Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

I will be on the other side of the world through Wednesday so my message will be at off times. Due to my compressed schedule and travel days (without wifi on the airplane, I may miss a day.

Quotes of the Day:

"Give me liberty to know, to utter and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties."

-John Milton

"There will always be ricks in the road ahead of us. They will be stumbling blocks or stepping stones.; it all depends on how you use them."

- Friedrich Nietzsche

"You can never really understand an individual unless you also understand the society, historical time period in which they lived, personal troubles, and social issues."

- S. Wright Mills

1. ‘This Could Be the Same’: China’s Growing Footprint in the Pacific Likened to Pre–Pearl Harbor Japan

2. Airman Shared Sensitive Intelligence More Widely and for Longer Than Previously Known

3. Pentagon Speeds Up Tank Timeline for Ukraine but Resists Calls for Jets

4. FBI leak investigators home in on members of private Discord server

5. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, April 21, 2023

6. US Military Cannot Refuel, Repair, Reload At Philippines Bases; Cannot Use EDCA To Defend Taiwan

7. US to Spend $100 Million on Upgrades to Philippine Military Facilities

8. Straight Talk about How the US is helping Ukraine

9. Russia admits its own warplane accidentally bombed Russian city of Belgorod, near Ukraine border

10. Twitter removes 'government-funded' news labels after NPR and other flubs

11. Postimperial Empire – How the War in Ukraine Is Transforming Europe

12. China’s Humanitarian Efforts Fail to Measure up in the Middle East

13. China unleashes the wolf warriors against South Korea and the Philippines

14. The US military must move beyond defense-reform theater

15. Navy Names First Woman to Lead Naval Academy

16. Bizarre Plot To Steal Russian Jets Ends In Ukrainians Charged With Treason

17. Japan Wades into Foreign Defense Assistance

18. Bipartisan bill would ‘arm Taiwan to the teeth’ with US cyber tech

19. Developing Strategically-Minded Enlisted Leaders

20. Army special operations community concludes first-ever Heritage Week

21. The American Spy Who Surrendered to the Nazis to Save Civilians

22. Rightwing Edgelords Are the Real Threat to National Security

23. Biden's 'Racial Equity' Order Threatens Military's Meritocracy

1. ‘This Could Be the Same’: China’s Growing Footprint in the Pacific Likened to Pre–Pearl Harbor Japan

Rhyming or repeating? An ominous warning from history.

‘This Could Be the Same’: China’s Growing Footprint in the Pacific Likened to Pre–Pearl Harbor Japan

By JIMMY QUINN

April 21, 2023

https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/04/this-could-be-the-same-chinas-growing-footprint-in-the-pacific-likened-to-pre-pearl-harbor-japan/?lctg=547f93a83b35d0210c8b61f3&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Monday%20through%20Friday%202023-04-21&utm_term=NRDaily-Smart

Adelegation led by a Solomon Islands leader ousted by the Pacific nation’s pro-Beijing government delivered a stark warning this week: that China’s growing influence in their country foreshadows an authoritarian takeover — and, potentially, a future attack on the U.S. akin to Pearl Harbor.

“When you look back at World War II, this is the similar thing that has happened with the Japanese Imperial Army. They were hanging around in the Pacific, and all of a sudden, they attacked Pearl Harbor,” said Celsus Talifilu, a political adviser to one of his country’s top opposition leaders.

“This could be the same, too. This could be the same. Once they get their foot in the Solomons and other places in the Pacific, the same, similar thing that happened to Pearl Harbor may happen, maybe not a generation from now, maybe not the next generation, but maybe later,” he added, speaking about the country where U.S. forces fought the Japanese in the Battle of Guadalcanal.

He made the comments yesterday in New York at a luncheon organized by the National Review Institute for Daniel Suidani, who until February led the government of the Solomons’ most populated island, Malaita, but was ousted this year for his outspoken opposition to the Chinese Communist Party.

Suidani and Talifilu were in town to attend meetings at a U.N. forum on indigenous peoples, and they plan to return to the Solomon Islands in a few weeks, after a swing through Washington, D.C. They said there are rumors that they will be arrested when they return, and they plan to have a lawyer ready in case anything happens.

In 2019, a pro-Beijing government led by Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare came to power in the Solomon Islands, switching the small but strategically located country’s recognition of Taiwan to that of Mainland China and setting in motion a broader alignment with Communist Chinese strategic goals. Since then, the Solomon Islands’ national government has inked a secretive security pact with China and served as a Pacific Island stopover for People’s Liberation Army transport jets.

There were also reports that the Solomon Islands planned to host one of China’s first overseas military bases, and the Pentagon said in its annual report on Chinese military power last year that Beijing “has probably already made overtures” to the country. Following an international outcry, however, Sogavare denied that that was the case.

Yet that has not reassured Washington, which is playing catch-up in the Pacific islands and has only recently pivoted to fervently working to shore up ties with governments in the region, including by establishing an embassy in the Solomon Islands capital of Honiara this year.

When a White House delegation rushed to the Solomons last summer, Sogavare reiterated his claim that there would not be a Chinese military presence. But in an unusual step, the Biden administration’s statement on the trip vowed that America would respond “if steps are taken to establish a de facto permanent military presence, power-projection capabilities, or a military installation.” There’s already a Chinese police presence in the Solomon Islands, pursuant to the security pact.

Accordingly, there’s a broader political transformation under way, which Suidani and Talifilu characterized as a slide toward authoritarianism enforced by Beijing’s financial heft and heavy-handed policing tactics. Sogavare has already postponed parliamentary elections by seven months, in an unprecedented move, and they believe that the prime minister might further delay them.

“Now that they see the presence of the security pact in the Solomon Islands, people are very fearful,” Suidani said. When he was ousted from the provincial premiership in February, his supporters took to the streets — and were tear-gassed by security forces sent by the central government. He said the vote to remove him from that post was backed by the national government. “I believe it was from the CCP that supported them,” he said, adding that security forces dispersed crowds of his supporters using patrol boats, tear gas, and firearms.

Talifilu said he sees a wholesale subjugation of the region to Chinese rule under way: “This is something bigger than Malaita, or Solomon Islands, or Fiji. This is something big. This communism will come and do the same thing they’ve done to the Uyghurs.”

2. Airman Shared Sensitive Intelligence More Widely and for Longer Than Previously Known

Airman Shared Sensitive Intelligence More Widely and for Longer Than Previously Known

By Aric Toler, Malachy Browne and Julian E. Barnes

April 21, 2023,

7:39 p.m. ET

4 MIN READ

The New York Time

· by

Julian E. Barnes

· April 21, 2023

A Discord user matching the profile of Jack Teixeira distributed intelligence to a larger chat group, days after the beginning of the Ukraine war.

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The first leak to Discord appeared to come less than 48 hours into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.Credit...Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

By Aric Toler, Malachy Browne and

April 21, 2023, 7:39 p.m. ET

The Air National Guardsman accused of leaking classified documents to a small group of gamers had been posting sensitive information months earlier than previously known and to a much larger chat group, according to online postings reviewed by The New York Times.

In February 2022, soon after the invasion of Ukraine, a user profile matching that of Airman Jack Teixeira began posting secret intelligence on the Russian war effort on a previously undisclosed chat group on Discord, a social media platform popular among gamers. The chat group contained about 600 members.

The case against Airman Teixeira, 21, who was arrested on April 13, pertains to the leaking of classified documents on another Discord group of about 50 members, called Thug Shaker Central. His job as an information technology specialist at an Air Force base in Massachusetts gave him top secret clearance.

It is not clear whether authorities are aware of the classified material posted on this additional Discord chat group.

The newly discovered information posted on the larger chat group included details about Russian and Ukrainian casualties, activities of Moscow’s spy agencies and updates on aid being provided to Ukraine. The user claimed to be posting information from the National Security Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency and other intelligence agencies.

The additional information raises questions about why authorities did not discover the leaks sooner, particularly since hundreds more people would have been able to see the posts.

The exposure of some of America’s most closely guarded secrets has prompted criticism about how the Pentagon and intelligence agencies protect classified data, and whether there are weaknesses in both vetting people for security clearances and enforcing the mantra that access to secrets should only be given to people with a “need to know.”

The Times learned about the larger chat room from a Discord user. Unlike Thug Shaker Central, the second chat room was publicly listed on a YouTube channel and was easily accessed in seconds.

A chain of digital evidence collected by The Times ties the posts containing the sensitive information to Airman Teixeira. The posts were made under a user name that The Times has previously connected to Airman Teixeira. The person leaking the information said he worked at a U.S. Air Force intelligence unit. Details in videos and photographs he posted matched images posted by family members inside the Teixeira home in North Dighton, Mass. Fellow Discord members sent the user birthday wishes on Dec. 21, the same date Airman Teixeira’s sister wished him a happy birthday on Facebook. And he posted a photograph of an antique German rifle for which The Times found an online receipt in Airman Teixeira’s name.

The posts reviewed by The Times appear to be detailed written accounts of the classified documents themselves, and identify which intelligence agency they are from. While it appears that the user likely posted pictures of some documents, those have since been deleted from the chat group.

Joshua Hanye, one of Airman Teixeira’s attorneys from the Boston public defenders office, declined to comment about the latest revelations. Officials from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Justice Department also declined to comment.

Jack Teixeira, the Air National Guardsman accused of releasing classified material, in a photo posted on social media.Credit...Reuters

It appears the first leak came less than 48 hours into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. “Saw a pentagon report saying that ⅓rd of the force is being used to invade,” the user wrote. Apparently eager to impress others in the group who questioned his analysis, he said: “I have a little more than open source info. Perks of being in a USAF intel unit,” referring to the United States Air Force.

Some of the intelligence posted appeared to foretell battlefield developments. On March 27, 2022, he shared classified information about the Russian pullback from Kyiv, information he said he “found on an NSA site.”

“Some ‘big’ news,” he wrote. “There may be a planned withdrawal of the troops west of Kiev, as in all of them.” Two days later, Russian officials announced they were pulling back from the Ukrainian capital.

Some posts began with an update on casualty numbers. He also reported on Ukraine’s targeting priorities and the activities of Russian intelligence agencies. He took particular interest in posting updates of which countries were providing lethal aid to Ukraine.

At times, he appeared to be posting from the military base where he was stationed. In one conversation, he said he was about to enter an area where people with security clearance can access classified computer networks, known as a SCIF — Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility.

How Airman Teixeira obtained the documents that he is accused of posting online has been a key question for investigators. They believe he used administrator privileges connected to his information technology job to access documents. In his posts, Airman Teixeira said his job gave him access to material that others could not see. “The job I have lets me get privilege’s above most intel guys,” he wrote.

Airman Teixeira also claimed that he was actively combing classified computer networks for material on the Ukraine war. When one of the Discord users urged him not to abuse his access to classified intelligence, Teixeira replied: “too late.”

At one point he offered to share information privately with members of the group living outside the United States. “DM me and I can tell you what I have,” he wrote.

On another occasion, he wrote that he was able to access a site run by the National Security Agency, the U.S. spy agency that focuses on communications intercepted from computer networks, to look for updates on the war.

He also claimed to have access to intelligence from U.S. partners. “I usually work with GCHQ people when I’m looking at foreign countries,” he told the chat group in September 2022, referring to Government Communications Headquarters, the British agency for intelligence, security and cyberaffairs.

A spokesman for the National Security Agency declined to comment, referring questions to the Justice Department. A spokeswoman for the British Embassy declined to comment as well.

Airman Teixeira continued to share more detailed information to the larger chat group until a month ago.

“I was very happy and willing and enthusiastic to have covered this event for the past year and share with all of you something that not many people get to see,” he wrote on March 19, before adding, “I’ve decided to stop with the updates.”

Glenn Thrush, Ishaan Jhaveri and Riley Mellen contributed reporting.

The New York Times · by Julian E. Barnes · April 21, 2023

3. Pentagon Speeds Up Tank Timeline for Ukraine but Resists Calls for Jets

Pentagon Speeds Up Tank Timeline for Ukraine but Resists Calls for Jets

The New York Times · by Helene Cooper · April 21, 2023

The U.S. will begin training Ukrainian troops on M1 Abrams tanks in the next few weeks, officials said, and combat-ready tanks could reach the battlefields by the fall.

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U.S. Army M1A1 Abrams tanks during NATO exercises in 2021 in Latvia.Credit...Ints Kalnins/Reuters

April 21, 2023Updated 7:39 p.m. ET

RAMSTEIN AIR BASE, Germany — Ukrainian troops will begin training on American M1 Abrams tanks in Germany in the next few weeks, U.S. defense officials say, in what would be a major step in arming Kyiv as it seeks to seize back territory from Russia.

Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III announced the timeline on Friday during a meeting with allies at Ramstein Air Base. Defense officials said that about 31 tanks were expected to arrive in Germany to begin a training program for Ukrainian troops that is expected to take 10 weeks. Combat-ready tanks could reach the battlefields in Ukraine by the fall, said the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss security matters.

But the United States stood firm in its refusal to supply Ukraine with F-16 fighter jets. Speaking at a news conference after the meeting, Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that Ukraine’s air-defense system had worked effectively for more than a year and kept Russian warplanes “cautious” for fear of being shot down.

Sustaining Ukraine’s air defenses, he said, “is the most critical thing right now.” General Milley said the United States would continue to work with its allies to that end, emphasizing “we need to do everything we can to ensure that Ukraine has adequate air defense — ground-based air-defense capability.”

Ukrainian leaders, calling for jets, tanks and other advanced weapons, have repeatedly expressed frustration with the pace of deliveries from their supporters in the West. President Volodymyr Zelensky urged NATO’s secretary general this week to help “overcome the reluctance” with providing long-range weapons and more modern aircraft and artillery.

The United States has stood firm in its refusal to supply Ukraine with F16 fighter jets.Credit...Giuseppe Lami/EPA, via Shutterstock

“Delay with appropriate decisions is time lost for peace and the lives of our soldiers, who have not yet received the vitally necessary number of defense means,” he said during a news conference with the NATO secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, in Kyiv on Thursday.

Ukraine withstood a Russian offensive over the winter, but at the cost of thousands of artillery shells a day and serious casualties in eastern battles. After a year of staving off Russia’s air force, Ukraine’s entire air-defense network is also weakening and in need of a huge influx of munitions, according to U.S. officials and recently leaked Pentagon documents.

Mr. Austin, during remarks on Friday at U.S.-led talks with top defense officials from about 50 nations, a collective known as the Ukraine Contact Group, said that the continued deliveries of weapons systems and ammunition and tanks to Kyiv “underscore just how badly the Kremlin miscalculated.”

“Putin thought that he could easily topple Kyiv’s democratically elected government,” Mr. Austin told the defense ministers assembled in a cavernous room in the officers’ club at Ramstein, referring to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. “He thought that the wider world would let him get away with it.”

During his trip to Europe — Mr. Austin arrived in Germany on Thursday after meetings with top officials in Sweden — he also sought to reassure allies in the aftermath of a Pentagon leak of hundreds of top-secret national security documents. A 21-year-old National Guard airman from Massachusetts was arrested and charged in the leak, which involved putting online many documents related to the war in Ukraine.

“I know many of you have been following the reports of unauthorized disclosure of sensitive and classified U.S. material,” Mr. Austin said. “I take this issue very seriously.”

He praised the Ukraine Contact Group for its “commitment to reject efforts to divide us.”

At the news conference, he said that altogether, the group members have delivered more than 230 tanks to Ukraine, more than 1,550 armored vehicles and enough equipment and munitions to support nine new armored brigades.

Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III at Ramstein Air Base, Germany, on Friday.

General Milley said that Ukrainian troops have also completed training on how to use the American Patriot air-defense system, and that Patriot systems had arrived in Ukraine this week. The theme of discussions among defense ministers, he said, “was air defense, air defense, air defense.”

Ukraine has also received several MIG-29 fighter jets from two neighbors, Slovakia and Poland. But those jets, which are Soviet-designed, are not the sophisticated American-made F-16 warplanes that Mr. Zelensky has insisted his forces need.

The Russian Air Force has largely avoided attacks deep within Ukraine since the early weeks of the war, when Ukraine managed to move its air defenses and catch Russian warplanes off guard. Since then, Russia has restricted its aircraft mostly to the front lines — though it has also suffered prominent losses within territory it claims.

Last summer, explosions at an air base in Crimea destroyed at least eight Russian fighter jets. In October, a Russian military jet crashed into the courtyard of an apartment building in a town in southern Russia, killing 14 people. On Friday, the Defense Ministry said a Russian warplane accidentally dropped a bomb on the Russian city of Belgorod, wounding three people and spreading panic in the city, near the border with Ukraine.

Several countries made new promises to shore up Ukraine’s weapons, ammunition and air-defense systems, and the Polish, German and Ukrainian defense ministers announced a plan for a Leopard 2 tank service center to be set up in Poland. Ukraine began receiving those battle tanks from Germany last month, as well as Challenger tanks from Britain.

American defense officials had initially said that the M1 Abrams tanks would not arrive in Ukraine until next year. But since January, when the Biden administration announced that it would send the tanks, senior defense officials have said they wanted to accelerate the plans.

The Ukrainian troops training on the Abrams tanks will have to go through qualification testing, maintenance training and drills on how to operate the advanced battle tank. They also will have to learn how to coordinate tank maneuvers with other military units, in what the American military calls “combined arms” tactics.

Mr. Austin eventually came around to the view that committing to sending American tanks was necessary to spur Germany to provide its coveted Leopard 2 tanks.Credit...Martin Meissner/Associated Press

These efforts are expected to support a Ukrainian counteroffensive that will be aimed at dislodging Russian troops from territory they seized early in the invasion, which began almost 14 months ago.

In the year since, the countries in the coalition supporting Ukraine have sent $55 billion in weapons, missiles, ammunition, tanks and other armored vehicles to Ukraine, Mr. Austin said. The United States has sent $35 billion of that amount.

Pentagon officials had initially expressed misgivings about sending the Abrams, citing concerns about how Ukraine would maintain the advanced tanks, which require extensive training and servicing. And officials had said it could take years for them to actually reach Ukrainian battlefields.

But Mr. Austin eventually came around to the view that committing to sending American tanks was necessary to spur Germany to follow with its coveted Leopard 2 tanks. Officials at the State Department and the White House argued that giving Germany the political cover it sought to send its tanks outweighed the Defense Department’s reluctance, the officials said.

And as it turned out, American officials were able to move Abrams tanks to Ukraine faster than expected. Defense officials said they moved quickly to expedite the delivery, and now say that they believe the tanks can be used in combat in a few months.

“I am confident that this equipment, and the training that accompanies it, will put Ukraine’s forces in position to succeed on the battlefield,” Mr. Austin said.

General Milley said the M1 tanks coming to Germany are “training tanks,” so they are not combat ready. But, he added about the eventual weapons heading to Ukraine, “I do think the M1 tank when it’s delivered, will make a difference.”

Anushka Patil contributed reporting.

The New York Times · by Helene Cooper · April 21, 2023

4. FBI leak investigators home in on members of private Discord server

Definitely not a whistleblower.

Excerpts:

Members of the Discord server said Teixeira shared the information with the group on his own, part of his desire to keep his online tribe informed about world events.

He wanted to “keep us in the loop,” a former member said, and provided access to insider knowledge that the members understood was kept from most people.

It appeared Teixeira understood he was not authorized to share the information with others.

“He’s a smart person,” the former member said. “He knew what he was doing when he posted these documents, of course. These weren’t accidental leaks of any kind.”

He added that Teixeira also didn’t seem motivated by a desire to inform the broader public about government wrongdoing, as earlier leakers have claimed when explaining their actions.

“I would definitely not call him a whistleblower. I would not call [Teixeira] a whistleblower in the slightest,” the former member said.

FBI leak investigators home in on members of private Discord server

Investigators have spoken to online friends of alleged leaker Jack Teixeira, who hung out and viewed secret documents in a gaming chatroom

By Shane Harris, Samuel Oakford and Devlin Barrett

Updated April 21, 2023 at 7:08 p.m. EDT|Published April 21, 2023 at 5:54 p.m. EDT

The Washington Post · by Shane Harris · April 21, 2023

The FBI has been interviewing members of a private Discord server where a 21-year-old National Guardsman is alleged to have shared classified documents, an indication that law enforcement officials are trying to understand how potentially dozens of people may have had access to highly sensitive information before it circulated on the internet and was obtained by journalists.

Jack Teixeira was arrested last week and charged with illegally retaining and transmitting classified information on a server that he administered. He faces up to 15 years in prison. Teixeira has not yet entered a plea.

The Discord Leaks

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

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

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

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

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

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As part of its investigation, the FBI has spoken to friends of Teixeira who hung out with him in the Discord server, known as Thug Shaker Central, according to people familiar with the matter. The questions included how members of the server first came to know Teixeira, what video games they played together and whether any of the members were foreign nationals, these people said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss interactions with law enforcement officials.

Members of the private Discord group previously told The Washington Post that foreign citizens, including from Russia and Ukraine, as well as Europe, Asia and South America, were among the roughly two dozen people who congregated on the server. The Post has not confirmed the presence of users from these locations.

Discord, which is a popular platform among online gamers, has said it is cooperating with the FBI’s investigation.

For the past several years, U.S. intelligence officials have worried that gaming platforms like Discord created an opportunity for foreign governments to access U.S. secrets, including by encouraging people with access to classified information to share it online.

It was not clear whether the FBI had determined that foreign nationals were in Teixeira’s server or whether any of them had connections to or worked for foreign governments. In at least one instance, the FBI has seized the electronic devices of a former member of the server, according to people familiar with the matter.

The FBI is responsible for collecting evidence of Teixeira’s alleged crime. But it is also seeking to assess the damage from the “spillage” of classified information. Former members of the server told The Post that Teixeira shared hundreds of classified documents, including transcriptions he typed out and photographs of documents that covered subjects ranging from battlefield updates on the war in Ukraine to insights into foreign countries and officials that the U.S. intelligence community is monitoring.

Two former members said additional accounts were part of the server, describing them as apparently inactive or “bots” that can be set up by Discord users to do things like play music.

One former member of the server told law enforcement officials that Teixeira began sharing classified documents in December. But two others told The Post that he provided documents earlier than that, beginning around last summer.

The classified documents appeared to be restricted to members of the server during that time. Former members said there was an unspoken rule not to share them beyond the small circle.

But unbeknown to the group, on Feb. 28, a teenage member began posting several dozen photographs showing classified documents on another Discord server affiliated with the YouTuber “wow_mao.” Some of the documents offered detailed assessments of Ukraine’s defense capabilities and showed how far U.S. intelligence has tapped into Russia’s military command.

On March 4, 10 documents appeared on “Minecraft Earth Map,” a Discord server focused on the popular video game. A user operating the account that posted the smaller tranche of images told The Post they obtained them on wow_mao.

Secret and top-secret documents were now available to thousands of Discord users, but the leak wouldn’t come to the attention of U.S. authorities for another month.

The Justice Department is unlikely to charge members of the server for viewing or sharing the classified information, based on past cases. Historically, the government has almost always charged only individuals with security clearances, which legally obligate them not to share classified information with people who aren’t authorized to see it.

A notable exception to that rule is WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, whom the Justice Department has charged with violating the Espionage Act for allegedly working with former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning to obtain and disseminate secret documents.

Assange’s alleged actions are similar to reporting work at many traditional news organizations. But the Justice Department has sought to distinguish his work from that of a reporter, arguing that Assange is not a journalist and that he engaged in “explicit solicitation of classified information,” as John Demers, then a senior department official, said at the time of Assange’s charging in 2019.

Members of the Discord server said Teixeira shared the information with the group on his own, part of his desire to keep his online tribe informed about world events.

He wanted to “keep us in the loop,” a former member said, and provided access to insider knowledge that the members understood was kept from most people.

It appeared Teixeira understood he was not authorized to share the information with others.

“He’s a smart person,” the former member said. “He knew what he was doing when he posted these documents, of course. These weren’t accidental leaks of any kind.”

He added that Teixeira also didn’t seem motivated by a desire to inform the broader public about government wrongdoing, as earlier leakers have claimed when explaining their actions.

“I would definitely not call him a whistleblower. I would not call [Teixeira] a whistleblower in the slightest,” the former member said.

The Washington Post · by Shane Harris · April 21, 2023

5. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, April 21, 2023

Maps/graphics: https://understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-april-21-2023

Key Takeaways

Russian forces used a new delivery of Shahed drones to strike Ukraine for the third consecutive day, targeting Kyiv for the first time in 25 days.
Commander of the Russian Baltic Sea Fleet Admiral Viktor Liina reportedly assumed command of the Russian Pacific Fleet following the completion of Russian drills in the Pacific.
A Russian fighter-bomber accidentally bombed Belgorod on April 20.
The Angry Patriots Club accused Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin of supporting efforts to freeze the war in Ukraine.
Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a law aimed at supporting the Kremlin’s ongoing efforts to set conditions for domestic crackdowns and the removal of officials who have fallen out of favor.
Russian forces conducted limited ground attacks along the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna line.
Russian forces continued to advance in and around Bakhmut, although Russian forces have not completed a turning movement around the city.
Russian forces continued offensive operations along the Avdiivka-Donetsk front and conducted a limited ground attack in western Donetsk Oblast.
Russian sources claimed that Ukrainian forces have established positions on the east (left) bank of Kherson Oblast.
Russian federal subjects are forming new cross-regional volunteer formations to support the ongoing force generation campaigns.
Russian authorities are expanding the logistics capabilities and security measures on the Arabat Spit likely to prepare for a possible Ukrainian counteroffensive.

RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, APRIL 21, 2023

Apr 21, 2023 - Press ISW

Download the PDF

Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, April 21, 2023

Kateryna Stepanenko, Riley Bailey, Grace Mappes, and Frederick W. Kagan

April 21, 7:45 pm ET

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

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

Russian forces used a new delivery of Shahed drones to strike Ukraine for the third consecutive day, targeting Kyiv for the first time in 25 days. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces launched 26 drones on April 20, of which Ukrainian forces shot down 21 and 12 drones on April 21, of which Ukrainian forces shot down eight.[1] Russian forces targeted Kyiv, Odesa, Poltava, Vinnytsia, Dnipropetrovsk, Zaporizhia, Kharkiv, and Chernihiv oblasts overnight on April 19 to 20 and 20 to 21.[2] The Kyiv City Military Administration reported no damage from the strikes in Kyiv.[3] Head of the Ukrainian Joint Coordination Press Center of the Southern Forces Nataliya Humenyuk stated on April 20 that Russian forces waited until a new shipment of Shahed drones arrived to use them for further strikes and noted that Russian use of missiles has also decreased.[4]

Commander of the Russian Baltic Sea Fleet Admiral Viktor Liina reportedly assumed command of the Russian Pacific Fleet on April 21 following the completion of Russian drills in the Pacific on April 20. Kremlin newswire TASS, citing an unnamed source, reported that Liina replaced Admiral Sergei Avakyants who had commanded the Russian Pacific Fleet since 2012.[5] Unofficial reports of Liina’s appointments coincide with the Russian Ministry of Defense’s (MoD) announcement that the Pacific Fleet and elements of the Russian Aerospace Forces completed drills in the Pacific under the supervision of Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Navy Admiral Nikolai Yevmenov.[6] The Russian MoD may have named Yevmenov as the supervisor for these drills following milblogger and nationalist discourse about Avakyants’ abrupt termination amidst the combat readiness checks.[7] ISW previously assessed that Avakyants’ dismissal may have been a result of his inability to recreate pre-war, large scale Pacific Fleet combat readiness checks due to the Pacific Fleet’s significant combat losses in Ukraine.[8]

A Russian fighter-bomber accidentally bombed Belgorod on April 20. The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) announced on April 20 that a Russian Su-34 bomber accidentally dropped a bomb while flying over Belgorod City.[9] The explosion left a crater with a 20-meter (65-foot) radius in the southern part of the city and injured three civilians.[10] The cause of the accidental bombing remains unclear, as does the reason for flying an armed bomber over a populated city. Russian milbloggers did not react to the bombing with the same vitriolic anger they often use with Russian battlefield failures. One milblogger compared the accidental bombing to the Su-34 crash in Yeysk, Krasnodar Krai, in October 2022, claiming that Belgorod residents should be thankful that the bomb did not hit a residential building.[11] Another milblogger expressed appreciation for the MoD taking responsibility for the accident and characterized the act as an atypical sign of health in the MoD.[12] A Rossiya-1 broadcaster, speaking about the event, stated that “modern military equipment allows Russian units to eliminate extremists in the special operation zone from a minimal distance”-- likely an error that indicates confusion in Russian state media on how to frame the accident in the information space.[13]

The Angry Patriots Club accused Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin of supporting efforts to freeze the war in Ukraine. Former Russian officer and ardent nationalist Igor Girkin and his Angry Patriots Club posed 40 direct questions addressed towards the Kremlin, Russian President Vladimir Putin, and the Russian military command about Russia’s conduct of the war in Ukraine, foreign affairs, and domestic power struggles.[14] Girkin asked why Russian authorities are not arresting Prigozhin for his “direct calls” to freeze the war at the current frontlines, which Girkin characterized as calls to “violate the territorial integrity of the Russian Federation.”[15] Girkin notably mentioned Prigozhin when asking who was responsible for Russian withdrawal from Kherson Oblast – an operation overseen by Wagner-affiliated former Commander of the Russian Armed Forces in Ukraine at that time Army General Sergey Surovikin.[16] Girkin and Prigozhin have a long-standing feud – likely as a result of competition for patronage – and Girkin’s accusations against Prigozhin may be an attempt to discredit his rival.[17]

This accusation may also indicate that Prigozhin has found a patron – possibly affiliated with the Russian MoD – who supports the temporary freeze of the war in Ukraine for political reasons. The Angry Patriots Club previously amplified a forecast that miscontextualized Prigozhin’s April 14 essay as a call to end the war in Ukraine, stating that Prigozhin’s essay was the start of a political campaign to move to the defense of new territories and freeze the war.[18] The forecast noted that the Russian MoD and Russian private military companies (PMCs) are already recruiting contract servicemen to defend occupied positions, while Russian propagandists are entertaining news about the counteroffensive to possibly present a major victory to Russians if Ukrainians are unsuccessful.[19] The forecast argues that Russia would freeze the war for 2024 for political reasons such as the presidential elections if Russia is successful in repelling Ukrainian counteroffensives. Prigozhin’s essay notably called on Russia to commit to a decisive battle in Ukraine or embrace a temporary defeat that would allow Russia to set conditions for a future victory without negotiations.[20] It is possible that Girkin and his patrons are fearful that Prigozhin has joined the political faction that is urging Russian President Vladimir Putin to stop the war on current lines following planned Ukrainian counteroffensive.[21]

Prigozhin publicly restored his cooperation with the Russian MoD and seemingly regained some Kremlin-allocated privileges at the start of April after a months-long feud with the Russian military command.[22] The Russian MoD and the Russian military command could be interested in freezing the war to reconstitute Russian forces. ISW previously assessed that the Russian MoD had likely advised Putin early on about measures such as mobilization that could have changed the course of the war earlier, and the Russian MoD had previously ordered a short-lived operational pause over the summer of 2022, for example.[23] Prigozhin’s recent cooperation with the Russian MoD indicates that he may have reached an agreement with the Russian military command – possibly offering to advocate to Putin for a temporary ceasefire to regain the ability to grow his forces and expand his political standing ahead of Russian gubernatorial and presidential elections. Prigozhin had also been criticizing Putin’s maximalist goals in Ukraine and offering grim forecasts about Russia’s need for years-long grinding attacks to capture Donbas, which are likely part of the ceasefire narrative.[24]

A temporary ceasefire in Ukraine and protraction of the war will only benefit Russia by allowing it to reconstitute its forces and wear down Western support for Ukraine. Russia will use occupied territories in Ukraine as a springboard for future offensive operations after it restores its combat capabilities. Russia is continuing to weaponize information operations in the West to discourage military aid provisions, and such efforts will only intensify if Russia is able to establish a strong defensive line with contract servicemen and conscripts that will slow Ukrainian advances.[25]

Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a law aimed at supporting the Kremlin’s ongoing efforts to set conditions for domestic crackdowns and the removal of officials who have fallen out of favor. Putin signed a bill on April 14 increasing administrative liabilities for unauthorized entry into critical energy infrastructure facilities and facilities operated or protected by Rosgvardia (Russian National Guard), the Federal Security Service (FSB), the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD), the Russian penitentiary system, the federal executive body for mobilization, and the Russian Armed Forces.[26] The Kremlin likely intends to use these increased punishments to obscure the activities of Russian military and security organs while also expanding these entities' ability to oust officials and crack down on Russian citizens under accusations of trespassing. Putin recently signed bills expanding legal punishments for the discreditation of all Russian personnel fighting in Ukraine and for the misappropriation of Russian military assets, and Russian security organs have increasingly used these laws as pretexts for the arrest of Russian citizens.[27] ISW has previously assessed that the Kremlin may be using the pretext of threats to Russia’s defense industrial base (DIB) to justify crackdowns, and the new law likely aims to broaden the guises under which Russian authorities justify internal repressions.[28] ISW previously assessed that the FSB appears to be conducting a large-scale overhaul of domestic security organs, which the new law may further augment.[29]

Key Takeaways

Russian forces used a new delivery of Shahed drones to strike Ukraine for the third consecutive day, targeting Kyiv for the first time in 25 days.
Commander of the Russian Baltic Sea Fleet Admiral Viktor Liina reportedly assumed command of the Russian Pacific Fleet following the completion of Russian drills in the Pacific.
A Russian fighter-bomber accidentally bombed Belgorod on April 20.
The Angry Patriots Club accused Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin of supporting efforts to freeze the war in Ukraine.
Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a law aimed at supporting the Kremlin’s ongoing efforts to set conditions for domestic crackdowns and the removal of officials who have fallen out of favor.
Russian forces conducted limited ground attacks along the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna line.
Russian forces continued to advance in and around Bakhmut, although Russian forces have not completed a turning movement around the city.
Russian forces continued offensive operations along the Avdiivka-Donetsk front and conducted a limited ground attack in western Donetsk Oblast.
Russian sources claimed that Ukrainian forces have established positions on the east (left) bank of Kherson Oblast.
Russian federal subjects are forming new cross-regional volunteer formations to support the ongoing force generation campaigns.
Russian authorities are expanding the logistics capabilities and security measures on the Arabat Spit likely to prepare for a possible Ukrainian counteroffensive.

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

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

Russian Main Effort – Eastern Ukraine

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

Russian forces conducted limited ground attacks on the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna line on April 12. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces conducted unsuccessful ground attacks while attempting to improve their tactical positions near Lyman Pershyi, Kharkiv Oblast (12km northeast of Kupyansk) and in the Serebrianska forest area (11km south of Kreminna).[30] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces advanced near Synkivka (10km northeast of Kupyansk) and conducted unsuccessful ground attacks northwest and west of Kreminna near Torske, Terny, and Nevske (16-19km northwest and west of Kreminna).[31] Footage posted on April 20 shows Russian 98th Guards Airborne Division forces striking a Ukrainian tank near Kreminna.[32] The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) claimed that Russian forces repelled four Ukrainian sabotage and reconnaissance groups near Lyman Pershyi.[33]

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

Russian forces continued to advance in and around Bakhmut on April 21, although Russian forces have not completed a turning movement around the city. Geolocated footage published on April 20 indicates that Russian forces advanced west of Dubovo-Vasylivka (6km northwest of Bakhmut).[34] Geolocated footage published on April 20 and 21 indicates that Wagner forces have likely captured the Bakhmut-2 railway station in central Bakhmut, advanced west of the railway line near the station, and advanced up to the railway line south of the station.[35] Russian milbloggers claimed that Wagner forces advanced in northern and southern Bakhmut and control at least 83 percent of the city.[36] Russian milbloggers claimed that Wagner forces advanced towards Khromove (immediately west Bakhmut) and captured positions along the O0506 highway between Khromove and Chasiv Yar (9km west of Bakhmut).[37] A Russian milblogger claimed that there are reports that Russian forces captured a several hundred-meter section of the highway in an unspecified location, but a majority of Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian forces have not physically cut off the highway.[38] Advisor to the Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) head Yan Gagin announced that Wagner forces had cut off a section of the highway and that this would make it impossible to supply the remaining Ukrainian grouping in Bakhmut.[39] Wagner financier Yevgeny Prigozhin denied that Wagner forces have encircled Bakhmut and stated that rumors about encirclement create problems for Wagner, which is continuing to fight heavy battles in the area.[40] DNR Head Denis Pushilin also denied Yan Gagin’s claims and stated that he would work with his advisors on avoiding reckless statements about the situation in Bakhmut.[41] Russian milbloggers claimed that Ukrainian forces would still be able to use tight logistics lines between Ivanivske (6km west of Bakhmut) and Khromove in the event of the Russian capture of a section of the O0506 highway, although milbloggers claimed that heavy rains are only permitting tracked vehicles to move along country roads in the area.[42] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that heavy battles for Bakhmut are ongoing and that Russian forces conducted an unsuccessful assault near Bohdanivka (6km northwest of Bakhmut).[43]

Russian forces continued to conduct offensive operations along the Avdiivka-Donetsk front on April 21. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces conducted unsuccessful offensive operations within 13km north of Avdiivka near Novokalynove, Stepove, and Kamianka and within 32km southwest of Avdiivka near Pervomaiske, Nevelske, Marinka, and Pobieda.[44] Geolocated footage published on April 17 indicates that Russian forces likely made marginal gains in Marinka (27km southwest of Avdiivka).[45] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces also conducted offensive operations near Sieverne (6km west of Avdiivka) and Avdiivka.[46] Another Russian milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces slowed down the pace of Russian advances in the Avdiivka area as of April 20.[47]

Russian forces conducted a limited ground attack in western Donetsk Oblast on April 21. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces conducted an unsuccessful ground attack near Vuhledar (30km southwest of Donetsk City).[48] Geolocated footage published on April 20 indicates that Russian forces made marginal gains north of Mykilske (27km southwest of Donetsk City).[49]

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

Russian sources claimed that Ukrainian forces have established positions on the east (left) bank of the Dnipro River in Kherson Oblast as of April 20. A prominent Russian milblogger claimed on April 20 that Ukrainian forces established a foothold across from Kindiyka (8km north of Oleshky) and regularly conduct sorties on the east (left) bank with Western-provided naval equipment.[50] The milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces have not attempted to move further inland because of supply issues and that recent attempts to advance from coastal areas on Velykyi Potemkin and Dnipryany islands in the Dnipro River delta failed for similar reasons.[51] The milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces are now able to cross the Dnipro River during the day whereas they previously conducted such crossings only at night.[52] The milblogger blamed bureaucratic red tape for preventing Russian artillery units in the area from conducting timely strikes on Ukrainian groups crossing the river.[53] Another Russian milblogger claimed on April 20 that Ukrainian forces successfully landed and entrenched themselves west of the Antonivsky bridge and have established stable supply lines to these positions.[54] A different prominent Russian milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces have a small bridgehead on an unspecified island in the Dnipro River delta close to the east (left) bank, but that the positions provide access only to floodplain swamp areas.[55] The milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces appear to be preparing a serious landing across the Dnipro River to create one or multiple bridgeheads.[56] ISW has not observed visual confirmation of Ukrainian forces maintaining positions on the east (left) bank of the Dnipro River in Kherson Oblast. One of the milbloggers speculated that Ukrainian forces may be conducting river crossings in order to divert Russian forces’ attention to this sector of the front and set conditions for a potential upcoming Ukraine counteroffensive.[57]

A Russian occupation official claimed that Ukrainian forces advanced in Zaporizhia Oblast on April 20. Zaporizhia Oblast Occupation Head Yevgeny Balitsky claimed that Ukrainian forces captured an unspecified section of a contested area of the front line in Zaporizhia Oblast.[58] ISW has not observed visual confirmation of recent marginal Ukrainian advances in Zaporizhia Oblast.

Russian forces continued routine fire west of Hulyaipole and in Kherson Oblast on April 21.[59]

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

Russian federal subjects are forming new cross-regional volunteer formations to support ongoing force generation campaigns. Kremlin newswire TASS reported that Russian officials are planning to form the “Siberia” volunteer Cossack battalion to recruit Cossacks from Siberia, the Far East, and Central Russia.[60] Russian Presidential Representative to the North Caucasus Federal District Yuri Chaika announced that Russia has created the “Skif” Cossack battalion with recruits from the North Caucasus and Crimea. Magadan Oblast Governor Sergei Nosov stated that Russian officials in Orenburg Oblast are forming the “Kolyma” battalion financed by Magadan Oblast budget.[61] Nosov stated that residents of different regions can enlist into the “Kolyma” battalion and are eligible for a one-time enlistment payment of up to 545,000 rubles (about $6,700) and a monthly salary of up to 440,000 rubles (about $5,400). Magadan Oblast may be attempting to shield its constituencies from contract service at the expense of residents in Orenburg Oblast.

Russian officials are continuing to issue contradictory statements regarding the subordination and operations of Russian military recruitment centers. Head of the Russian Main Organizational and Mobilization Directorate of the General Staff Colonel General Yevgeny Burdinsky stated that the Russian General Staff sent an order to Russian military recruitment centers to exclude some reservists from a training call-up due to constraints imposed by partial mobilization and conscription.[62] Burdinsky noted that regional governors and administration heads are in charge of the draft committee and have the authority to decide on the distribution of draft notices. Burdinsky concluded that the draft committee is not subordinate to the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD), hence why the Russian General Staff’s request to cancel some reservist call-up did not affect local draft procedures.[63]

Russian milbloggers criticized the commander of the Luhansk People’s Republic’s (LNR) 2nd Guards Army Corps, Lieutenant General Esedulla Abachev, for seizing civilian vehicles from servicemen at the Russia-Luhansk Oblast checkpoints.[64] The milbloggers claimed that Abachev is forcing Russian servicemen to use suboptimal trucks and likely Soviet UAZ utility vehicles.

The Financial Times, citing leaked US intelligence documents, reported that Wagner Group attempted to purchase ammunition from China at the beginning of 2023.[65] The Financial Times reported that China did not provide weapons or weapon samples to Wagner and noted that there is no information that China is planning such provisions.

Bloomberg reported that Russia stopped supplying credit for $10 billion worth of spare parts and two S-400 batteries air defense systems as India is unable to find ways to pay Russia without violating US sanctions.[66] Unnamed officials told Bloomberg that Russia remains unwilling to accept rupees due to exchange-rate volatility, while India simultaneously does not want to pay in rubles.[67]

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

Russian authorities are expanding the logistics capabilities and security measures on the Arabat Spit likely to prepare for a possible Ukrainian counteroffensive. Kherson Oblast Occupation Head Vladimir Saldo announced the construction of a second Arabat Spit road and the increasing staffing at security checkpoints, both of which Saldo claimed will solve longstanding traffic and logistics problems.[68] Saldo noted that there is an existing road on the Arabat Spit but that the road needs repairs.[69] Saldo stated that occupation authorities continue to develop residential areas in the spit, which authorities would likely use to support increased logistics capabilities.[70] The decision to build a second road rather than just repair the existing Arabat Spit road suggests that Russian authorities want to significantly increase the logistics capability of the spit in a short period of time. Russian forces could use one or two roads to advance quickly from rear areas in occupied Crimea to secure checkpoints at the spit in the event of a Ukrainian counteroffensive, for example.

Ukrainian officials reported that Russian authorities continue to forcibly remove Ukrainian children to Russia under evacuation schemes. The Ukrainian Office of the General Prosecutor announced an investigation into a video that shows Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin and Wagner representatives illegally removing families with underage children from Bakhmut.[71] The Office of the General Prosecutor stated that the Wagner Group also transported two additional families with underage children to an unspecified area. Ukrainian Verkhovna Rada Human Rights Commissioner Dmytro Lubinets stated that Russian military personnel in Kherson Oblast and Enerhodar, Zaporizhia Oblast are attempting to forcibly deport Ukrainian children to the Russian Far East and to Crimea, respectively, under evacuation and health camp schemes.[72]

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

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

Belarusian forces continued to conduct combat readiness drills in Belarus.[73]

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

[1] https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid0aNT3UFDtWSGYrtt6i8o...https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid0XCkzTq3Afq4B4vTdvqF...; https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid0rh5pVSYZJ6bZWBBo6j7...

[2] https://t.me/miroshnik_r/11119; https://t.me/readovkanews/57183; https://t.me/readovkanews/57184; https://t.me/readovkanews/57185; https://t.me/readovkanews/57187; https://t.me/readovkanews/57188; https://t.me/voenkorKotenok/46912; https://t.me/milchronicles/1794; https://t.me/milinfolive/99503; https://t.me/NeoficialniyBeZsonoV/24506; https://t.me/readovkanews/5718... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5vvrb1YsqU; https://suspilne dot media/450939-ukraina-otrimae-novu-dopomogu-vid-ssa-sili-oboroni-vedut-kontrnastup-na-kilkoh-napramkah-421-den-vijni-onlajn/; https://t.me/milchronicles/1795

[3] https://t.me/VA_Kyiv/1505

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5vvrb1YsqU; https://suspilne dot media/450939-ukraina-otrimae-novu-dopomogu-vid-ssa-sili-oboroni-vedut-kontrnastup-na-kilkoh-napramkah-421-den-vijni-onlajn/

[5] https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-general-officer-gu...

[6] https://t.me/mod_russia/25819

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

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

[9] . https://t.me/chpbelgorod/5945

[10] https://t.me/readovkanews/57296; https://t.me/readovkanews/57291; https://t.me/readovkanews/57281; https://t.me/readovkanews/57277; https://t.me/readovkanews/57274; https://t.me/readovkanews/57271; https://t.me/readovkanews/57268; https://t.me/readovkanews/57265; https://t.me/milinfolive/99573 https://t.me/milinfolive/99574; https://t.me/rlz_the_kraken/57854

[11] https://t.me/boris_rozhin/83500; https://t.me/boris_rozhin/83509; https://t.me/m0sc0wcalling/23219

[12] https://t.me/aleksandr_skif/2667

[13] https://meduza dot io/news/2023/04/21/v-syuzhete-rossii-1-o-sbrose-bomby-na-belgorod-prozvuchala-fraza-boevaya-tehnika-pozvolyaet-likvidirovat-ekstremistov-s-minimalnogo-rasstoyaniya-vnimanie-na-litso-veduschego

[14] https://t.me/strelkovii/4603 ; https://t.me/KRPRus/10 ; https://t.me...

[15] https://t.me/strelkovii/4605

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[23] https://isw.pub/RusCampaignJuly7 ; https://www.understandingwar.org/ba...

[24] https://isw.pub/UkrWar021123 ; https://isw.pub/UkrWar032223

[25] https://meduza dot io/feature/2023/04/21/kreml-stremitsya-sozdat-v-germanii-koalitsiyu-ob-ediniv-levyh-i-pravyh-tsel-oslabit-podderzhku-ukrainy-v-evrope

[26] http://www.kremlin dot ru/acts/news/70932

[27] https://isw.pub/UkrWar0318723 ; https://www.understandingwar.org/backg...

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

[29] https://isw.pub/UkrWar041923

[30] https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid0XCkzTq3Afq4B4vTdvqF... https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid0rh5pVSYZJ6bZWBBo6j7...

[31] https://t.me/wargonzo/12062

[32] https://t.me/readovkanews/57262

[33] https://t.me/mod_russia/25834

[34] https://twitter.com/KrzysztofJano15/status/1649096528152215565; https:/... https://twitter.com/klinger66/status/1649185396637544449

[35] https://twitter.com/klinger66/status/1649209391483179009; https://twitt...

[36] https://t.me/voenkorKotenok/46976 ; https://t.me/wargonzo/12062 ; ht...

[37] https://t.me/NeoficialniyBeZsonoV/24560 ; https://t.me/rusich_army/848...

[38] https://t.me/boris_rozhin/83530 ; https://t.me/NeoficialniyBeZsonoV/24...

[39] https://tass dot ru/politika/17576391

[40] https://t.me/concordgroup_official/814

[41] https://t.me/sashakots/39420 ;

[42] https://t.me/boris_rozhin/83530 ; https://t.me/sashakots/39416; https... https://t.me/vysokygovorit/11373 ; https://t.me/basurin_e/938 ; https://t.me/orchestra_w/6244 ; https:/...

[43] https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid0XCkzTq3Afq4B4vTdvqF...

[44] https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid0rh5pVSYZJ6bZWBBo6j7...

[45] https://twitter.com/auditor_ya/status/1649334118071582720; https://twit... https://t.me/voenacher/43046

[46] https://t.me/wargonzo/12062

[47] https://t.me/rybar/46077

[48] https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid0XCkzTq3Afq4B4vTdvqF...

[49] https://twitter.com/auditor_ya/status/1649168447090114560; https://twit... https://t.me/lost_warinua/33999

[50] https://t.me/rybar/46079

[51] https://t.me/rybar/46079

[52] https://t.me/rybar/46079

[53] https://t.me/rybar/46079

[54] https://t.me/Separ13_13/10915;

[55] https://t.me/strelkovii/4597

[56] https://t.me/strelkovii/4597

[57] https://t.me/rybar/46079

[58] https://utro dot ru/news/ukraine/2023/04/20/1526518.shtml; https://zp-news dot ru/society/2023/04/20/118149.html

[59] https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid0XCkzTq3Afq4B4vTdvqF...

[60] https://tass dot ru/obschestvo/17579471

[61] https://ria dot ru/20230421/batalon-1866842143.html?utm_source=yxnews&utm_medium=desktop&utm_referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fdzen.ru%2Fnews%2Fsearch%3Ftext%3D

[62] https://t.me/mobilizationnews/11350

[63] https://t.me/mobilizationnews/11350

[64] https://vk.com/wall67599458_6520; https://t.me/wehearfromyanina/1733

[65] https://www.ft.com/content/755b7302-6f69-4790-a143-d75dd2ad8aef

[66] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-04-21/russian-arms-sales-to...

[67] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-04-21/russian-arms-sales-to...

[68] https://t.me/SALDO_VGA/704

[69] https://t.me/hueviyherson/38277

[70] https://t.me/SALDO_VGA/700; https://t.me/SALDO_VGA/699

[71] https://armyinform dot com.ua/2023/04/21/iz-bahmutu-vagnerivczi-prymusovo-deportuvaly-ditej-ofis-genprokurora/

[72] https://t.me/dmytro_lubinetzs/2220

[73] https://t.me/modmilby/26135; https://t.me/modmilby/26108; https://t.me/modmilby/26095

US Military Cannot Refuel, Repair, Reload At Philippines Bases; Cannot Use EDCA To Defend Taiwan -- Reports

eurasiantimes.com · by Ashish Dangwal · April 19, 2023

In the face of China’s vehement opposition to the Philippines providing the US access to more military bases, Manila has announced that it will not allow the US to store weapons that could be used for defending Taiwan on these facilities, reported SCMP.

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In early 2023, the US and the Philippines announced that the US would be granted access to four more bases under the 2014 Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA) terms.

But, China has been critical of the deal, accusing the US of exploiting access to these bases to interfere in the situation across the Taiwan Strait to advance its own geopolitical objectives.

On April 19, Foreign Affairs Secretary Enrique Manalo made it clear that the United States would not be allowed to carry out any operations not permitted under the 2014 agreement.

Manalo stated at a Senate hearing on Wednesday that the EDCA is not intended to target any third country beyond its purpose of supporting the Philippines.

He continued by saying that the government’s primary foreign policy was to be “friends to all” and promised that the security pact would reflect that stance. Additionally, the minister stated that Manila would not permit US forces to refuel, repair, or reload at EDCA installations.

The Philippines recently announced that it would grant the US access to four more bases close to the Taiwan Strait and the contentious South China Sea, raising the total number of military facilities Washington may utilize to nine.

Three of the sites are on the main island of Luzon, near Taiwan, while one is in Palawan province in the South China Sea (SCS).

In recent months, the US has increased efforts to broaden its access to critical military sites in the Indo-Pacific amid growing worries about China’s assertive territorial behavior across the region.

The new outposts will enable the US to shift soldiers between nine bases across the Philippines, including the strategically significant Balabac Island near Chinese installations in the South China Sea.

Growing Tensions Between Philippines & China

According to Manila and Washington, the new locations will primarily be used to respond to natural and man-made disasters in Southeast Asian countries.

However, China has strongly condemned the agreement and alleged that the US is exploiting these bases to intervene in the Taiwan Strait and advance its geopolitical goals.

Ambassador Huang Xilian of China recently expressed concern over the Philippines’ decision to expand US military access, stating that this move has “caused widespread and grave concern among Chinese people.”

Xilian advised the Philippines to firmly oppose any moves towards Taiwanese independence if the country genuinely cares about the welfare of the approximately 150,000 overseas Filipino workers.

Philippines President Ferdinand Marcos responded by announcing on April 19 that he would meet with Beijing’s envoy in Manila to ask for an explanation of his comments about how the Philippines was “stoking the fire” over Taiwan’s independence.

File Image: US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin with Philippines Defense Secretary Carlito Galvez

Marcos suggested that the ambassador’s statement may have resulted from miscommunication or lost translation. Following criticisms from lawmakers, China’s embassy in Manila clarified that the ambassador was misquoted.

The Philippines’ strategic location offers significant advantages for the US, providing a crucial point for US military operations that bases cannot match in Okinawa.

With access to key waterways in the South China Sea, the country allows for greater flexibility and engagement for US troops in multiple theaters of operation in Northeast and Southeast Asia.

The recent agreement between the US and the Philippines is in line with other commitments made by the US to Asian countries.

For instance, on January 11, the US pledged to enhance its alliance with Japan to combat the influence of China and North Korea. Experts believe that by deterring Chinese aggression in the region, the US-Philippines deal will also increase the security of Japan and South Korea.

The Taiwan situation is currently the most concerning regarding the risk of escalating regional tension. China’s aggressive behavior towards the island, which has its own government separate from China’s, has created a sense of urgency among neighboring countries and the US to resist China’s actions. According to experts, armed conflict over the island is possible in the near future.

Contact the author at ashishmichel(at)gmail.com
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eurasiantimes.com · by Ashish Dangwal · April 19, 2023

7. US to Spend $100 Million on Upgrades to Philippine Military Facilities

Excerpts:

The top line figures offered by Manalo are not new – $82 million for the five initial bases was announced last year, and the supplemental $18 million after last week’s meeting in Washington – but Manalo offered some hints of the status of the upgrades.

He told the Committee that there had been significant progress in eight of the 16 projects approved for the initial five EDCA locations. Of the eight projects, six are estimated to be completed by the end of the year. These include the $25 million runway rehabilitation project at Basa Air Base in Pampanga, which broke ground last month. It also includes a storage facility at Mactan Air Base in Cebu, and a Humanitarian Disaster Relief warehouse in Fort Magsaysay in Luzon. The upgrades to the four newly designated EDCA sites will presumably begin in short order.

The expansion of EDCA and the injection of U.S. funds into these signs reflect the rapid advances that have taken place in the U.S.-Philippine alliance over the past year, which have reversed, and even exceeded, the reversals that took place under the previous administration of Rodrigo Duterte. Upon coming to office in July 2016, Duterte initiated a turn against its U.S. alliance and steered the inveterately pro-U.S. nation into a closer relationship with the likes of China and Russia.

US to Spend $100 Million on Upgrades to Philippine Military Facilities

Foreign Secretary Enrique Manalo said yesterday that six projects are slated for completion by the end of the year.

thediplomat.com · by Sebastian Strangio · April 20, 2023

The United States plans to spend more than $100 million upgrading the nine Philippine military bases to which it has access under a 2014 security pact, the country’s foreign secretary confirmed yesterday.

In February, the two nations agreed to expand the scope of the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA) to four additional military facilities, in addition to the five identified in 2016, all of which have been slated for U.S.-funded upgrades.

“To date, the U.S. allocated a total of over 100 million U.S. dollars to EDCA projects,” Foreign Secretary Enrique Manalo said yesterday during an inquiry of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. He said that this included an additional $18 million that the U.S. announced during the two nations’ third 2+2 ministerial dialogue last weekend in Washington. The talks, which brought together U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and their Philippine counterparts Manalo and defense chief Carlito Galvez Jr., was the first such meeting to take place since 2016.

Signed in 2014, EDCA allows the U.S. military to rotate troops through select Philippine military facilities to use facilities such as runways, and to pre-position military materiel. Manalo told the Senate that the investment from Washington “would cover projects in both existing and new agreed locations.”

The four additional sites announced in February are located in strategically important parts of the country: three of them in Luzon, adjacent to the Taiwan Strait, and on Palawan island, which lies close to disputed parts of the South China Sea.

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The top line figures offered by Manalo are not new – $82 million for the five initial bases was announced last year, and the supplemental $18 million after last week’s meeting in Washington – but Manalo offered some hints of the status of the upgrades.

He told the Committee that there had been significant progress in eight of the 16 projects approved for the initial five EDCA locations. Of the eight projects, six are estimated to be completed by the end of the year. These include the $25 million runway rehabilitation project at Basa Air Base in Pampanga, which broke ground last month. It also includes a storage facility at Mactan Air Base in Cebu, and a Humanitarian Disaster Relief warehouse in Fort Magsaysay in Luzon. The upgrades to the four newly designated EDCA sites will presumably begin in short order.

The expansion of EDCA and the injection of U.S. funds into these signs reflect the rapid advances that have taken place in the U.S.-Philippine alliance over the past year, which have reversed, and even exceeded, the reversals that took place under the previous administration of Rodrigo Duterte. Upon coming to office in July 2016, Duterte initiated a turn against its U.S. alliance and steered the inveterately pro-U.S. nation into a closer relationship with the likes of China and Russia.

Sebastian Strangio

Sebastian Strangio is Southeast Asia editor at The Diplomat.

thediplomat.com · by Sebastian Strangio · April 20, 2023

8. Straight Talk about How the US is helping Ukraine

Excerpts:

I don’t disagree with everything Vance said; I think the Ohio senator was completely right when he declared, “The thing that we need to prevent more than anything is a Chinese invasion of Taiwan; it would be catastrophic for this country, it would decimate our entire economy . . . it would [pull] this country into a great depression.” And you can find indisputable experts on China, such as Elbridge Colby, who argue that the U.S. can’t keep helping Ukraine at the current pace and provide a serious defense of Taiwan at the same time.

But I think Ukraine-aid skeptics undermine their more plausible and coherent arguments when they mislead people into believing U.S. military forces are on the ground fighting the Russians in Ukraine or contend that corruption in the Ukrainian government abrogates any U.S. interest in helping other countries stand up against the territorial aggression and brutality of Vladimir Putin.

Straight Talk about How the US is helping Ukraine

https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/straight-talk-about-how-the-u-s-is-helping-ukraine/

by JIM GERAGHTY

April 21, 2023 9:55 AM

On the menu today: It’s time for some serious talk about U.S. military aid to Ukraine, because there are certain kinds of American-manufactured weapons and munitions that the U.S. can provide to Ukraine indefinitely, but at least four kinds the U.S. is running dangerously low on. And there are fair and serious questions about whether the U.S. is sufficiently armed to help Taiwan if China invades that island nation. (And it’s an independent nation. Don’t let anybody fool you into thinking otherwise.) But this discussion is muddled by misleading claims, like the ones from Ohio Republican senator J. D. Vance yesterday that “maybe apparently America already has troops on the ground in Ukraine,” and that Ukraine has “maybe the most corrupt leadership anywhere in the world.”

What You Need to Know about American Aid to Ukraine

Yesterday, Ohio Republican senator J. D. Vance spoke at the Heritage Foundation, and a healthy portion of his remarks dealt with foreign policy.

There are fair arguments for caution or wariness about expanding the U.S. commitment to helping Ukraine. At the beginning of the year, the Center for Strategic and International Studies published a report about which munitions the U.S. military was running low on, and how long it would take to restock the supplies of those munitions to normal, pre-invasion levels.

According to CSIS estimates — and it cautions that these figures are only estimates, based upon the best information currently available — at the “surge” or prioritized production rate, it will take two and a half years to restock the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) mobile-artillery system and vehicles, four years to restock at least one category of 155 millimeter shells, five and a half years to restock the Javelin anti-tank-missile stockpile, and six and a half years to restock the Stinger air-defense-missile stockpile.*

Yesterday, I published the most updated, and quite long, list of military aid that the U.S. has sent to Ukraine. So far, the U.S. has sent Ukraine 38 HIMARS and ammunition; 160 155mm Howitzers, and more than 1,500,000 155mm artillery rounds; more than 7,000 precision-guided 155mm artillery rounds; more than 14,000 155mm rounds of Remote Anti-Armor Mine Systems; 10,000 Javelin anti-armor systems; and more than 1,600 Stinger anti-aircraft systems.

CSIS was quick to note, “Most inventories are okay. . . . The U.S. has provided 108 million rounds of small arms ammunition, but U.S. production is about 8.6 billion rounds per year, so this transfer is easy to accommodate. The U.S. provided 300 M113 armored personnel carriers but has thousands available because the Army is moving to a different system. The U.S. has provided 276 tactical vehicles to tow weapons but has tens of thousands in inventory. For most categories of weapons and munitions, the U.S. can provide support indefinitely.” (Note that those numbers represent arms transfers as of January.)

You don’t have to be a Putin apologist, an isolationist, or an ardent anti-interventionist to look at this and conclude that the U.S. needs to go on a long-overdue defense-production binge, and that any additional military aid to Ukraine in those particular systems must be dependent upon there being enough left to protect U.S. interests in other parts of the world. The U.S. military can only supply weapons and equipment it can afford to spare.

The problem is that opponents of additional aid to Ukraine often use arguments that are misleading or outright false.

Yesterday at the Heritage Foundation, Vance said, “We’re learning that maybe apparently America already has troops on the ground in Ukraine,” and urged, “Get Americans out of Ukraine,” and was greeted with applause.

This is presumably a reference to that leak of a classified document, dated March 23, that indicated that the United Kingdom had 50 special-forces operators in Ukraine, Latvia had 17, France had 15, the U.S. had 14, and the Netherlands had one.

As this newsletter has noted previously, we’ve seen stories like this several times during the war. The U.S. and its NATO allies are still operating embassies in Kyiv. The U.S. closed its embassy in February 2022 and reopened it in May. For obvious reasons, those embassies need a lot more than the usual security, and these Western governments need to be able to evacuate their diplomatic personnel at a moment’s notice in extremely dangerous circumstances.

Back on April 12, White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told Fox News, “There is a small U.S. military presence at the embassy in conjunction with the Defense Attachés office to help us work on accountability of the material that is going in and out of Ukraine,” Kirby said, referencing the weapons and other support the U.S. has been sending to Kyiv. “So they’re attached to that embassy and to that the defense attache.”

Kirby added that those troops “are not fighting on the battlefield.” In addition, Fox News reported that those U.S. forces in Kyiv also provide security services.

“There has been no change to the president’s mandate that there will not be American troops in Ukraine fighting in this war,” Kirby told the network.

(If you count U.S. Marine guards at American embassies, then American has “troops on the ground” in just about every country on earth. Note that the host country has the primary responsibility for the protection of the American embassy, and that while Marines often play a role in the protection of U.S. diplomatic staff, their primary duty is to protect — and if necessary destroy — any classified information so it doesn’t fall into enemy hands.)

Does Vance want to remove those 14 or so special operators in Ukraine? Would the senator prefer to entirely rely on the Ukrainians for the security of U.S. diplomats and all that classified information within the embassy? Does he want the U.S. embassy to move back to Lviv or Poland, as it did for a few months last year?

Vance also said at Heritage, “Let’s not mistake the courage of Ukrainian troops on the ground with the fact that they have the most corrupt leadership and corrupt government in Europe and maybe the most corrupt leadership anywhere in the world.”

Ukraine has the “most corrupt leadership anywhere in the world”? Really? Because in Transparency International’s 2021 ranking of nations by corruption, Ukraine ranked 123 out of 180 countries. I’m not saying that’s a good ranking, but it’s a far cry from those at the bottom like Venezuela, Somalia, Syria, and South Sudan. Yes, Ukraine did rank lowest in Europe, but it scored a 32 out of a possible 100, while Bosnia and Albania scored 35, Moldova scored 36, Turkey and Serbia scored 38, Macedonia and Kosovo scored 39, Belarus scored a 41, Bulgaria hit 42, and Hungary — one of Vance’s favorites! — scored a 43. Corruption in pre-war Ukraine was a little worse than the generally bad level found in most of southeastern Europe.

Oh, and Russia scored a 29. I guess it depends upon how you define “Europe.”

(Since I know you’re wondering, the U.S. scored a 67. The highest-rated, and least-corrupt countries were Denmark, Finland, and New Zealand, which all scored an 88.)

But let’s say you do deem Zelensky and the Ukrainian government intolerably corrupt. Is the right answer to let the Russian military run roughshod over the Ukrainians, right up to the borders of the NATO alliance? Do the Ukrainian people deserve that? According to the United Nations, 8,534 Ukrainian civilians have been killed and 14,370 have been injured in the war so far. Is America’s policy to be, “Tough luck. We think your leadership is too corrupt to offer you any help”?

Note that one of the reasons we have those 14 special operators on the ground is “accountability of the material that is going in and out of Ukraine,” as Kirby put it. In other words, the Pentagon knows there’s the potential for corruption in the Ukrainian government and is taking steps to mitigate it. For what it’s worth, I don’t think the risk of Ukraine reselling U.S. arms on the black market is particularly high, as Ukraine needs all those weapons to fight the ongoing Russian invasion. Starving men rarely resell food.

I don’t disagree with everything Vance said; I think the Ohio senator was completely right when he declared, “The thing that we need to prevent more than anything is a Chinese invasion of Taiwan; it would be catastrophic for this country, it would decimate our entire economy . . . it would [pull] this country into a great depression.” And you can find indisputable experts on China, such as Elbridge Colby, who argue that the U.S. can’t keep helping Ukraine at the current pace and provide a serious defense of Taiwan at the same time.

But I think Ukraine-aid skeptics undermine their more plausible and coherent arguments when they mislead people into believing U.S. military forces are on the ground fighting the Russians in Ukraine or contend that corruption in the Ukrainian government abrogates any U.S. interest in helping other countries stand up against the territorial aggression and brutality of Vladimir Putin.

*Do you notice I put in links there, so that if you want to know more about those weapons systems, you can quickly and easily read more about them and what they do? When you’re evaluating who’s right in an argument, think about who gives you the most information, with links to sources, and who just asserts things and expects you to nod along and believe them.

ADDENDUM: I find myself with conflicted feelings about the end of BuzzFeed News. No doubt, the outlet’s leadership attempted to build a serious news organization, and good reporters worked there over the years. The Pulitzer it won was for using satellite images to expose China’s mass detention of Muslims is a testament to the extraordinary, groundbreaking reporting that more news organizations should embrace.

But when you heard the name “BuzzFeed,” you probably thought of silly cat videos, listicles of pop-culture gifs, and inane quizzes such as, “Which Hogwarts house would you end up in?” The site was always this awkward arranged marriage between real news, like breaking the news about the allegations surrounding actor Kevin Spacey, and the silliest, lightest, fluffiest, and sometimes dumbest content on the Internet.

I’m surprised so many folks on the right seethe about BuzzFeed publishing the Steele dossier, as the publication of the dossier is what allowed the general public to develop its own (largely skeptical) assessment of it, rather than relying on other publications’ reporting that described it and alluded to it, but did not show it. In a book excerpt published yesterday, Ben Smith wrote, “Publishing the dossier wasn’t, in the end, a dagger to Trump’s heart. If anything, it muddied the less sensational revelations of his business dealings and his campaign manager’s ties to Russia.”

BuzzFeed was not quite “grand opening, grand closing,” but in a bit more than a decade, the site went from a joke to the employer of several big-name political journalists to a Pulitzer winner to back to being a joke, and now, to being defunct. Sometimes, the publication or website that is touted as the Next Big Thing genuinely turns into the Next Big Thing. And yet the story of BuzzFeed is that you can earn your status as the Next Big Thing and still, within a few years, turn into That Thing That Isn’t Around Anymore.

JIM GERAGHTY is the senior political correspondent of National Review. @jimgeraghty

9. Russia admits its own warplane accidentally bombed Russian city of Belgorod, near Ukraine border

Russian being transparent? Hard to hide bombing your own city?

Video and photos at the link: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/russia-bombs-own-city-near-ukraine-as-war-increases-russian-military-accidents/

Russia admits its own warplane accidentally bombed Russian city of Belgorod, near Ukraine border

CBS News

Moscow — When a powerful blast shook a Russian city near the border of Ukraine residents thought it was a Ukrainian attack. But the Russian military quickly acknowledged that it was a bomb accidentally dropped by one of its own warplanes.

Belgorod, a city of 340,000 about 25 miles east of the border with Ukraine, has faced regular drone attacks that Russian authorities blame on the Ukrainian military, but the explosion late Thursday was far more powerful than anything its residents had heard before.

This handout photo posted to the Telegram channel of Belgorod region governor Vyacheslav Gladkov shows damaged apartments building near the crater after an explosion in Belgorod, Russia, April 21, 2023, caused by a Russian Su-34 warplane accidentally discharging ammunition over the city. Telegram/Vyacheslav Gladkov/AP

Witnesses reported a low hissing sound followed by a blast that made nearby apartment buildings tremble and threw a car on a store roof.

It left a 66-foot-wide crater in the middle of a tree-lined boulevard flanked by apartment buildings, shattering their windows, damaging several cars and injuring two residents. A third person was later hospitalized with hypertension.

A frame grab taken from video released by Russia's Defense Ministry on October 9, 2015, shows a Russian Su-34 fighter-bomber dropping a bomb in the air over Syria. REUTERS/Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation/Handout

Immediately after the explosion, Russian commentators and military bloggers were abuzz with theories about what weapon Ukraine had used for the attack. Many called for a powerful retribution. But about an hour later, the Russian Defense Ministry acknowledged that the explosion was caused by a weapon accidentally dropped by one of its own Su-34 bombers. It didn't offer any further details, but military experts said the weapon likely was a powerful 1,100-pound bomb.

In Thursday's blast, the weapon was apparently set to explode with a small delay after impact, to hit underground facilities.

Russian ground staff load a Sukhoi Su-34 fighter-bomber with weapons at the Hmeymim air base near Latakia, Syria, in a handout photo released by Russia's Defense Ministry on October 22, 2015. REUTERS/Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation/Handout

Belgorod Gov. Vyacheslav Gladkov said local authorities decided to temporarily resettle residents of a nine-story apartment building near the blast while it was inspected to make sure it hadn't suffered irreparable structural damage.

The explosion in Belgorod followed the crash of a Russian warplane next to a residential building in the port city of Yeysk on the Sea of Azov that killed 15 people. Yeysk hosts a big Russian air base with warplanes flying missions over Ukraine.

A Russian warplane crashed in a residential area in the southern city of Yeysk, Russia, Oct. 17, 2022. Reuters/Stringer

Military experts have noted that as the number of Russian military flights have increased sharply during the fighting, so have the crashes and accidents.

Analysts and U.S. officials have described Russia's tactics in the Ukraine war as akin to the methods applied by the armies on both sides of the First World War, as Moscow has thrown wave after wave of both man and machine at the front lines for months, rapidly depleting its resources with little to show in return.

Last month it emerged that the Russian military was rolling Soviet-era tanks off storage bases where they had been mothballed for decades, presumably to bolster its forces amid the wanton destruction of its hardware on the battlefield.

Ukraine has also relied heavily on its stocks of old Soviet-era tanks and other weapons during the war, but it has begun to take delivery of dozens of modern battle tanks promised by its European partners, with U.S. tanks also expected to arrive this year.

In March, Poland said it would also give Ukraine about a dozen MiG-29 fighter jets, becoming the first NATO member to fulfill Kyiv's increasingly urgent requests for warplanes to defend itself against the Russian invasion.

CBS News

10. Twitter removes 'government-funded' news labels after NPR and other flubs

Twitter "management" is a joke.

Twitter removes 'government-funded' news labels after NPR and other flubs

TechCrunch · by Amanda Silberling · April 21, 2023

After weeks of truly stupid antics, Twitter has removed “government-funded media” labels on all accounts, from NPR to the Chinese state-affiliated Xinhua News. Twitter even appears to have deleted its web page explaining the “government-funded media” labels.

This whole saga started when Twitter labeled NPR as “state-affiliated,” a designation that Twitter reserves for publications where the government exercises influence or control over editorial decisions. But NPR receives about 1% of its funding from the government and operates with editorial independence. So, Twitter created a new “government-funded media” label for NPR, which is a bit less misleading, yet still could easily give users the wrong idea about the accuracy of its news. NPR ended up leaving Twitter, with its CEO saying he has lost his faith in the decision-making at Twitter.

Twitter doubled down, adding “government-funded” labels to media outlets like the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), Australian Broadcasting Company (ABC Australia), Australia’s Special Broadcasting Service (SBS), New Zealand’s public broadcaster RNZ, Sweden’s SR Ekot and SVT and Catalonia’s TV3.cat.

In one particularly asinine act, Twitter assigned the CBC a “69% government-funded media” label, since the network claimed it was less than 70% government-funded, and as we very well-know, Twitter owner Elon Musk has the same sense of humor as a high school freshman on Reddit. This prompted the CBC to follow NPR’s lead and leave Twitter altogether.

And now we’ve come full-circle. Just like legacy blue checks, the government-funded media labels have disappeared. So it goes.

Elon Musk’s Twitter: Everything you need to know, from layoffs to verification

TechCrunch · by Amanda Silberling · April 21, 2023

11. Postimperial Empire – How the War in Ukraine Is Transforming Europe

Excerpts:

Although the United States’ own foundational identity is that of an anticolonial power, it has in NATO an “empire by invitation,” in the historian Geir Lundestad’s phrase. Explaining his use of the word “empire,” Lundestad quotes former U.S. National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski’s argument that “empire” can be a descriptive rather than a normative term. This American anti-imperial empire is more hegemonic than the European one but less so than it was in the past. As Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has repeatedly demonstrated, and Scholz also in his way, the United States can’t simply tell other NATO member states what to do. This alliance, therefore, also has a credible claim to be an empire by consent.

One can push the language of empire too far. Comparing the EU and NATO with past empires reveals differences that are as interesting as the similarities. Politically, neither the European Union nor the United States will ever present themselves as an empire, nor would they be well advised to do so. Analytically, however, it is worth reflecting that whereas the twentieth century saw most of Europe transitioning from empires to states, the world of the twenty-first century still has empires—and it needs new kinds of empire to stand up to them. Whether Europe actually manages to create a liberal empire strong enough to defend the interests and values of Europeans will, as always in human history, depend on conjuncture, luck, collective will, and individual leadership.

Here, then, is the surprising prospect that the war in Ukraine reveals: the EU as a postimperial empire, in strategic partnership with an American postimperial empire, to prevent the comeback of a declining Russian empire and constrain a rising Chinese one.

Postimperial Empire

How the War in Ukraine Is Transforming Europe

By Timothy Garton Ash

May/June 2023

Published on April 18, 2023

Foreign Affairs · by Homelands: A Personal History of Europe · April 18, 2023

History loves unintended consequences. The latest example is particularly ironic: Russian President Vladimir Putin’s attempt to restore the Russian empire by recolonizing Ukraine has opened the door to a postimperial Europe. A Europe, that is, that no longer has any empires dominated by a single people or nation, either on land or across the seas—a situation the continent has never seen before.

Paradoxically, however, to secure this postimperial future and stand up to Russian aggression, the EU must itself take on some of the characteristics of an empire. It must have a sufficient degree of unity, central authority, and effective decision-making to defend the shared interests and values of Europeans. If every single member state has a veto over vital decisions, the union will falter, internally and externally.

Europeans are unaccustomed to looking at themselves through the lens of empire, but doing so can offer an illuminating and disturbing perspective. In fact, the EU itself has a colonial past. As the Swedish scholars Peo Hansen and Stefan Jonsson have documented, in the 1950s the original architects of what would eventually become the EU regarded member states’ African colonies as an integral part of the European project. Even as European countries prosecuted often brutal wars to defend their colonies, officials spoke glowingly of “Eurafrica,” treating the overseas possessions of countries such as France as belonging to the new European Economic Community. Portugal fought to retain control of Angola and Mozambique into the early 1970s.

The lens of empire is even more revealing when one peers through it at the large part of Europe that, during the Cold War, was behind the Iron Curtain under Soviet or Yugoslav communist rule. The Soviet Union was a continuation of the Russian empire, even though many of its leaders were not ethnic Russians. During and after World War II, it incorporated countries and territories (including the Baltic states and western Ukraine) that had not been part of the Soviet Union before 1939. At the same time, it extended its effective empire to the very center of Europe, including much of what had historically been known as central Germany, restyled as East Germany.

There was, in other words, an inner and an outer Russian empire. The key to understanding both Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in the 1980s was to recognize that this was indeed an empire—and an empire in decay. Decolonization of the outer empire followed in uniquely swift and peaceful fashion in 1989 and 1990, but then, even more remarkably, came the disintegration of the inner empire in 1991. This was prompted, as is often the case, by disorder in the imperial center. More unusually, the final blow was delivered by the core imperial nation: Russia. Today, however, Russia is straining to regain control over some of the lands it gave up, thrusting toward the new eastern borders of the West.

GHOSTS OF EMPIRES PAST

Anyone who has studied the history of empires should have known that the collapse of the Soviet Union would not be the end of the story. Empires usually do not give up without a struggle, as the British, French, Portuguese, and “Eurafricanists” demonstrated after 1945. In one small corner, the Russian empire struck back rather quickly. In 1992, General Alexander Lebed used Russia’s 14th Armed Guards to end a war between separatists from the region of the newly independent state of Moldova that lies east of the river Dniester and legitimate Moldovan forces. The result was what is still the illegal para-state of Transnistria at the eastern end of Moldova, critically located on the frontier to Ukraine. In the 1990s, Russia also fought two brutal wars to retain control of Chechnya, and it actively supported separatists in the Abkhazia and South Ossetia regions of Georgia.

Yet as Moscow sought to claw back some of its lost colonial territories, the EU was preoccupied with two completions of Europe’s characteristic twentieth-century transition from empires to states. The violent disintegration of Yugoslavia and the peaceful divorce of the Czech and Slovak parts of Czechoslovakia drew renewed attention to the legacies of, respectively, the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires, which had been formally dissolved at the end of World War I. But there was nothing inevitable about the breakup of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. Postimperial multinational states do not have to disintegrate into nation-states, and it is not necessarily the best thing for the people who live there if they do. Yet it is simply an empirical observation that this is the way recent European history has tended to go. Hence today’s intricate patchwork of 24 individual states in Europe east of what used to be the Iron Curtain (and north of Greece and Turkey), whereas in 1989, there were just nine.

Russia’s larger neocolonial pushback began with Putin declaring a course of confrontation with the West at the Munich Security Conference in 2007, where he denounced the U.S.-led unipolar order. This was followed by his armed seizure of Abkhazia and South Ossetia from Georgia in 2008. It escalated with the annexation of Crimea and the invasion of eastern Ukraine in 2014, beginning a Russo-Ukrainian war that, as Ukrainians frequently remind the West, has been going on for nine years. To adapt a telling phrase of the historian A. J. P. Taylor, 2014 was the turning point at which the West failed to turn. One can never know what might have happened if the West had reacted more forcefully then, by reducing its energy dependence on Russia, stopping the flow of dirty Russian money swilling around the West, supplying more arms to Ukraine, and issuing a more forceful message to Moscow. But there is little doubt that such a course would have put both Ukraine and the West in a different and better position in 2022.

Civilians watching a Russian military convoy, Zugdidi, Georgia, August 2008

Umit Bektas / Reuters

Even as Russia pushed back, the West faltered. The year 2008 marked the beginning of a pause in what had been a remarkable 35-year story of the enlargement of the geopolitical West. In 1972, the European Economic Community, the predecessor of the EU, had just six members, and NATO had only 15. By 2008, however, the EU had 27 member states, and NATO had 26. The territories of both organizations extended deep into central and eastern Europe, including the Baltic states, which had been part of the Soviet-Russian inner empire until 1991. Although Putin had reluctantly accepted this double enlargement of the West, he increasingly feared and resented it.

At NATO’s April 2008 summit in Bucharest, the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush wanted to start serious preparations for Georgia and Ukraine to join NATO, but leading European states, including France and especially Germany, were resolutely opposed. As a compromise, the summit’s final communiqué declared that Georgia and Ukraine “will become members of NATO in the future” but without specifying concrete steps to make that happen. This was the worst of both worlds. It increased Putin’s sense of a U.S.-led threat to the remains of the Russian empire without guaranteeing the security of Ukraine or Georgia. Putin’s tanks rolled into Abkhazia and South Ossetia just four months later. Subsequent NATO enlargements took in the small southeast European countries of Albania, Croatia, Montenegro, and North Macedonia, making today’s total of 30 NATO members, but these additions hardly changed the balance of power in eastern Europe.

At the same time, EU expansion stalled, not because of Russian pushback but because of “enlargement fatigue” after new central and eastern European members were admitted in 2004 and 2007, together with the impact of other major challenges to the EU. The global financial crisis of 2008 segued from 2010 onward into a long-running crisis of the eurozone, followed by the refugee crisis of 2015–16, Brexit and the election of U.S. President Donald Trump in 2016, the rise of antiliberal populist movements in such countries as France and Italy, and the COVID-19 pandemic. Croatia slipped into the EU in 2013, but North Macedonia, accepted as a candidate country in 2005, is still waiting today. The EU’s approach to the western Balkans over the last two decades recalls nothing so much as the New Yorker cartoon of a businessman saying to an obviously unwelcome caller on the telephone, “How about never? Is never good for you?”

EUROPE WHOLE AND FREE

Illustrating once again the truth of Heraclitus’s saying that “war is the father of all,” the largest war in Europe since 1945 has unblocked both these processes, opening the way to a further, large and consequential eastward enlargement of the West. As late as February 2022, on the eve of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, French President Emmanuel Macron was still expressing reservations about enlarging the EU to include the western Balkans. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz supported the western Balkan enlargement but wanted to draw the line at that. Then, as Ukraine courageously and unexpectedly resisted Russia’s attempt to take over the entire country, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky put the EU on the spot. Ukrainian opinion had evolved over the last three decades, through the catalytic events of the Orange Revolution in 2004 and the Euromaidan protests in 2014, and his presidency already exhibited a strong European orientation. Accordingly, he repeatedly asked not just for weapons and sanctions but for EU membership, too. It is remarkable that this long-term aspiration should have been among the top three demands from a country facing the imminent prospect of a ruinous Russian occupation.

By June 2022, Macron and Scholz were standing with Zelensky in Kyiv, together with Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi (who had endorsed the prospect of membership a month earlier and played a notable part in changing his fellow leaders’ minds) and Romanian President Klaus Iohannis. All four visitors declared that they supported the EU accepting Ukraine as a candidate for membership. That same month, the EU made this its formal position, also accepting Moldova as a candidate (subject to some preliminary conditions for both countries) and sending an encouraging signal to Georgia that the EU might in the future grant it the same status.

NATO has not made any such formal promise to Ukraine, but given the extent of NATO member states’ support for the defense of Ukraine—dramatically symbolized by U.S. President Joe Biden’s visit to Kyiv earlier this year—it is now hard to imagine that the war could end without some sort of de facto, if not de jure, security commitments from the United States and other NATO members. Meanwhile, the war has prompted Sweden and Finland to join NATO (although Turkish objections have delayed that process). The war has also brought the EU and NATO into a more clearly articulated partnership as, so to speak, the two strong arms of the West. In the long run, NATO membership for Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine would be the logical complement to EU membership and those countries’ only durable guarantee against renewed Russian revanchism. Speaking at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting this year in Davos, no less a realpolitiker than former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger endorsed this perspective, noting that the war that Ukraine’s non-NATO neutrality was supposed to prevent had already broken out. At the Munich Security Conference in February, several Western leaders explicitly supported NATO membership for Ukraine.

Iohannis, Zelensky, Draghi, Scholz, and Macron in Kyiv, June 2022

Ludovic Marin / Reuters

The project of taking the rest of eastern Europe, apart from Russia, in to the two key organizations of the geopolitical West is one that will require many years to implement. The first double eastward enlargement of the West took some 17 years, if one counts from January 1990 to January 2007, when Bulgaria and Romania joined the EU. Among many evident difficulties is that Russian forces currently occupy parts of Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine. For the EU, there is a precedent for admitting a country that has regions its legitimate government does not control: part of Cyprus, a member state, is effectively controlled by Turkey. But there is no such precedent for NATO. Ideally, future rounds of NATO enlargement would be done in the context of a larger dialogue about European security with Russia, as in fact happened during NATO’s 1999 and 2004 rounds of eastward enlargement, with the latter even securing the reluctant agreement of Putin. But that is hard to imagine happening again unless a very different leader is in the Kremlin.

It may take until the 2030s to achieve this double enlargement, but if it does occur, it will represent another giant step toward the goal identified in a 1989 speech by U.S. President George H. W. Bush: Europe whole and free. Europe does not end at any clear lines—although at the North Pole it ends at a point—but merely fades away across Eurasia, across the Mediterranean, and, in some significant sense, even across the Atlantic. (Canada would be a perfect member of the EU.) Yet with the completion of this eastward enlargement, more of geographical, historical, and cultural Europe than ever before would be gathered into a single interlinked set of political, economic, and security communities.

Beyond that, there is the question of a democratic, post-Lukashenko Belarus, if it can free itself from Russia’s grip. Another phase, also potentially embracing Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Turkey (a NATO member since 1952 and an accepted candidate for EU membership since 1999), could eventually contribute to a further geostrategic strengthening of the West in an increasingly post-Western world. But the enormous scale of the task the EU has just assumed, combined with political circumstances inside those countries, makes this a prospect that is not on the current agenda of European politics.

THE EU TRANSFORMED

This long-term vision of an enlarged EU, in strategic partnership with NATO, immediately raises two large questions. What about Russia? And how can there be a sustainable European Union of 36, going on 40, member states? It is difficult to address the first question without knowing what a post-Putin Russia will look like, but a significant part of the answer will in any case depend on the external geopolitical environment created to the west and south of Russia. This environment is directly susceptible to shaping by Western policymakers in a way that the internal evolution of a declining but still nuclear-armed Russia is not.

Politically, the most important speech on this subject was delivered by Scholz in Prague last August. Reaffirming his new commitment to a large eastward expansion of the EU—including the western Balkans, Moldova, Ukraine, and, in the longer term, Georgia—he insisted that as with previous rounds of widening, this one would require further deepening of the union. Otherwise, an EU of 36 member states would cease to be a coherent, effective political community. Specifically, Scholz argued for more “qualified majority voting,” an EU decision-making procedure that requires the assent of 55 percent of member states, representing at least 65 percent of the bloc’s population. This process would ensure that a single member state, such as Viktor Orban’s Hungary, could no longer threaten to veto another round of sanctions on Russia or other measures that most member states regard as necessary. In short, the central authority of the EU needs to become stronger to hold together such a large and diverse political community, although always with democratic checks and balances and without a single national hegemon.

Scholz’s analysis is evidently correct, and it is doubly important because it comes from the leader of Europe’s central power. But is this not itself a version of empire? A new kind of empire, that is, based on voluntary membership and democratic consent. Most Europeans recoil from the term “empire,” regarding it as something belonging to a dark past, intrinsically bad, undemocratic, and illiberal. Indeed, one reason Europeans have been talking more about empire recently is the rise of protest movements that call on former European colonial powers to recognize, acknowledge, and make reparation for the evils done by their colonial empires. So Europeans prefer the language of integration, union, or multilevel governance. In The Road to Unfreedom, the Yale historian Timothy Snyder characterizes the contest between the EU and Putin’s Russia as “integration or empire.” But the word “integration” describes a process, not an end state. To counterpose the two concepts is rather like speaking of “rail travel versus city”; the method of transportation does not describe the destination.

Clearly, if one means by “empire” direct control over other people’s territory by a single colonial state, the EU is not an empire. But as another Yale historian, Arne Westad, has argued, this is too narrow a definition of the word. If one of the defining features of empire is supranational authority, law, and power, then the EU already has some important characteristics of empire. Indeed, in many policy areas, European law takes precedence over national law, which is what so infuriates British Euroskeptics. On trade, the EU negotiates on behalf of all member states. The legal scholar Anu Bradford has documented the global reach of the EU’s “unilateral regulatory power” on everything from product standards, data privacy, and online hate speech to consumer health and safety and environmental protection. Her book is revealingly, if a touch hyperbolically, subtitled How the European Union Rules the World.

Moreover, the longest-running empire in European history, the Holy Roman Empire, was itself an example of a complex, multilevel system of governance, with no single nation or state as hegemon. The comparison with the Holy Roman Empire was made already in 2006 by the political scientist Jan Zielonka, who explored a “neo-medieval paradigm” to describe the enlarged EU.

Scholz inspecting weapons in Bergen, Germany, October 2022

Fabian Bimmer / Reuters

Support for thinking about the EU in this way comes from an especially pertinent source. Dmytro Kuleba, Ukraine’s foreign minister, has described the European Union as “the first ever attempt to build a liberal empire,” contrasting it with Putin’s attempt to restore Russia’s colonial empire by military conquest. When he and I spoke in the heavily sandbagged Ukrainian Foreign Ministry in Kyiv in February, he explained that a liberal empire’s key characteristic is keeping together very different nations and ethnic groups “not by force but by the rule of law.” Seen from Kyiv, a liberal, democratic empire is needed to defeat an illiberal, antidemocratic one.

Several of the obstacles to achieving this goal are also connected with Europe’s imperial history. The German political scientist Gwendolyn Sasse has argued that Germany must “decolonize” its view of eastern Europe. This is an unusual version of decolonization. When people speak of the United Kingdom or France needing to decolonize their view of Africa, they mean that these countries should stop seeing it (consciously or unconsciously) through the lens of their own former colonial history. What Sasse suggests is that Germany, with its long historical fascination with Russia, needs to stop seeing countries like Ukraine and Moldova through somebody else’s colonial lens: Russia’s.

The imperial legacies and memories of former western European colonial powers also impede European collective action in other ways. The United Kingdom is an obvious example. Its departure from the EU had many causes, but among them was an obsession with strictly legal sovereignty that goes all the way back to a 1532 law that enacted King Henry VIII’s break from the Roman Catholic Church, resonantly claiming that “this realm of England is an empire.” The word “empire” was here used in an older sense, meaning supreme sovereign authority. The memory of the overseas British Empire “on which the sun never set” also played into a mistaken belief that the United Kingdom would be just fine going it alone. “We used to run the biggest empire the world has ever seen, and with a much smaller domestic population and a relatively tiny civil service,” wrote Boris Johnson, the most influential leader of the Leave campaign, in the run-up to the 2016 Brexit referendum. “Are we really unable to do trade deals?” In the French case, memories of past imperial grandeur translate into a different distortion: not rejection of the EU but a tendency to treat Europe as France writ large.

Then there is the perception of Europe in places that were once European colonies or, like China, felt the negative impact of European imperialism. Chinese schoolchildren are taught to contemplate and resent a “century of humiliation” at the hands of Western imperialists. At the same time, President Xi Jinping proudly refers to continuities, from China’s own earlier civilizational empires to today’s “Chinese dream” of national rejuvenation.

If Europe is to make its case more effectively to major postcolonial countries such as India and South Africa, it needs to be more conscious of this colonial past. (It might also help to point out that a large and growing number of EU member states in eastern Europe were themselves the objects of European colonialism, not its perpetrators.) When European leaders trot around the globe today, presenting the EU as the sublime incarnation of postcolonial values of democracy, human rights, peace, and human dignity, they often seem to have forgotten Europe’s long and quite recent colonial history—but the rest of the world has not. That is one reason why postcolonial countries such as India and South Africa have not lined up with the West over the war in Ukraine. Polling conducted in late 2022 and early 2023 in China, India, and Turkey for the European Council on Foreign Relations—in partnership with Oxford University’s Europe in a Changing World research project, which I co-direct—shows just how far they are from understanding what is happening in Ukraine as an independence struggle against Russia’s war of attempted recolonization.

OVERLAPPING EMPIRES

Beyond this is the fact that, as the war in Ukraine has once again made clear, Europe still ultimately relies for its security on the United States. Macron and Scholz talk often of the need for “European sovereignty,” yet when it comes to military support for Ukraine, Scholz has not been ready to send a single class of major weapons (armored fighting vehicles, tanks) unless the United States does so, too. It is a strange version of sovereignty. The war has certainly galvanized European thinking, and action, on defense. Scholz has given the English language a new German word, Zeitenwende (roughly, historic turning point), and committed to a sustained increase in German defense spending and military readiness. Germany taking the military dimension of power seriously again would be no small fact in modern European history.

Poland plans to build up the biggest army inside the EU, and a victorious Ukraine would have the largest and most combat-hardened armed forces in Europe outside Russia. The EU has a European Peace Facility, which during the first year of the war in Ukraine spent some $3.8 billion to co-fund member states’ arms supplies to Ukraine. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen is now proposing that the European Peace Facility should directly order ammunition and weapons for Ukraine, comparing this to the EU’s procurement of vaccines during the COVID-19 pandemic. The EU thus also has the very modest beginnings of the military dimension that traditionally belongs to imperial power. If all this happens, the European pillar of the transatlantic alliance should grow significantly stronger, thus also potentially freeing up more U.S. military resources to confront the threat from China in the Indo-Pacific. But Europe is still unlikely to be able to defend itself alone against any major external threat.

Although the United States’ own foundational identity is that of an anticolonial power, it has in NATO an “empire by invitation,” in the historian Geir Lundestad’s phrase. Explaining his use of the word “empire,” Lundestad quotes former U.S. National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski’s argument that “empire” can be a descriptive rather than a normative term. This American anti-imperial empire is more hegemonic than the European one but less so than it was in the past. As Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has repeatedly demonstrated, and Scholz also in his way, the United States can’t simply tell other NATO member states what to do. This alliance, therefore, also has a credible claim to be an empire by consent.

One can push the language of empire too far. Comparing the EU and NATO with past empires reveals differences that are as interesting as the similarities. Politically, neither the European Union nor the United States will ever present themselves as an empire, nor would they be well advised to do so. Analytically, however, it is worth reflecting that whereas the twentieth century saw most of Europe transitioning from empires to states, the world of the twenty-first century still has empires—and it needs new kinds of empire to stand up to them. Whether Europe actually manages to create a liberal empire strong enough to defend the interests and values of Europeans will, as always in human history, depend on conjuncture, luck, collective will, and individual leadership.

Here, then, is the surprising prospect that the war in Ukraine reveals: the EU as a postimperial empire, in strategic partnership with an American postimperial empire, to prevent the comeback of a declining Russian empire and constrain a rising Chinese one.

TIMOTHY GARTON ASH is Professor of European Studies at the University of Oxford and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. This essay draws on the analysis in his forthcoming book Homelands: A Personal History of Europe (Yale University Press, 2023).

Foreign Affairs · by Homelands: A Personal History of Europe · April 18, 2023

12. China’s Humanitarian Efforts Fail to Measure up in the Middle East

Excerpts:

China’s global rise foreshadows Beijing gaining an outsized voice over humanitarian issues in the future. Its current lackluster relief efforts, limited commitments, and trend of supporting belligerent regimes to date is largely in opposition to hopes that China would be a constructive actor, particularly as it pursues great power status. Despite its track record, others in the humanitarian community are recognizing Beijing’s growing role, and calling on China to assume a more active and productive approach to relief.

In 2021, International Committee for the Red Cross President Peter Maurer called on Chinese officials to step up their role in humanitarian assistance and integrate a humanitarian dimension into the BRI, particularly by supporting and financing humanitarian action and empowering victims of conflict to co-design preparedness and response strategies. However, the current UNSC debate over humanitarian access in Syria is one example the scale of the divide between China and its Western counterparts on the governance of humanitarian affairs.

Commensurate with its GDP and global standing, China could certainly be doing more financially to alleviate humanitarian crises – particularly in the Middle East where humanitarian responses to regional crises are already underfunded. Refugee-hosting countries like Jordan and Lebanon are struggling to meet the needs of both refugees and their host communities. If Beijing wants to play a more constructive role in humanitarian relief, it can enhance its contributions to U.N.-led multilateral aid efforts in support of these struggling nations rather than throwing cash at belligerent regimes, like the Assad government in Syria, which will only embolden those regimes to deepen their control over the humanitarian environment.

China’s Humanitarian Efforts Fail to Measure up in the Middle East

For all the focus on Beijing’s diplomatic prowess in the region, there is one area where it falls woefully short: humanitarian aid

thediplomat.com · by Jesse Marks · April 20, 2023

China’s successful mediation of the Iran-Saudi rivalry has raised expectations for a larger Chinese role in resolving other conflicts in the region, including in Yemen and Syria, and most recently, between Israel and Palestine. The Iran-Saudi mediation also reinforced Chinese claims to regional leadership in the Middle East made at the China-Arab Summit in December 2022.

Beijing has indeed presented itself as a political partner for resolving regional conflicts, but it has rejected any such role in resolving the region’s many humanitarian crises. Despite being one of the most influential and powerful nations, China has largely remained on the sidelines of humanitarian efforts in the region and resigned itself to the pursuit of economic interests. Instead, it has been pouring development assistance and investment under the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), normally reserved for developing countries, into Saudi Arabia – the country which has the least need for economic aid in the region – while leaving those affected by conflicts across the region in dire straits.

Beijing’s View of Humanitarian Crises

Beijing’s stance on humanitarian crises is that “war, conflict, and poverty” are the primary drivers of refugee crises, and that the only way to resolve them is through “peace and development.” Using that framework, China participates in many of the United Nations’ forums and processes on refugees and migration, particularly high visibility events that align with its foreign policy priorities and improve its image.

In October, China’s U.N. Ambassador Chen Xu argued at the 73rd Executive Committee of the U.N. refugee agency UNHCR for Beijing’s policy of “common but differentiated responsibilities” for developed and developing countries. He emphasized the financial obligation of Western nations – as exporters of “wars and turmoil” – to address the “symptoms” of refugee crises in developing countries by fulfilling aid commitments, supporting reconstruction, and increasing financial aid to refugee-hosting countries.

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Interestingly, China, a self-proclaimed developing country despite being the world’s second-largest economy, absolved itself from any such obligation to provide financial assistance on a large scale to address refugee crises. Rather, Beijing has prioritized economic gains over humanitarian ones.

Chinese officials maintain that their policies are designed to address the root causes of refugee crises, such as armed conflict, impoverishment, and the lack of progress. They believe that the implementing the BRI in areas of conflict is an effective way to achieve peace. This view holds that development is essential for peace and that a strong central government is necessary for successful national reconstruction, commercial activity, investment, and infrastructure growth.

High Visibility, Low Impact

In practice, China’s “development as peace” approach largely overlooks conflict zones in favor of energy-rich countries. BRI funds have dried up in the Levant region – Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria – and migrated to the Arab Gulf. For low- and middle-income countries, like Jordan, many BRI projects never materialized, despite the lofty rhetoric. Those that did have been plagued by the exclusion of local labor participation and dashed expectations of economic development.

Instead, the COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on local economies pushed Beijing to reduce BRI lending and reprioritize investment to Gulf Cooperation Council markets, where it can reap higher returns. For example, Saudi Arabia was one of the largest global recipients of BRI funding globally in 2022, totaling $5.5 billion, and the two nations are expected to rapidly expand bilateral trade and investment by an estimated $20 billion.

China does employ humanitarian diplomacy in the Middle East, often around high visibility crises like Syria and Yemen, to bolster Beijing’s international image and improve its perception in the region. Instead of providing meaningful relief, China actively broadcasts its minuscule aid provisions through the nation’s propaganda machine in order to project an image of itself as a responsible world power. The substance of its actual engagements, however, has little to no impact on alleviating Middle East crises.

Beijing prefers to remain above the fray in the region’s conflicts and eschews entanglement in the geopolitics of conflict. However, its prioritization of BRI funding over meaningful humanitarian action commensurate with its economic standing sends powerful signals to the international humanitarian community, particularly U.N. agencies, who increasingly are expected to do more with less. And China’s short-term, one-off aid provisions do little to support the multilateral aid effort.

A Troubled Track Record

Aid actors often criticize Beijing’s humanitarian contributions as meager and insufficient to support the region’s varied humanitarian and refugee crises. Beijing gives significantly less than peer competitors, like the United States, in foreign aid. For example, in 2019, Beijing’s total foreign aid was estimated to between $4.8 billion and $5.9 billion, whereas U.S. global foreign aid – excluding military and security funds – amounted to $31 billion. Chinese contributions come in the form of commitments and in-kind donations of relief items to U.N. agencies – such as UNHCR, UNICEF, and the World Food Programme – through its state-led aid agencies, the Global Development and South-South Cooperation Fund and the China International Development Cooperation Agency.

In Syria, for example, Beijing does not even rank among the top 50 donors to the U.N.-led response. China committed an average of $1.8 million to the U.N. Humanitarian Response Plan Regional Response Plan for only six out of the 12 years of war in Syria. Instead, Beijing has directly provided the Syrian government with an estimated $54 million in bilateral economic support. Compare that to the United States, which has provided nearly $15 billion in humanitarian assistance to Syria and the surrounding region since 2011. Meanwhile, Syria’s neighbors, Lebanon and Jordan, have received little in terms of Chinese aid.

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Beyond humanitarian commitments, China’s behavior as a U.N. Security Council (UNSC) member, notorious for its vetoes over action in humanitarian crises, has also created a more restrictive and convoluted aid environment for humanitarian actors, who must operate under extreme top-down pressure from China as a permanent UNSC member. For example, in the ongoing debate over U.N. Resolution 2642 – which authorizes U.N. cross-border humanitarian assistance in Syria to areas outside of the control of the Syrian government – Chinese and Russian pressure on U.N. agencies to shift from providing aid across international borders to providing aid across battle lines inside of Syria threatens to undermine hard-fought access to remote areas across the country.

Furthermore, Beijing’s increasing pressure, alongside Russia, does not come with any additional guarantees of increased funding or contributions to bolster multilateral aid efforts. Instead, Beijing and Moscow are pressuring U.N. relief agencies to centralize in Damascus, under the purview of the Syrian regime, subjugating the Syrian aid environment to a government still actively at war with its people.

As in the case of Syria, China prefers to give foreign aid bilaterally to partner governments. This aid, at times, has sustained belligerent regimes, notably in Syria and previously in Sudan, during protracted periods of state-led crises and genocide. In the case of Sudan, Beijing’s humanitarian aid during the Darfur crisis in the 2000s largely flowed through the Sudanese government, despite its role as a combatant in the conflict. Under Chinese pressure, Khartoum eventually consented to a U.N. peacekeeping mission in Darfur. Chinese pressure on the embattled regime was a last resort for China to preserve its energy and oil interests in Sudan, stave off calls for stronger international intervention, and restore China’s international image, which came under extensive scrutiny in advance of the 2008 Olympics.

Conclusion

China’s global rise foreshadows Beijing gaining an outsized voice over humanitarian issues in the future. Its current lackluster relief efforts, limited commitments, and trend of supporting belligerent regimes to date is largely in opposition to hopes that China would be a constructive actor, particularly as it pursues great power status. Despite its track record, others in the humanitarian community are recognizing Beijing’s growing role, and calling on China to assume a more active and productive approach to relief.

In 2021, International Committee for the Red Cross President Peter Maurer called on Chinese officials to step up their role in humanitarian assistance and integrate a humanitarian dimension into the BRI, particularly by supporting and financing humanitarian action and empowering victims of conflict to co-design preparedness and response strategies. However, the current UNSC debate over humanitarian access in Syria is one example the scale of the divide between China and its Western counterparts on the governance of humanitarian affairs.

Commensurate with its GDP and global standing, China could certainly be doing more financially to alleviate humanitarian crises – particularly in the Middle East where humanitarian responses to regional crises are already underfunded. Refugee-hosting countries like Jordan and Lebanon are struggling to meet the needs of both refugees and their host communities. If Beijing wants to play a more constructive role in humanitarian relief, it can enhance its contributions to U.N.-led multilateral aid efforts in support of these struggling nations rather than throwing cash at belligerent regimes, like the Assad government in Syria, which will only embolden those regimes to deepen their control over the humanitarian environment.

Jesse Marks

Jesse Marks is a nonresident fellow at the Stimson Center. He previously served as a Schwarzman Scholar in China and Fulbright fellow in the Middle East where he researched Chinese foreign policy in the Middle East.

thediplomat.com · by Jesse Marks · April 20, 2023

13. China unleashes the wolf warriors against South Korea and the Philippines

Excerpts:

This silliness isn't very helpful to China's interests. True, diplomatic insults are not a problem for France and Germany, whose leaders (German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock aside) have turned themselves into human carpets for Xi. Nevertheless, most governments possess at least moderate resolve that their Chinese interchanges should extend beyond Communist Party lecturing. And where, as in these two cases, China doubles down on the lecturing, it fosters popular disenchantment that then encourages more robust government responses against its interests. Much like Xi's economic policy, the means of China's diplomacy are thus utterly self-defeating to the desired ends. There is a reason that China is viewed increasingly poorly around the world.

Yet there's an almost childish quality to Beijing's diplomatic rhetoric. Take Wang's response to the U.S. indictment of Chinese security agents who allegedly ran an illegal police station in New York. Rather than sidestepping the uncomfortable issue, as a normal diplomat might do, Wang went into attack mode. He said that "the U.S. should reflect on what it has done and immediately stop and correct its wrongdoing."

China unleashes the wolf warriors against South Korea and the Philippines

by Tom Rogan, National Security Writer & Online Editor | April 21, 2023 03:05 PM

Washington Examiner · April 21, 2023

Increasingly paranoid about dominating its Asia-Pacific neighbors, China is again unleashing its "wolf warrior" diplomatic strategy. Centered on aggressive rebuttals of what Beijing regards as affronts to its core interests, the wolf warrior strategy has been relatively dormant over the past 18 months. Chinese leader Xi Jinping appeared to recognize that it was doing more harm than good.

No longer. In a series of outbursts this week, a Chinese foreign ministry spokesman and Beijing's Global Times propaganda newspaper have unleashed the wolf.

THE US SHOULD HELP UKRAINE DISSECT CRIMEA FROM RUSSIA, NOT SEIZE IT

First up, the Philippines.

Tensions between the two nations have risen in recent weeks. China is infuriated by a recent agreement that would allow the U.S. military to use new bases in the northern part of the Philippines. These bases would be of significant utility in a war with China.

Yet, disregarding the fact that the United States and the Philippines are treaty allies, Beijing is now demanding that Manila backtrack. Noting the visit of China's Foreign Minister Qin Gang to the Philippines on Friday, the Global Times declared that recent Philippine actions have been "unacceptable to China."

It added that "military cooperation between the Philippines and the U.S. has reached a concerning level. It is necessary for the Philippine side to provide more sufficient explanations" and concluded Manila "should maintain a high degree of sober mind." Most absurdly, the newspaper said that "China has shown the utmost respect and goodwill toward the Philippines, with great restraint in its tone."

Really?

Taking aside the hectoring rudeness of the Global Times's editorial, recent weeks have seen Chinese coast guard ships increasingly harass Philippine vessels with various tactics such as shining high-powered lasers. Is this "great restraint"? China has been firing its lasers because the Philippines has the gall to operate in waters close to its shores — waters that China illegally claims as its own.

(State Department)

"Illegally" and "absurdly" are a better choice of words. The map below shows the waters China claims as its own, constituting nearly the entirety of the South China Sea. The lunacy of these claims is perhaps best underlined by the fact that the James Shoal (by dash #4) is 70 miles from Malaysia but 1,000 miles from the closest Chinese territory of Hainan Island. China, without any legitimate historic or political claim, says it has incontrovertible sovereignty over the James Shoal and everything else within those 10 dashes (look at where dash #10 is).

Next up, there's South Korea.

Seoul summoned the Chinese ambassador on Friday following insulting remarks by Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin. Wang angered Seoul by criticizing the South Korean president's comparison of tensions over Taiwan to the North Korean nuclear program. Wang declared that "the issue of the Korean Peninsula and the Taiwan question are completely different in nature, cause and history and cannot be mentioned in the same breath." On Friday, Wang maintained this stance, explaining that Beijing had made "serious" complaints to Seoul.

This silliness isn't very helpful to China's interests. True, diplomatic insults are not a problem for France and Germany, whose leaders (German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock aside) have turned themselves into human carpets for Xi. Nevertheless, most governments possess at least moderate resolve that their Chinese interchanges should extend beyond Communist Party lecturing. And where, as in these two cases, China doubles down on the lecturing, it fosters popular disenchantment that then encourages more robust government responses against its interests. Much like Xi's economic policy, the means of China's diplomacy are thus utterly self-defeating to the desired ends. There is a reason that China is viewed increasingly poorly around the world.

Yet there's an almost childish quality to Beijing's diplomatic rhetoric. Take Wang's response to the U.S. indictment of Chinese security agents who allegedly ran an illegal police station in New York. Rather than sidestepping the uncomfortable issue, as a normal diplomat might do, Wang went into attack mode. He said that "the U.S. should reflect on what it has done and immediately stop and correct its wrongdoing."

It might sound good to Central Foreign Affairs Commission chief Wang Yi and Xi. It doesn't, however, sound good or credible to anyone else. Quite the contrary.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER

Washington Examiner · April 21, 2023

14. The US military must move beyond defense-reform theater

Excerpts:

Some of these regulations, such as those in the Truth in Negotiations Act, are undoubtedly necessary as they prevent the taxpayer from being ripped off. Others, while well-intentioned, are simply onerous and drive up compliance costs. Paring back regulations would start updating our Soviet-style acquisition system and allow greater speed and urgency in bolstering deterrence.

In addition to regulatory refresh, the Pentagon should also review whether the work of Space Command is now duplicative or redundant given that the U.S. Space Force has stood up. Congress is poised to debate the future of Space Command as an organization that has potentially outlived its usefulness and should be sunsetted if appropriate — and then statutory work reassigned if needed.

Change doesn’t come overnight at the Pentagon. Rather, defense reform is the patient, hard work of many years, which both requires leadership and doggedness of implementation.

By pursuing these reforms (and straying away from harmful ideas like capping spending at arbitrary levels disconnected from the real world), Congress can begin this essential but difficult job of reform through reduction rather than the addition of new laws and rules that further slow down an already glacial organization. Moreover, policymakers will demonstrate their seriousness about needed defense rehabilitation, while skipping the defense-reform theater that has plagued the military for too long.

The US military must move beyond defense-reform theater

Defense News · by Mackenzie Eaglen · April 21, 2023

The sheer size, scope, reach and budget of the U.S. military is startling. Therefore it makes sense the Pentagon is a most tempting target for constant reform. But change for change’s sake is not helpful, nor is defense-reform theater. Serious crusaders must chart a different course for modernizing defense bureaucracy — one fit for the information age where urgency, flexibility, transparency and action are the watchwords.

Over the past eight sessions of Congress, there have been no fewer than 14 different Pentagon efficiency drills. The names are familiar to budget watchers: Better Buying Power 1.0 (and 2.0 … and 3.0), the Weapon Systems Acquisition Reform Act, night court, fourth-estate reform, and others. Some of these efforts were successful; others not so much.

While well-intentioned, a common theme was that these were short-term, budget-bogey exercises that yielded few new dollars for reinvestment into higher priorities. This is due in part to defense reform being over-focused on the acquisition of things. However, the majority of what the military purchases is no longer weapons systems but rather services and technology. Zealous reformers continue to over-focus on weapons buys when hardware is increasingly the commodity.

Moreover, the U.S. military is no longer a monopsony buyer able to move markets due to smaller bets, nor is the organization an original inventor changing the American economy. Rather, the military must increasingly innovate with mostly commercial products and give them a unique defense application.

In addition, the Pentagon finds itself in a new and uncomfortable position: that of needing to work to attract and entice new companies to want to do business with the armed forces. Tech and commercial companies know of the Defense Department’s low appetite for risk-taking and long timelines to take ideas from the lab to the field when compared to the private sector.

Change and modernization are needed, but not simply the rinse-and-repeat acquisition reforms of the past. Instead reform should fall into two categories:

Change with respect to reduction — whether of mission, rules, head count, regulations, laws, provisions, workload and more.
Modifications that increase accountability for passing appropriations on time and highlighting the true costs of running the U.S. military.

That means accountability, like sequestering congressional paychecks until appropriations are enacted each day after the start of the fiscal year. Appropriators must also revise rules established at a time when the defense budget was a fraction of its size today, and let the Defense Department move more money around after being approved to react in real time to changing technology.

It also means greater transparency on the costs of doing business. As former Rep. Anthony Brown, D-Md., highlighted — but few seem to be aware — Washington spends “$1 billion more on Medicare in the defense budget than we do on new tactical vehicles. We spend more on the Defense Health Program than we do on new ships. In total, some $200 billion in the defense budget are essentially for nondefense purposes — from salaries to health care to basic research.”

Congress should focus on combining the pay and benefits of defense workforces — uniformed and civilian — and their health care into one new account. Such a change should launch a broader discussion of moving certain costs, primarily people and paychecks, out of discretionary and into mandatory federal spending. That will energize a needed debate on how much the United States is spending on direct military capability, compared to expenses beyond the scope of the Defense Department that have little impact on warfighting or belong in the domain of another agency.

When it comes to slashing the barnacles of bureaucracy and taking away mission and work, Pentagon contracting is overdue for a refresh. As the American Enterprise Institute’s Bill Greenwalt has highlighted, federal acquisition regulation clauses mandate companies doing business with the Defense Department must operate in ways that they may not otherwise have to in their commercial operations.

Some of these regulations, such as those in the Truth in Negotiations Act, are undoubtedly necessary as they prevent the taxpayer from being ripped off. Others, while well-intentioned, are simply onerous and drive up compliance costs. Paring back regulations would start updating our Soviet-style acquisition system and allow greater speed and urgency in bolstering deterrence.

In addition to regulatory refresh, the Pentagon should also review whether the work of Space Command is now duplicative or redundant given that the U.S. Space Force has stood up. Congress is poised to debate the future of Space Command as an organization that has potentially outlived its usefulness and should be sunsetted if appropriate — and then statutory work reassigned if needed.

Change doesn’t come overnight at the Pentagon. Rather, defense reform is the patient, hard work of many years, which both requires leadership and doggedness of implementation.

By pursuing these reforms (and straying away from harmful ideas like capping spending at arbitrary levels disconnected from the real world), Congress can begin this essential but difficult job of reform through reduction rather than the addition of new laws and rules that further slow down an already glacial organization. Moreover, policymakers will demonstrate their seriousness about needed defense rehabilitation, while skipping the defense-reform theater that has plagued the military for too long.

Mackenzie Eaglen is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute think tank. She also serves on the U.S. Army Science Board.

15. Navy Names First Woman to Lead Naval Academy

Navy Names First Woman to Lead Naval Academy

military.com · by Konstantin Toropin · April 21, 2023

The Navy has nominated a pioneering female officer for yet another historic first. If confirmed, Rear Adm. Yvette Davids will be the first female superintendent of the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland.

Davids, who became a naval officer in 1989, has commanded the frigate USS Curts, the cruiser USS Bunker Hill, and she was the commander of Carrier Strike Group 11. Her assignment to Curts made her the first Hispanic American woman to command a Navy warship. She was also one of the first Hispanic American women to command a carrier strike group.

A press release issued by the Naval Academy Friday noted that "pending confirmation by the U.S. Senate," Davids would take over running the service academy "in summer 2023."

Davids' appointment leaves the US Military Academy at West Point as the only service academy to have never had a female leader.

Rear Adm. Sandra Stosz became the first woman to lead an academy when she took command of the U.S. Coast Guard Academy in 2011. In 2013, Lt. Gen. Michelle Johnson became the first female superintendent of the U.S. Air Force Academy. Finally, retired Coast Guard Rear Adm. Joanna Nunan became the first female superintendent of the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy in December.

Meanwhile, the Army named Brig. Gen. Diana M. Holland as commandant of cadets -- a lower position than Superintendent -- in 2016.

While military nominations such as Davids', which was submitted Thursday, typically pass the Senate quickly with little fanfare, all general and flag officer promotions are being slowed right now by Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala.

Tuberville is blocking military nominees from quick confirmation over his opposition to the Pentagon's recently announced travel and leave policies for troops seeking reproductive care. He has suggested he could lift his hold if he is granted a vote on the Pentagon policy, but said Thursday that Democrats and Pentagon officials have not reached out to him recently to end the impasse.

While Tuberville cannot single-handedly prevent nominees from being confirmed, his objection significantly delays confirmations since the Senate has to find floor time to hold roll-call votes on more than 180 nominees who would typically be approved in a voice vote in a single batch.

The post would be a homecoming for Davids, who graduated from the academy in 1989. Her husband, Rear Adm. Keith Davids, graduated in 1990, and the pair were both on the schools' sailing team, Colleen Krueger, a spokeswoman for the academy, confirmed.

Keith Davids is currently the commander of Naval Special Warfare Command, and he had command roles on several Navy SEAL Teams over his career. The pair have twin children together, Krueger confirmed.

They are believed to be the Navy's first married couple to both become admirals.

-- Rebecca Kheel contributed to this report

-- Konstantin Toropin can be reached at konstantin.toropin@military.com. Follow him on Twitter @ktoropin.

military.com · by Konstantin Toropin · April 21, 2023

16. Bizarre Plot To Steal Russian Jets Ends In Ukrainians Charged With Treason

Bizarre Plot To Steal Russian Jets Ends In Ukrainians Charged With Treason

A commander was killed, troops were wounded and two jets were destroyed as a result of the failed operation, Ukrainian state security says.

HOWARD ALTMAN

PUBLISHED APR 20, 2023 5:14 PM EDT

thedrive.com · by Howard Altman · April 20, 2023

An undisclosed number of Ukrainian service members have been charged with treason, the Ukrainian State Security Service (SBU) announced Thursday, after a bizarre plot to convince Russian pilots to steal their aircraft apparently backfired. As a result of the ensuing Russian investigation, its forces launched a "massive missile attack" on Ukraine's "Kanatove airfield on July 23, 2022.” It killed a commander, wounded 17 airmen, destroyed two fighter jets and caused “significant damage” to the airstrip and several buildings, SBU stated in a release.

Just two days after the deadly attack, Bellingcat Russia investigator Christo Grosev described the plot in a Twitter thread as a “crazier-than-fiction story of triple-agents, fake passports and faux girlfriends.” Bellingcat, he said, was chronicling this plot as it unfolded, via a documentary about “one of the wackiest counter-counter-intel operations of all time.”

It was a tale, he said, that Russia's FSB security agency falsely accused him of being involved in.

The genesis of this operation was based on a new Ukrainian law offering money to Russians who provide Kyiv with military hardware, Grosev said.

“A team of Ukrainian operatives decided to approach Russian pilots with an offer based on this law,” Grosev wrote. “We found out about the initiative, and assured ourselves a front seat – to make a documentary about this brazen operation.”

He was quick to point out that the operation “was not a project of either SBU or GUR [Ukraine's Defense Intelligence Directorate]. (If it were, there'd be no way we would - or want to - get access to it). It was organized by maverick ex operatives whom we got to know” via a previous Bellingcat investigation.

“Several Russian military pilots were approached and even sent ‘proof-of-access’ videos from inside their planes, in each case bearing a separate number hand-written on pieces of paper. Some of the footage from the inside of the planes was quite detailed and enlightening.”

The plot, however, went sideways.

“This bizarre mutual-deceit game came to an end when the FSB realized no one will show up at any of the suggested meet-ups (FSB were keen to identify Ukrainian agents), realizing they've been burned,” Grosev wrote. “And the Ukrainians realized they're likely not getting a real pilot either.”

Still, it was a win for Ukraine, Grosev wrote.

“While Russia is presenting today this as a coup for its counter intelligence, in fact the operation was a serious blunder for the FSB, disclosing unintentionally identities of dozens of counter intel officers, their methods of operation, and their undercover assets.”

Last month, Yahoo News took a deep dive into the story about the plot, laying out the complex twists and turns of what the SBU now says was a rogue off-the-books operation that had devastating results.

“Last summer, a group of Ukrainian volunteers, working closely with their country’s intelligence service, apparently came close to persuading three Russian aviators who were in the midst of bombing Ukraine to defect with their warplanes in exchange for $1 million a piece,” according to Yahoo News. “It was a bold, months-long operation, ‘like a movie,’ in the words of one of the Russian marks, a trio of exceptionally well-trained airmen who seemed amenable to betraying their motherland for a sum of money they’d otherwise never see in their lifetimes.”

The plot involved Russian pilots of the Tu-22M3 Backfire-C bombers as well as the Su-34 Fullback strike aircraft and Su-24 Fencer strike aircraft, Yahoo News wrote.

One of the pilots in the reported plot to steal Russian aircraft flew a Tu-22M Backfire bomber. (Dmitry Pichugin photo)

Had this been successful, it could have been a major win for Ukraine and, to possibly a bigger degree, the United States.

Capturing a fully-intact Su-34 would be a intelligence haul, especially for U.S. Foreign Materiel Exploitation programs. The Su-24 could bolster Ukraine's dwindling fleet, while the Tu-22 would be a major propaganda win and one less to be used to attack Ukraine.

But what “looked like a legitimate plan to switch sides proved anything but," Yahoo News wrote. "None of the pilots defected in the end. There is strong evidence that most if not all of them were found out by Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB), one of the successor agencies to the Soviet KGB."

Russian propaganda "says the whole saga was in fact orchestrated by the FSB from the start,” according to Yahoo News.

But the Ukrainians “insist the FSB only got involved late in the negotiations, after sincere commitments were made by each pilot. Kyiv also maintains its failure to acquire Russian warplanes was nonetheless a mitigated success: It gleaned valuable technical information about Russia’s air force and compromised three military officers, at least one of whom has not flown combat missions since. A complex intelligence operation thus devolved into a remote game of dueling counterintelligence narratives with both sides claiming victory.”

However, there is another twist to this story.

Yahoo News reported that the FSB also claimed a victory here, saying it discovered the location of the Kantatove airfield as a result of uncovering the Ukrainian plot, a narrative that lines up with the SBU version of events.

But in reality, “those airfields had already been bombed since the start of Moscow’s invasion,” Yahoo News reported, citing previous news accounts.

The Kantatove airfield as seen on Aug. 7, 2021. (Google Earth image)

It's hard to understand what the issue is here with this airfield as its existence is no secret, although precise operations ongoing there could have been leveraged by Russian intelligence. It's just unclear how the successful targeting of this base was prompted by this allegedly botched operation.

Regardless, the SBU on Thursday said the unraveling of the plot resulted in the deadly attack and that the service-members involved had to be punished.

“Therefore, such actions of individual servicemen, which led to serious consequences, the death and injury of Ukrainian defenders and harmed the country's defense capabilities, require an appropriate legal assessment,” according to SBU. “Criminal proceedings have been opened under Part 2 of Article 111 (treason) and Part 5 of Article 426-1 (exceeding authority or official powers by a military official) of the Criminal Code of Ukraine.”

We reached out to SBU to see if they could offer more details and explain how the Russians discovered this airfield as a result of the plot after it had already been targeted. And we reached out to Grosev, to check on the status of his documentary into this convoluted tale.

We will update this story with any response provided and if and when the case goes to trial and a verdict is reached.

Contact the author: howard@thewarzone.com

thedrive.com · by Howard Altman · April 20, 2023

17. Japan Wades into Foreign Defense Assistance

Can Japan someday become another partner in the Arsenal of Democracy?

Japan Wades into Foreign Defense Assistance

OPINION - April 18, 2023

By Mark Soo

https://www.geopoliticalmonitor.com/japan-wades-into-foreign-defense-assistance/

On April 5, 2023, the Japanese government announced that it has established the Official Security Assistance (OSA) framework to provide assistance for militaries and other related organizations of friendly (developing) countries, an initiative that is partially based on Tokyo’s experience in providing Official Development Assistance (ODA). The new framework is taken from the National Security Strategy (NSS) paper released on December 16, 2022, which states that OSA will improve “defense capabilities as well as enhance the security and deterrence capabilities of like-minded countries in order to prevent unilateral attempts to change the status quo by force, ensure the peace and stability of the Indo-Pacific region in particular, and create a security environment desirable for Japan”. The paper also states that Japan will provide the necessary military-based materials and equipment to strengthen the country’s various security requirements. Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirokazu Matsuno stated that countries to be considered for OSA assistance include Bangladesh, Fiji, Malaysia, and the Philippines.

However, Japan will have a long road in implementing OSA effectively, as both Japan and the OSA recipients will need to abide by the rules of the Three Principles on Defense Equipment Transfers. Japan will also face stiff competition from other countries that have provided similar military aid packages to various Indo-Pacific countries.

Under the Three Principles on Defense Equipment Transfers, military hardware will be provided for areas not related to international conflict. This means that Japan will expect OSA recipients to follow through with the conditions of using them in activities related to ensure peace and stability. This also includes not sending any material to countries that are under arms sanctions under the United Nations (UN) or certain states. Examples of these stability activities include counter-terrorism, anti-piracy, search and rescue (SAR) and peacekeeping operations. The Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) also said that policies being put into place to ensure OSA packages are implemented properly include transparency on what type of aid Japan will provide and strict guidelines on not transferring any military hardware to third parties and the prevention of extra-purpose use.

Another area of concern is the competition Japan faces with other countries that have provided similar military aid packages in the past. One reason why developing countries may be reluctant to purchase Japanese military equipment is due to the high costs. This is why they would consider other countries that can provides arms and military vehicles through financing, discounted prices or sometimes for free. For example, China provided military assistance to the Philippines in December 2016 for free alongside a $500 million long-term soft loan. On May 29, 2022, the United States Embassy in Fiji donated four vehicles worth around $224,000 to Republic of Fiji Military Forces (RFMF) as part of a Global Peace Operations Initiative (GPOI) package that includes 11 vehicles, two forklifts, and four generators.

An ideal solution would be the defense (credit) line that Tokyo announced will be used as part of OSA. It should be made flexible, according to the security demands that a certain country has or may need in the future. An announcement was made that this line will be provided, so long as lethal military hardware is not purchased. The high cost of Japanese military hardware is also being considered after OSA was announced. But there seems to be promise on this area. On March 20, 2023, Kawasaki Heavy Industries Global Aerospace Defense Business Manager Jun Tomiyama said in an interview that KHI will lower production costs in response to concerns raised by the Japanese Ministry of Defense and potential export customers of the C-2 aircraft. He did not specify on the details, but it appears to be a good start that at least the issue is being addressed.

Japan’s announcement to provide OSA assistance, while useful in strengthening military and security ties with developing countries, is bound to get off to a rocky start. Not only does Japan have to follow its own rules, which could limit how the recipients use any Japanese-made military hardware. The pricing for Japanese military hardware is also another concern since not all developing countries may have the financial capacity to purchase them, even if they want to. More solutions will be needed to lower the financial risk for OSA recipients to acquire Japanese military hardware. But as for not allowing the purchase of said hardware in an international conflict, it remains to be seen if this can continue to be upheld if and when the international security environment continues to change.

The views expressed in this article belong to the authors alone and do not necessarily reflect those of Geopoliticalmonitor.com.

18. Bipartisan bill would ‘arm Taiwan to the teeth’ with US cyber tech

Bipartisan bill would ‘arm Taiwan to the teeth’ with US cyber tech

Defense News · by Colin Demarest · April 21, 2023

WASHINGTON — A bipartisan group of lawmakers wants to apply U.S. cybersecurity technologies and techniques in defense of Taiwan, a target of Chinese influence campaigns, digital onslaughts and potential military takeover.

Sens. Jacky Rosen, D-Nev., and Mike Rounds, R-S.D., and Reps. Chrissy Houlahan, D-Pa., and Mike Gallagher, R-Wis., on April 20 introduced the Taiwan Cybersecurity Resiliency Act, which would require the Pentagon to intensify its cyber outreach and collaboration with the much-discussed independent island.

Such expanded partnership would involve training exercises and the eradication of malicious cyber activity, according to Rosen, who mentioned the legislation in a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing featuring the the top U.S. military commander in the Indo-Pacific, Navy Adm. John Aquilino.

China considers Taiwan a renegade province and has vowed to retake it by force, if necessary. The U.S. has for decades supplied Taiwan with military hardware and software worth billions of dollars. The Taiwanese government has previously said its agencies are peppered by thousands of cyberattacks each week.

Rosen on Thursday said the U.S. is “acutely aware of the threat that China poses in the cyber domain,” and described Taiwan as Beijing’s “testing ground,” language also used to described the Russia-Ukraine dynamic. Gallagher, who leads the House special committee on China, in a statement said the bill would help “arm Taiwan to the teeth in the cyber domain.”

U.S. officials consider China a premier cyber hazard, alongside Russia. The Biden administration’s national cybersecurity strategy, released early last month, labels China as the most persistent digital threat, capable of twisting narratives and siphoning intellectually property, and Russia as a foreign meddler, a haven for hackers.

The U.S. Capitol is seen reflected on a window of the Keck Center, a National Academies building, in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 19, 2023. (Colin Demarest/C4ISRNET)

Invigorating cybersecurity at home and abroad is critical, according to Aquilino, who is responsible for all U.S. military activities in the Indo-Pacific.

With the help of Cyber Command, he told Rosen, the U.S. is working “to strengthen ally, partner and friend networks, so that they’re secure and that they can have a confidence that the things they’re putting out in their own networks are not being read or impacted by other nations.”

INDOPACOM’s fiscal 2024 unfunded priorities list, totaling nearly $3.5 billion, includes $184 million for offensive cyber capabilities, $90 million for cybersecurity and network hardening, and $39 million for the so-called mission partner environment, which allows data from a range of militaries to be collated, secured, shared and acted upon.

Military leaders submit the unfunded inventories, often referred to as wish lists, to Congress to highlight projects that did not make it into the White House budget blueprint but would be useful, should money be available.

“To talk to those allies and partners right now, I have 13 separate networks; that’s costly, they’re at risk,” Aquilino said. “What we’re attempting to deliver is a single pane of glass that allows us to communicate securely, in a cyber-safe way, with all of our partners across the region, no matter who, at the level at which we can share.”

About Colin Demarest

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

19. Developing Strategically-Minded Enlisted Leaders

Conclusion:

There are many significant assignment opportunities available for both officers and enlisted Soldiers. However, the U.S. Army lacks broadening assignments for NCOs, to develop them as strategic-level thinkers. As we look at the great power competition with Russia and China, the Army needs to develop strategic thinkers within the NCO ranks. Pre-existing broadening assignments for officers should be expanded to NCOs. More specifically, the Army should expand the JCS Internship to include NCOs. Developing strategic level thinkers in the enlisted ranks is not only good for individuals, but also for the Army and the nation.

Developing Strategically-Minded Enlisted Leaders

armyupress.army.mil

Publishing Disclaimer: In all of its publications and products, NCO Journal presents professional information. However, the views expressed therein are those of the authors and are not necessarily those of the Army University, the Department of the US Army, or any other agency of the US Government.

By Staff Sgt. Nicholas DiMichele

U.S. Army National Guard

March 20, 2023

Download the PDF

A photo of the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. on May 25, 2016. The military wants to develop future senior enlisted leaders to be strategic-level thinkers. (U.S. Army photo by Sgt. 1st Class Marisol Walker)

I recently had a conversation with my brother, a sergeant first class, working as a drill sergeant at Fort Benning, Georgia. I encouraged him to apply for the White House Fellowship. I told him it is a broadening assignment where he can gain expertise on strategic-level policy. For a little bit of context, the White House Fellowship is a one-year assignment, open to both enlisted Soldiers and officers, at the White House where they can rub elbows with supreme court justices, cabinet secretaries, senior White House officials, members of Congress, foreign heads of state, and military leaders (Mackey, 2020 p. 56). The White House Fellowship is one of the few strategic-level broadening assignments available to enlisted service members.

Examining the Broadening Opportunity Program (BOP) released by the U.S. Army Human Resources Command confirms only two of the 15 strategic-level broadening assignments are open to enlisted Soldiers (Mackey, 2020, p. 2).

Enlisted career paths are very structured. Soldiers can generally plan out their careers, from private to command sergeant major. While this may be beneficial for career planning, it doesn't encourage enlisted Soldiers to pursue strategic-level broadening assignments because their options are limited. The U.S. Army should make more broadening assignments available to enlisted Soldiers, like the Joint Chiefs of Staff Intern Program, to develop strategically minded enlisted leaders.

Developing Enlisted Leaders for Tomorrow's Wars

The idea of developing enlisted leaders into strategic-level thinkers is paramount to the future of warfare. Developing Enlisted Leaders for Tomorrow's Wars, a document published by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and signed off by the top enlisted leaders from every service, highlights the need to tackle this ambition (Joint Staff, 2021).

SEAC Ramón Colón-López, Senior Enlisted Advisor to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recites the oath of enlistment with service members on Al Dhafra Air Base, United Arab Emirates, Jan. 10, 2023. Service senior enlisted leaders have envisioned an enlisted force be far better educated and more knowledgeable in the employment and integration of the instruments of National Power. (U.S. Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. Sabatino DiMascio)

The document states, "the emerging operating environment demands that joint enlisted leaders be far better educated and more knowledgeable in the employment and integration of the instruments of National Power" (Joint Staff, 2021, p. 1). Senior Enlisted Advisor to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (SEAC), Ramón Colón-Lopez, highlighted that we need to change the force to confront strategic challenges from China and Russia (Garamone, 2022).

The military has transitioned to developing strategically minded enlisted service members through the Gateway course that Colón-López calls "Keystone-minus." Taught at National Defense University specifically for E-6s and E-7s, the Gateway course discusses U.S. national strategic policy, national military capabilities and organization, a joint forces overview, and regional knowledge and operational culture (National Defense University, 2022 p. 2).

This course is an effort to develop future senior enlisted leaders to be strategic-level thinkers. However, it is only 12-day days long (National Defense University, 2022, p. 5). Given the short length of the course, would those enlisted Soldiers who take the course walk away with a concrete understanding of strategic level concepts? Twelve days is not nearly enough time.

In 2013, Brig. Gen. Timothy Connelly, then a lieutenant colonel, produced a thesis for the Army War College,“Developing Strategic Leaders in the NCO and Warrant Officer Corps”(Connelly, 2013). He recommended increasing enlisted broadening assignments to build bridges between services, governmental agencies, and international organizations (Connelly, 2013).

Connelly also recommended NCOs receive a strategic military education (Connelly, 2013). While the author highlighted that senior NCOs attend the Keystone-minus course, only few can attend so there is little opportunity to “build a bench” of strategically minded senior NCOs (Connelly, 2013).

Anyone interested in this topic should read his thesis; however, his two policy recommendations should be expanded and combined to build strategic-level NCOs through the JCS Intern Program.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff/Office of the Secretary of Defense/Army Staff Internship, commonly known as the JCS Internship, is a broadening assignment for post key-development Army Captains (Meyer & Kennedy, 2021). Captains spend a year at Georgetown University earning a master's degree in policy management, one year on the Joint Staff or Office of the Secretary of Defense staff, and a third year on the Army staff (Meyer & Kennedy, 2021). In all, service members spend one year in school and two years working with Pentagon staff.

U.S. Army Sgt. 1st Class Nathan Cassidy, with 10th Support Group Ammunition Depot, briefs senior leaders near Kure, Japan, Mar. 10, 2023. The Army should make more broadening assignments available to enlisted Soldiers to develop strategically minded enlisted leaders. (Defense Department photo by Brian Lamar)

Opening the program up to sergeants first class, because they have enough time at tactical and operational levels, would make those NCOs effective advisors at the strategic level. Most sergeants first class are either career enlisted or close to it, meaning the Army gets a good return on investment by keeping these Soldiers in the force. This approach would develop strategic level thinkers who may one day serve as sergeants major at the brigade, division, and corps levels.

The benefits of making a similar internship program available to NCOs would include positive relationships built while attending the university and attaining a master’s degree and while working with Pentagon staff. An integrated enlisted and officer cohort going through Georgetown together could develop strong relationships that could last throughout their careers.

Additionally, once these NCOs are assigned to Pentagon staff, they may further develop networks and relationships with other military and civilian leaders. Developing relationships is vital to accomplishing even the simplest tasks.

Another consideration is the opportunity to gain a different perspective. NCOs bring points-of-view different from their officer counterparts. Based purely on numbers, enlisted Soldiers are rare in the strategic halls of the Pentagon. One could argue that the "best military advice" should come not only from officer input and perspective, but also from strategically minded enlisted leaders. The JCS Internship has the potential to play a pivotal role in developing strategic thinking, and experienced, NCOs.

Limitations

Training programs are not without their limitations and the JCS Internship is no exception. One limitation is the small number of individuals selected for the JCS Internship.

At Georgetown University there are on average of 12-15 students per year who are Army JCS interns. Even if the program doubled to add 12-15 NCOs the U.S. Army would gain little from so few enlisted Soldiers going through the program. That is a fair argument; however, expanding the JCS Intern Program is more of a steppingstone rather than the solution.

Expanding the JCS Internship is only one broadening assignment that should be extended to enlisted. Successful implementation of enlisted into the JCS Internship could prompt more significant discussion on other broadening assignments.

Since most sergeants first class may not have an undergraduate degree, a prerequisite for the JCS Program, that may be a barrier for many NCOs, but it may push them to attain those prerequisites. Not having an undergraduate degree may also prompt further discussion on NCO higher education. Nevertheless, it is crucial to maintain the program's competitive and selective edge.

Finally, the fact NCOs do not want to participate in the JCS Internship should be addressed. They may view a Pentagon assignment as "away from the fight" or a place where you "die on the vine" (Misso, 2018). Simply put, enlisted culture discourages Soldiers from taking on assignments that deviate from a more “traditional” career path. For the U.S. Army to gain forward-thinking, strategically minded NCOs, that culture needs to change.

Conclusion

There are many significant assignment opportunities available for both officers and enlisted Soldiers. However, the U.S. Army lacks broadening assignments for NCOs, to develop them as strategic-level thinkers. As we look at the great power competition with Russia and China, the Army needs to develop strategic thinkers within the NCO ranks. Pre-existing broadening assignments for officers should be expanded to NCOs. More specifically, the Army should expand the JCS Internship to include NCOs. Developing strategic level thinkers in the enlisted ranks is not only good for individuals, but also for the Army and the nation.

References

Connelly, T. (2013). Developing Strategic Leaders in the NCO and Warrant Officer Corps. https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA589124.pdf

Garamone, J. (2022). Changes Coming to Enlisted Joint Professional Military Education. https://www.defense.gov/News/NewsStories/Article/Article/2945689/changes-coming-to-enlisted-joint-professionalmilitary-education/

Joint Staff. (2021). Developing Enlisted Leaders for Tomorrow’s Wars. https://www.jcs.mil/Portals/36/Documents/Doctrine/education/epme_tm_vision_digital.pdf?ver=dmj-ILYBhrr-6wq3JhdXog%3d%3d

Mackey, K. (2020). Fiscal Year 2021 Broadening Program (BOP). https://www.benning.army.mil/Armor/OCoA/content/References%20and%20Guides/2021%20Broadening%20Opportunity%20Program%20Catalog.pdf

Meyer, D. and Kennedy, R. (2021). Strategic Broadening in the JCS Internship. https://fromthegreennotebook.com/2021/04/01/strategic-broadening-in-the-jcs-internship/

Misso, R. (2018). How To Be a Junior Servicemember in the Pentagon. https://warontherocks.com/2018/01/junior-servicemember-pentagon/

National Defense University. (2022). Gateway Course Catalog. https://www.jcs.mil/Portals/36/Gateway%20Course%20Catalog_June%202022.pdf

Staff Sgt. Nicholas DiMichele served nine years active duty as an Infantryman and serving in a variety of gunner and leadership roles. His assignments included the 4/25 IBCT (ABN), the 173rd IBCT (ABN) and the 82nd, 3 BDE (ABN). He still serves a part-time as a National Guardsman.

As a civilian he worked for a member of Congress and the House Foreign Affairs Committee. He also has worked for the U.S. Trade Representative in the Office of the World Trade Organization and Multilateral Affairs. Currently he is a Defense Analyst in the Office of the Secretary of Defense for Policy (Homeland Defense and Hemispheric Affairs).

He earned a Bachelor of Science in Political Science from the University of Maryland Global Campus, a Master of International Policy and Practice from George Washington University and a Master of Policy Management from Georgetown University.

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20. Army special operations community concludes first-ever Heritage Week

Army special operations community concludes first-ever Heritage Week

armytimes.com · by Rachael Riley · April 21, 2023

Thirteen veterans and civilians were named as distinguished and honorary members Thursday to the regiments of the Special Forces, Psychological Operations and Civil Affairs community.

The inductees were honored during a ceremony that coincides with the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School’s Heritage Week to celebrate decades of training and education in Army special operation forces.

The first-ever Heritage Week marks the 71st anniversary of the Army Special Forces school and center and coincides with the 50th anniversary of the establishment of Army Training and Doctrine Command.

“Our close coordinating relationship with TRADOC is vital to ensuring Special Operations Forces remain aligned with the Army as we work to deliver the critical multi-domain capabilities for 2030,” Brig. Gen. Guillaume “Will” Beaurpere, Commander, U.S. Army John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center School told Army Times in an email statement.

For a half-century the center and school trained generations of soldiers in irregular warfare, advanced special operations leader development and education for the total Army, Beaurpere wrote.

“We are extremely proud to be part of a TRADOC enterprise that generates the Army for the challenges of tomorrow,” he said.

Among the inductees is a Medal of Honor recipient, a former acting secretary of defense and ambassadors.

Exclusive: Inside the ongoing ‘evolution’ of Army special operations

Army SOF mull new force structures, new career fields and new concepts.

Each of the inductees has contributed to the legacy and history of their respective regiments and the nation in and out of uniform, Beaurpere said.

“The stories of physical and intellectual capabilities and adaptability of our inductees remind us that once we set our minds to an objective and a mission and commit our energies, there is very little we as Americans can not accomplish,” Beaurpere said.

The Regimental Honors program began in 1981, covered in updated Army Regulation 870-21 to replace the Combat Arms Regimental System, which dated to the late 1950s, Roxanne M. Merritt, director of the JFK School’s Heritage Center and museum, told Army Times in an email response.

The majority of inductees are retired. If on active duty status, they were either killed in action or died prematurely while serving. Nominations come from a variety of organizations, persons, or individual commands. Inductees are honored in the local ceremony and, in some cases, a medallion, Merritt wrote.

A short biography, photo and description of contributions outside of military service are included on the Regimental Hall of Fame in Clay Hall at the school/center and also on digital kiosks throughout the campus.

There have been more than 225 inductees to the Regimental Honors program since 1981. Inductees are honored by their respective regiments - Psychological Operations, Civil Affairs and Special Forces.

School spokesman Army Maj. Rick Dickson told Army Times that the first Heritage Week saw members of the three regiment communities across generations converge on Fort Bragg for a series of events that included a chapel rededication, physical training session, a formal dinner and the induction ceremony among other events.

“This Heritage Week is really focused on looking at the past and remembering our history as we try to move forward into the future,” Dickson told Army Times in a phone interview. “American irregular warfare and unconventinal warfare tactics trace back all the way to the American Revolutionary War.”

As the service looks to the Special Operations Force of 2030, Dickson said that history is important.

“We’re trying to take that history and lessons learn and move it into the future,” Dickson said.

Psychological Operations

Retired Col. Rick Springett served in multiple roles within the psychological operations regiment including in the U.S. Special Operations Command.

As chief of the Military Information Support Operations Branch, he was responsible for four trans-regional programs supporting the geographic combatant commands and theatre special operations commands. The programs included strategic military information support operations “directed against Al Qaida, their affiliates, and violent extremism.”

Retired Col. Rick Springett was one of the 2023 Regimental Honors inductees during and Heritage Week held at the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School at Fort Bragg, North Carolina in late April. (Army)

Between 2004 to 2008, Springett worked with others to establish policies and procedures for the initial assessment of psychological operations and civil affairs officers.

After his retirement in 2014, Springett was a senior civilian plans analyst under SOCOM’s Sensitive Activities Division until 2021, deploying to Afghanistan and Southwest Asia in the role.

First Lt. Daniel J. Edelman entered the Army as a public relations specialist during World War II under the 5th Mobile Radio Broadcasting Co., 100th Infantry Division.

His time at the Office of War Information “allowed him to counter German propaganda and disinformation” through publishing “Der Speigel,” a German magazine, and polling Germans to determine their attitudes toward the occupation and the Nuremberg Trials.

First Lt. Daniel J. Edelman was one of the 2023 Regimental Honors inductees during and Heritage Week held at the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School at Fort Bragg, North Carolina in late April. (Army)

Edelman founded his own public relations firm in 1952, which counts a campaign to increase support for the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial in its portfolio. Edelman dedicated his time to nonprofits like the American Red Cross and Save the Children until his death in 2013.

Special Forces

Maj. John J. Duffy was presented the Medal of Honor on July 5, by President Joe Biden for his 1972 actions in Vietnam.

According to Duffy’s citation, he served as a senior enlisted advisor to the 11th Airborne Battalion, 2d Brigade, Airborne Division. After his commander was killed during an attack that wounded Duffy twice, Duffy refused to be evacuated.

Duffy directed defense around a support base on April 14, 1972, and moved close to enemy positions to call in airstrikes, becoming wounded again.

After the enemy attacked the base, Duffy ensured wounded friendly foreign soldiers were moved to safety and maintained his position during indirect enemy fire. He was the last man to leave the base during a withdrawal.

Maj. John J. Duffy was one of the 2023 Regimental Honors inductees during and Heritage Week held at the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School at Fort Bragg, North Carolina in late April. (Army)

When the acting battalion commander was wounded, he assumed command of the evacuation and maintained communication with the available air support to direct fire on the enemy.

The following morning, Duffy organized defensive positions when the enemy ambushed the battalion and led the wounded to an evacuation area.

Retired Maj. Gen. David A. Morris was a charter member of Charlie Company, 3d Battalion, 7th Special Forces Group Combatant Commanders, which is now known as the Critical Threats Advisory Co.

During his career, he conducted foreign internal defense in support of the El Salvadorian government during two tours and received presidential approval for his recommendation to overcome the insurgents’ advantage.

Near the end of his first decade of service, Morris was selected to assume responsibility for Phase I training of the Special Forces Qualification Course at Camp Mackall.

Retired Maj. Gen. David A. Morris was one of the 2023 Regimental Honors inductees during and Heritage Week held at the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School at Fort Bragg, North Carolina in late April. (Army)

His career included developing a program with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to use artificial intelligence to guide the mission planning of U.S. special operations forces and helped develop a program that later became the Defense Threat Database System.

In 1989, he wrote a paper that provided support to special operations forces during Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm.

Then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Colin Powell approved Morris’ classified plan for creating the Army Special Mission Unit.

In retirement, he has served as chairman of the Green Beret Foundation and serves with veteran nonprofit organizations.

Retired Col. Ronald D. Johnson enlisted in the National Guard in 1971 and graduated from the Special Forces Officers Course in 1977, while assigned to the 20th Special Forces Group. In 1984, he entered active-duty service as the detachment commander with the 3rd Battalion, 7th Special Forces Group in Panama.

He would serve in a wide variety of roles, including being selected as the first Special Forces officer to attend the Army War College fellowship at the Central Intelligence Agency.

Johnson spent most of his military career in the Southern Command Area of Responsibility and led combat operations in El Salvador as one of the authorized 55 military advisors during the civil war there in the 1980s.

Retired Col. Ronald D. Johnson was one of the 2023 Regimental Honors inductees during and Heritage Week held at the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School at Fort Bragg, North Carolina in late April. (Army)

He also deployed to the Balkans in the 1990s as the senior military officer of an integrated team made up of members of the CIA, National Security Agency and Special Mission Unit to apprehend people indicted for war crimes.

After leaving military service, Johnson worked with the CIA and participated in worldwide operational and combat experiences with special mission units. He also served as the senior representative for directors of National Intelligence and the CIA at the U.S. Southern Command and as the science and technology liaison to the U.S. Special Operations Command for the Central Intelligence Agency.

In 2019, he was appointed and served as the U.S. ambassador to El Salvador until his retirement in 2021.

Retired Col. Christopher C. Miller served as an enlisted infantryman in the U.S. Army Reserves and as a military policeman in the Washington, D.C., National Guard during his 27 years of military service.

In 1993, he transferred to U.S. Army Special Forces, serving in numerous command and staff positions within the 5th Special Forces Group.

He is credited for being a “key player” during numerous worldwide deployments and contributing to the planning and participation of the 5th Special Forces Group’s initial combat operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Retired Col. Christopher C. Miller was one of the 2023 Regimental Honors inductees during and Heritage Week held at the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School at Fort Bragg, North Carolina in late April. (Army)

Miller served in numerous special operations organizations and as deputy commander of the Specialized Joint Unit, U.S. Special Operations Southern Command.

After retiring in 2014, he worked as a defense contractor, a special assistant to the president at the National Security Council, assistant secretary of defense for special operations low-intensity conflict and deputy assistant secretary of defense for Special Operations and Combating Terrorism.

Miller served as the acting secretary of defense from Nov. 9, 2020, to Jan. 20, 2021.

Retired Col. Mark E. Mitchell commissioned in 1987 as an infantry officer and served in the 24th Infantry Division, including in Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm.

He graduated from the Special Forces qualification course in 1993 and served as a detachment commander, company commander, battalion operations officer, and battalion commander with the 5th Special Forces Group during Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Mitchell spent a significant portion of his military career in the Central Command Area of Responsibility, leading combat operations in Kuwait, Afghanistan, and Iraq.

Retired Col. Mark E. Mitchell was one of the 2023 Regimental Honors inductees during and Heritage Week held at the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School at Fort Bragg, North Carolina in late April. (Army)

He was director of plans at the U.S. Special Operations Command Central; director of operations for the Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force Arabian Peninsula and was also the commander of the 5th Special Forces Group and Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force at the Arabian Peninsula.

He has also served as director for Counterterrorism on the National Security Council and after his military retirement, served as principal deputy and acting assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict.

Retired Lt. Col. Roger D. Carstens commanded a platoon in the 75th Rangers, including a combat jump into Panama during Operation Just Cause.

He graduated from the Special Forces Qualification Course in 1991 and was a detachment commander and company executive officer and battalion executive officer with the 10th Special Forces Group in Germany.

He’s also commanded Company A, 4th Battalion and Company F, 1st Battalion under the 1st Special Warfare Training Group, training soldiers in unconventional warfare skills including the final Robin Sage exercise.

Retired Lt. Col. Roger D. Carstens was one of the 2023 Regimental Honors inductees during and Heritage Week held at the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School at Fort Bragg, North Carolina in late April. (Army)

Carstens served as legislative liaison for U.S. Special Operations Command and as an advisor to the National Counter Terror Bureau during Operation Iraqi Freedom.

After his military career, Carstens has served as a special presidential envoy for hostage affairs, which negotiates the release of American citizens wrongfully detained abroad or taken hostage by terrorists and was designated as an ambassador by the president.

He also served as senior counterinsurgency and security force assistance advisor in Kabul, Afghanistan.

Sgt. 1st Class Riley E. Lott Jr. was of several Green Berets of Native American descent.

Lott altered his birth certificate at the age of 16 in 1960 to join the Army as a medic. After basic training personnel discovered his age, he was sent home and rejoined the military the next year.

Lott spent five of his nine years of military service in Vietnam as a combat medic.

He began his education in jungle medicine at Long An, Vietnam, treating those affected by the siege of the Special Forces team as the Civilian Irregular Defense Group revolted against U.S. forces.

Sgt. 1st Class Riley E. Lott Jr. was one of the 2023 Regimental Honors inductees during and Heritage Week held at the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School at Fort Bragg, North Carolina in late April. (Army)

In Don Phuoc, he lived with, fought alongside, trained and treated Cambodian strikers who made up the Mobile Strike Force Command

Lott worked with the Cambodian forces to rebuild the abandoned Special Forces camp at To Chau and clear areas surrounding Special Forces camps at Cai Cai and My Dien II.

Lott left the Army at the age of 26 but continued to help family members, veterans and strangers in need, taking veterans to hospice care and hosting weekly veteran lunches.

He died Aug. 29, 2021.

Azadeh Aryana was born in Tehran and fled Iran during the Islamic Revolution of 1979 with her 3-year-old son. Pregnant at the time and fleeing under diplomatic immunity, she arrived in California.

While awaiting the arrival of her husband who was still in Iran, Aryana, with limited English, worked as a janitor at a fast-food restaurant.

She first rose through the ranks at the restaurant, before rising in the ranks and becoming security director of Cisco Systems, a multinational digital communications conglomerate.

Azadeh Aryana was one of the 2023 Regimental Honors inductees during and Heritage Week held at the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School at Fort Bragg, North Carolina in late April. (Army)

Aryana then opened her own security firm providing personal security to clients in the San Francisco area.

After putting her children through college, she retired and devoted her time to American service members after a family member joined Special Forces.

Over the past 17 years, she has personally shipped more than 10,000 care packages to deployed active and reserve Special Forces soldiers.

Additionally, Aryana serves as a Special Forces goodwill ambassador, consistently attending military homecomings across California and has participated as a patriot motorcycle rider.

Civil Affairs

Born in Peru and raised in Arizona, retired Col. Ernesto L. Sirvas commissioned to serve in the field artillery branch from 1987 to 1996. He then joined the Civil Affairs branch from 1996 to 2015.

At the beginning of his Civil Affairs career with the 96th Civil Affairs Battalion, Sirvas served four years in various roles including as a team leader, operations officer, company executive officer, company commander and logistics staff officer.

Sirvas’ next assignment took him to Special Operations Command South in Puerto Rico for four years, where he served as a Civil Affairs planner and command group executive officer.

Col. Ernesto L. Sirvas was one of the 2023 Regimental Honors inductees during and Heritage Week held at the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School at Fort Bragg, North Carolina in late April. (Army)

Sirvas continued his career by commanding the U.S. Army Forces Battalion in support of Joint Task Force Bravo in Honduras and returned to the 95th Civil Affairs Brigade as deputy commander.

In 2010, Sirvas was assigned to Regional Command West, Afghanistan, in support of Operation Enduring Freedom. There, he coordinated and synchronized U.S. support to stability and governance efforts in the Afghan provinces of Herat, Rarah, Badghis, and Ghor, and advised the commander and staff on matters pertaining to stability and governance.

He also worked with Spanish, Lithuanian, Italian, and U.S. governments and agencies to implement programs supporting International Security Force Assistance joint command lines of effort in western Afghanistan.

Sirvas returned to Fort Bragg to serve as the U.S. Army Special Operations Command chief of Concepts, Experimentation, and Science and Technology.

He also directed the creation of a cross-organization planning team to review and develop recommendations to redesign the U.S. Army Reserve Civil Affairs structure to enhance the soldiers’ career paths and their ability to support the conventional maneuver force commander. Furthermore, he directed the implementation of a Reserve Component Civil Affairs Captains’ Career Course.

After 28 years of Army service, Sirvas retired and continues to be of service to the military community through volunteer work, providing scholarships to military family members, donating to family readiness groups and assisting Civil Affairs soldiers and families after traumatic events.

Donald C. Barton first enlisted in the Army from 1974-1981 as an air defense artillery vulcan gunner and other positions. In 1981, he reenlisted in the U.S. Army Reserve and served at the 307 Psychological Operations Company in roles of increasing leadership until 1993. In 1993, Barton returned to active duty and served until his retirement in 2006.

After 20 years of active service and 12 years of reserve service, Barton authored and coauthored several documents that established or revised more than seven Civil Affairs military occupational specialties.

He’s also provided analysis during the Civil Affairs Force Modernization Assessment.

Donald C. Barton was one of the 2023 Regimental Honors inductees during and Heritage Week held at the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School at Fort Bragg, North Carolina in late April. (Army)

Barton is currently a Fayetteville resident.

Spencer Meredith IlI serves as a professor of National Security Strategy at the National Defense University, College of International Security Affairs.

He has spent more than half that time mentoring, advising, and educating the operational and institutional special operations forces.

He provides regional expertise on Eastern Europe, Russian, Eurasian, and Middle Eastern politics, and their roles throughout the special operations community.

Spencer Meredith IlI was one of the 2023 Regimental Honors inductees during and Heritage Week held at the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School at Fort Bragg, North Carolina in late April. (Army)

He also serves as a subject-matter expert for several geographic combatant commands, the intelligence community, and joint special operations and frequently advises the U.S. Army Special Operations Command and subordinate units at Fort Bragg.

Meredith also has articles appearing in professional publications such as Strategy Bridge, Small Wars Journal, InterAgency Journal and Foreign Policy Journal.

The Fayetteville Observer military and crime editor F.T. Norton and Army Times contributed to this report.

Editor’s Note: This article was published as part of a content-sharing agreement between Army Times and The Fayetteville Observer. This article has been updated to include additional comments from the commander of the JFK Special Warfare Center School.

21. The American Spy Who Surrendered to the Nazis to Save Civilians

What a great story. I had the honor of having his son for a boss in Korea.

HISTORY | APRIL 19, 2023

The American Spy Who Surrendered to the Nazis to Save Civilians

In 1944, Pierre Julien Ortiz parachuted into occupied France, where the Gestapo offered a reward of half a million francs for his capture

Smithsonian · by Smithsonian Magazine · April 19, 2023

Several excruciating days had passed since the telegram reached my great-grandmother’s doorstep in Queens, New York:

The secretary of war desires me to express his deep regret that your son Second Lieutenant Murray L. Simon has been reported missing in action. … If further details or other information are received, you will be promptly notified.

At 1:41 a.m. on May 6, 1944, a German fighter plane shot down the B-24 Liberator that Simon was piloting on a secret moonlit mission over Nazi-occupied France. His crew of seven airmen leapt from the burning plane, and he followed. Barreling down from the inferno while tugging his parachute open, he closed his eyes and thrust his hands up before finding himself dangling a foot from the ground, his chute harness tangled in a tree.

The Roanne area was teeming with Vichy French and German troops searching for the fallen American airmen. My grandfather was a 23-year-old, six-foot-tall American Jew who could hardly pronounce the French phrases listed on the notecard he’d been told to read if shot down. If captured by the Germans, he could be viewed as a spy and tortured and killed accordingly. His best chance of getting home was finding the French Resistance.

Remains of the B-24 Liberator that Murray Simon was piloting when he was shot down over France in May 1944 Courtesy of the Harrington Aviation Museum

After about a week of bouncing from helper to helper, Simon reached a safe house in Valence, where resistance fighters introduced him to a 30-year-old American Marine Corps major who had helped several other downed Allied airmen escape across the Spanish border. He went by several aliases, including Chambellan and Jean-Pierre, or J.P. He was 6-foot-2, with chiseled cheekbones, bright blue eyes and a posh English accent. He spoke English, French, German, Spanish, Russian and Arabic. And his real name was Pierre Julien Ortiz, often anglicized as Peter J. Ortiz.

The mysterious young officer had arrived in France four months earlier on a top-secret operation code-named Union I. He and his companions—a British Special Operations Executive (SOE) officer and a French Army radio operator—were the first Allied agents to land in France in uniform since the fall of Paris in June 1940. Ortiz was working for the CIA’s forerunner organization, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Tasked with collecting intelligence and mobilizing French resistance units ahead of D-Day, he had just been recalled to the OSS’s London office.

Ortiz’s offer to escort my grandfather back to England came with a warning: He’d nearly been captured a few weeks earlier. His covers, along with those of several guerrilla bands he’d been working with, were blown, and he had a reward of half a million French francs on his head.

Together, Ortiz and Simon drove through France in an SS staff car (one of a fleet of ten stolen by Ortiz), rode trains under the noses of Gestapo officers, trekked the Pyrenees with tobacco-smuggling Roma, and marched through Andorra and Spain with an escaped Russian prisoner of war. They reached Gibraltar at the end of May and arrived safely in England just before D-Day. Nearly a month after my grandfather was shot down and declared missing in action, he sent a telegram to his mother: “I am well and safe. No need for worry. Write to my old address.”

A photograph used in one of Ortiz's many false IDs National Archives, Records of Special Operations Executive

I never met my grandfather. He died of lung cancer in 1981, a few years before I was born. But as I leafed through his wartime scrapbook—which included a photo of Ortiz receiving a Navy Cross opposite a clipping from a 1946 True magazine article about him headlined “Secret Mission”—I got curious about the swashbuckling spy my grandfather described to my mother as “a real-life knight of the Round Table.” The OSS officer, it turns out, was a hero to many more than my grandfather.

Ortiz’s status as one of the most decorated members of the OSS—and a Marine in the European rather than Pacific theater—made him stand out, even within the elite assemblage of college professors, amateur spies and daring commandos who laid the foundation for an intelligence organization that would, in 1947, morph into the CIA. At various points in his life, Ortiz worked as a lion tamer, a circus performer, a dude ranch manager and a racecar driver. His now-declassified OSS personnel file describes a real-life James Bond: an operative who was “not a good candidate for a desk job ever.”

Born in New York in 1913 and raised between California and France, Ortiz was a restless young man. At age 15, he dropped out of the fancy French boarding school he’d been sent to and shipped out as a seaman on an American liner. This decision wasn’t particularly pleasing to his parents, especially his father, Philippe Ortiz, the publisher of Paris Vogue, who persuaded him to return to school but couldn’t keep him from traveling across Europe in search of adventure and romance during the summer months.

In 1932, Ortiz again dropped out of school and, at age 18, joined the rough-and-tough French Foreign Legion, using the last name of his Polish girlfriend as an added act of rebellion. He remained in the service until 1940, when he was taken captive by the Germans and held as a prisoner of war. After several failed escape attempts, a nurse at a Vienna hospital helped him make his way back to France, where he joined the Resistance. “I stayed in Paris for about a month, hoping to pull a job on Gestapo headquarters,” Ortiz later recalled. “[But] I felt that I wanted to get back to the States and serve my country more directly.” He arrived in New York just after Pearl Harbor and enlisted in the Marines soon after.

Out to learn more about Ortiz, I connected with Marine and CIA officer-turned-writer Nick Reynolds, the historian responsible for developing the OSS gallery of the CIA’s in-house museum. Reynolds is an expert on the spy organization, whose alumni include four future CIA directors, a Supreme Court justice, the first Black Nobel laureate and many other notable Americans. But one particular individual stood out to Reynolds so much that he kept a picture of the officer on his desk for years. It was Ortiz. -Katie Sanders

Ortiz posing for a portrait at his desk in California Courtesy of the Ortiz family

A heroic surrender in the French Alps

After completing Union I and escorting Simon to safety, Ortiz immersed himself in preparations for Union II, a second deep-penetration mission in France, with his signature mix of modesty and seize-the-moment bravado.

On June 14, Ortiz visited OSS headquarters in central London, where he made an impression on the debriefer, who described him as “a tall, sunburned, good-looking young man, slightly older in appearance than his 31 years,” stylishly dressed in a gray suit.

Ortiz “did not think there was anything of real interest in his story,” the debriefer noted. He disagreed, concluding in his top-secret report that Ortiz had done a “magnificent job … under most difficult conditions.” The OSS concurred, arranging for Ortiz to receive his first Navy Cross for his role in organizing and training the maquisards—French Resistance fighters—as well as battling the Germans and rescuing downed Allied airmen like Simon. Neither the OSS nor SOE hesitated to greenlight the follow-up mission, Union II, which was intended to coincide with Allied landings in France in the coming months.

Ortiz with the Maquis in August 1944 Courtesy of the Ortiz family

Ortiz assembled a team from two familiar elite outfits: an officer named Francis L. Coolidge from the tiny community of Americans who had served together in the Foreign Legion in North Africa and five noncommissioned officers from the only slightly larger cadre of Marine parachutists, all of whom happened to be in England.

August 1—the day Ortiz returned to France—was ideal for flying, the sky clear and blue, the wind barely noticeable. Roaring in breathtakingly fast and low, at roughly 150 knots some 400 feet over the ground (the norm was closer to 90 knots at 600 or more feet), 78 American B-17 bombers dropped 864 canisters of supplies, along with Ortiz and his six men, onto a high plateau near a mountain pass in the Savoie known as the Col des Saisies.

Though emboldened by the massive resupply, the French resisters waiting on the ground were horrified when Sergeant Charles L. Perry landed hard, lying lifeless at their feet. Now, maquisards and Americans alike found themselves at Perry’s funeral.

While German troops hunted for them, the members of Ortiz’s team, all in American uniforms, formed up to render honors to their comrade. Ortiz himself wore what the Marines call a “barracks cover,” intended for formal ceremonies and seldom worn or even carried into battle. He could have been forgiven if he had ordered the body buried in a makeshift grave and moved on; instead, here the men were, standing at attention alongside a proper grave, heaped with flowers and a four-foot wooden cross.

Charles L. Perry's funeral in occupied France National Archives and Records Administration

After the funeral, Ortiz and his men took stock of their situation. Almost two months had passed since the first D-Day landings in Normandy. The Allies had not yet captured Paris but were relentlessly pushing the German Army back from the coast. Liberation seemed like simply a matter of time; French men—and women—were flocking to the Resistance. Some French and even American guerrillas eagerly plunged into the fight. But not Ortiz. His team methodically equipped and trained the Maquis before conducting reconnaissance patrols to catalog German strengths and weigh the prospects for attack. Watching Ortiz work, Marine Jack R. Risler was impressed: The major not only had “no fear” but “could [also] think like the Germans.” He could even rattle off the enemy’s unit designations.

Only on August 12 did Ortiz conclude that the time had come to fight. The Maquis seemed ready to start pushing the Germans out of the mountain valleys. While a German spotter plane circled high above, Ortiz and his team entered the hamlet of Montgirod and paused for a lunch of bread, cheese and rabbit while 200 maquisards waited nearby.

Soon, mortar shells started landing, injuring four maquisards, two of them so badly they couldn’t be moved. They would hide as best they could in a nearby church.

Ortiz led his men into the nearby hills, where from 800 feet up they could see flames rising into the night sky from Montgirod. They would soon learn that the enemy had executed the injured maquisards, razed the church and torched the town, evoking memories of a July massacre at Vassieux-en-Vercors, where Waffen SS troops massacred 72 French citizens and burned the town to the ground.

Ortiz in uniform Courtesy of the Ortiz family

Under constant attack from Allied forces and fearing an ambush at every bend in the road, the Germans were behaving more and more like cornered animals, especially when feeling provoked by French resisters and Allied commandos, who were already at grave risk. (Adolf Hitler’s October 1942 “commando order” decreed that members of this raiding and reconnaissance force be summarily executed, even if in uniform and trying to surrender.) Operation Dragoon, the Allied invasion of Provence on August 15, added more pressure from the south. It also drove Ortiz to risk a move after daybreak on August 16.

“Pete, we have been seen,” shouted Coolidge as the team, carefully spread out over 100 yards, proceeded down the road leading out of the village of Centron toward Montgirod, a few miles away.

Ortiz shouted to return fire and take cover—a tricky proposition, since the road ran through open fields. Shots rang out from the German convoy, about 200 strong, motoring down the national highway that intersected the road. The intense machine gun and rifle fire left Ortiz little choice but to fall back to Centron, which was little more than a few clusters of houses and a church. In the confusion, the team split in two. While their comrades slipped away, Ortiz found himself with Marine sergeants Risler and John Bodnar, who kept firing as fast as they could. The Germans advanced and surrounded the village. Ortiz heard the clearly terrified inhabitants begging him not to make a stand that would lead to another massacre like Vassieux.

“I felt my responsibility for the lives of these people very keenly,” Ortiz later recalled. Without outward hesitation, he decided to surrender to spare the villagers. He knew his decision likely meant torture and execution at the hands of the enemy. Aware of the bounty on his head, as well as the Germans’ brutal treatment of Allied spies, Ortiz was certain “there was no reason to hope that we would be treated as ordinary prisoners of war.”

Ortiz (second from left) with his team of OSS operatives in August 1944 Courtesy of the Archives Branch, Marine Corps History Division

But Risler and Bodnar might have initially felt differently. “For the other members of the mission … to surrender [while they could all still] fight … required a real sacrifice,” Ortiz said. While dodging German bullets, he explained his decision to Bodnar, giving the two Marines the option of escaping and evading. They declined because they “[were] Marines” and would stick together; what Ortiz thought was right would be right for them, too.

Certain this would be the end for him, Ortiz grabbed a villager’s white sheet and walked toward the Germans, shouting out in German, English and French that he was ready to give himself up.

At first, the Germans kept firing, their bullets kicking up puffs of dirt around Ortiz before slackening and finally stopping. Various accounts have Ortiz and a German major named Johann Kolb parlaying. Kolb offered Ortiz a cigarette; Ortiz refused, lighting his own. Ortiz offered to surrender his men in return for a guarantee that the Germans would not harm the citizens of Centron. Kolb, a World War I veteran, gave his word. Ortiz shouted for Risler and Bodnar to come out. The men surrendered with ceremony. Expecting to see a platoon of 40 to 50 soldiers come forward, the Germans were outraged. How could Ortiz’s small band have maintained such a heavy volume of fire?

Still, Kolb kept his word. The people of Centron lived, while Ortiz, Risler and Bodnar went into captivity along with a French officer posing as a fellow Marine. The German knew a great deal about the two weeks of Union II but apparently did not connect Ortiz to Union I, when his exploits had spanned more than four months.

Treating his captives not as commandos but as regular troops, Kolb shielded them from the SS and the harsh treatment that hard-line Nazis would likely have meted out. Instead, he sent the Marines to a series of prisoner-of-war camps in northern Germany, where they were treated relatively humanely. In April 1945, British troops liberated the camps, and the OSS Marines set out for home—but only after higher powers declined Ortiz’s offer to continue fighting the Germans. -Nick Reynolds

A postwar reunion in Hollywood

I heard Simon’s and Ortiz’s voices for the first time when, in the basement of the film and radio archive at the University of California, Los Angeles, I listened to a recording of the NBC radio show “This Is Your Life.” Ortiz was the principal subject of a November 1949 episode.

The show’s host, Ralph Edwards, described the then-36-year-old American war hero as “a Marine whose life has been packed with enough adventure, thrills, hair-raising escapes, raw courage and excitement to make half a dozen movies.” My grandpa, one of the guests flown in to surprise Ortiz, then recounted the few details he could divulge regarding their escape from occupied France: “I was very much surprised when he showed up in a big, official-looking car”—one of the Nazi vehicles stolen by Ortiz. “We went right through the center of town with the Germans waving at us and Pete waving back.” Also there to celebrate Ortiz was a Resistance fighter from Centron, whose life Ortiz saved when he surrendered in 1944. -Katie Sanders

Simon (left) and Ortiz reunite for the first time since World War II on the set of NBC radio show "This Is Your Life" in November 1949. Courtesy of Katie Sanders

Hollywood embraced Ortiz in the years following the war. He worked as a technical advisor on the 1947 World War II spy film 13 Rue Madeleine, starring James Cagney. The 1952 film Operation Secret was also inspired by his exploits. His friend John Ford, OSS photographic unit head and bigwig director, cast Ortiz in many movies. But while Ortiz acted alongside John Wayne in Rio Grande and The Wings of Eagles, he didn’t like life in front of the camera. Nor did he care for articles chronicling his life with sensational headlines like “They Called Him the Widow Maker—the Fantastic Saga of Pete Ortiz: WWII’s Most Incredible Spy” and “Odyssey of an OSS Officer Who Knew Not Fear.”

Ortiz would fall far short of stardom—and even a steady paycheck. Between playing minor roles in movies, he bounced around North America in a mobile home and moved twice to Mexico with his wife, Jean, and son, Pete Jr. There, he taught philosophy, rounded up donations for local orphanages and delivered first aid to hurricane victims. He never seemed to escape a gravitational pull toward adventure and sacrifice.

In 1947, Ortiz found himself back in Europe on a mysterious spy mission. “I posed as a French communist and went to see how it was behind the Iron Curtain,” he wrote in the autobiography he sold to Warner Brothers. “I went to Poland, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia.” The official record is silent on whether Ortiz went for his government. In the 1950s, he volunteered at least once to return to active duty in the Marine Corps, reportedly even offering to parachute into Dien Bien Phu, the French outpost in Vietnam that was about to fall to the communist Viet Minh. The Marines politely declined his offer.

Ortiz (right) on the set of What Price Glory alongside director John Ford Archives Branch, Marine Corps History Division

In October 1985, after being diagnosed with terminal cancer, Ortiz wrote a letter to then-Secretary of State George Shultz, volunteering himself for one last mission: “I do in fact hereby propose … that I unreservedly and unconditionally place myself under the physical control of the ‘Jihad,’” he wrote, suggesting that the U.S. government send him, a decorated American hero, to Islamic extremists as a prisoner in exchange for innocent hostages. His proposal was denied.

Three years later, nearly 44 years to the day after he intercepted Simon and led him out of France, Ortiz was laid to rest at Arlington National Cemetery. Along with American, British and French officers, his wartime comrades Risler and Bodnar stood loyally by, just as they had at another burial in occupied France in 1944. -Katie Sanders and Nick Reynolds

Ortiz's widow, Jean, and son, Pete. Jr., in Centron for the 40th anniversary of the Union II landings Archives Branch, Marine Corps History Division

Katie Sanders | | READ MORE

Katie Sanders is a magazine journalist based in New York City. Her reporting has brought her to prisons, Jdate, the CIA and the White House, and she often writes about World War II and the Holocaust. Website: katiessanders.com

Nick Reynolds | READ MORE

Nick Reynolds, a longtime student of World War II and Marine Corps history, is the author of the recently published Need to Know: World War II and the Rise of American Intelligence. Website: nicholasreynoldsauthor.com

American History CIA Espionage European History France Germany Military Nazis US Military Veterans Day Warfare World War II

Rightwing Edgelords Are the Real Threat to National Security

“The amount of Three Percenters and Boogaloo guys I work with is untenable,” said one Department of Defense worker.

Vice · by Ben Makuch, Matthew Gault · April 21, 2023

Since the beginning of the Biden Administration, the GOP has painstakingly attacked the Pentagon as a “woke” institution that’s somehow morphing the military and the nation into a soft power. Drag queen story hours and “DEI” (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) training have become buzzwords for institutional rot, popping up on Fox News and in congressional committees as national security threats destroying the Department of Defense.

Then last week it was revealed that perhaps the most damaging unauthorized disclosure of U.S. intelligence since Wikileaks, wasn’t laid at the hands of some “woke warrior” but apparent Discord edgelord and national guardsman Jack Teixeira, highlighting what ideological beliefs might actually pose a threat to the U.S. government.

A gun and military gear enthusiast, Teixeira led a Discord server made up of young men and reportedly appears in a video firing a weapon while yelling antisemitic epithets (the chatroom was also reportedly rife with racist shitpostings). He was even touted as a posterboy for the extremist corners of the right, including Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor-Greene who called him “white, male, Christian, and anti-war”—a reference to the anti-Ukraine War sentiment among Republicans. Teixeira has been charged with the removal, retention, and transmission of classified documents and could face over a decade in prison if convicted.

While it isn’t exactly clear what Teixeira’s beliefs or motivations were, the behavior on the Discord certainly bears the hallmarks of an edgelord; usually very online, young men posting mock-shocking memes and comments for lols and kudos among each other. Someone allegedly taking classified information to impress their chaos-loving online friends is yet another security threat to a defense force that military sources say has yet to even properly handle individuals with anti-government or extremist beliefs.

“It highlights the need to screen harder in our clearance process,” said a veteran and Department of Defense worker who was not authorized to speak to the media. They said that even in the intelligence world, seeing people who voice support for the militia movement, long understood to be a veiled version of white supremacy and anti-governmentalism, isn’t shocking.

“I’m not saying Republicans can’t have clearances, but the amount of Three Percenters and Boogaloo guys I work with is untenable,” they said, referring to two extremist groups that were active during the attacks on January 6.

It’s well established that there is a threat of rightwing extremist violence among a minority of both active duty servicemen and veterans, but they can also clearly be an intelligence threat. The latest leaks alone likely led to the delay of a multibillion dollar Ukrainian counteroffensive against Russia and major headaches between Washington and some of its key allies.

“Right-wing extremists in the military pose security risks beyond their potential for violence,” said Joshua Fisher-Birch, an expert on the far right at the Counter Extremism Project, a New York City-based nonprofit terrorism watchdog. “The recent leak case highlights the possibility that individuals could share sensitive information with a broader online audience or with potential extremists or other hostile actors. Ideological views that sympathize with a U.S. opponent might also heighten the risk of sharing sensitive information.”

Are you a member of the military and have a tip for us? We’d love to hear from you. Contact Ben Makuch on email at ben.makuch@vice.com or on the Wire app @benmakuch.

Other military sources have told VICE News in the past that seeing active duty servicemen posting in support of Kyle Rittenhouse or Boogaloos Bois employed at the NSA, is not unheard of. For example, a Marine who not only participated in the Jan. 6 insurrection on Capitol Hill and charged for his actions that day, was then assigned to a post inside the NSA in 2021, which required a high-level security clearance.

According to Fisher-Birch, from a classical counterintelligence perspective, having far-right sympathies and posting about them publicly has the added problem of exposing an individual to bribery or being flipped into a foreign asset.

There’s already signs that some U.S. service people have been susceptible to foreign interests recently.

On Sunday, news broke that one of the key online disseminators of the Pentagon leaks was a pro-Kremlin (and pro-Wagner mercenary group) blog overseen by the alias “Donbas Devushka,” but was later unmasked as 37-year old Sarah Bils, an ex-Naval noncommissioned officer living in Washington state. Beginning last year, Bils reportedly worked behind the scenes of the blog, while still in uniform and is now facing an FBI investigation into her activities.

“Involvement in political extremism could also make an individual a target for blackmail,” said Fisher-Birch, while they could also be pressured into sharing “their training and other skills gained while in uniform with ideological allies.”

Some Republican lawmakers have publicly embraced policies that counter the U.S. government's national security goals, which has created political divisions inside institutions like the military and intelligence services. Other GOP operators have also been instrumental in spreading the idea that the Pentagon is somehow suffering from progressive human resource policies and not with the insider threat of a shadow Boogaloo contingent walking its halls.

“I guess my question is how much taxpayer money should go to fund drag queen story hours on military bases?” asked Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz, during a House Armed Services Committee weeks ago to top Department of Defense officials. In the same week of questioning, a number of Republican senators doubled down, railing against the military and its “woke agenda,” with Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville going so far as to label Pentagon initiatives focusing on diversity as “hell” for American troops that are damaging America’s ability to fight wars and recruit new soldiers.

Some of the GOP talking points in recent years have become indistinguishable from far-right trolls on Telegram pages or 4Chan: Whether it's calling for the dissolution of NATO, specific attacks on Pentagon officials, or antisemitic conspiracy theories surrounding billionaire George Soros, it’s the type of rhetoric that enemy intelligence services have sought to amplify as a means of destabilizing the U.S. government.

Follow Ben Makuch on Twitter.

Vice · by Ben Makuch, Matthew Gault · April 21, 2023

23. Biden's 'Racial Equity' Order Threatens Military's Meritocracy

And from the other side of the culture war. Also note the author's and media outlet's bias.

Biden's 'Racial Equity' Order Threatens Military's Meritocracy

The Federalist · by Elaine Donnelly · April 20, 2023

On Feb. 16, President Joe Biden signed Executive Order 14091, titled “Further Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government.”

Biden’s sweeping order multiplies and muscles up government diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) diversity-crats — the diversity-industrial complex — and makes their power bases virtually permanent.

The order also bestows special status and benefits on favored groups, called “underserved communities,” while excluding everyone else. Why now?

Perhaps the administration is anticipating adverse Supreme Court decisions, expected in June, in two cases challenging racial preferences at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina (Harvard/UNC).

As reported previously, Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) is representing higher-scoring Asian and white students who sued the schools for discriminatory admission policies.

The Department of Defense is not a party to the litigation, but in oral arguments last October, U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar admitted that the military employs discriminatory policies to achieve racial “diversity” at the military service academies and in ROTC (contract) programs. Prelogar further claimed without evidence that discriminatory policies to achieve demographic diversity are essential for national security.

The Supreme Court’s decision is unknown, but if the justices decide racial discrimination in higher education is unconstitutional, the administrators will try to find loopholes and ambiguities that distinguish their own discriminatory practices from those of the Harvard/UNC defendants.

John B. Daukas has noted that even after the landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling, some school districts kept discriminating.

Now comes this new Executive Order 14091. As stated in this Center for Military Readiness policy analysis, with a stroke of his pen Biden established a powerful DEI bureaucracy designed to continue racial discrimination, no matter what the Supreme Court says.

Biden’s Bigger Government

The scope of the order is limitless. It establishes equity action teams in every federal government department and agency, directing them to implement an “ambitious, whole-of-government approach to racial equity.”

Color-conscious decisions will govern programs related to everything from climate change and artificial intelligence algorithms to community wealth-building and transgender interventions for vulnerable children and adults.

All DEI teams will report to a White House Steering Committee headed by diversity doyenne Susan Rice. The order also expands an existing corps of chief diversity officers (CDOs) who review all promotions to ensure support for the DEI agenda.

The order defines “underserved communities” with a paragraph-long list that includes black, Latino, indigenous, Native American, and LGBT people, rural and U.S. territory residents, persons with disabilities, and many others. Conspicuously missing from the list of favored groups are healthy white males who are young or middle age, financially secure, Christian, and English-language proficient.

“Equity” is not the same as “equality.” Deliberate discrimination against non-minorities, in pursuit of ideological goals, squarely fits the definition of woke-ism: leftist policies taken to extremes with coerced compliance, even if it hurts the institution.

Military Cultural Values Under Attack

Biden’s power grab will affect all Americans, but the consequences of outcome-based “equity” mandates that treat some people as “more equal” than others will be most severe in our military.

House Armed Services Personnel Subcommittee Chairman James Banks has expressed concern about the Pentagon’s declining respect for meritocratic values. And combat veterans Rep. Mike Waltz and retired Maj. Gen. Patrick Brady have warned that policies focusing on skin color or other inconsequential characteristics are threatening essential elements of military culture: color-blindness, selflessness, and mutual trust.

Equity mandates that elevate percentage-based “metrics” (quotas) over meritocracy weaken mutual trust, cohesion, and the selfless warrior ethic that unites and inspires troops in battle.

The Need for Congress to Intervene

Congress has the power of the purse and the constitutional authority to make sound policies for the military. Members should start by defunding the diversity-industrial complex, which has become something of a racket.

Following Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s mandatory anti-extremism stand-downs in 2021, an investigation found fewer than 100 cases of “extremism” in the ranks. A recent RAND study searched for offensive speech in Air Force social media posts but found almost none.

The Daily Caller reported that the Air Force is hiring DEI officers at salary rates ranging from $82,000 to $183,500 per year, even though numerous studies have questioned the efficacy of “anti-bias” training.

Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., and Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, are re-submitting legislation to abolish Pentagon DEI advisers and chief diversity officers, but Congress also needs to protect meritocracy in the military, which is under attack.

Non-discrimination policies that recognize merit often create diversity, but the constantly repeated mantra of Pentagon leaders, “Diversity is a strategic imperative,” undermines meritocracy as a cultural value.

Executive Order 14091 defines “equity” as “the consistent and systematic treatment of all individuals in a fair, just, and impartial manner, including individuals who belong to communities that often have been denied such treatment.”

The phrase “all individuals” is misleading because the clear intent of the order, from title to glossary, is to elevate ideology and group rights above merit and individual rights. Wiggle words in the definition of “equity” may have been inserted to inoculate the order against charges that it violates principles of equal protection and is therefore unconstitutional.

The order also claims its mandates are “permitted by law” or “consistent with applicable law.” But there is a catch. The government wants to continue discriminating.

When individuals file lawsuits challenging discrimination, the government will claim that the absence of any law forbidding such practices authorizes continued color-conscious decisions.

DEI vs. Meritocracy

The tenor and context of the entire DEI program aim to achieve “racial equity” for favored “underserved communities.” This belies any hope of equal treatment for excluded non-minority individuals or sound priorities that put military necessity first.

Absent congressional action, meritocratic values — essential elements of military culture — could be lost in a single generation.

Members of Congress should seek bipartisan support for efforts to defund and eliminate DEI power bases, mandates, and practices, while codifying principles of meritocracy and non-discrimination in military personnel policies. A successful two-pronged approach could lead to more positive actions that could break the back of the diversity-industrial complex.

Elaine Donnelly is President of the Center for Military Readiness, an independent public policy organization that reports on and analyzes military and social issues.

The Federalist · by Elaine Donnelly · April 20, 2023

24.

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Foundation for Defense of Democracies

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Foundation for Defense of Democracies

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

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

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

Access NSS HERE

Company Name | Website

Airman Shared Sensitive Intelligence More Widely and for Longer Than Previously Known

Pentagon Speeds Up Tank Timeline for Ukraine but Resists Calls for Jets

FBI leak investigators home in on members of private Discord server

Investigators have spoken to online friends of alleged leaker Jack Teixeira, who hung out and viewed secret documents in a gaming chatroom

RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, APRIL 21, 2023

Tags

US Military Cannot Refuel, Repair, Reload At Philippines Bases; Cannot Use EDCA To Defend Taiwan -- Reports

‘Substantial Threat’! Russia Moves Its Warship To Northern Base, Warning Issued – Is Moscow Planning Zircon Hypersonic Missile Test?

3X Faster Than Sound, China Gears To Deploy WZ-8 High-Altitude Drone That Can Keep An Hawks Eye Over Indo-Pacific

Growing Tensions Between Philippines & China

US to Spend $100 Million on Upgrades to Philippine Military Facilities

The four additional sites announced in February are located in strategically important parts of the country: three of them in Luzon, adjacent to the Taiwan Strait, and on Palawan island, which lies close to disputed parts of the South China Sea.

Russia admits its own warplane accidentally bombed Russian city of Belgorod, near Ukraine border

Twitter removes 'government-funded' news labels after NPR and other flubs

Postimperial Empire

How the War in Ukraine Is Transforming Europe

By Timothy Garton Ash

Published on April 18, 2023

GHOSTS OF EMPIRES PAST

EUROPE WHOLE AND FREE

THE EU TRANSFORMED

OVERLAPPING EMPIRES

China’s Humanitarian Efforts Fail to Measure up in the Middle East

China unleashes the wolf warriors against South Korea and the Philippines

The US military must move beyond defense-reform theater

Navy Names First Woman to Lead Naval Academy

Bizarre Plot To Steal Russian Jets Ends In Ukrainians Charged With Treason

Japan Wades into Foreign Defense Assistance

Bipartisan bill would ‘arm Taiwan to the teeth’ with US cyber tech

Developing Strategically-Minded Enlisted Leaders

By Staff Sgt. Nicholas DiMichele

Developing Enlisted Leaders for Tomorrow's Wars

Limitations

Conclusion

References

Army University Press Social Media

NCO Journal Social Media

Military Review LATAM Social Media

Army University Press Offices

About Us

Army special operations community concludes first-ever Heritage Week

HISTORY | APRIL 19, 2023

The American Spy Who Surrendered to the Nazis to Save Civilians

In 1944, Pierre Julien Ortiz parachuted into occupied France, where the Gestapo offered a reward of half a million francs for his capture

A heroic surrender in the French Alps

A postwar reunion in Hollywood

Rightwing Edgelords Are the Real Threat to National Security

Biden's 'Racial Equity' Order Threatens Military's Meritocracy

Biden’s Bigger Government

Military Cultural Values Under Attack

The Need for Congress to Intervene

DEI vs. Meritocracy