Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

"Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not."

– Thomas Henry Huxley

"There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew."

– Marshall McLuhan

"The television, that insidious beast, that Medusa which freezes a billion people to stone every night, staring fixedly, that Siren which called and sang and promised so much and gave, after all, so little."

– Ray Bradbury

1. Israel Strikes Iran in Narrow Attack Amid Escalation Fears

2. What We Know About Israel’s Strike in Iran

3. Israel carries out strike in Iran, Israeli official says; no damage to nuclear sites, IAEA says

4. Calling On Congress to Pass Ukraine Aid Package

5. Longstreet and How Much Work Remains to Be Done

6. Russia ramps up weapons production, using mass quantity to outgun Ukraine

7. Opinion Here are the U.S. congressional districts benefiting from Ukraine aid

8. What Would Russian Victory in Ukraine Look Like?

9. Ukraine downs Russian strategic bomber after air strike kills eight, Kyiv says

10. New bipartisan bill seeks to tackle national child care shortage with help from the Pentagon

11. Pentagon anti-fentanyl efforts face operational challenges: watchdog

12. Why a potential TikTok ban is alive again in Congress, and what’s next

13. Drone strike at Isfahan has worked before, was it the right move now? - analysis

14. Israel gave US last-minute warning about drone attack on Iran, Italian foreign minister says at G7

15. G7 foreign ministers' statement in Italy, April 2024

16. With mild reported strike, Israel aims to bolster coalition to tackle Iran nuke threat

17. How Army special operators use deepfakes and drones to train for information warfare

18. Secret Russian foreign policy document urges action to weaken the U.S.

19. FBI says Chinese hackers preparing to attack US infrastructure

20. Unpacking the FISA Section 702 Reauthorization Bill

21. Information operations will be 'foundational' to future DOD efforts, Cybercom chief says

22. Defying Niger exit order leaves U.S. troops vulnerable, whistleblower says

23. Burmese Opposition Offensive Switches Strategy – Analysis

24. Fall Of Myawaddy Is Latest Humiliating Defeat For Myanmar’s Military Regime – Analysis

25. Brave New Ukraine

26. The Five Futures of Russia

27. A war is brewing in the Pacific

28. The Axis Off-Kilter: Why an Iran-Russia-China “Axis” Is Shakier than Meets the Eye29.

1. Israel Strikes Iran in Narrow Attack Amid Escalation Fears

What is the priority: Achieving effects that prevent further attack or preventing escalation?

Israel Strikes Iran in Narrow Attack Amid Escalation Fears

Blasts reported near central city of Isfahan; Iran rescinds airspace restrictions as state media plays down incident

https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/iran-activates-air-defenses-and-cancels-flights-27b6d416

By Dov LieberFollow, Aresu Eqbali, Benoit FauconFollow and Rory JonesFollow

Updated April 19, 2024 5:56 am ET

Israel retaliated overnight against Iran’s massive drone and missile attack on its territory, people familiar with the matter said—with what appeared to be a limited strike aimed at avoiding an escalatory cycle that could push the countries closer toward war.

The strike targeted the area around Isfahan in central Iran, one of the people said. Iranian media and social media reported explosions near the city, where Iran has nuclear facilities and a drone factory, and the activation of air-defense systems in provinces across the country after suspicious flying objects were detected.

Much remained unclear about the extent or the impact of the Israeli action. State-run news agency IRNA said Friday morning that its reporters hadn’t seen any large-scale damage or explosions anywhere in the country and that no incidents were reported at Iran’s nuclear facilities. Flight restrictions imposed overnight by Iran were lifted in the morning.

What We Know About Israel’s Strike in Iran

Israel struck Iran early Friday, according to officials from both countries, in what appeared to be its first military response to the Iranian attack on Israel last weekend.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/19/world/middleeast/israel-strikes-iran-why.html

A poster depicting missiles in Tehran on Thursday.Credit...Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times

By Liam Stack

Reporting from Jerusalem

April 19, 2024

Updated 4:54 a.m. ET

Want to stay updated on what’s happening in Iran and Israel? Sign up for Your Places: Global Update, and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.

Israel struck Iran early on Friday, according to officials from both countries, in what appeared to be its first military response to the Iranian attack on Israel last weekend.

The strike was the latest in a cycle of retaliation between the two foes that has alarmed world leaders, who fear that back-and-forth attacks could erupt into a broader war.

Here is a look at what we know about the strike and its implications.

What did Israel strike?

Iranian officials said on Friday that an Israeli strike hit a military air base near Isfahan, a city in central Iran. The scale and method of the attack were unclear.

Iranian officials said a separate Israeli attack was thwarted in Tabriz, a region roughly 500 miles north of Isfahan. Iranian news agencies said explosions were heard near both cities.

The state media in Syria, a major Iranian ally that borders Israel, said also that Israeli missiles had hit air-defense positions in southern Syria on Friday.

The Israeli military declined to comment.

Why did Israel strike?

Israel attacked Iran in retaliation for a large Iranian attack on Israeli territory last weekend that included more than 300 missiles and drones.

That attack frightened Israelis but caused little damage and few injuries because nearly all of Iran’s weapons were intercepted by Israel and its allies, including the United States, Britain and Jordan.

That Iranian attack was launched in response to an Israeli strike on an Iranian diplomatic compound in Syria on April 1, which killed seven Iranian officials. Israeli officials did not warn the United States of the Damascus strike and some have since privately conceded that it was a serious miscalculation.

Middle East Crisis: Live Updates

Updated April 18, 2024, 10:58 p.m. ETApril 18, 2024April 18, 2024

Will Iran retaliate?

It was not clear whether or not Iran would retaliate, but initial reaction in Israel and Iran, where some officials and state-backed media sought to downplay the strike’s severity, suggested that its response may be muted.

Iranian state TV broadcast footage of Isfahan looking peaceful, and reported that military and nuclear facilities there were undamaged. One newsreader told viewers the strike was “not a big deal.”

Officials in Israel said the strike had been designed to avoid escalating tensions. The national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, however, used a Hebrew phrase on social media in apparent reference to Iran that roughly translates to “weak” or “pathetic.”

Why is Isfahan important?

Isfahan is one of Iran’s most famous and historic cities, known for its beautiful turquoise and purple tiled mosques, picturesque arched bridges and Grand Bazaar.

The area is also home to four small nuclear research facilities and is a center of Iranian weapons production. Many of the country’s Shahab medium-range missiles — which can reach Israel and beyond — are assembled there.

The province of Isfahan also contains the Natanz uranium enrichment site, as well as an air base that is home to a fleet of American-made F-14 Tomcats. They were purchased by the U.S.-backed Iranian government before the 1979 Islamic revolution, according to The Associated Press.

Why are world leaders so worried about a war between Iran and Israel?

For the past week, President Biden and other world leaders have urged Israel not to respond to last weekend’s Iranian missile attack. They have said they fear that an Israeli response could escalate into an all-out war.

World leaders advised Israel that it should view the interception of nearly all of the Iranian missiles and drones as a strategic victory. That is especially so, they have said, because it was achieved by an international coalition including Arab countries, which have historically not been inclined to come to Israel’s defense.

Israel has also been fighting allies of Iran on two other fronts — Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon — for the last six months. Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza, where more than 33,000 people have been killed and famine has begun to set in, has left it increasingly isolated diplomatically.

Liam Stack is a Times reporter covering the Israel-Hamas war from Jerusalem. More about Liam Stack

3. Israel carries out strike in Iran, Israeli official says; no damage to nuclear sites, IAEA says

Israel carries out strike in Iran, Israeli official says; no damage to nuclear sites, IAEA says

The Washington Post · April 19, 2024

The Israeli military carried out an airstrike inside Iran, an Israeli official said Friday, in retaliation for an Iranian barrage of missiles and drones launched against Israel. It was not clear what damage the strike caused, but the official — who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive military matters — said it was intended to signal to Iran that Israel had the ability to strike inside the country.

Here's what to know:

Iran’s attack on Israel was itself a response to a deadly Israeli strike on an Iranian diplomatic compound in Syria earlier this month. The United States and allies have urged restraint, but Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu this week said Israel alone will decide its response to Iran.

Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian told the U.N. Security Council before the Israeli strikes that if there is any retaliation from Israel, Iran “will not hesitate one bit to assert its inherent right to give a decisive and proper response to it.”

The United States and its allies announced new sanctions on Iran. President Biden said the measures would hold Tehran responsible for the weekend’s attack on Israel. The administration’s actions are meant to “degrade and disrupt” the Iranian drone program, Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen said.

The United States on Thursday vetoed a U.N. Security Council resolution that aimed to extend full member status to a Palestinian state at the United Nations. Twelve council members voted in favor and the United Kingdom and Switzerland abstained.

U.N. Secretary General António Guterres told the U.N. Security Council on Thursday that although Israeli authorities have cleared more aid convoys to enter Gaza, “the impact is limited, sometimes nil.”

At least 33,970 people have been killed and 76,770 injured in Gaza since the war began, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants but says the majority of the dead are women and children.

Israel estimates that about 1,200 people were killed in Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack, including more than 300 soldiers, and says 260 soldiers have been killed since its military operation in Gaza began.

4. Calling On Congress to Pass Ukraine Aid Package

Access the letter here: https://soaa.org/wp-content/uploads/Special-Operations-Association-of-America-Supports-Ukraine-Aid-Letter.pdf

Calling On Congress to Pass Ukraine Aid Package

https://soaa.org/ukraine-support/

Post published:April 18, 2024

In a recent letter to Congress, we urge Congress to continue to support Ukraine through the passage of the new Ukraine Aid Package without delay. Daily our teams witness first-hand how vital allied support is in determining the outcome of this war. It is also imperative that Putin be held responsible for his actions. He has caused the devastation in Ukraine and should be required to pay for its rebuilding. For this reason, we support the REPO provision in this legislation.

Further, we commend our European allies for the crucial support they continue to provide to Ukraine amid Russia’s ongoing invasion. Put simply, Ukraine cannot successfully fend off Russian take-over without equipment, training, and supplies from its allies. Reports from our boots-on-the-ground confirm the delivery and utilization of high-quality weapons and equipment from European allies directly to the frontlines of Ukraine. This support has proven indispensable in Ukraine’s valiant resistance against Russian aggression.

In the fight for peace and security around the world, collaboration and solidarity are our strongest allies. As the world witnesses Ukraine’s resilience in the face of adversity, we must continue to rally behind them with unwavering support. Let us heed this call and ensure Ukraine receives the assistance it needs to defend its sovereignty and uphold the values of democracy and freedom. Together, we can make a difference in the struggle against tyranny and advance the cause of peace and security in Europe and beyond.

5. Longstreet and How Much Work Remains to Be Done

A thoughtful review essay.

As an aside I thought that Longstreet at the former Ft Bragg was named after Longstreet and it was subsequently changed to "Long Street" at Ft Liberty. But I was wrong and the article at this link explains what took place: https://www.fayobserver.com/story/news/2022/01/19/fort-bragg-renames-roads-named-confederate-soldiers-longstreet-long-street/6562196001/

Longstreet and How Much Work Remains to Be Done - War on the Rocks

warontherocks.com · by Kori Schake · April 18, 2024

Elizabeth Varon, Longstreet: The Confederate General Who Defied the South (Simon & Schuster, 2023)

When I recently visited Montgomery, Alabama, I went to see the rows of rusted plinths that together make up the city’s Peace and Justice Memorial. The memorial is designed to replicate the cycle of a lynching. Walking through the memorial, one will see plinths hanging from the ceiling, and others rising out of the ground like coffins. Each plinth represents a county, inscribed with the names of thousands of Black Americans who had been lynched by their neighbors and fellow citizens, and the date of their murders. Less than a half mile away, just outside the state capitol building, stands a statue of Jefferson Davis, and a gigantic Confederate monument. It’s a jarring reminder that while the Union won the American Civil War, formally ended chattel slavery, and forced compliance with federal law, we continue to live with the legacy of losing the civil war peace.

That legacy is not just evident in the culture of the American south, but also in the U.S. military. When the armed services inventoried their real property holdings as the request of the Naming Commission, on which I served, they identified more than 10,000 installations, streets, apartment buildings, swimming pools, and other properties commemorating people who voluntarily took up arms against the U.S. government. Beginning in 1952, the U.S. Military Academy proudly displayed in its student library a 20-foot-high painting of Robert E. Lee, the Confederate general and former superintendent of the academy. It depicts Lee wearing his Confederate uniform in the foreground with a black slave in the background holding his horse. The painting had been given to the academy by the Daughters of the Confederacy as the cases that would become Brown vs. Board of Education were percolating through the courts. Arlington National Cemetery, which only permitted Confederate soldiers to be buried there starting in 1898, had a 40-foot high Confederate memorial including friezes of faithful black slaves serving their white masters — it was only removed in December of 2023.

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Within the military, far and away the greatest influence of the lost cause of the Confederacy is in the Army: 10 major Army posts were named for Confederates, two Navy ships, and essentially nothing in either the Marine Corps or the Air Force. The veneration of Confederate military leaders by the Army has partly to do with the legacy of so many West Point graduates choosing to serve the southern cause during the war (including Lee), partly to do with efforts to bind the nation back together after the war, but also much to do with resurgent socio-economic and -political practices in the south. Military bases were named to please the communities in which they were situated, and they were created as the military expanded during the Jim Crow years of the early 20th century.

None of those bases — or anything else — were named for Lt. Gen. James Longstreet, although he was Lee’s most trusted lieutenant. But Longstreet was also the only major Confederate figure who participated in enforcing the political settlement the Union imposed on the secessionist states. While a slaveholder, racist, and traitor to the Union, he nonetheless believed that having lost the war, the seceded states had a responsibility to uphold the terms of surrender and accept the consequences of unsuccessful rebellion: abolition of slavery, adherence to the laws of the United States, and military occupation until determined by the victorious power to be rehabilitated and re-admitted to national political participation.

For these views and acts, Longstreet was termed by his southern brethren as “Lee’s tarnished Lieutenant.” Not only has his post-war record been vilified by his confederates, but his counsel to Lee and battlefield leadership are also hotly contested. In her book Longstreet: The Confederate General Who Defied the South, Elizabeth Varon has undertaken an incredibly important historical task, which is to excavate Longstreet from the “lost cause” mythology that emerged as the Confederacy that lost the war won the peace.

The military historian Peter Cozzens reviewed this book in the Wall Street Journal, negatively and I think unfairly. Cozzens’ main complaint about the book is that it focuses too little on Longstreet’s Civil War record, when Varon’s subject is the way his post-war choices have colored southern historiography of his record. She is writing a life, not a war. Cozzens was complaining that she didn’t write the book he wanted her to write, not evaluating the book she has written.

And the book she has written is incredibly important. What Varon shows is the politicization of history to exculpate the moral bankruptcy of southern social, economic, and political practices. Her careful scholarship demonstrates that Longstreet differed with Lee over strategy, but properly deferred to his commander — and that criticism of his wartime performance begins in earnest only after the war, when his post-war political choices affronted the emergent storyline of the defeated Confederacy.

That storyline, known as the “lost cause,” seeks to repudiate the Union victory, or disparage it as the product solely of superior resources in the hands of incompetent Union generals. The purpose of the lost cause myth was more than salving the wounded pride of defeated southerners, though. As Varon writes, “by denying the legitimacy of the North’s military victory, former Confederates hoped to deny the North the right to impose its political will on the South.”

Southerners were aided in this purpose by the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln. As Varon and every other historian of the era show, “[President Andrew] Johnson’s policies permitted former Confederate leaders to return to power in the south and emboldened them to reassert racial dominance.”

Longstreet stood in stark contrast. Varon shows that “It was not the battle at Gettysburg that defined Longstreet’s Civil War but rather the surrender at Appomattox.” He accepted, as no other leading Confederate did, that the honorable thing to do was enact the political and economic agenda imposed by the north. He never renounced his racism — he owned eight slaves from the age of 11, advocated for slavery’s expansion and kept company with radical advocates. He continued to hold humans in bondage even while an active-duty Army officer and brought two with him on deployment to Comanche territory. He directed that captured free Blacks be enslaved (more than 1000 during the Gettysburg campaign alone!) and defended slavery as late as 1864. After the war he wanted a whites-only, states-rights Republican party. But Longstreet also believed that “there can be no discredit to a conquered people for accepting the conditions offered by their conquerors.” He argued the south should “come forward, then, and accept the ends involved in the struggle.”

As a post-war elected leader in New Orleans, Longstreet hired black soldiers as police and led voter registration drives for blacks. And he physically defended the Black community during the 1873 Colfax massacre, which was the single bloodiest day during Reconstruction. Varon recounts the sad denouement as violence overtook Reconstruction: murderous intimidation of Black voters, Republican politicians, and northern businessmen throughout the south; Supreme Court decisions narrowing protections against racial violence; and public weariness even in the north of the burden of military occupation. Longstreet abandoned working to advance Reconstruction in 1875 and moved to Georgia.

The death of Lee removed the last restraint on vilification of Longstreet. Because while Lee disapproved of Longstreet’s politics, he would not deny Longstreet’s war record. Nor did other Confederate leaders contemporaneously. After Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg, Lee singled out Lt. Gen. Richard Ewell for halting execution of the Confederate advance, but not Longstreet. After William Tecumseh Sherman’s success against Longstreet in the Tennessee campaign, Longstreet offered his resignation and Confederate President Jefferson Davis refused, needing competent commanders amidst feuding among the generals in the western theater. Lee wrote Longstreet an admiring letter on Feb, 25, 1865 demonstrating the continued confidence he had in him just six weeks before surrendering at Appomattox:

We might also seize the opportunity of striking at Grant, should he pursue us rapidly or at Sherman before they could unite. I wish you to consider this subject and give me your views … I wish you would watch closely his movements on the south side of the run, and try to ascertain whether he is diminishing his force … I should very much like to confer with you on these subjects, but I fear it will be impossible for me to go south of the James River, and I do not know that it will be convenient for you to come here.

So it is difficult to credence post-war derogation of Longstreet’s wartime performance. But Longstreet was querulous, disputing credit among Confederate generals from the first battle of the war. Still, his strategy was better suited to Confederate strengths and weaknesses than was Lee’s: Longstreet’s preferred approach in battle was “allowing the enemy to attack a fortified position, then counterattack a weakened foe.” Of Gettysburg, Longstreet said “My idea was to throw ourselves between the enemy and Washington, select a strong position, and force the enemy to attack us.” Yet he yielded to Lee on Pickett’s Charge and refused Gen. John Bell Hood’s requests for changes. Varon has done a great service by unearthing the political motivations for lost cause mythologists castigating Longstreet and chronicling the timing and therefore revealing the purpose of the alternative history with which he’s painted.

In War Music, Christopher Logue’s magisterial retelling of the Iliad, Hector’s smart wife Andromache is lovingly compared to Helen of Troy: “From diadem past philtrum on to peeping shoes, / You show another school of beauty.” I hear it echo as Varon’s biography of Longstreet shows an alternative American history, one where the “lost cause” myth isn’t permitted to sink roots, where Confederate flags are disdained rather than brandished, where there is no question that slavery was the cause of the Civil War and its advocates shunned in public discourse and scorned from elected office. But that is not the legacy we continue to live.

The Naming Commission was mandated by Congress in the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act to “remove all names, symbols, displays, monuments, and paraphernalia that honor or commemorate the Confederate States of American or any person who served voluntarily with the Confederate States of America from all assets of the Department of Defense.” Commissioners spanned the political spectrum from a serving Republican congressman of Georgia to the activist author of a book about the moral necessity of purging Confederate memorials. Retired Adm. Michelle Howard, the chair we commissioners selected, led us by drawing out consensus on decision rules: We would interpret our mandate narrowly — rename the 10 Army bases and capital ships, and set standards for military academies — and committed to making all our recommendations unanimous. For new names, we would show a preference for people who soldiers could emulate. We wanted enlisted and non-commissioned heroes rather than only generals. We wanted Medal of Honor recipients from more recent wars and from communities that had been overlooked. We met with affected communities, took their and other public suggestions, and listened to soldiers stationed at the posts.

What that process produced was the recommendation for renaming 758 items at military installations, and a suggested list of 90 exemplary candidates. We offered specific recommendations for the 10 Army posts and two ships. Ft. Rucker, which had been named for a Ku Klux Klan leader, was renamed to honor Chief Warrant Officer Michael J. Novosel, a Medal of Honor recipient from the Vietnam War who flew over 2,000 medevac extraction missions. Ft. Benning was replaced with commemoration of Lt. Gen. Hal Moore of We Were Soldiers Once fame and his wife Julia Compton Moore, who revolutionized casualty notification practices in the Army.

It’s shocking that it took so long to stare unblinkingly at the racism of commemorating the Confederacy. That we — including me — thought so little of what that communicated about us, especially to those Black Americans who chose to risk their lives for our country, is terrible. And there has been widespread acceptance of the new names. Yet Republican presidential candidates Mike Pence, Ron DeSantis, and Donald Trump all said on the campaign trail that if elected they would rescind the renaming. Varon’s book reminds us how we came to be where we are, and how much work remains to be done: There are more than 4,400 American names etched into those plinths in Montgomery, all killed by their fellow Americans after Longstreet gives up trying to win the peace of the American Civil War.

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Kori Schake leads the foreign and defense policy team at the American Enterprise Institute. She was a commissioner on the Base Renaming Commission.

Image: Wikimedia

Book Reviews

warontherocks.com · by Kori Schake · April 18, 2024

6. Russia ramps up weapons production, using mass quantity to outgun Ukraine

Excerpts:

As Western military aid for Kyiv has slowed in recent months, including in the United States, Russian forces have retaken the initiative in Ukraine, where they can now fire artillery and deploy drones at a far higher rate than the Ukrainians.

Russia has rearmed its forces by refurbishing existing gear — much of it dating to the Soviet era. Replacement parts from China, North Korea and Iran are of inconsistent quality, experts said, but procuring them has demonstrated Moscow’s ability to circumvent sanctions.

The Soviet-era equipment, including missiles and guided aerial bombs, has compensated for Russia’s failure, at least so far, to produce and deploy new, advanced weapons such as the T-14 Armata tank that theoretically could rival the U.S.-made Abrams and German-made Leopards that the West has given Ukraine.

U.S. officials initially believed the war in Ukraine had seriously degraded Russia’s military. But Gen. Christopher G. Cavoli, the top U.S. commander in Europe, testified in Congress this month that Moscow now had more soldiers than at the start of its invasion, and that its armed forces have “shown an accelerating ability to learn and adapt to battlefield challenges both tactically and technologically.”

Russia ramps up weapons production, using mass quantity to outgun Ukraine

By Mary Ilyushina

April 19, 2024 at 1:00 a.m. EDT

The Washington Post · by Mary Ilyushina · April 19, 2024

Russia has ramped up military production by replenishing stocks of standard weapons and ammunition and probably can sustain its onslaught in Ukraine for at least the next two years, analysts say — a sobering assessment for Kyiv, which is short on weapons and soldiers and losing ground on the battlefield.

While the Kremlin is struggling to expand capacity and to develop modern arms that could improve its army’s battlefield performance, it has capitalized on its overwhelming advantage in numbers of soldiers, its ability to arm them with old but reliable weaponry and a willingness to endure heavy casualties.

By recalibrating its economy on a war footing, forcing existing facilities to work in overdrive to produce or refurbish older equipment, and buying parts from Iran, China and North Korea, Russia has made a surprising recovery from its early losses in Ukraine.

“Russia is not producing more of its modern fighting equipment,” said Nikolai Kulbaka, a Russian economist. “But it has been making a lot more of simpler working equipment, rifles, shells, mass weapons for mass soldiers.”

As Western military aid for Kyiv has slowed in recent months, including in the United States, Russian forces have retaken the initiative in Ukraine, where they can now fire artillery and deploy drones at a far higher rate than the Ukrainians.

Russia has rearmed its forces by refurbishing existing gear — much of it dating to the Soviet era. Replacement parts from China, North Korea and Iran are of inconsistent quality, experts said, but procuring them has demonstrated Moscow’s ability to circumvent sanctions.

The Soviet-era equipment, including missiles and guided aerial bombs, has compensated for Russia’s failure, at least so far, to produce and deploy new, advanced weapons such as the T-14 Armata tank that theoretically could rival the U.S.-made Abrams and German-made Leopards that the West has given Ukraine.

U.S. officials initially believed the war in Ukraine had seriously degraded Russia’s military. But Gen. Christopher G. Cavoli, the top U.S. commander in Europe, testified in Congress this month that Moscow now had more soldiers than at the start of its invasion, and that its armed forces have “shown an accelerating ability to learn and adapt to battlefield challenges both tactically and technologically.”

Late last year, Russian President Vladimir Putin approved a record increase in military spending for 2024, planning to spend around $115 billion, nearly one-third of the country’s total annual budget and double the amount allocated for the military in 2021, the year before the invasion of Ukraine.

In recent months, top Russian officials, including Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, have claimed record numbers, reporting to Putin that the military-industrial complex has quadrupled production of armored vehicles, quintupled the supply of tanks and boosted manufacturing of drones and artillery shells by nearly 17 times.

These numbers, including a claim that 1,500 tanks were built in 2023, cannot be verified because the government does not disclose statistics about military production and the costs of the war and because the military often uses creative accounting, conflating new and rebuilt materiel, to show positive results.

“My impression is that Shoigu’s numbers and the figure of 1,500 tanks supplied over 2023 is technically correct, but it also includes refurbished stuff,” said Michael Gjerstad, land warfare analyst at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), a London-based think tank. “There could also be a percentage of tanks that are being cannibalized and their parts used to make other tanks, which could also be added into the statistics.”

Gjerstad said he believes Russia can manufacture up to 330 tanks a year but is actually building half that. Still, Russia managed to replenish about 1,140 tanks that it is estimated to have lost in 2023 by dusting off and refurbishing old armor taken from storage.

Experts note that the supply of existing gear is limited and that a key challenge for Russia is to develop capacity to build new fighting vehicles when it runs out of old models to upgrade.

The last new hull for the T-80 tank was built decades ago. Instead, Russia has gutted and refurbished hundreds that were made more than 50 years ago. But in the fall, Russian military commanders ordered a renewal of production at Omsktransmash, short for Omsk Transport Engineering Plant, where the T-80 is built.

“This is the task at hand,” Alexander Potapov, the CEO of Omsktransmash’s parent company, tank maker Uralvagonzavod, told the state-run Zvezda news outlet, at the time.

In 2019, the plant’s engineers told state media that it takes about a month to remodel one tank.

But Pavel Aksenov, a military expert and defense correspondent for the BBC’s Russian service, said the effort so far had yielded nothing. “They have not been able to restart this serial manufacturing,” Aksenov said. “It is a lot easier to boost the rates of existing production.”

It is similarly unlikely that Russia can supply its army with more modern hardware, like the T-14 Armata tank, which debuted with an array of new fighting vehicles at the 2015 Victory Day parade and infamously got stuck during rehearsals.

In early 2023, Russian state media published reports citing unnamed military officials that the Armata had been tested on Ukrainian front lines, prompting speculation it would soon be supplied to units there.

But last month, the head of Russia’s defense manufacturer, Rostec, Sergei Chemezov, said the Armata will not be deployed in Ukraine because of its high cost.

“Of course, it is much superior to other tanks in terms of functionality, but it is too expensive,” Chemezov said, according to state media. “Therefore, the army is unlikely to use it now. It’s easier to buy T-90.”

Neither the manufacturer, Uralvagonzavod, nor officials have disclosed the cost of the tank, but in 2011, Russian experts estimated it to be around $7.9 million, compared with about $3.6 million for the T-90S modification.

Aksenov said there is no proof that production of the Armata was ever finalized.

“They didn’t have enough time to nail it down before the war,” he said. “And although it was logical to begin that level of modernization, because Soviet technology is very outdated, and the invasion showed this, a war requires a different approach.”

“You need reliable equipment steadily supplied to the front line, one that is well-known to the troops, has no childhood diseases and plenty of spare parts to fix it,” Aksenov continued.

Gjerstad said Russia has sought to offset supplies of advanced Western equipment to Ukraine by prioritizing quantity and allocating better tanks to better trained units while supplying older T-55 and T-62 machines to units composed of conscripts and ex-convicts.

“Would you rather have three Fords or one Cadillac,” Gjerstad said. “That’s been the Russian thinking … it’s been like a crutch for them.”

In Ukraine, drones — or unmanned aerial vehicles — are even more vital than tanks.

To increase supply, Russia struck a deal with Iran to set up a factory for Shahed drones in Tatarstan, about 500 miles east of Moscow, and has pushed for a major increase in production of Russia’s Lancet self-detonating drone, manufactured by a subsidiary of Russian arms giant Kalashnikov Concern.

“They’ve been converting old shopping centers into drone production facilities, where they were apparently able to scale up the production quite a bit,” said Fabian Hinz, a drone expert with IISS.

“Russia doesn’t have to become the most innovative army in the world,” Hinz added. “If they managed to get a few systems that work well, like the Lancet, and then they managed to just brutally force through production, that’s already dangerous enough.”

To circumvent sanctions, Russia has forged new supply chains to obtain Western components for high-tech military equipment, with parts routed through Turkey, China and Kazakhstan, experts said, as the West has struggled with enforcement.

A recent report by the Kyiv School of Economics concluded: “Russia continues to be able to acquire large amounts of the inputs that it needs for its military production.” Imports of priority goods are down just 10 percent since sanctions were imposed, the report found.

Russia also has sought basic raw materials. Officials in the Baltics last month called for banning sales of manganese ore, a key component in steel and alloy production, after Estonian media reported that supplies to Russia had surged — often via Estonian and Latvian ports.

Russia has also managed to acquire supplies of nitrocellulose, a compound needed to produce explosives such as artillery shells, according to a report by Ukraine’s Center for Defense Strategies, including from Germany, Taiwan and China.

Catherine Belton in London contributed to this report.

The Washington Post · by Mary Ilyushina · April 19, 2024

7. Opinion Here are the U.S. congressional districts benefiting from Ukraine aid

This is an interesting survey of our industrial base. See the maps, graphics, and tables at the link. It is an interesting picture. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/04/18/ukraine-map-districts-weapons/?utm

Opinion Here are the U.S. congressional districts benefiting from Ukraine aid

By Marc A. Thiessen

Columnist

Follow author

April 18, 2024 at 10:35 a.m. EDT

Opinion | Here are the U.S. congressional districts benefiting from Ukraine aid

The Washington Post · by Marc A. Thiessen · April 18, 2024

If you knew that most of the military aid that Congress approves for Ukraine was being spent right here in the United States, quite possibly in your own congressional district — strengthening our defense production capacity and creating good manufacturing jobs for American workers — would you want your representatives in Washington to support it?

As the House prepares to vote on a new military aid package for Ukraine, the map above details the congressional districts that have been getting Ukraine aid money, including examples of the weapons systems being produced. As this map shows, military aid not only protects Ukrainian civilians and advances U.S. national security — it is also good for workers and manufacturing communities right here at home.

Providing military assistance to Ukraine is the right thing to do. American-made weapons are protecting Ukrainian civilians from Russian bombardment, stopping Russian forces from seizing Ukrainian cities and slaughtering their residents, and decimating the Russian military threat to NATO. It is in both our moral and national security interests to help Ukraine defeat Russia’s unjust aggression.

But our military aid to Ukraine is also revitalizing our defense industrial base, creating hot production lines for the weapons we need to deter potential adversaries and creating manufacturing jobs in the United States. That’s because 90 percent of the $68 billion in military and related assistance Congress has thus far approved is not going to Ukraine but is being spent in the United States, according to an analysis by Mark Cancian of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

With a team of researchers at the American Enterprise Institute, I have catalogued the weapons systems being produced in the United States for Ukraine, identifying the congressional districts where they are being made and how House members voted on the funding. We analyzed contracts and news releases and spoke to defense industry experts, diplomats and Pentagon officials to determine where U.S. tax dollars end up. We found that our military aid is providing a major cash infusion to 122 defense production lines in 65 congressional districts across the country that directly benefits American workers — and that doesn’t count all the suppliers that provide these contractors with parts or all the shops, restaurants and other businesses that support the factories rolling out weapons in these districts.

While many members of Congress voted in favor of aid that is going to their districts, many whose congressional districts have been prime beneficiaries have been vocal opponents of Ukraine aid. Here is a regional breakdown of where Ukraine aid is going, along with the members who represent those districts.

South

A lot of Ukraine aid is going to congressional districts in the South whose members oppose it. For example, Ukraine aid is funding High Mobility Artillery Rocket (HIMARS), Hellfire and Javelin engineering in Rep. Matt Gaetz’s (R) Niceville, Fla., district. It is funding HIMARS launchers and VAMPIRE Counter-Unmanned Aircraft Systems munitions in Rep. Bill Posey’s (R) Melbourne, Fla., district. It is funding HIMARS guidance sets and AN/TPQ-53 radar systems in Rep. Anna Paulina Luna’s (R) Clearwater, Fla., District; HIMARS and Javelin final assembly in Rep. Barry Moore’s (R) Troy, Ala., district; and HIMARS rocket motor production in Rep. Alex Mooney’s (R) Rocket Center, W.Va., district. It is funding production of C-4 explosives for Ukraine in Rep. Diana Harshbarger’s (R) Kingsport, Tenn., district and Joint Direct Attack Munition Extended Range (JDAM-ER) glide bombs in Rep. Josh Brecheen’s (R) Grove, Okla., district.

This despite those members’ opposition to the funding.

Midwest

Workers in Rep. Jim Jordan’s (R) Lima, Ohio, congressional district are churning out Abrams tanks and Stryker combat vehicles for Ukraine thanks to the military aid he has opposed.

West

In Rep. Lance Gooden’s (R) Mesquite, Tex., district, Ukraine aid is also funding a brand-new factory that is expected to produce about 20,000 155mm artillery shells a month and employ at least 125 workers after it comes online this year — despite his vote against the aid.

Northeast

Rep. Scott Perry’s (R) constituents are producing Bradley infantry fighting vehicles, Bradley fire support team vehicles and Hercules recovery vehicles for Ukraine in his York, Pa., district over his objections. Americans are also making Ground Launched Small Diameter Bombs (GLSDB) and Patriot air defense missiles in Rep. John Joyce’s (R) Letterkenny/Chambersburg, Pa., district, despite his opposition.

Like the previous military aid that Congress has approved, about 80 percent of the new military aid package for Ukraine will go to Americans, CSIS’s Cancian told me — including $23.2 billion to replenish U.S. stockpiles of weapons and equipment we have already provided to Ukraine and $13.8 billion to allow Ukraine to rearm itself through the purchase of weapons and munitions from the U.S. defense industrial base.

In many cases, the weapons being produced are not going to Ukraine at all. Instead, we are sending older versions of the weapons systems to Kyiv from our stockpiles and replacing them with brand-new, more advanced versions — thus using Ukraine aid money to modernize our military. Our aid is restarting production lines for weapons that would otherwise have remained dormant, such as Stinger antiaircraft missiles, which hadn’t been produced since 2005.

For example: The Patriot air defense system, which has been critical to the defense of both Ukraine and Israel. The new Ukraine aid package includes $1.5 billion to increase production of the most advanced PAC-3 Patriot aerial-attack interceptors. In 2018, the United States was building those missiles at an anemic rate of 350 a year. In December, thanks in part to Ukraine aid, that production increased to 500 a year — and the new aid package will increase it to 650. Rep. Bruce Westerman (R), whose Camden, Ark., district produces the most advanced of these interceptors, has a mixed record on Ukraine aid — voting against aid in 2022 but for it in 2023.

The new aid package includes $5.3 billion to reach the Army’s goal producing 100,000 155mm artillery rounds per month — money that will benefit factories receiving Ukraine aid for this purpose in Scranton, Wilkes-Barre and Bristol, Pa.; Camden, Ark.; Kingsport and Cordova, Tenn.; Middletown, Iowa; Coachella, Calif.; and Mesquite, Tex.

It includes $550 million to produce Guided Multiple Launch Rocket Systems (GMLRS) which are currently being built in Camden, Ark., Lincoln, Neb., and Springboro, Ohio.

It includes $348 million to produced TOW antitank guided missiles which are already being manufactured with Ukraine aid in Diné and Farmington, N.M, and Tucson, Ariz., and $227 million to produce Javelin antitank missiles with existing production lines in Farmington, N.M.; Orlando; Tucson, Ariz.; and Troy, Ala., as well as funding for many other critical weapons systems.

These investments will help protect Ukrainian civilians from Russian aggression, while strengthening America’s defenses so we are prepared to deter future adversaries.

How will members of Congress vote? In a forthcoming essay, I will let you know who voted for — and against — defense jobs in their districts.

The Washington Post · by Marc A. Thiessen · April 18, 2024

8. What Would Russian Victory in Ukraine Look Like?

Excerpts:

Some Eastern European governments have already begun to explore contingency options in the event of a Russian victory, developing plans to accelerate air and missile defense, rush additional troops and equipment to NATO’s eastern flank, and buy more advanced weapons systems. The European Union would doubtless also face a humanitarian catastrophe with millions more Ukrainians pouring across its borders.

A Russian victory isn’t inevitable. The Russian military hasn’t won a conventional war since World War II, and its forces suffer from systemic corruption, massive casualties, and an inability to conduct joint operations between air, ground and naval forces.

But the clock is ticking. Without a clear U.S. strategy and a sustained supply of Western weapons, intelligence and training, Mr. Putin could prevail. A dangerous world would suddenly become a lot more so.

What Would Russian Victory in Ukraine Look Like?

It would send shock waves across the globe, make China and Iran bolder, and endanger NATO.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-would-russian-victory-in-ukraine-look-like-war-aid-putin-fae2a24a?mod=Searchresults_pos6&page=1

By Seth G. Jones

April 18, 2024 1:05 pm ET

Ukrainian soldiers prepare to fire toward Russian positions in Ukraine, March 25. PHOTO: EFREM LUKATSKY/ASSOCIATED PRESS

As war persists in the Mideast, Ukraine’s fight for survival has slipped from the headlines. Yet its efforts grind on, and as I witnessed on a recent visit, its forces are in an increasingly perilous position against their Russian invaders. A palpable sense of anxiety among Ukrainian officials has replaced the optimism of 2022 and 2023. To grasp what is at stake, we must assess how a Russian victory might materialize and what such an outcome would mean for the free world.

The most obvious way Vladimir Putin’s army might prevail is by breaking through Ukrainian lines, collapsing its military, and seizing Kyiv. Though difficult, this is likely Russia’s strategy, which hinges on using brute force in a campaign of attrition by wearing down Ukraine’s lines, forcing units to disperse, decimating its defense production and breaking Ukrainian society’s morale.

A key component of that effort would be to pummel Ukrainian defenses with artillery, attack drones, ballistic and cruise missiles, and glide bombs. This is already happening. Since March, Russian forces have punished Ukrainian lines with artillery and an average of 44 glide bombs and 77 drones a day, senior Ukrainian military officials told me. Russia would also likely continue to escalate its air, missile and drone campaign to target Ukraine’s weapons production facilities, military installations and electricity grid—cutting off its ability to wage war. This, too, has persisted for months.

To capitalize on its ground gains, the Russian military would seek to break Ukrainians’ morale by relentlessly punishing their cities. Such attacks would be complemented by an aggressive propaganda campaign to convince civilians that the U.S. and Europe have abandoned them and that defeat is inevitable.

After weakening Ukrainian defenses and morale, Russian ground forces would punch through fatigued military lines with armor and dismounted infantry, supported by missiles, attack drones and air power. Russia might first seize cities closer to the front lines, such as Slovyansk, Kupyansk and Kramatorsk. Its taking of Kyiv would be only a matter of time. The Russian military is already pressing forward on several axes, including around Siversk and Bakhmut in the east and Robotyne and Verbove in the south.

Most Ukrainian combat brigades are at least 50% undermanned, according to military officials. Russia is using armored columns against defenses more effectively in some areas, such as Donetsk oblast, because of Ukrainian artillery shortages. Moscow is also preparing to mobilize an additional 300,000 soldiers that some Ukrainian and Western officials believe might be used for a major offensive campaign in the late summer or early autumn.

The military balance favors Russia. Its forces have a significant advantage in manpower and a 7-to-1 advantage in firepower, according to Ukrainian assessments. That is owing in part to the West’s dithering in the provision of aid, which has prevented Ukrainian forces from receiving critical artillery, aircraft and air-defense systems. With help from China, Iran and North Korea, Russia has also revitalized its defense industrial base. Quantity has a quality all its own.

In the event that Russian forces can’t take Kyiv, they could nevertheless conquer more territory in the east and south. The Russian army could capture the remainder of Luhansk oblast and push west to take territory in Kharkiv and Donetsk oblasts. In the south, the Russian army could advance in Zaporizhzhia and Kherson oblasts, retaking the city of Kherson among others.

A partial Russian victory would create a rump Ukrainian state with a broken economy, while Russia could grow stronger with greater natural resources, industrial strength, and agricultural wealth. Since January, it has already seized more than 139 square miles of territory—an area roughly the size of Las Vegas.

A Russian victory would send shock waves across the globe, stoke the appetites of its allies in China and Iran, and eviscerate U.S. and North Atlantic Treaty Organization credibility and deterrence. It would also embolden Mr. Putin, who sees himself as a modern-day Peter the Great, and put in serious danger Poland, Moldova, Georgia, the Baltic states and other U.S. allies and partners that border Russia.

Some Eastern European governments have already begun to explore contingency options in the event of a Russian victory, developing plans to accelerate air and missile defense, rush additional troops and equipment to NATO’s eastern flank, and buy more advanced weapons systems. The European Union would doubtless also face a humanitarian catastrophe with millions more Ukrainians pouring across its borders.

A Russian victory isn’t inevitable. The Russian military hasn’t won a conventional war since World War II, and its forces suffer from systemic corruption, massive casualties, and an inability to conduct joint operations between air, ground and naval forces.

But the clock is ticking. Without a clear U.S. strategy and a sustained supply of Western weapons, intelligence and training, Mr. Putin could prevail. A dangerous world would suddenly become a lot more so.

Mr. Jones is senior vice president and director of the International Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

9. Ukraine downs Russian strategic bomber after air strike kills eight, Kyiv says

300 KM from its border.

Ukraine downs Russian strategic bomber after air strike kills eight, Kyiv says

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/ukraine-says-russian-strikes-dnipropetrovsk-region-kill-least-8-2024-04-19/?utm

By Tom Balmforth and Anastasiia Malenko

April 19, 20246:07 AM EDTUpdated an hour ago

Item 1 of 3 Firefighters work at a site of an apartment building hit by a Russian missile strike, amid Russia's attack on Ukraine, in Dnipro, Ukraine April 19, 2024. REUTERS/Mykola Synelnykov

[1/3]Firefighters work at a site of an apartment building hit by a Russian missile strike, amid Russia's attack on Ukraine, in Dnipro, Ukraine April 19, 2024. REUTERS/Mykola Synelnykov Purchase Licensing Rights, opens new tab

Summary

KYIV, April 19 (Reuters) - Ukraine shot down a Russian strategic bomber 300 km from its border on Friday after the warplane took part in a long-range air strike that killed at least eight people including two children in the central Dnipropetrovsk region, Kyiv said.

Missiles rained down on the city of Dnipro and the surrounding region in the early hours, damaging residential buildings, the main train station and injuring at least 28 civilians, regional officials said.

Russia has stepped up its long-range aerial assaults on Ukraine's energy system and other targets in recent weeks, ratcheting up the pressure on Kyiv far behind the front lines where Russian forces have been slowly advancing in the east.

President Volodymyr Zelenskiy called for urgent supplies of air defences from Kyiv's allies as Ukraine's stocks dwindle due to a slowdown in vital Western military aid.

"Russia must be held accountable for its terror, and every missile, every Shahed (drone) must be shot down," he said. "The world can guarantee this, and our partners have the necessary capabilities."

In a first for Ukraine during the invasion, Kyiv's air force commander and military spy agency said they had shot down a Russian Tu-22M3 strategic bomber that had fired missiles at Ukraine during the overnight attack.

The warplane, they said, had been flying in Russian airspace 300 km from the Ukrainian border.

An intelligence source told Reuters that Kyiv had used a modified S-200 air defence missile for the attack, but did not say where it had been fired from. The S-200 is a Soviet-era long-range surface-to-air missile system.

Unconfirmed social media footage showed a warplane with its tail on fire spiralling towards the ground

The Russian defence ministry said the bomber had crashed in Russia's southern Stavropol region, hundreds of kilometres from Ukrainian-controlled territory, as it returned to base after carrying out a combat mission.

But it said the crash appeared to have been caused by technical malfunction.

The four Russian air force crew members ejected from the warplane; two were rescued, one died and a rescue operation was under way for the fourth, the Russian regional governor said.

SURVIVING 'HELL'

Ukraine's air force said it shot down 15 missiles, including two Kh-22 cruise missiles and 14 drones during the overnight attack.

The Dnipropetrovsk region's governor Serhiy Lysak said air defences shot down 11 out of 16 missiles and nine out of 10 drones that attacked the region.

Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal put the death toll at eight. Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said a 14-year-old girl and 8-year-old boy had been killed.

A five-storey residential building in the city of Dnipro was badly damaged and fire fighters battled to put out a fire at the site early in the morning.

"Dnipropetrovsk region survived hell. But who do the Russians want to break with their missiles? No one can unite around a shared tragedy like the Ukrainians do," Lysak, the governor, said.

Russia denies targeting civilians during its air strikes and says the energy system is a legitimate target, but hundreds of civilians have been killed during air strikes.

State-run railways company Ukrzaliznytsia said Russia targeted its infrastructure in the attack and that one of its workers was killed.

Coming soon: Get the latest news and expert analysis about the state of the global economy with Reuters Econ World. Sign up here.

Reporting by Anastasiia Malenko and Yuliia Dysa; Writing by Tom Balmforth; Editing by Gerry Doyle and Philippa Fletcher

10. New bipartisan bill seeks to tackle national child care shortage with help from the Pentagon

New bipartisan bill seeks to tackle national child care shortage with help from the Pentagon

Legislation from Sens. Jeanne Shaheen and Joni Ernst would launch a pilot program to help child care providers near military installations train and recruit staff members.

NBC News · by Kate Santaliz

WASHINGTON — As the country faces a shrinking supply of child care workers and higher costs of care, a bipartisan duo of senators is taking steps to address the shortage, specifically targeted at helping service members who face unique challenges trying to access reliable child care.

Sens. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., and Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, will introduce the Expanding Child Care for Military Families Act on Thursday, proposing a first-of-its-kind Defense Department-led pilot program to help child care providers near military installations train, recruit and retain staff members. The goal would be to boost the availability of care, for both military members and local civilians, by increasing workforce development opportunities for workers in the industry, using the Defense Department’s already existing resources.

“We have a workforce shortage, and to the extent that people look at the challenges of family life in the military — child care is one of those challenges, and that’s a deterrent for people to join the military. Anything we can do to address that is really important,” Shaheen said in an interview Wednesday.

The legislation would enable the Defense Department to enter into partnerships with both private and public child care centers on or near military installations and require it to participate in recruitment and retention programs for child care providers at participating centers.

Ernst, the first female combat veteran in the Senate, said the legislation is personal. “As a mom and a new grandma, I know it takes a village to raise a child and that our military members need high-quality, affordable child care for their young ones,” she said. “By boosting training and recruitment efforts, this bipartisan bill will ensure military kids are safe and loved while their parents diligently train and prepare to protect our nation.”

Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa.Samuel Corum / Getty Images file

To further close the worker gap, the bill would also allow the Pentagon to work with AmeriCorps, a government agency for national service, to place its volunteers at participating child care facilities, and it would encourage the Pentagon to train and recruit military spouses to join the industry.

“That’s one of the biggest challenges right now,” Shaheen said of the staffing shortage. “One of the reasons that’s such a challenge is because the pay scale for child care teachers is so low, and often benefits are not provided for people, as well. So I think we need to think about all the ways that we can be creative to figure out how to get more people in the field.”

During the Covid-19 pandemic, the federal government spent $24 billion to help keep child care facilities afloat, but the funding expired in September, leaving many providers who relied on it unable to make ends meet.

A recent survey from the National Association for the Education of Young Children found that more than half of child care centers’ directors and operators reported staffing shortages.

Cora Hoppe, the director of Rochester Child Care Center, a nonprofit center in New Hampshire that would partner with the Defense Department if the new bill passes, said the provider shortage is particularly felt among families of service members, who deal with frequent moves that bring a unique set of challenges for parents.

“It can be harder for service members because of how far away [child care] can be from a base or if they don’t have access to it on an active base,” Hoppe said in an interview Tuesday. “It’s just an extremely important partnership, because when you have uncertainty everywhere else, it’s nice to have a certain partnership to help support you through that.”

The Rochester Child Care Center serves five to 10 military families at a given time and takes in military subsidies to help with expenses, but Hoppe said budgetary constraints and high operating costs recently caused her to have to let go of a quarter of her staff.

“There’s no wiggle room. There’s absolutely none. I’m in the classroom constantly. I have workers call out because they have sick kids. It’s all over the place,” she said.

Hoppe said that if she had access to additional resources from the Defense Department, she would have been able to hold on to her staff.

“The DoD’s backing would be huge, because then it would allow us to build our capacity,” she said.

“Right now, we’re all in silos. So to have a DoD program available, I think it could bring together more of the child care industry. It would bring us in less siloed positions and give us opportunities to work more together in order to collaborate to support these types of families.”

Shaheen, who has pushed for several measures to ease the burden for both parents and child care facilities, said she will continue to advocate for more accessible and affordable child care.

“We’ve got to be flexible in thinking about how we respond to the child care needs of families, that we need to provide options. There’s not a one-size-fits-all, and I think that’s particularly true for military families,” she said.

“I think this is an issue that there is no one magic silver bullet answer, and so we need to look at a whole variety of things. That’s why this kind of a pilot program would be really helpful,” she said.

NBC News · by Kate Santaliz

11. Pentagon anti-fentanyl efforts face operational challenges: watchdog

Certainly complex command relationships and responsibilities can hinder operations.

Pentagon anti-fentanyl efforts face operational challenges: watchdog

militarytimes.com · by Zamone Perez · April 18, 2024

The three combatant commands involved in the Pentagon’s counternarcotics mission in the Americas need more defined roles in their joint operations, according to a watchdog report released Tuesday.

The Government Accountability Office noted that the commands involved in U.S. efforts to curb drug trafficking of cocaine, fentanyl and precursor chemicals — U.S. Southern Command, Northern Command and Indo-Pacific Command — do not have updated agreements on their “individual and joint responsibilities in the overlapping operation area.”

While the Office of the Deputy Secretary of Defense for Counternarcotics and Stabilization Policy collects data on counternarcotics activities, the report found that assessing effectiveness of operations is limited due to an inconsistency of entering data into the respective database.

The GAO added that establishing measurable outcomes for counternarcotics objectives would allow the Pentagon to more appropriately allocate resources and adapt to changing threats.

“DOD has not assessed the agency-wide effectiveness of its counternarcotics and counter–transnational organized crime activities and does not have a plan for future assessments,” the report states. “Contrary to key practices, [the Pentagon] has not identified measurable outcomes for each strategic objective. ... Officials also said they intend to assess agency-wide progress but have not developed a plan to do so.”

An assessment of Pentagon efforts to disrupt drug traffickers comes at a precarious time in the United States. Overdoses involving synthetic opioids, such as fentanyl, are the leading cause of death for people 18 to 45, according to the Council on Foreign Relations. A study from Mayo Clinic and Yale University found that deaths from fentanyl alone tripled between 2016 and 2021.

Transnational criminal organizations are transitioning from plant-based drugs, such as cocaine or heroin, to synthetic drugs, such fentanyl, according to the report. Defense officials told the GAO that the more lucrative synthetic drugs are easier to produce and transport across borders, which leads to greater difficulty detecting and monitoring.

In 1989, the Pentagon created a number of joint task forces to allow the military to better coordinate its counternarcotics operations with other federal agencies. INDOPACOM, SOUTHCOM and NORTHCOM still have task forces for such efforts, but the boundaries of those task forces have shifted.

The Pentagon published a memo in 2003 that expanded the area of operation for Joint Interagency Task Force-South — previously only within SOUTHCOM. Instead of each of the combatant commands having a corresponding task force, that task force brought in areas under two other combatant commands: the western coasts of Mexico and the U.S., the islands in the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico.

Defense officials cited Caribbean operations and naval operations off the Mexican coast as two areas of specific contention over operational duties, according to the report.

About Zamone Perez

Zamone “Z” Perez is a reporter at Military Times. He previously worked at Foreign Policy and Ufahamu Africa. He is a graduate of Northwestern University, where he researched international ethics and atrocity prevention in his thesis. He can be found on Twitter @zamoneperez.

12. Why a potential TikTok ban is alive again in Congress, and what’s next

Excerpts:

To bypass those constraints, House lawmakers are attaching the TikTok legislation to a package of funding bills they were already slated to consider, to send aid to Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan. Those efforts have bipartisan backing on Capitol Hill and the support of the White House, which could expedite efforts to get a deal on TikTok done as well.

The new bill, called the 21st Century Peace Through Strength Act, or H.R. 8038, would allow the president to level new sanctions against Russia and Iran in addition to the TikTok provisions.

“This legislation is a first step in protecting Americans against foreign subversive data collection,” Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Tex.), who previously led a congressional effort to target TikTok, said during a committee hearing on Thursday.

Why a potential TikTok ban is alive again in Congress, and what’s next

The Washington Post · by Cristiano Lima-Strong · April 19, 2024

Federal lawmakers are again taking up legislation to force video-sharing app TikTok to be sold or banned in the United States over national security concerns.

This time, it may have an easier path to the president’s desk.

Republican House leaders this week unveiled an unconventional plan to tuck the TikTok crackdown into a series of foreign aid packages slated for a Saturday vote. The tactic could fast-track the proposal, maneuvering the stand-alone bill that has stalled in the Senate.

Lawmakers have scrutinized the popular short-form video app over allegations that its links to China pose a risk to Americans’ personal data, but past attempts to ban or restrict it have run into major constitutional concerns that the efforts would infringe on the free-speech rights of its millions of U.S. users.

Here’s what to know about the plan:

Wait, didn’t the House pass this already?

Yes. Last month, the House voted 352-65 to approve legislation requiring that TikTok either be sold off from ByteDance, its Beijing-based parent company, or face a national ban.

The measure — called the Protecting Americans From Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, or H.R. 7521 — would give apps deemed to be “controlled” by rival foreign powers 180 days to divest or face a prohibition. The bill explicitly designates TikTok and other platforms owned by ByteDance as “foreign adversary controlled applications” and would create a mechanism by which the president could target additional apps in the future.

House lawmakers swiftly and overwhelmingly passed the bill, led by Reps. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.) and Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.), just over a week after it was introduced. That kicked the measure over to the Senate, where members have yet to formally take it up.

Why are lawmakers now tying TikTok to foreign aid?

Because it speeds up the process. House lawmakers initially passed the TikTok crackdown as a stand-alone bill, but it needs to pass in the Senate, where leadership would need to either move it through a key committee or call it up on the floor for a vote.

At least one member, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), has already indicated he would block calling the bill to the floor under unanimous consent. Senate leaders probably would need to dedicate a significant amount of time in committee or on the floor to debate the TikTok bill. That could prove difficult ahead of the 2024 elections.

To bypass those constraints, House lawmakers are attaching the TikTok legislation to a package of funding bills they were already slated to consider, to send aid to Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan. Those efforts have bipartisan backing on Capitol Hill and the support of the White House, which could expedite efforts to get a deal on TikTok done as well.

The new bill, called the 21st Century Peace Through Strength Act, or H.R. 8038, would allow the president to level new sanctions against Russia and Iran in addition to the TikTok provisions.

“This legislation is a first step in protecting Americans against foreign subversive data collection,” Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Tex.), who previously led a congressional effort to target TikTok, said during a committee hearing on Thursday.

“It is unfortunate that the House of Representatives is using the cover of important foreign and humanitarian assistance to once again jam through a ban bill that would trample the free speech rights of 170 million Americans,” TikTok said in a statement posted online Wednesday.

When could TikTok face a ban?

Congress would first need to pass the aid package.

While House lawmakers are expected to vote on the bills Saturday, it’s unclear when the Senate might take it up. Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said Thursday he is monitoring the House’s foreign aid bills — which closely resemble a prior Senate package. (Schumer spokespeople did not return requests for comment on the TikTok provision.)

The bill gives TikTok just under a year to divest from ByteDance. While the original House bill gave TikTok 180 days to be sold, the version included in the aid package gives the company 270 days and allows the president to extend by an additional 90 if “significant progress” has been made toward a divestiture.

At that point, if ByteDance refuses to sell, mobile app stores and web-hosting services would be prohibited from offering TikTok to the public — effectively banning the app from the United States.

Is the TikTok bill more likely to become law now?

It appears so. The TikTok proposal already had broad bipartisan support in the House, and President Biden said last month he would sign it into law if it came to his desk. The only outstanding question was whether enough of the Senate would rally behind the push.

After the House quickly passed its TikTok crackdown, many senators struck a cautious tone, urging colleagues not to rush through consideration of the issue. Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), whose committee has jurisdiction over the TikTok bill, expressed concern that the proposal would not survive legal challenges and floated first holding a hearing on the topic.

But in a notable shift, Cantwell announced in a statement Wednesday that she supports the updated TikTok legislation now that it gives the company additional time to divest. Cantwell had previously cast doubt on its prospects for passage, creating a major roadblock for the effort.

“As I’ve said, extending the divestment period is necessary to ensure there is enough time for a new buyer to get a deal done,” said Cantwell, who chairs the Senate Commerce Committee.

Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-Va.), another key voice in the TikTok debate as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in a statement Thursday he supports the House’s inclusion of the TikTok crackdown in their foreign aid package.

“I’m glad to see the House help push this important bill forward to force Beijing-based ByteDance to divest its ownership of TikTok,” Warner told The Washington Post in a statement. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), the Intelligence Committee’s vice chairman, also supports the maneuver, a spokesman confirmed in an email.

A number of senators on both sides of the aisle have previously called for the chamber to take up the bill ahead of the 2024 elections. This may now become their most viable path to do so.

The Washington Post · by Cristiano Lima-Strong · April 19, 2024

13. Drone strike at Isfahan has worked before, was it the right move now? - analysis

So this was not the first attack of Iran by Israel last night?

Excerpt:

In January 2023, despite Iranian claims, a drone attack on Iran at Isfahan was a tremendous success, according to a mix of Western intelligence sources and foreign sources, the Jerusalem Post learned at the time.

Drone strike at Isfahan has worked before, was it the right move now? - analysis

If no nuclear sites were hit, the response might be viewed as limited by Iran and the West.

By YONAH JEREMY BOBAPRIL 19, 2024 08:10Updated: APRIL 19, 2024 09:06

Jerusalem Post

If reports are correct that Israel has used drones to strike Iranian air force assets, whether Iranian drones, ballistic missiles, aircraft, or all of the above, at Isfahan, this would be straight out of a playbook that has worked before, as recently as January 2023.

It is also possible that long-range missiles were used, though initial reports indicate an attack from within Iran, which would be more consistent with drone strikes.

In January 2023, despite Iranian claims, a drone attack on Iran at Isfahan was a tremendous success, according to a mix of Western intelligence sources and foreign sources, the Jerusalem Post learned at the time.

There were four explosions at the site, which could even be witnessed on social media, against a facility developing advanced weapons, and the damage went far beyond the "minor roof damage" that the Islamic Republic claimed and which it had falsely claimed before also in other incidents in recent years.

Israel played both the current and January 2023 incidents mum, but most Western intelligence and Iranian sources credited the Mossad with similarly successful attacks against Iran's Natanz nuclear facility in July 2020, a different Natanz nuclear facility in April 2021, another nuclear facility at Karaj in June 2021 and with destroying around 120 or more Iranian drones in February 2022.

A ballistic missile lies on the shore of the Dead Sea, after Iran launched drones and missiles towards Israel, April 14, 2024. (credit: REUTERS/Alon Ben Mordechai)Former prime minister Naftali Bennett later publicly admitted to ordering the attack on Iran's drone facility in February 2022.

There are also few organizations globally besides the Mossad which are reported to have the advanced and surgical strike capabilities appeared to be displayed in the operation.

Iran's history of denial

In each of the incidents, Tehran tried to initially pretend that the attacks failed and only acknowledged the extent of the damage when satellite photos or other evidence broke into the public sphere, outflanking their denials.

It is still unclear whether the advanced weapons that were damaged related only to conventional warfare or might have dual-use relevance also to nuclear issues, such as certain ballistic missiles or explosives equipment that can be used for both conventional and nuclear weapons purposes - but any anonymous sources commenting seemed to emphasize both in January 2023 and on Friday that the heart of the nuclear program was untouched.

If this is true, it would be Israel's way of limiting its response so as to avoid a larger Iranian retaliation and also partially honoring US and EU requests to either not strike back or strike back in a limited fashion.

Isfahan has been used on and off for various nuclear issues as well as non-nuclear military issues.

Iran even at one point told the IAEA that some of the nuclear activities being carried out at the Karaj nuclear facility until June 2021 had been moved to Isfahan.

Jerusalem Post

14. Israel gave US last-minute warning about drone attack on Iran, Italian foreign minister says at G7

Israel gave US last-minute warning about drone attack on Iran, Italian foreign minister says at G7

By Nicole Winfield | AP

April 19, 2024 at 7:11 a.m. EDT

The Washington Post · by Nicole Winfield | AP · April 19, 2024

CAPRI, Italy — The United States told the Group of Seven foreign ministers on Friday that it received “last minute” information from Israel about a drone action in Iran, Italy’s foreign minister said.

Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani, who chaired the meeting of ministers of industrialized countries, said the United States provided the information at a Friday morning session that was changed at the last minute to address the suspected attack.

Tajani said the U.S. informed the G7 ministers that it had been “informed at the last minute” by Israel about the drones. “But there was no sharing of the attack by the U.S. It was a mere information.”

Early Friday, Iran fired air defenses at a major air base and a nuclear site near the central city of Isfahan after spotting drones, part of an apparent Israeli attack in retaliation for Tehran’s unprecedented drone-and-missile assault on the country last weekend.

In a communique following the three-day meeting, the ministers urged the parties “to prevent further escalation.”

The statement pledged support for Israel’s security and condemned “in the strongest terms” what the foreign ministers described as Iran’s “unprecedented attack against Israel of April 13-14, which Israel defeated with the help of its partners,” as well as the seizure of the Portuguese-flagged vessel MSC Aries in the Strait of Hormuz.

“We stand ready to adopt further sanctions or take other measures, now and in response to further destabilizing initiatives,” the document read.

The group also warned Iran against transferring ballistic missiles and related technology to Russia.

On the war in Gaza, the group called on Hamas to release hostages and reminded Israel to respect international and humanitarian law.

It added that G7 countries remained opposed to “a full scale military operation in Rafah that would have catastrophic consequences on the civilian population,” and called for increasing the flow of aid into Gaza.

“The G7 worked and will work for a de-escalation,” Tajani said in a closing press conference. He said that would include a de-escalation of tensions, followed by a cease-fire, liberation of hostages and aid to the Palestinian people.

The Washington Post · by Nicole Winfield | AP · April 19, 2024

15. G7 foreign ministers' statement in Italy, April 2024

From the UK Foreign Office.

Topics:

1. Iran

2. Conflict in Gaza

3. Freedom of Navigation in the Red Sea

4. Yemen

5. Syria

G7 foreign ministers' statement in Italy, April 2024

gov.uk

Press release

Following their meeting in Capri, G7 foreign ministers gave a joint statement on the situation in the Middle East.

From:

Published

19 April 2024

Situation in the Middle East

1. Iran

We, the G7 Foreign Ministers of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States of America, and the High Representative of the European Union, condemn in the strongest terms Iran’s direct and unprecedented attack against Israel of April 13-14, which Israel defeated with the help of its partners. This was a dangerous escalation, as Iran fired hundreds of ballistic missiles, cruise missiles and drones.

We also condemn the Iranian boarding and seizure, in breach of international law, of the Portuguese flagged merchant vessel MSC Aries by armed personnel, which occurred while the merchant vessel was sailing near the Strait of Hormuz. We call for the immediate release of the vessel, its crews and cargo.

Israel and its people have our full solidarity and support and we reaffirm our commitment towards Israel’s security. Iran’s actions mark an unacceptable step towards the destabilization of the region and a further escalation, which must be avoided. In light of reports of strikes on April 19th , we urge all parties to work to prevent further escalation. The G7 will continue to work to this end.

We call on all parties, both in the region and beyond, to offer their positive contribution to this collective effort.

We call on Iran to refrain from providing support to Hamas and taking further actions that destabilize the Middle East, including support for Lebanese Hezbollah and other non-state actors. Iran’s continued provision of arms and related materiel to the Houthis in violation of UNSCR 2216 and to other non-state actors in the region are dangerously increasing tensions. We call on all countries to prevent the supply of components or other items to Iran’s UAV and missile programmes.

We demand that Iran and its affiliated groups cease their attacks. We will hold the Iranian government accountable for its malicious and destabilizing actions and we stand ready to adopt further sanctions or take other measures, now and in response to further destabilizing initiatives.

We reiterate our determination that Iran must never develop or acquire a nuclear weapon. We urge Iran to cease and reverse nuclear escalations and to stop the continuing uranium enrichment activities reported by IAEA in the framework provided by UNSCR 2231 that have no credible civil justification and pose significant proliferative risks. Tehran must reverse this trend and engage in serious dialogue, returning to full cooperation with the IAEA to enable it to provide assurances that Iran’s nuclear program is exclusively peaceful. We support IAEA’s monitoring and verification role regarding Iran’s nuclear-related obligation and commitments and express strong concern about Iran’s current lack of cooperation with the Agency.

We are extremely concerned by reports that Iran is considering transferring ballistic missiles and related technology to Russia. We call on Iran not to do so, as it would represent a substantive material escalation in its support for Russia’s war in Ukraine. Were Iran to proceed with providing ballistic missiles or related technology to Russia, we are prepared to respond in a swift and coordinated manner, including with new and significant measures against Iran.

We reiterate our deep concern over Iran’s human rights violations and abuses, especially against women, girls and minority groups, and in light of the first report issued on March 8 by the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission established by the Human Rights Council, which said that certain violations against “Women, Life, Freedom” protestors amounted to crimes against humanity.

We strongly reject Iran’s targeting and arbitrary arrest of dual and foreign citizens and call on Iran’s leadership to end all unjust and arbitrary detentions. We condemn Iran’s harassment, intimidation and plots to kill perceived dissidents and opponents of the regime overseas, including journalists and religious figures, as well as the targeting of Jewish individuals and institutions.

2. Conflict in Gaza

We condemn in the strongest terms the brutal terrorist attacks conducted by Hamas and other terrorist groups against Israel that began on October 7, 2023. In exerting its right to defend itself, Israel must fully comply with international law, including international humanitarian law. Hamas must release all hostages immediately and unconditionally. We continue to press for the full investigation of the horrific reports of sexual violence committed by Hamas and other terrorist groups and for perpetrators to be held accountable.

We deplore all losses of civilian lives and note with great concern the unacceptable number of civilians, including thousands of women, children and persons in vulnerable situations who have been killed in Gaza. We call for urgent action to address the devastating and growing humanitarian crisis in Gaza, particularly the plight of civilians throughout the territory. We reiterate our opposition to a full scale military operation in Rafah that would have catastrophic consequences on the civilian population. We reiterate our call for a credible and actionable plan to protect the civilian population there and address their humanitarian needs. We are deeply concerned by the internal displacement within Gaza and the risk of forcible displacement from Gaza. Israel must act in compliance with its obligations under international law and treat individuals humanely and with dignity, and should thoroughly and transparently investigate credible allegations of wrongdoing and ensure accountability for any abuses or violations.

We underscore the urgent need for specific, concrete, and measurable steps to significantly increase the flow of aid into Gaza in light of imminent risk of famine for a majority of Gaza’s population. We urge the rapid implementation of steps announced by the Government of Israel including the commitment to expand flow of aid through existing land crossings, opening new land crossings, and facilitating aid to northern Gaza where humanitarian needs are most acute, including by opening more routes into Gaza. We welcome efforts to establish a maritime corridor to further increase the flow of much-needed humanitarian assistance into Gaza, in coordination with the United Nations. We reiterate that such corridors must complement and not be a substitute to expanded and sustained assistance flows by land.

Securing full, rapid, safe, and unhindered humanitarian access in all its forms remains an absolute priority. We call on Israel to do more to ensure protection of international and local humanitarian aid workers, journalists, and Palestinian civilians, to improve humanitarian deconfliction, including communications, and to pursue full accountability, as appropriate, for incidents of harm against aid workers and civilians. We call on all parties to allow the unimpeded delivery of aid, including food, water, medical care, electricity, fuel, shelter, as well as facilitate the restoration of basic services and ensure access for humanitarian workers. All parties must protect civilians, especially those most vulnerable, particularly women, children, and people with disabilities, consistent with international humanitarian law.

Since the onset of the crisis, the G7 has been among the largest providers of assistance to the affected population in Gaza. We reiterate our intention to continue doing so and we call on all our partners to strengthen their efforts. We welcome the initiative “Food for Gaza” launched by Italy together with FAO, WFP and IFRC (International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Society), aimed at better meeting the urgent demand for food security and primary health of the population.

We recognize the crucial role played by UN agencies and other humanitarian actors in delivering assistance. UNRWA has a vital role in the Gaza humanitarian response. We welcome the swift decision by the UN Secretary General to initiate an immediate investigation on UNRWA to provide full transparency on the serious allegations against its staff and to appoint an independent review group also in view of the implementation of the needed reforms. We agreed it is critical that UNRWA and other UN organizations and agencies’ distribution networks be fully able to deliver aid to those who need it most, fulfilling their mandate effectively.

We call for an immediate release of hostages and a sustainable ceasefire that allows for a surge of the urgently needed humanitarian assistance to be delivered safely throughout Gaza. In this context, we strongly support the ongoing mediation efforts undertaken by the United States and regional partners to that aim, respected by all parties, leading to a sustainable cessation of hostilities, in order to facilitate the immediate return of all hostages, a surge of assistance and for the urgent implementation of UNSC resolutions 2712, 2720, and 2728. Hamas’ refusal to release hostages is only prolonging the conflict and the suffering of civilians.

We welcome the new Palestinian Authority cabinet and remain ready to support the Palestinian Authority as it undertakes the reforms that are indispensable to enable it to take up its responsibilities in the aftermath of the conflict, in both Gaza and the West Bank.

We are also working, including by imposing sanctions and other measures, to deny Hamas the ability to raise funds to carry out further atrocities. Likewise, we will also continue our work to fight against the dissemination of terrorist content online.

All parties must refrain from unilateral actions that undermine the prospect of a two-state solution. We are concerned by rising levels of settlers’ violence. Extremist settlers responsible for violent acts against Palestinian communities must be brought to account.

A viable solution to the conflict can only be the result of a coordinated regional effort. We remain committed to a lasting and sustainable peace based on a two-State solution and the establishment of an independent Palestinian state with security guarantees for Israel and the Palestinians. We call for upholding unchanged the historic status quo at the holy sites in Jerusalem. We concur that the final territory of a Palestinian state should be defined through negotiations based on 1967-lines. We note that the recognition of a Palestinian state, at the appropriate time, would be a crucial component of that political process.

We are working intensively – along with partners in the region – to prevent the conflict from escalating further. We are particularly concerned by the situation along the Blue Line. We recognize the essential stabilizing role played by the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) and the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) in mitigating that risk. We urge all involved to exercise restraint and to work toward de-escalation.

We oppose all discrimination and violence based on religion or belief and we call for effective protection of all members of religious minority groups. We strongly reject all forms of antisemitism and anti-Muslim hatred.

3. Freedom of Navigation in the Red Sea

We condemn the attacks perpetrated by the Houthis against commercial vessels transiting the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden and the navy ships protecting them. We are greatly concerned by the deaths of three innocent mariners aboard the True Confidence and the sinking of the Rubymar, which created a navigational hazard and a serious environmental threat. We call for the immediate release by the Houthis of the Galaxy Leader and its crew, seized on 19th November 2023. In line with UNSCR 2722, we reiterate our support for countries that exercise the right to defend their vessels from attacks, in accordance with international law. We also call for continued international involvement in close cooperation with the United Nations and coastal states, as well as with regional and sub-regional organizations to prevent further escalation with possible multidimensional consequences.

We welcome the continued efforts of the EU maritime operation “Aspides” and of the U.S.-led operation “Prosperity Guardian” along with UK and 10 other countries to protect these crucial shipping lanes.

We are concerned by the hindrance to the transit of energy supplies, raw materials and other commodities through the Red Sea. The countries most negatively affected by the Houthis’ attacks include those in the region. Maritime security and navigational rights and freedoms are critical to ensuring free movement of essential commodities to destinations and populations all over the world. This includes delivery of life-saving humanitarian assistance to more than half the population of Yemen and to Sudan and Ethiopia.

4. Yemen

We express great concern for the situation in Yemen, notably for the humanitarian conditions of the Yemeni civilian population. Yemeni parties must allow safe, rapid, and unimpeded access to all those in need, halt requirements that restrict women’s freedom of movement and impede delivery of humanitarian aid, and remove obstacles to the delivery of assistance, notably to the most vulnerable. All parties must comply with their obligations under international humanitarian law.

We reiterate our strong support to the United Nations and to UN Special Envoy Hans Grundberg for his efforts to resolve the conflict in Yemen.

We welcome the understanding reached in December 2023 between the Presidential Leadership Council and the Houthis that included a commitment on a set of measures to implement a nation-wide ceasefire and to improve living conditions in the country. We urge all involved parties and in particular the Houthis to engage in good faith in preparations for an inclusive political process in consultation with civil society and under UN auspices.

We call for accountability for human rights violations, including grave violations of children’s rights, and abuses and violations of international humanitarian law.

5. Syria

We remain committed to a Syrian-led and Syrian-owned political process, in line with UN Security Council resolution 2254, and we fully support the mandate of the UN Special Envoy, Geir O. Pedersen. We call on the Syrian regime to engage meaningfully with the UN-facilitated political process to achieve a peaceful solution to the crisis and national reconciliation. Normalization, reconstruction and lifting of sanctions would only be considered in the framework of a credible inclusive and enduring political process consistent with UNSC resolution 2254. Stability and peace in Syria cannot be achieved without the enduring defeat of Daesh. As members of the Global Coalition against Daesh we are committed to ending Daesh’s presence in Syria.

We remain committed to advancing justice for victims and accountability for all actors responsible for violations of international law in Syria, including international humanitarian law and international human rights law. We reiterate our condemnation of the use that the Syrian régime has made of chemical weapons in Syria. We continue to urge the Syrian regime to comply with its obligations under UNSCR 2118 and the Chemical Weapons Convention and to eliminate its chemical weapons programme completely and verifiably.

We continue to call for the immediate release of all civilians arbitrarily detained and to clarify the fate of those forcibly disappeared. We support the work of organizations such as the Commission of Inquiry and the International Independent and Impartial Mechanism, which document the crimes perpetrated in Syria. We stand ready to support the newly established UN Independent Institution for Missing Persons in Syria.

We will continue to support the Syrian people through humanitarian assistance to meet their needs, including early recovery assistance and measures fostering resilience, and demand that the regime facilitate unhindered humanitarian access to all Syrians, including through UN cross-border humanitarian assistance, for which there is no alternative. We remain grateful to regional countries for continuing to host Syrian refugees, and we call upon the Syrian regime to create the conditions for voluntary, safe, and dignified refugee returns.

The upcoming Eighth Brussels Conference on the Future of Syria and the Region is important in maintaining a high level of engagement and mobilisation of the international community in this regard.

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Foreign affairs

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16. With mild reported strike, Israel aims to bolster coalition to tackle Iran nuke threat

Excerpts:

In terms of practical consequence, the reported Israeli response, then, was apparently no remote parallel to Iran’s attack, which would have caused devastation were it not for the combination of US-led coalition forces and Israel’s multiple layers of air defense. According to those foreign reports we have to cite, it was also not launched directly from Israel but rather carried out by a few drones launched from inside Iran.

The choice of the Isfahan location would seem to constitute an obvious counter to the kind of threats issued by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ nuclear commander, Ahmad Haghtalab, who warned on Thursday that Iran might revise its nuclear doctrine were Israel to strike its nuclear facilities, and asserted that Iran had all the intelligence and capacities it needs to target Isrsael’s nuclear capacities. Israel, the message of the Isfahan mini-strike would appear to say, not only knows a great deal about Iran’s nuclear sites but can target them at will, including with attacks launched from inside Iran’s own territory.

According to Yadlin, the overall goal was to convey to the Iranians, “Pay attention; you are vulnerable.”

The official silence in Jerusalem gives Iran the potential to refrain from the “massive” response it has been promising to even the tiniest Israeli retaliation. Initially, at least, Iran would appear to be inclining in that direction. After a very few hours of apparent initial domestic chaos, Iran reopened its airports, clarified that it had not come under missile attack, declared its air defense had thwarted a drone attack, and asserted that no damage had been caused. A senior official was quoted saying there was no sign of an external attack and no immediate plan for retaliation against Israel.

With mild reported strike, Israel aims to bolster coalition to tackle Iran nuke threat

Attack at Isfahan sends warning to Iran, seeks to avoid escalation, reflects US calls for strategic thinking, keeps intact the alliance that helped defend Israel on Saturday

By DAVID HOROVITZ FOLLOW

Today, 1:13 pm

timesofisrael.com

The United States had implored Israel to think carefully and strategically when weighing a response to the hundreds of missiles and drones Iran launched at Israel overnight Saturday-Sunday.

Amid the limited reliable information emerging Friday about Israel’s reported retaliation, insistent official silence in Jerusalem, and the military censor’s requirement that any allegation and detailing of an Israeli retaliatory strike be attributed to overseas media reports, it appeared that the government had indeed taken that advice to heart.

After days of protracted war cabinet discussions, visits by foreign leaders urging caution, and innumerable consultations with the United States, it would appear that the reported Israeli response was far more symbolic than damaging — designed to send messages, preserve alliances, avoid any further escalation in the short term, and keep a focus on the strategic, indeed existential, imperative of ensuring that the regime in Iran does not attain a nuclear weapons capability.

The response also appears to have been designed with a greater government awareness than in recent months of the central importance of Israel’s relationship with the United States — and specifically with a Biden administration that rallied to Israel’s defense on Saturday night, that is maintaining the vital flow of military assistance for the war against Hamas and other defense needs, and that a very few hours before the reported Israeli strike single-handedly prevented UN recognition of Palestinian statehood.

The symbolism of the reported Israeli strike was unmistakable: Five days after the sole Israeli military target hit by Iran’s direct onslaught was the Nevatim Air Force Base, which sustained minor damage, Israel is said to have targeted an Iranian military base at Isfahan. According to the former IDF intelligence chief Amos Yadlin, the base in question is a kind of Iranian “equivalent to Nevatim” — an air base, used by combat aircraft and military transport planes, likely with air defense systems.

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It is also, Yadlin noted, close to a major Iranian nuclear facility for uranium enrichment. Several other military facilities are also located in the area.

File: Iranian students form a human chain outside the Isfahan Uranium Conversion Facility during a protest in the city in support of Iran’s nuclear program and against military threats by Israel on November 15, 2011. (AFP photo)

In terms of practical consequence, the reported Israeli response, then, was apparently no remote parallel to Iran’s attack, which would have caused devastation were it not for the combination of US-led coalition forces and Israel’s multiple layers of air defense. According to those foreign reports we have to cite, it was also not launched directly from Israel but rather carried out by a few drones launched from inside Iran.

The choice of the Isfahan location would seem to constitute an obvious counter to the kind of threats issued by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ nuclear commander, Ahmad Haghtalab, who warned on Thursday that Iran might revise its nuclear doctrine were Israel to strike its nuclear facilities, and asserted that Iran had all the intelligence and capacities it needs to target Isrsael’s nuclear capacities. Israel, the message of the Isfahan mini-strike would appear to say, not only knows a great deal about Iran’s nuclear sites but can target them at will, including with attacks launched from inside Iran’s own territory.

According to Yadlin, the overall goal was to convey to the Iranians, “Pay attention; you are vulnerable.”

The official silence in Jerusalem gives Iran the potential to refrain from the “massive” response it has been promising to even the tiniest Israeli retaliation. Initially, at least, Iran would appear to be inclining in that direction. After a very few hours of apparent initial domestic chaos, Iran reopened its airports, clarified that it had not come under missile attack, declared its air defense had thwarted a drone attack, and asserted that no damage had been caused. A senior official was quoted saying there was no sign of an external attack and no immediate plan for retaliation against Israel.

That could change in the coming hours and days, of course. But Israel, too, apparently sees no immediate danger of escalation, with no change to the current business-as-usual Home Front command regulations.

People cross a road along the beach in Tel Aviv on April 19, 2024, hours after a reported Israeli attack in Iran. (Jack Guez / AFP)

Characteristically, the only Israeli minister to have alluded to the reported Israeli strike as of this writing was the reliably irresponsible far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, who after Saturday night’s Iranian onslaught demanded that Israel “go crazy” in response. He tweeted a single word on Friday morning, best translated as “lame.”

If Ben Gvir was indeed referring to the reported Israeli retaliation, lame it certainly was, as far as we know right now, by comparison to Iran’s unprecedented direct assault on Israel.

But that assault was almost completely thwarted by a US-led coalition of European and regional states acting together with Israel in remarkable coordination and effectiveness, after years of joint training.

Iran’s assault reminded the international community of the dangers posed by the regime — not only to Israel, directly and via its proxies in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria and beyond, but to the entire international community.

And it underlined the devastating threat posed to the entire international community by this rapacious Islamic extremist regime in Tehran on its march to nuclear weapons.

The days since Iran’s attack have seen international movement toward intensified sanctions against Tehran, and toward the wider recognition of the IRGC as a terrorist organization — positive steps, though hardly likely to have the ayatollahs quaking. But Saturday night’s assault on Israel reminded the international community of how unthinkable an Islamic Republic with nuclear warheads atop those ballistic missiles would be, and hopefully will see the US-led international coalition working more assiduously to tackle the threat.

The danger of escalation has not passed. Indeed, fighting across the northern border has intensified over the past week, with Hezbollah stepping up its attacks, and Israel responding. (A single Hezbollah drone strike on Wednesday, which injured 18 people, several of them seriously, underlined the vast harm those Iranian projectiles would have caused were it not for the array of defenses.) Israel also hit targets in Syria overnight. Iran could yet choose to hit back at Israel indirectly, or at Israeli or Israeli-linked targets overseas. Again, these are the initial hours after yet another development in the endlessly fraught post-October 7 reality.

File: An Iranian technician works at the Isfahan Uranium Conversion Facilities, February 3, 2007. (AFP/ Behrouz Mehri)

But by striking back at Iran in the way it reportedly did, Jerusalem apparently sought to underline the message that Tehran is vulnerable, and to respond to Saturday night without prompting wider conflict and without alienating the new coalition, the better to galvanize international support for tackling the paramount Iranian nuclear threat.

In recent years, it has often seemed as though Israel was destined to have to try alone to thwart the ayatollahs’ march to the bomb. After Saturday night, that may no longer be the case. And what Israel did or didn’t do in the past few hours was evidently designed to maintain the possibility of concerted action.

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17. How Army special operators use deepfakes and drones to train for information warfare

SOF: Solve complex political-military problems and create dilemmas for adversaries. But I am sure this will be panned by some and I expect an over reaction from some quarters. Critics do not like "ungentlemanly warfare/"

Excerpts:

The basic idea behind Ghost Machine is not new—armies have broadcast the voices of collaborators to encourage allied surrender since at least World War II. In the 2010s, ARSOF members encouraged defections within Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony’s force by broadcasting messages from members’ families.

But those voice broadcasts required the physical presence and willing participation of the speaker. Now, an ARSOF soldier could theoretically copy an enemy’s commander’s voice from intercepted communications or public data, then use it to trick an enemy into thinking their commander had been captured.

The main limitations are hardware and the quantity of data on which to train the program, the instructor said, speaking at a stand displaying psychological warfare technology during ARSOF’s yearly capabilities exercise.

“If you have less performing hardware, you need a little bit more data. If you have high performing hardware, just a minute or 30 seconds [of audio] will do an outstanding job at cloning,” said the instructor, who asked to go by his first name, Achilles, due to Army Special Operations policy.

How Army special operators use deepfakes and drones to train for information warfare

One soldier helped create a voice-cloning program using off-the-shelf AI.

BY SAM SKOVE

STAFF WRITER

APRIL 18, 2024 04:22 PM ET

defenseone.com · by Sam Skove

FORT LIBERTY, North Carolina—With a sample of your voice and a gaming laptop, this Army psychological operations instructor can make you appear to say anything: an order for pizza, a call to the doctor, or just hello.

In peacetime, it’s a party trick. In war, it’s a tool that can be used for deception, luring enemies into traps, or encouraging defection by mimicking the voices of enemy soldiers.

Dubbed Ghost Machine, the tool helps Army Special Operations Forces instructors teach operators how cheap, easily-available tech is reshaping governments’ abilities to target and influence soldiers.

The basic idea behind Ghost Machine is not new—armies have broadcast the voices of collaborators to encourage allied surrender since at least World War II. In the 2010s, ARSOF members encouraged defections within Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony’s force by broadcasting messages from members’ families.

But those voice broadcasts required the physical presence and willing participation of the speaker. Now, an ARSOF soldier could theoretically copy an enemy’s commander’s voice from intercepted communications or public data, then use it to trick an enemy into thinking their commander had been captured.

The main limitations are hardware and the quantity of data on which to train the program, the instructor said, speaking at a stand displaying psychological warfare technology during ARSOF’s yearly capabilities exercise.

“If you have less performing hardware, you need a little bit more data. If you have high performing hardware, just a minute or 30 seconds [of audio] will do an outstanding job at cloning,” said the instructor, who asked to go by his first name, Achilles, due to Army Special Operations policy.

Ghost Machine is particularly good at replicating the voice of a man who runs a fake podcast for an ARSOF training scenario, thanks to the quantity of the data, Achilles said.

“We have gigabytes of his audio,” Achilles said. “When you use his voice in [Ghost Machine], it is perfect.” The copy is so good, it even accurately creates the breathing patterns and pauses of the podcaster, he added.

In one example loaded into the Ghost Machine, the program duplicated a fictional Chinese enemy commander telling his troops to surrender.

Achilles couldn’t speak to the accuracy of the automatic translation widget used to translate the English-language message into Chinese. However, he said its Spanish translation did a “really good job” based on his knowledge as a native speaker.

Achilles went through a special operations-funded project to train soldiers as software designers, then later helped launch the project. It was designed by one machine-learning engineer contractor, and took about six weeks from creation to final product.

The main costs for the program were training Achilles and hiring the contractor, he said. The program’s interface is run off the open-source Gradio app, and its algorithms are powered by commercially available artificial intelligence models.

A separate large language model used for exercises can create whole pieces of content—such as a radio script—based on the Republic of Pineland, the fictional country at the center of ARSOF’s Robin Sage exercise, Achilles said.

Getting audio in the right position for an enemy to hear it is another challenge, but other ARSOF instructors said they’re working on it.

In the past, units would set up speakers in the general direction of the enemy and pressing play. But that requires carting loudspeakers close to the front, and even then, the enemy may not hear the message if the speakers are not enormous.

Now, instructors teach students how speakers slung from drones can be flown toward enemy positions to blast messages, said Nathan, another soldier training ARSOF forces in psychological operations.

On display was a $40 speaker Nathan built out of car speaker parts—a skill he picked up growing up, he said.

The combination of speakers and drones is in part a reflection of tactics seen in Ukraine, he added, referring to numerous instances of Russian soldiers surrendering to Ukrainian drones. In one video, a Ukrainian drone drops surrender instructions to a Russian soldier, who then follows the drone back to Ukrainian lines.

The example shows how combining technological advancements with time-tested techniques— like dropping leaflets—can work, said ARSOF psychological operations soldiers.

After all, such drops require the U.S. to know the enemies’ “actual location,” adding a level of intimidation, said George, another ARSOF soldier.

defenseone.com · by Sam Skove

18. Secret Russian foreign policy document urges action to weaken the U.S.

Should not be a surprise to anyone.

Secret Russian foreign policy document urges action to weaken the U.S.

The Washington Post · by Catherine Belton · April 17, 2024

Russia’s Foreign Ministry has been drawing up plans to try to weaken its Western adversaries, including the United States, and leverage the Ukraine war to forge a global order free from what it sees as American dominance, according to a secret Foreign Ministry document.

In a classified addendum to Russia’s official — and public — “Foreign Policy Concept of the Russian Federation,” the ministry calls for an “offensive information campaign” and other measures spanning “the military-political, economic and trade and informational psychological spheres” against a “coalition of unfriendly countries” led by the United States.

“We need to continue adjusting our approach to relations with unfriendly states,” states the 2023 document, which was provided to The Washington Post by a European intelligence service. “It’s important to create a mechanism for finding the vulnerable points of their external and internal policies with the aim of developing practical steps to weaken Russia’s opponents.”

The document for the first time provides official confirmation and codification of what many in the Moscow elite say has become a hybrid war against the West. Russia is seeking to subvert Western support for Ukraine and disrupt the domestic politics of the United States and European countries, through propaganda campaigns supporting isolationist and extremist policies, according to Kremlin documents previously reported on by The Post. It is also seeking to refashion geopolitics, drawing closer to China, Iran and North Korea in an attempt to shift the current balance of power.

Using much tougher and blunter language than the public foreign policy document, the secret addendum, dated April 11, 2023, claims that the United States is leading a coalition of “unfriendly countries” aimed at weakening Russia because Moscow is “a threat to Western global hegemony.” The document says the outcome of Russia’s war in Ukraine will “to a great degree determine the outlines of the future world order,” a clear indication that Moscow sees the result of its invasion as inextricably bound with its ability — and that of other authoritarian nations — to impose its will globally.

The Foreign Policy Concept of the Russian Federation, which was published March 31, 2023, and approved by Russian President Vladimir Putin, deploys bland diplomatic language to call for “the democratization of international relations,” “sovereign equality” and the strengthening of Russia’s position on the global stage. Though the Foreign Policy Concept also charges that the United States and “its satellites” have used the Ukraine conflict to escalate “a many-years-long anti-Russia policy,” it also states that “Russia does not consider itself an enemy of the West … and has no ill intentions toward it.”

Russia hopes the West will “realize the lack of any future in its confrontational policy and hegemonistic ambitions, and will accept the complicated realities of the multipolar world,” the public document states.

The Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement that it did not comment “on the existence or nonexistence of internal ministry documents” and on the progress of work on them. “As we have stated several times on different levels, we can confirm the mood is to decisively combat the aggressive steps taken by the collective West as part of the hybrid war launched against Russia,” the ministry added.

Russia’s recent veto against extending U.N. monitoring of sanctions against North Korea over its nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles program, effectively ending 14 years of cooperation, was “a clear sign” that the work contemplated in the classified addendum is already underway, said a leading Russian academic with close ties to senior Russian diplomats. The academic spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive deliberations in Moscow.

“Russia can create difficulties for the U.S. in many different regions of the world,” the academic said. “This is about the Middle East, northeast Asia, the African continent and even Latin America.”

The creation of the Foreign Policy Concept and the classified addendum followed a call to Russian academics for policy suggestions. One proposal submitted in February 2023 to the Foreign Ministry by the deputy head of Moscow’s Institute for the Commonwealth of Independent States, which maintains close ties to Russia’s security apparatus, laid out Russia’s options more bluntly still.

The academic, Vladimir Zharikhin, called for Russia to “continue to facilitate the coming to power of isolationist right-wing forces in America,” “enable the destabilization of Latin American countries and the rise to power of extremist forces on the far left and far right there,” as well as facilitate “the restoration of European countries’ sovereignty by supporting parties dissatisfied with economic pressure from the U.S.”

Other points in the policy proposal, which was also provided to The Post, suggested that Moscow stoke conflict between the United States and China over Taiwan to bring Russia and China closer together, as well as “to escalate the situation in the Middle East around Israel, Iran and Syria to distract the U.S. with the problems of this region.”

Zharikhin declined to discuss his proposal.

Western officials have warned that Russia has been escalating its propaganda and influence campaigns over the past two years as it seeks to undermine support for Ukraine. As part of that, it has sought to create a new global divide, with Russian propaganda efforts against the West resonating in many countries in the Middle East, Africa, Latin America and Asia.

“I think the U.S. was convinced that the rest of the world — North and South — would support the U.S. in the conflict with Russia and it turned out that this was not true,” Zharikhin told The Post in an earlier interview. “This demonstrates the single polar world is over, and the U.S. doesn’t want to come to terms with this.”

For Mikhail Khodorkovsky — the longtime Putin critic who was once Russia’s richest man until a clash with the Kremlin landed him 10 years in prison — it is not surprising that Russia is seeking to do everything it can to undermine the United States. “For Putin, it is absolutely natural that he should try to create the maximum number of problems for the U.S.,” he said. “The task is to take the U.S. out of the game, and then destroy NATO. This doesn’t mean dissolving it, but to create the feeling among people that NATO isn’t defending them.”

The long congressional standoff on providing more weapons to Ukraine was only making it easier for Russia to challenge Washington’s global power, he said.

“The Americans consider that insofar as they are not directly participating in the war [in Ukraine], then any loss is not their loss,” Khodorkovsky said. “This is an absolute misunderstanding.”

A defeat for Ukraine, he said, “means that many will stop fearing challenging the U.S.” and the costs for the United States will only increase.

The Washington Post · by Catherine Belton · April 17, 2024

19. FBI says Chinese hackers preparing to attack US infrastructure

The two words I always use: Unrestricted Warfare.

FBI says Chinese hackers preparing to attack US infrastructure

aol.com · by AOL Staff

By Christopher Bing

Nashville, Tennessee (Reuters) - Chinese government-linked hackers have burrowed into U.S. critical infrastructure and are waiting "for just the right moment to deal a devastating blow," FBI Director Christopher Wray said on Thursday.

An ongoing Chinese hacking campaign known as Volt Typhoon has successfully gained access to numerous American companies in telecommunications, energy, water and other critical sectors, with 23 pipeline operators targeted, Wray said in a speech at Vanderbilt University.

China is developing the "ability to physically wreak havoc on our critical infrastructure at a time of its choosing," Wray said at the 2024 Vanderbilt Summit on Modern Conflict and Emerging Threats. "Its plan is to land low blows against civilian infrastructure to try to induce panic."

Wray said it was difficult to determine the intent of this cyber pre-positioning which was aligned with China's broader intent to deter the U.S. from defending Taiwan.

China claims democratically governed Taiwan as its own territory and has never renounced the use of force to bring the island under its control. Taiwan strongly objects to China's sovereignty claims and says only the island's people can decide their future.

Earlier this week, a Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson said Volt Typhoon was in fact unrelated to China's government, but is part of a criminal ransomware group.

In a statement, China's Embassy in Washington referred back to the MFA spokesperson's comment. "Some in the US have been using origin-tracing of cyberattacks as a tool to hit and frame China, claiming the US to be the victim while it's the other way round, and politicizing cybersecurity issues."

Wray said China's hackers operated a series of botnets - constellations of compromised personal computers and servers around the globe - to conceal their malicious cyber activities. Private sector American technology and cybersecurity companies previously attributed Volt Typhoon to China, including reports by security researchers with Microsoft and Google.

(Reporting by Christopher Bing; Editing by Richard Chang)

aol.com · by AOL Staff

20. Unpacking the FISA Section 702 Reauthorization Bill

For the lawyers and civil liberties and intelligence experts.

Unpacking the FISA Section 702 Reauthorization Bill

justsecurity.org · by David Aaron · April 18, 2024

April 18, 2024

As another sunset of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Section 702 authorities looms, the House of Representatives has passed a compromise bill, the “Reforming Intelligence and Securing America Act,” H.R. 7888 (RISAA), which the Senate is now considering.

The bill would reauthorize Section 702 – the controversial law that allows the U.S. government to acquire communications of non-Americans outside the United States without a warrant – and make a range of changes to FISA overall. It has something to interest everyone, from addressing the use of U.S. person query terms to formalizing oversight measures to a technical expansion of the type of service provider that can be compelled to help the U.S. government acquire communications. The changes are a combination of direct responses to legislative gaps and real or perceived Executive Branch transgressions, codifying existing practices, and updating FISA in ways that are evolutionary, but not radical. Taken together, they appear to reflect deep dissatisfaction with how the Executive Branch has implemented aspects of FISA, paired with a recognition of the need to permit essential national security operations to continue under the supervision of all three branches of government.

FISA and Section 702

FISA was enacted in 1978, largely as a means to impose a framework and limits on domestic national security surveillance. Such surveillance had grown in size, scope, and creativity over the preceding decades, and entities such as the Church Committee uncovered a stunning range of misguided and abusive activities. FISA brought domestic national security surveillance within the judicial system. It created the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) and empowered it to issue orders authorizing national security electronic surveillance upon a showing by the government that, among other things, the target of such surveillance is a foreign power or agent of a foreign power. Similar to applications for criminal search warrants, investigative targets are not represented in FISC proceedings (informing criminal or national security subjects that they are being investigated is counterproductive). FISA also established the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review (FISCR), a court to which the government can appeal FISC orders or denials. For U.S. persons (U.S. citizens or lawful permanent residents) to be “agents of a foreign power,” their activity generally must implicate U.S. criminal laws. See 50 U.S.C. § 1801(b)(2). FISA has been amended multiple times, for example to authorize the FISC to issue orders for national security physical searches and to establish a panel of amici to provide the FISC and FISCR with neutral support from experts from outside of government.

Whereas most FISA authorities require the government to make particularized showings to the FISC and obtain orders specific to particular targets, Section 702 of FISA, which was added in 2008 as part of the FISA Amendments Act (FAA), is different. It targets non-U.S. persons who are outside the United States and authorizes the government to compel certain communication service providers within the United States to assist the government in acquiring those targets’ communications. Such targets are not subject to Fourth Amendment protection. As a result, rather than obtain orders identifying and authorizing each target, under Section 702 the Attorney General (AG) and Director of National Intelligence (DNI) submit a “certification” to the FISC, which the FISC can authorize for up to one year.

A certification, among other things, describes targeting procedures the government will use to ensure that only non-U.S. persons outside the United States will be targeted, minimization procedures the government will apply to its acquisition, retention, and dissemination of collected information, and (as a recent addition) query procedures governing the use of U.S. person identifiers, such as names, telephone numbers, and email addresses, to search information that has already been collected under Section 702. Although Section 702 prohibits “reverse targeting” – collecting communications of an eligible target for the purpose of targeting a specific person in the United States – queries are run against information that has already been collected.

Section 702 has a built-in sunset provision under which its authorities periodically expire. Not for the first time, Congress enacted a brief extension of Section 702 in the National Defense Authorization Act at the end of 2023. Section 702 is now scheduled to expire on April 19, 2024, unless it is extended. The sunset clause for Section 702, however, has a continuation provision that allows certifications that are already in place to remain effective until their expiration date, even if the statute expires. See Pub. L. 11-261 § 404(b)(1), as amended.

Reauthorization of Section 702

Section 19 of RISAA would extend the sunset of Section 702 for two years from the date of the bill’s enactment. This is a shorter sunset provision than prior reauthorizations contained.

Section 21 would require the government to obtain new certifications within 90 days of enactment to replace any certifications that were obtained during the short-term extension of Section 702. Any such certifications would otherwise remain in effect for the remainder of their one-year duration. This would apply the new RISAA requirements sooner than such certifications’ expiration.

Section 702 Query Procedure Reform

Congress recently added the requirement for query procedures to Section 702. The statute currently allows the government to query “information” collection under Section 702 pursuant to querying procedures. Querying procedures must be “consistent with the requirements of the fourth amendment” and ensure that agencies keep records of each U.S. person identifier used for a query. Those records are available for after-the-fact internal and external oversight. Absent an emergency such as an imminent threat to life, the FBI may only review the “contents” (a subset of “information” that does not include metadata) of communications retrieved through a query used in a non-national security criminal investigation if the FISC finds probable cause to believe that those contents include evidence of a criminal activity, contraband, fruits of a crime, or property used to commit a crime. See 50 U.S.C. § 1881a(f)(2)(C), (D).

The FBI’s authority to use U.S. person identifiers to query information previously collected under Section 702 has been debated and discussed at length. A recent panel discussion (which I co-moderated) summarized different constituencies’ views of some of the operational, policy, and constitutional considerations. Some consider U.S. person queries to be a “back door” search for U.S. person communications without a warrant, while others consider them to be an operationally important search of material that has already been lawfully collected. Bills in the most recent reauthorization cycle emerging from the House Judiciary Committee, House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI), and Senate Judiciary Committee each approached the issue differently.

The RISAA compromise, set forth in Section 2, would not impose a warrant requirement. Its title asserts that it would “Strictly Limit” FBI queries of unminimized Section 702-acquired information using U.S. person identifiers. The new limits would include a requirement that an FBI supervisor or attorney approve such queries. Political appointees would be ineligible to approve queries, and only FBI personnel who are approved to access raw FISA-acquired information (in other words, information to which investigators have not applied minimization procedures) could approve requests – which in practical terms means they would have to have received mandatory training in FISA-related procedures.

This is a far cry from a search warrant or other court approval, but it adds a metaphorical “grownup in the room” when line agents, who can have less experience, conduct intrusive searches of Americans’ communications. This reduces the likelihood that an agent, however well-intentioned, might transgress based on a misunderstanding of the rules. The bill would also enhance individual accountability by requiring the FBI to maintain written records of queries (including its justification) and requiring the Department of Justice to review queries within 180 days of when they were conducted. Based on personal experience, Justice Department reviews of agencies’ compliance with FISA and National Security Investigation rules can be very thorough, and – along with agency self-reporting – have been an important means of identifying compliance and implementation issues.

The query provision also requires that any FBI personnel who conduct queries must receive annual training on applicable procedures. “Sensitive” queries – such as queries using terms associated with elected officials, politicians, media organizations and figures, and religious organizations and figures – would require higher-level approvals, as would queries run using “batch job” technology (for a discussion of batch jobs, see the Privacy and Civil Liberties Board (PCLOB) 2023 Report on Section 702 at 101 and this explainer from Lawfare).

In addition, the query provision would prohibit FBI database checks from automatically running against raw Section 702-acquired information by default. Rather, when an FBI agent or analyst uses any tool that pulls information from multiple data stores, they would have to affirmatively opt in to searching against Section 702-acquired data, which would likely require them to affirm that they understood the applicable rules.

The House also included limitations on the FBI’s authority to conduct queries using the identifiers of Members of Congress. For queries related to investigations, the FBI would be required to notify Congressional leadership and the subject of the query, to the extent consistent with national security considerations, which could include maintaining the integrity of an investigation. And the FBI would require a Member’s consent before using their identifiers in a query to support a counterintelligence defensive briefing.

In sum, the query procedure modifications would add some degree of responsibility and accountability that Section 702 did not previously require. Some individual requirements seem sufficiently specific that they are likely responses to particular incidents. These will not satisfy those who consider a query of previously collected data to constitute a search under the Fourth Amendment, and probably will provide sufficient flexibility to potentially aggravate, but not impede, operators who seek to query raw data.

Other Changes to Acquisition and Use Under Section 702

Separately, Section 3 of RISAA would prohibit the FBI from conducting queries of raw Section 702-acquired information (information to which the minimization procedures have not been applied) solely to find evidence of a crime, absent a serious emergency. The bill would permit queries designed to identify information that the government is required to preserve or produce in discovery, such as Brady material.

Section 3 would also prohibit the FBI from ingesting unminimized data into analytic repositories unless the target from whom the data was collected is “relevant to an existing, open, predicated full national security investigation.” The FBI can only open a “full” investigation under circumstances described in Justice Department guidelines, so this rule incorporates a tangible threshold. It is less clear what the scope of “analytic” repositories is and the extent to which FBI systems might fall outside that definition.

Section 22 would repeal the government’s authority to use “abouts” collection. “Abouts” collection refers to the use of a selection term associated with a target, such as an email address, to acquire communications that are not to or from that target. See 50 U.S.C. § 1881a(m)(4)(B)(i). Such collection is currently prohibited unless the AG and DNI initiate a specified Congressional process described in 103(b) of the 2017 FAA reauthorization. RISAA would eliminate the possibility of the AG and DNI re-initiating abouts collection.

Section 24 would require Section 702-related procedures to facilitate vetting of non-U.S. persons traveling to the United States. The use of Section 702-acquired information for vetting purposes was discussed, for example, in the PCLOB 2023 Report on Section 702. The PCLOB found that “[v]etting is a crucial national security function, and Congress should make clear that Section 702 may be utilized to support it,” and expressed concern that the government might lawfully possess Section 702-acquired information that it was not allowed to access for such a purpose. According to the PCLOB, the National Security Agency (NSA) querying procedures were amended in April 2023 to permit such queries. See PCLOB 2023 Report at 97. RISAA would go a step further and require those procedures to permit the use of queries for vetting.

Section 5, discussed further below, would also create a presumption that the FISC would consult independent legal and/or technical experts as amici when considering Section 702 certifications or procedures by requiring the FISC to consult amici absent an affirmative finding that such consultation was not appropriate.

Changes to Fundamental Definitions

Section 23 would expand the definition of “foreign intelligence information” to include the international production distribution, or financing of certain drugs, including drugs “driving overdose deaths,” such as opioids. This is significant because Section 702 certifications and targeting decisions are predicated on the acquisition of foreign intelligence information (and the term is also one important pillar of “traditional” FISA). In July 2023, the DNI disclosed that “there are three Certifications under Section 702, covering the following categories of foreign intelligence: (1) foreign governments and related entities, (2) counterterrorism, and (3) combatting proliferation.” Adding to the definition of foreign intelligence information could potentially lead to an additional certification and/or an expansion of the scope and volume of Section 702 collection.

Section 25 would expand the definition of “Electronic Communication Service Provider” (ECSP), which determines the range of entities that the government can compel to provide assistance in acquiring communications under Section 702. The definition currently includes (A) telecommunications carriers; (B) providers of electronic communications service (ECS) (cross-referencing the Wiretap Act); (C) providers of remote computing service (RCS) (cross-referencing the Stored Communications Act); (D) “any other communication service provider who has access to wire or electronic communications either as such communications are transmitted or as such communications are stored;” and (E) an officer, employee, or agent of any of the listed types of entities.

Similar to an earlier HPSCI bill, RISAA would add another type of provider: a service provider that “has access to equipment that is being or may be used to transmit or store wire or electronic communications,” but would not qualify under any of the existing definitions. It would also add “custodians” to the list of individuals who could qualify. These additions, which appeared in the Protect America Act (which preceded the FAA), appear to have been proposed in response to a 2022 FISC decision, which the FISCR affirmed in 2023, finding that a provider that the government sought to serve with a Section 702 directive was not an ECSP, and therefore could not be compelled to provide assistance. The publicly released versions of the opinions were subjected to extensive use of the government’s “black highlighters,” and do not disclose the type of service the provider offered. A recent New York Times article, however, reported that the recipient was a data center. The Times described data centers as “centralized warehouses of computer servers that can be accessed over the internet from anywhere in the world” that are “increasingly operated by third parties that rent out the storage space and computing power that make other companies’ online services work.”

The application of this amendment, of course, will not necessarily be limited to the specific use addressed in the FISC and FISCR opinions. The provider of any internet or communications infrastructure service that is not covered by the existing definition could potentially be implicated, if the provider is subject to U.S. jurisdiction and the target of acquisition is a non-U.S. person outside the United States.

There has been public speculation about whether the expanded definition could bring businesses such as hotels and coffee shops that provide internet connectivity within the scope of Section 702. To the extent that such entities are not already ECSPs, such as by operating as an ECS or RCS, the expansion would only appear to implicate them to the extent they could help acquire non-Americans’ communications overseas. The definitional change does not affect other limitations of the statute, so even under the HPSCI bill, Section 702 could still not be used to compel a hotel, coffee shop, store, or other establishment within the United States to provide any assistance to the government. Still, in response to concerns about the expansion, the RISAA definition includes exceptions that the HPSCI bill did not. The proposed new definition of ECSP would exclude “any entity that serves primarily as” a public accommodation facility, dwelling, community facility, or food service establishment.

Changes to FISC and FISA Applications

RISAA proposes to change how the government obtains particularized orders under “traditional” FISA – the sections of FISA under which the FISC can authorize electronic surveillance and physical search of U.S. persons and within the United States. Here are some notable provisions.

Accuracy. FISA applications are generally supported by sworn declarations of Headquarters-based supervisory agents, sometimes referred to as “program managers.” See, e.g., Justice Department OIG 2019 FISA Report at 44. Program managers do not conduct the investigation or collect the information underlying FISA applications; rather, they rely on information from the case agent in the field who is seeking FISA authorities. The FBI applies accuracy procedures, sometimes referred to as “Woods Procedures,” to confirm that “the factual assertions contained in the application are accurate.” Records relating to the application of accuracy procedures are subject to Justice Department review. Rule 13(a) of the FISC’s rules requires the government to disclose, correct, and explain material misstatements or omissions in FISA applications.

Section 10 of RISAA would bring the accuracy procedures into FISA itself, thereby codifying (and potentially modifying) processes and understandings among the Justice Department, the Intelligence Community, and the FISC. Moreover, it would add a requirement for the government to disclose to the FISC “exculpatory” information about the target, similar to prosecutors’ Brady and Giglio obligations in criminal discovery.

FISC Procedures. FISC orders authorizing electronic surveillance are limited in duration, so the government must seek renewed authorization to continue such surveillance before an order expires. Section 5 would require the government to present a request to renew FISC authorization to conduct electronic surveillance to the same FISC judge that authorized the initiation of that surveillance, subject to certain exceptions. This could potentially present logistical challenges and, particularly given the very involved role of FISC staff attorneys in the evaluation of FISA applications, it is not entirely clear how significant a problem this would solve.

Section 5 would also require the FISC to “designate one or more attorneys” to review applications for electronic surveillance of a U.S. person and present analyses to the court. This appears to simply codify the FISC’s longstanding practice of employing highly experienced attorneys to fulfill that purpose and others.

Section 5 would also grant certain Members of Congress and their designees with access to FISC proceedings. Observers should stay tuned on this seemingly arcane point; it is not clear to outsiders how the Justice Department, the Intelligence Community, or the FISC would react.

Applications. Section 6 appears to be a reaction to recent commentary regarding publicized FISA applications. It would require factual declarations supporting FISA applications to be “sworn,” which they already are. Section 6 would also prohibit the use in FISA applications of information obtained from a political organization unless the organization is clearly identified, the information has been corroborated, and the factual declaration describes the investigative techniques used to corroborate the information. It would similarly require identification and certain disclosures about any news media reports on which an application relies.

Section 6 would also increase the government’s burden to explain other, presumably less intrusive, investigative techniques it used before applying for authority to conduct electronic surveillance of a U.S. person; such assertions are currently required at a more general level in the certifications (not to be confused with Section 702 certifications) that high-level FBI or other Intelligence Community agency officials submit as art of FISA applications. Section 6 would similarly require the government to provide more detail in renewal applications about the need to continue implementing FISA authorities.

Interestingly, Section 6 would impose a new pleading requirement specifically when the government seeks electronic surveillance or physical search authority based on one way a target can act as an “agent of a foreign power”: by engaging in “clandestine intelligence activities,” other than intelligence-gathering, “for or on behalf of an intelligence service or network of a foreign power” and pursuant to its direction. Currently, a U.S. person can only be targeted (i.e., found to be an agent of a foreign power) for engaging in such activities when those activities “involve or are about to involve a violation of the criminal statutes of the United States.” 50 U.S.C. § 1801(b)(2)(B). The official providing the factual basis for a FISA application, who is usually an FBI agent, currently must set forth the facts and circumstances justifying a belief that the target is an agent of a foreign power, see 50 U.S.C. § 1804(a)(3)(A), and this particular definition of “agent of a foreign power” already incorporates a criminal violation. But Section 6 would require an application based on to specifically state the basis to believe that “a violation of the criminal statutes referred to in [Section 1801(b)(2)(B)] has occurred or is about to occur.” This may be a response to a specific issue, but its inclusion in a bill that also adds the requirement for a “sworn” statement and enhances accuracy requirements, as described above, and imposes penalties for government officials relating to FISA applications, described below, evinces Congressional concern about accuracy and accountability. The fact that this requirement only applies to allegations that the target is engaged in clandestine intelligence activities other than intelligence collection – such as spreading disinformation, collecting unclassified information, or harassing dissidents at the direction of a foreign intelligence service – is interesting.

Transparency, Oversight, Consequences, and Future Reform

Conducting classified domestic operations in a democracy presents inevitable and enduring challenges when it comes to balancing national security and government transparency. Section 7 of RISAA would add a specific deadline to FISA’s existing requirement for the DNI and AG to conduct declassification reviews of significant FISC and FISCR opinions. Section 8 would require FISC hearings to be transcribed, much like other court proceedings. Section 9 would require a Justice Department Inspector General audit of FBI querying practices.

RISAA would also impose consequences for noncompliance with FISA requirements. Section 12 would require the FBI to implement “measures for holding the executive leadership of each covered component appropriately accountable for ensuring compliance” with FISA procedures. The FBI would be required to report to Congress regarding this and other FISA-related disciplinary measures. Section 13 would criminalize unauthorized disclosure of FISA applications or of classified Section 702-acquired information to which a U.S. person is a party (both of which likely could be prosecuted under existing law). Section 13 would also add a sentencing enhancement for false declarations before the FISC.

Section 16 would require the FBI to implement “minimum accountability standards” for noncompliance with limits on using U.S. person identifiers to query Section 702, and Section 17 would require adverse employment actions against any federal officer who engages in misconduct regarding proceedings before the FISC.

Looking Forward. Sections 18(b) would direct a study to be made of the potential use of technology to monitor the FBI’s compliance with Section 702-related rules. Section 18(c) would charter a FISA Reform Commission to “consider ongoing reforms” to FISA.

IMAGE: The moon rises over the U.S. Capitol Dome at sunset in Washington, D.C., on Dec. 28, 2020. (Photo by SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images)

justsecurity.org · by David Aaron · April 18, 2024

21. Information operations will be 'foundational' to future DOD efforts, Cybercom chief says

Information operations will be 'foundational' to future DOD efforts, Cybercom chief says

In addition to conducting information operations, the military must begin preparing for how service members and commanders will themselves be targeted, according to Gen. Timothy Haugh.

MARK POMERLEAU

APRIL 17, 2024

defensescoop.com · by Mark Pomerleau · April 17, 2024

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Information operations and activities in the information environment will be “foundational” and important for most everything the Department of Defense will be doing in the future, according to the commander of U.S. Cyber Command.

“I think that largely, information operations are foundational for every operation that the department will do going forward. We have to be thinking about the information environment component of those activities,” Gen. Timothy Haugh, who also leads the National Security Agency, said at the Summit on Modern Conflict and Emerging Threats, hosted by Vanderbilt University, on Wednesday.

In recent years, adversaries have sought to exploit the information environment through disinformation, misinformation, information ops and other activities as a means of undermining U.S. and allied interests without having to confront them in direct military conflict.

The Pentagon has sought to play catch-up of sorts, releasing updates to doctrine and strategy — and the services themselves issuing their own guidance within the information realm.

The DOD has also shifted its mindset in recent years to a stance of perpetual competition. Adversaries have viewed conflict on a continuum while the U.S. has traditionally viewed it as a binary state of either war or peace. The Joint Concept for Competing, released last year, formally recognizes that the department is engaged in a competition on a daily basis below the threshold of all-out conflict.

Additionally, given that much of this information capability will be delivered via cyber means, Cybercom will play a big role in the information environment going forward.

Haugh said the Russia-Ukraine conflict provides some real-world evidence of the importance of the information environment and how certain operations, such as strategic disclosures, can help thwart adversarial efforts.

“The fact that the United States really used sensitive intelligence to be able to demonstrate to the world what we believed Russia was going to do [and] when they were going to do it, too, really set the tone of this is what it means to be for the international dialogue. That was in and of itself a strategic use of information to be able to drive support,” he said regarding the strategic disclosures of intelligence ahead of Russia’s invasion.

Haugh noted that defense officials need to be mindful of how information capabilities will be used against U.S. forces.

“The other aspects, I think, from a military perspective that we need to be thinking about [is] how are we preparing our force for their likely involvement in a conflict and what will the information operations look like targeting our military force?” he said. “How well are we prepared for that? Is that an area that commanders talk about and they’re going to receive messages that are personalized on their own devices? Those are things we need to be thinking about how we prepare.”

During its 2014 incursion into Ukraine, Russia demonstrated the adept ability to target Ukrainian soldiers’ personal devices with tailored messages, something U.S forces took great interest in.

Information operations can also be conducted in the civilian or corporate worlds — something the U.S. government also must be mindful of.

“It’s not just within a military environment. I think we have seen some shifts in the cybercrime world that have already moved to information operations … Not just ransomware holding things at risk, but hacking and extracting information that is now held as a coercive tool for a ransom that is really about the disclosure of information,” Haugh explained. “It’s not just something that is within a military domain or between nations. This can be very personal for any business in the Western society that’s targeted by an actor and coerced based off of a hacking activity that will disclose information, [that] will either to be embarrassing or do some form of competitive advantage. It’s a part of our daily lives and it’s certainly going to be a part of military activities moving forward.”

When it comes to deterring China and being prepared for what Beijing could do, Haugh explained the U.S. must me mindful of how its potential adversary would use information capabilities.

“The area that I think that we have to really be mindful of, is thinking about what the information environment would look like in a crisis with China and how they would use the tools that are available to them in the information environment and what would be the implications of that, both within the region and with our population,” he said.

China’s use of misinformation and disinformation in the Pacific region and across the world to influence various populations, has concerned many.

“The execution of propaganda, misinformation and disinformation is a real concern for me. It should be a real concern for all of the United States. The [People’s Republic of China’s] ability to influence our information environment is concerning,” Adm. John Aquilino, commander of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, said in March before the Senate Armed Services Committee.

One recent example he provided the committee was the notion being put forth that the West — and particularly, the U.S. — is in decline, while China is rising.

“That is Chinese propaganda. Our economy continues to grow, theirs is in the cellar. So, the actions in the information space, ultimately, it was being reported all over the United States. That’s the expansive ability of mis- and disinformation to influence the United States,” he said. “We ought to understand that it’s occurring and we ought to understand that our free and open media and the truth that we project is a critical value of the United States, it’s one to be protected. But we have to call out the mis- and disinformation to stop that ability to influence.”

Aquilino noted that the best way to combat behavior like this is to “expose the bad and amplify the good.”

“We have to understand how media is used in the People’s Republic of China, oh, by the way, and in Russia, because it’s a similar problem … But it is not what we see in our media. We have to understand what’s occurring in the differences, we have to value it and then we have to expose it,” he said.

The U.S. government has taken the approach of exposing adversary activities — be it by releasing malware samples they use, declassifying videos of their actions, or other methods — as a key way to beat back their malevolent efforts by shaming these actors and revealing their tactics so organizations can develop countermeasures, in addition to declassifying intelligence.

Aquilino’s successor told Congress as part of his confirmation process, that he plans to use information tools and work with other government agencies to maximize information capabilities to beat back and expose malign Chinese behavior.

“We must also employ information-related capabilities to transparently bring attention to malign behavior, such as the United States and our partners publicly releasing video of coercive and risky [People’s Liberation Army] intercepts of our lawfully operating ships and aircraft. If confirmed, I will assess current information-related capabilities and consider all viable options to improve our information operations posture and readiness,” Adm. Samuel Paparo wrote in responses to senators‘ questions. “It is critical that we continue highlighting malign PRC activities in the information environment.”

Paparo also indicated he may be inclined to use the strategic disclosure playbook that officials believed were successful against Russia, in the region against Chinese behavior.

“[W]e learned how the timely sharing of previously classified intelligence with our partners and the public revealed Russia’s imminent plans for an attack and helped spur the international community to act in support of Ukraine. Timely transparency can be an effective tool to counter aggression,” Paparo said. A similar tactic could be used to expose China’s activity towards Taiwan, he added, suggesting he could provide more details to lawmakers in a classified setting.

Written by Mark Pomerleau

Mark Pomerleau is a reporter for DefenseScoop, covering information warfare and cyberspace.

defensescoop.com · by Mark Pomerleau · April 17, 2024

22. Defying Niger exit order leaves U.S. troops vulnerable, whistleblower says

It does sound like the troops are in limbo - can't do their job and can't leave. Is this a "catch-22?"

Defying Niger exit order leaves U.S. troops vulnerable, whistleblower says

Deployed Americans are in limbo, unable to do their jobs or go home while State Department seeks to extend military presence, complaint contends

By John Hudson, Dan Lamothe, Rachel Chason and Alex Horton

April 17, 2024 at 6:52 p.m. EDT

The Washington Post · by John Hudson · April 17, 2024

A senior U.S. Air Force leader deployed in Niger is raising an alarm over the Biden administration’s reluctance to heed an eviction notice from the military junta that last year overthrew the West African nation’s democratically elected government.

The airman, in a private whistleblower complaint to Congress obtained by The Washington Post, accused top officials at the U.S. Embassy in Niger’s capital of Niamey of having “intentionally suppressed intelligence” as they seek to maintain the “facade of a great country-to-country relationship.” The embassy’s actions, the whistleblower wrote, have “potential implications” for U.S. relations with other African nations “and the safety of our personnel in the region.”

The State Department and Defense Department rejected the claims of negligence, saying the United States is making a final push to maintain a U.S. military presence in post-coup Niger, though they acknowledge that talks are difficult and may fail to produce an agreement.

The whistleblower complaint was transmitted to Capitol Hill before U.S. officials met Wednesday with Niger’s prime minister. Follow-on discussions with other senior Nigerien officials were scheduled for next week — talks that may seal the fate of Washington’s relationship with what had been its chief security partner in a region beset by violence from groups linked to the Islamic State and al-Qaeda.

“There’s a very narrow path here to finding an accommodation that addresses their interests and concerns and our interests and concerns,” said a senior State Department official, who like some others spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the Biden administration’s diplomatic efforts. “It may not work, but the fat lady hasn’t sung yet.”

U.S. military whistleblower warns troops in Niger are vulnerable

View the Whistleblower’s private complaint to Congress

The whistleblower’s allegations highlight the difficulties for the United States in operating in a region of Africa that is increasingly unstable. In 2017, four American soldiers were killed after being ambushed on a mission in Niger, which military investigators blamed on poor training, planning and other institutional failures.

For years, the Pentagon has deployed a mix of mostly Air Force and Army personnel to Niger to support a mission scrutinizing militant groups in the region. Until the coup, the arrangement included drones flying in counterterrorism operations from a base the United States built and U.S. and Nigerien troops partnering on some patrols.

Niger’s military junta last month declared the U.S. military presence there “illegal” and said that it was ending all accords, effective immediately. That announcement followed tense meetings with top officials from the State Department and the Pentagon, whom Nigerien leaders accused of attempting to dictate that the West African nation have no relationship with Iran, Russia or other U.S. adversaries.

In his complaint, directed to Rep. Dusty Johnson (R-S.D.) and other lawmakers, the whistleblower takes aim at Ambassador Kathleen FitzGibbon and Air Force Col. Nora J. Nelson-Richter, the defense attaché posted there, accusing both of jeopardizing the safety of 1,100 American military personnel who are “being held hostage” in Niger while a diplomatic resolution remains elusive.

Officials at the U.S. Embassy referred questions to the State Department in Washington, which denied the whistleblower’s claims. A spokesperson for Johnson’s office declined to comment, saying they don’t discuss possible constituent correspondence.

The complaint reveals new details about the status of U.S. forces in Niger and the restrictions on their ability to swap out personnel. After the coup, the whistleblower wrote, service members were told to “sit and hold” on their bases, leaving them unable either to carry out their counterterrorism mission or return to the United States after their six-month deployment reached its scheduled conclusion.

“They failed to be transparent with U.S. service members deployed to this country,” the airman wrote of the embassy’s top officials, adding that while they “gave a pretense that ‘things were being worked,’ ” required permissions to fly U.S. military aircraft in Nigerien airspace were purposely “not being approved by the country’s military government as a political bargaining chip to entice the U.S. government back to negotiate their withdrawal.”

Reached by phone, the whistleblower declined to comment, citing a fear of professional reprisal and safety concerns. The Post verified the individual’s name, rank and assignment, but generally does not identify whistleblowers who make protected communications to Congress.

Senior U.S. officials said they sympathized with concerns posed by personnel who have been unable to carry out their duties since last summer’s coup, but they rejected the whistleblower’s claim that embassy leaders had suppressed intelligence or put U.S. troops at risk.

“No one is suppressing any information: We’re seeing the good, the bad, and the ugly. It’s feeding into the deliberative process,” said the senior State Department official. “To this person, it might be slow.”

Gen. Michael Langley, who oversees U.S. military activity in Africa, confirmed in a statement to The Post that some diplomatic clearances for military flights recently have been denied, extending the deployments of U.S. troops in some cases. Senior leaders in his headquarters, he said, are working closely with the State Department and other organizations to make sure that U.S. forces deployed in Niger have what they need.

While the Defense Department “paused” numerous activities in Niger following the coup in July, Langley said, “we greatly value and appreciate the U.S. forces deployed to the region, who continue to enable the [Defense Department] to monitor for potential threats throughout the Sahel in order to protect U.S. personnel, assets and interests, including the welfare of our partners.”

A U.S. defense official said that some units have rotated in and out of Niger since the coup, while other deployments have been extended.

“But this is not uncommon,” the defense official said, “particularly in distant locations.”

When asked during a House Armed Services Committee hearing on Tuesday about the halting of flights into Niger, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy A. George said he was aware it was an issue.

Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), who said at the hearing that he’s spoken to a half-dozen U.S. personnel serving in Niger, criticized George and his civilian counterpart, Army Secretary Christine Wormuth, for not taking the situation more seriously.

“We have Army soldiers right now in Niger who aren’t getting their troop rotations, who aren’t getting their medicine, who aren’t getting their supplies, who aren’t getting their mail and the two senior people in the United States Army are sitting before me and it’s like ‘hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil,’” said Gaetz.

Gaetz accused government officials of delaying the inevitable departure of U.S. forces from Niger to spare the Biden administration the embarrassment of having to close facilities that cost the United States hundreds of millions of dollars to build only recently — a charge officials denied.

U.S. officials have said they are examining the possibility of having a similar mission run from another West African country, but no specifics have been disclosed.

The whistleblower is deployed at Air Base 101 in Niamey. For months following the coup, senior Pentagon officials have said that U.S. troops are consolidating from the base in Niamey to another installation, Air Base 201, outside the Nigerien city of Agadez. U.S. troops are still in both locations, with the majority at 201, defense officials said.

The facility outside Agadez was conceived in 2013 and completed in 2019, according to a Defense Department inspector general report published in 2020 that cited the project for mismanagement and cost overruns. The base cost at least $100 million to build, the report said, underscoring the long-term investment the Pentagon made in Niger.

The fate of the U.S. military presence has been uncertain since Nigerien military officers ousted the country’s president, Mohamed Bazoum, last summer.

The United States paused its security cooperation with Niger, limiting U.S. activities — including unarmed drone flights — to protection of American personnel. The Sahel region, including neighboring Mali and Burkina Faso, has become a global hot spot for Islamic extremism in recent years, and Niger saw such attacks spike dramatically following the coup.

Efforts by top American officials to convince Niger to get back on a democratic pathway so that U.S. assistance could resume have appeared to make little headway. Bazoum remains detained, and no timeline has been set for elections, despite repeated requests from American officials.

Then last month, a U.S. delegation visited Niamey. It included Langley, Molly Phee, the State Department’s top official for African affairs, and Celeste Wallander, the Pentagon’s assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs.

In a statement read on live television in mid-March, junta spokesman Amadou Abdramane accused that American delegation of condescension and emphasized Niger’s right to choose its own partners. The junta has not publicly changed its position since then.

Last week, at least 100 Russian military instructors arrived in Niamey, marking an escalation of Niger’s security relationship with Moscow that analysts said could make it difficult, if not impossible, for the United States to continue its own security cooperation. Reports on Nigerien state television said that the Russian instructors would be providing training and equipment — specifically an air defense system — to Niger.

Among Nigeriens, there has been a growing sense of resentment toward the American presence since the junta’s announcement last month, an issue that Langley, during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing last month, attributed in part to Russian disinformation.

This past weekend, hundreds of protesters gathered in Niamey in what was a largely peaceful demonstration, chanting and waving signs as they called on the American troops to leave.

Chason reported from Dakar, Senegal.

The Washington Post · by John Hudson · April 17, 2024

23. Burmese Opposition Offensive Switches Strategy – Analysis

Burmese Opposition Offensive Switches Strategy – Analysis

eurasiareview.com · April 18, 2024

Burmese resistance forces have switched to targetting top junta bigwigs rather than just gain territory in far flung regions

A series of recent drone attacks on top Myanmar military figures reflects a strategic shift in the offensive launched by multiple ethnic and Bamar armed groups insofar as the priority now seems to be on carrying the battle to the heart of Burmese military junta.

The anti-regime armed groups have so far focussed on expanding spheres of territorial control in remote regions since the 1027 Brotherhood Alliance offensive began last autumn, but since the beginning of April they are focusing more on striking at the center of the military regime’s governance structure.

Senior Myanmar generals have become the targets of Opposition drone attacks in recent days, reinforcing the impression that the regime is under severe survival pressure and the country’s long civil war is entering a decisive final phase.

Even if the Burmese military junta hangs on to power for longer than now expected, not only are they looking at a huge loss of territories. especially in strategic border regions, but at drone attacks and attempted individual assassinations of junta figures that may impact the military’s power base.

Vice Senior General Soe Win, the second-ranking officer in the military regime, while attending a meeting at a military facility in the state of Mon, was attacked by Opposition drone swarms on Monday and Tuesday. The vice senior general, number two in the junta hierarchy, was reportedly injured and his parked helicopter damaged.

A People’s Defense Forces spokesperson, affiliated with the parrellel National Unity Government, told this writer that two drones crashed into buildings at the facility on Monday and five drones rammed into buildings and a helicopter at the same facility on Tuesday.

The strikes followed an attack in the same state on Saturday, when the convoy of Gen. Mya Tun Oo was hit by a bomb dropped by a drone. He is among the regime’s top five officers. An army spokesman admitted that a luxury van was damaged, but the general — also the country’s deputy prime minister as well as minister of transport and communications — was not harmed.

The Karen National Defence Organization, an ethnic minority armed group in Myanmar’s eastern Kayin State, confirmed its involvement in the attack. Its spokesperson admitted that they had advance notice of Mya Tun Oo’s and others’ planned inspection of the new airport in Mon.

These drone attacks point to two key factors which may turned the tide decisively against the military junta. In the first place, it points to greater coordination between the vast multitude of Opposition forces and some evidence of coordinated centralised planning in striking pre-selected targets. Secondly, it shows the Opposition now has solid intelligence on the junta’s movements and plans which is helping them conduct drone strikes.

These drone strikes were carried out days after over a dozen drones on April 4 attacked the military’s headquarters and a base in Naypyitaw. A state-run daily said those drones were intercepted by the military regime’s forces, and no facilities were damaged. But the private residence of military chief Min Aung Hlaing was reportedly in their sights.

The plains around Naypyitaw and Yangon are considered a disadvantage for the resistance forces. Although they are strong in mountainous guerrilla warfare, they are far inferior to the military in terms of heavy equipment such as tanks. The use of drones enables surprise attacks on the military regime’s facilities and key personnel.

Separately, photos shared on social media by the Karen National Union, a prominent anti-regime force, on Thursday show guns and ammunition draped with the flag of the Myanmar army’s 275th battalion, indicating the group’s surrender to resistance forces in Myawaddy, along the Thai border.

The social media photos were posted after hundreds of Myanmar military personnel and their family members surrendered to the KNU, and after officials reportedly began evacuating over the weekend.

India should not be complacent over the surge in drone attacks by Burmese Opposition. This is because, some of these ethnic rebel armies have strong ties to rebel groups in Northeast India. A few consignments of drones, like the Alpha Bats supplied to the Burmese rebels by US and Western intelligence, could be passed on to the Indian rebels. To ensure that does not happen, Indian intelligence needs to covertly connect to these groups and ensure they don’t help their ethnic brethren in Northeast India. India needs to connect to these groups like the Arakan Army anyway because their increasing territorial control means Delhi cannot complete its ambitious connectivity projects through Myanmar without managing these rebel groups.

eurasiareview.com · April 18, 2024

24. Fall Of Myawaddy Is Latest Humiliating Defeat For Myanmar’s Military Regime – Analysis

Fall Of Myawaddy Is Latest Humiliating Defeat For Myanmar’s Military Regime – Analysis

eurasiareview.com · April 18, 2024

By Jan Servaes

Operation 1027 has caused a change in Myanmar. Since October 2023, the advance of the anti-junta coalition of the Arakan Army (or AA, a mainly Rakhine group), the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army (or MNDAA, a predominantly Kokang group, a Han Chinese minority) and the Ta’ang National Liberation Army (or TNLA, a mainly Ta’ang group) has taken more and more cities. Major overland trade routes to China were cut off and dozens of military outposts in northern Shan were overrun.

Resistance is also on the rise in other regions. The armed conflict between the Tatmadaw, Myanmar’s military, and the United League of Arakan/Arakan Army (ULA/AA) in northern Rakhine State has continued and intensified. The ULA/AA called on residents to evacuate to safer places. There continue to be a number of civilian casualties every week as a result of both targeted and indiscriminate artillery and air strikes by the Myanmar military. In addition, unexploded ordnance and landmines also pose a risk to the civilian population.

On April 4, the NUG opposition government announced that resistance forces under its command had carried out successful drone attacks on the Myanmar military headquarters, the Alar air base in the capital Nay Pyi Taw, and the SAC junta chairman’s residence there. The southern regional military command in Mon state also came under fire.

While the Tatmadaw continues to mainly use indiscriminate air strikes with fighter planes, the resistance’s use of drones is proving to be increasingly advanced, and they are managing to evade the army’s defences.

The capture of Myawaddy near the Thai border

But the main battle developed in the Karen State on the border with Thailand where the Karen National Union/Karen National Liberation Army (KNU/KNLA) captured military bases in Thin Gan Nyi Nyaung Village and Myawaddy Town. The KNU is one of Myanmar’s most powerful ethical armed organizations. These incidents deserve special attention because of their potential significance in terms of the trends in the conflictand the discourse surrounding it.

In the fighting, the KNU/KNLA captured the Tactical Command Post, the largest SAC base in Myawaddy Township, on April 6, and 617 soldiers and family members surrendered. Myawaddy Town, a strategically important city with a population of 200,000, is located about 10 km from Mae Sot, the Thai border town. The border crossing, which was under the control of the junta, is crucial for trade, especially for commercial goods and food entering Myanmar. It is also the location for several billion-dollar online scam factories/casinos that have exploded in Myanmar/Thailand’s lawless border regions in recent years. In many, ‘foreigners’ are forced to work in conditions that resemble modern slavery. The UN estimates that up to 120,000 people are being held in such encampments in Myanmar.

On April 9 (after failed attempts to negotiate a surrender), the KNU/KNLA attacked the remaining Myanmar Army forces in Myawaddy Town. Some army units did not surrender and fled to Thailand.

Although the KNU/KNLA controls most of the city, shooting is still sporadic. The situation is made even more complicated by strategic differences within the opposition. The KNU alone consists of 14 affiliated groups, seven of which are active in northern Myawaddy and the remaining seven active in the south.

On April 6, Thailand agreed to allow the SAC junta to use Thailand’s Mae Sot airport to evacuate people from Myawaddy Town on April 7, 8 and 9. The flight arrived in Mae Sot on April 7, but the SAC canceled the request before any further flights took place. Reports differ as to what, if anything, was returned to Myanmar on April 7. The intention was to repatriate Tatmadaw soldiers who had surrendered, but Thailand subsequently said it had only agreed to the evacuation of civilians and documents. One media outlet reported that soldiers had been evacuated, but others said the people fleeing were civilians. Still others said there were no people on board, only documents and suitcases containing money from banks in Myawaddy Town.

The conflict has had a dramatic impact on the logistics sector, forcing trucks to divert their route from Mae Sot to Myawaddy. This detour adds an estimated seven hours to the travel time. As a result, many traders, seeking to avoid the conflict-ridden border areas now under opposition control, are attempting to ship their goods through Yangon’s port. This port remains under the control of the junta.

Analysts believe the loss of Myawaddy, a vital source of revenue from border trade, will further increase pressure on the junta, which is already struggling with a slumping economy.

Myanmar’s international trade with foreign trading partners crossed the US$30 billion mark in the last fiscal year 2023-2024 (April-March), indicating a significant decline of four billion dollars compared to that of the fiscal year 2022-2023. The total trade balance stood at $3.39 billion in the same period a year ago, according to official statistics quoted in The Global New Light of Myanmar.

The Thai military has stepped up security on its side of the border using army vehicles equipped with roof-mounted machine guns. Thai soldiers check the bags and belongings of those crossing the border.

However, there are also indications that Thailand could use this opportunity to advance peace talks. Thai Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin told Reuters that the junta in Myanmar was “losing strength” and urged opening talks with the regime. He urged that the recent fighting should not spread into his country’s airspace.

Thailand wants to remain officially neutral in the conflict and can accommodate up to 100,000 people displaced by the unrest, said Parnpree Bahiddha-Nukar, Thailand’s foreign minister.

China, Russia, the UN, and ASEAN

According to Human Rights Watch (HRW), governments in the region — particularly Thailand, Brunei, Laos, Singapore and Vietnam — continue to take unclear positions on ongoing human rights violations in Myanmar. Since the 2021 coup, this has also been the case for the position of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).

The military government in Nay Pyi Taw, which took power by force, is struggling with escalating pressure from numerous armed resistance groups. The military has already lost control of areas along Myanmar’s borders with Bangladesh, China and India, while suffering a significant loss of manpower. They consider Russia their best ally, since relations with China have cooled in some places.

Ties between Russia and the military regime have expanded beyond arms trade and military training since the coup. Together with four former Soviet republics (Armenia, Belarus and Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan), they form the Eurasian Economic Union. At a recent summit in Nay Pyi Taw, they discussed trade, direct payments, direct flights and cooperation in agriculture, oil, gas and textiles.

At the UN Security Council meeting on April 4, China indicated that it is trying to mediate a ceasefire in Rakhine State. However, local and international analysts argued that China still has limited influence over the ULA/AA and that the ULA/AA is likely to agree to a ceasefire only if significant concessions are made.

China also remains concerned about fighting along the border in Kachin State. China has played a key role in facilitating dialogues between the military and opposition groups along the Myanmar-China border, but the conflict continues. The population of Myanmar as a whole remains wary of Chinese involvement in Myanmar, as evidenced in recent surveys by ISP-Myanmar, The Irrawaddy and the US Institute of Peace.

Also last week, United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres announced the appointment of the new UN Special Envoy for Myanmar: former Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop. The post has been vacant since June last year, when veteran Singaporean UN official Noeleen Heyzer left after 20 fruitless months.

Bishop can be considered a controversial choice. During her tenure from 2013 to 2018, the Australian government implemented a plan to encourage Rohingya imprisoned in the Pacific Gulag of Manus Island to return to Myanmar – in 2017 – as the military continued its brutal ‘clearance operations’ against the Muslim minority group in northern Rakhine State.

Thailand

In response to the ongoing conflict, the Bangkok Post reported, some Thai authorities have also begun working with armed groups to establish safe zones along major trade routes, aiming to protect the safety of residents and traders.

At the border crossing in Mae Sot, approximately 4,000 people attempt to flee Myanmar every day.

In late October, the Thai army forcibly sent back thousands of refugees who had been hiding in the border areas next to Myanmar’s Karenni state. There was also recently a lot of fuss about 19 unaccompanied Burmese children aged 5 to 17 ‘without papers’ that Thailand initially wanted to repatriate to Myanmar. The previous government had used a similar argument in July 2023 to justify sending back 126 undocumented Myanmar children from a school in Ang Thong province.

Thai parliamentarians, human rights groups and Thailand’s National Human Rights Commission sharply criticized the planned return. Subsequently, the Minister of Social Development and Human Security, Varawut Silpa-archa, backed down in a media interview and stated that the 19 children could remain in Thailand.

“Thai authorities showed sympathy and support by allowing 19 children from Myanmar to remain in Thailand,” said Elaine Pearson, Asia director at Human Rights Watch. “The government’s next step should be to assure all those fleeing Myanmar that they can find protection in Thailand.” “The deteriorating human rights situation in Myanmar could lead to Thailand hosting many more refugees in the near future,” Pearson said. “While the Thai government must reassure refugees that they will not be endangered, concerned governments must be prepared to support Thailand to provide protection.”

Any forced return to Myanmar may violate Thailand’s obligations as a party to the Convention against Torture, the Rights of the Child, and the principle of customary international law that the “forced return of any person to a place where he or she are at real risk of persecution, torture or other ill-treatment, or a threat to their lives.” Thailand should also provide protection and support to all refugees, including by allowing the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, to conduct refugee status determinations.

There is no end in sight to the junta regime

As I noted in earlier messages, the end of the junta regime may not happen soon. International, and especially Western, observers have repeatedly been wrong about Myanmar in the past.

For example, an international political analyst decried the lack of faith among both international and regional actors in the defeat and “extermination” of Myanmar’s military, despite the significant successes of ethnic armed organizations (EAOs) and other resistance forces. The political analyst concluded that the combination of actions and “in-actions” by international actors is contributing to Myanmar’s return to the power of “corrupt political elites.”

Also other analysts are skeptical of claims that the collapse of the junta regime is imminent. They acknowledge that the junta is losing territory, cities and military camps and is suffering heavy casualties, but note that the crucial factors in the survivability of Myanmar’s military are its air force and weapons production. The SAC has retained control of major air bases and its network of weapons-producing sites in central Myanmar. Not to mention that the country can still import jet fuel and military supplies despite international sanctions.

A security analyst focused on the Asia-Pacific region, meanwhile, predicted that fighting in the coming rainy season will increasingly move into central Myanmar, and that such a conflict is unlikely to produce the kind of quick resistance victories that have seen recent offensives in the border areas.

The analyst claimed that there is a clear difference in military preparedness and weapons between the EAOs and the People’s Defense Forces (PDFs). He argued that the lack of strategic thinking among some PDFs and their inability to withstand a sustained military response could lead to the conflict becoming less organized and more destructive, with even more serious humanitarian consequences.

To avoid such a situation, the analyst made two suggestions: that EAOs should increase training and logistical support for PDFs, including arming them with some of the heavy weaponry captured from the SAC; and that the resistance should concentrate attacks on transportation and communications routes, to draw SAC forces from their bases and buy time to build better organized and equipped PDF battalions and brigades.

In search of alternative forms of self-government

Various resistance groups in Chin, Mon and Shan States have taken separate steps towards agreeing, developing and/or establishing guidelines, rules and regulations under which the respective areas should be governed. Each state opts for self-government within a federal, democratic framework based on equality and self-determination.

It points out the shift in the paradigm of the NUG and the EAOs, away from mere fear of and (armed) resistance against the Myanmar army, but also paying attention to the creation of alternative forms of governance and administration.

While Myanmar needs a “quick solution” – an end to the current fighting – finding solutions to the underlying and decades-long problems facing the country remains an absolute priority.

It is feared that foreign, and especially Western ‘peacemakers’ will probably not be able to tackle, let alone effectively resolve, the complex conflict situation in Myanmar.

eurasiareview.com · April 18, 2024

25. Brave New Ukraine

Excerpts:

THE SPARTAN FUTURE

Although Ukraine may have to militarize the economy to survive, that doesn’t mean that it will have to militarize society, as well. There is nothing more normal than aspiring to a world without wars, and after Ukraine achieved independence in 1991, that is what the country mostly did. Its leaders assumed that fewer soldiers were needed and that less could be spent on defense. Then, in 2022, Ukrainians learned the hard way that you can be dragged into a fight without asking for one. Today, no one is arguing that the country’s defenses shouldn’t be further strengthened.

While I was embedded in an elite paratrooper squadron near the Ukrainian border, I asked the squadron members how they see their futures after the war and how the military sees the future of the country. All were in agreement: they missed their wives and kids and dreamed of laying down their arms. “Most of the people here would love to get rid of the guns as long as we’re home, we definitely won’t miss them,” said one. Yet they quickly added that this would be possible only when they knew their families were safe and wouldn’t be attacked again.

In the case of Maksym, the soldier I talked to, he said his whole village was waiting for him to come back home, as soon as the Russians leave Ukrainian soil. “We do not need any piece of Russian land, because then instead of being liberators, we would become occupiers,” he said. “If that happened, what would it all be for?”

Even if a cease-fire agreement is someday reached and the war ends, Ukrainians know that they will always have Russia and Belarus on their borders. That means a permanent threat to Ukraine and an ongoing demand for weapons for the country to defend itself. Most European states developed their military infrastructure during the Cold War, when defense spending was high. Ukraine, a very big country, must do so amid a hot war on its own soil, when it has few resources and desperate needs. Under such circumstances, reshaping the social and economic system—and preserving the country’s democratic institutions—cannot depend on one leader or even the armed forces; it requires the involvement of the entire country. And there are no definite right answers.

Brave New Ukraine

How the World’s Most Besieged Democracy Is Adjusting to Permanent War

By Nataliya Gumenyuk

April 19, 2024

Foreign Affairs · by Nataliya Gumenyuk · April 19, 2024

After more than two years fighting one of the world’s most powerful armies, Ukraine has enacted a new mobilization law—a move hailed by the West as an urgent reform. Signed into law on April 16, the legislation comes at a time when Ukraine faces a series of growing challenges in its defense against Russia, from shortages of soldiers and ammunition to wavering Western support. In this view, the new law could make it easier for the government to replenish its forces as it prepares for a major Russian offensive this summer.

For Ukrainians, however, the law also represents something else. Subject to more than 4,200 amendments, the law required months of contentious debate in the Ukrainian parliament. Indeed, some of its original provisions—such as planning for how and when the hundreds of thousands of soldiers who have been serving since the war began should be discharged—were ultimately left out for a separate bill. But it also has become a symbol of Ukraine’s imperfect yet still flourishing democracy. More significantly, it has helped define the pivot point at which the country now stands: having weathered the initial emergency of war, Ukraine now needs to restructure its institutions and its society as it adapts to a potentially much longer conflict.

Back in the spring and summer of 2022, in the months after Russia launched its full-scale invasion, Ukrainians’ response to the attack was almost spontaneous. Huge numbers of men enlisted, and despite brutal fighting and constant bombardment, they were able to defeat Russia’s attempt to take Kyiv and even to reclaim significant territory captured by the Russians. With arms and supplies flooding into Ukraine from the United States and the West and immediate fighting to be done, there was not much time to think about building the country’s own defense industries or managing the wartime economy.

Today, the Ukrainians continue to maintain a tough frontline against the Russians and are as determined as ever to defend their country. But as the war becomes protracted, the country also faces major structural demands. The armed forces must be prepared to fight for months or years to come. The government has to keep the civilian economy afloat, even as it sends more of its able-bodied population into battle. And as the leadership in Kyiv awaits a long-delayed aid package from the U.S. Congress, it must learn to do more with less. In practice, that means creating a system in which much of the adult male population of the country—before the war, there were some 10.5 million men between the ages of 18 and 59—serves in the army. It means building, almost from scratch, a defense production capability that allows Ukraine to lessen its dependence on allies. And it means further reorganizing the national economy to ensure there is enough money to pay for the runaway costs of war.

To meet these daunting tasks, the Ukrainian government has spent months pushing the mobilization bill through parliament. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has also taken a series of interim steps to help close the gap in the armed forces, even as members of his administration try to put the economy on a more strategic war footing. But each of these moves requires balancing complex and sometimes contradictory decisions with the need to maintain the country’s social cohesion. Often, there are no perfect answers.

THE VETERANS’ DILEMMA

After more than two years of war, Ukraine’s need for soldiers is acute. But it is not just a question of adding more people to the existing forces or making up for the fallen and wounded. In actual numbers, officials have made varying estimates of the country’s needs: in December 2023, army commanders demanded 500,000 new soldiers; more recently, the new commander in chief, General Oleksandr Syrsky, suggested that 150,000 recruits per year might be sufficient, although many regard that figure as too low. Equally pressing, however, may be the issue of maintaining troop quality.

For many of the country’s military leaders, a top priority is providing a fair deal for those who have been risking their lives for two years already, even as millions of other Ukrainians have preserved a relatively normal way of life away from the battlefield. Thus, even as new troops are mobilized, the army is under pressure to release some of its most experienced service personnel. But it is no secret that the vast combat experience that these veterans have cannot be matched by even the best-trained new recruits, creating a dilemma for the army.

Some of these challenges date to well before the current war. In the years leading up to Russia’s occupation of Crimea in 2014, Ukraine, whose territory had been the major defensive line between the Soviets and the West during the Cold War, had abolished the draft, and its standing army had shrunk to tiny levels. As the 2014 invasion was unfolding, Ukraine’s acting defense minister, with only slight exaggeration, claimed that the country had only 5,000 soldiers fit for combat. Moscow’s aggression became a wake-up call for Ukraine’s military and ushered in major reforms.

The harder the state pushes, the more chance that Ukrainians will rebel.

By 2022, the armed forces had grown to 300,000, many of whom were volunteers. Today, that figure has ballooned to more than one million people, out of a total population of about 40 million. A large majority began their service at the start of the war: following Russia’s February 2022 invasion, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians enlisted, and a draft of serving-age men began. (The call-up has continued to the present: on an almost weekly basis, most Ukrainians witness someone they know going into service.) The huge influx was crucial to Ukraine’s defense, but it also meant that the army began the war with very little experience or internal cohesion. Its soldiers are predominantly civilians who come from widely disparate social and economic backgrounds and have varying political views and levels of education. There is no such thing as a typical Ukrainian soldier anymore.

Under existing law, there is no formal time limit for military service. Soldiers are supposed to be discharged when martial law ends—which means the end of the war and could be years away. As one officer told me, “Even the most determined [soldier] will consider this to be an eternal contract.” To address the problem, the original draft mobilization bill, when it was introduced in January, proposed to mandate demobilization after 36 months of active duty. But that provision was dropped because of pressure from military leaders, who feared they would lose their most experienced troops.

Coming after two years of intense warfare, the challenge of building a just system for military enlistment has turned into a focal point for larger debates about Ukraine’s democratic foundations and the future of the war. Although the mobilization bill was in itself broadly supported, critics argued that some of its provisions violated the Ukrainian constitution, which cannot be changed under martial law and was written in times when a major land war on Ukrainian soil seemed almost unthinkable. For instance, the constitution guarantees the right of free movement and the right of of education: if you were studying at a university or for a Ph.D., you could avoid the draft, whereas now, if you are of serving age, you may be conscripted. The new enlistment system also requires Ukrainians of serving age to provide personal data, which may violate existing privacy laws.

Ukraine’s political classes are also sensitive to the country’s implicit social contract: the harder the state pushes and the stricter the rules that are enforced, the more chance there is that the Ukrainians will rebel and disobey. Like the Americans, the Ukrainians have a deep-seated suspicion of government intrusion in their lives. Thus, the government must find ways to encourage people to serve instead of forcing them to do so.

YOUNGER AND STRONGER?

This winter, while the mobilization law was held up in parliament, Zelensky began to issue a series of partial measures to alleviate the growing pressure for more troops. In February, he allowed foreigners to join the National Guard—mainly as a way to allow people who live in Ukraine with residence permits but not citizenship to serve in the armed forces. In early April, the president also signed into law a bill lowering the military mobilization age by two years, from 27 to 25, a step that opens the way to recruiting the country’s population of younger adult males.

Many Ukrainians have long felt that keeping the country’s youth away from the horrors of battle was a wise policy. In Ukraine, mandatory military service starts at age 18 for those who are not studying for a university degree, but thus far, regular conscripts who are under 27 could not be ordered to the battlefield. Those younger men who are fighting in the war have done so of their own volition. (The new mobilization law replaces conscription with what is now called basic military training.)

One result of these policies is that the average age of Ukrainian soldiers today is over 40; men can be mobilized up to age 60. This means that the army rank and file tend to be more mature, and many fighters have families to return to and know what’s at stake. A few of the more experienced soldiers in one squadron I spoke to emphasized that they do not want young men to fight because “the youngest are the least careful, and take too many risks.”

Ukrainian soldiers firing a multiple launch rocket system, Donetsk region, Ukraine, March 2024

Sofiia Gatilova / Reuters

After 26 months of war, however, the military understands that soldiers in their 20s are fitter and recover faster, allowing them to bounce back from injuries and return to the front. For instance, a young person who has experienced a concussion from an explosion may be able to recover from temporary hearing loss, whereas someone over 40 faces a higher risk of permanent deafness. In any event, the public seems to understand the military’s shifting needs. Zelensky’s decision to lower the draft age by two years—a move that has been anticipated for more than a year—has caused little popular reaction. He has also signed a bill requiring all Ukrainian men to register with a new “draftee e-account.” The account provides various online services to avoid paper bureaucracy, but it cannot be used for calling people for the draft.

Although these steps—and the new mobilization law—won’t produce an immediate wave of fresh soldiers, they will make millions more Ukrainians visible to the military bureaucracy. Currently, although nearly 20 million Ukrainians use the mobile app DIYA—an identity system that makes official documents, such as passports and university diplomas, available online—the military’s draft registries are maintained on paper and are connected to the places where people are registered to work or their official place of residence. And since millions of Ukrainian men are internally displaced and not officially employed, they may not be in these records.

Meanwhile, the government has sought better ways to deal with people who evade the draft. In 2023, Ukrainian courts prosecuted 1,274 people for evading military service; 60 cases resulted in prison sentences. There is also growing controversy about the abuse of draft exemptions, which are available to fathers who have to care for three or more children, single fathers, men who have to care for disabled relatives, or men who suffer from any one of a long list of health conditions. State institutions and companies also have the right to keep a set number professionals with unique skills, such as doctors and nuclear scientists—a pool that could amount to as many as 500,000 people nationwide—out of the draft. Since the war began, prosecutors have opened thousands of investigations involving alleged bribes to military commissioners or forged documents; in August 2023, Zelensky replaced all of the country’s regional military commissioners.

THE FEAR FACTOR

Still, in absolute terms, available manpower—and womanpower—is not the primary problem Ukraine is facing. According to one analysis released in March, there are as many as five million additional Ukrainian men who are potentially able to serve. Of these, 700,000 are between the ages of 18 to 25 and are currently deemed too young to serve. The study also found that if women who do not have children were mobilized, as many as three million women could be recruited, some of whom could be used in an auxiliary capacity or as support staff. Today, 45,000 women are serving in Ukrainian law enforcement, and around 5,500 are in combat roles as snipers, artillery specialists, or assault forces. But Ukrainian society remains conservative, and the idea of a general enlistment of women is not popular; Zelensky has said he opposes it.

In any case, such far-reaching moves would require extensive debate, including what a total militarization of society lasting for years to come would mean for the population and for the economy. Recently, the Public Interest Journalism Lab, for which I work, together with the Kharkiv Institute for Social Research, conducted a focus group study with both current military members and potential recruits to ask in-depth questions about the draft. Our research is still being analyzed, but the initial findings have indicated that for many Ukrainians, fear of the unknown is a significant factor in shaping negative views of the draft reform. Many are afraid they will find themselves in Bakhmut or Avdiivka just a few days after enlistment.

Almost everyone knows someone who has been killed in the war.

Respondents are also concerned about the inefficient use of draftees’ skills: they wonder, for instance, if an engineer with three degrees and who is not physically fit may be sent to train as a paratrooper, whereas skilled drivers or professional fighters might be sent to join the marine troops rather than the tank brigades or sniper units. Such concerns could be mitigated by more transparent discussions from military commanders about their most acute troop needs, as well as a more nimble system for assessing skills and assigning tasks.

Many Ukrainians also express concerns that the army is given insufficent material support, that soldiers are given little time to rest and recover, that the country’s “selective” approach to mobilization may not be fair, and that there is too little support for wounded soldiers and the families of the dead. In many cases, respondents complained about the lack of clear rules for payments in case of injury or death, even though such rules exist. The Ukrainian government, for instance, has decreed that it will provide families of soldiers who are killed in battle with 15 million Ukrainian hryvnia (about $377,000) compensation, an extraordinarily large sum. Yet the survey demonstrates that much of the population is not aware of it.

The government has attempted a few media and outreach campaigns aimed at providing basic information about military service, but they clearly have been inadequate. Overwhelmingly pervasive, however, is the fear of injury or death, given that Ukrainians face an almost constant barrage of news about fresh casualties, and almost everybody knows someone who has been killed in the war.

DEFIANT NORMALITY

Closely linked to the mobilization dilemma is the question of how to maintain civilian life. The war is already estimated to have caused hundreds of billions of dollars in damage to Ukraine’s economic output. Entire industrial regions and large corporations have been destroyed. Ports that played a key role in international shipping and exports are blocked. Millions of professionals have left the country, and multiple economic sectors have simply disappeared during the war. Sustaining the military itself has also come at a high cost.

Ukraine’s battlefield successes are often now taken for granted, but they have been crucial to sustaining efforts by the government to maintain a working society. The liberation of the capital and Ukrainian regions in the north, east, and south, holding the frontline for almost two years, and the crucial role of Western-supplied air defenses such as the Patriot missile system have helped allow millions of civilians to continue with fairly normal lives in large parts of the country.

Notably, none of the funds provided to Ukraine by foreign partners such as the United States or the European Union are designated for paying Ukrainian soldiers or supporting arms production in Ukraine. Instead, international economic aid covers social payments, such as pensions, civil service salaries, and health care. As a result, almost all national revenues must now be used to maintain the armed forces. And that means that adding tens of thousands of new troops could put a further strain on the country’s coffers.

Families of Ukrainian soldiers demanding demobilization measures, Kyiv, April 2024

Sofiia Gatilova / Reuters

For now, the Ukrainian economy has continued to reinvent itself. New types of businesses appear and are even growing, little by little. One such sector is logistics, both inside and outside the country, as many industries have been relocated and require new supply chains. Another growth area relates to reconstruction and rebuilding in areas formerly under Russian occupation. Online services have also expanded across the country to serve the displaced population with e-banking, online education, and other needs. And other sectors, cut off from global markets, have reoriented their production domestically: instead of producing clothes for global retailers, for example, some companies are producing uniforms for the military.

The government has also introduced initiatives to maintain whole industries with fewer people. Take agriculture, the sector that represents a considerable chunk of Ukraine’s economy. Some of the country’s largest fields are located close to the frontline and, in many cases, are now covered in land mines and can’t be planted. Moreover, the drivers of tractors and combines are major assets for the army, because they can drive tanks without much training, so many men in the agricultural sector have been drafted. In their absence, however, companies are developing unmanned farm vehicles that can be operated remotely.

There are similarities to the way that businesses survived the COVID-19 pandemic: it will never be as good as it was in normal times, but many industries can somehow manage to operate. Keeping workers inside the country was and remains critical for maintaining jobs. Another challenge for the government is how to pay for large numbers of enlistees who are not yet fighting but no longer working and paying taxes. The government has negotiated with the military to keep some workers out of the draft in order to keep critical areas of the economy going. Thus, the economy is being gradually transformed through thousands of such small steps.

WHERE ARE THE PATRIOTS?

For months, Ukraine has had a critical shortage of ammunition. Consider the retreat from Avdiivka in February, which has become a focal point for international analysts concerned about the shifting momentum in the war. In fact, Ukrainian forces were forced to pull back after four months of battle mainly because they ran out of bullets, not because they were losing the fight. Even the country’s most experienced battalions cannot overcome this shortfall.

Observing the inability of Ukraine’s Western partners to resupply weapons in a timely fashion, many feared the collapse of the frontline this spring. Those fears were alleviated somewhat by recent deliveries of ammunition, in particular from the Czech Republic and Germany, which have at least partially stabilized the situation. But they have also underscored how crucial this one element is to the overall war effort. Today, military officials must confront the dilemma of whether it makes sense to send waves of new soldiers to a frontline where many current soldiers already lack ammunition.

The most common explanation for Ukraine’s ammunition crisis is a global supply problem: Ukraine’s allies themselves, the logic goes, have not been able to produce munitions rapidly enough to keep up with demand. But arms experts disagree about how many weapons and ammunition supplies are still sitting in the warehouses of democratic allies. A lot depends on distribution. As with vaccine competition during the pandemic, countries may be hoarding supplies at a moment when global instability makes armed conflict more likely.

Loading ammunition into a magazine, near Kyiv, April 2024

Valentyn Ogirenko / Reuters

South Korea, for example, is often mentioned as a state that produces enough ammunition to sell to other partners, yet it tends to keep a large surplus for domestic contingencies. By contrast, a few eastern European states, in particular in the Baltic region, have given almost everything they have to Ukraine, arguing that Russia wouldn’t attack a NATO state and that the Ukrainians are holding the frontline for the entire Western world.

At the World Economic Forum in January, Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis stated that what is currently given to Ukraine is just a small part of what is necessary to defend a country of a similar size. Landsbergis noted that Poland has responded to the Ukraine crisis by ordering from the United States some 1,000 Abrams tanks, 500 long-range guided HIMARS missile systems, and 40 Patriot missile systems. “Poland is roughly the same size and has the same population as Ukraine,” Landsbergis said, “and Poland has NATO’s Article 5.” Ukraine, he implied, would need much more than that. Ukraine is currently believed to possess some Abrams tanks, a few dozen HIMARS systems, and fewer than ten Patriot systems. Recently, Zelensky announced that 25 Patriot systems would be enough to defend the whole of the country.

But Russian attacks are intensifying. On March 22, Moscow launched its deadliest attack on the Ukrainian energy system, and in Kharkiv, Odessa, and Zaporizhzhia, it has started to use so-called double strikes, well documented in Russia’s campaign in Syria: following a strike on a target, Russian forces will follow up with a second strike in the same area to deliberately target rescue workers and doctors coming to save the victims. On April 17, Russia also attacked the city center of Chernihiv in northern Ukraine with three missiles, killing at least 18 civilians, injuring 78 more, including four children, and damaging more than 500 apartments in 28 high-rise buildings. The strike has raised new alarms about the expected summer offensive; many observers point out that the attack could have been neutralized if Ukraine had received more air defense systems from its Western partners.

HOME REMEDIES

For the foreseeable future, Kyiv will continue to depend on its allies for more sophisticated weapons such as HIMARS and Patriot systems. To confront Russia’s air dominance, it is also resting its hopes on the long-awaited delivery of F-16 fighter jets this summer. According to an analysis of Ukraine’s military budget through 2030 by Janes, a defense intelligence firm, Ukraine’s military procurement jumped to a projected 20-year high of nearly $10 billion in 2023, compared with a prewar figure of about $1 billion a year.

But the Ukrainian leadership recognizes that it is equally important to bolster the country’s own defense industry. By now, Ukraine has started to produce Bohdana artillery cannons, which are able to shoot NATO-caliber rounds, but it will need to do more. Zelensky is often criticized by the opposition for failing to prepare the economy for the full invasion and instead naively trying to find a peaceful solution to the conflict with Russia. He has responded that scaring the population by moving to a total war footing would have caused an outflow of investors and workers, the departure of businesses and taxpayers, and, in the end, a lack of funds in the state budget with which to wage a defense.

In some ways, today’s dilemma is similar: the government must figure out how to spend more on defense while still preserving some level of normalcy, so that the country’s best minds do not leave and businesses can function. Although ideas about nationalizing businesses, forcing private companies to produce weapons, and using citizens to make shells have come up during public debates, they are hard to put into practice without compromising Ukraine’s democratic foundations.

For Ukraine's defense industries, the problem is not lack of capability, but lack of funds.

Nevertheless, the government is making some changes. Oleksandr Kamyshin, Ukraine’s strategic industries minister, has observed that Ukrainian industry could learn to produce various types of shells and drones and currently has $20 billion worth of production capacity. At the moment, however, the state budget can come up with no more than $6 billion for procurement. According to Kamyshin, the problem is no longer lack of capabilities but lack of funds.

But there may be ways around this problem as well. Today, many of Ukraine’s partners prefer to rely on weapons produced by their domestic markets. This is the case with the United States and Canada, just as European countries often rely on European producers. Over the last few years, some private Ukrainian companies have switched to weapons production and also managed to produce cheaper models than their Western counterparts. For instance, a Canadian Sky Ranger R70 drone costs $87,500, whereas a similar Ukrainian model costs from $10,300 to $25,000.

Now, Kamyshin has made the paradoxical-sounding proposal to Western allies that they should purchase Ukraine-produced weapons for Ukrainian forces, which, in addition to serving urgent frontline needs, would bring an infusion of cash to develop Ukraine’s defense sector. In fact, on April 18, Denmark became the first Western country to do so, reaching a deal with Kyiv to buy $28.5 million worth of Ukrainian-produced weapons and military equipment for Ukrainian forces.

CONSTANT GAME CHANGING

Observing the evolving war in Ukraine, arms experts have noted that successful defense production depends less on the capacity to produce any one particular technology than on the continual ability to modernize. Consider the case of drones: during the first year of the invasion, the Russians were hardly using any drones; now, they have made drones a central part of their arsenal. Moscow is not only importing large quantities of drones from Iran and North Korea but has also organized its own production of models that it previously bought from Tehran. For Ukraine, the takeaway is that relentless innovation is necessary, because the adversary is constantly learning and adapting.

Many Western defense companies, far from the battlefield, are not equipped to respond nimbly to the latest needs with new prototypes. But for the Ukrainian military and for Ukraine’s engineers and IT specialists, continual adaptation has become the only viable way to proceed. For example, Ukraine has been testing a variety of unmanned technologies—basically robots—that can be used for mining bridges, evacuating the wounded, and delivering weapons. Various IT solutions are in continuous development for communications and intelligence. Sometimes it is not just about the battlefield. As one Ukrainian soldier noted, she now uses ChatGPT for writing military reports, which saves her hours she used to spend on bureaucratic chores.

Ukrainians are cautious about using the term “asymmetric warfare” in their war with Russia. Former Defense Minister Andriy Zagorodnyuk explains that the term can lead foreign partners to see Ukraine’s fight as a form of guerrilla warfare rather than as a full-fledged military campaign. That assumption caused problems in the run-up to the Russian invasion and during the initial months afterward, when the United Kingdom and the United States limited their supply of equipment to Ukraine to portable antitank weapons. These can be helpful in urban warfare, but they are hardly sufficient for the kind of conventional warfare Ukrainian forces are contending with, involving very long frontlines and thousands of square miles of land. Still, Ukraine has continued to reap tactical benefits by using approaches that surprise the enemy.

A Ukrainian soldier during combat, Chernihiv region, Ukraine, March 2024

Gleb Garanich / Reuters

Zagorodnyuk insists the current war of attrition is also bad for Russia. The Ukrainian secret service claimed that one of its recent attacks was aimed at a factory in Tatarstan, where the Russians were producing drones using Iranian technology. Ukraine’s military goal in this war is not just to retake the territories and save people from the brutal Russian occupation. Kyiv has to destroy Moscow’s capabilities to grab new territories and prevent it from carrying out future missile attacks on Ukrainian cities.

During the past year, the armed forces of Ukraine demonstrated they are able to do this in the Black Sea—and almost without naval support, relying mainly on sea drones produced in Ukraine. As a result of Ukrainian pressure, the Russian navy has moved away from Crimea, closer to Russian naval bases. This has significantly decreased Russian missile capabilities. The farther the Russian flagships are from Ukrainian shores, the less they can shoot and the less precise their attacks are. This also unblocked the passageway for Ukraine to resume agricultural exports, which bring money to the state budget. Ukraine has also destroyed some Russian planes, including the Ilyushin Il-20PP, which Russia claimed to be capable of jamming modern AWACS aircraft and Patriots air defense systems while blocking analogous jamming measures.

Nonetheless, the Russian army has also demonstrated that quantity still can override quality. Even without good reconnaissance, an abundance of drones can be used effectively. That’s not an approach that Ukraine can afford, but Ukrainians can benefit from their growing knowledge of how to deal with weapons and plan military tactics.

THE SPARTAN FUTURE

Although Ukraine may have to militarize the economy to survive, that doesn’t mean that it will have to militarize society, as well. There is nothing more normal than aspiring to a world without wars, and after Ukraine achieved independence in 1991, that is what the country mostly did. Its leaders assumed that fewer soldiers were needed and that less could be spent on defense. Then, in 2022, Ukrainians learned the hard way that you can be dragged into a fight without asking for one. Today, no one is arguing that the country’s defenses shouldn’t be further strengthened.

While I was embedded in an elite paratrooper squadron near the Ukrainian border, I asked the squadron members how they see their futures after the war and how the military sees the future of the country. All were in agreement: they missed their wives and kids and dreamed of laying down their arms. “Most of the people here would love to get rid of the guns as long as we’re home, we definitely won’t miss them,” said one. Yet they quickly added that this would be possible only when they knew their families were safe and wouldn’t be attacked again.

In the case of Maksym, the soldier I talked to, he said his whole village was waiting for him to come back home, as soon as the Russians leave Ukrainian soil. “We do not need any piece of Russian land, because then instead of being liberators, we would become occupiers,” he said. “If that happened, what would it all be for?”

Even if a cease-fire agreement is someday reached and the war ends, Ukrainians know that they will always have Russia and Belarus on their borders. That means a permanent threat to Ukraine and an ongoing demand for weapons for the country to defend itself. Most European states developed their military infrastructure during the Cold War, when defense spending was high. Ukraine, a very big country, must do so amid a hot war on its own soil, when it has few resources and desperate needs. Under such circumstances, reshaping the social and economic system—and preserving the country’s democratic institutions—cannot depend on one leader or even the armed forces; it requires the involvement of the entire country. And there are no definite right answers.

NATALIYA GUMENYUK, a Ukrainian journalist, is CEO of the Public Interest Journalism Lab and Co-Founder of the Reckoning Project.

Foreign Affairs · by Nataliya Gumenyuk · April 19, 2024

26. The Five Futures of Russia

The five:

RUSSIA AS FRANCE

RUSSIA RETRENCHED

RUSSIA AS VASSAL

RUSSIA AS NORTH KOREA

RUSSIA IN CHAOS

The Five Futures of Russia

And How America Can Prepare for Whatever Comes Next

By Stephen Kotkin

May/June 2024

Published on April 18, 2024

Foreign Affairs · by Stephen Kotkin · April 18, 2024

Vladimir Putin happened to turn 71 last October 7, the day Hamas assaulted Israel. The Russian president took the rampage as a birthday present; it shifted the context around his aggression in Ukraine. Perhaps to show his appreciation, he had his Foreign Ministry invite high-ranking Hamas representatives to Moscow in late October, highlighting an alignment of interests. Several weeks later, Putin announced his intention to stand for a fifth term in a choiceless election in March 2024 and later held his annual press conference, offering a phalanx of pliant journalists the privilege of hearing him smugly crow about Western fatigue over the war in Ukraine. “Almost along the entire frontline, our armed forces, let’s put it modestly, are improving their position,” Putin boasted in the live broadcast.

On February 16, Russia’s Federal Penitentiary Service announced the sudden death of the opposition activist Alexei Navalny, aged 47, in a penal colony above the Arctic Circle, from which he had continued to reach his millions of followers with instructions on how to protest Putin’s plebiscite. A month later, the most one could say was that the Kremlin had at least waited until after the voting was staged to announce Putin’s victory.

Putin styles himself as a new tsar. But a real tsar would not have to worry about a looming succession crisis and what it might do to his grip on power in the present. Putin does; that is partly why he must simulate elections. He is now set in his office until 2030, when he will be in his 78th year. Male life expectancy in Russia does not even reach 67 years; those who live to 60 can expect to survive to around 80. Russia’s confirmed centenarians are few. Putin might one day join their ranks. But even Stalin died.

Putin’s predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, turned out to be that rare would-be tsar who named a successor and smoothed his path to power. In 1999, Yeltsin, facing chronic health challenges and fearing that he and his “family” of corrupt cronies might face prison after he stepped down, chose Putin to preserve his liberty and legacy. “Take care of Russia,” Yeltsin offered as a parting instruction. In 2007, aged 76, he died a free man. But the protector has refrained from emulating his patron’s example. In 2008, Putin briefly stepped aside from the presidency, in recognition of the same two-consecutive-term limit that Yeltsin faced. Putin appointed a political nonentity in his place, shifted himself to the position of prime minister, and came right back for a third presidential term in 2012 and then a fourth. Finally, he induced his counterfeit legislature to alter the constitution to effectively remove any term limits. Stalin, too, had stubbornly clung to power, even as his infirmities worsened. He refused to countenance the emergence of a successor; eventually, he suffered a massive, final stroke and fell into a puddle of his own urine.

Putin is not Stalin. The Georgian despot built a superpower while dispatching tens of millions to their deaths in famines, forced labor camps, execution cellars, and a mismanaged defensive war. Putin, by contrast, has jerry-rigged a rogue power while sending hundreds of thousands to their deaths in a war of choice. The juxtaposition is nevertheless instructive. Stalin’s system proved unable to survive without him, despite having an institutionalized ruling party. And yet, amid the breakdown that began with the collapse of the Soviet Union but lasted well beyond 1991, Putin consolidated a new autocracy. This fusion of fragility and path dependence derives from many factors that are not easily rewired: geography, a national-imperial identity, an ingrained strategic culture. (The nineteenth-century Russian satirist Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin remarked of his country that everything changes dramatically every five to ten years but nothing changes in 200 years.) Still, whenever and however Putin might go, his personalistic autocracy and, more broadly, Russia already face questions about the future.

Putin’s regime styles itself an icebreaker, smashing to bits the U.S.-led international order on behalf of humanity. Washington and its allies and partners have allowed themselves to be surprised by him time and again—in Libya, Syria, Ukraine, and central Africa. This has provoked fears about the next nasty surprise. But what about the long term? How, in the light of inescapable leadership mortality and larger structural factors, might Russia evolve, or not, over the next decade and possibly beyond?

Readers seeking odds on Russia’s trajectory should consult the betting markets. What Western officials and other decision-makers need to do, instead, is to consider a set of scenarios: to extrapolate from current trends in a way that can facilitate contingency planning. Scenarios are about attempting to not be surprised. Needless to note, the world constantly surprises, and something impossible to foresee could occur: the proverbial black swan. Humility is in order. Still, five possible futures for Russia are currently imaginable, and the United States and its allies should bear them in mind.

Over the course of multiple presidential administrations, Washington has learned the hard way that it lacks the levers to transform places such as Russia and, for that matter, China: countries that originated as empires on the Eurasian landmass and celebrate themselves as ancient civilizations that long predate the founding of the United States, let alone the formation of the West. They are not characters out of the playwright George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, ripe for conversion from street urchins to refined ladies: that is, from authoritarian, imperialist regimes to responsible stakeholders in the U.S.-dominated international system. Efforts to remake their “personalities” invariably result in mutual recriminations and disillusionment. Leaders such as Putin and China’s Xi Jinping did not capriciously reverse a hopeful process; in no small measure, they resulted from it. So Washington and its partners must not exaggerate their ability to shape Russia’s trajectory. Instead, they should prepare for whatever unfolds.

RUSSIA AS FRANCE

France is a country with deep-seated bureaucratic and monarchical traditions—and also a fraught revolutionary tradition. Revolutionaries abolished the monarchy only to see it return in the guise of both a king and an emperor and then disappear again, as republics came and went. France built and lost a vast empire of colonial possessions. For centuries, France’s rulers, none more than Napoleon, threatened the country’s neighbors.

Today, these traditions live on in many ways. As the French thinker Alexis de Tocqueville shrewdly observed in his 1856 work The Old Regime and the Revolution, the revolutionaries’ efforts to break definitively with the past ended up unwittingly reinforcing statist structures. Despite the consolidation of a republican system, France’s monarchical inheritance endures symbolically in palaces in Versailles and elsewhere, in ubiquitous statues of Bourbon dynasty rulers, and in an inordinately centralized form of rule with immense power and wealth concentrated in Paris. Even shorn of its formal empire, France remains a fiercely proud country, one that many of its citizens and admirers view as a civilization with a lingering sense of a special mission in the world and in Europe, as well as a language spoken far beyond its borders (60 percent of daily French speakers are citizens of elsewhere). But crucially, today’s France enjoys the rule of law and no longer threatens its neighbors.

Russia, too, possesses a statist and monarchical tradition that will endure regardless of the nature of any future political system and a fraught revolutionary tradition that has also ceased to be an ongoing venture yet lives on in institutions and memories as a source of inspiration and warning. To be sure, the autocratic Romanovs were even less constrained than the absolutist Bourbons. Russia’s revolution was considerably more brutal and destructive than even the French one. Russia’s lost empire was contiguous, not overseas, and lasted far longer—indeed, for most of the existence of the modern Russian state. In Russia, Moscow’s domination of the rest of the country exceeds even that of Paris in France. Russia’s geographical expanse dwarfs France’s, enmeshing the country in Europe but also the Caucasus, Central Asia, and East Asia. Very few countries have much in common with Russia. But France has more than perhaps any other.

A man wearing a shirt depicting Russian President Vladimir Putin, Saint Petersburg, May 2022

Anton Vaganov / Reuters

Contemporary France is a great country, although not without its detractors. Some decry what they deem its excessive statism, the high taxes necessary to underwrite uneven services, as well as a broad socialistic ethos. Others find fault with what they perceive as France’s great-power pretensions and cultural chauvinism. Still others lament France’s difficulty in assimilating immigrants. But it is possible to be disappointed in these or other aspects of the country and still recognize that it provides the closest thing to a realistic model for a prosperous, peaceful Russia. If Russia were to become like France—a democracy with a rule-of-law system that luxuriated in its absolutist and revolutionary past but no longer threatened its neighbors—that would constitute a high-order achievement.

France tramped a tortuous path to become what it is today. Recall Robespierre’s revolutionary terror, Napoleon’s catastrophic expansionism, Napoleon III’s self-coup (from elected president to emperor), the seizure of power by the Paris Commune, the country’s rapid defeat in World War II, the Vichy collaborationist regime that followed, the colonial Algerian war, and the extraconstitutional acts of President Charles de Gaulle after he came out of retirement in 1958. One might be seduced by the notion that Russia needs its own de Gaulle to help consolidate a liberal order from above, even though no such deus ex machina looms on Russia’s immediate horizon. But only hagiographers believe that one man created today’s France. Notwithstanding the country’s moments of instability, over generations, France developed the impartial, professional institutions—a judiciary, a civil service, a free and open public sphere—of a democratic, republican nation. The problem was not mainly that Yeltsin was no de Gaulle. The problem was that Russia was much further from a stable, Western-style constitutional order in 1991 than France had been three decades earlier.

RUSSIA RETRENCHED

Some Russians might welcome a transformation into a country that resembles France, but others would find that outcome anathema. What the world now sees as Putinism first surfaced in the Russian-language periodicals and volunteer societies of the 1970s: an authoritarian, resentful, mystical nationalism grounded in anti-Westernism, espousing nominally traditional values, and borrowing incoherently from Slavophilism, Eurasianism, and Eastern Orthodoxy. One could imagine an authoritarian nationalist leader who embraces those views and who, like Putin, is unshakable in the belief that the United States is hell-bent on Russia’s destruction but who is also profoundly troubled by Russia’s cloudy long-term future—and willing to blame Putin for it. That is, someone who appeals to Putin’s base but makes the case that the war against Ukraine is damaging Russia.

Demography is a special sore point for Russia’s blood-and-soil nationalists, not to mention the military brass and many ordinary people. Since 1992, despite considerable immigration, Russia’s population has shrunk. Its working-age population peaked in 2006 at around 90 million and stands at less than 80 million today, a calamitous trend. Spending on the war in Ukraine has boosted Russia’s defense industrial base, but the limits of the country’s diminished labor force are becoming ever more evident even in that high-priority sector, which has around five million fewer qualified workers than it needs. The proportion of workers who are in the most productive age group—20 to 39—will further decline over the next decade. Nothing, not even kidnapping children from Ukraine, for which the International Criminal Court indicted Putin, will reverse the loss of Russians, which the war’s exorbitant casualties are compounding.

Productivity gains that might offset these demographic trends are nowhere in sight. Russia ranks nearly last in the world in the scale and speed of automation in production: its robotization is just a microscopic fraction of the world average. Even before the widened war in Ukraine began to eat into the state budget, Russia placed surprisingly low in global rankings of education spending. In the past two years, Putin has willingly forfeited much of the country’s economic future when he induced or forced thousands of young tech workers to flee conscription and repression. True, these are people that rabid nationalists claim not to miss, but deep down many know that a great power needs them.

Washington has learned the hard way that it lacks the levers to transform Russia.

Given its sprawling Eurasian geography and long-standing ties to many parts of the world, as well as the alchemy of opportunism, Russia is still able to import many indispensable components for its economy despite Western sanctions. Notwithstanding this resourcefulness and despite the public’s habituation to the war, Russian elites know the damning statistics. They are aware that as a commodity-exporting country, Russia’s long-term development depends on technology transfers from advanced countries; Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has made it harder to use the West as a source, and his symbolic embrace of Hamas’s nihilism gratuitously strained Russia’s relations with Israel, a major supplier of high-tech goods and services. At a more basic level, Russia’s elites are physically cut off from the developed world: hideaways in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), however agreeable, cannot replace European villas and boarding schools.

Although a Russian authoritarian regime has once again proved resilient in war, Putin’s grave lack of domestic investment and diversification, his furtherance of demographic distress, and his role in the country’s descent into technological backwardness could yet compel hardcore nationalists—among them many elites—to admit that Russia is on a self-defeating trajectory. Many have privately concluded that Putin conflates the survival of his aging personal regime with the storied country’s survival as a great power. Historically, at least, such realizations have precipitated a change of course, a turn from foreign overextension to domestic revitalization. Last summer, when the mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin’s death squad marched on Moscow, it did not elicit bandwagoning by military officers, which is one reason Prigozhin called it off. But neither did it galvanize the regime’s supporters to defend Putin in real time. The episode furnished an unwitting referendum on the regime, revealing a certain hollowness inside the repressive strength.

Retrenchment could result from hastening Putin’s exit, or it could follow his natural demise. It could also be forced on him without his removal by meaningful political threats to his rule. However it happened, it would involve mostly tactical moves spurred by a recognition that Russia lacks the means to oppose the West without end, pays an exorbitant price for trying, and risks permanently losing vital European ties in exchange for a humiliating dependence on China.

RUSSIA AS VASSAL

Defiantly pro-Putin Russian elites boast that they have developed an option that is better than the West. The Chinese-Russian bond has surprised many analysts aware of Beijing and Moscow’s prickly relations in the past, including the infamous Sino-Soviet split in the 1960s, which culminated in a short border war. Although that conflict was formally settled with a border demarcation, Russia remains the sole country that controls territory seized from the Qing empire in what the Chinese vilify as unfair treaties. That has not stopped China and Russia from bolstering ties, including by conducting large-scale joint military exercises, which have grown in frequency and geographic scope in the past 20 years. The two countries are fully aligned on Russia’s grievances regarding NATO expansion and Western meddling in Ukraine, where Chinese support for Russia continues to be crucial.

Chinese-Russian rapprochement predates the rise of Putin and Xi. In the 1980s, it was Deng Xiaoping who performed a turn away from Moscow more momentous than the one Mao Zedong had carried out in the 1960s and 1970s. Deng gained access to the American domestic market for Chinese producers, the same trick that enabled the transformation of Japan and then South Korea and Taiwan. Deng’s divorce from the communist Soviet Union for a de facto economic marriage with American and European capitalists ushered in an era of astonishing prosperity that birthed a Chinese middle class. But China and Russia remained intertwined. Deng’s handpicked successor, Jiang Zemin, who had trained at a Soviet factory, brought Russia back as a mistress without breaking the U.S.-Chinese marital bond. Jiang placed orders that helped resuscitate Russia’s forlorn military-industrial complex and modernize China’s own weapons production and military. In 1996, Jiang and Yeltsin proclaimed a “strategic partnership.” Despite modest bilateral trade, China’s domestic economic boom indirectly helped bring civilian Soviet-era production back from the dead by lifting global demand and therefore prices for the industrial inputs the Soviet Union had produced in low quality but high quantity, from steel to fertilizer. Just as the United States had helped forge a Chinese middle class, so, too, did China play a part in conjuring into being Russia’s middle class and Putin’s economic boom.

Nevertheless, societal and cultural relations between the two peoples remain shallow. Russians are culturally European, and few speak Chinese (compared with English). Although some elderly Chinese speak Russian, a legacy of Moscow’s erstwhile centrality in the communist world, that number is not large, and the days when Chinese students attended Russian universities in great numbers are a distant memory. Russians are apprehensive of China’s power, and many Chinese who hold weakness in contempt ridicule Russia online. Stalwarts of the Chinese Communist Party remain unforgiving of Moscow’s destruction of communism across Eurasia and eastern Europe.

And yet the profundity of the personal relationship between Putin and Xi has compensated for these otherwise brittle foundations. The two men have fallen into a bromance, meeting an astonishing 42 times while in power, publicly lauding each other as “my best friend” (Xi on Putin) and “dear friend” (Putin on Xi). The two kindred souls’ authoritarian solidarity is undergirded by an abiding anti-Westernism, especially anti-Americanism. As China, the former junior partner, became the senior partner, the two autocratic neighbors upgraded relations, announcing a “comprehensive strategic partnership” in 2013. Officially, trade between Russia and China surpassed $230 billion in 2023; adjusting for inflation, it had hovered around $16 billion three decades earlier and stood at just $78 billion as recently as the mid-2010s. The 2023 figure, moreover, does not include tens of billions more in bilateral trade that is disguised using third parties, such as Kyrgyzstan, Turkey, and the UAE.

China still buys military aircraft engines from Russia. But otherwise, the dependence goes in the other direction. Western sanctions accelerated the loss of Russia’s domestic vehicle industry to China. Moscow is now holding a substantial pile of renminbi reserves, which can be used only for Chinese goods. But despite innumerable meetings over decades, there is still no final agreement on a major new natural gas pipeline that would originate in Siberia and make its way to China through Mongolia. The Chinese leadership has keenly avoided becoming dependent on Russia for energy or anything else. On the contrary, China is already the global leader in solar and wind power and is working to displace Russia as the top global player in nuclear energy.

Besides raw materials and political thuggery, the only things Russia exports are talented people.

Russian elites, even as they vehemently denounce an imaginary U.S. determination to subjugate or dismember their country, have by and large not raised their voices against Putin’s subordination of Russia to China. And lately, Russian commentators have taken to retelling the tale of Alexander Nevsky, who in the thirteenth century reigned as prince of Novgorod, one of the states folded into Muscovy, the precursor to imperial Russia. When faced with a two-front challenge, Nevsky chose to fight the crusaders of the west, defeating the Teutons in the Battle of the Ice, and to accommodate the invading Mongols of the east, traveling across central Asia to the capital of the Mongol Golden Horde to be recognized as grand prince of Russia. In this telling, the Western Christians were determined to undermine Russia’s Eastern Christian identity, whereas the Mongols merely wanted Russia to pay tribute. The implication is that today’s accommodation of China does not require Russia to relinquish its identity, whereas a failure to confront the West would.

This is bunkum. It took Russians centuries to free themselves from what their school textbooks uniformly called the Mongol yoke, but Russia has survived relations with the West for centuries without itself ever becoming Western. Being non-Western, however, does not necessarily mean being anti-Western—unless, of course, one is struggling to protect an illiberal regime in a liberal world order. Russia existed within its post-Soviet borders for two decades before Putin decided the situation was intolerable. Now, having burned bridges with the West and blamed it for the arson, he has little recourse other than to rely on China’s good graces.

The great and growing imbalance in the relationship has induced analysts to speak of Russia as China’s vassal. But only China decides whether a country becomes its vassal, whereby Beijing dictates Russian policy and even personnel, and assumes the burden of responsibility. It has no binding treaty obligations with Russia. Putin possesses only the 70-year-old Xi’s word—and Xi, too, is mortal. Nonetheless, the two leaders continue to denounce the United States’ bid for hegemony and cooperate closely. A shared commitment to render the world order safe for their respective dictatorships and dominate their regions is driving a de facto vassalage that neither fancies.

RUSSIA AS NORTH KOREA

In deepening Russia’s dependence on China, Putin or his successor could draw paradoxical inspiration from the experience of North Korea, which in turn could give Xi or his successor pause. During Beijing’s intervention to rescue Pyongyang in the Korean War, Mao, employing a proverb, stated that if the lips (North Korea) are gone, the teeth (China) will be cold. This metaphor implies both an act of buffering and a condition of interdependence. Over the years, some Chinese commentators have doubted the value of propping up North Korea, particularly after the latter’s defiant nuclear test in 2006. Faced with UN sanctions, which China joined, North Korea’s leadership pressed forward aggressively with its programs for nuclear weapons and missiles, which can reach not just Seoul and Tokyo but also Beijing and Shanghai. Still, China’s leadership eventually reaffirmed its backing of Pyongyang, in 2018. Given North Korea’s extreme dependence on China for food, fuel, and much else, Beijing would seem to have its leader, Kim Jong Un, in a vice grip.

Yet Pyongyang loyalists sometimes warn that the teeth can bite the lips. As ruling circles in Beijing have discovered time and again, Kim does not always defer to his patrons. In 2017, he had his half brother, Kim Jong Nam, who was under China’s protection abroad, murdered. Kim can get away with defiance because he knows that no matter how much he might incense Beijing, China does not want the regime in Pyongyang to fall. If the North Korean state imploded, the peninsula would be reunited under the aegis of South Korea, a U.S. treaty ally. That would amount to China, at long last, losing the Korean War, which for more than 70 years has remained suspended by an armistice. A loss of the Korean buffer could complicate Beijing’s options and internal timelines regarding its hoped-for absorption of Taiwan, since China would face a more hostile external environment close by. Historically, instability on the Korean Peninsula has tended to spill over into China, and an influx of refugees could destabilize China’s northeast and potentially much more. So Beijing appears to be stuck in a form of reverse dependence with Pyongyang. Xi would not want to find himself in a similar position with Moscow.

Russian service members march in a military parade, Moscow, May 2023

Maxim Shemetov / Reuters

Russia and North Korea could scarcely be more different. The former is more than 142 times as large as the latter in territory. North Korea possesses the kind of dynasty that Russia does not, even though each Kim family successor gets rubber-stamped as leader by a party congress. North Korea is also a formal treaty ally of China, Beijing’s only such ally in the world, the two having signed a mutual defense pact in 1961. (Some Chinese commentary has suggested China is no longer obliged to come to North Korea’s defense in the event of an attack because of Pyongyang’s development of nuclear weapons, but the pact has not been repealed.) North Korea faces a rival Korean state in the form of South Korea, making it more akin to East Germany (which of course is long gone) than to Russia.

Despite these and other differences, Russia could become something of a gigantic North Korea: domestically repressive, internationally isolated and transgressive, armed with nuclear weapons, and abjectly dependent on China but still able to buck Beijing. It remains unclear how much Putin divulged in Beijing, in February 2022, about his plans for Ukraine when he elicited a joint declaration of a Chinese-Russian “partnership of no limits” that soon made it appear as if Xi endorsed the Russian aggression. Not long after China released a peace plan for Ukraine, Xi traveled to Moscow for a summit, at one point appearing with Putin on an ornate Kremlin staircase that, in 1939, Joachim von Ribbentrop, the German foreign minister under the Nazis, had descended with Stalin and his foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, while cementing the Hitler-Stalin pact. And yet a Kremlin spokesperson spurned the possibility of peace, even though Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s government accepted China’s vague document as worthy of discussion. (China’s low-level peace mission to Kyiv fell flat.) Later, after Chinese diplomats bragged to all the world and especially to Europe that Xi had extracted a Russian pledge to not use nuclear weapons in Ukraine, Putin’s regime announced it was deploying tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus. (China went on to criticize the deployments.) It is not likely that any of these episodes were intended as explicit slights. But they made observers wonder about Russia’s evolution toward a North Korean scenario, for even if unintended, they revealed the potential for Moscow to embarrass Beijing without suffering consequences.

Since the Prigozhin mutiny, Xi has stressed what he calls “the fundamental interest of the two countries and their peoples,” implying that the special relationship would outlast the Kremlin’s current leadership. In truth, an authoritarian China could hardly afford to lose Russia if that meant ending up with a pro-American Russia on its northern border, a scenario parallel to, yet drastically more threatening than, a pro-American, reunited Korean Peninsula. At a minimum, access to Russian oil and gas, China’s partial hedge against a sea blockade, would be at risk. But even if China were gaining little materially from Russia, preventing Russia from turning to the West would remain a topmost national security priority. An American-leaning Russia would enable enhanced Western surveillance of China (the same way, in reverse, that U.S. President Richard Nixon’s rapprochement with Mao enabled Western surveillance on the Soviet Union from Xinjiang). Worse, China would suddenly need to redeploy substantial assets from elsewhere to defend its expansive northern border. And so China must be prepared to absorb Pyongyang-like behavior from Moscow, too.

RUSSIA IN CHAOS

Putin’s regime wields the threat of chaos and the unknown to ward off internal challenges and change. But while keenly sowing chaos abroad, from eastern Europe to central Africa and the Middle East, Russia itself could fall victim to it. The Putin regime has looked more or less stable even under the extreme pressures of large-scale war, and predictions of collapse under far-reaching Western sanctions have not been borne out. But Russian states overseen from St. Petersburg and Moscow, respectively, both disintegrated in the past 100-odd years, both times unexpectedly yet completely. There are many plausible hypothetical causes for a breakdown in the near future: a domestic mutiny that spirals out of control, one or more natural catastrophes beyond the authorities’ capacity to manage, an accident or intentional sabotage of nuclear facilities, or the accidental or nonaccidental death of a leader. Countries such as Russia with corroded institutions and legitimacy deficits can be susceptible to cascades in a sudden stress test. Chaos could well be the price for a failure to retrench.

Even amid anarchy, however, Russia would not dissolve like the Soviet Union. As the KGB’s final chief analyst lamented, the Soviet federation resembled a chocolate bar: its collective pieces (the 15 union republics) were demarcated as if with creases and thus were ready to be broken off. By contrast, the Russian Federation mostly comprises territorial units not based on ethnicity and without quasi-state status. Its constituents that are national in designation mostly do not have titular majorities and are often deeply interior, such as Tatarstan, Bashkortostan, Mari El, and Yakutia. Still, the federation could partly disintegrate in volatile border regions such as the North Caucasus. Kaliningrad—a small Russian province geographically disconnected from the rest of the federation and sandwiched between Lithuania and Poland, more than 400 miles from Russia proper—could be vulnerable.

Were chaos to engulf Moscow, China could move to retake the expansive lands of the Amur basin that the Romanovs expropriated from the Qing. Japan might forcibly enact its claims to the Northern Territories, which the Russians call the southern Kurils, and Sakhalin Island, both of which Japan once ruled, and possibly part of the Russian Far Eastern mainland, which Japan occupied during the Russian civil war. The Finns might seek to reclaim the chunk of Karelia they once ruled. Such actions could spark a general unraveling or backfire by provoking a Russian mass mobilization.

Amid chaos, even without major territorial loss, criminal syndicates and cybercriminals could operate with yet more impunity. Nuclear and biological weapons, as well as the scientists who develop them, could scatter—the nightmare that might have accompanied the Soviet collapse but was essentially avoided, partly because many Soviet scientists believed a better Russia might emerge. If there were to be a next time, it’s impossible to predict how Russians might weigh their hopes against their anger. Chaos need not mean a doomsday scenario. But it could. Armageddon might have only been postponed, instead of averted.

CONTINENTAL CUL-DE-SAC

A Russian future missing here is the one prevalent among the Putin regime’s mouthpieces as well as its extreme-right critics: Moscow as a pole in its version of a multipolar world, bossing around Eurasia and operating as a key arbiter of world affairs. “We need to find ourselves and understand who we are,” the Kremlin loyalist Sergei Karaganov mused last year. “We are a great Eurasian power, Northern Eurasia, a liberator of peoples, a guarantor of peace, and the military-political core of the World Majority. This is our manifest destiny.” The so-called global South—or as Karaganov rendered it, “the World Majority”—does not exist as a coherent entity, let alone one with Russia as its core. The project of Russia as a self-reliant supercontinent, bestride Europe and Asia, has already failed. The Soviet Union forcibly held not just an inner empire on the Baltic and Black Seas but also an outer empire of satellites, ultimately to no avail.

Russia’s world is effectively shrinking despite its occupation of nearly 20 percent of Ukraine. Territorially, it is now farther from the heart of Europe (Kaliningrad excepted) than at any time since the conquests of Peter the Great and Catherine the Great. More than three centuries after appearing on the Pacific, moreover, Russia has never succeeded at becoming an Asian power. That was true even when World War II presented it with opportunities to avenge itself against Japan for the defeat Russia suffered at its hands in 1905, to reestablish the tsar’s position in Chinese Manchuria, and to extend its grasp to part of the Korean Peninsula. Russia will never be culturally at home in Asia, and its already minuscule population east of Lake Baikal has contracted since the Soviet collapse.

Russia’s influence in its immediate neighborhood has been diminishing, too. The bulk of non-Russians in the former Soviet borderlands want less and less to do with their former overlord and certainly do not want to be reabsorbed by it. Armenians are embittered, Kazakhs are wary, and Belarusians are trapped and unhappy about it. Eurasianism and Slavophilism are mostly dead letters: the overwhelming majority of the world’s non-Russian Slavs joined or are clamoring to join the European Union and NATO. Without Russia menacing its European neighbors, NATO’s reason for being becomes uncertain. But that means Russia could break NATO only by developing into a durable rule-of-law state, precisely what Putin resists with all his being.

Separating Russia from China would be a tall order.

There is no basis for Russia to serve as a global focal point, drawing countries toward it. Its economic model offers little inspiration. It can ill afford to serve as a major donor of aid. It is less able to sell weapons—it needs them itself and is even trying to buy back systems it has sold—and has been reduced in some cases to bartering with other pariah states. It has lost its strong position as a provider of satellites. It belongs to a pariah club with Iran and North Korea, exuberantly exchanging weapons, flouting international law, and promising much further trouble. It’s not difficult to imagine each betraying the other at the next better opportunity, however, provided they do not unravel first; the West is more resilient than the “partnerships” of the anti-West. Even many former Soviet partners that refused to condemn Russia over Ukraine, including India and South Africa, do not view Moscow as a developmental partner but as scaffolding for boosting their own sovereignty. Russia’s foreign policy delivers at best tactical gains, not strategic ones: no enhanced human capital, no assured access to leading-edge technology, no inward investment and new infrastructure, no improved governance, and no willing mutually obliged treaty allies, which are the keys to building and sustaining modern power. Besides raw materials and political thuggery, the only things Russia exports are talented people.

Russia has never sustained itself as a great power unless it had close ties to Europe. And for Putin or a successor, it would be a long way back. He undid more than two centuries of Swedish neutrality and three-quarters of a century of Finlandization (whereby Helsinki deferred to Moscow on major foreign policy considerations), prompting both countries to join NATO. Much depends on the evolving disposition of Germany: imagine the fate of Europe, and indeed the world order, if post–World War II Germany had evolved to resemble today’s Russia rather than undergone its remarkable transformation. Germany played the role of bridge to Russia, securing peaceful unification on its terms and lucrative business partnerships. But as things stand, Moscow can no longer cut deals with Berlin to revive its European ties without fundamentally altering its own political behavior, and maybe its political system. Even if Russia did change systemically, moreover, Poland and the Baltic states now stand resolutely in the way of Russian reconciliation with Europe as permanent members of the Western alliance and the EU.

Russia’s future forks: one path is a risky drift into a deeper Chinese embrace, the other an against-the-odds return to Europe. Having its cake and eating it, too—enduring as a great power with recaptured economic dynamism, avoiding sweeping concessions to the West or lasting subservience to China, dominating Eurasia, and instituting a world order safe for authoritarianism and predation—would require reversals beyond Russia’s ability to engineer.

IS THERE A BETTER WAY?

Russia’s basic grand strategy appears simple: vastly overinvest in the military, roguish capabilities, and the secret police, and try to subvert the West. No matter how dire its strategic position gets, and it is often dire, Russia can muddle through, as long as the West weakens, too. Beyond Western disintegration, some Russians quietly fantasize about a war between the United States and China. West and East would maul each other, and Russia would greatly improve its relative standing without breaking a sweat. The upshot would seem to be self-evident: Washington and its allies must stay strong together, and Beijing must be deterred without provoking a war. The conventional options, however, have severe limits. One is accommodation, which Russian rulers occasionally need but rarely pursue—and, when they do, they make it difficult for the West to sustain. The other is confrontation, which Russian regimes require but cannot afford, and the opportunity costs of which are too high for the West. The path to a better option begins with a candid acknowledgment of failures, but not in accordance with received wisdom.

Calls to recognize Russia’s “legitimate” interests are frequently heard in critiques of U.S. policy, but the great-power stability purchased by indulging coercive spheres of influence always proves ephemeral, even as the agonies of sacrificed smaller countries and the ignominy of compromising U.S. values always linger. Consider that in the aftermath of Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s maneuvering, China and Russia are closer than ever. Arms control is effectively dead. Détente died before many people even knew what the word connoted, but the damage in Indochina, Latin America, South Asia, and elsewhere remains palpable even now. Kissinger might have argued that these disappointing results were the fault of others for failing to adhere to his practice of shrewd balancing in international affairs. But any equilibrium that depends on the dexterity of a single person is not, in fact, an equilibrium.

Many advocates for and past practitioners of engagement assert that the multidecade U.S. policy of engaging China was smarter than it looked, that American policymakers were always skeptical that economic growth would lead China toward an open political system but believed it was worth trying anyway. Some also claim they hedged against the risk of failure. Such retrospective image burnishing is belied by the glaring insecurity of global supply chains (as revealed by the COVID-19 pandemic) and the pitiful state of the U.S. defense industrial base (as revealed by the war against Ukraine). In the case of Russia, Washington did hedge, expanding NATO to include almost all of eastern Europe and the Baltic states. But that had less to do with an unsentimental assessment of Russia’s possible trajectory than with the shame of Yalta, when Washington proved powerless to deliver on its promises of free and fair elections after World War II, and the post-1989 pleas of the potential new entrants for admission. Critics of NATO expansion, for their part, blame it for Russia’s revanchism, as if a repressive authoritarian regime that invades its neighbors in the name of its security is something unexpected in Russian history and wouldn’t have happened anyway had the alliance not expanded—leaving even more countries vulnerable.

Russia can muddle through, as long as the West weakens, too.

Peace comes through strength, combined with skillful diplomacy. The United States must maintain concerted pressure on Russia while also offering incentives for Moscow to retrench. That means creating leverage through next-generation military tools but also pursuing negotiations in close cooperation with U.S. allies and partners and aided by so-called Track II exchanges among influential but nongovernmental figures. Meanwhile, Washington should prepare for and assiduously promote the possibility of a Russian nationalist recalibration. In the event that Russia does not become France any time soon, the rise of a Russian nationalist who acknowledges the long-term price of extreme anti-Westernism remains the likeliest path to a Russia that finds a stable place in the international order. In the near term, a step in that direction could be ending the fighting in Ukraine on terms favorable to Kyiv: namely, an armistice without legal recognition of annexations and without treaty infringement on Ukraine’s right to join NATO, the EU, or any other international body that would have it as a member. Putin might well achieve his war aims before a Russian nationalist officer or official gets the chance to accept such terms, but the high costs to Russia would persist, as the conflict could shift from attritional warfare into a Ukrainian insurgency.

As strange as it might sound, to create the right incentives for retrenchment, Washington and its partners need a pro-Russian policy: that is, instead of pushing Russians further into Putin’s arms, confirming his assertions about an implacably anti-Russian collective West, Western policymakers and civil society organizations should welcome and reward—with visas, job opportunities, investment opportunities, cultural exchanges—those Russians who want to deconflate Putin and Russia but not necessarily embrace Jeffersonian ideals. It would be a mistake to wait for and reward only a pro-Western Russian government.

The West should also prepare for a Russia that inflicts even greater spoliation on a global scale—but not drive it to do so. Some analysts have been urging U.S. President Joe Biden (or a future president) to pull off a reverse Nixon-Kissinger: to launch a diplomatic outreach to Moscow against Beijing. Of course, China and the Soviet Union had already split well before that previous American gambit. Separating Russia from China today would be a tall order. Even if successful, it would necessitate looking the other way as Moscow coercively reimposed a sphere of influence on former Soviet possessions, including Ukraine. The tightness of the Chinese-Russian relationship, meanwhile, has been mutually discrediting, and it has bound Washington’s allies in Asia and Europe much more closely to the United States. Rather than a reverse, Washington could find itself in an updated Nixon-Kissinger moment: asking China to help restrain Russia.

OPPORTUNITY ABROAD, OPPORTUNITY AT HOME

The supreme irony of American grand strategy for the past 70 years is that it worked, fostering an integrated world of impressive and shared prosperity, and yet is now being abandoned. The United States was open for business to its adversaries, without reciprocation. Today, however, so-called industrial policy and protectionism are partially closing the country not just to rivals but also to U.S. allies, partners, friends, and potential friends. American policy has come to resemble China’s—right when the latter has hit a wall.

To be sure, technology export controls have a place in the policy toolkit, whether for China or Russia. But it’s not clear what the United States is offering in a positive sense. A strategic trade policy—reflected by initiatives such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement, which Washington crafted but then abandoned—might be a nonstarter in the current domestic political climate. A nimble administration, however, could repackage such an approach as an ambitious quest to secure global supply chains.

World order requires legitimacy, an example worth emulating, a system open to strivers. The United States was once synonymous with economic opportunity for its allies and partners but also for others who aspired to attain the prosperity and peace that the open U.S.-led economic order promised—and, for the most part, delivered by reducing inequality on a world historic scale, raising billions of people out of poverty globally, and fostering robust middle classes. But over time, the United States ceded that role, allowing China to become synonymous with economic opportunity (as the leading trade partner of most countries) and manufacturing prowess (as a hub of technical know-how, logistics mastery, and skilled workers). To recapture lost ground and to restart the engine of social mobility at home, the United States, which has a mere 1.5 million mathematics teachers and must import knowledge of that subject from East Asia and South Asia, needs to launch a program to produce one million new teachers of math within a decade. It makes little sense to admit students to college if, lacking the universal language of science, engineering, computers, and economics, they are limited to majoring in themselves and their grievances.

The turret of a destroyed Russian tank near Robotyne, Ukraine, February 2024

Stringer / Reuters

The government and philanthropists should redirect significant higher education funding to community colleges that meet or exceed performance metrics. States should launch an ambitious rollout of vocational schools and training, whether reintroducing them in existing high schools or opening new self-standing ones in partnership with employers at the ground level. Beyond human capital, the United States needs to spark a housing construction boom by drastically reducing environmental regulations and to eliminate subsidies for builders, letting the market work. The country also needs to institute national service for young people, perhaps with an intergenerational component, to rekindle broad civic consciousness and a sense of everyone being in this together.

Investing in people and housing and rediscovering a civic spirit on the scale that characterized the astonishing mobilizations of the Cold War around science and national projects would not alone guarantee equal opportunity at home. But such policies would be a vital start, a return to the tried-and-true formula that built U.S. national power in conjunction with American international leadership. The United States could once again be synonymous with opportunity abroad and at home, acquire more friends, and grow ever more capable of meeting whatever future Russia emerges. The American example and economic practice bent the trajectory of Russia before, and it could do so again, with fewer illusions this time.

STEPHEN KOTKIN is Kleinheinz Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He is the author of the forthcoming book Stalin: Totalitarian Superpower, 1941–1990s, the last in his three-volume biography.

Foreign Affairs · by Stephen Kotkin · April 18, 2024

27. A war is brewing in the Pacific

American militarism?

Conclusion:

Our allies in Asia are thus faced with a choice: they can either choose to exploit their unique geographical position and act as a bridge between East and West; or they can choose to become tools of American militarism and great-power confrontation. To see how the latter might end up, they only have to look to Europe.Our allies in Asia are thus faced with a choice: they can either choose to exploit their unique geographical position and act as a bridge between East and West; or they can choose to become tools of American militarism and great-power confrontation. To see how the latter might end up, they only have to look to Europe.

A war is brewing in the Pacific

Will Aukus make the same mistakes as Nato?

unherd.com · by Thomas Fazi · April 18, 2024

The US may be losing ground to new global powers in many respects, but when it comes to the business of sowing conflict around the world, it remains unrivalled. As it slowly abandons Ukraine to its own fate, after playing a crucial role in triggering the conflict in the first place, and as it contributes to the dangerous escalation in the Middle East, it is also laying the ground for a future war with China in Asia.

For much of the past half-century, the US and its Asia-Pacific allies shunned a collective Nato-like approach to security in the region, opting instead for a so-called hub-and-spokes system: with the United States as the hub and various bilateral and multilateral alliances as the spokes of an ideal “wheel of security”. In recent years, amid growing tensions with Beijing, these initiatives have multiplied, with overlapping political, military and economic deals creating, in the words of The Economist, “an ever-thickening lattice on China’s periphery”.

The US, however, now appears determined to take this approach one step further, by transforming its patchwork of arrangements into a full-blown military alliance: an Asian Nato. The first major step in this direction was the creation, in the early days of the Biden administration, of the Australia-United Kingdom-United States pact (Aukus), a new trilateral military partnership that included, as its central pillar, the provision of nuclear-powered (but not nuclear-armed) submarines to Australia. The project was initially met with scepticism and hostility — especially, as one might have expected, from China, which said that the partnership risked “severely damaging regional peace”.

While this led to a sluggish start for the new alliance, Aukus has gained momentum in recent months. The three countries recently announced the launch of Pillar II of the pact, which will see its members collaborate on next-gen military technologies — including quantum computing, artificial intelligence, hypersonic weapons and undersea capabilities — and decide whether to invite new members, such as South Korea, Canada, New Zealand and Japan. Earlier this month, the US ambassador to Japan, Rahm Emanuel, wrote that Japan was “about to become the first additional Pillar II partner”.

Over the past year, the US and its allies in the region have emphatically denied that these moves are aimed at establishing an “Asian Nato”. However, such reassurances don’t carry much weight these days — especially in China. After all, the US is very open about the fact that it considers China to be its major “pacing threat” — and several high-ranking US officials have argued that they consider a US-China war in the coming years to be all but inevitable. Indeed, Nato itself has declared China to be a “systemic challenge”. Meanwhile, US allies in the region are deepening their relations with Nato itself through so-called Individually Tailored Partnership Programmes (ITPPs), and the leaders of Australia, Japan, Korea and New Zealand were invited as guests to a Nato summit in Lithuania last year, whose communique called out China more than a dozen times for coercive and destabilising military and economic actions.

The Western narrative is that the military build-up in the Asia-Pacific is merely a response to China’s increasingly assertive posture in the region — and is therefore about deterrence, not escalation, and shouldn’t be perceived by China as a threat. But should we expect China to take our word for it? Indeed, Beijing has made it very clear that it views Aukus, and the growing US military presence in the Asia-Pacific, as a threat — especially in light of the new US Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell’s admission that “Aukus submarines are intended for a potential war with China over Taiwan”.

In this context, Campbell’s argument that Aukus will “strengthen peace and stability more generally” in the region appear naïve at best, and deceiving at worst. Indeed, it’s hard to see how pouring military machinery into an already volatile region won’t lead to the escalatory spiral that Aukus’s strengthening and expansion is ostensibly aimed at preventing: an all-out US-China war.

If all this feels familiar, that’s because it is. In many respects, what is happening with Aukus in the Asia-Pacific is reminiscent of Nato’s post-Nineties expansion towards Russia’s border. Even then, Nato claimed that its expansion was defensive in nature and shouldn’t be viewed as a threat by Russia. Yet, countless US politicians and diplomats, including George Kennan and Bill Clinton, understood that Nato expansion would become a self-fulling prophecy: regardless of Western assurances, it would create a security dilemma for Russia, and invite a retaliatory response from the latter at some point, thus engendering the very security threat that Nato expansion was purportedly defending against. This is, of course, exactly what happened, eventually leading to the tragic events still unfolding in Ukraine.

“If all this feels familiar, that’s because it is.”

Today, a similar self-fulfilling prophecy is unfolding in the Asia-Pacific. With regard to the expansion of Aukus, the US is once again adopting the same incremental, or “salami”, tactic as it did during Nato’s expansion: it is cutting off thin slices gradually — moving in small steps — so that no single action can be used by the other side to justify a major response, while over time achieving the desired (and officially denied) outcome.

Throughout Nato’s gradual enlargement, this strategy enabled Washington to dismiss any complaints and to depict Russia’s responses as disproportionate. A similar argument is used today to dismiss Chinese concerns about Aukus’s Pillar II: the latter, the US claims, simply implies greater military-technological collaboration between allied countries, not the creation of a full-blown military alliance. But of course increasing “joint capabilities and interoperability” between countries — just as the US was doing in Ukraine in the lead-up to Russia’s invasion — is a step in that direction.

Another tactic plucked from Nato’s playbook is the “deterrence-cooperation dichotomy” — a term coined by the Norwegian political scientist Glenn Diesen to describe the way in which Nato expanded while continuing to promote cooperation with Russia in several domains. A similar approach today has been adopted in countries like Australia and New Zealand: while deepening their relations with the US and Nato in the context of avowedly anti-China military-security alliances, they continue to express their keenness to maintain solid economic ties with China.

Now, this may seem understandable: China today is the top trading partner for most US allies and partners in the Asia-Pacific region, including Australia and New Zealand. But it also speaks to the irrationality of this approach to China. After all, it’s unclear exactly how China represents a “threat” to these countries — unless one construes the end of American dominance of the Asia-Pacific region, and the rise of a more policentric order, to be an instrinsic threat, which indeed seems to be the case. As the former New Zealand PM Helen Clark asked of reports that the government is considering joining Aukus: “Why do we need a military alliance ostensibly aimed at defending us from our major trading partner? This somehow doesn’t quite add up.”

In response, local politicians might tell themselves — and their citizens — that military alliances such as Aukus don’t compromise their country’s sovereignty, and that they remain in charge of their foreign policy. However, the history of Nato tells a different story: US-led military alliances of this kind create a path dependency that makes it very hard for individual members to disentangle themselves from the foreign-policy decisions taken in Washington, even if they disagree with them. Again, the history of Nato expansion is instructive here. When President Clinton attempted to advance the deployment of strategic missile defence systems in Eastern Europe, he met strong opposition from several European countries. But Washington, as the de facto leader of the dominant security system in Europe, methodically used the demand for “alliance solidarity” to mute criticism from allies. Eventually, Nato allies fell in line — just as they did following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

In this sense, countries such as Australia and New Zealand would be naïve to think that they could avoid getting dragged into a future US-China conflict. Aukus means effectively surrendering their foreign policy to the US. After all, the Americans have been pretty open about the fact that they view Aukus as a Nato-like means to assert US hegemony over the region. Campbell, the chief architect of Biden’s Asia strategy, has openly admitted that Aukus is about “locking [Australia] in for the next 40 years” — i.e. subordinating it to America’s geopolitical strategy.

The Australian government has often stated that Aukus “does not involve any ante facto commitment to participate in, or be directed in accordance with, the military operations of any other country”. But they were recently rebuffed by none other than Campbell himself, who, according to the Financial Review, confirmed that “Washington would not transfer the jewel in its crown — nuclear-powered submarines — if it did not have ultimate say over their operational use, especially if a conflict arises with China”. As The Economist recently observed, Australia isn’t destined to become a sovereign partner, but “America’s military launchpad into Asia”.

Our allies in Asia are thus faced with a choice: they can either choose to exploit their unique geographical position and act as a bridge between East and West; or they can choose to become tools of American militarism and great-power confrontation. To see how the latter might end up, they only have to look to Europe.

Thomas Fazi is an UnHerd columnist and translator. His latest book is The Covid Consensus, co-authored with Toby Green.

battleforeurope

unherd.com · by Thomas Fazi · April 18, 2024

28. The Axis Off-Kilter: Why an Iran-Russia-China “Axis” Is Shakier than Meets the Eye

Why do they leave out north Korea?( Yes, my bias is showing)

Excerpts:

As the United States and its allies consider the recent naval exercises between Iran, Russia, and China, they should refrain from fixating solely on this somewhat tenuous trilateral nexus. Instead, they should look at the broader trend toward multipolarity among countries committed to eschewing U.S. leadership. Regrettably, this trilateral engagement is but one symptom of a much larger problem.

What would a more pronounced Iran-Russia-China axis look like? One potential indicator of deepening trilateral engagement would be the public acknowledgment and inclusion of Tehran’s ambitious proposals for more structured military cooperation in the official discourse of Moscow and Beijing. Iran’s quest for Shanghai Cooperation Organization membership is an instructive example: After over a decade of resistance, Beijing eventually came around to the idea following sustained advocacy from Moscow and Tehran. If Moscow were to take Iran’s side and advocate for formalized military engagement among all three nations, it would represent a significant step in this direction, as together, the two states may be able to soften China’s position. Should Beijing, likely the most resistant partner, indicate its interest in the idea, a formalized military alliance could be imminent. Until then, observers should realize that for now, the axis is indeed off-kilter.

The Axis Off-Kilter: Why an Iran-Russia-China “Axis” Is Shakier than Meets the Eye - War on the Rocks

LUCAS WINTER, JEMIMA BAAR, AND JASON WARNER

warontherocks.com · by Lucas Winter · April 19, 2024

On 11 March, Iran, Russia, and China launched the fourth iteration of their four-day annual trilateral naval exercises. According to Iranian Second Rear Admiral Mustafa Taj al-Dini, the exercises “testif[y] to the emergence of a new alliance to ensure security in the northern Indian Ocean.” The reality, though, might not be quite so dramatic.

First held in 2019, these exercises have always taken place in the Arabian Sea, and been based out of the Iranian port of Chabahar. They occur in a highly strategic corridor in the northern Indian Ocean, which links the Arabian Peninsula to Chinese ports in the Pacific Ocean via the Strait of Malacca. What is most notable about these exercises are the geopolitical implications of strategic coordination between Iran, Russia, and China. Indeed, even as talk of a burgeoning Iran-Russia-China axis increases, these naval exercises remain the only regularly cited example of trilateral military coordination in action. As such, they have much to tell us about the nature of this trilateral relationship — its motivations, possibilities, and limitations.

Relations between all three states seem to be deepening. Chinese General Secretary Xi Jinping has made “strengthen[ed] strategic coordination” with Russia a priority, while in his post-“election” victory speech, Russian President Vladimir Putin declared that China’s and Russia’s “national interests coincide,” which “creates a favorable environment for resolving our common tasks and in the sphere of international relations.” In our recently published reports from the U.S. Army’s Foreign Military Studies Office, we found that both China and Russia employ instruments of national power for military influence in Iran at a high level, each scoring a four on a five-point scale. Furthermore, our research assesses that both Russian and Chinese military influence in Iran are likely to increase in the next three years. Alongside the stronger bilateral relations between the three countries, Iran recently joined the Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa (BRICS) group and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, arguably the two most prominent Russo-Chinese alternative multilateral institutions. In articulating their importance to Iran, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi described membership in the BRICS as “countering unilateralism,” while the Shanghai Cooperation Organization was “a great family of civilizations” standing in opposition to Western “moral downfall.” The foundation for a trilateral security alliance, in short, seems to be in place.

This burgeoning engagement between Iran, Russia, and China is a cause for serious concern, as it places three of the most significant U.S. adversaries in a coalition that, at its core, seeks to disrupt and challenge the U.S.-led order. Commentators have thus raised the alarm about a new “axis of disorder,” “Axis of Evil 2.0,” “axis of autocracy,” “unholy alliance,” or even “Legion of Doom.” Yet increased bilateral engagement and multilateral cooperation do not necessarily result in a trilateral “axis.” How cohesive is such an Iran-Russia-China “axis,” and how concerned should the United States and its allies be?

While concerning to a degree, this axis is, currently, more rhetorical than real. Although there are clear reasons why the three countries might mutually benefit from the emergence of deep and consistent trilateral engagement — and have indeed collaborated in practice — important fissures in such a trilateral axis exist. The aforementioned naval exercises, for example, are not as important as typically portrayed. On a broader level, each of the three countries brings its own challenges to the would-be axis. As a result, the United States and its allies — while remaining wary — should recognize the tenuousness of this axis and avoid viewing all interactions between these three states as inherently deep, meaningful, and, thus, threatening. Instead, the real threat is more subtle: each of these three countries seeks to leverage its growingnetwork of multilateral partnerships, often beyond this trilateral context, to its benefit and to the detriment of the United States.

Become a Member

The Trilateral Axis in Theory

On the surface, for China, Russia, and Iran, the potential benefits of collaboration in a formalized axis are intuitive. First, it would facilitate the shared goal of challenging and remaking the U.S.-led global order. Within this group, there is no shortage of rhetoric extolling this objective. Xi has called for China to “lead the reform of the global governance system” and has launched initiatives to rival the U.S.-led world order, such as the Belt and Road Initiative, Global Development Initiative, and Global Security Initiative. Russia, the mid-level partner, has a primary foreign policy focus, as articulated in the so-called Primakov doctrine, to create a multipolar world in which the United States is constrained by other major powers. Raisi appeals to his Chinese and Russian counterparts to join the “resistance” to “turn the threat [of the United States] into an opportunity for progress.”

Second, while America’s primary concern over the axis is its military implications, the creation of a formalized trilateral axis offers opportunities for robust economic partnerships amongst all three countries, at least two of which (Russia and Iran) are under punitive global sanctions. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, there has been renewed interest in Moscow and Tehran for developing the International North-South Transport Corridor , a multi-mode route for moving freight between Russia, Central Asia, and India. Tangible steps toward greater economic integration have occurred: in February 2023, Moscow and Tehran announced that they had connected their national financial messaging services after their access to the Belgium-based Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication was suspended. The move insulates bilateral financial exchanges from Western sanctions and could be expanded to involve other countries in the future.

Third, the creation of a trilateral axis would help each of the countries shore up its security as they look to a conflict-ridden future, with China contemplating conflict with the United States over Taiwan, Russia considering a longer-term war in Europe, and Iran viewing itself as perennially under attack. While the naval exercises demonstrate the potential maritime security implications, the three have also collaborated in the space domain. For example, all three have made concerted efforts to eliminate their reliance on the United States’ GPS global navigation satellite system and instead reinforce each other’s. In 2021, Iran’s military was granted full access to China’s BeiDou satellite navigation system (the second country apart from Pakistan), while integration efforts between BeiDou and Russia’s indigenous satellite system, GLONASS, are under way.

The Limits of Naval Cooperation

While the ideological bases for a trilateral axis are theoretically in place, in practice, the most frequently invoked example of the axis’ existence is less than the sum of its parts. Specifically, the trilateral naval drills in the Arabian Sea — the sole public instance of trilateral military coordination — remain largely performative. Alone, they are unlikely to increase trilateral interoperability in any meaningful way. Still, the fact that these exercises have occurred with some regularity is indicative of a desire by all three parties, even if symbolic, to project an image of trilateral coordination.

Militarily, there is no indication that these exercises — or past editions — are intended to simulate a complex coordinated operation. Instead, they involve fairly standard tactical-level maritime exercise activities and have hardly changed in this focus over the years. The 2024 edition, called “Security Bond–2024” (or alternatively “Maritime Security Belt 2024”) was focused primarily on “firing at sea and armed rescue of hijacked merchant vessels.” Previous iterations of the exercises were similarly focused on simulated hijacked vessel rescue operationsand nighttime target shooting. The types of Russian and Chinese vessels involved in these exercises have changed little over the years.

In addition to the limited nature of what the exercises are, it is also instructive where they are. It is noteworthy that the Arabian Sea remains the sole area of operations where this “trilateralism” comes to life. This is no coincidence: The Arabian Sea is one of the few spaces where all three core elements of a potential axis mentioned above — challenging the U.S.-led order, facilitating economic partnerships, and shoring up security — converge in one place. In this particular environment, each country prioritizes these elements to different degrees. Russia sees the exercises as a means of moving forward its “Collective Security in the Persian Gulf” agenda, which was unveiled a few months before the first edition of trilateral exercises occurred in 2019. The exercises also play a role in furthering Moscow’s goal of becoming a “great maritime power,” which, as detailed in its 2022 naval doctrine, involves establishing a naval presence in the Persian Gulf. For Iran, the host nation, security is at the forefront, and the exercises respond to a desire for strengthened naval projection capabilities in the increasingly contested Indian Ocean region. For China, the exercises enhance the projection of its naval escort taskforce in the Gulf of Aden, which, along with a naval base in Djibouti, give Beijing a limited but permanent naval presence in this strategic corridor through which the majority of its oil is transported. In short, while the exercises are of limited relevance to strengthening interoperability between the three navies, each participant has specific, if limited, needs met through participating.

Individual Challenges

Beyond the fact that the naval exercises themselves are weaker as a means of trilateral cooperation than are often portrayed, a closer inspection reveals that each state brings to the table its own distinct issues that hinder the formation of such a more formalized trilateral axis.

One of the greatest impediments from the Iranian side is the fact that Tehran is pushing for a broader security cooperation coalition than the other two seemingly feel comfortable with. Although it is the newest member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, Tehran has been an ardent proponent of fundamentally refocusing the organization to serve as a conduit for greater military cooperation amongst all states. Immediately after Iran became a full member, Minister of Defense Brigadier General Mohammad-Reza Ashtiani declared that the “[Shanghai Cooperation Organization] member states share the responsibility for designing a new world order.” He called for the establishment of a “Shanghai Maritime Security Belt” — a new military zone that would protect trade between members. Though this has not materialized, the proclamation, if embraced, would have been indicative of a fundamental shift of the organization’s raison d’être,reorienting it from its founding focus on combating what China describes as “the Three Evils” — terrorism, separatism, and extremism — and toward protection against external state threats. Tellingly, neither Russia nor China has addressed this proposal publicly.

Indeed, for China, one of the biggest stumbling blocks to the creation of a formal alliance with Iran and Russia is, quite simply, it does not want one, at least in the way desired by Iran. First, Iran’s bravado in likening its cooperation with Russia and China to “a new NATO” is diametrically opposed to China’s preferred approach. Successive Chinese leaders, including Xi Jinping, have eschewed deep, binding security alliances. Second, for China, membership in an overtly anti-Western bloc with two global pariahs would fly in the face of its desire to explicitly avoid pursuing (or being perceived as pursuing) a full break with the United States. Given its significant “equities in the current international system,” China is likely reluctant to engage in an explicit counter-order that leads to a more severe rupture with Washington. After all, it was Beijing’s desire to avoid being perceived as part of an overtly anti-U.S. bloc that caused China to hesitate granting Iran full membership in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization for over a decade.

Russia’s challenge to the emergence of such a trilateral axis is not a lack of interest, but rather a lack of focus. Since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Moscow has been too overwhelmed to be a reliable partner. An illustrative example is Russia’s repeated failure to deliver the Su-35s that Iran had purchased. Another challenge that Russia brings to a would-be trilateral alliance is its reluctance to step in on Iran’s behalf in all circumstances. For instance, Russia has shown a limited willingness to push back against Israel’s ongoing attacks on Iranian facilities and personnel in Syria. There are, in other words, already clear limits to how far Russia is willing to extend its support for Iran.

A final challenge is that China diverges from Russia and Iran on its perspective on India’s role in all this. Indeed, both Iran and Russia appear to want something more than a trilateral alliance with China: Instead, they arguably seek a quadrilateral alliance that would include India and that would theoretically exert overwhelming influence throughout Eurasia. The Primakov doctrine, for example, names China and India explicitly as the powers with which Russia cooperates against the United States through a “strategic triangle.” Iran, meanwhile, looks favorably on both Russia and India as providing the means to bolster its economy, via participation in the International North-South Transport Corridor, in the face of Western sanctions. A trilateral alliance that excludes or antagonizes India, in short, is unlikely to gain much traction in Moscow or Tehran.

Beijing, by contrast, is not on board with inviting India into this tenuous axis. At present, China and India are increasingly competing for influence in South Asia. India has begun “flexing its naval power” in the Indian Ocean, deploying ships to its backyard to demonstrate to China that it does not have a monopoly on patrolling the region. The tensions extend to the naval exercises themselves: Following the first Russia-China-Iran trilateral in December 2019, a deadly border skirmish in 2020 led China and India to refuse invitations to participate in the second edition in early 2021. (In the end, only Russia and Iran participated in the 2021 exercises, which proved to be largely inconsequential.) Tellingly, India hosted multilateral naval exercises in February 2024, which included, among others, Russia and Iran, as well as the United States. China was not invited.

Finally, the ongoing Israel-Hamas war underscores the fact that where there does appear to be trilateral coordination, it is often limited to rhetorical alignment and nonmilitary diplomacy that is not exclusive to the trilateral grouping. Russian and Chinese narratives on Gaza, for instance, largely mirror those of Iran — critical of Israel and supportive of Hamas. Russian and Chinese officials have both met with Hamas leaders. When it comes to Gaza-related resolutions, the two countries have voted in tandem at the United Nations Security Council. Yet these rhetorical and diplomatic positions are hardly limited to members of the purported trilateral axis, but rather reflect a deeper global divide from which Russia and China seek to capitalize. Although ties between Israel and both Russiaand China have frayed as a result of these positions, both countries seek to preserve their positive relations with Israel, and neither has assisted Hamas on the battlefield.

The strengths and limits of trilateral coordination have also been on display in the Red Sea. In late January, China reportedly expressed its displeasure with Houthi anti-ship attacks and asked Iran to help rein them in. In mid-March, the Houthis purportedly struck a formal deal to not target Russian or Chinese vessels off Yemen’s coast. Days later, though, Houthi anti-ship ballistic missiles struck a Chinese merchant vessel, likely by mistake.

What’s Next

While bilateral relations between China, Russia, and Iran are robust, this does not alone amount to a trilateral axis. Indeed, the fact that the largely performative naval exercises off the Iranian coast are the only instance of trilateral military coordination between them, in addition to the individual challenges that each state brings to the table, is testament to the practical challenges facing such coordination.

Still, these exercises should not be written off as irrelevant. Cooperation can always deepen. Indeed, military ties between Russia, China, and Iran may well be on stronger footing than were the relations between the three World War II Axis powers (Germany, Italy, and Japan) prior to the Tripartite Pact of 1940, which created a defense alliance between the three countries. Structurally, the similarities between then and now are striking, with revisionist powers “seeking a dramatically transformed global order” at a time of global interdependence. As in World War II, a common enemy could well become a somewhat sudden, unifying externality.

Second, although the Russia-China-Iran trilateral axis does not appear to be blossoming into a trilateral alliance on the level of, for example, NATO, its emergence is suggestive of a new modus operandi. Russia, China, and Iran have all demonstrated an inclination to work individually and collectively to create a robust network of multilateral partnerships that erode U.S. security relationships by enticing U.S. partners to join one of their clubs. For instance, in the latest edition of the trilateral naval exercises, several countries were invited as observers, including Azerbaijan, India, Kazakhstan, Oman, Pakistan, and South Africa. The countries represent overlapping membership in several “alternative” multilateral organizations and projects, most importantly the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, BRICS, and the International North-South Transport Corridor. Thus, the creation of a variety of alternatives, rather than a single alternative, to the current order may prove more challenging.

As the United States and its allies consider the recent naval exercises between Iran, Russia, and China, they should refrain from fixating solely on this somewhat tenuous trilateral nexus. Instead, they should look at the broader trend toward multipolarity among countries committed to eschewing U.S. leadership. Regrettably, this trilateral engagement is but one symptom of a much larger problem.

What would a more pronounced Iran-Russia-China axis look like? One potential indicator of deepening trilateral engagement would be the public acknowledgment and inclusion of Tehran’s ambitious proposals for more structured military cooperation in the official discourse of Moscow and Beijing. Iran’s quest for Shanghai Cooperation Organization membership is an instructive example: After over a decade of resistance, Beijing eventually came around to the idea following sustained advocacy from Moscow and Tehran. If Moscow were to take Iran’s side and advocate for formalized military engagement among all three nations, it would represent a significant step in this direction, as together, the two states may be able to soften China’s position. Should Beijing, likely the most resistant partner, indicate its interest in the idea, a formalized military alliance could be imminent. Until then, observers should realize that for now, the axis is indeed off-kilter.

Become a Member

Lucas Winter is the senior Middle East analyst at the U.S. Army’s Foreign Military Studies Office, part of the U.S. Army’s Training and Doctrine Command G-2. He is co-director of the office’s M-DIME Research Project, which systematically assesses Russian and Chinese military influence across the globe. He has a M.A. in international relations from Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and was an Arabic language flagship fellow in Damascus, Syria, in 2006–2007.

Jemima Baar is a research fellow at the Foreign Military Studies Office. She is pursuing a master’s degree in international affairs at Columbia University, where she is an international fellow. She has been a research intern at the Council on Foreign Relations and a research assistant at Cambridge’s Center for Geopolitics.

Dr. Jason Warner is the Director of Research at the Foreign Military Studies Office, where he is also the Senior Africa and Senior Terrorism and Transnational Crime Analyst. He is also co-director of the office’s M-DIME Research Project. Between 2016 and 2022, he was a civilian Assistant Professor in the Department of Social Sciences at the U.S. Military Academy (West Point). He holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University.

The opinions expressed in this piece are the authors’ and do not represent the views of the U.S. Army, Department of Defense, or the U.S. government.

Image: NAVCENT Public Affairs

Commentary

warontherocks.com · by Lucas Winter · April 19, 2024

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

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

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

Access NSS HERE

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