Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

"Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence."

~ Robert Frost

“The worst thing about some men is that when they are not drunk they are sober.”

- William Butler Yeats

Human beings are of four types:

1. A man who knows, and knows that he knows. This is the scholar, so take and patiently learn from him.

2. A man who knows, but does not know that he knows. This one has forgotten, so quietly remind him.

3. A man who does not know, and knows that he does not know. This one is a student, so teach him continuously because he will be a great scholar one day.

4. A man who does not know, and does not know that he does not know and isn’t even interested in knowing. This one is an idiot, so reject him".

~ ECSaayli

1. Full Committee Hearing: U.S. Military Posture and National Security Challenges in the Indo-Pacific Region (INDOPACOM Commander)

2. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, April 18, 2023

3. U.S. Citizens and Russian Intelligence Officers Charged with Conspiring to Use U.S. Citizens as Illegal Agents of the Russian Government

4. U.S. charges four Americans with aiding Kremlin efforts

5. Intelligence mission yanked for National Guard unit where leaks occurred

6. Scolding Isn’t a Foreign Policy

7. What Drives Political Polarization

8. Taiwan to More Than Double Military Police

9. Unique US Advantages DoD Can Better Leverage To Keep Up With Tech Advances

10. China readies supersonic spy drone unit, leaked document says

11. Ukraine Conflict Update - April 19, 2023 | SOF News

12. China Minister Lauds Putin for ‘Promoting World Peace’

13. Campaigning Through (Security) Cooperation: A Roadmap for Implementing the National Defense Strategy in Lower Priority Theaters

14. The Pentagon Needs to Put Climate Clarity at the Top of Its Target List

15. Just how many US troops and spies do we have in Ukraine?

16. Competition is Inevitable, War is Not: Using Games to Rethink the U.S.-Chinese Relationship

1. Full Committee Hearing: U.S. Military Posture and National Security Challenges in the Indo-Pacific Region (INDOPACOM Commander)

The hearing can be viewed here: https://armedservices.house.gov/hearings/full-committee-hearing-us-military-posture-and-national-security-challenges-indo-pacific

Admiral Aquilino's 42 page statement can be access here: https://armedservices.house.gov/sites/republicans.armedservices.house.gov/files/2023%20INDOPACOM%20Statement%20for%20the%20Record.pdf

Excerpts:

The men and women of USINDOPACOM work tirelessly every day to prevent conflict in this region, not to provoke it. War is not inevitable. However, this decade presents a period of increased risk as illustrated by Russia’sillegitimate, unprovoked war in Ukraine; the People's Republic of China (PRC)’s nuclear and conventional buildup; the PRC’s malign behavior, including its "No Limits" expanding partnership with Russia; the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK)’s continued missile provocations and nuclear rhetoric; and the risk of violent extremism. Our National Defense Strategy (NDS) identifies the PRC as the most consequential strategic competitor to the United States and the only competitor capable of combining its economic, diplomatic, military, and technological capabilities to mount a sustained challenge to the rules-based international order.

Seize the Initiative is USINDOPACOM'S approach to implement the NDS and accomplish our defense priorities - defend the homeland, deter strategic attacks, deter aggression, and build a resilient joint force. By design, this approach prevents conflict through integrated deterrence, ensures we can fight and win should deterrence fail, and provides the Secretary of Defense and President with options for any contingency. It aims to deliver a robust theater posture; campaign with lethal, persistent forces forward; technologically superior capabilities to maintain our warfighting advantages in the near, mid, and long-term; and stronger relationships with our allies, partners, and friends.

1) A Distributed Force Posture

...

2) A Joint and Combined Operations Campaign

...

3) Delivering Advanced Warfighting Capabilities

...

4) A Robust Network of Allies and Partners

Mr. Jedidiah P. Royal's 8 page statement can be accessed here: https://armedservices.house.gov/sites/republicans.armedservices.house.gov/files/20230418%20PDASD%20Jedidiah%20P.%20Royal%20HASC%20INDOPACOM%20Posture%20Hearing_Statement%20for%20the%20Record.pdf

Excerpt:

The very first words of the Biden-Harris Administration’s Indo-Pacific Strategy plainly state that “the United States is an Indo-Pacific power.” And Secretary Austin has been clear about our commitment to seeking transparency; openness and accountability; freedom of the seas, skies, and space; and the peaceful resolution of disputes in the region.

That vision – and that commitment – continues today. Alongside our partners across the U.S. government, the Department seeks to uphold a rules-based order where commerce and ideas flow and flourish without the threat of coercion, aggression, or contempt for human dignity. I look forward to speaking with you today about many of those efforts and the results we are seeing as part of the Administration’s “invest, align, compete” strategy.

My disappointment in both statements: neither discusses our plan for information and influence activities. Both recognize our adversaries' hostile influence operations but offer no hint of how we are to counter their activities or seize the initiative for offensive influence operations. My concern is that while they are not revealing classified influence programs (which they of course cannot do in an open hearing) they are not discussing overt influence activities they are placing all their effort in classified programs. I will argue that classified or covert influence programs are insufficient for competing in the information space. We need overt influence campaigns.

But maybe I missed something so i'll have to go back and re-read the statements.

Full Committee Hearing: U.S. Military Posture and National Security Challenges in the Indo-Pacific Region

armedservices.house.gov · April 18, 2023

Date:

Tuesday, April 18, 2023 - 10:30am

Location:

Rayburn 2118

Purpose: The purpose of the hearing is to examine Department of Defense policies, programs, and activities in the Indo-Pacific region in preparation for the committee’s consideration of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2024. The hearing provides an opportunity to assess the threats to U.S. national security in the region and to evaluate the effectiveness of the department’s use of the resources provided by Congress to accomplish its objectives.

Witnesses:

Mr. Jedidiah P. Royal

Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Indo-Pacific Security Affairs

Department of Defense

Admiral John C. Aquilino, USN

Commander

U.S. Indo-Pacific Command

General Paul J. LaCamera, USA

Commander

United Nations Command / Combined Forces Command / U.S. Forces Korea

Mr. Jedidiah P. Royal Opening Statement

Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Indo-Pacific Security Affairs

Department of Defense

Admiral John C. Aquilino, USN Opening Statement

Commander

U.S. Indo-Pacific Command

General Paul J. LaCamera, USA Opening Statement

Commander

United Nations Command / Combined Forces Command / U.S. Forces Korea

118th Congress

armedservices.house.gov · April 18, 2023

2. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, April 18, 2023

Maps/graphics: https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-april-18-2023

Key Takeaways

Russian President Vladimir Putin continued to portray himself as a wartime leader in anticipation of a planned Ukrainian counteroffensive during his visit to occupied Kherson and Luhansk oblasts.
Putin’s visit likely intended to publicly identify scapegoats ahead of the planned Ukrainian counteroffensives.
Putin’s demonstrative meetings with Teplinsky, Makarevich, and Lapin likely confirm another change in military command and possibly within the Kremlin’s inner circle.
Select members of the “Club of Angry Patriots” are advocating for a revolution in Russia if the Kremlin freezes the war or pursue peace negotiations with Ukraine and the West.
Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu and Chinese Defense Minister Li Shangfu met to discuss on strategic partnership and military cooperation in Moscow on April 18.
The Russian State Duma approved a series of amendments to the Russian Criminal Code on April 18 aimed at encouraging domestic self-censorship and repressing the Russian public.
Russian authorities detained Russian public relations specialist Yaroslav Shirshikov, an associate of detained Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, in Yekaterinburg on April 18.
The Russian Immortal Regiment Central Headquarters announced the cancelation of the annual Immortal Regiment Victory Day march, likely in an effort to reduce public discussion of war dead.
Russian forces conducted limited ground attacks northeast of Kupyansk and along the Svatove-Kreminna line.
Russian forces continued to make gains in Bakhmut and conducted ground attacks along the Avdiivka-Donetsk City line.
Ukrainian officials reported that Russian forces continue defensive preparations in southern Ukraine.
The Kremlin continues efforts to integrate proxy formations with conventional Russian forces.
Russian occupation officials continue to deport Ukrainian civilians to Russia under healthcare and rehabilitation schemes.
Belarus may begin economically supporting Russian-occupied Donetsk Oblast with a patronage system.

RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, APRIL 18, 2023

Apr 18, 2023 - Press ISW

Download the PDF

Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, April 18, 2023

Kateryna Stepanenko, Grace Mappes, Nicole Wolkov, George Barros, and Frederick W. Kagan

April 18, 8 pm ET

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

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

Russian President Vladimir Putin continued to portray himself as a wartime leader in anticipation of a planned Ukrainian counteroffensive during his visit to occupied Kherson and Luhansk oblasts. The Kremlin announced on April 18 that Putin visited the headquarters of the Russian Dnepr Group of Forces in Kherson Oblast and the Vostok National Guard headquarters in occupied Luhansk Oblast.[1] Kremlin Spokesperson Dmitry Peskov claimed that Putin visited occupied territories on April 17. Putin, however, stated that Orthodox Easter holiday is “coming up” in one of the videos, which suggests that his visit occurred prior to April 16.[2] The Kremlin later edited the video to exclude Putin’s statement about the then-upcoming East holiday. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky visited the Avdiivka frontline on April 18, and it is possible the Kremlin deliberately released footage of Putin’s visit to overshadow Zelensky’s visit in the information space.[3] ISW reported on Russian milbloggers criticizing Russian officials for failing to visit the frontlines like Zelensky, and Putin had previously visited occupied Mariupol on March 19 to improve his appearance as a wartime leader.[4] Russian occupation officials and milbloggers celebrated Putin’s visit and claimed that he boosted the morale of Russian servicemen preparing to repel Ukrainian counteroffensives.[5] Geolocated footage shows that Putin visited Arabat Spit in southwestern Kherson Oblast - at least 130km from the nearest frontline.[6]

Putin’s visit likely also intended to publicly identify potential scapegoats ahead of the planned Ukrainian counteroffensives. Putin received briefings from Commander of Russian Airborne Forces (VDV) Colonel General Mikhail Teplinsky, Commander of the Dnepr Group of Forces Colonel General Oleg Makarevich, and other unnamed military commanders regarding the situation along the Kherson and Zaporizhia frontlines.[7] Putin also met with Colonel General Alexander Lapin and other unnamed top-ranking officers to discuss the situation on the Luhansk frontline. Putin likely deliberately singled out Teplinsky and Makarevich as commanders responsible for southern Ukraine, and Lapin as a commander overseeing the Luhansk direction. Putin, Kremlin sources, and milbloggers have been increasingly discussing the prospects for a Ukrainian counteroffensive, and it is likely that the Kremlin is preparing the domestic information space for either military failures or the defeat of the counteroffensive threat.[8]

Putin’s demonstrative meetings with Teplinsky, Makarevich, and Lapin likely confirm another change in military command and possibly within the Kremlin’s inner circle. A Kremlin-affiliated milblogger observed that the Chief of the Russian General Staff Army General Valery Gerasimov and Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu did not attend Putin’s meetings in occupied Ukraine.[9] The milblogger claimed that Teplinsky and Lapin – both of whom had reportedly been placed on a leave – returned to the Russian military command likely against the wishes of Gerasimov and Shoigu. Russian sources previously claimed that the Kremlin replaced Wagner-affiliated Teplinsky with Makarevich as the VDV commander on January 13, likely after the Russian MoD and Gerasimov regained Putin’s favor in the lead up of Russia’s unsuccessful winter-spring offensive operation in Donbas.[10] The meeting confirms previous Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin’s hints at Teplinsky’s reappointment.[11] ISW previously assessed that Teplinsky’s confirmed reappointment suggests that the Kremlin is likely seeking to work with Wagner to achieve a decisive victory in Bakhmut.[12] The confirmation may further indicate that Prigozhin has at least partly regained Putin’s favor by overriding Gerasimov and Shoigu’s efforts to eliminate Wagner in Bakhmut.[13]

Putin may be attempting to balance Wagner’s influence by reappointing Lapin to command the Luhansk sector of the frontline. The Kremlin-affiliated milblogger claimed that Lapin assumed the role of the commander of the Vostok National Guard formation and noted that the Putin-Lapin meeting confirms Lapin’s return to the frontlines.[14] Prigozhin and Chechen Leader Ramzan Kadyrov had led a successful campaign to remove Lapin from his position as the commander of the “center” group of Russian forces, likely due to personal conflicts during the Severodonetsk-Lysychansk and Luhansk offensive operations in the summer of 2022.[15] The milblogger speculated that Putin reappointed Lapin to reinforce command in the area or to help Putin avoid conflicts with the Russian Defense Ministry.

Select members of the “Club of Angry Patriots” are advocating for a revolution in Russia if the Kremlin freezes the war or pursues peace negotiations with Ukraine and the West. Self-proclaimed former “People’s Governor of Donetsk Oblast” Pavel Gubarev defined the “Club of Angry Patriots” as a “potentially revolutionary power” that will prevent “betrayal” if the government decides to freeze the current frontlines in Ukraine.[16] Gubarev also noted that Russia cannot win the war without a revolution – either from within the government or in society – because oligarchs, agents, ethnic mafias, and nationalist separatists will not allow for the reformation of social-economic institutions to support the war effort. Former Russian officer and ardent nationalist Igor Girkin noted that Gubarev’s opinion does not represent the collective vision on the “Club of Angry Patriots” and noted that any revolution begins with a “coup from the top” over which he and other members of the group have no control over since they do not have connections to the Kremlin.[17]

The official “Club of Angry Patriots” Telegram account amplified a forecast regarding possible political changes within the Kremlin as a result of a Ukrainian counteroffensive, which may represent the group’s concerns over the progress of the war.[18] The group amplified a post from the leader of the Russian “Civil Solidarity” movement Georgiy Fedorov, who stated that the political situation in Russia largely depends on frontline realities. Fedorov assessed that Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin’s recent statements about the end of the “special military operation” is the start of the campaign to freeze the war in Ukraine.

Fedorov stated that if Russians are able to defeat Ukrainian counteroffensives over the summer, then Russian President Vladimir Putin may freeze the war to avoid calling up mobilization ahead of the 2024 presidential election cycle. Fedorov claimed that Russia would likely present a suppressed Ukrainian counteroffensive as a victory and is likely intensifying volunteer recruitment efforts to generate enough contract servicemen to hold existing frontlines. Fedorov claimed that the Kremlin will continue to intensify censorship and repressions and will not replace officials in the Kremlin or within the military command under the conditions of unsuccessful counteroffensive operations. Fedorov stated that if Ukrainians are successful, then political situation within the Kremlin will lead to a deeper conflict between different parties for influence and the Kremlin will conduct personnel changes. Fedorov claimed that despite potential mobilization and disruption in society and the Kremlin, Putin’s system is capable of eliminating all threats “associated with the interception of power.” Fedorov noted that the most unlikely scenario is the imminent dissolution of Putin’s power system, but noted that different financial, regional, and industrial figures may be preparing for such an outcome.

Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu and Chinese Defense Minister Li Shangfu met to discuss unspecified strategic partnership and military cooperation in Moscow on April 18. Shoigu claimed that mutual Russian-Chinese efforts aim to stabilize and reduce conflict and that each state significantly values deepening military cooperation.[19] Shoigu also claimed that Russia and China can deepen their partnership by firmly supporting each other on national security issues. Li stated that his first visit to Russia as Defense Minister demonstrates the determination to strengthen cooperation between the Russian military and the Chinese People’s Liberation Army.[20] Shoigu’s and Li’s remarks largely echoed Li’s and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s remarks on April 16.[21]

The Kremlin continued efforts to portray Russia as a respected international partner by meeting with China against the backdrop of the G7 meeting in Japan on April 18. The G7 communique condemned Russian nuclear blackmail rhetoric, Russia’s possible deployment of tactical nuclear weapons to Belarus, destabilizing Wagner Group activities in Africa, the forced deportation of Ukrainian children from occupied Ukraine, Russia’s suspension of the New START Treaty, and Iran’s provision of combat UAVs to Russia.[22] The Russian Ministry of Defense published footage of two Russian strategic bombers flying in international airspace over the Bering and Okhotsk Seas as part of the Pacific Fleet’s ongoing readiness check.[23] ISW previously assessed that the Pacific Fleet’s ongoing readiness checks are likely meant to posture that Russia supports Chinese security objectives in the Pacific ahead of the G7 meeting.[24]

Russian authorities detained Russian public relations specialist Yaroslav Shirshikov, an associate of detained Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, in Yekaterinburg on April 18. Russian news outlet Kommersant reported on April 18 that Russian authorities detained Shirshikov and charged him with justifying terrorism possibly for his social media posts about prominent Russian milblogger Maxim Fomin’s (alias Vladlen Tatarsky) assassination.[25] Shirshikov spoke to Gershkovich shortly before Gershkovich’s arrest and was one of the first people to report Gershkovich as missing.[26] Shirshikov previously stated that Gershkovich had traveled to Yekaterinburg to report on Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin’s criticisms of Yekaterinburg History Museum Director Igor Pushkarev and locals’ opinions on the war.[27]

The Russian State Duma approved a series of possibly unconstitutional amendments to the Russian Criminal Code on April 18 aimed at encouraging domestic self-censorship and repressing the Russian public. The Russian State Duma approved amendments to the Russian Criminal Code that increase the maximum prison sentence for high treason from 20 years to life and authorize the revocation of Russian citizenship for discrediting the Russian military and participating in designated undesirable nongovernmental organizations.[28] The amendment also stipulates that a Russian citizen may not renounce their citizenship if the citizen has an outstanding duty to the state, such as mobilization.[29] These measures appear to violate the Russian Constitution, as Article 6 states that a Russian citizen may not be deprived of their citizenship or of the right to change citizenship status.[30] The State Duma also approved an amendment that criminalizes advising international organizations in which Russia does not belong or foreign states bodies.[31] Russian opposition media outlet OVD-Info states that this amendment would criminalize facilitating international war crimes investigations.[32] International Humanitarian Law, to which Russia is a party, stipulates that states have a duty to investigate and prosecute war crimes.[33]

The Russian Immortal Regiment Central Headquarters announced the cancellation of the annual Immortal Regiment Victory Day march, likely in an effort to reduce public discussion of deaths in the current conflict. Russian State Duma Member Deputy and Co-Chair of the Immortal Regiment Central Headquarters Elena Tsunaeva announced the cancellation of the march, which memorializes Russian war dead, on April 18, for unspecified security reasons.[34] Tsunaeva stated that citizens can instead submit photos of relatives to a centralized online database to participate in a ”virtual procession,” which Russian authorities will likely use to hide the number of Russian soldiers killed in Ukraine. Tsunaeva also invited people to share pictures of their deceased family members online, on clothes, and on cars.

Key Takeaways

Russian President Vladimir Putin continued to portray himself as a wartime leader in anticipation of a planned Ukrainian counteroffensive during his visit to occupied Kherson and Luhansk oblasts.
Putin’s visit likely intended to publicly identify scapegoats ahead of the planned Ukrainian counteroffensives.
Putin’s demonstrative meetings with Teplinsky, Makarevich, and Lapin likely confirm another change in military command and possibly within the Kremlin’s inner circle.
Select members of the “Club of Angry Patriots” are advocating for a revolution in Russia if the Kremlin freezes the war or pursue peace negotiations with Ukraine and the West.
Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu and Chinese Defense Minister Li Shangfu met to discuss on strategic partnership and military cooperation in Moscow on April 18.
The Russian State Duma approved a series of amendments to the Russian Criminal Code on April 18 aimed at encouraging domestic self-censorship and repressing the Russian public.
Russian authorities detained Russian public relations specialist Yaroslav Shirshikov, an associate of detained Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, in Yekaterinburg on April 18.
The Russian Immortal Regiment Central Headquarters announced the cancelation of the annual Immortal Regiment Victory Day march, likely in an effort to reduce public discussion of war dead.
Russian forces conducted limited ground attacks northeast of Kupyansk and along the Svatove-Kreminna line.
Russian forces continued to make gains in Bakhmut and conducted ground attacks along the Avdiivka-Donetsk City line.
Ukrainian officials reported that Russian forces continue defensive preparations in southern Ukraine.
The Kremlin continues efforts to integrate proxy formations with conventional Russian forces.
Russian occupation officials continue to deport Ukrainian civilians to Russia under healthcare and rehabilitation schemes.
Belarus may begin economically supporting Russian-occupied Donetsk Oblast with a patronage system.

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

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

Russian Main Effort – Eastern Ukraine

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

Russian forces conducted limited ground attacks northeast of Kupyansk and along the Svatove-Kreminna line on April 18. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces conducted unsuccessful ground attacks near Synkivka (8km northeast of Kupyansk), Dibrova (5km southwest of Kreminna), and Spirne (25km south of Kreminna).[35] Russian milbloggers claimed on April 17 that Russian forces conducted ground attacks near Synkivka, Dvorichna (15km northeast of Kupyansk), Chervonopopivka (5km northwest of Kreminna), and Kreminna, and that Russian forces conducted assault operations near Makiivka (22km northwest of Kreminna) toward Nevske (18km northwest of Kreminna).[36] Another Russian milblogger claimed on April 18 that Russian forces conducted ground attacks in the direction of Torske, Terny, and Nevske (all within 14 to 18km west or northwest of Kreminna) and near Bilohorivka (12km south of Kreminna).[37] Footage published on April 17 and 18 purportedly shows Ukrainian forces driving a captured TOS-1A thermobaric artillery system in the Svatove-Kreminna direction and Chechen ”Akhmat” special forces elements repelling Ukrainian forces near Kreminna.[38]

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

Russian forces continued to make gains in Bakhmut on April 18. Geolocated footage published on April 17 indicates that Wagner Group forces have likely advanced closer to the House of Culture in northwestern Bakhmut.[39] The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) claimed that Wagner forces captured three unspecified blocks in northern, central, and southern Bakhmut.[40] Russian milbloggers claimed that Wagner forces have advanced in northern, southern, and central Bakhmut, including most of the rail station area and across the railway in central Bakhmut.[41] A Russian milblogger claimed that Wagner forces advanced west of the rail line in western Bakhmut.[42] One milblogger claimed that Wagner attacks towards Khromove (immediately northwest of Bakhmut) and Ivanivske (3km southwest of Bakhmut) failed.[43] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces conducted ground attacks in Bakhmut, and that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian forces near Ivanivske and Predtechnyne (12km southwest of Bakhmut).[44] Commander of the Ukrainian Ground Forces Colonel General Oleksandr Syrskyi stated that Russian forces have increased heavy artillery and air strikes against Bakhmut.[45] The Ukrainian Border Guards stated on April 18 that Wagner forces are not currently suffering from artillery ammunition shortages.[46] Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian forces began to use modified FAB-500 aerial bombs equipped with guidance systems to strike Bakhmut as of at least April 17.[47]

Russian forces continued to conduct ground attacks along the Avdiivka-Donetsk City line on April 18. Geolocated footage shows that Russian forces have advanced up to the H-20 highway northeast of Krasnohorivka (3km north of Avdiivka).[48] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces conducted unsuccessful ground attacks near Stepove (2km north of Avdiivka), Novokalynove (8km north of Avdiivka), Berdychi (4km northwest of Avdiivka) Avdiivka, Sieverne (5km west of Avdiivka), Pervomaiske (11km southwest of Avdiivka), and Marinka (27km southwest of Avdiivka).[49] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces made unspecified advances near Kruta Balka (3km northeast of Avdiivka), Vodyane (8km southwest of Avdiivka), and Nevelske (6km northwest of Donetsk City).[50] Other milbloggers claimed that Russian forces tried and failed to break through Ukrainian defenses near Keramik, Pervomaiske, Nevelske, and Marinka.[51]

Ukrainian forces likely conducted limited counterattacks in western Donetsk Oblast. Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian forces repelled Ukrainian ground attacks near Vuhledar, Pavlivka (3km southwest of Vuhledar), and a forest belt north of Mykilske (4km southeast of Vuhledar) and posted footage of Russian forces striking Ukrainian tanks in the area.[52] Russian forces did not conduct any confirmed or claimed ground attacks in western Donetsk Oblast on April 18.[53]

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

Ukrainian officials reported that Russian forces continue defensive preparations in southern Ukraine. Head of the Ukrainian Joint Coordination Press Center of the Southern Forces Nataliya Humenyuk stated that Russian forces have mined the east (left) bank of the Dnipro River in Kherson Oblast in preparation for a possible Ukrainian counteroffensive.[54] Ukrainian Mariupol Mayoral Advisor Petro Andryushchenko reported that Russian forces in Mariupol have not conducted any major movements recently and continue to reinforce Mariupol as some Russian forces deploy from Mariupol to other areas including the Vuhledar area.[55] Melitopol Mayor Ivan Fedorov stated that Russian forces continue to transport personnel and defensive fortifications through Melitopol between other rear areas and the front.[56]

Some Russian occupation officials and milbloggers have significantly shifted their narrative warning of a prospective Ukrainian counteroffensive; Russian sources that previously warned about a possible Ukrainian counteroffensive in Zaporizhia Oblast are now warning that Ukrainian forces may conduct a counteroffensive in Kherson Oblast. Kherson Oblast occupation head Vladimir Saldo claimed on April 18 that Ukrainian forces have concentrated unspecified forces in west (right) bank Kherson Oblast and have demonstrated a willingness to cross the Dnipro River.[57] Saldo’s claim coincides with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s recently reported visit to the Russian rear on the Arabat Spit in Kherson Oblast to check Russian preparations for a possible Ukrainian counteroffensive.[58] Russian milbloggers went into greater detail on Saldo’s claims, largely assessing that Ukrainian forces are preparing to establish a bridgehead across the Dnipro River.[59] Russian milbloggers have largely claimed that Ukrainian forces would mass for a counteroffensive in Zaporizhia Oblast and warned of claimed imminent counteroffensives since October 2022, as ISW has previously reported.[60] Another prominent Russian milblogger claimed that reports of a Ukrainian counterattack in western Zaporizhia Oblast (north of Melitopol) are false, but that Ukrainian forces are preparing for counteroffensive pushes near Polohy and Orikhiv.[61]

Russian forces conducted routine fire west of Hulyaipole and in Kherson, Mykolaiv, and Dnipropetrovsk oblasts on April 18.[62]

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

The Kremlin continues efforts to integrate proxy formations with conventional Russian forces. The Russian State Duma passed a bill on its first reading on April 18 that grants veteran status and benefits to Russian proxy fighters and Russian nationals who fought in Donbas starting since 2014.[63] The Duma also passed a bill that completely writes off loans for anyone who participated in Russia’s invasion in Ukraine starting since 2014 and died or was seriously wounded in combat.[64]

The Kremlin dramatically increased advertisements for the Russian volunteer recruitment campaign starting since March 2023. Russian independent outlet Novaya Gazeta Europe reported that Russian officials, local media, and even schools posted 75,000 enlistment advertisements on Russian social media platform VK, of which 70 percent emerged over the past two months.[65] Novaya Gazeta noted that 90 percent of all posts advertise contract service with the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD), while another 2,500 posts promoted recruitment for the Wagner Group private military company (PMC). The outlet found that government officials most commonly promote such advertisements and noted that recruitment posts also appear within social media groups that are completely unrelated to news, employment, or military affairs. Russian officials are also advertising in hospitals, apartment entrances, and on the metro. A Russian military expert told Novaya Gazeta that volunteers used to sign contracts with the Russian MoD for a defined temporary service period, but currently the Russian MoD is offering indefinite military service contracts that can only be terminated by Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The Kremlin’s ongoing volunteer recruitment campaign is likely increasingly integrating Wagner recruitment efforts into an overarching official Kremlin recruitment effort. Novaya Gazeta reported that Wagner is planning to recruit volunteers with the help of local officials and has promised to visit 36,097 settlements in Russia in April. Wagner is planning to advertise military service on local administration buildings and in post offices. Wagner advertisements have also appeared on federal TV channels such as RT, and local Crimean and Novosibirsk channels. The local administrations’ support for Wagner recruitment may indicate that the Kremlin is once again allowing Wagner to expand its force or suggests that Wagner financier Yevgeny Prigozhin has a profound network of Wagner-affiliated local officials. Prigozhin previously complained that St. Petersburg and Yaroslavl Oblast are the only two regions that are not actively supporting the recruitment efforts.[66]

Russia is forming a new private military training entity, which likely also supports the Kremlin’s force generation efforts. The Voevoda Training Center announced the opening of variety of training centers in several Russian cities, inviting individuals ages 14 to 60 to attend military training on April 6.[67] Voevoda advertised that experienced combat veterans will train the class and promoted specialized tactical lessons for operations with UAVs and anti-UAV operations.

Russian occupation officials are also forming Cossack military formations in southern Ukraine. Head of the Zaporizhia Oblast Occupation Administration Yevgeny Balitsky announced that the administration supported the decision to make a registered Cossack force in occupied Zaporizhia Oblast.[68]

Pardoned former Wagner convict forces are continuing to commit violent crimes in Russia following the conclusion of their contracts and reintegration into Russian society. Released Wagner mercenary Georgy Siukaev reportedly killed a civilian in Tskhinvali, South Ossetia.[69] Siukaev recently returned from the frontlines in Ukraine, and Prigozhin claimed that Wanger’s reoffender rate remains low.[70]

Russian outlets reported that Russian state defense conglomerate Rostec had transferred ammunition production facilities in Burevestnik Central Research Institute, Uraltransmash, and Plant No. 9 from under the ownership of the Uralvagonzavod machine industry company to the Techmash.[71] Rostec claimed that the transfer would increase production volume, while Uralvagonzavod focuses on tank production. A Kremlin-affiliated milblogger noted that some Russian sources are criticizing the transfer, claiming that such move is an “insidious privatization” of defense enterprises while Russian forces face shell shortages.[72] The milblogger denounced such concerns, noting that these industrial facilities remain under state ownership.

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 occupation officials continue to forcibly deport Ukrainian civilians to Russia under healthcare and rehabilitation schemes.[GM47] Former Advisor to Luhansk People’s Republic (LNR) Head Rodion Miroshnik claimed on April 18 that 23 children and 17 mothers from Severodonetsk, Kreminna, and other occupied areas of Luhansk Oblast departed from occupied Ukraine and will spend 21 days at Klyazma sanitorium in Moscow Oblast under the “We Help Our Own” project.[73] Miroshnik claimed that the “We Help Our Own” project also plans to send mothers and children from occupied areas of Donetsk Oblast to Russia under the same healthcare and rehabilitation scheme.

Russian occupation authorities continue efforts to indoctrinate Ukrainian children into Russian patriotic organizations. Zaporizhia Oblast occupation head Yevgeny Balitsky announced on April 18 that the public youth organization “Russian Student Teams,” which aims to engage in the patriotic education of youth and involve students in unspecified labor activities, opened a regional branch in occupied Zaporizhia Oblast.[74] Balitsky claimed that the organization already has three cells of over 80 people that will unite under the new regional branch.

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.

Belarus may begin economically supporting Russian-occupied Donetsk Oblast with a patronage system.[GM48] Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) Head Denis Pushilin met Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko in Minsk on April 18.[75] Pushilin stated said Lukashenko said that Belarus is ready to assist occupied Donetsk Oblast with “large scale restoration.”[76] Pushilin claimed that he and Lukashenko also discussed potential agriculture, industry, and construction cooperation between occupied Donetsk Oblast and Belarus.[77] The Kremlin may seek to leverage Belarus‘ state budget to offset some of the costs of restoring damaged infrastructure in Donetsk Oblast. ISW has previously written about how Russian federal subjects have formalized patronage-like partnerships in an effort to bring the standard of living in Russian-occupied Ukrainian territories up to Russian standards.[78]

The Belarusian Ministry of Defense announced on April 18 that Belarusian territorial defense elements will conduct a command staff exercise of unspecified size to protect critical infrastructure from enemy sabotage and reconnaissance elements in the Novogrudok and Korelichi raions in Grodno Oblast from April 18 – 21.[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.

[1] https://t.me/mod_russia/25750; http://kremlin dot ru/events/president/news/70944; https://t.me/VGA_Kherson/8699; ; https://t.me/miroshnik_r/11094; http...

[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-65308470

[3] https://www.president.gov dot ua/news/glava-derzhavi-vidvidav-peredovi-poziciyi-ukrayinskih-zahisn-82321

[4] https://www.understandingwar.org/sites/default/files/Russian%20Offensive...

[5] https://t.me/rybar/45951 ; https://t.me/Aksenov82/2364; https://t.me/...

[6] https://twitter.com/666_mancer/status/1648298287307341826?s=20;

[7] http://en.kremlin dot ru/events/president/news/70944

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

[9] https://t.me/rybar/45951

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

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

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

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

[14] https://t.me/rybar/45951

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

[16] https://t.me/pgubarev/630

[17] https://t.me/strelkovii/4566

[18] https://t.me/KRPRus/5

[19] https://telegra dot ph/Vstupitelnoe-slovo-Ministra-oborony-Rossijskoj-Federacii-generala-armii-SKSHojgu-04-18

[20] https://telegra dot ph/Vstupitelnoe-slovo-ministra-oborony-Kitajskoj-Narodnoj-Respubliki-general-polkovnika-Li-SHanfu-04-18

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

[22] https://www.mofa.go.jp/files/100492731.pdf

[23] https://t.me/readovkanews/57066

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

[25] https://t.me/bbcrussian/44824; https://t.me/bbcrussian/44018; https://... ru/doc/5940146 ; https://veved dot ru/eburg/news/politika/185025-ekaterinburgskomu-piarschiku-jaroslavu-shirshikovu-oficialno-predjavleno-obvinenie-v-opravdanii-terrorizma.html

[26] https://t.me/bbcrussian/44824; https://t.me/bazabazon/16994; https://meduza dot io/news/2023/04/18/v-ekaterinburge-za-post-o-gibeli-voenkora-tatarskogo-zaderzhali-piarschika-kotoryy-vstrechalsya-s-zhurnalistom-wsj-gershkovichem-nezadolgo-do-ego-aresta

[27] https://t.me/bbcrussian/44018

[28] https://t.me/astrapress/25128; https://t.me/astrapress/25132; https://t.me/readovkanews/57088; https://meduza dot io/news/2023/04/18/gosduma-odobrila-popravku-o-lishenii-priobretennogo-grazhdanstva-rf-za-ugrozhayuschie-natsonalnoy-bezopasnosti-deystviya; https://meduza dot io/news/2023/04/18/gosduma-odobrila-popravki-o-pozhiznennom-sroke-za-gosizmenu-i-sroke-do-pyati-let-za-pomosch-v-ispolnenii-resheniy-mezhdunarodnyh-organizatsiy; https://t.me/istories_media/2373; https://www.severreal dot org/a/gosduma-odobrila-pozhiznennoe-zaklyuchenie-za-gosizmenu/32368874.html; https://t.me/severrealii/16140

[29] https://t.me/sotaproject/57307

[30] http://www.constitution dot ru/en/10003000-02.htm

[31] https://ovd dot news/express-news/2023/04/17/gd-opublikovala-popravki-ob-otvetstvennosti-za-rabotu-s-mezhdunarodnymi; https://ovd.news/express-news/2023/04/17/gd-opublikovala-popravki-ob-otv...

[32] https://ovd dot news/express-news/2023/04/17/gd-opublikovala-popravki-ob-otvetstvennosti-za-rabotu-s-mezhdunarodnymi; https://ovd.news/express-news/2023/04/17/gd-opublikovala-popravki-ob-otv...

[33] https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/ru/customary-ihl/v2/rule158

[34] https://t.me/tass_agency/188494; https://meduza dot io/news/2023/04/18/v-moskve-otmenili-shestvie-bessmertnogo-polka-organizatory-ob-yasnili-eto-reshenie-soobrazheniyami-bezopasnosti

[35] https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid02Z22xqoWEzEeRLsAXBr...

[36] https://t.me/voenkorKotenok/46865; https://t.me/readovkanews/57056

[37] https://t.me/wargonzo/12017

[38] https://t.me/RKadyrov_95/3544; https://t.me/grey_zone/18307

[39] https://twitter.com/GirkinGirkin/status/1648168443831566336 ; https://t.me/boris_rozhin/83263 ; https://t.me/russkiy_opolchenec/36363; https://t.me/grey_zone/18304

[40] https://t.me/mod_russia/25761

[41] https://t.me/voenkorKotenok/46865; https://t.me/readovkanews/57056; https://t.me/wargonzo/12017

[42] https://t.me/boris_rozhin/83284

[43] https://t.me/wargonzo/12017

[44] https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid02Z22xqoWEzEeRLsAXBr...

[45] https://www.facebook.com/easternforces/posts/pfbid02CeVRiNfeoKuW7VWEdtd9...

[46] https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=525975699736379

[47] https://t.me/voenkorKotenok/46865; https://t.me/dva_majors/13242; https://t.me/rybar/45934

[48] https://twitter.com/cyber_boroshno/status/1648271147677413376; https://twitter.com/cyber_boroshno/status/1648271186390921216; https://t.me/escadrone/179

[49] https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid0hqo3ZxjQbt3oF3SENFt... https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid0hqo3ZxjQbt3oF3SENFt...

[50] https://t.me/readovkanews/57056

[51] https://t.me/wargonzo/12017; https://t.me/voenkorKotenok/46865

[52] https://t.me/readovkanews/57056; https://t.me/readovkanews/57056; http... https://t.me/RtrDonetsk/16762

[53] https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid0hqo3ZxjQbt3oF3SENFt... https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid02Z22xqoWEzEeRLsAXBr...

[54] https://t.me/hueviyherson/38132; https://hromadske.radio/news/2023/04/18/okupanty-na-khersonshchyni-hotui...

[55] https://t.me/andriyshTime/8747

[56] https://t.me/ivan_fedorov_melitopol/1739

[57] https://t.me/readovkanews/57093

[58] https://t.me/mod_russia/25750; http://kremlin dot ru/events/president/news/70944; https://t.me/VGA_Kherson/8699; ; https://t.me/miroshnik_r/11094; https://t.me/miroshnik_r/11093; https://t.me/sashakots/39348; https://t.me/vzglyad_ru/75817; https://t.me/z_arhiv/20404; https://t.me/rian_ru/200115 https://twitter.com/RALee85/status/1648241830759378947?s=20; https://twitter.com/RALee85/status/1648242789325627398?s=20; https://twitter.com/RALee85/status/1648245874043256832?s=20; https://twitter.com/RALee85/status/1648248931003043842?s=20

[59] https://t.me/grey_zone/18318; https://t.me/rusfleet/7820; https://t.me/grey_zone/18319; https://t.me/NeoficialniyBeZsonoV/24421

[60] https://www.understandingwar.org/sites/default/files/Russian%20Offensive... https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign...

[61] https://t.me/rybar/45964

[62] https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid0hqo3ZxjQbt3oF3SENFt... https://t.me/voenkorKotenok/46865

[63] https://t.me/readovkanews/57092; https://t.me/notes_veterans/9009; https://t.me/sashakots/39363

[64] https://t.me/saraliev/1028

[65] https://novayagazeta dot eu/articles/2023/04/18/priamaia-naruzhka-na-front

[66] https://76 dot ru/text/world/2023/04/12/72214475/

[67] https://t.me/voevodatraining/422; https://t.me/voevodatraining/424

[68] https://t.me/BalitskyEV/999

[69] https://t.me/ia_res/16690; https://cominf dot org/node/1166549337

[70] https://t.me/concordgroup_official/788

[71] https://www.kommersant dot ru/doc/5940197

[72] https://t.me/rybar/45972

[73] https://t.me/miroshnik_r/11095

[74] https://t.me/BalitskyEV/994

[75] https://president.gov dot by/ru/events/vstrecha-s-vremenno-ispolnyayushchim-obyazannosti-glavy-dnr-denisom-pushilinym; https://t.me/pushilindenis/3348; https://t.me/pul_1/8746; https://t.me/TRO_DPR/12097; https://t.me/readovkanews/57073; https://t.me/miroshnik_r/11097; https://t.me/basurin_e/842

[76] https://t.me/pushilindenis/3348

[77] https://t.me/pushilindenis/3348

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

[79] https://t.me/modmilby/25924

Department of Justice

Office of Public Affairs

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Tuesday, April 18, 2023

U.S. Citizens and Russian Intelligence Officers Charged with Conspiring to Use U.S. Citizens as Illegal Agents of the Russian Government

Defendants Sought to Sow Discord, Spread Pro-Russia Propaganda and Interfere in Elections Within the United States

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/us-citizens-and-russian-intelligence-officers-charged-conspiring-use-us-citizens-illegal

justice.gov · April 18, 2023

A federal grand jury in Tampa, Florida, returned a superseding indictment charging four U.S. citizens and three Russian nationals with working on behalf of the Russian government and in conjunction with the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) to conduct a multi-year foreign malign influence campaign in the United States. Among other conduct, the superseding indictment alleges that the Russian defendants recruited, funded and directed U.S. political groups to act as unregistered illegal agents of the Russian government and sow discord and spread pro-Russian propaganda; the indicted intelligence officers, in particular, participated in covertly funding and directing candidates for local office within the United States.

Additionally, in a separate case out of the District of Columbia, a criminal complaint was unsealed charging Russian national Natalia Burlinova with conspiring with an FSB officer to act as an illegal agent of Russia in the United States.

“Russia’s foreign intelligence service allegedly weaponized our First Amendment rights – freedoms Russia denies its own citizens – to divide Americans and interfere in elections in the United States,” said Assistant Attorney General Matthew G. Olsen of the Justice Department’s National Security Division. “The department will not hesitate to expose and prosecute those who sow discord and corrupt U.S. elections in service of hostile foreign interests, regardless of whether the culprits are U.S. citizens or foreign individuals abroad.”

“Efforts by the Russian government to secretly influence U.S. elections will not be tolerated,” said Assistant Attorney General Kenneth A. Polite, Jr. of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division. “As today’s announcement demonstrates, the Criminal Division is committed to eradicating foreign malign influence from the U.S. political system and helping ensure the integrity of our elections.”

“Today’s announcement paints a harrowing picture of Russian government actions and the lengths to which the FSB will go to interfere with our elections, sow discord in our nation and ultimately recruit U.S citizens to their efforts,” said Acting Assistant Director Kurt Ronnow of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division. “All Americans should be deeply concerned by the tactics employed by the FSB and remain vigilant to any attempt to undermine our democracy. The FBI remains committed to confronting this egregious behavior and ultimately disrupting our adversaries and those who act on their behalf.”

United States v. Ionov, et al.

According to the superseding indictment returned in the Middle District of Florida, Aleksandr Viktorovich Ionov, a resident of Moscow, was the founder and president of the Anti-Globalization Movement of Russia (AGMR), an organization headquartered in Moscow, Russia, and funded by the Russian government. Ionov allegedly utilized AGMR to carry out Russia’s malign influence campaign. Ionov’s influence efforts were allegedly directed and supervised by Moscow-based FSB officers, including indicted defendants Aleksey Borisovich Sukhodolov and Yegor Sergeyevich Popov.

“The prosecution of this criminal conduct is essential to protecting the American public when foreign governments seek to inject themselves into the American political process,” said U.S. Attorney Roger B. Handberg for the Middle District of Florida. “We thank our partners at the FBI for their tireless investigation of these events and their commitment to ensure justice is done.”

Among other illegal activities, the superseding indictment alleges that Ionov, Sukhodolov and Popov conspired to directly and substantially influence democratic elections in the United States by clandestinely funding and directing the political campaign of a particular candidate for local office in St. Petersburg, Florida, in 2019. For instance, the superseding indictment alleges that Popov expressly referred to this effort on behalf of the FSB as “our election campaign,” and Ionov referring to the candidate as the “candidate whom we supervise.” Ionov and Popov allegedly intended that this election interference plot would extend beyond the 2019 local election cycle in St. Petersburg, and subsequently discussed that the “USA Presidential election” was the FSB’s “main topic of the year.”

Moreover, from at least November 2014 until July 2022, Ionov allegedly engaged in a years-long foreign malign influence campaign targeting the United States. As a part of the campaign, Ionov allegedly recruited members of political groups within the United States, including the African People’s Socialist Party and the Uhuru Movement (collectively, the APSP) in Florida, Black Hammer in Georgia and a political group in California (referred to in the superseding indictment as U.S. Political Group 3), to participate in the influence campaign and act as agents of Russia in the United States, including the following indicted defendants:

Omali Yeshitela, a U.S. citizen residing in St. Petersburg, Florida, and St. Louis, Missouri, who served as the chairman and founder of the APSP;
Penny Joanne Hess, a U.S. citizen residing in St. Petersburg, Florida, and St. Louis, Missouri, who served as the leader of a component of the APSP;
Jesse Nevel, a U.S. citizen residing in St. Petersburg, Florida, and St. Louis, Missouri, who served as a member of a component of the APSP; and
Augustus C. Romain Jr., aka Gazi Kodzo, a U.S. citizen residing in St. Petersburg, Florida, and Atlanta, who served as a leader of the APSP and a founder of Black Hammer in Georgia.

One focus of Ionov’s alleged influence operation was to create the appearance of American popular support for Russia’s annexation of territories in Ukraine. For example, in May 2020, Ionov allegedly sent a request he stated was from “Russia, the Donetsk People’s Republic” – an apparent reference to a Russian-occupied region in eastern Ukraine – to Yeshitela and members of other U.S. political groups to make statements in support of the independence of the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic, a Russian-backed breakaway state in eastern Ukraine. Ionov later allegedly touted to the FSB that Yeshitela’s video-recorded statement of support was the first time that “American nonprofit organizations congratulated citizens” of the occupied region.

Ionov’s use of the APSP to promote Russian propaganda relating to Ukraine allegedly continued after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. On the day Russia invaded Ukraine, Feb. 24, 2022, Ionov allegedly emailed Nevel an “URGENT MESSAGE” which contained pro-Russian talking points in support of the invasion. Thereafter, throughout March 2022, the APSP repeatedly hosted Ionov via video conference to discuss the war, during which Ionov falsely stated that anyone who supported Ukraine also supported Naziism and white supremacy, and Yeshitela and another APSP member allegedly made statements of solidarity with the Russian government.

Ionov, Sukhodolov, Popov, Yeshitela, Hess, Nevel and Romain are charged with conspiring to have U.S. citizens act as illegal agents of the Russian government within the United States without providing prior notification to the Attorney General, as required by law. If convicted, they each face a maximum penalty of five years in prison. Yeshitela, Hess and Nevel are also charged with acting as agents of Russia within the United States without such prior notification. If convicted, they each face a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison. If convicted, a federal district court judge will determine any sentence after considering the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines and other statutory factors.

Assistant U.S. Attorneys Daniel J. Marcet and Risha Asokan for the Middle District of Florida, Trial Attorney Menno Goedman of the Justice Department’s Counterintelligence and Export Control Section, and Trial Attorney Demetrius Sumner of the Criminal Division’s Public Integrity Section are prosecuting the case.

United States v. Burlinova

According to the affidavit in support of the criminal complaint unsealed in the District of Columbia, Russian national Natalia Burlinova, a resident of Moscow, conspired with an FSB officer to recruit U.S. citizens from academic and research institutions to travel to Russia to participate in a public diplomacy program called Meeting Russia. The program was operated by PICREADI, a Russian organization led by Burlinova, funded by the Russian government and devoted to promoting Russian national interests.

“The defendant is accused of subverting our foreign agent notification laws to promote Russian national interests here in the United States, concealing from the public that her recruitment efforts were funded by a Russian security service,” said U.S. Attorney Matthew M. Graves for the District of Columbia. “We will continue to expose these serious crimes and hold all who perpetrate them accountable.”

The affidavit alleges that the FSB officer provided funding and other support for Burlinova’s foreign recruitment and her efforts to advance Russian interests in the United States. In return, Burlinova provided the FSB officer with extensive information about U.S. citizens who were recruited to attend her programs, including their résumés, passport information, photographs and analyses of their views toward Russia. Burlinova further identified for the FSB officer particular U.S. citizens who, in Burlinova’s view, had expressed positive attitudes towards Russia and were prepared to continue to collaborate. During a recruitment trip to the United States in fall 2018, Burlinova met with U.S. citizens at various universities and research institutions and provided to photographs of her meetings to the FSB officer. The FSB officer used the information Burlinova provided prepare FSB intelligence reports. Burlinova never notified the Attorney General of these efforts or otherwise disclosed to the public that her recruitment efforts were supported and funded by a Russian security service.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael J. Friedman for the District of Columbia and Trial Attorney Emma D. Ellenrieder of the National Security Division’s Counterintelligence and Export Control Section are prosecuting the case.

An indictment and a complaint are merely an allegation. All defendants are presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law.

justice.gov · April 18, 2023

4. U.S. charges four Americans with aiding Kremlin efforts

Excerpts:

The charged Americans are African People’s Socialist Party leaders Omali Yeshitela, Penny Joanne Hess, Jesse Nevel and Augustus C. Romain Jr., all of whom reside or used to reside in St. Petersburg, Fla.

“Russia’s foreign intelligence service allegedly weaponized our First Amendment rights — freedoms Russia denies its own citizens — to divide Americans and interfere in elections in the United States,” Assistant Attorney General Matthew G. Olsen said in a written statement. The Justice Department, he said, “will not hesitate to expose and prosecute those who sow discord and corrupt U.S. elections in service of hostile foreign interests, regardless of whether the culprits are U.S. citizens or foreign individuals abroad.”

...

Separately Tuesday, the Justice Department filed another Russian influence case in the nation’s capital, accusing Natalia Burlinova, a Russian citizen, of conspiring with the FSB to recruit U.S. academics and researchers to travel to Russia as part of a public diplomacy program called Meeting Russia. The program, authorities say, was funded by the Russian government and designed to promote Russian national interests.

Burlinova is accused of helping the FSB gather information on Americans without registering her work on behalf of the Russian government.

“The defendant is accused of subverting our foreign agent notification laws to promote Russian national interests here in the United States, concealing from the public that her recruitment efforts were funded by a Russian security service,” said U.S. Attorney Matthew M. Graves in a written statement.

U.S. charges four Americans with aiding Kremlin efforts

Charges are the latest Justice Department effort against secret foreign propaganda networks on U.S. soil

April 18, 2023 at 2:02 p.m. EDT

The Washington Post · by Devlin Barrett · April 18, 2023

Federal authorities charged four Americans on Tuesday with roles in a malign campaign pushing pro-Kremlin propaganda in Florida and Missouri — expanding a previous case that charged a Russian operative with running illegal influence agents within the United States.

The FBI signaled its interest in the alleged activities in a series of raids last summer, at which point authorities charged a Moscow man, Aleksandr Viktorovich Ionov, with working for years on behalf of Russian government officials to fund and direct fringe political groups in the United States. Among other things, Ionov allegedly advised the political campaigns of two unidentified candidates for public office in Florida.

Ionov’s influence efforts were allegedly directed and supervised by officers of the FSB, a Russian government intelligence service.

Now, authorities have added charges against four Americans who allegedly did Ionov’s bidding through groups including the African People’s Socialist Party and the Uhuru Movement in Florida, Black Hammer in Georgia, and an unidentified political group in California — part of an effort to influence American politics.

Authorities said Ionov sought to use the groups to promote Russia’s occupation of part of Ukraine, and the eventual invasion of that country in 2022.

The charged Americans are African People’s Socialist Party leaders Omali Yeshitela, Penny Joanne Hess, Jesse Nevel and Augustus C. Romain Jr., all of whom reside or used to reside in St. Petersburg, Fla.

“Russia’s foreign intelligence service allegedly weaponized our First Amendment rights — freedoms Russia denies its own citizens — to divide Americans and interfere in elections in the United States,” Assistant Attorney General Matthew G. Olsen said in a written statement. The Justice Department, he said, “will not hesitate to expose and prosecute those who sow discord and corrupt U.S. elections in service of hostile foreign interests, regardless of whether the culprits are U.S. citizens or foreign individuals abroad.”

The charges filed in federal court in Tampa accuse Ionov of running the Anti-Globalization Movement of Russia, which U.S. officials say is funded by the Russian government and directed by FSB officers Aleksey Borisovich Sukhodolov and Yegor Sergeyevich Popov.

The three Russians and four Americans are charged with conspiring to have U.S. citizens act as illegal, unregistered agents of the Russian government.

When the FBI searched the homes and offices of some of the suspects last year, a member of the group said they were being targeted “because of our relationship with forces internationally who support the anti-colonial struggle,” adding that the group was being used “in a propaganda war against Russia.”

Separately Tuesday, the Justice Department filed another Russian influence case in the nation’s capital, accusing Natalia Burlinova, a Russian citizen, of conspiring with the FSB to recruit U.S. academics and researchers to travel to Russia as part of a public diplomacy program called Meeting Russia. The program, authorities say, was funded by the Russian government and designed to promote Russian national interests.

Burlinova is accused of helping the FSB gather information on Americans without registering her work on behalf of the Russian government.

The Washington Post · by Devlin Barrett · April 18, 2023

5. Intelligence mission yanked for National Guard unit where leaks occurred

Excerpts:

“The 102nd Intelligence Wing is not currently performing its assigned intelligence mission. The mission has been temporarily reassigned to other organizations within the Air Force,” Air Force spokeswoman Ann Stefanek said in a statement.

Intelligence mission yanked for National Guard unit where leaks occurred

washingtontimes.com · by Mike Glenn

The Air Force on Tuesday stripped a Massachusetts Air National Guard unit of its intelligence mission after a lone airman there was accused of leaking potentially hundreds of classified military documents, including material about the state of Ukraine’s ongoing war against Russia and U.S. assessments of Taiwan’s ability to withstand an attack by China.

Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall also ordered the service’s inspector general to investigate “overall compliance with policy, procedures, and standards” at the 102nd Intelligence Wing, based in Cape Cod.

“The 102nd Intelligence Wing is not currently performing its assigned intelligence mission. The mission has been temporarily reassigned to other organizations within the Air Force,” Air Force spokeswoman Ann Stefanek said in a statement.

Airman 1st Class Jack Teixeira, 21, had been assigned to the unit when he was arrested Thursday and charged with unauthorized removal and retention of classified material. He is expected to make another appearance on Wednesday in federal court in Boston.

According to its website, the mission of the 102nd Intelligence Wing is to “provide worldwide, precision intelligence, and command and control, along with trained and experienced airmen for expeditionary combat support and homeland security.”

Airman Teixeira is accused of leaking hundreds of sensitive military and intelligence documents on a private chatroom for gamers on the Discord social media site, creating political embarrassment and security headaches for the Biden administration with allies and adversaries alike. Every unit in the Air Force will conduct a security-focused “stand-down” within the next 30 days, Mr. Kendall said in a memo to the force.

“The focus of the stand-down will be to reassess our security posture and procedures, validate the need to know for each person’s access, and emphasize to all Airmen and Guardians the responsibility we are entrusted with,” he said.

Mr. Kendall said commanders are responsible for safeguarding national security information within their units and ensuring their personnel are properly trained in security procedures.

“We must be continually alert for personnel who should not have access or who do not possess the need-to-know for specific classified information. Enforcing the need-to-know requirement is a chain-of-command responsibility,” he said.

• Mike Glenn can be reached at mglenn@washingtontimes.com.

washingtontimes.com · by Mike Glenn

6. Scolding Isn’t a Foreign Policy

Scolding Isn’t a Foreign Policy

America needs friends, and it isn’t going to win them by delivering lectures.

By Walter Russell MeadFollow

April 17, 2023 6:21 pm ET

https://www.wsj.com/articles/scolding-isnt-a-foreign-policy-blinken-philippines-china-vietnam-communism-pragmatism-morality-3028f9c

Internationally, it was another grim week for the Biden administration, the United States of America, and world peace. Brazil, the country with the largest population, economy and landmass in Latin America, reinforced its alignment with China as its president Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva pledged to work with Xi Jinping to build a new global order and called on the European Union and the U.S. to stop shipping weapons to Ukraine. Indian officials reported that China is supporting the development of a military listening post on Myanmar’s strategic Great Coco Island in the Bay of Bengal. Saudi Arabia, which flirted a few weeks ago with opening diplomatic relations with Israel, is intensifying its oil cooperation with Russia and now seeks a meeting with Hamas. Farther south, a Sudanese military faction backed by Russia’s Wagner Group battles for control of Africa’s third-largest nation.

The usual spinners and makeup artists are doing their best to make the disorderly unraveling of the American-led world order look like a visionary triumph of enlightened foreign policy, but former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers expressed a more cogent view. Describing America’s increasing loneliness on the world scene, Mr. Summers said, “Somebody from a developing country said to me, ‘What we get from China is an airport. What we get from the United States is a lecture.’ ”

When the Biden administration steps down from the bully pulpit, good things can still happen. A year ago, Ferdinand Marcos Jr.—son of the U.S. Cold War ally and Philippine strongman whose 1986 overthrow was hailed by democracy activists as a milestone in world history—ascended to his father’s former office after a decisive victory in a less-than-pristine election. The democracy lobby was appalled. Six Democratic senators, including three members of the Foreign Relations Committee, wrote a letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken warning him to prioritize democracy and rule-of-law issues. Their core prescription for managing the Filipino leader was the same one they prescribe for almost every American bilateral relationship: Lecture more, and when that fails, use sanctions.

Fortunately, the administration was smarter than this. While the Philippines ranks low on the Freedom House global freedom index and ranks high on Transparency International’s measurement of perceived corruption, its location makes the country’s cooperation vital for any serious attempt to deter China from an invasion of Taiwan. Stroking and petting the democracy lobbyists while insulating the relationship from their ill-counseled meddling, Team Biden persuaded Mr. Marcos to allow the U.S. access to four new strategically important bases on its territory as the two countries launched their largest joint military exercise in three decades.

This is surely a better outcome than anything the Biden administration has accomplished by the impassioned stream of moralistic lectures it unleashed against the crown prince of Saudi Arabia.

On Mr. Blinken’s recent visit to Vietnam, he again chose morality over moralism, refraining from criticizing the Communist Party of Vietnam for its many policies that displease the democracy lobby in the interest of shoring up the coalition of states aiming to prevent Chinese hegemony in the Indo-Pacific.

Dean Acheson, Harry S. Truman’s secretary of state, thought deeply about the place of morality in foreign policy. “The righteous who seek to deduce foreign policy from ethical or moral principles are as misleading and misled as the modern Machiavellis who would conduct our foreign relations without regard to them,” he said in 1964.

America’s Cold War policy aimed at stopping the spread of Soviet tyranny was, Acheson rightly believed, deeply moral. Today, the Chinese Communist Party has become an expansionist, tyrannical power whose inordinate ambition endangers freedom world-wide. America’s interests and values both lead us to oppose that ambition, even as we seek to avoid the catastrophe of another great-power war.

Too many self-described democracy activists want the U.S. to dissipate its diplomatic energy in moralistic posturing. They would rather we prioritized sermons and sanctions over building a multilateral coalition to check Chinese expansion. Their problem is not that they love righteousness too much. It is that they have thought too little and too superficially about what righteousness really demands.

Moral foreign policy often requires pragmatism. Defeating Nazi Germany required an alliance with the equally evil Soviet Union. And President Nixon’s rapprochement with Mao’s China, then at the horrifying acme of the Cultural Revolution, similarly was driven by the need to counter the greater threat posed at that time by the Soviet Union.

After the Cold War, many Americans thought that global moral improvement had replaced national security as the principal goal of American foreign policy and that pragmatic calculation was a form of moral cowardice.

Those illusions can no longer be sustained.

America needs friends now, and nobody likes or trusts the village scold.

Appeared in the April 18, 2023, print edition as 'Scolding Isn’t a Foreign Policy'.

7. What Drives Political Polarization

Conclusion:

If Ms. Mettler and Mr. Brown are correct—and theirs is the most balanced and persuasive account I’ve seen—our current polarization is the result of tectonic economic and cultural shifts that won’t be reversed quickly or easily.

What Drives Political Polarization

A new study suggests that the jobs gaps between rural and urban places is a key.

By William A. GalstonFollow

April 18, 2023 2:49 pm ET

https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-drives-political-polarization-geography-republicans-democrats-manufacturing-culture-elites-4256ab4c?mod=opinion_lead_pos8

By most measures, the U.S. has become far more polarized than it was when I cast my first vote in 1968. And politically, the kind of polarization that matters most is geographical.

In the close 1976 election between Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford, 20 states were decided by margins of less than 5 percentage points. By 2000, when Al Gore and George W. Bush faced off in another close election, only 12 states ended up this category. That number fell to 11 in 2016 and eight in 2020. During this period, few states became more competitive. Instead, most red states became redder, and blue states bluer, while many swing states shifted decisively toward one or the other party.

County lines are nearly as stable as state borders, and polarizing shifts within counties are similarly pronounced. As recently as 1992, 38% of voters lived in counties that gave winning margins of at least 20 points to Democrats or Republicans. By 2016 the share of these voters had risen to 60%, and this trend appears to have continued in 2020.

Against this backdrop, it should come as no surprise that the number of competitive congressional districts has declined sharply. In 1999, according to Cook Political Report’s David Wasserman, 164 seats were within 5 points of the nearly even national partisan divide. That number has since been cut in half. The number of seats that remain competitive in every election—what Cook calls “hyper-swing seats”—has fallen during this period by 58%, from 107 to 45. In more than 80% of districts, the outcome is for all practical purposes determined in the dominant party’s primary election, typically low-turnout affairs dominated by the most committed voters.

One of the main drivers of geographical polarization is the widening gap between rural and urban America. In an illuminating new study, Cornell’s Suzanne Mettler and Trevor Brown show that as recently as three decades ago, rural and urban voting patterns in presidential elections closely tracked each other. In 1996 Bob Dole’s share of the rural vote was only 3 points higher than his urban share, even though he was Republican from Kansas. In 2020 Donald Trump’s gap was 21 points. He received 64% of the rural vote and 43% of the urban vote.

It is tempting but wrong to view this divide as the consequence of the South’s political realignment. Yes, the urban-rural gap between the parties widened to 18 points in the South, but it expanded even more in the Midwest (22 points) and the West (20 points), with the Northeast not far behind at 15 points.

According to Ms. Mettler and Mr. Brown, two main forces drove this widening. First, the economic fortunes of urban and rural America have diverged sharply. Since the 1980s, manufacturing has been about twice as important for rural areas as for their urban counterparts. The decline of manufacturing jobs since 2000 has hit rural areas especially hard. Many small towns depended heavily on single manufacturing plants, whose closure sent many of them in a downward spiral that proved hard to reverse.

In 1970, the education gap between rural and urban areas was modest. Today, 35% of urban residents have at least a bachelor’s degree, compared with 21% for rural Americans. This helps explain why urban areas were more able to take advantage of the expanding information economy. An incredible 94% of the nation’s job growth since 2000 has occurred in urban counties, while almost half of their rural counterparts have suffered net job losses during the same period. Similarly, since the turn of the century, the population of urban counties has risen at more than twice the rate of rural counties, 41% of which have experienced population losses. When rural Americans say they feel left behind, this is part of what they mean.

The second large force driving the urban-rural political divide, the authors argue, is the growing nationalization of policy, which many rural Americans view as efforts by educated urban Americans to enforce their elite outlook on issues ranging from racial, ethnic and gender identity to the environment, education, gun ownership, immigration and religious liberty. As the urban influence has grown in the Democratic Party, rural Americans have rallied behind the Republican Party in resistance.

These scholars show that we need not choose between economics and culture to explain the widening political gap between rural and urban America. In recent decades, the U.S. has experienced what the authors call “sequential polarization,” with rural economic decline increasing rural Americans’ receptivity to the Republican message of cultural resistance.

If Ms. Mettler and Mr. Brown are correct—and theirs is the most balanced and persuasive account I’ve seen—our current polarization is the result of tectonic economic and cultural shifts that won’t be reversed quickly or easily.

Appeared in the April 19, 2023, print edition as 'What Drives Political Polarization?'.

8. Taiwan to More Than Double Military Police

Excerpts:

“While there are relatively few explicit mentions of a Taiwan urban warfare scenario in PLA sources, evidence suggests this scenario has influenced recent Military Operations on Urban Terrain [MOUT] training,” Lilly writes. “Since at least 2009, the PLA has used dedicated MOUT spaces in at least three locations: the main MOUT facility within the greater Zhurihe Training Base in Inner Mongolia, which has been used since 2009; a potential pilot or legacy facility at Yanshan that may still be available for smaller scale MOUT exercises in mountainous terrains; and, perhaps most relevant for a Taiwan scenario, a mock city complete with a library, coffee shop, and power plant located at a certain training field in Northern Jiangsu.”

...

Wendell Minnick, a long-term Taipei-based defense expert, told Asia Sentinel that the MP command would be Taipei’s only military protection from special operation forces infiltrating the city to cause chaos. According to Minnick, the actual current number of military police is only 3,000, not 5,000 as the newspapers claim, with these units only protecting the presidential area.

“In the past, the MPs numbered 20,000, with the drop to 3,000 being part of their ‘military modernization’ plan, which also eliminated the military police court system and turned it over to the civilian courts who are unfamiliar with military code of conduct,” Minnick said. “I have been a strong advocate of removing the parking lots in front of the Presidential Building that would serve as helicopter offloading of special operations forces. There is also the soccer field behind the First Girls School across the street, and something has to be done with the massive open area at Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall that could accommodate at least four Z-8F/AC313 [helicopters] capable of carrying 30 commandoes,” Minnick wrote in his China In Arms newsletter.

DEFENSE/SECURITY

Taiwan to More Than Double Military Police

Move comes as China’s PLA study battles for Baghdad, Fallujah, Aleppo and Mosul

APR 19, 2023

https://www.asiasentinel.com/p/taiwan-more-than-double-military-police?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=23934&post_id=115815298&isFreemail=false&utm_medium=email

By: Jens Kastner

Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense intends to expand the military police from the current 5,000-plus to 11,000 to counter the threat posed by Chinese “decapitation” strikes and pro-mainland gangsters, guard critical infrastructure and match a planned expansion of the armed forces, according to multiple Taiwanese media outlets.

The reports cited Su Ziyun, senior official of the government’s Institute for National Defense and Security Research in Taipei, as applauding the move in the face of China’s strengthening amphibious combat capability and the high likelihood that China’s fifth column would conduct sabotage activities in Taiwan during wartime. It is believed that several hundred Taiwanese pro-China gangsters on the island would engage in urban warfare to help the PLA succeed in an invasion.

Su furthermore said that drawing on the experience of the Ukrainian war, the PLA will have closely studied how to take action to destroy oil, electricity, water, and information communication systems. According to Su, much of the threat is associated with the strengthening capability of PLA helicopters that would be bringing in soldiers and equipment.

The marked expansion of Taiwan’s is to be accompanied by purchases of Kestrel anti-armor rockets and man-portable infrared homing surface-to-air missile, with these two weapons systems becoming the standard systems for the military police forces.

“The fifth column that lurks in every corner of society in normal times will definitely take advantage of the opportunity to destroy it in wartime,” Su was quoted as saying. “The national military must improve the overall protection capabilities of key infrastructures, even including the concerns of all parties, such as TSMC and other parts of the semiconductor supply chain.”

The announcement of military police expansion plans follows the US-based defense think tank RAND in late-2022 publishing the book “Crossing the Strait: China’s Military Prepares for War with Taiwan.”

Sale Lilly, a senior policy analyst at RAND, in a chapter called “‘Killing Rats in a Porcelain Shop’: PLA Urban Warfare in a Taiwan Campaign” analyzes the frequency of PLA publications on urban warfare over time, which offers clues as to when the Chinese military has paid special attention to this topic. Two apparent spikes in attention occurred in 2004–2005 and 2016–2019, which, Lilly says, reflected increased PLA attention to US operations in the Middle East and had little to do with developments across the Taiwan Strait. The first spike, in 2004–2005, can be attributed to PLA case studies of US urban warfare experience in the early stages of the Iraq War, in particular, the battle of Baghdad and the first and second battles for Fallujah. The second spike, in 2016–2019, reflects a combination of Chinese observations of US urban warfare during the multiyear battle of Aleppo in Syria and the battle for Mosul in Iraq.

“While there are relatively few explicit mentions of a Taiwan urban warfare scenario in PLA sources, evidence suggests this scenario has influenced recent Military Operations on Urban Terrain [MOUT] training,” Lilly writes. “Since at least 2009, the PLA has used dedicated MOUT spaces in at least three locations: the main MOUT facility within the greater Zhurihe Training Base in Inner Mongolia, which has been used since 2009; a potential pilot or legacy facility at Yanshan that may still be available for smaller scale MOUT exercises in mountainous terrains; and, perhaps most relevant for a Taiwan scenario, a mock city complete with a library, coffee shop, and power plant located at a certain training field in Northern Jiangsu.”

Wendell Minnick, a long-term Taipei-based defense expert, told Asia Sentinel that the MP command would be Taipei’s only military protection from special operation forces infiltrating the city to cause chaos. According to Minnick, the actual current number of military police is only 3,000, not 5,000 as the newspapers claim, with these units only protecting the presidential area.

“In the past, the MPs numbered 20,000, with the drop to 3,000 being part of their ‘military modernization’ plan, which also eliminated the military police court system and turned it over to the civilian courts who are unfamiliar with military code of conduct,” Minnick said. “I have been a strong advocate of removing the parking lots in front of the Presidential Building that would serve as helicopter offloading of special operations forces. There is also the soccer field behind the First Girls School across the street, and something has to be done with the massive open area at Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall that could accommodate at least four Z-8F/AC313 [helicopters] capable of carrying 30 commandoes,” Minnick wrote in his China In Arms newsletter.

9. Unique US Advantages DoD Can Better Leverage To Keep Up With Tech Advances

Excerpts:

Finally, the DoD workforce is another important asset, but it needs to increase its tech and finance literacy. To help achieve that, the military is investing in tech competencies needed to understand the art of the plausible when it comes to writing requirements, structuring and evaluating proposals, and integrating software. They are also working to upskill users so they can employ new tech and provide a continuous feedback loop that maximizes the impact of tech development and acquisition efforts.

Additionally, DoD is increasingly investing in its workforce financial literacy and relationships with the investment community through programs like Shift Defense Ventures that embeds DoD employees in venture and private capital firms.

Defense still has many steps to take to become a better buyer of dual use and disruptive technology. But the discussions currently going on in the industry and at DoD are starting to identify the US assets that can push our national security well ahead of rivals, if used to their full potential. When it comes to innovation, the DoD has a vast arsenal upon which it can rely. We just need to learn how to deploy it better.

Unique US Advantages DoD Can Better Leverage To Keep Up With Tech Advances

Forbes · by Oliver Wyman · April 17, 2023

... [+]AFP via Getty Images

By Kelleigh Bilms

Kelleigh is a Washington DC-based principal in Oliver Wyman’s Aerospace and Defense practice.

The US Defense Department has struggled for decades to ensure the most advanced technology gets into the hands of warfighters as early as possible — a daunting task given the accelerating pace of tech development in the commercial market. How can we do it faster, at scale, and cost efficiently?

Three recommendations for unleashing the power of US commercial innovation on behalf of national security are rising to the top in discussions across the defense industry, private capital investors, and government. They leverage three uniquely American assets — vast private capital markets, a cohort of large, well-funded defense producers, and an extensive, well-educated DoD workforce.

First and foremost, an advantage the US clearly has over rivals on the world stage is access to domestic capital markets with $50 trillion-plus sloshing around that could be leveraged by Defense to fund technological advances for the military. While the private capital is there to fuel the defense tech race, this treasure trove remains underutilized by DoD.

The need for public-private partnerships

One way for Defense to integrate private capital markets to speed up the transition of tech from commercial uses to military is through public-private partnerships. This is not a new idea, but to date DoD efforts have been too timid. It needs to create more partnerships that are bigger and more collaborative if it is to improve its ability to nurture tech innovation and adoption.

To illustrate what’s possible, one need only look at models established by other US government agencies. Two examples are the US Agency for International Development’s INVEST program, which mobilizes private capital to support growth in developing countries, and venture capital partnerships to combat future pandemics created by the Department of Health and Human Services. The Departments of Energy and Commerce also use loan guarantees to support the private sector.

While DoD has historically focused on providing non-dilutive, research and development (R&D) funding to companies through mechanisms like Small Business Innovative Research Grants and the Rapid Innovation Fund, it has started exploring a broader set of public-private partnership tools. At the end of last year, the Secretary of Defense established the Office of Strategic Capital. This new unit will collaborate with private capital to support technologies key to national security, such as advanced materials and semiconductors.

But finding solutions through these kinds of partnerships should become the rule not the exception for Defense, as they are today. They must be expanded to support the range of technologies needed to drive and sustain the US military’s competitive advantage.

Work with the biggest

The second step would be incentivizing the biggest manufacturers of defense systems to do the heavy lifting on pulling through dual-use and disruptive tech innovation. This connects with a change of heart among many defense stakeholders who now believe DoD should do less investing in early-stage R&D that overlaps with commercial innovation. Instead, DoD should preserve investment for defense-specific science and technology and later-stage R&D and procurement that customizes and adopts technology for DoD-specific missions and use cases.

Where many over the past decade had pushed DoD to harvest tech by going straight to commercial firms and startups, there is now growing recognition that major defense contractors are better positioned to act as conduits. These defense giants already own the vast majority of large-scaled “programs of record” — those which center on hardware-enabled systems like aircraft, missiles, and satellites — and thus understand how to navigate the DoD acquisition community. To facilitate smoother tech transitions from commercial to military, prime integrators like these must be seen as key channels to market — especially when bringing on disruptive tech defense platforms and systems.

To encourage this, primary defense system manufacturers need incentives, such as tax breaks for supporting startups or making investment in startups an allowable expense on government contracts. Another option to consider is evolving evaluation criteria on requests for proposals to allow defense contractors to cite the percentage of proposed commercial startup content on new weapons systems.

A tech-savvy DoD and the way forward

Finally, the DoD workforce is another important asset, but it needs to increase its tech and finance literacy. To help achieve that, the military is investing in tech competencies needed to understand the art of the plausible when it comes to writing requirements, structuring and evaluating proposals, and integrating software. They are also working to upskill users so they can employ new tech and provide a continuous feedback loop that maximizes the impact of tech development and acquisition efforts.

Additionally, DoD is increasingly investing in its workforce financial literacy and relationships with the investment community through programs like Shift Defense Ventures that embeds DoD employees in venture and private capital firms.

Defense still has many steps to take to become a better buyer of dual use and disruptive technology. But the discussions currently going on in the industry and at DoD are starting to identify the US assets that can push our national security well ahead of rivals, if used to their full potential. When it comes to innovation, the DoD has a vast arsenal upon which it can rely. We just need to learn how to deploy it better.

Forbes · by Oliver Wyman · April 17, 2023

10. China readies supersonic spy drone unit, leaked document says

China readies supersonic spy drone unit, leaked document says

THE DISCORD LEAKS | China’s cutting-edge drone could give it a surveillance advantage during a possible military confrontation over Taiwan

By Christian Shepherd, Vic Chiang, Pei-Lin Wu and Ellen Nakashima

April 18, 2023 at 7:06 p.m. EDT

The Washington Post · by Christian Shepherd · April 18, 2023

The Chinese military could soon deploy a high-altitude spy drone that travels at least three times the speed of sound, according to a leaked U.S. military assessment, a development that would dramatically strengthen China’s ability to conduct surveillance operations.

A secret document from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which has not previously been reported, shows the Chinese military is making technological advances that could help it target American warships around Taiwan and military bases in the region.

The document features satellite imagery dated Aug. 9 that shows two WZ-8 rocket-propelled reconnaissance drones at an air base in eastern China, about 350 miles inland from Shanghai. The drones are a cutting-edge surveillance system that could help China gather real-time mapping data to inform strategy or carry out missile strikes in a future conflict.

The assessment says the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) had “almost certainly” established its first unmanned aerial vehicle unit at the base, which falls under the Eastern Theater Command, the branch of the Chinese military responsible for enforcing Beijing’s sovereignty claims over Taiwan.

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 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.

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The Washington Post obtained the assessment of the WZ-8 program from a trove of images of classified files posted on Discord, a group chat service popular with gamers, allegedly by a member of the Massachusetts Air National Guard.

The Defense Department declined to comment. China’s Ministry of National Defense did not respond to a faxed request for comment.

Other documents in the trove detail a number of disclosures about Chinese spying and military modernization, including intelligence that revealed the existence of additional Chinese spy balloons and an assessment that Taiwan is ill-prepared to prevent early Chinese air superiority during an invasion.

This latest revelation about the advancement comes as intensifying military aggression around Taiwan has heightened concern about a Chinese invasion on the self-governed island democracy.

CIA Director William J. Burns has said Chinese leader Xi Jinping wants the PLA to be capable of seizing Taiwan by 2027, although he added that this does not mean Xi will order an attack at that time.

Beijing introduced the WZ-8 drones in 2019 when two of the jet-black aircraft were paraded past Tiananmen Square during celebrations for the 70th anniversary of the establishment of the Communist Party-run People’s Republic of China. Few analysts considered the drones fully operational at the time.

Also included in the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s assessment are possible flight paths for the drone as well as for the twin-engine H6-M Badger bomber used to launch it. After taking off from its home air base, the warplane would fly to just off China’s east coast before releasing the stealthy drone, which could then enter Taiwanese or South Korean airspace at a height of 100,000 feet and fly three times the speed of sound. The document does not detail how the drone is propelled but says “engine features are primarily associated with rocket fuel.”

A map of projected routes, labeled “not necessarily authoritative,” suggests ways the drone’s “Electro-optical” cameras and sensors could gather intelligence on Taiwan’s main island and the western side of South Korea including Seoul, the capital city. The use of synthetic aperture radar would allow it to map territory at night and foggy weather.

The drone’s primary use won’t be against Taiwan but against the United States and its military bases in the Pacific, said Chi Li-pin, director of the aeronautical systems research division at the National Chung-Shan Institute of Science and Technology, Taiwan’s military-run weapons developer. “It’s a weapon for anti-access and area denial,” he said.

Chi added that the aircraft does not currently appear to be designed to launch attacks, but he noted modifications could allow it to conduct strikes in future. “It is difficult to detect and intercept. The existing U.S. air-to-air weapons aren’t good enough,” he said.

Dean Cheng, a nonresident senior fellow with the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies, said the disclosure shows China is developing a capability to monitor the entire Indo-Pacific region. “This is not just aimed at the United States or South Korea,” said Cheng, who had not seen the documents. “Japan has to worry about it. India has to worry about it. All Southeast Asia has to worry about it.”

China, he noted, is creating a range of high-tech systems for military use — from hypersonic weapons that can use drone reconnaissance for anti-ship purposes to antisatellite weapons that they could use to try to blind the United States. “Individually, none of these things are game-changers,” he said. “Taken together, we’re looking at a PLA that is developing a reconnaissance strike complex: Find the enemy, hit the enemy, kill the enemy.”

The airfield described in the document as “Liuan” appears to be a base in Dushan County of Lu’an city, according to coordinates in the document. (The first Chinese character in Lu’an is often pronounced ‘liu’ but it is ‘lu’ in this instance.)

It was originally built in 1970, part of leader Mao Zedong’s campaign to move crucial industries and military installations into mountainous regions, prompted after relations with the Soviet Union soured and left China’s communist leadership feeling vulnerable to attack. The hangars of the original air base, known then as the 8301 airfield, were burrowed into the hillside and had steel-plated doors that were 12 inches thick, according to Chinese state media.

A review of satellite imagery publicly available on Google Earth and provided to The Post by Planet Labs shows the base has expanded multiple times in recent years, with at least 18 new structures constructed after August 2020. Beginning in late February 2022, new, significantly wider thoroughfares that lead into the hills south of the runway were constructed. In some places, the new clearing is about 130 feet wide.

Enthusiasts who use open-source material to track the Chinese air force believe the base is home to a regiment of the Eastern Theater’s 10th bomber division, the branch most likely to conduct air attacks if China launches a full-scale assault on Taiwan.

Joseph Wen, a Taipei-based independent analyst who tracks military installations in China, says that the base was abandoned for years. It was even used as a filming location for a patriotic action film about the Sino-Japanese War.

But there have been clear signs since 2019 that the base has been brought back into service. Wen has tracked a flurry of construction activity, included widening the paths that lead to the southern cavern entrance to nearly 130 feet. The wingspan of the bomber plane used to launch the drone is 108 feet.

Meg Kelly contributed to this report.

The Washington Post · by Christian Shepherd · April 18, 2023

11. Ukraine Conflict Update - April 19, 2023 | SOF News

Ukraine Conflict Update - April 19, 2023 | SOF News

sof.news · by SOF News · April 19, 2023

Curated news, analysis, and commentary about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, tactical situation on the ground, in the air, and on the seas. Additional topics include NATO, aid to Ukraine, refugees, internally displaced personnel, humanitarian efforts, cyber, and information operations.

Image / Photo: Destroyed Russian tanks in the Sumy region, Ukraine. Photo by Irina Rybakova, press service of the Ukrainian Ground Forces, March 7, 2022.

Do you receive our daily newsletter? If not, you can sign up here and enjoy it five (almost) days a week with your morning coffee (or afternoon tea depending on where in the world you are).

Big Picture of the Conflict

Leaked Documents. The top secret documents leaked by an Air National Guardsman have revealed a lot of the behind the scenes happenings with the Ukraine conflict. One aspect of the conflict is the likelihood of a prolonged conflict that appears to be a stalemate; but one that favors Russia over the long-term. Since Russia is a larger country with more resources, industrial capacity, and a large population base, it can afford a long war of attrition. “Leaked documents could both help and hurt Ukraine”, The Hill Defense, April 16, 2023. The U.S. Department of Defense says that the leaked documents will not hinder cooperation with NATO partners in the support for Ukraine. “Partnered Commitment to Ukraine Unlikely to be Deterred by Recent Intel Leaks”, DoD News, April 17, 2023.

Russian Recruitment. Enlistment offices across Russia are attempting to bring recruits into the military. A new campaign is underway canvassing high schools and colleges. A mobilization in September 2022 of 300,000 reservists was the spark to led to tens of thousands of military age men to flee Russia for other countries. Russia is avoiding another large-scale call up as it resulted in wide spread opposition. “New Russian campaign tries to entice men to fight Ukraine”, AP News, March 26, 2023.

Ground Situation

News Updates. A detailed daily update of the war – a daily review – is provided by Euromaidan Press. And, of course, there is the always comprehensive daily report by the Institute for the Study of War.

Situation Maps. War in Ukraine by Scribble Maps. The Institute for the Study of War presents a map that depicts the assessed control of terrain in Ukraine as of March 6, 2023, 3:00 PM ET. View more Ukraine SITMAPs that provide updates on the disposition of Russian forces.

Fight for Bakhmut and Stalingrad. Gaelan Hanlon provides an analysis of the Battle of Bakhmut. He used the historical example of the Battle for Stalingrad during World War II as a comparison model. His analysis concludes that the time has come for the Ukrainians to cede control of this small industrial city in eastern Ukraine to the Russians. The defenders should withdraw and live to fight another day. “How Long Should Ukrainian Forces Defend Bakhmut? Lessons from Stalingrad”, Modern War Institute, April 18, 2023.

“A Wall of Armor”. The Russian invasion and occupation of Ukraine has galvanized NATO countries into action. Eastern European countries are learning from the conflict in Ukraine that main battle tanks still have a role in a ground war. Part of the response to Russian aggression is sending tanks to Ukraine. This then requires the acquisition of new tanks. Many nations are looking to acquire the M1 Abrams, a U.S. made main battle tank. “The M1 Abrams is becoming the Benchmark Main Battle Tank for Eastern Europe”, Real Clear Defense, April 18, 2023.

Fight for the Skies

More Airpower Needed. Douglas Birkey of the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies argues that Kyiv needs more jets – and points to the recently leaked U.S. intelligence documents to buttress his argument. Ukraine’s stockpile of surface-to-air missiles are running low and Russia could be on the verge of gaining air superiority later this spring. This would be a disaster for Ukraine’s planned counteroffensive that may kick off in a matter of weeks. “Don’t want to lose Ukraine? Empower Kyiv with airpower”, Breaking Defense, April 17, 2023.

Finland’s Airspace. The skies of Finland are now open for NATO surveillance and intelligence missions. This will allow NATO to monitor Russian activities more closely in the region. The first surveillance flight was conducted on March 23, 2023. Both manned and unmanned aircraft will be performing these future intelligence gathering missions. Both Sweden and Finland joined NATO’s Alliance Persistent Surveillance from Space (APSS) program in February 2023. Finland, currently a ‘NATO partner’, has applied to join NATO in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and other aggressive activities in the region. “Finland opens airspace for NATO surveillance and intelligence flights”, Defence Today, March 23, 2023.

Maritime Activities

Blockade of Crimea? Ukraine seems determined, if you listen to the rhetoric, to recapture Crimea from Russia. The peninsula was annexed in 2014 at the beginning of the Russian Ukraine War. Most military analysts believe that Ukraine does not have the military capability to retake Crimea. However, some suggest a Ukrainian blockade is feasible. The peninsular is susceptible to a blockade. It’s two main supply routes are over the Crimea Bridge that spans the Kerch Strait or on the land route from the Russian border, along the west coast of the Sea of Azov (close to the front lines), and across the narrow band of land that connects Crimea to Ukraine. Read more in “Why Blockading Rather Than Retaking Crimea Might Be Kyiv’s Best Option”, The Rand Blog, April 10, 2023.

General Information

Changes in NATO Military Strategy. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization is becoming the fighting alliance it once was during the Cold War. NATO is moving from a strategy of deterrence by retaliation to deterrence by denial. For the Baltic States, this new strategy is one they can embrace. “Russian Invasion of Ukraine Revolutionizes NATO Military Strategy”, by Steven Erlanger, The New York Times, April 17, 2023.

Egypt’s About Face. Apparently, according to leaked intelligence reports, Egypt was prepared to provide rockets to Russia for its use in the Ukraine conflict. But it seems that U.S. intervention has swayed the country to instead provide 152mm and 155mm artillery ammunition to Ukraine instead. Initial plans had Egypt providing up to 40,000 122mm Sakr-45 rockets to Russia. “Egypt nearly supplied rockets to Russia, agreed to arm Ukraine instead, leak shows”, The Washington Post, April 17, 2023. (subscription)

Commentary and Papers

Russia’s Frozen Billions. The economic cost of the war has been catastrophic for Ukraine. One-third of its population has been displaced and one-third of its GDP has been lost. Cities, towns, and villages have been destroyed. The civilian infrastructure will take years to rebuild. However, there is a source of funding that could assist Ukraine with the economic pain it is experiencing. Approximately $300 billion in Russian central bank assets that were frozen by Western governments could be used to counter the costs of Moscow’s destruction of Ukraine. “The moral and legal case for sending Russia’s frozen $300 billion to Ukraine”, The Washington Post, March 20, 2023. (subscription)

Moldova – In the Crosshairs? Russian aggression in Ukraine has captured the attention of this east European country. Sharing a border with Ukraine (Google Maps) and having its own bit of troubles with Russian agitators, Moldova is weathering a storm of uncertainty and unrest. Russia’s attempts to destabilize the country through disinformation, propaganda, and agitation are a very real threat. “War as a Neighbor”, Foreign Policy Research Institute, April 14, 2023.

Paper – The Russian General Staff. A host of authors provide an understanding of the Russian military’s decision making role in a ‘besieged fortress’. This document details the formal authorities and responsibilities of the Russian General Staff and the General Staff’s capacity to influence Russia’s national security decision making process. RAND Corporation, March 2023, PDF, 132 pages. https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA1233-7.html

Resources about the Ukraine Conflict

Maps of Ukraine

https://www.national-security.info/ukraine/maps.html

Weapons of the Ukraine War.

https://www.national-security.info/ukraine/weapons.html

Ukraine Conflict Info. The Ukrainians have launched a new website that will provide information about the war. It is entitled Russia Invaded Ukraine and can be found at https://war.ukraine.ua/.

Ukrainian Think Tanks – Brussels. Consolidated information on how to help Ukraine from abroad and stay up to date on events.

UNCN. The Ukraine NGO Coordination Network is an organization that ties together U.S.-based 501c3 organizations and non-profit humanitarian organizations that are working to evacuate and support those in need affected by the Ukraine crisis. https://uncn.one

sof.news · by SOF News · April 19, 2023

12. China Minister Lauds Putin for ‘Promoting World Peace’

I do not know whether to laugh or cry. But I am sure there are people who will take these statements seriously.

China Minister Lauds Putin for ‘Promoting World Peace’

Video of unknown origin shows Li Shangfu’s remarks at meeting
Putin’s Ukraine invasion began Europe’s worst war since 1945

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-04-18/china-s-defense-minister-lauds-putin-for-promoting-world-peace?sref=hhjZtX76

ByBloomberg News

April 18, 2023 at 12:42 AM EDTUpdated onApril 18, 2023 at 3:01 AM EDT

China’s defense minister congratulated Russian President Vladimir Putin for “promoting world peace,” underscoring the warm relations between the two nations more than a year after Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine sparked Europe’s biggest conflict since World War II.

A clip posted on the Chinese company NetEase Inc.’s short-video platform appears to show Li Shangfu reading prepared remarks in a meeting with Putin and Li’s Russian counterpart on Sunday.

Calling Putin “an extraordinary state leader,” Li cited his “important contributions to promoting world peace and development.”

The comments highlighted the contrast between Beijing’s approach to the Kremlin leader - who’s wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged war crimes - and that of the US and its allies, which have hit Russia with sweeping sanctions and sought to isolate Putin over a war that’s killed tens of thousands and displaced millions.

Top diplomats from the Group of Seven leading industrial nations Tuesday condemned “Russian aggression” and vowed to continue “supporting Ukraine as long as it takes.”

Read: G-7 to Back Ukraine Indefinitely, Seeks Stability With China

It wasn’t clear what the source of the Li video was. The remarks were not included in Chinese state media’s reporting on the meeting of the three men or in the official Kremlin readout of the event. China’s Defense Ministry didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on Tuesday.

Vladimir Putin, Sergei Shoigu meet with Chinese Defense Minister Li Shangfu at the Kremlin in Moscow on April 16.Photographer: Pavel Bendyakov/AFP/Getty Images

Li’s visit to Russia is the first by a Chinese defense minister since the war began. Beijing has been Russia’s biggest supporter since Putin ordered the February 2022 invasion. Chinese President Xi Jinping visited Moscow in March and has spoken to Putin several times on the phone over the past year. Xi said “China highly values the relationship with Russia” during his trip.

China has tried to cast itself as a peacemaker in the war, and unveiled a vague 12-point peace blueprint in February. Its call for a cease-fire that would freeze Russian forces in Ukraine is a non-starter for Kyiv, the US and Ukraine’s other supporters.

More: Putin Meets China’s Defense Minister, Praises Military Ties

Xi hasn’t spoken with Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskiy since the fighting started, though there were reports around the time of Xi’s visit to Moscow that a call is planned.

In the meeting with Li on Sunday, Putin highlighted the exchange of intelligence and joint maneuvers in the Far East and Europe, the Interfax news service reported.

Li said China was willing to “further strengthen strategic communication between the two militaries” according to state broadcaster China Central Television.

— With assistance by Philip Glamann and Jing Li

(Updates with more detail from third paragraph)

13. Campaigning Through (Security) Cooperation: A Roadmap for Implementing the National Defense Strategy in Lower Priority Theaters

Just as a reminder. When we were developing Security Force Assistance as a concept back in 2007-2008 this was how I interpreted the vision of the Commander of USSOCOM and the CSO of USSOCOM.

•Security Force Assistance is a process (e.g., campaign) that integrates the Title 10 Foreign Internal Defense (FID) mission (which is inherently and by definition Joint and Whole of Government) with Title 22 Security Assistance (SA) programs to be able to train, advise, assist, and equip a friend, partner and ally (e.g., build partner capacity) in order to defend itself against internal and external threats, (USASOC G3 understanding of CDR USSOCOM and CSO intent) - 2008)

Of course that definition/description was not accepted by the joint staff and services.

We really need to campaign with all our programs, missions, activities, and authorities not have separate compartmented activities run by DSCA or in some theater by the J4 which oversees Foreign Military Sales, etc).

Excerpts:

Campaigning through cooperation in low priority theaters will require creative solutions on behalf of combatant commands and theater armies. Despite numerous arguments that the DoD is ill-equipped to out-compete, the inverse appears to be true. The tools are readily available for the Army to employ multidomain solutions in cooperation with partners to compete in all regions. In general terms, the operations process is already inherent to the basic implementation of security cooperation programs and this approach will grant those under-resourced regions the ability to prioritize operations, activities, and investments appropriately. A return to the post 9/11 era engagement plans and hyper-focus on tactical results will not suffice in the current environment.

Rather, planners must make a deliberate attempt to incorporate theater security cooperation activities to shape how the Joint Force will campaign through cooperation. ADP 5-0 does not only serve as a guide for conducting operations against the enemy. It can also serve campaigning, through security cooperation, to achieve and maintain enduring advantages for the Joint Force, enable credible, integrated deterrence when required, and build partner capacity to operate with or in lieu of US forces in support of key US objectives.

Campaigning Through (Security) Cooperation: A Roadmap for Implementing the National Defense Strategy in Lower Priority Theaters - Irregular Warfare Initiative

irregularwarfare.org · by Agustin E. Dominguez, Ryan Kertis · April 18, 2023

“As we face complex challenges that span across borders, our success will depend on how closely we work with our friends around the world to secure our common interests and promote our shared values.”

– Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin III, Message to the Force, March 2021

Campaigning through cooperation is paramount to implementing the 2022 National Defense Strategy (NDS), particularly in lower priority theaters. When the Department of Defense (DoD) transmitted the NDS to Congress in March 2022, it included an unclassified fact sheet that describes a strategic environment identifying China as the United States’ pacing challenge; the acute threats posed by Russia; persistent threats that include North Korea, Iran, and violent extremist organizations; and transboundary threats including climate change and pandemics. In other words, the United States cannot make every region a defense priority. Indeed, the unclassified NDS fact sheet is clear that the Indo-Pacific and Europe are the top priorities. While the fact sheet also makes reference to Central Command with its inclusion of Iran, it fails to mention US Southern Command or Africa Command.

The NDS further identifies integrated deterrence, campaigning, and actions that build enduring advantages as the three primary ways for the DoD to advance its goals. Partners and allies anchor this strategy: they are force multipliers and contribute to the enduring strength of the United States. The Army is well-positioned to leverage existing legal frameworks while applying current doctrine to best campaign through cooperation to provide the US Army access and influence, ensuring that land power remains critical to the Department’s efforts to outcompete China.

What Does Cooperation Look Like?

Joint Doctrine Note 1-19 (JDN 1-19), Competition Continuum, describes campaigning through cooperation as “a purposeful activity to achieve or maintain policy objectives.” Campaigning through cooperationcan build enduring advantages for the Joint Force and establish a resilient partner nation ecosystem that contributes to integrated deterrence. Ultimately, campaigning through cooperation provides the US Army with unique access to operational environments and partner forces that are necessary for maintaining elevated levels of readiness. Thus, establishing enduring relationships through cooperation gives the Army and the Joint Force benefits as it moves along the competition continuum.

The reduced number of warfighting assets and allocated units in lower priority theaters make security cooperation programs, including State Department-funded security assistance programs, the main tools to integrate the contributions of allies and partners. In fact, General Mark Milley, then Chief of Staff of the Army, remarked in 2016 that “we are most successful when we fight as part of a combined multi-national team. While our Armed Forces will always be capable of fighting alone, our priority is to fight together.” Yet security cooperation activities are typically reduced to experiences with security force assistance or greater desire for advise and assist missions. As DoD dedicates less and less resources to these lower priority theaters, channels for communication and action atrophy and steadily dilute in their effectiveness throughout the interagency environment.

Still, there is valuable legal and policy infrastructure to salvage in this space. Notably, a pre-existing legal framework that guides security cooperation activities should be the foremost organizing principle for campaigning through cooperation. For DoD programs, the Fiscal Year 2017 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) aggregated disparate authorities to streamline security cooperation planning and fundamentally changed the Department’s approach to security cooperation. Under this new framework, DoD conducts security cooperation activities that range from key leader engagements, exchanges, and technical training to large-scale combined exercises—otherwise collectively known as campaigning.

For the Department of State, security assistance programs are necessarily nested within the foreign policy objectives of each respective region and country. These programs include traditional assistance activities such as professional military education and training at US-based institutions and US-funded grants via foreign military financing. To be sure, the ongoing war in Ukraine best captures how both the State and Defense Departments have synergized their efforts within the last decade to professionalize, modernize, and prepare partner nation forces to defend their country.

Doctrine Meets Law: A Framework for Competition

Campaigning through cooperation inherently means the Army must rely on existing security cooperation authorities to make progress on policy objectives. Prior to the 2017 NDAA, a patchwork of authorities existed that enabled the Department of Defense to support myriad disparate programs to address counterterrorism, counternarcotics, and other cooperation activities. These authorities were born out of the post-9/11 reaction to make the DoD more responsive to the emergent threat of terrorism overseas. Combatant commands executed theater security cooperation and provided capabilities to a partner nation while also providing operational support to sustain it to best support counterterrorism objectives. Through the lens of the Army Operations Process, the combatant commands could remain in a prepare-execute-prepare-execute cycle so long as that capability continued to serve US interests and funding was available. Generally speaking, this era was marked by a myopic emphasis on tactical results, not partner nation capacity or US Army access and influence.

But after nearly two decades of global conflict and poor results in the Middle East and Central Asia, Congress passed the 2017 NDAA, ushering in the greatest reforms to security cooperation since the passing of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961. The most notable change was the onset of Title 10, Chapter 16: Security Cooperation. Here, practitioners can find the principal authorities available to conduct theater engagements, DoD-led train and equip programs, and the authority that permits the DoD to train alongside partner nations, an essential component of maintaining proficiency working with partner forces while campaigning. These are just a few examples of authorities the Army leverages in chapter 16.

While a suite of legal authorities remains available to conduct a wide range of activities, security cooperation professionals at all echelons can turn to Army fundamentals captured in Army Doctrine Publication (ADP) 5-0: The Operations Process to plan programs. As a result, combatant command campaign plans and subsequent theater security cooperation plans will have a deliberate planning component targeting specific objectives, as opposed to disparate engagements that do not promote integrated campaigning for the Joint Force.

The Operations Process: A Deliberate Approach to Campaigning through Cooperation

The Army Operations Process provides a helpful structure for implementing the legal framework available to the DoD. Although campaigning occurs at various echelons and security cooperation nests tactical activities for strategic effects, the operations process provides a doctrinal reference point for bridging these activities. ADP 5-0 defines planning as “the art and science of understanding a situation, envisioning a desired future, and laying out effective ways of bringing that future about.” The 2017 NDAA reforms and JDN 1-19 require a departure from the “prepare-execute” approach to successfully campaign through cooperation. The operations process describes fundamentals for effective planning, preparing, executing, and assessing operations, which are the essential aspects of proper security cooperation programing to support the partner nation from inception to full operating capability. Once that capability is achieved, it is critical that the partner provides a return on investment by conducting operations in support of US security interests, including multinational exercises that benefit US Army training objectives and bolster a culture of sustained interoperability.

Figure 1: ADP 5-0 Operations process

Approaching campaigning through cooperation via the Operations Process requires a change in mindset from implementing annual, individual security cooperation programs to planning holistic, multi-year programs to achieve campaign objectives. Security cooperation professionals at every echelon of the DoD Security Cooperation network must understand their role in the operations process and how it applies to campaigning. By getting back to the basics, the Army may use established doctrine as a roadmap to leverage the legal framework in support of campaigning through cooperation. As a result, security cooperation initiatives will grow the Army’s land power network while simultaneously fostering partner nation capabilities, improving US Army readiness, and implementing the NDS. The following describes how legal authorities can be layered within US Army doctrine:

Plan: Pre-operational activities within §312, often referred to as Traditional Commander’s Activities, permit the DoD to fund the personnel expenses necessary for security cooperation. This commonly includes exchanges, planning meetings, and key leader engagements that are necessary for theater security cooperation.
Prepare: Preparing partner nations to train or fight alongside US forces requires the longest planning timeline to implement. Title 22 Foreign Military Financing, International Military Education and Training, and §333 Train and Equip are available tools, yet often require more than one year to plan.
Evaluate/Re-Assess: Leveraging security cooperation to bring US Army units to a “trained” status is critical to campaigning through cooperation and demonstrates the US commitment to partners while benefitting from the access created by deploying units abroad. Here, §321 and §322 can be used to evaluate and certify partners through combined exercises while developing US Army tactical tasks.
Execute: Once a partner force achieves full operational capability, combatant commands can turn to operational support authorities to enable combined operations with, or in lieu of, the US Joint Force. §331, for example, authorizes provision of logistics support, supplies, and services to friendly foreign countries that are conducting Secretary of Defense-designated operations, or a military or stability operation that benefits US national security interests.
Assess: A defining characteristic of the security cooperation reforms of 2017 was the legal mandate to conduct assessment, monitoring, and evaluation (AM&E). AM&E occurs continuously throughout the lifecycle of a program. Inherent to the operations process is the “assess” function that leaders at all levels apply throughout the training and operations cycle. Applying a more flexible, rapid, and qualitative assessment will provide the combatant commands and the US Army the ability to respond to emergent needs and to shift or terminate programs that are untenable.

Figure 2: Example cycle, does not illustrate all possible authorities to use.

Campaigning through cooperation in low priority theaters will require creative solutions on behalf of combatant commands and theater armies. Despite numerous arguments that the DoD is ill-equipped to out-compete, the inverse appears to be true. The tools are readily available for the Army to employ multidomain solutions in cooperation with partners to compete in all regions. In general terms, the operations process is already inherent to the basic implementation of security cooperation programs and this approach will grant those under-resourced regions the ability to prioritize operations, activities, and investments appropriately. A return to the post 9/11 era engagement plans and hyper-focus on tactical results will not suffice in the current environment.

Rather, planners must make a deliberate attempt to incorporate theater security cooperation activities to shape how the Joint Force will campaign through cooperation. ADP 5-0 does not only serve as a guide for conducting operations against the enemy. It can also serve campaigning, through security cooperation, to achieve and maintain enduring advantages for the Joint Force, enable credible, integrated deterrence when required, and build partner capacity to operate with or in lieu of US forces in support of key US objectives.

Lt. Col. Agustin E. Dominguez, US Army, is a foreign area officer (FAO) currently serving as the US Army War College Fellow at the Brazilian National War College in Rio de Janeiro. He previously served in the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy. He holds a BS from the US Military Academy and an MBA from Florida International University. As a FAO, he has also served as chief of the Office of Security Cooperation at the US Embassy in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, as the assistant Army attaché in Bogota, Colombia, and as a political-military officer in the Strategic Plans and Policy Directorate, J-5, Office of the Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff. Prior to becoming a FAO, Dominguez served with the 82nd Airborne Division and the 173rd Airborne Brigade.

Maj. Ryan Kertis, US Army, is a foreign area officer (FAO) currently serving in the Office of Defense Coordination in Mexico City. He previously served as a regional security assistance officer at the United States Southern Command and with the Security Cooperation Office in Santiago, Chile. He holds an MA in Latin American studies from Stanford University and an MA in diplomacy from Norwich University. Prior to becoming a FAO, Kertis served as an infantry officer with the 25th Infantry Division and 7th Infantry Division and completed tours in Iraq and Afghanistan.

14. The Pentagon Needs to Put Climate Clarity at the Top of Its Target List

Excerpts:

Instead of attempting to tackle climate change, the DoD needs to target climate resilience and adaptation, which can only be done through preparedness for severe weather, flooding, and temperature extremes. These are the climate events that impact operations and installations, and barely mentioned in the DoD climate directives is the best way to be ready for them: improving the U.S. military’s capability to characterize and predict ocean and atmospheric conditions with advanced sensors, models, and decision support tools.

Our armed forces must be able to fight and win against our largest and most likely threats. Climate change is not one of them. By moving away from militarily irrelevant emissions reductions and instead advancing weather readiness, the Pentagon can address climate with the clarity needed to meet its national security mandates for the 21st century.

The Pentagon Needs to Put Climate Clarity at the Top of Its Target List

By Tim Gallaudet

April 19, 2023

https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2023/04/19/the_pentagon_needs_to_put_climate_clarity_at_the_top_of_its_target_list_894526.html

Over the past two years, the Biden Administration’s Department of Defense (DoD) has directed the U.S. military to support Executive Order (EO) 14008 Tackling the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad. As the global security situation seems to deteriorate by the day, it is worth asking the question, “Are the DoD’s actions to address climate change in the nation’s best interest?”

To answer this question, first consider the DoD Climate Adaptation Plan which was released in September 2021. Curiously, this was nearly two months before the release of the DoD Climate Risk Analysis. Risk analyses are a standard part of the military operational planning process, so the sequencing of these two documents is suspect. More concerning in the latter is the complete absence of citations of peer-reviewed scientific research regarding the climatic trends it identifies. In fact, the DoD Climate Risk Analysis presents no actual analysis at all and instead simply asserts a range of security implications resulting from climate change.

The DoD Climate Risk Analysis also characterizes climate change as an “existential” threat. Despite the persistent alarmism coming from the media, the Administration, and the United Nations, this is an unfounded claim which assumes that (a) we know with certainly that widespread and extreme changes will occur, and (b) our species will be unable to adapt unless we take action to stop them by drastically reducing the greenhouse gas emissions which are causing them. Both are problematic. Climate projections are rife with uncertainty, and even the Biden Administration’s Environmental Protection Agency has recently adopted lower emissions scenarios that are far more likely.

An apparent influence on the DoD’s approach is the extreme emissions scenario known as Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) 8.5, which refers to the concentration of carbon that delivers global warming at an average of 8.5 watts per square meter across the planet. RCP 8.5 is the highest of other lower emissions scenarios introduced in 2014 within the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report (AR5). Because climate research results using this high emissions scenario are often dramatic, the media and many policy makers point to the often-outlandish headlines they generate. Such results are not only implausible, but they also mislead many in the public who lack the scientific expertise to discern their validity.

This is not to say that the DoD should ignore changes in the Earth’s climate. There is broad consensus among the scientific community regarding several current and projected climatic trends affecting the military. These include increases in flooding in the Southeast U.S., heatwaves around the globe, and melting of sea ice in the Arctic. On the other hand, several inferences in the DoD documents are flat out wrong. For example, occurrences of typhoons and the most extreme weather in the U.S. – landfalling hurricanes – have shown no increase over the past century. The same holds true for wildfire frequency in the U.S. over the past four decades.

The Pentagon’s presumption of a board increase in all types of climate hazards is too imprecise to support its conclusion that they will exacerbate instability in any region. Highly specific, peer-reviewed research regarding a given region, country, and locality needs to be assessed in terms of large and fine scale climatic trends in phenomena such as storm frequency, rainfall rate, flooding occurrence, drought persistence, temperature patterns, sea ice extent, and sea state statistics. Then, by considering the interaction with other geophysical characteristics (e.g., terrain, bathymetry, vegetation, etc.), as well as socioeconomic, geopolitical, and cultural factors, a potentially useful climate risk assessment can be developed.

Lastly, the DoD’s emphasis on emissions reductions is misguided. I do not dispute that increasing the use of renewables while maintaining energy independence is necessary for our national, natural, and economic security. For our military, however, emissions reductions are a dangerous distraction at a time when threat levels are so high. China is openly challenging the United States in every corner of the globe, Russia is continuing to wage war against Ukraine on NATO’s doorsteps. North Korea is only escalating its ballistic missile provocations, and Iran is persisting in its destabilizing influence in the Middle East. None of these security risks is made significantly worse by actual changes in our Earth’s climate.

Instead of attempting to tackle climate change, the DoD needs to target climate resilience and adaptation, which can only be done through preparedness for severe weather, flooding, and temperature extremes. These are the climate events that impact operations and installations, and barely mentioned in the DoD climate directives is the best way to be ready for them: improving the U.S. military’s capability to characterize and predict ocean and atmospheric conditions with advanced sensors, models, and decision support tools.

Our armed forces must be able to fight and win against our largest and most likely threats. Climate change is not one of them. By moving away from militarily irrelevant emissions reductions and instead advancing weather readiness, the Pentagon can address climate with the clarity needed to meet its national security mandates for the 21^st century.

Rear Admiral (ret.) Tim Gallaudet is the CEO of Ocean STL Consulting, LLC, former acting and deputy administrator at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and former acting undersecretary and assistant secretary of Commerce. Prior to NOAA, he served as an oceanographer in the U.S. Navy completing his career as the commander of the Navy Meteorology and Oceanography Command and director of the Navy’s Task Force Climate Change.

15. Just how many US troops and spies do we have in Ukraine?

From the Quincy Institute. With input from the rogue's gallery of a;ll the anti-US military (and anti-SOF) journalists.

I think all Congress has to do is ask and DOD will provide the numbers. But it is more fun to make conspiracy theories out of the information.

Just how many US troops and spies do we have in Ukraine? - Responsible Statecraft

responsiblestatecraft.org · by Kelley Beaucar Vlahos · April 18, 2023

ukraine war

Just how many US troops and spies do we have in Ukraine?

In the wake of the leaks and a drip-drip of info over the last year, one lawmaker is demanding clarity from the White House.

April 18, 2023

Written by

Kelley Beaucar Vlahos

Just how many US troops and spies do we have in Ukraine?

Congressman Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), who has flooded the docket in recent months with resolutions designed to get U.S. troops out of overseas missions he believes have not been approved by Congress, is now demanding that President Joe Biden tell the American people just how many American military personnel are operating in Ukraine today.

His new Privileged Resolution of Inquiry, which forces Biden to notify the House of the exact number of U.S. military inside Ukraine and to hand over “copies of any and all documents outlining plans for military assistance to Ukraine,” comes a week after leaked Pentagon documents showing previously unreported U.S. Special Forces inside the war zone.

According to the document there were 97 special forces from NATO countries operating in Ukraine as of March, including 14 U.S. special forces. When asked by the Guardian newspaper for confirmation/clarification, the Department of Defense said, “We are not going to discuss or confirm classified information due to the potential impact on national security as well as the safety and security of our personnel and those of our allies and our partners.” The Pentagon has not denied the authenticity of the documents, however.

While “14 special forces” sounds like a drop in the bucket, these revelations are a drip-drip of other pieces of information over the last year that, when added up, leave more questions than answers, and the bottom line is that the American people have a right to know, says (Ret.) Lt. Col. Daniel Davis.

“It is entirely appropriate that the American people know, authoritatively, whether any U.S. troops are engaged in military operations within Ukraine — and to demand a change if we don’t like the answer,” Davis told me yesterday when I asked him about the Gaetz resolution.

“American history is rife with too many examples of presidents secretly employing U.S. troops without the consent or knowledge of our people. It almost always goes sideways when presidents go covert with our troops.”

We know from reporting last year, beginning in June 2022, that the CIA had a strong presence in Ukraine, engaging a network of commandos and spies among European partners set up to provide critical weapons and military intelligence to Ukraine. According to the New York Times, “even as the Biden administration has declared it will not deploy American troops to Ukraine, some C.I.A. personnel have continued to operate in the country secretly, mostly in the capital, Kyiv, directing much of the massive amounts of intelligence the United States is sharing with Ukrainian forces.”

Ken Klippenstein and Jim Risen reported in October 2022 that “there is a much larger presence of both CIA and U.S. special operations personnel and resources in Ukraine” than publicly known. They reported for the Intercept that several former and current intelligence officers told them that the covert operations were being conducted “under a presidential covert action finding,” for which only a handful of Congressional lawmakers have been notified.

In November, the administration announced it was sending a team of military “weapons inspectors” into Ukraine to keep track of weapons shipments, but that they would be away from the fighting. Also that month, the DoD confirmed that it would be setting up a new joint forces command called the Security Assistance Group Ukraine, or SAGU, based out of U.S. Army Europe and Africa headquarters in Wiesbaden, Germany and led by a 3-star general to “handle weapons shipments and personnel training.”

In February of this year, the Washington Post reported that the Pentagon wanted to revive pre-Ukraine war orders that would allow them to insert commandos in the form of “control teams” to direct Ukrainian operatives to counter Russian disinformation and monitor troops movements on the ground. This would require the U.S. personnel to be in Ukraine or in a neighboring country. Washington had been operating such teams in Ukraine under Section 1202 of the 2019 National Defense Authorization Act until the invasion last year.

Nick Turse, who has written extensively about U.S. covert operations in other parts of the globe, said the recent leak showing special ops forces in Ukraine “is hardly a surprise. ”

“U.S. Special Operations forces deploy throughout the world, often with next to no transparency or real oversight,” he said when asked about the Gaetz resolution. “Under little-known authorities, special operators conduct shadowy missions — sometimes indistinguishable from combat — unbeknownst to the American people and most members of Congress.”

What we don’t know much about is how many trainers and intelligence personnel might be working under contract for the U.S. government on the ground in Ukraine. There have been hints that they are there. Of course, some American experts, like Alexander Vindman, who are frustrated that the U.S. military is not more directly involved, have been calling on Biden to send contractors into the fight from the beginning.

Others have said “operational contractors” should be inserted into Ukraine, not to fight, but to help the Ukrainians train and operate the sophisticated weaponry Washington is sending over there. Are they there now? It is hard to tell. We know there are plenty of private military contractors in Ukraine today from all over the West working in extraction, training, and humanitarian aid, but they are, as far as we know, freelancing, not on the U.S. dole.

The use of contractors, whether they be Americans or third party, has been widespread since the U.S. launched a Global War on Terror after 9/11. According to the Congressional Research Service, as of the end of 2022, there were approximately 22,000 contractor personnel working for the DoD throughout the US Central Command’s area of responsibility.

“It is highly probable that contractors are a significant part of the U.S. personnel presence in Ukraine,” speculated Ted Carpenter, who wrote about the topic recently for RS.

“My expectation is that they would be used for the operation and maintenance of the more advanced (and twitchy?) weapons systems that NATO has given to Kyiv,” he shared on Monday. “Another interesting question is how many DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency) and Pentagon personnel, as well as contractors, might be helping Ukraine with targeting information for attacks on Russian forces. Some of the operations have seemed far too sophisticated for the known capabilities that Ukraine possessed when the invasion began.”

RS has put in a request to the DoD press office to ask just how many contractors might be in Ukraine today. In the meantime, Gaetz said in a statement he will press on with his own quest for a clear number of U.S. troops there. “There must be total transparency from this administration to the American people when they are gambling war with a nuclear adversary by having special forces operating in Ukraine.”

Written by

Kelley Beaucar Vlahos

responsiblestatecraft.org · by Kelley Beaucar Vlahos · April 18, 2023

16. Competition is Inevitable, War is Not: Using Games to Rethink the U.S.-Chinese Relationship

Conclusion:

Conducting an ongoing series of games will lead to better strategy only if they create diverse perspectives and honest dialogue. The purpose of the congressional game series we propose is to encourage debate and dissent in pursuit of advantage. The stratagems that emerge and survive the marketplace of ideas and public discussion are more likely to win the peace. That is ultimately the goal of competition and deterrence — the north star of American foreign policy.

Competition is Inevitable, War is Not: Using Games to Rethink the U.S.-Chinese Relationship - War on the Rocks

BENJAMIN JENSEN AND MARK MONTGOMERY

warontherocks.com · by Benjamin Jensen · April 19, 2023

Elected leaders need tabletop exercises, crisis simulations, and wargames to help them visualize and describe modern strategy. From questions about technology and intellectual property to food security and economic concerns, the new era of great-power competition transcends narrow bureaucratic definitions of national security that defined much of the Cold War. U.S. military might alone will not deter the Chinese Communist Party. Rather, creative combinations of military and non-military activities that cut across traditional congressional committee authorities will likely prove more effective at deterring China and capable of translating American power into enduring competitive advantage.

This essay outlines our opening gambit to build a series of games designed to better understand 21st-century competition along these lines. It builds on previous calls to bring wargaming to Congress and to usher in a new era of strategic analysis. First, we review the pilot tabletop exercise we ran with the Republican Issue Conference and plan to run with House Democrats to ensure we keep foreign policy bipartisan. Second, we discuss our plan to build on this initiative to engage multiple congressional committees over the next two years. These analytical exercises do not replace the good work being done in the executive branch. Rather, we see them as a complementary way of bridging branches of government as well as engaging the American public in a larger debate about the future.

Would You Like to Play a Game?

Good strategy starts by analyzing competitive decision-making. Any research — from historical cases to trend analysis and quantitative models — that helps leaders recreate this clash of wills provides a simulation against which to develop plans. If you can visualize and describe competition, you can develop ideas about how best to increase your chances of winning while favorably shaping your adversaries’ choices. This logic makes games and strategy natural bedfellows. To quote legendary designer Sid Meier, the best games replicate a series of interesting decisions. Players weigh tradeoffs and calibrate risk to gain an advantage.

Become a Member

Architects of competitive strategy during the Cold War like Herman Kahn and Andrew Marshall would have agreed. They saw games as a way of understanding the complexities of interdependent decision-making between rival states with entrenched bureaucracies. Strategy is a false promise if it doesn’t illustrate opportunity costs and encourage debate. That is, unlike a traditional tactical wargame that evaluates competing courses of action against static evaluation criteria, there is a distinct category of strategy games that helps senior leaders generate and test ideas. The result is strategy by deliberation as opposed to by fiat. It is better to replicate and understand hard strategic choices today than wait for them in the future.

Applied to the unfolding competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party, games can play a critical role. They can help both parties in Congress and the American public better understand how China competes and why it matters to protect an open 21st century. Strategy games can help elected officials play a creative role and visualize the types of hearings, legislation, and budget priorities most likely to gain a competitive advantage and how best to engage the constituents they serve.

Fast Dragon

With this end state in mind, members of the House Select Committee on the Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party asked the two of us — both alumni of the U.S. Cyberspace Solarium Commission — to develop an unclassified tabletop exercise. The event was designed to help members of Congress think about modern strategy and the challenges the United States faces in confronting the threat from the Chinese Communist Party. The starting point was a scenario much discussed in the news: Chinese military action design to compel Taiwan and achieve reunification by any means necessary. After a mix of gray-zone activities and military exercises, China rapidly moves to blockade Taiwan and attack its political center of gravity, hoping to shock the world and the Taiwanese people. We labeled this scenario Fast Dragon.

The team carefully constructed a road to crisis to help leaders think about competition before conflict and what is required to deter future wars. In other words, the game used an imagined war to help Congress think about winning the peace. The scenario illustrated how China outflanks the United States using a mix of economic coercion, development assistance including infrastructure projects, and technology investments alongside intellectual property theft to gain a long-term position of advantage. The intent was to show that Taiwan is part of a larger competition. In this competition, Beijing seeks to degrade American access and influence in the Asia-Pacific and drive a wedge between the United States and countries China needs for resources in the Global South.

This long view of a short war helps leaders think about strategy in time. Failing to shape competition in the near term creates strategic risk in the long term. It also helps prevent hard choices from becoming tragic choices. Winning a war in Asia that destroys the American economy and sees critical infrastructure associated with power, transportation, water, and sanitation crippled by cyber attacks is a pyrrhic victory at best. It is a civilization-ending gambit at worst if states cross the nuclear threshold.

The first game was held March 19, 2023, at the GOP Issue Conference, an annual gathering of House Republicans, but with the intent to hold the same exercise with elected Democrats and independents. Members watched as the team showed the road to war and a possible opening Chinese invasion in the midst of a blockade. Players — who included leaders from multiple committees — then deliberated on diplomatic, economic, military, and homeland security response options. Based on their choices, the team used a mix of computer-generated models and professional judgment to adjudicate the results and facilitate a conference-wide discussion.

Player choices about diplomatic engagement determined how large the U.S. coalition defending Taiwan became and whether America fought alone — something it hasn’t done for 100 years — or as part of a larger coalition. Choices about military responses determined the type of guidance that would be given through the Secretary of Defense and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs to the commander of Indo-Pacific Command. The combination of diplomatic and military decisions allowed the team to run 36 scenarios in Command, a common commercial gaming engine used in multiple defense establishments around the world. The team then integrated economic and homeland fallout into scenarios based on research that included reviewing major market downturns associated with military conflict since World War I and assessments of critical infrastructure vulnerabilities from the U.S. Cyberspace Solarium Commission. The result was that no matter what the players selected, there was a ready scenario that helped elected officials rapidly view and understand the military outcome, economic fallout, and district-level impacts.

In this manner, the game drove a larger conversation and helped members discuss the essence of strategy and how best to win the peace. The clear consensus was a need to better prepare the United States to engage in competition and support deterrence. Real questions about political will and budgets — if the United States should fight and how best to resource competition given historically high debt levels and addiction to deficit spending — were met with clear answers about tradeoffs. This type of open, honest dialogue is something the Chinese Communist Party cannot match and is an enduring source of American strength.

More Games, Better Strategy

We view the opening game as the beginning of a larger effort to recreate bipartisan dialogue about competitive strategy. National security and common sense can trump polarization. We owe that to the American people and a world weary of more war. The path to get there starts with expanding the number of games that visualize and describe modern strategy.

First, we welcome an opportunity to run the same game with House Democrats and afterwards to have a series of ongoing bipartisan games. The more diverse and inclusive the better. We want to see hawks and doves debating strategy and learning to appreciate each other’s perspective in the process. Strategy games can help tone down the noise and encourage mutual understanding and respect even where large differences prevail.

Second, we think that each committee with national security interests needs games tailored to their portfolio. The House Committee on Homeland Security could assess the cyber resilience of both our military mobility capabilities and our national critical infrastructure and its ability to protect our economic productivity in the face of malicious cyber activity. Even more challenging is figuring out how to enable these capabilities at the same time. The House Committee on Foreign Affairs could explore how to counter malign influence by authoritarian regimes like China through countering their access into civil society globally. The committee could also play a series of alliance games to better understand the perspective of our different coalition partners and how it shapes strategic objectives. The House Agriculture Committee could oversee an excursion run on how land purchases by the Chinese Communist Party in the United States and abroad could affect future food security. The House Science, Space, and Technology Committee could explore how a mix of market incentives, industrial policy, and patent protections shape the race for disruptive technologies. Imagine if Apple, Microsoft, and Intel were Soviet — not American — companies when they started and how it would have shaped the Cold War. The Financial Services, Natural Resources, and Energy and Commerce Committees could explore what an actual economic war and race for resources short of armed conflict would look like and how best to protect American citizens and businesses from its fallout. These non-traditional games would complement more conventional games for armed services, intelligence, and homeland security, thus helping members visualize and describe competitive strategy.

Conducting an ongoing series of games will lead to better strategy only if they create diverse perspectives and honest dialogue. The purpose of the congressional game series we propose is to encourage debate and dissent in pursuit of advantage. The stratagems that emerge and survive the marketplace of ideas and public discussion are more likely to win the peace. That is ultimately the goal of competition and deterrence — the north star of American foreign policy.

Become a Member

Benjamin Jensen, Ph.D., is a professor of strategic studies at the School of Advanced Warfighting in the Marine Corps University and a senior fellow for future war, gaming, and strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. He is a U.S. Army veteran.

Mark Montgomery is the senior director of the Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation in the Foundation for the Defense of Democracy. He previously served as the executive director for the U.S. Cyberspace Solarium Commission and retired as a rear admiral in the U.S. Navy.

Commentary

warontherocks.com · by Benjamin Jensen · April 19, 2023

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Foundation for Defense of Democracies

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

V/R

David Maxwell

Senior Fellow

Foundation for Defense of Democracies

Phone: 202-573-8647

Personal Email: d avid.maxwell161@gmail.com

Web Site: www.fdd.org

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Subscribe to FDD’s new podcast, Foreign Podicy

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

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

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

Access NSS HERE

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

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