vague, and contradictory classification and declassification guidebooks and original classification authorities dramatically, any hope of automating the review of the ever-expanding number of classified documents generated on a daily basis will be less than zero.”

So, how did the geospatial agency get here?

About seven years ago the agency, which is a member of the Defense Department and intelligence community, realized that overclassification was getting in the way of executing its mission. Post-Cold War, the agency was established as the National Imagery and Mapping Agency in October 1996 and then after a reorganization and name change from Congress, it became the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency in 2003 after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

“The agency was taking way too long to get its images and information to soldiers on the battlefield and when they finally did get this material to them, it was either too late to be useful, or it was classified at too high a level for our soldiers to share it with their foreign compatriots who they needed to plan attacks with on the frontlines,” said the paper.

In other cases, overclassification was getting in the way of working with allied governments and private companies, the working group found. Therefore, the agency took on a review to see what was getting in the way of serving its customers.

Officials found during the review that the agency was using 65 different classification security guidebooks: many came over from the legacy agencies when it was created, most “were created to keep information from being released,” and in others the instructions were re “conflicting, vague, or subjective,” said the report. “[The geospatial agency’s] top brass immediately recognized that the classification guides, ostensibly created to protect our national security, were instead impairing it by making it nearly impossible for any [agency] official to properly classify or declassify any information or imagery.”

Within five months, the agency consolidated the guides into a single one to rid any “contradictory, subjective, and vague rules” as well as institute “clear requirements to review any classification appeal within 30 days and to modify the [agency’s] security classification guidebook five or more times a year based on the outcome of these appeals.”

The agency “takes pride in the work we’ve done to ensure classification is easily established at the appropriate level,” said Arthur Haubold, director of security and installations at the agency. “[The geospatial agency’s] modernized approach to security classification allows analysts to tailor product classification by intended audience. This supports the dynamic nature of operations and intelligence sharing, including the wide proliferation of open source intelligence available today.”

The nonprofit briefed the Public Interest Declassification Board, an advisory committee to the president and other executive branch officials, about the paper last month. The board said in a post shared earlier this week that many of the findings in the paper align with a report it issued in 2020 and “broadly echoes” remarks from Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines’ in January about the perils of over classification.

defenseone.com · by Courtney Bublé

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Foundation for Defense of Democracies

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

V/R

David Maxwell

Senior Fellow

Foundation for Defense of Democracies

Phone: 202-573-8647

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Web Site: www.fdd.org

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

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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."

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Billy Waugh, 93, ‘Godfather of the Green Berets,’ Is Dead

RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, APRIL 14, 2023

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Opinion | What Are America and China Fighting About, Anyway?

What Are America and China Fighting About, Anyway?

Document Leaks Indicate Extent of U.S. Electronic Snooping

Classified material shows U.S. eavesdrops on allies as well as enemies

The Critical Minerals Club

The United States and allies aim to sidestep reliance on China for the materials needed for clean tech and advanced defense gear.

Leaked documents show officials were aware of additional Chinese spy balloons: report

Misinformation Defense Worked in 2020, Up to a Point, Study Finds

The Spread of Misinformation and Falsehoods

China Is Studying Russia’s Economic Playbook for Conflict

Moscow’s efforts to deflect Western intervention may be applied to Taiwan.

Leaked secret documents detail up to four additional Chinese spy balloons

THE DISCORD LEAKS | One balloon flew over a U.S. carrier strike group in the Pacific, and another circumnavigated the globe with sophisticated surveillance technology

State Dept cyber bureau plans to add tech experts to every embassy by next year | Federal News Network

The Narcissists Who Endanger America

Myth 1: Military assistance to Ukraine is hurting our Indo-Pacific posture.

Myth 2: Europe isn’t shouldering enough of the Ukraine burden.

Myth 3. Our actions toward Ukraine won’t help deter China.

Helping Ukraine Can Deter China

Myth 1: Military assistance to Ukraine is hurting our Indo-Pacific posture.

Myth 2: Europe isn’t shouldering enough of the Ukraine burden.

Myth 3. Our actions toward Ukraine won’t help deter China.

Our Rotten Military Promotion System

Accountability for Biden's Botched Afghan Withdrawal?

How much of a threat does Russia's Pacific fleet pose to the US?

The latest on Task & Purpose

TikTok Is Too Popular to Ban

And outlawing the app would be un-American.

By James Surowiecki

PLA Freezes out Pentagon, Sustains Military-to-Military Relations with U.S. Allies

Publication: China Brief Volume: 23 Issue: 7

By: John S. Van Oudenaren

The Biggest American Porn Site Got Bought and the Entire Thing Is Super-Sketch

Did a foreign intelligence service just make a play for Pornhub?

1. Pornhub

China expands wartime military draft to include veterans and college students

'Digital Prison Camp' -- Putin Signs Electronic Conscription Bill Into Law

Taiwan highly vulnerable to Chinese air attack, leaked documents show

Troubling details raise questions about U.S. intelligence agencies’ ability to detect a pending invasion and the island’s capacity to defend itself

Alien motherships: Pentagon official floats a theory for unexplained sightings

Questions remain 75 years after mysterious Fort Knox UFO incident, downe...

Russia’s commando units gutted by Ukraine war, U.S. leak shows

THE DISCORD LEAKS | Russia’s clandestine spetsnaz forces have been put to use alongside the infantry, suffering massive numbers of dead and wounded

This Agency’s Declassification Work Could Be a Model for Others

A new paper, based on consultations with government officials and others, looks at what the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency has done in recent years.