Quotes of the Day:

"Nothing is more liberating than to fight for a cause larger than yourself, something that encopasses you but is not defined by your existence alone."

- John McCain

"If you hear a voice within you say 'you cannot paint,' then by all means paint and that voice will be silenced." 

 – Vincent Van Gogh

"A book must be an axe for the frozen sea inside of us." 

–  Franz Kafka

1. Israel–Hamas War (Iran) Update, April 6, 2024

2. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, April 6, 2024

3. China-Taiwan Weekly Update, April 5, 2024

4. COMPOUND MARITIME (IN)SECURITY Strong pointing Trade Security & Profitability in the Global ‘Un-Commons’ thru “3D+C” Integrated Statecraft Solutions (a ‘compound security competition’ (CsC) use case) By Isaiah (Ike) Wilson III, PhD

5. In Six Months, Everything Has Changed for Israel

6. A Warlord Turns to Death, Rape and Rap Videos to Expand Control in Haiti

7. The Guantánamo Spy Who Wasn’t

8. Benjamin Franklin Taught America a Lesson It Needs to Hear

9. Help Ukraine Hold the Line

10. China Providing Geospatial Intelligence to Russia, US Warns

11. Journalist Who Broke Story on Israel’s AI Warfare Discusses the Technology 

12. Iran is winning the Gaza war

13. Video: Crafty quadcopter sits on power lines to recharge

14. Opinion: Ukraine's Victory Remains in Reach By Alexander Vindman

15. Do our leaders, ‘experts’ and pundits want World War III?

16. Stopping Online Terrorism: Pulling the Plug on the Russian Imperial Movement

17. The Next Frontier? Philosophy in Space.

1. Israel–Hamas War (Iran) Update, April 6, 2024

I wish ISW and others would stop allowing malign actors to legitimize themselves by using resistance in their title. They are not an axis of resistance. They are an axis of dictators or totalitarian or malign actors but they should not be using the term resistance. That needs to be reserved for those who are resisting the oppression of such dictators.

Excerpt:

Iran and Axis of Resistance

The Islamic Resistance in Iraq—a coalition of Iranian-backed Iraqi militias—claimed two drone attacks targeting an unspecified military facility in the Golan Heights and an oil refinery in Haifa on April 5.[26]

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/iran-update-april-6-2024

Key Takeaways:

• Central Gaza Strip: Palestinian fighters have claimed several attacks targeting Israeli forces near Deir al Balah in the central Gaza Strip in recent days.
• Southern Gaza Strip: Hamas claimed to conduct a multi-stage attack targeting Israeli forces in eastern Khan Younis.
• Political Negotiations: A senior US official said that US President Joe Biden sent letters to the Egyptian president and Qatari emir, asking them to pressure Hamas to agree to a six-week ceasefire agreement.
• West Bank: Israeli forces engaged Palestinian fighters in at least five locations in the West Bank.
• Southern Lebanon and Golan Heights: Lebanese Hezbollah conducted at least seven attacks from southern Lebanon into northern Israel.
• Iraq: The Islamic Resistance in Iraq claimed two drone attacks targeting an unspecified military facility in the Golan Heights and an oil refinery in Haifa, Israel.

IRAN UPDATE, APRIL 6, 2024

Apr 6, 2024 - ISW Press

Download the PDF

Iran Update, April 6, 2024

Ashka Jhaveri, Johanna Moore, Alexandra Braverman, and Nicholas Carl

Information Cutoff: 2:00 pm ET

The Iran Update provides insights into Iranian and Iranian-sponsored activities abroad that undermine regional stability and threaten US forces and interests. It also covers events and trends that affect the stability and decision-making of the Iranian regime. The Critical Threats Project (CTP) at the American Enterprise Institute and the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) provides these updates regularly based on regional events. Click here to see CTP and ISW’s interactive map of Israeli ground operations. This map is updated daily alongside the static maps present in this report. Click here to subscribe to the Iran Update.

CTP-ISW defines the “Axis of Resistance” as the unconventional alliance that Iran has cultivated in the Middle East since the Islamic Republic came to power in 1979. This transnational coalition is comprised of state, semi-state, and non-state actors that cooperate with one another to secure their collective interests. Tehran considers itself to be both part of the alliance and its leader. Iran furnishes these groups with varying levels of financial, military, and political support in exchange for some degree of influence or control over their actions. Some are traditional proxies that are highly responsive to Iranian direction, while others are partners over which Iran exerts more limited influence. Members of the Axis of Resistance are united by their grand strategic objectives, which include eroding and eventually expelling American influence from the Middle East, destroying the Israeli state, or both. Pursuing these objectives and supporting the Axis of Resistance to those ends have become cornerstones of Iranian regional strategy.

We do not report in detail on 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 utterly condemn violations of the laws of armed conflict and the Geneva Conventions and crimes against humanity even though we do not describe them in these reports.

CTP-ISW will publish abbreviated updates on April 6 and 7, 2024. Detailed coverage will resume Monday, April 8, 2024.

Key Takeaways:

• Central Gaza Strip: Palestinian fighters have claimed several attacks targeting Israeli forces near Deir al Balah in the central Gaza Strip in recent days.
• Southern Gaza Strip: Hamas claimed to conduct a multi-stage attack targeting Israeli forces in eastern Khan Younis.
• Political Negotiations: A senior US official said that US President Joe Biden sent letters to the Egyptian president and Qatari emir, asking them to pressure Hamas to agree to a six-week ceasefire agreement.
• West Bank: Israeli forces engaged Palestinian fighters in at least five locations in the West Bank.
• Southern Lebanon and Golan Heights: Lebanese Hezbollah conducted at least seven attacks from southern Lebanon into northern Israel.
• Iraq: The Islamic Resistance in Iraq claimed two drone attacks targeting an unspecified military facility in the Golan Heights and an oil refinery in Haifa, Israel.

Gaza Strip

Axis of Resistance objectives:

• Erode the will of the Israeli political establishment and public to sustain clearing operations in the Gaza Strip
• Reestablish Hamas as the governing authority in the Gaza Strip

Palestinian fighters have claimed several attacks targeting Israeli forces near Deir al Balah in the central Gaza Strip in recent days.[1] Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) claimed on April 6 that its forces returned from the front lines east of Deir al Balah and reported attacking an Israeli tank with an explosively formed penetrator.[2] The al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, which is the self-proclaimed militant wing of Fatah, separately mortared Israeli forces near Deir al Balah.[3] Commercially available satellite imagery captured on April 5 shows flattened terrain southeast of Deir al Balah, indicating that Israeli bulldozers and/or bulldozers are operating in the area.

Israeli forces continued to conduct clearing operations in al Amal neighborhood in western Khan Younis on April 6.[4] The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Givati Brigade (162nd Division) destroyed a weapons depot and found over 40 improvised explosive devices and other explosives in al Amal.[5] Israeli forces engaged Palestinian fighters in close combat and destroyed a four-man Palestinian squad in one attack.[6]

Hamas claimed that it conducted three attacks targeting Israeli forces in al Amal after Hamas fighters returned from the front lines.[7] Hamas fighters fired anti-tank rocket-propelled grenades (RPG), tandem-charge anti-tank rockets, and detonated a mine targeting Israeli forces.

Hamas claimed to conduct a multi-stage attack targeting Israeli forces in eastern Khan Younis on April 6.[8] Hamas fighters targeted three IDF tanks with anti-tank RPGs in al Zana. Hamas fighters then claimed that they prevented an Israeli quick reaction force from responding to the situation by detonating a minefield that they set prior to the attack. Hamas later claimed that its fighters targeted Israeli forces that responded to the attack.[9] The IDF has not commented on the attack at the time of this writing.

The IDF Air Force killed a senior official in Hamas’ internal security apparatus in Khan Younis, who was also responsible for managing some militia activity.[10] The IDF said that the figure was the deputy head of internal security and responsible for significant attacks against Israel targets. Hamas controls several internal security forces, including the Civil Police.[11]

The IDF reported on April 6 that Israeli forces rescued the body of a hostage during an overnight operation in Khan Younis.[12] The Israeli Army Radio reported that that PIJ killed the hostage, named Elad Katzir, in January 2024.[13] The IDF 89th Commando Brigade (98th Division), with support from Shin Bet and Military Intelligence, returned the body to Israel. Israeli authorities say that Palestinian militias still hold around 133 hostages and that 99 of them are believed to still be alive.[14]

A CNN team in Israel reported on April 6 hearing gunfire and explosions near the Erez crossing connecting Israel with the northern Gaza Strip.[15] These reports come immediately after Israel decided to reopen the crossing, which has been closed since the war began, to facilitate humanitarian aid.[16] The IDF moved the CNN team to another unspecified location after hearing the gunfire and explosions. The Israeli War Cabinet approved on April 5 the reopening of its Erez crossing, which has been closed since the beginning of the war.[17]

A senior US official said that US President Joe Biden sent letters to the Egyptian president and Qatari emir on April 4, asking them to pressure Hamas to agree to a six-week ceasefire agreement.[18] Biden ”urged them to secure commitments from Hamas to agree to and abide by a deal," the US official said. Israeli media reported that a senior Hamas delegation led by Ismail Haniyeh is expected to travel to Cairo on April 7 for further negotiations.[19] Senior Hamas sources said that the group still insists on a full ceasefire before they release any hostages.[20]

US, Israeli, and Egyptian officials told the Wall Street Journal that the Biden administration is pressing Israel to allow a limited number of displaced Palestinians to return to the northern Gaza Strip as part of the current round of ceasefire talks.[21] Unspecified Arab mediators stated that    Israel is open to permitting 2,000 people per day—mainly women and children—to return to the northern Gaza Strip. Israel would reportedly allow a maximum of 60,000 Palestinians to return to the northern Gaza Strip as part of the deal, representing an Israeli concession.[22] Israel sent an “updated” ceasefire proposal to the mediators and Hamas on April 2, which Hamas later rejected.[23]

Palestinian fighters did not conduct any indirect fire attacks from the Gaza Strip into Israel on April 6.

West Bank

Axis of Resistance objectives:

• Establish the West Bank as a viable front against Israel

Israeli forces have engaged Palestinian fighters in at least five locations in the West Bank since CTP-ISW's last data cut off on April 5.[24]

This map is not an exhaustive depiction of clashes and demonstrations in the West Bank.

Southern Lebanon and Golan Heights

Axis of Resistance objectives:

• Deter Israel from conducting a ground operation into Lebanon
• Prepare for an expanded and protracted conflict with Israel in the near term
• Expel the United States from Syria

Lebanese Hezbollah has conducted at least seven attacks from southern Lebanon into northern Israel on April 6.[25]

Recorded reports of attacks; CTP-ISW cannot independently verify impact.

Iran and Axis of Resistance

The Islamic Resistance in Iraq—a coalition of Iranian-backed Iraqi militias—claimed two drone attacks targeting an unspecified military facility in the Golan Heights and an oil refinery in Haifa on April 5.[26]

2. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, April 6, 2024

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-april-6-2024

Key Takeaways:

•  Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky indicated that Ukraine does not have enough materiel to contest the battlefield initiative.
• Zelensky stressed that additional Western security assistance is necessary for Ukrainian forces to effectively defend Ukraine’s airspace against the intensified Russian strike campaign and increased Russian aviation operations along the frontline.
• Zelensky cautioned that the arrival of all promised F-16 fighter jets from Ukraine’s Western partners in 2024 will provide Ukraine with only 10 percent of the fighter aircraft Ukraine would need to completely defeat Russian aviation and restore Ukraine’s ability to operate effectively in the air domain.
• Continued delays in US security assistance are specifically impacting the capabilities that Ukrainian forces need to respond to the increased tempo of Russian mechanized assaults in eastern Ukraine.
• The Kremlin explicitly threatened its long-term ally Armenia on April 5 over Armenian outreach to the West following Russia’s failure to prevent Armenia’s loss of Nagorno-Karabakh in September 2023.
• The Russian MFA also continues to threaten Finland and claimed that Finland has “lost its independence in making foreign policy decisions” since its accession to NATO — a narrative that the Kremlin routinely used to falsely claim that NATO was controlling Ukraine and using Ukraine to threaten Russia.
• Chechen Republic Head Ramzan Kadyrov announced on April 5 that 3,000 former Wagner Group personnel will join the Akhmat Spetsnaz unit following successful negotiations between Akhmat and Wagner commanders.
• Russian forces recently made confirmed advances near Avdiivka and Donetsk City.
• Russian President Vladimir Putin passed two laws on April 6, offering Russian society some concession for its sacrifices to support Russia’s war in Ukraine.

RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, APRIL 6, 2024

Apr 6, 2024 - ISW Press

Download the PDF

Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, April 6, 2024

Riley Bailey, Grace Mappes, Angelica Evans, Kateryna Stepanenko, and George Barros

Date cut-off: 10:15pm 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 see ISW’s 3D control of terrain topographic map of Ukraine. Use of a computer (not a mobile device) is strongly recommended for using this data-heavy tool.

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.

Note: The data cut-off for this product was 2pm ET on April 6 ISW will cover subsequent reports in the April 7 Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky indicated that Ukraine does not have enough materiel to contest the battlefield initiative. Zelensky stated during an interview aired on April 6 that Ukrainian forces currently do not have enough ammunition to initiate and sustain future counteroffensive operations and reiterated that Ukrainian forces are currently using drones to partially compensate for artillery ammunition shortages across the theater.[1] Zelensky stressed that Ukraine must conduct countermeasures to deprive Russian forces of the ability to prepare and conduct significant offensive efforts and not only rely on defensive operations. Zelensky stated that striking Russian force concentrations is one such countermeasure but that Ukrainian forces lack long-range weapons to strike Russian force concentrations and other targets necessary to undermine Russian operations. Senior Ukrainian officials have long called for timely and sustained Western military assistance that would enable Ukraine to conduct both defensive and counteroffensive operations when the timing is optimal for Ukraine to undertake such efforts, as opposed to having materiel shortages constrain Ukraine’s ability to plan and execute operations and losing opportunities to exploit Russian weaknesses.[2] Zelensky recently stated that delays in security assistance forced Ukraine to cede the battlefield initiative to Russia, and Ukrainian officials have warned that Ukraine cannot plan either a successful counteroffensive or defensive effort without knowing when and what kind of aid Ukraine will receive. ISW continues to assess that shortages in Western military assistance have forced Ukrainian forces to husband materiel, and Zelensky’s statement suggests that Ukrainian forces are now having to make difficult decisions about prioritizing certain aspects of its defense over constraining Russian military capabilities or preparing for counteroffensive operations.[3] The New York Times similarly reported on April 5 that Ukrainian forces are close to running out of some types of munitions and that Ukrainian officials have observed a five-to-one Russian artillery advantage throughout the frontline.[4] Ukrainian soldiers reportedly told the New York Times that Ukrainian forces currently have enough cluster munitions that are effective at repelling Russian infantry assaults but are low on high-explosive artillery shells needed to repel mechanized assaults.[5]

Zelensky stressed that additional Western security assistance is necessary for Ukrainian forces to effectively defend Ukraine’s airspace against the intensified Russian strike campaign and increased Russian aviation operations along the frontline. Zelensky stated that Ukraine will need an additional 25 Patriot air defense systems, likely meaning launchers, to extend full air defense coverage to all of Ukraine’s territory.[6] Zelensky warned that if Russian forces sustain the tempo of their current missile and drone strikes then Ukraine will likely lack the air defense missile stocks needed to protect Ukrainian cities and critical infrastructure.[7] Russian forces appear to be exploiting Ukraine’s already degraded air defense umbrella in an attempt to collapse Ukraine’s energy grid, likely in an effort to constrain Ukraine’s long-term defense industrial capacity.[8] Russian missile and drone strikes have consistently pressured Ukraine’s limited air defense and have forced Ukraine to make difficult decisions about providing air defense coverage between large population centers in the rear and active areas of the frontline.[9] Sparse and inconsistent air defense coverage along the front has likely facilitated Russia’s intensification of guided and unguided glide bomb strikes, which Russian forces used to tactical effect in their seizure of Avdiivka in mid-February 2024.[10] Zelensky stated that the previous downing of Russian aircraft has temporarily constrained glide bomb strikes and that Russian forces are now conducting glide bomb strikes from further away, increasing the need for long-range air defense systems.[11]

Zelensky cautioned that the arrival of all promised F-16 fighter jets from Ukraine’s Western partners in 2024 will provide Ukraine with only 10 percent of the fighter aircraft Ukraine would need to completely defeat Russian aviation and restore Ukraine’s ability to operate effectively in the air domain.[12] Zelensky stated that Ukraine will need a combination of air defense systems and fighter aircraft to combat the Russian aviation threat, namely to prevent the Russian use of KAB guided glide bombs.[13] Zelensky also added that Ukraine is currently developing new weapons to defend against Russian KAB guided glide bombs as part of this combined air defense. The further degradation of Ukraine’s air defense umbrella would not only limit Ukraine’s ability to protect critical elements of its war effort in the rear but would also likely afford Russian aviation prolonged secure operation along the frontline. Such security would allow Russian forces to significantly increase glide bomb strikes at scale and possibly even allow Russian forces to conduct routine large-scale aviation operations against near rear Ukrainian logistics and cities to devastating effect.[14] Western security assistance that allows Ukraine to establish a robust combined air defense system will enable Ukraine to protect its cities while providing air defense to potentially operationally significant defensive and counteroffensive operations.

Continued delays in US security assistance are specifically impacting the capabilities that Ukrainian forces need to respond to the increased tempo of Russian mechanized assaults in eastern Ukraine. Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief Colonel General Oleksandr Syrskyi warned on April 6 that a particularly difficult situation has emerged east of Chasiv Yar and west of Avdiivka in Donetsk Oblast, both areas where ISW has observed a recent intensification of Russian mechanized assaults ranging from platoon-sized to battalion-sized attacks.[15] Syrskyi also observed that Russian forces are conducting platoon-, company-, and sometimes battalion-sized infantry assaults in separate directions. The Press Service of the Ukrainian Airborne Forces stated that Russian forces with massed armored vehicle support are still attempting to break through Ukrainian defenses west of Avdiivka despite not yet repeating mechanized assaults as large as the ones that they conducted in the area between March 29 and March 31.[16] Geolocated footage published on April 6 indicates that elements of the Russian 90th Guards Tank Division (41st Combined Arms Army [CAA], Central Military District [CMD]) recently conducted a likely company-sized mechanized assault southeast of Umanske (west of Avdiivka), and a Ukrainian airborne assault brigade reported that its personnel destroyed 10 Russian tanks, five BMP infantry fighting vehicles (IFVs), and a MT-LB IFV during 11 mechanized assaults in the area.[17] Ukrainian forces have so far successfully repelled intensified Russian mechanized assaults throughout eastern Ukraine in the past week but have done so despite persisting materiel shortages.

The Kremlin explicitly threatened its long-term ally Armenia on April 5 over Armenian outreach to the West following Russia’s failure to prevent Armenia’s loss of Nagorno-Karabakh in September 2023. Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, European Union (EU) High Representative Josep Borell, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and US Agency for International Development (USAID) Administrator Samantha Powers met on April 5 in Brussels to discuss continued Western support of Armenian democratic and economic development.[18] The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) released a statement later on April 5 responding to the meeting, in which the Russian MFA claimed that the West is attempting to “drag the South Caucasus [region] into a geopolitical confrontation" between Russia and the West.[19] The Russian MFA stated that "extra-regional interference” in the South Caucasus region is “irresponsible” and “destructive” and aims to drive a wedge between the South Caucasus countries and Russia. The Russian MFA threatened that Western interference could result in the “most negative consequences for [regional] stability, security, and economic development” and an “uncontrollable increase in tension” in the region. The Russian MFA explicitly threatened the Armenian government and warned that Armenia could “go down the wrong path,” which the MFA claimed is fraught with security and economic issues, could result in an “outflow of the population,” and is reminiscent of the issues that Russia’s invasion has caused Ukraine. The Russian MFA accused the West of attempting to “deceive” Armenia into withdrawing from the Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) and Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) and requesting that Russia withdraw from Russia’s military base in Armenia and from the Yerevan International Airport.     

The Russian MFA's April 5 statement follows several months of Kremlin threats against Armenia in response to ongoing Armenian efforts to secure new, Western security guarantees and efforts to blame Armenia for deteriorating Russian-Armenian relations.[20] Armenian officials recently stated that Armenia is considering withdrawing from the CSTO and applying to join the EU and recently asked Russia to withdraw Russian border guards from the Yerevan International Airport.[21] The Russian MFA’s statement insinuates that the Armenian government is not independently making decisions about its security, and that Western countries are somehow guiding the Armenian government’s decisions. The Kremlin has made similar ridiculous claims that the West controls the Ukrainian government as part of Kremlin efforts to question and undermine Ukrainian sovereignty.[22] The Kremlin has previously conducted hybrid wars against former Soviet states that have sought EU accession.

The Russian MFA also continues to threaten Finland and claimed that Finland has “lost its independence in making foreign policy decisions” since its accession to NATO — a narrative that the Kremlin routinely used to falsely claim that NATO was controlling Ukraine and using Ukraine to threaten Russia. Russian Ambassador to Finland Pavel Kuznetsov stated during an interview with Kremlin newswire TASS on April 6 that Finland is on a “destructive course” in its relationship with Russia and that Finland’s accession to NATO is making the Baltic region a “zone of potential escalation.”[23] Kuznetsov threatened Finland and the NATO alliance broadly, claiming that Russia would have to respond to a buildup of NATO material and manpower or the deployment of a nuclear weapon in Finland and that Russia’s response would be “adequate but not necessarily symmetrical.” Kuznetsov claimed that Finland has joined the “party of war until victory over Russia” by joining NATO and accused perceived Finnish “Russophobia” of causing a complete breakdown of the Russian-Finnish relationship. Kuznetsov insinuated that Finland has no option but to improve its relationship with Russia, given that “we can’t escape geography," but blamed Finland unilaterally for the poor state of Russian–Finnish relations, despite the artificial migrant crisis that Russia created on the Russian–Finnish border in fall 2023 and repeated Russian threats against Finland and the wider NATO alliance.[24] ISW continues to assess that Russian threats against NATO member states are aimed at leading the West to deter itself and that Russian claims of imagined threats originating from NATO are aimed at setting informational conditions to justify and support an envisioned long-term geopolitical confrontation with the West.[25]

Chechen Republic Head Ramzan Kadyrov announced on April 5 that 3,000 former Wagner Group personnel will join the Akhmat Spetsnaz unit following successful negotiations between Akhmat and Wagner commanders.[26] Kadyrov claimed that Commander of the Akhmat Spetsnaz (and deputy commander of the 2nd Luhansk People’s Republic’s [LNR] Army Corps [AC]) Apty Alaudinov reached an agreement with Wagner leadership that Wagner commander Alexander Kuznetsov (call sign “Ratibor”) will join Akhmat Spetsnaz along with 3,000 Wagner personnel. Kadyrov added that the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) already allocated a required number of vacancies within the Akhmat Spetsnaz unit to accommodate the Wagner personnel, and that Wagner personnel can start combat missions after resolving all organizational issues. Kadyrov’s mention of the Russian MoD indicates that these Wagner elements will be subordinated under the Russian MoD’s authority rather than Rosgvardia. Alaudinov also amplified a Kremlin-affiliated milblogger’s claim that the main group of Wagner commanders and 5,000 Wagner personnel are transferring to the 2nd AC under the Russian MoD.[27] The milblogger added that the Russian military is still discussing whether these 5,000 Wagner personnel will form a regiment like the unit under Kuznetsov, form a new separate brigade, or be distributed among existing brigades.

The claimed transfer of 3,000 Wagner personnel into MoD’s Akhmat Spetsnaz indicates that the Russian MoD is successfully formalizing control over some elements of the remaining Wagner Group force — an objective it has been pursuing since 2023. ISW previously assessed that the Russian MoD launched a campaign in early-to-mid-2023 which aimed to directly subordinate Wagner forces under the Russian MoD. ISW also assessed that deceased Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin and Wagner personnel started the mutiny in June 2023 in protest of the Russian MoD’s efforts to consolidate control over Wagner forces.[28] The transfer of Wagner personnel to Akhmat Spetsnaz units sparked some criticism from Wagner-affiliated irregular formations, such as the Rusich Sabotage Assault Reconnaissance Group which accused these Wagner personnel of selling out to the Russian MoD.[29] One Russian milblogger also accused Kadyrov of exaggerating the number of transferred Wagner personnel, claiming that most Wagner personnel hate Kuznetsov and are located in Africa.[30] Kremlin-affiliated milbloggers largely celebrated the claimed transfer, claiming that Wagner personnel had two options: to either hold on to their past grudges or let them go to serve the Russian state.[31] One Kremlin-affiliated milblogger claimed that former Wagner forces previously formed the Kamerton detachment under Akhmat Spetsnaz and that the Russian MoD did not ban this detachment from using Wagner symbology, networks, and management systems.[32]

Key Takeaways:

•  Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky indicated that Ukraine does not have enough materiel to contest the battlefield initiative.
• Zelensky stressed that additional Western security assistance is necessary for Ukrainian forces to effectively defend Ukraine’s airspace against the intensified Russian strike campaign and increased Russian aviation operations along the frontline.
• Zelensky cautioned that the arrival of all promised F-16 fighter jets from Ukraine’s Western partners in 2024 will provide Ukraine with only 10 percent of the fighter aircraft Ukraine would need to completely defeat Russian aviation and restore Ukraine’s ability to operate effectively in the air domain.
• Continued delays in US security assistance are specifically impacting the capabilities that Ukrainian forces need to respond to the increased tempo of Russian mechanized assaults in eastern Ukraine.
• The Kremlin explicitly threatened its long-term ally Armenia on April 5 over Armenian outreach to the West following Russia’s failure to prevent Armenia’s loss of Nagorno-Karabakh in September 2023.
• The Russian MFA also continues to threaten Finland and claimed that Finland has “lost its independence in making foreign policy decisions” since its accession to NATO — a narrative that the Kremlin routinely used to falsely claim that NATO was controlling Ukraine and using Ukraine to threaten Russia.
• Chechen Republic Head Ramzan Kadyrov announced on April 5 that 3,000 former Wagner Group personnel will join the Akhmat Spetsnaz unit following successful negotiations between Akhmat and Wagner commanders.
• Russian forces recently made confirmed advances near Avdiivka and Donetsk City.
• Russian President Vladimir Putin passed two laws on April 6, offering Russian society some concession for its sacrifices to support Russia’s war in Ukraine.

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 Russian violations of the laws of armed conflict and the Geneva Conventions and crimes against 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 Air, Missile, and Drone Campaign
• Russian Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts
• Russian Technological Adaptations
• Activities in Russian-occupied areas
• Ukrainian Defense Industrial Base Efforts
• Russian Information Operations and Narratives
• Significant Activity in Belarus

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)

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky stated in a televised interview on April 6 that there is currently no threat of a Russian ground invasion towards Kharkiv City and that all discussions about Russia’s plans to capture the city are information operations aimed at inciting panic in Ukraine.[33]

Ukrainian forces reportedly achieved unspecified tactical successes in the Kupyansk and Lyman directions amid continued positional engagements along the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna line on April 6. Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief Colonel General Oleksandr Syrskyi stated that Ukrainian forces have achieved unspecified tactical successes in the Kupyansk and Lyman directions.[34] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian attacks near Terny (west of Kreminna) and Bilohorivka (south of Kreminna), although Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian forces are advancing on the outskirts of Terny and near the chalk quarry in Bilohorivika.[35]

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 efforts to advance west of Bakhmut towards Chasiv Yar on April 6, but there were no confirmed changes to the frontline in the area. Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian forces, chiefly elements of the 98th Airborne (VDV) Division, continued attacks northeast and southeast of Chasiv Yar and captured positions in forest areas along the railway to the east and in the Stupky-Holubovski 2 nature preserve to the southeast.[36] The milbloggers claimed that Russian forces conducted heavy tube artillery, rocket, and airstrikes against Ukrainian positions in and around Chasiv Yar. A milblogger also claimed that elements of the Russian “Sever-V” Volunteer Brigade (Russian Volunteer Corps) pushed back some Ukrainian forces from Bohdanivka (northwest of Bakhmut) towards Chasiv Yar and Kalynivka (between Bohdanivka and Chasiv Yar).[37] Another Russian milblogger claimed that vulnerable logistics will likely complicate Russian efforts to advance towards Chasiv Yar and that Russian forces need to prioritize additional measures to defend against Ukrainian drone strikes and stabilize their supply lines over rushing to pressure Bohdanivka and Ivanivske (between Bakhmut and Chasiv Yar).[38]

Positional fighting also continued northeast, southwest, and south of Bakhmut. Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian forces marginally advanced near Vesele (northeast of Bakhmut near Siversk) on April 6, but ISW has not observed visual confirmation of these claims.[39] Positional fighting continued northeast of Bakhmut near Spirne, Rozdolivka, and Vyimka; southwest of Bakhmut near Klishchiivka, Andriivka, and Zelenopillya; and south of Bakhmut near Niu York.[40]

Russian forces continued to advance west of Avdiivka amid continued attacks on April 6. Geolocated footage published on April 6 shows that Russian forces advanced southwest of Umanske (west of Avdiivka) during a likely company-sized mechanized assault and into central Pervomaiske (southwest of Avdiivka).[41] Additional geolocated footage published on April 6 shows that Russian forces advanced further into northern Berdychi (northwest of Avdiivka) but likely did not make this advance within the past day.[42] Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian forces advanced in and north of Berdychi and into southern and central Semenivka (west of Avdiivka).[43] Milbloggers also claimed that Russian forces are clearing forest areas between Tonenke (west of Avdiivka) and Vodyane (southwest of Avdiivka). ISW is unable to confirm these Russian claims of advance, however. Another Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces are trying to push Ukrainian forces from Pervomaiske and advance towards Umanske (both southwest of Avdiivka).[44] Russian milbloggers posted footage on April 6 of Russian forces conducting an airstrike against a dam bridge allegedly across the Durna River near Umanske.[45] Fighting also continued northwest of Avdiivka near Novokalynove; west of Avdiivka near Orlivka, Nevelske, and Yasnobrodivka; and southwest of Avdiivka near Netaylove.[46] Elements of the Russian 90th Guards Tank Division (41st Combined Arms Army [CAA], Central Military District [CMD]) are reportedly fighting southeast of Umanske, elements of the “Yastreb” private military company (reportedly created by Russian state energy operator Gazprom) are reportedly fighting near Semenivka, and elements of the ”Vega” Special Purpose Detachment (reportedly of the 24th Guards Spetsnaz Brigade) are reportedly fighting in the Avdiivka direction.[47]

The Ukrainian Airborne Forces Press Service reported on April 6 that Russian forces are still conducting large numbers of infantry-led assaults and are using combat vehicles to drive infantry to the front.[48] A Ukrainian servicemember operating in the Avdiivka direction noted that Russian forces are trying to cut off and capture settlements on the flanks of Avdiivka but that Russian forces are now attacking strong Ukrainian defensive lines.[49]

Russian forces recently advanced southwest of Donetsk City amid continued fighting in the area on April 6. Geolocated footage published on April 6 shows that Russian forces advanced on the northern outskirts of Novomykhailivka (southwest of Donetsk City) and further west into central Novomykhailivka.[50] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces also advanced into a field southeast of Novomykhailivka, but ISW has not observed visual confirmation of this claim.[51] Positional fighting also continued west of Donetsk City near Krasnohorivka and Heorhiivka and southwest of Donetsk City near Kostyantynivka.[52] Elements of the Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) 105th Infantry Regiment (1st DNR Army Corps) are reportedly fighting in Novomykhailivka.[53]

Positional fighting continued in the Donetsk-Zaporizhia Oblast border area near Staromayorske (south of Velyka Novosilka) on April 6.[54]

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

Positional fighting continued near Robotyne and northwest of Verbove (east of Robotyne) in western Zaporizhia Oblast on April 6.[55] Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief Colonel General Oleksandr Syrskyi described Russian assaults near Robotyne and Verbove as localized offensive operations that aim to recover previously lost territory.[56] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian and Ukrainian forces are heavily using drones in the Robotyne area.[57] Elements of the 108th Guards Airborne (VDV) Regiment and likely elements of the 56th Guards VDV Regiment (both of the 7th Guards VDV Division) are reportedly operating in the Zaporizhia direction.[58]

Positional fighting continued in the east (left) bank of Kherson Oblast, likely near Krynky, on April 6.[59] Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian forces destroyed several Ukrainian groups that attempted to cross the Dnipro River near Krynky on April 5 and 6.[60] Likely elements of the Russian 810th Naval Infantry Brigade (Black Sea Fleet) are operating in the Kherson direction.[61]

Russian Air, Missile, and Drone Campaign (Russian Objective: Target Ukrainian military and civilian infrastructure in the rear and on the frontline)

Russian forces conducted a series of drone and missile strikes overnight on April 5 to 6 and during the day on April 6 targeting civilian, industrial, and agricultural infrastructure in Ukraine. Ukrainian Air Force Commander Lieutenant General Mykola Oleshchuk reported that Russian forces launched overnight three S-300 missiles from Belgorod Oblast, two Kh-101/Kh-555 cruise missiles from strategic aircraft that took off from Saratov Oblast, one Kalibr cruise missile from the Black Sea, and 32 Shahed-136/131 drones from Kursk Oblast and Primorsko-Akhtarsk, Krasnodar Krai.[62] Oleshchuk reported that Ukrainian forces destroyed both Kh-101/Kh-555 cruise missiles, the Kalibr cruise missile, and 28 Shahed drones.[63] Ukrainian officials reported that Russian forces targeted agricultural enterprises in Kherson Oblast and industrial facilities, civilian infrastructure, and residential areas in Kyiv, Zaporizhia, Odesa, and Kharkiv oblasts.[64] Ukrainian officials reported that Russian drones struck agricultural enterprises in Kherson Oblast and industrial facilities in Zaporizhzhia City and that Russian S-300 missiles struck residential areas in Kharkiv City.[65] Zaporizhia Oblast Military Administration Head Ivan Fedorov reported that Russian forces also struck a humanitarian center for internally displaced people in Zaporizhzhia City.[66] Ukrainian officials reported that Russian forces struck an unspecified utility facility near Odesa City with a likely Iskander-M ballistic missile later in the day on April 6.[67] The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) claimed that Russian forces targeted Ukrainian defense industrial base (DIB) facilities and temporary deployment points.[68]

Ukrainian Energy Minister Herman Halushchenko stated in an interview with Bloomberg published on April 6 that Ukraine needs improved air defenses to protect energy assets from Russian strikes and avoid blackouts during peak energy consumption in the summer.[69] Halushchenko stated that recent Russian strikes have significantly damaged both Ukrainian power generation and transmission capabilities and that Ukrainian officials have not yet assessed the full extent of the damage at energy infrastructure facilities.[70] Russian missile and drone strikes have reportedly damaged or disrupted roughly 80 percent of electricity generation at Ukrainian thermal power plants (TPPs) in recent weeks, as Russian forces continue to exploit the degraded Ukrainian air defense umbrella in an effort to collapse Ukraine’s energy grid.[71]

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

Russian President Vladimir Putin passed two laws on April 6 offering Russian society some concession for its sacrifices to support Russia’s war in Ukraine. Putin signed a law exempting Russian servicemen fighting in Ukraine from paying interest on consumer loans and credit holidays.[72] Putin previously signed a law on October 7, 2022, exempting mobilized personnel and other participants of the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine from accruing penalties for late payments for housing, communal services, loans, and credit card debts.[73] ISW previously assessed that such payment holidays may cost the Russian federal government little in the short term but may have long term implications as Russia continues to financially incentivize more recruits to fight in Ukraine in exchange for state benefits. Putin also signed a law amending the Russian Labor Code and prohibits employers from dismissing widows of Russian servicemen for one year from the date of the husband’s death.[74] The Kremlin has likely instituted this law in hopes of appeasing and limiting criticism from wives of deceased servicemen.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky discussed reports that Russia is planning to “mobilize” 300,000 servicemembers by June 1 during a televised interview on April 6, noting that Russia may not be able to meet this goal.[75] Zelensky stated that Russia may attempt to mobilize more than 300,000 personnel but might not meet its June 1 deadline because of discipline problems and the need to train these forces. It is unclear if Zelensky was referring to Russia’s ongoing “crypto-mobilization” campaign, which aims to generate combat forces via volunteer and irregular recruitment campaigns, or a possible future Russian decision to conduct a formal call up of the Russian mobilization reserve.

Russia is forming a new “Stalinskiye Sokoly” (Stalin’s Hawks) Volunteer Battalion to defend a “strategically important facility” in Republic of Tatarstan, likely in response to the recent successful Ukrainian unmanned aerial systems (UAS) strikes on military production infrastructure in the region.[76] A prominent Russian milblogger amplified a recruitment advertisement offering 261,000 rubles (around $2,820) monthly salaries to recruits with past air defense military service experience.[77] Russian officials also continue to recruit foreigners to fight in Ukraine. A Russian opposition outlet published pictures of an English-language brochure from an Oryol City military recruitment office inviting foreigners to join an unnamed special unit for foreigners. The brochure offered recruits a one-time signing bonus of $2,000, a monthly salary of $2,200, and Russian citizenship for recruits and their families.[78]

Rosgvardia’s Press Service reported on April 6 that Rosgvardia plans to conscript over 11,000 servicemen during the spring 2024 conscription cycle between April 1 and June 15.[79] Rosgvardia’s Press Service claimed that Rosgvardia will not involve conscripts in Russia’s war in Ukraine and added that the number of conscripts wishing to serve in Rosgvardia has increased since 2022.

Russian Technological Adaptations (Russian objective: Introduce technological innovations to optimize systems for use in Ukraine) 

A Ukrainian military observer reported that Ukrainian forces destroyed a T-72 tank jerry-rigged with several EW systems in an unspecified part of the front on April 5.[80] The Ukrainian military observer stated that the Russian tank, which was leading a column of armored vehicles during a mechanized assault, was able to completely disrupt all Ukrainian first-person view (FPV) drones in the area and that Ukrainian forces had to use a specialized fixed-wing drone with an additional terminal guidance system to strike the tank.[81] Russian forces are attempting to equip their armored vehicles with electronic warfare (EW) systems to protect them against Ukrainian drone strikes.

Ukrainian Defense Industrial Efforts (Ukrainian objective: Develop its defense industrial base to become more self-sufficient in cooperation with US, European, and international partners)

ISW is not publishing coverage of Ukrainian defense industrial efforts today.

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

ISW is not publishing coverage of activities in Russian-occupied areas today.

Russian Information Operations and Narratives

Russian State Duma Deputy and former Southern Military District (SMD) Commander Lieutenant General Andrei Gurulev reportedly claimed in a leaked voice memo that Russia plans to invade Kazakhstan. A Russian insider source leaked a voice memo on April 6, which Gurulev purportedly privately sent to members of the Russian State Duma Defense Committee, in which Gurulev claimed that Russia could attack Kazakhstan after completing its invasion of Ukraine and that Russian authorities have already made an unspecified, corresponding decision to this effort.[82] The insider source claimed that Gurulev is advocating for a future Russian invasion of Kazakhstan because Gurulev believes that unspecified, presumably pro-Ukrainian actors launched the April 2 Ukrainian drone strike against Tatarstan from Kazakhstan or another Central Asian country.[83] Gurulev responded to the leaked audio, calling it fake and rude and criticizing the Telegram channels that amplified the leaked audio.[84] Gurulev previously faced backlash from Russian milbloggers and other Kremlin officials for leaking an audio recording of former Russian 58th Combined Arms Army (SMD) Commander Major General Ivan Popov complaining about heavy Russian losses and a lack of effective counterbattery capabilities in western Zaporizhia Oblast, which resulted in Popov’s dismissal in July 2023.[85] A Kremlin-affiliated milblogger recently criticized Kazakhstan for not appreciating its “shared history” with Russia.[86] ISW is unable to verify the authenticity of Gurulev’s alleged leaked audio message.

Prominent Russian milbloggers are circulating claims that US military personnel participated the recent border raids into Russia. A prominent Russian milblogger published footage on April 6 that he alleged showed US citizens participating in combat operations in Belgorod Oblast.[87] The milblogger insinuated that the video is proof that US citizens are imbedded within the Ukrainian military and are participating in combat operations against Russia. At least six other prominent Russian milbloggers amplified the posts and footage and expressed agreement with the first milblogger’s assertion that US citizens were involved in the border raids.[88] Russian President Vladimir Putin stated on March 18 that military personnel from NATO member countries are already in Ukraine.[89] The Kremlin is already publicly communicating that it believes that NATO military contingents are in Ukraine and that the West has already violated Russia’s stated ”red line” regarding NATO personnel in Ukraine. 

The Kremlin appears to be investing in its next generation of propagandists, having recognized the success of its previous and ongoing information operations. Russia’s Far Eastern Federal University announced on April 5 that its students recently met with a Donetsk Oblast occupation official as part of the university’s “Heroes Among Us” program.[90] The “Heroes Among Us” program is reportedly aimed at helping students create emotional and persuasive propaganda documentaries to further the Kremlin’s narratives that justify Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and occupation of Crimea and Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhia, and Kherson oblasts.

Significant activity in Belarus (Russian efforts to increase its military presence in Belarus and further integrate Belarus into Russian-favorable frameworks and Wagner Group activity in Belarus)

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky stated on April 6 that Ukrainian officials do not assess that there is an active threat to Ukraine from Belarusian territory.[91]

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.

3. China-Taiwan Weekly Update, April 5, 2024

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/china-taiwan-weekly-update-april-5-2024

Key Takeaways

• Former Republic of China (ROC) President Ma Ying-jeou met with the People's Republic of China's (PRC) Taiwan Affairs Office Director Song Tao in Shenzhen.
• The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) proposed legislative reforms in response to the Kuomintang (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party's (TPP) reforms that threaten to undermine the DPP's governance.
• CCP Secretary General Xi Jinping emphasized Taiwan and economic issues in a phone call with US President Joe Biden. The PRC readout of the call did not mention the US key security concerns.
• Top PRC officials met with US business and academic leaders to boost foreign investment.
• A flotilla of PLA Southern Theater Command naval warships carried out live-fire drills in an unspecified area of the South China Sea on the weekend of March 30.

CHINA-TAIWAN WEEKLY UPDATE, APRIL 5, 2024

Apr 4, 2024 - ISW Press

Download the PDF

China-Taiwan Weekly Update, April 5, 2024

Authors: Matthew Sperzel, Daniel Shats, and Nils Peterson of the Institute for the Study of War

Editors: Dan Blumenthal and Frederick W. Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute

Data Cutoff: April 3 at 5 pm ET

The China–Taiwan Weekly Update is a joint product of the Institute for the Study of War and the American Enterprise Institute. The update supports the ISW–AEI Coalition Defense of Taiwan project, which assesses Chinese campaigns against Taiwan, examines alternative strategies for the United States and its allies to deter the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) aggression, and—if necessary—defeat the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). The update focuses on the Chinese Communist Party’s paths to controlling Taiwan and cross–Taiwan Strait developments.

Key Takeaways

• Former Republic of China (ROC) President Ma Ying-jeou met with the People's Republic of China's (PRC) Taiwan Affairs Office Director Song Tao in Shenzhen.
• The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) proposed legislative reforms in response to the Kuomintang (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party's (TPP) reforms that threaten to undermine the DPP's governance.
• CCP Secretary General Xi Jinping emphasized Taiwan and economic issues in a phone call with US President Joe Biden. The PRC readout of the call did not mention the US key security concerns.
• Top PRC officials met with US business and academic leaders to boost foreign investment.
• A flotilla of PLA Southern Theater Command naval warships carried out live-fire drills in an unspecified area of the South China Sea on the weekend of March 30.

Cross-Strait Relations

Former ROC President Ma Ying-jeou met with the PRC’s Taiwan Affairs Office Director Song Tao on April 1 in Shenzhen. Song repeated standard rhetoric expressing the PRC’s cross-strait policy, including urging adherence to the “1992 Consensus” and opposing Taiwanese independence and foreign interference. Ma echoed Song’s statements and advocated for stronger cross-strait cooperation and exchanges in all areas, especially between the youth.[1] Ma’s meeting with Song occurred on the first day of his trip to the PRC and did not appear on his public itinerary.[2] The stated purpose of Ma’s visit to the PRC is to lead a delegation of Taiwanese students to participate in exchanges with mainland youth and promote cross-strait stability from April 1-11.[3]

The CCP insists that all cross-strait negotiations must be on the mutual basis of the “1992 consensus,” which Ma and the Kuomintang (KMT) recognize but the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) does not. The 1992 Consensus is an alleged verbal agreement between semi-official representatives of the PRC and the then KMT-ruled ROC following negotiations in 1992. It states that both sides agree there is only one China and that Taiwan is part of China. The CCP interprets this “one China” to be the People’s Republic of China, however, while the KMT interprets it to be the Republic of China. The CCP does not acknowledge that the KMT’s interpretation of the 1992 Consensus does not align with its own. The PRC severed official cross-strait contact in 2016 based on the DPP’s refusal to accept the 1992 Consensus.[4]

CEO of the Ma Ying-jeou Foundation and former Ma aide Hsiao Hsu-tsen mentioned the possibility that Ma will meet with CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping on April 8.[5] Ma last met Xi in Singapore in 2015, when Ma was ROC president. The 2015 meeting was the first between the leaders of the PRC and Taiwan. Ma became the first former Taiwanese president to visit the PRC in March 2023 during a visit that overlapped with sitting president Tsai Ing-wen’s trip to the United States. Ma did not meet Xi on that visit, however. PRC officials have repeatedly lauded the period during Ma’s presidency as a high point in cross-strait relations to portray relations as having failed under the DPP. The PRC’s Taiwan Affairs Office (TAO) spokesperson Chen Binhua stated on March 13 that Taiwan should aim to relive the prosperity and peaceful development that cross-strait relations enjoyed from 2008 to 2016.[6]

Several senior KMT officials reacted positively to Ma’s trip. KMT Vice Chairman Andrew Hsia, who has held numerous meetings with CCP officials since assuming his role in 2021, expressed confidence that Ma’s trip will have a placatory and stabilizing effect on cross-strait relations.[7] Legislative Yuan Deputy Speaker Johnny Chiang urged respect for Ma’s itinerary and advocated for “diverse and multi-level” cross-strait exchanges.[8] DPP members have been critical of Ma’s trip, however. DPP Caucus Whip Rosalia Wu expressed disapproval of Ma’s gracious attitude despite the CCP’s failure to acknowledge Ma as the former president. Wu warned Ma to be cautious with his words and actions during his trip.[9] Premier Chen Chien-jen called on Ma to assert that “Taiwan is a sovereign and independent country” in front of Xi Jinping if the two of them meet.[10]

Taiwan

The DPP proposed legislative reforms on April 3 in response to KMT-TPP reform plans that threaten to undermine the DPP's governance.[11] The KMT proposed a series of legislative reforms to increase the Legislative Yuan’s (LY) oversight of the government on March 6. The reforms call for the establishment of inquiry committees and hearing procedures to compel individuals— including the president— to testify before the LY, assert penalties for perceived non-compliance or dishonesty in responses, and empower the LY to confirm political appointments.[12] The Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) released a similar draft on February 16.[13] The DPP’s recommended reforms do not include core elements of the opposition’s proposals, including the creation of special inquiry committees and the ability to hold testifiers in contempt.

The TPP and KMT have consistently stated that establishing a legislative investigative task force to intensify supervision of the executive branch is at the top of their agenda.[14] TPP Caucus Whip Huang Kuo-chang stated the TPP and KMT align in their reform direction, and the TPP’s support for the KMT in the LY will be aimed at achieving reform.[15]

The KMT has largely dismissed the DPP’s proposal as an attempt to water down necessary reforms and pledged to continue pursuing the reforms that it proposed. KMT legislator Luo Chih-chiang stated that the KMT would persist in defending the LY’s dignity and legislative reform.[16] KMT Caucus Secretary-General Hung Mong-kai claimed the DPP’s version would not achieve the goal of strengthening legislative oversight to increase the representation of public opinion in the LY.[17] KMT Caucus Whip Fu Kun-chi, a leader of the reforms, has consistently urged for the need to impose checks and balances on the government to limit its power and expose corruption.[18]

DPP Caucus Whip Ker Chien-ming emphasized the constitutionality of the DPP’s proposed reforms and stated that they would never sow chaos in politics, unlike the reforms that the opposition parties put forth.[19] The DPP has consistently criticized the opposition’s dogged determination to pursue the legislative reforms. Ker stated that “the evil forces of Blue and White,” referring to the KMT and TPP, are taking advantage of their collective majority in the LY to expand their power and wage a new “White Terror” against the executive branch.[20] DPP General Secretary Rosalia Wu emphasized the unconstitutionality of the opposition’s proposals and stressed that the LY cannot directly interfere with the executive branch by subjecting the president to legislative oversight.[21]

The opposition’s plan to impose checks and balances on the DPP could significantly hamper the government’s ability to pass policy by miring it in defensive actions against accusations of overstepping authority or corruption. KMT Caucus Deputy Secretary-General Lin Tzu-ming earlier referred to the proposed reforms as a “great weapon” that the LY must use to supervise the government.[22] The KMT’s outspoken rejection of the DPP’s reform proposal indicates the two largest parties will not compromise on the DPP’s revised version. Collaboration between the KMT and the TPP to advance their reforms suggests their version will pass with a majority in the LY, as the TPP’s eight seats constitute a crucial swing vote. The opposition’s determination to derail the DPP government is favorable to Chinese Communist Party (CCP) interests, especially if it hinders the government’s ability to implement its foreign and defense policy.

The LY’s Judiciary and Organic Laws and Statutes Committee will review the DPP’s proposal under the KMT’s rotating chairmanship of the committee next week.[23]

China

CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping emphasized cross-strait relations and economic issues in the US-PRC relationship during a phone call with US President Joe Biden on April 2. The PRC readout of the call did not address the US security concerns, including the PRC's support for Russia and heightened tensions in the South China Sea. Xi and Biden spoke by phone on April 2, in their first direct conversation since their meeting in San Francisco on November 15, 2023. According to the PRC readout of the call, Xi warned that the PRC considers the “Taiwan question” a “red line” and will act to counter Taiwanese “separatists” and external support for them. He also objected to US sanctions measures on PRC companies which he claimed are “suppress[ing] China’s trade and technology development,” saying the PRC welcomes mutually beneficial trade with the United States but will not “sit back and watch” if the United States seeks to “deprive China of its legitimate right to development.” Xi also said the three underlying principles of US-PRC relations in 2024 should be to value peace, to prioritize stability, and to uphold the credibility of commitments to each other.[24]

The PRC readout did not elaborate on many other issues the two discussed according to the White House readout, including freedom of navigation in the South China Sea, PRC support for Russia’s defense industrial base, and denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.[25] The Xi-Biden call followed a call between US Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell and PRC Vice Foreign Minister Ma Zhaoxu on March 27, which discussed similar issues.[26] The focus of the PRC readout shows the CCP is trying to portray trade issues and US support for Taiwan as the core disputes in an otherwise stable US-PRC relationship while downplaying US concerns about the PRC’s threats to regional and US national security.

The PRC used a series of high-profile meetings with US political, business, and academic leaders to boost foreign investment. The PRC invited top US business, academic, and strategic leaders to the PRC for the China Development Forum on March 25-26 and a meeting with Xi Jinping on March 27. Nearly all top PRC officials for economic affairs, including Premier Li Qiang, Vice Premiers Ding Xuexiang and He Lifeng, Vice President Han Zheng, and Xi Jinping’s Chief of Staff Cai Qi held high-level meetings with foreign business executives including Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman, Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon, and US-China Business Council president Craig Allen.[27] Academics, such as former Harvard Kennedy School dean Graham Allison, also attended meetings with Xi and other top officials, as did National Committee on US-China Relations (NCUSCR) Chairman Evan Greenberg.[28] The meetings and PRC state media reporting about them sought to boost foreign investor confidence in the PRC economy and signal “win-win opportunities” for investors.

Xi used the occasion to reiterate that US-China "incorrect perceptions" from the US side are a key cause of tensions in the US-China relationship.[29] PRC state media Xinhua ran a series of commentary articles promoting the development of healthy US-PRC relations.[30] Global Times published an interview with Allison in which he said the United States and PRC were “inseparable, conjoined Siamese twins” and praised PRC leaders for seeking to escape the “Thucydides Trap,” a term Allison coined to describe the historical tendency of rising powers and established great powers to go to war.[31] CCP meetings with US business leaders, academics, and PRC-friendly groups like NCUSCR and the US-China Business Council may offer avenues for the CCP to influence US policy and lend credence to CCP narratives, such as the narrative that problems in US-PRC relations are caused by “incorrect perceptions” in the United States and the promotion of investment opportunities in the PRC.

The PRC also promoted stabilizing relations and boosting investment in meetings with European officials, including Premier Li Qiang and Foreign Minister Wang Yi’s meetings with French Foreign Minister Stéphane Séjourné on April 1.[32]

PRC officials expressed opposition to the expansion of the AUKUS security partnership. New Zealand Foreign Minister Winston Peters said New Zealand expects the PRC to respect its right to explore joining AUKUS, a trilateral security partnership between Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. MFA spokesperson Lin Jian responded by expressing the PRC’s “strong concerns” about AUKUS and noting that the PRC opposes “camp confrontation” and forming “exclusive small circles.”[33] PRC Ministry of Defense (MOD) spokesperson Wu Qian criticized the expansion and upgrading of AUKUS as a “dangerous step in a more dangerous direction.” Wu was referring to an AU$4.6 billion agreement for the UK to build nuclear submarines for Australia and US plans to discuss Japan’s technical cooperation with AUKUS when Japan Prime Minister Fumio Kishida meets with US President Joe Biden in April.[34] CCP opposition to AUKUS is consistent with the CCP view that all US alliance structures are in alignment against the PRC. The MOD also expressed concerns about NATO’s “eastward march into the Asia-Pacific and the Taiwan issue” during the 8th China-NATO security policy dialogue held in mid-March.[35]

Northeast Asia

North Korea

The PRC abstained from voting for a United Nations Security Council resolution about extending a monitoring panel that tracks adherence to UN sanctions against North Korea. Russia vetoed the UNSC resolution on March 28.[36] The UN Security Council has unanimously adopted the annual renewal of the North Korean sanctions monitoring panel’s mandate since its inception in 2009.[37] The PRC Permanent Mission to the UN stated that the “sanctions should not be set in stone, nor should it be indefinite.” It instead called for “adjust[ing] the sanctions against the DPRK in the humanitarian and livelihood field.”[38] The PRC MFA Spokesman Lin Jian claimed on March 29 that there was “still time for consultations” when the UNSC “rushed" the resolution for a vote.[39]

Japan

Chinese Coast Guard (CCG) vessels entered disputed waters around the Senkaku islands 101 days in a row as of April 1 in an ongoing effort to assert PRC sovereignty over the islands. The Senkaku Islands, called the Diaoyu Islands in Chinese, are an uninhabited archipelago about 120 miles northeast of Taiwan and 200 miles southwest of Japan's Okinawa Prefecture. Japan administers the islands, but the PRC and Taiwan also claim the islands.[40] The CCG has normalized daily incursions into the contiguous zone around the Senkaku Islands, which is between 12 and 24 nautical miles from the islands. The current string of consecutive daily CCG incursions into the islands’ adjacent waters began on December 22, 2023, the same day Japan’s Cabinet approved a record-high defense budget of 7.95 trillion yen ($48 billion) for 2024.[41] The PRC has repeatedly expressed opposition to Japan increasing its defense budget or taking a more active military role in the region.[42]

The CCG began near-daily incursions into the Senkaku Islands’ adjacent waters in 2012 and significantly increased the volume of these incursions in 2019. It has made 90-110 incursions in most months since April 2019 into the Senkaku Islands’ contiguous zone, as well as 4-12 incursions into the territorial waters within 12 nautical miles of the islands. CCG ships entered 121 times into the archipelago’s contiguous zone and 10 times into its territorial waters in March 2024.[43] There were only 10 days since April 1, 2023, without CCG incursions into the contiguous waters.

Source: Japan Coast Guard

The PRC is framing growing US-Japan military cooperation as a threat to the PRC. The Japanese Parliament passed its record $48 billion defense budget on March 28 for the fiscal year beginning April 1. This is the same budget the Cabinet approved in December. MFA spokesperson Lin Jian said Japan’s annually increasing defense budget, relaxation of restrictions on arms exports, and breakthrough military developments raise “strong doubts” about whether Japan is sincerely focused on defense and peaceful development. He urged Japan to respect the security concerns of its neighbors, “deeply reflect on its history of aggression,” and avoid “further breaking the trust of its Asian neighbors.”[44] MOD spokesperson Wu Qian framed the possibility of Japanese technical cooperation with AUKUS as a “dangerous step in a more dangerous direction.”[45] Foreign Minister Wang Yi met former Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda and urged Japan to “do more things conducive to regional peace and stability, rather than the opposite.”[46] PRC state-owned tabloid Global Times claimed the US-Japan alliance is evolving into an “axis of evil” that threatens regional stability and cited scholars who claimed the US recruitment of Japan to participate in trilateral US-Philippines-Japan patrols in the South China Sea was part of a US attempt to “consume allies’ resources and weaken China.”[47] US President Joe Biden will host Japan Prime Minister Fumio Kishida on April 10 to discuss enhanced military cooperation.[48]

Southeast Asia

Philippines

A flotilla of PLA Southern Theater Command naval warships carried out live-fire drills in an unspecified area of the South China Sea on the weekend of March 30. The drills included fire targeting an armed militia fishing boat and an enemy jet. The drills followed separate daytime and nighttime exercises in the South China Sea that the PLAN carried out on an unspecified date in early spring.[49] State-owned tabloid Global Times quoted PRC analysts who said the drills signaled that the PRC will be on “high alert” regardless of US, Philippine, or Japanese activities in the region.[50]

4. COMPOUND MARITIME (IN)SECURITY Strong pointing Trade Security & Profitability in the Global ‘Un-Commons’ thru “3D+C” Integrated Statecraft Solutions (a ‘compound security competition’ (CsC) use case) By Isaiah (Ike) Wilson III, PhD

A long read. the full article can be accessed here: https://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/compound-maritime-insecurity

As I reflect on this (and as someone not of the naval services), I can see how important maritime security is to our future. Yes we have to deal with the human domain that is on the land but we must never neglect the maritime domain. It is critically important.

Tomorrow we will publish a following Fictional Intelligence piece (FICINT

Conclusion:

In conclusion, we call for – and propose – an integrated approach to sustain maritime security with a firm eye on strategic choke points (Wilson, 2024). Recommendations to mitigate the risk of choke point disruptions include modernizing technology for risk management, increased foreign direct investment in infrastructure within fragile chokepoint countries, promoting ratification and effective governance under the Law of the Sea Convention (1982), and developing more efficient shipping mechanisms such as larger DWT vessels (Busby et al., 2012; Ibarrarán et al., 2008; OTW, 1961). The integration of these prescriptions into policy measures aims to fortify global trade networks, reduce vulnerabilities, and ensure security in a way that satisfies both commercial interests and strategic defense objectives, while also fostering international collaboration for enduring maritime security (Smitson, 2024; Thiel, Blomquist, & Garrick, 2019). Finally, this approach underscores the importance of "compound" Maritime Domain Awareness (MDA) and the need for novel security coordination models, especially those that weave in commercial-business stakeholders into the supported-supporting architectures for operational planning and implementation (OECD, 2022). The goal is to build a robust, multifaceted integrative response that is proactive rather than reactive, and that addresses the security concerns at their geographic points of origin with a well-orchestrated symphony of international cooperation and strategic foresight.

Conclusions and Policy Recommendations:  Understanding of the intersectionalities of disruptive threats on maritime choke points will need a multifaceted integrative statecraft mechanism to build, assure, and secure strong maritime world-wide trade, and most importantly, at reduced vulnerability and loss of profits, particularly at or proximate to maritime choke points. We believe this “mechanism” needs to be an innovation-outside the standard security coordination models, with commercial-business stakeholders playing a more intimate integrated role in the supported-supporting architectures for planning and implementation of “compound” Maritime Domain Awareness (MDA)-enabled operations, actions, and activities (OAAs). Thus, Some recommendations for mitigation of risks in choke points closures:

Sat, 04/06/2024 - 12:33pm

Epilogue ...

Imagine, ... in a tension-gripped year of 2028, the world inches towards a novel kind of warfare—one that sprawls across the arteries of international trade, the maritime chokepoints.

In the Strait of Hormuz, an insidious cyber onslaught disrupts the flow of oil, sending the United States and China into a scramble of military posturing and peace-brokering. A drone strike targeting a vessel in the Suez Canal escalates tensions, with fingers pointing towards Chinese military strategists, compelling the US to strengthen its Mediterranean fleet and Russia to show off its naval capabilities in response.

In the South China Sea, Chinese AI drones aggressively assert dominance, intimidating neighboring nations into a fraught dance of diplomacy and deterrence. The Panama Canal, too, falls prey to cyber interference, triggering delays that highlight the influence of Russian digital operatives and stretching American naval defenses.

Dramatically altering the naval chessboard, Russia and China join forces to pioneer the Northern Sea Route, proposing an alternative to the conventional maritime corridors dominated by Western powers and introducing a bold challenge to the status quo.

Even as the Black Sea burgeons with tension and Brazil's southern ports enter the stage as geopolitical prizes, the consequences of disrupted global commerce are felt worldwide—from soaring costs to shattered economies.

With the international community in tumult, the UN convenes to address the shattering potential of widespread conflict. Secretive diplomatic endeavors aim to forge a semblance of agreement, yet the enduring undercurrent of rivalry casts a long shadow over the future of international maritime law and the collective hope for enduring peace.

This foretold story is a near-future thriller. "The Battle of the Straits: A Geopolitical Maelstrom," weaves a tale of clandestine cyber skirmishes and shadowy military maneuvers that threaten the delicate lattice of global commerce.

The storyline unravels across several strategic locations. Terse and potent, the story captures the real-world implications of these clashes: disrupted supply chains, skyrocketing costs of trade, and an ever-complicating global political matrix of alliances and enmities. As nations grapple with these emerging threats, the narrative explores the repercussions for local economies, marking a stark rise in regional tensions and an accelerating arms race.

"The Battle of the Straits" ends as a stark allegory for the potential crises that might arise from the world's growing geopolitical fissures—where the all-too-real game of nations plays out in the waters that carry the lifeblood of global trade. 

Unfortunately, this stark allegory told as a useful fiction is now an actuality, of a world where the stability, security, and prosperity of the ‘Global (Maritime) Commons’, are now rapidly becoming a deadly “Un-Commons.”

Future security, prosperity, and profits lie in the balance of ‘winning’ this “Battle of the Straits” now begun; most importantly, doing so in preventive ‘ways’ that can achieve ‘wins’ without fighting.   

COMPOUND MARITIME (IN)SECURITY

Strong pointing Trade Security & Profitability in the Global ‘Un-Commons’ thru “3D+C” Integrated Statecraft Solutions

(a ‘compound security competition’ (CsC) use case)

By Isaiah (Ike) Wilson III, PhD

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Challenges to maritime security, especially in choke points like the Red Sea, threaten global trade and present complex, ‘compound security’ issues. These challenges include military threats to navigation that affect energy supplies, economic stability, and efforts to address climate insecurity issues, and especially through energy transition. The United States' Operation Prosperity Guardian seeks to safeguard the waters of the Red Sea and the Bab al Mandeb strait but has had limited success. Current military and diplomatic strategies are inadequate to fully protect these vital economic lifelines, hence the need for a multifaceted "3D+C" approach—combining Defense, Diplomacy, Development, and Commercial strategies.

Maritime security directly influences financial stability. Disruptions in choke points impact global markets, hindering trade and inflating costs. These threats pose economic risks at global, regional, and local levels, potentially affecting investment confidence, pricing, and livelihoods. An integrated "3D+C" approach is crucial for ensuring a secure and stable maritime trading environment to mitigate those risks. Foreign Direct Investments (FDIs) in choke point regions can bolster local economies, enhance security infrastructure, and contribute to regional stability. Strategic investments can transform local choke points into assets of regional stability by improving employment, economic planning, and governance.

The proposal promotes a state-centric, private-public partnered maritime security solution, where governments maintain control and leverage commercial investments. It contrasts with privatized security models, ensuring that key decisions are guided by collective good and strategic foresight rather than by purely profit motives. Human security is a fundamental component of this strategy. Protecting and empowering individuals in choke point regions is essential, fostering safer conditions for maritime activity and reinforcing the socio-political fabric against potential security threats.

Conclusively, an integrated “3D+C” approach, with a focus on state control and investments in human and local security, offers a robust solution to maritime security challenges. It aligns defense, diplomacy, development, and commercial interests, ensuring safe navigation and stability in maritime choke points, contributing to global economic growth and prosperity. Such a holistic approach ensures the protection of commerce, local communities, and the global supply chain.

Continued at this link: https://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/compound-maritime-insecurity

5. In Six Months, Everything Has Changed for Israel

War changes everything.

"You must not fight too often with one enemy, or you will teach him all your art of war."

– Bonaparte

In Six Months, Everything Has Changed for Israel

Nation that was building new alliances before Oct. 7 now appears as isolated as ever

https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/in-six-months-everything-has-changed-for-israel-5c5130e9?mod=hp_lead_pos1

By Shayndi RaiceFollow and Dov LieberFollow

Updated April 7, 2024 12:03 am ET

TEL AVIV—On Oct. 6, Israel appeared on the cusp of a new era of recognition from the Muslim world, close to a peace deal with Saudi Arabia that would move it to the center of a realigned Middle East after years on its fringes. The historic conflict with the Palestinians that had defined its existence for most of its 75-year history appeared to have finally receded into the background. 

It all changed on Oct. 7.

Today, after a bloody attack that might have brought it the world’s sympathy, Israel is closer to being a global pariah than ever before. Its Saudi peace deal is on hold. The Palestinian question is again roiling its Arab neighbors. It is in open argument with its main ally, the U.S. And its physical living space has been shrunk by dangers on its northern and southern borders. 

In six months, the world has turned upside down for this small nation. On Oct. 7—or Black Sabbath, as Israelis now call it—the Jewish state experienced a fundamental shock that upended its sense of security and belief in the strength of its military. It responded with a heavy-handed invasion of Gaza that in much of the world’s eyes left it the aggressor and its attackers the victims. The resulting isolation could be more of a threat to its future than the attack by Hamas that killed 1,200 people on Oct. 7. 

“Israel’s longevity is in question for the first time since its birth,” said Benny Morris, an Israeli historian. The only time Israel faced a similar existential threat, he said, was in its war for independence in 1948, when it battled five Arab countries and local Palestinian militias. 

An Israeli strike on World Central Kitchen vehicles on Monday led to the suspension of some aid efforts in Gaza. PHOTO: ISMAEL ABU DAYYAH/ASSOCIATED PRESS

A family was in mourning in Rafah on Thursday. PHOTO: FATIMA SHBAIR/ASSOCIATED PRESS

The outpouring of global sympathy on display after the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust has dwindled, having been replaced by images of starving and dead Palestinians in Gaza. Images projected across the world show swaths of the Gaza Strip turned into rubble. More than 33,000 Palestinians have been killed, according to Palestinian health authorities, whose numbers don’t distinguish between combatants and civilians.

This week, the killing of seven aid workers trying to feed desperate Gazans appears to have punctured the notion for much of the world that the Israeli military isn’t running amok in Gaza and has caused a rethink by the U.S. about its support for Israel. 

Normalization with Saudi Arabia is on hold, while ties with Arab allies such as Egypt and Jordan have frayed. Pro-Palestinian protesters have thronged the streets of Western capitals, at times calling for Israel’s demise. A surge in antisemitism has shocked and alarmed not only Israelis but Jews across the globe. It is all strengthening a feeling inside Israel that the country can only rely on itself. 

Israel faces a dilemma where it wants to be loved by the West, but needs to be feared by its enemies in the Middle East to ensure its long-term existence, said Micah Goodman, an Israeli author and philosopher. 

“That’s the catch-22 we’re in,” he said. 

Many Israelis who evacuated from the Lebanon border are living in temporary housing such as this hotel on a northern Israel kibbutz. PHOTO: ARIEL SCHALIT/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Israel, about the size of New Jersey, has had its livable land space diminished. Hundreds of thousands of displaced Israelis from the Gaza periphery and the northern border near Lebanon have been evacuated from their homes. Many have moved back to communities in the south, but none have been able to return to communities in the north. Many are still living in hotels. 

As the war in Gaza drags on, Israelis still don’t know if the worst has yet to come. 

The West Bank is on edge. A full-blown war with the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, which is far more powerful than Hamas and has been fighting Israel since Oct. 8, appears more likely with each passing day. Israel is also bracing for retaliation by Iran or one of its allied militias for a suspected Israeli airstrike Monday on an Iranian diplomatic building in Syria. 

Israel has only begun to feel the economic impact the war is having, as hundreds of thousands of reservists have been forced to leave their jobs to fight in the war. 

Amid all this, Israel has achieved neither of its war goals of returning all the hostages abducted on Oct. 7 and successfully routing Hamas from Gaza. 

The push to recover hostages abducted by Hamas has been at the forefront of Israel’s wartime protest movement. PHOTO: EYAL WARSHAVSKY/ZUMA PRESS

A scene in November of an Israeli kibbutz near the Gaza Strip that was attacked by Hamas. PHOTO: LEO CORREA/ASSOCIATED PRESS

For Israel’s political leadership, Oct. 7 challenged the notion that the conflict with the Palestinians could be contained with a mix of security measures and economic incentives, rather than through a peace accord. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s tenure was marked by the belief that he could continue to divide Palestinian leadership between the Palestinian Authority, which controls the West Bank, and Hamas in Gaza, thereby avoiding the need to negotiate a two-state solution. Israel believed it could thrive economically, politically and militarily despite a continuing occupation in the West Bank and hostile actors at its southern and northern borders. Normalcy was a promise that appeared to have been delivered but was then shattered. 

“This approach collided with a brick wall and proved to be a complete failure on Oct. 7,” said Yohanan Plesner, president of the Jerusalem-based Israel Democracy Institute.

All this is taking place as Israelis remain divided over the country’s leadership and the government’s handling of the war. Netanyahu’s right-wing, ultranationalist and religiously conservative coalition is once again under attack by antigovernment protesters calling for new elections. Divisions among members of Netanyahu’s own war cabinet over how to give priority to the competing war aims of rescuing hostages and destroying Hamas have spilled into public view, deepening the sense that the leadership is fighting itself while also fighting a war. 

All the while, Netanyahu has delayed a plan for who will rule postwar Gaza, saying a Palestinian state is off the table and refusing to work with the Palestinian Authority. 

It is adding up to a situation where, despite many tactical wins on the ground in Gaza, a strategic victory for Israel appears far off. 

In six months, the Israeli military has seen many tactical achievements. Around 40% of Hamas’s tunnel system has been destroyed, 18 out of 24 battalions dismantled, the majority of rockets destroyed and many senior Hamas commanders killed. Israel now has freedom of action in most of Gaza. 

Netanyahu says victory is near, but a majority of the country, polls show, isn’t convinced. 

Hamas shows no signs of surrendering. Hamas operatives are able to infiltrate areas as soon as Israeli troops withdraw, a sign that an insurgency is building. 

Mounting tensions with the Biden administration are limiting Israel’s options over the final battle for Rafah, the Gazan city that borders Egypt and where Israel says Hamas has four remaining battalions. More than one million Palestinians are sheltering there.

The U.S., however, has warned Israel that it would be crossing a red line if it operates in Rafah without a credible plan to keep the civilian population safe, which U.S. officials say Israel hasn’t presented. 

Netanyahu has said that if necessary, Israel will operate in Rafah without American approval.

“If we take Rafah but lose America, we’ve lost the war,” said Goodman.

The ruins of war in the Gaza Strip. PHOTO: MAHMOUD ISSA/REUTERS

Write to Shayndi Raice at Shayndi.Raice@wsj.com and Dov Lieber at dov.lieber@wsj.com

6. A Warlord Turns to Death, Rape and Rap Videos to Expand Control in Haiti

Chaos on our doorstep continues.

A Warlord Turns to Death, Rape and Rap Videos to Expand Control in Haiti

‘Gonna whack them all,’ says the gang chief known as Izo; veteran law enforcers are stunned by the level of violence as the country spirals toward disaster

https://www.wsj.com/world/americas/a-warlord-turns-to-death-rape-and-rap-videos-to-expand-control-in-haiti-8882f1f8?mod=hp_lead_pos11

By Kejal Vyas

Follow

April 6, 2024 9:00 am ET

Johnson Andre, the Haitian gang boss known as Izo, re-enacts a failed police raid of his Port-au-Prince slum in a rap video posted on social media.

After heavily armed gangsters burst open the gates of Haiti’s National Penitentiary last month, a warlord called Izo posted a video on his popular TikTok account showing a crowd of freed inmates cheering him on after he had landed yet another blow against Prime Minister Ariel Henry’s crumbling government.

“Ariel in Izo’s hands, kicked him out, kicked him out,” prisoners chanted in a courtyard.

The prison raid was a brazen display of strength by the gangs and particularly Izo, whose real name is Johnson Andre, a 20-something rapper who has quickly emerged from obscurity to become one of the country’s most-feared gang bosses.

“Gonna whack them all,” Andre said in a TikTok post directed to his rivals. “Going to snort cocaine and kill everyone who hates me.”

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Amid a surge of violence, Haiti’s Prime Minister Ariel Henry agreed to resign. While international backers say a transitional council will pave the way for elections, heavily armed gangs have tightened their grip on the country. Photo Illustration: Todd Johnson

Andre, along with his so-called Five Seconds Gang, has surged to prominence during the past few years and has expanded his control over the ports and coastline used for drugs and weapons smuggling. Along the way, he has systematically used the world’s most popular social-media platforms to recruit more foot soldiers and sow terror, posing a major challenge for the international security force that the U.S. and its allies are trying to deploy to stabilize a country fast falling into anarchy and starvation, security researchers and the United Nations say. 

On Friday, TikTok banned Andre’s account, which had 227,000 followers, joining Alphabet’s YouTube and Meta—the parent of WhatsApp and 

Facebook—in curbing the spread of his content, in which he ridiculed Haitian politicians, rapped about killing police officers, and showed off new fatigues and military-grade weapons. “We stand firmly against violent extremism, and we work aggressively to identify and remove content and accounts that break these rules,” a TikTok spokesperson said.The videos from Andre, who rarely speaks to the mainstream press, had for business and political leaders become an important window into the murky world of gangs that have brought Haiti’s government to its knees. Haitian police, the United Nations and the U.S. blame Andre for much of the mayhem. They accuse him of homicide, rape, drug-running, kidnapping for extortion and hijacking vehicles that transport food and fuel. His gang has been one of the most active in the forced recruitment of child soldiers, the U.N. says, and has pushed thousands of civilians from their homes at gunpoint to solidify control over slums.

A man near the prison area in Haiti’s capital last month keeps his head down because of nearby gunfire, after armed gangs freed close to 5,000 inmates. PHOTO: CLARENS SIFFROY/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

When sanctioning Andre in December, the U.S. Treasury Department said he and his gang were responsible for more than 1,000 cases of sexual violence in 2022.

Andre didn’t respond to requests for comment directed to his social-media accounts before they were banned. He couldn’t be reached for comment by other means. 

The sheer violence of Andre’s methods—and the publication of the attacks on social media and messaging apps like WhatsApp—have astonished even experienced officials who have worked in Haiti.

“What’s new is the cruelty and public humiliation,” said Bill O’Neill, the United Nations’ top human-rights expert on Haiti.

He described how videos of rapes, sometimes in front of family members, are disseminated on the web. “Never seen this before. Never on this level,” said O’Neill, a 30-year veteran in Haiti who helped author a 156-page U.N. Security Council report on the gangs.

In a country with some 300 gangs, Andre and his Five Seconds Gang have stood out for their self-promotion.

Stocky, his hair and nails painted vibrant colors, and often brandishing metallic grills over his teeth, the baby-faced Andre had posted almost daily. “Mission failed,” he raps in one choreographed and edited music video where he and fellow gangsters re-enact a thwarted police raid that left an officer dead and another a hostage.

Andre revels in the chaos, unlike Haiti’s other gang chiefs, such as Jimmy “Barbecue” Chérizier, who often lace their speeches with revolutionary rhetoric and claim to be liberating their nation from oppression by foreign imperialists and powerful oligarchs. In recent months, the most prominent among them have struck a temporary alliance to oust the unpopular Henry government and discourage the arrival of international peacekeeping forces, but the detente is fragile, gang experts say. And Andre in his videos has tried to outshine the others by claiming he is the most ruthless of them all.

“With others, it’s a message of social justice. With Izo, it’s, ‘The world has gone to hell, and I’m the biggest devil,’” said Vanda Felbab-Brown, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who researches armed groups in the Americas and Africa. 

The growing power of Izo marks an evolution in Haiti’s complex gang dynamics, security experts say, one that makes controlling the country harder than before. 

For years, powerful political movements and business groups had financed and used gangs as enforcers, to control territory and fend off rivals. But Andre has spread his control to ports and coastline, making the Five Seconds Gang rich from the trafficking of weapons and drugs. 

He also has a fleet of boats that his gang has allegedly robbed, which Felbab-Brown says gives him more maritime might than Haiti’s beleaguered coast guard. 

“We’re seeing gangs act more and more autonomously and no longer depend on political handouts,” said Nathalye Cotrino, who tracks gangs for New York-based Human Rights Watch. “Now we have gangs that are not interested in anything political, just continuing in their criminal activities.”

That makes Andre particularly difficult to rein in, as Haiti’s political establishment struggles to organize a new transitional council that would name a new prime minister to succeed Henry, who said last month that he would resign, and welcome a Kenya-led international police force to bring order. Henry is outside Haiti, unable to return since embarking on a trip to meet with officials in Kenya.

Andre commands his Five Seconds Gang from a large Port-au-Prince home in a portside slum dubbed Village of God. A photograph taken from above and published in the U.N. report shows a soccer field and large pool in his gated compound, which is sandwiched between tin-roofed shanties. 

The pool is a prominent fixture in Andre’s social-media videos, where he can be seen swimming and cooling off. In one, he counts a wad of $100 bills and gulps down cognac. In another post, he shows off a snazzy designer suit while a rap song interlaced with gunfire plays in the background. Others show him DJ-ing, liquor bottle in hand, as gang members in brightly colored balaclavas dance.

One large business owner in Haiti described Andre’s gang as nihilistic, citing its burning of schools, hospitals and the few remaining factories in the country. The gang has also taken control over hundreds of shipping containers holding everything from commercial merchandise to humanitarian-aid supplies. 

“They want to destroy, destroy, destroy,” said the business owner. He added that his factory has to frequently turn off its power generators so that the noise from the motor doesn’t attract the attention of gangsters.

O’Neill, the U.N. rights official, said that after Andre raided the prison last month, he incorporated numerous inmates into his gang, including Dimitri Herard, a former head of the presidential guard who had been locked up on charges of conspiring in the 2021 assassination of President Jovenel Moise.

“He’s giving training, vehicles, gear” to Andre’s gang, O’Neill said of Herard.

The gang’s recruitment efforts have been bolstered by Andre’s ubiquitous social-media presence, which appears difficult to contain.

Last year, Andre was banned from YouTube after he received a silver plaque from the platform for surpassing 100,000 subscribers, which triggered a public campaign by activists to remove him from the site because of his role in violence.

But smaller, alternate accounts on YouTube continue to publish his videos. A YouTube spokesman said Andre is prohibited from posting on the platform, which is also working to terminate channels that prominently feature him. The site on Thursday took down one account with 70,000 followers, which had drawn millions of views, in response to questions from The Wall Street Journal.

Meta said it is using artificial intelligence to help weed out content from Andre and other large criminal organizations.

Andre, center, in one of his videos on YouTube. He has tried to outshine other gang chiefs by claiming to be the most ruthless.

Andre’s use of social media mirrors strategies that in recent years helped other insurgent and criminal organizations expand their footprint, like al-Shabaab in East Africa, Mexican cartels and the Brazilian prison syndicate First Capital Command, said Felbab-Brown. The videos, she added, are used to stoke fear in rivals but also serve as advertising to South American cocaine smugglers who have long used Haiti as a transit hub for U.S.- and Europe-bound drug shipments.

His videos have helped lure more members to the gang, which is made up largely of young men from Haiti’s poorest enclaves who work for food, guns, phones and money, according to the U.N. report. 

But where in the past barefoot gangsters wore torn and stained clothing, they are now in fresh uniforms, carry heavy weapons and pose in front of new Toyota pickup trucks, the videos show. They also showcase their tactical sophistication publishing videos recorded with drones that document strikes against Haitian National Police. The U.N. said drones are also used to surveil territory and plan kidnappings.

“This is like a professional studio that came in. My videos don’t look like that, and we have a team!” Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick (D., Fla.), the only Haitian American serving in Congress, said after seeing Andre’s posts recently. With the average age in Haiti at about 24 years, “it seems like they’re putting out these propaganda videos to recruit, to show how wonderful it is to be part of the gangs,” she added.

O’Neill, the U.N. rights official, said that though their barbarity is shocking, the posts the gang members have published on social media might one day be used against them. 

“Maybe we’ll be able down the road to identify them and bring them to justice,” he said.

Ingrid Arnesen contributed to this article.

Write to Kejal Vyas at kejal.vyas@wsj.com

7. The Guantánamo Spy Who Wasn’t

Quite a story:

Excerpts:

One by one, nearly every allegation in the case evaporated. The government could not prove that Al-Halabi had emailed classified documents. Arabic writing found in his room was deemed to be typical articles of Islamic faith.

Nearly 10 months into the hearing, as the charges continued to be dismissed, the military judge turned to Al-Halabi and said, “You’re not going to be in confinement tomorrow,” he remembers. It was “the most beautiful sentence” he had ever heard. He had been in custody for 295 days, and he was suddenly, unexpectedly free. He would still need to come back to court, but he would not spend another night in detention.

Al-Halabi eventually pleaded guilty to four violations. He did take unauthorized photos, and he did lie at first to investigators about them. He did move classified documents from his Afghanistan assignment to his Guantánamo quarters improperly. And he did mail documents to his quarters in Travis Air Force Base and retained them without authorization. The military judge sentenced him to time served. After the trial, the Air Force released a statement: “The case demonstrated the fairness and effectiveness of the military justice system,” Col. John Kellogg said. “As the evidence evolved, the charges were reduced accordingly.”

In late November 2004, Rana flew with her father from the U.A.E. to Travis Air Force Base to meet him. On Dec. 1, she and Al-Halabi were married at the Solano County courthouse in California. Al-Halabi would have to spend the next several months being debriefed, but the newlyweds were still thrilled to be in each other’s company.

...

But when his father’s health started to decline, Al-Halabi decided to return to Dearborn in 2015 to be with him. His father died of cancer four years later. By then, Al-Halabi and Rana had decided they would stay. Enough time had passed. Dearborn seemed different, America seemed different — far from the fear and anxiety of those early post-9/11 years. Al-Halabi, who now works for a nonprofit group helping refugees, started to think back on his military service with pride.

Al-Halabi tailgates at University of Michigan football games, where he has joined a veterans’ group. He recently translated a document that a war-memorabilia collector brought to show the group. “I told him, ‘This is letterhead from Saddam Hussein’s desk,’ and he went crazy,” Al-Halabi says. “He was so happy to finally know what it was. And it made me happy.”

He says he sometimes thinks about working for the government again, if they could use him. He would translate, he says, but not just language: culture. The world could use that now, he thinks.

In a way, he says, his first instinct on the very day of his arrest turned out to be true: It was all a misunderstanding. And somehow, in the end, as he had felt sure it would be — but not before the days and nights of anxiety and not before the dashing of his early dreams — it was all cleared up.

The Guantánamo Spy Who Wasn’t

Ahmad Al-Halabi was an immigrant who did the most American thing possible: join the military. Then the U.S. government accused him of espionage.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/04/magazine/guantanamo-spy-case.html

By Tamara Audi

Tamara Audi is a journalist based in Los Angeles. For this article, she revisits a case she covered 20 years ago for The Detroit Free Press.

• April 4, 2024

It was all a big mistake. Ahmad Al-Halabi was sure this had to be some sort of misunderstanding that he could clear up before his flight in a few hours.

It was July 2003, and Al-Halabi, a 24-year-old American citizen and Air Force airman, was being escorted through the naval air station in Jacksonville, Fla., by four government agents who said they wanted to talk to him. They walked him into an empty bathroom, where they searched his pockets and removed a small Quran that he always carried as an observant Muslim. They told him they had some questions, but they didn’t want to talk in the restroom; he would have to come with them. Al-Halabi told them he was worried about making his flight, but he agreed. They told him they were going to handcuff him.

“Why?” he asked.

“We’ll explain as soon as we can,” one officer said.

A jacket covered his handcuffed wrists but hardly hid the spectacle: A young man in jeans and a Tommy Hilfiger T-shirt, surrounded by four men, one on either side, one behind him and one in front. The terminal was crowded with people — some of them could be his co-workers. He was too embarrassed to look up, but he felt their eyes on him. The agents led him to a waiting car and drove to a small office nearby.

He wondered if this was about his leave. Al-Halabi had been serving as a translator at Guantánamo Bay, America’s sprawling detention center on the eastern edge of Cuba for hundreds of foreigners held as terrorists in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks. He was traveling to Syria for his wedding. The trip required many days of travel; the paperwork was complicated. Had he done something wrong? Or had something happened in Guantánamo?

Call my supervisor at Travis, Al-Halabi urged the agents, referring to his home base in California; he will explain my travel has been cleared.

Instead, the agents asked him what he knew about Wahhabism, an austere form of Islam tied to Al Qaeda. They asked him if he ever took photos inside the detention facilities.

No, Al-Halabi said.

The agents showed him pictures of fences and a guard tower at Guantánamo Bay and asked him if he recognized the images. Well, yeah, maybe, he said. He had taken pictures to test a disposable camera and then lost the camera, he told them. He didn’t know what had happened to it. Maybe he had broken a rule, but he figured it wasn’t a big deal.

All he could think about was getting back to the airport. He reminded the agents over and over that he had a flight to catch.

“It doesn’t look like you’re going to make that flight,” he recalls one saying.

He still thought that whatever was happening could be fixed quickly. He had, in his eight months translating for the U.S. military, seen his share of misinterpretations — lousy translations that could easily have dire consequences. Once, in a letter written by a detainee, a translator misunderstood the name of a 13th-century writer for the Arabic word for nuclear, which it resembled. Al-Halabi had to clarify that the man was not requesting books about nuclear weapons.

At times like that, he saw himself as a helpful bridge between the worlds he inhabited: military and Muslim, American and Arab. But experiences like those now made him feel overwhelmed and frightened. Some of the Guantánamo detainees seemed to him to have landed in detention through a mix of bad luck and bad information. Now here he was, another Muslim suspected of something nefarious.

After questioning, he was taken for a medical exam, during which he pleaded with the doctor for help. “You know, sir, believe me, I’m innocent,” he told him. The doctor said he was there only to make sure Al-Halabi was healthy. Officials then stripped him naked, he says, and told him to squat, so they could make sure he wasn’t hiding anything on or in his body. He was given prison clothes, and someone ordered him to stand straight. His holding cell had a bed wrapped in plastic, a metal toilet and a small window. He could see a storm raging outside.

That first night in jail was “the worst night of my life,” Al-Halabi recalls. He lay on the bed, exhausted but unable to sleep, his mind circling around the same questions: What did I say wrong for me to be here? How do I tell my mom? What the hell is happening?

Two days later, he finally learned the answer: The U.S. government said Al-Halabi was a spy.

Federal prosecutors would file 30 charges against Al-Halabi, including espionage and aiding the enemy. Two other men that Al-Halabi worked with at Gitmo were also arrested and charged: Captain James Yee, a Muslim chaplain and Al-Halabi’s friend, and a civilian translator on the base, Ahmed Mehalba. Military officials suggested in interviews at the time that they had broken up a spy ring on the base made up of Muslim and Arab American service members and contractors.

The charges against Al-Halabi included accusations that he emailed classified information, took unauthorized photos of the base, lied to investigators and mishandled classified documents. Investigators claimed he was passing sensitive information about the base and its prisoners to an agent of the Syrian government. The espionage charge could carry the death penalty.

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Al-Halabi, middle, leaves court with his father, Ibrahim, right, and members of his defense team during his trial at Travis Air Force Base, Calif., in 2004.Credit...Photograph by Marcio Jose Sanchez/Associated Press

“I didn’t know what espionage was,” Al-Halabi says. “I had to look it up.” As his lawyers read the charge sheet, Al-Halabi was “shocked and horrified,” he says. “I was telling my lawyer: ‘No, this is a lie. They are wrong.’” He remembers thinking, Maybe if I tell my lawyer, “No, it’s not true,” they will listen to her. Years later, he laughs aloud at how naïve that sounds. “How could I think like that? I was truly just trying to get by. I was just trying to be a good soldier.”

In 2003, the nation was still raw from 9/11. The last piece of steel from the twisted remains of the twin towers was removed from ground zero only the previous year. The war in Iraq had just begun. The Department of Homeland Security had just been created. For the nation, the charges against Al-Halabi, Yee and Mehalba captured the country’s worst fears — enemies could live among us and infiltrate our defenses.

Since the attacks, the New York City Police Department had been surveilling Muslim neighborhoods. In Southern California, the F.B.I. sent an informant into mosques. Federal prosecutors brought terrorism cases across the country. Muslim truck drivers, waiters and tourists were swept into investigations, interrogations and prosecutions that almost invariably led to lesser convictions or, in some cases, fell apart.

No case more perfectly captured the fear-driven frenzy of those post-9/11 years than the Guantánamo Bay spying case, perhaps the highest-profile collapse of them all.

In less than a year, all the criminal charges against Yee were dropped. Mehalba served 17 months for removing a disk of classified information from the base so he could continue to work and taking it with him while traveling to Egypt to visit family. Al-Halabi spent nearly 10 months in confinement awaiting his trial’s resolution, even as many of the charges against him were dropped, including the most serious ones of espionage and aiding the enemy.

He entered four guilty pleas and was given a bad-conduct discharge from the Air Force. He left the United States and faded from headlines.

I wrote about Al-Halabi’s case for The Detroit Free Press in 2003. I spoke to his father, sister, lawyers and friends and traveled to Guantánamo Bay to talk to his commanders and see where he had lived and worked. But I had never spoken to Al-Halabi, who was in custody at the time. The case seemed extraordinary: The government said he was a dangerous traitor; his father told me he was a sensitive boy whose “heart is pure.”

Several years ago, Al-Halabi friended me on Facebook. I was always curious about how he felt about being wrongfully accused of spying and also how he felt about America and his place in it. He had decided to return to Dearborn, the Arab American enclave outside Detroit, when his father became ill and then stayed after his death. In 2022, we spoke for the first time by phone, nearly 20 years after his arrest. He said he was ready to tell his story.

I met Al-Halabi at a large, popular Middle Eastern restaurant in Dearborn on a cold afternoon last year. I got there early and watched for the man the government once said was a spy. In walked a tired-looking father, now 45, carrying a chubby-faced baby. Rana, the woman he was on his way to wed when he was arrested, stood beside him with their three daughters and young son. We took a large table in a corner. The children bounced in their seats. His oldest, 16-year-old Lian, quiet with attentive eyes, was the same age he was when he arrived in Dearborn from Syria. She focused on her phone, but her eyes darted up from time to time as she listened.

Over the din of clanking plates, Al-Halabi mentioned his time in jail. His youngest daughter, Taleen, froze. “Baba went to jail?” she asked, wide-eyed.

Al-Halabi paused. Lian stared at him from behind her screen.

“Well, not really,” Al-Halabi began, slowly. “I went to confinement, not jail. For example, if someone you know stole something, he goes to court and the judge says, ‘You go to jail for one year or two years.’ But when they put you in confinement, they just hold you in one place. You’re not supposed to go until they find the truth.”

The younger girl seemed appeased. Lian studied Al-Halabi. I asked her if she knew her father’s story. “I’ve heard of his case, but not the story,” she said.

“Honestly, I have mixed feelings,” Al-Halabi told me later about revisiting this moment in his past. “Like, I really don’t want to go through all this again. You know, open doors that I closed.” But he and Rana both agreed it was time. Their children would eventually learn the truth — the internet would mean they could easily stumble on it — and it was best for it to come from them. And after the ordeal he suffered, Al-Halabi somehow remained positive, even patriotic, about the country that had once called him a traitor. It was still his country, and he wanted his children to know it was theirs too.

“They all believe Omar can be president because he was born here,” he said at the restaurant. He thought it was possible, too. Omar, his youngest, grinned and drooled as he gnawed on a piece of bread.

He wanted his children to understand that “the system worked,” even when America was at its lowest moment. He was not executed; he was set free. His return to Dearborn, he said, was in a way a vote of confidence in the country’s future. “I’m optimistic,” he said.

It was an extraordinary thing to hear from a man whose experience so vividly reflected the anxieties of Arabs and Muslims in America after 9/11. In the months after the attacks, the communities were targeted by government officials searching for terrorists and recruiting informants. The F.B.I. questioned 5,000 Arab or Muslim men in the United States, nearly 600 of whom lived in southeastern Michigan, home to one of the largest concentrations of Arab and Muslim populations in the country. Among the questions they were asked: Do you know of anybody who is advocating, supporting or planning a terrorist attack of any kind? Do you know anyone raising money for terrorist activities?

Al-Halabi’s case deeply rattled Dearborn. Here was an immigrant kid who did the most American thing possible: join the military. And now, he was on trial for his life. Al-Halabi seemed like proof that even the most basic elements of your identity — your name, religion, accent, country of origin — could be used against you.

Al-Halabi arrived in Dearborn from Syria in 1996 as a painfully shy teenager who spoke very little English. He enrolled in high school as a freshman, and after school, joined his father and brother working in Middle Eastern restaurant kitchens.

His father had left for the United States years earlier to earn money in Dearborn. Before leaving, he explained to Al-Halabi, then around 10, that he would eventually come to America and, maybe, one day join a great military. That idea stuck in young Al-Halabi’s head.

In Michigan, he saw soldiers at parades and admired them. He thought that joining the American military would not only be “cool” but that he could “be part of a greater good.” He was even more thrilled to learn the military would help pay for his education. It was, for him, a path out of Dearborn’s kitchens and into a career. “I’m on Cloud Nine,” he remembers thinking at the time. “This is exactly what I want to do.”

He learned English quickly, and he was soon translating daily American life for his family, who were still not fluent. Many of the elderly or newer immigrants in the community often needed help, and they turned to Al-Halabi, too. “People would call me, like they would want to ship this package, so I would call FedEx, or call their credit-card company for missing a payment,” Al-Halabi told me. “For some reason, I got very good at it.” Within a few years, he felt he understood his new country and could help explain it to his community. And helping adults interact with the world was teaching him how that world worked.

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“A lot of individuals in Guantánamo were arrested and jailed for years on end,” Al-Halabi said. “And they’re innocent. I immediately thought that could be the case with me.” Credit...Wayne Lawrence for The New York Times

Soon after graduating from high school in 1999, he walked into a Marine recruiting office in suburban Detroit ready to enlist. But the recruiter erroneously told him he couldn’t join with only a green card; he needed to be a citizen.

“I said, ‘OK, fine,’ and I walked out of the Marines and into the Air Force,” Al-Halabi says. The Air Force recruiter gave him an aptitude test and offered him a position in logistics. The quiet teenager, who had been on an airplane only once, when he moved to America, left Dearborn to become an Air Force airman.

At Travis Air Force Base, a compound between San Francisco and Sacramento, Al-Halabi decorated his room with an American flag and posters of fighter jets. But his English, he discovered, was not as strong as he had believed. “Everyone was talking so fast,” he remembers. “There were all these new words.” He also found it hard to fit in when most of his colleagues liked to drink and party. “It wasn’t my scene,” he says.

As a clerk for the 60th Supply Squadron, he worked coordinating delivery loads onto massive C-5 airplanes. It was a lonely job that often required him to work nights, but Al-Halabi didn’t mind: The schedule allowed him to study English and take classes at a local college.

Two years later, he was on assignment in Kuwait, where his Arabic skills proved useful. His superiors were impressed with his meticulous record-keeping and could see that he was working hard to improve his English. In early 2001, he was named Outstanding Airman of the Year for his squadron and promoted to senior airman.

On the morning of Sept. 11, Al-Halabi was at breakfast at Travis when word of the attacks filtered out. When he learned who was behind the attacks, “it was devastating,” he says. It was the last thing Arabs and Muslims needed “as we’re trying to, you know, assimilate. And now we have this.”

He had little time to consider what, if anything, this might mean for him, though, because the base was put on high alert and his squadron went to work for 22 hours straight. He remembers being “shocked” at how fast everything was moving, how quickly the base shifted from the normal rhythms of military life to a wartime footing.

A couple weeks later, he says, federal agents came to visit him. They asked him if he knew anything about the attacks or if he knew anyone who had been flying that day. His father, he told them, was supposed to fly from Los Angeles to Detroit after visiting Al-Halabi’s sister, but his flight was canceled. The agents also asked if he felt discriminated against as a Muslim and Arab, and urged him to tell his commanders if he was singled out because of these identities.

That the agents would ask him about discrimination made him feel as if this country cared about him, but he also found himself wondering why they would think he had any information about a terror attack. Why would they come to him?

Al-Halabi became a U.S. citizen a few months later, and the next year, his superiors asked if he would be willing to serve as a translator at Guantánamo Bay, where the military was holding suspected terrorists. There weren’t enough Arabic speakers in the military, they told him, and Al-Halabi could put his language skills to use. He said yes, proud and excited to be able to be part of something so important.

Before Al-Halabi left for Guantánamo, he took personal leave to travel to the United Arab Emirates, where Rana lived, to ask her to marry him. The pair, who were introduced through Al-Halabi’s mother, had spoken and emailed frequently but never met. They decided that Rana would leave her family and become a military wife. “Getting things in motion was extremely important for me,” Al-Halabi says. “I was extremely hopeful.”

But even before he left for Guantánamo, he had become a target of the suspicions swirling around Muslims in the United States at the time. Some of those suspicions, voiced by his fellow service members, later found their way into interviews with investigators and witness statements during Al-Halabi’s trial. After his own lawyers interviewed Al-Halabi’s colleagues at Travis and Guantánamo, they found that some suspicions of Al-Halabi were tied directly to his religion and ethnicity.

One colleague told them that he started referring to Al-Halabi as “Taliban” because he thought it was odd he wanted to take his leave in the U.A.E.

A female service member told investigators that she was suspicious of phone calls Al-Halabi made to his father. “It was right after Sept. 11, so I was watching everything around me,” she later told Al-Halabi’s lawyers, noting that he was communicating in Arabic.

Al-Halabi says that at the time, he thought his tensions with this woman were nothing more than typical work politics: He didn’t like her and tried to avoid speaking to her. But to this woman, he was a Muslim being secretive about his activities. She grew so wary of him that she followed him around Travis Air Force Base one day. He drove to the parking lot of a store and looked at other cars for 15 minutes, never entering the store. She confronted him, she told Al-Halabi’s lawyers, telling him he was a terrorist. “He said, ‘I’m a U.S. citizen, I went to an American school.’ And I said that doesn’t make you a nonterrorist.”

Al-Halabi felt annoyed by this woman but wasn’t worried at the time. It wasn’t the first time he had heard these kinds of insults since 9/11. On another assignment in Kuwait, an Army master sergeant called him “Airman Al Qaeda.” It stung, but who would take an accusation like that seriously?

The whispers and allegations were not enough to prevent his superiors from deploying him. He traveled to the U.A.E. and got engaged to Rana and shortly after that deployed to Guantánamo Bay.

He knew he was not a spy, but he also knew innocent people could be killed by governments. Mistakes were made. America was at war.

In November 2002, Al-Halabi arrived at the heart of America’s global war on terror. The look of the sprawling base didn’t fit its reputation, with low-slung stucco houses that conjured the suburban neighborhoods of any American town. There was a high school for the children of the military families stationed there, a McDonald’s and a bowling alley. “It seemed nice,” Al-Halabi recalls. “It seemed like a normal place” with views of a beautiful blue-green sea.

When the prison first opened earlier that year, detainees were kept in open-air cages, known as Camp X-Ray, built far from where the officers and their families lived. Eventually, though, they were moved into more permanent cellblocks, called Camp Delta. An entire system was built to hold them, including a field hospital, a dental facility and interrogation rooms, all guarded by special units rotating in from around the United States.

Al-Halabi was assigned to a small group of linguists that included some Muslims as well as Arab Christians. The immediate need was for translations of letters the detainees were writing home, so that censors could black out sensitive information and also possibly glean intelligence. But soon new commanders on the base wanted the linguists to gather information in other ways: They directed them to walk the cellblocks and chat with detainees — a strategy of “passive intelligence” gathering.

These conversations caused friction with the military police guarding the cells, who began to see the linguists as sympathetic to the detainees. Guards, Al-Halabi says, called them “terrorists” and “detainee lovers” and threw in racist slurs. Al-Halabi felt caught between two groups of people, neither of whom respected the work he and the other translators were trying to do. The guards were suspicious of them but so were the detainees, who called them “infidels.”

The linguists were led by Capt. Tariq Hashim, who bonded with Al-Halabi over their shared Muslim faith. The two men befriended Yee, a Muslim convert who served as the Muslim chaplain on base. Yee was married to a Syrian woman and turned to Al-Halabi for help with dialect. Soon, the three men were spending free time together and worshiping together as well, Al-Halabi recalls.

Al-Halabi knew that the clique they formed might have rankled their peers, but he did not realize it also made them a target of suspicion. He would only learn this later, during his trial. One captain, an intelligence officer at Camp Delta, told investigators that the Muslim service members and civilian workers would pray “while non-Muslims were performing their duties.”

“They were fervent in their beliefs and encouraged other Muslims to participate in their religious activities,” he said in another statement, referring to Al-Halabi and his small circle of Muslim friends. “A lot of their religious beliefs mirrored those of the detainees.”

Looking back after his hearing, Al-Halabi thought there might be an additional explanation for his peers’ behavior: the cars. Cars were rare on the sprawling base, and not everyone was allowed to have them. The three men would drive to the beach together, pray and hang out around the base. “Having a means of transportation is a huge privilege,” Al-Halabi says. “And these two captains have cars and I’m friends with both of them. Wow.”

Even as Al-Halabi was becoming an object of distrust to his peers, he and the other linguists were also trying to meet the increasing demands of their work. In 10 months, Al-Halabi says he translated 2,750 documents and more than 2,000 interviews, in addition to reviewing the work of other translators.

The translators were under pressure to work as fast as they could, because detainees were complaining to the International Committee of the Red Cross that they weren’t getting their mail quickly enough. In the beginning, Al-Halabi hand-wrote his translations, because the military hadn’t provided enough computers for the team. A few translators began bringing their own laptops to work and connecting to the base’s network. Al-Halabi was one of them. Eventually, once the translators were allocated more computers, they were prohibited from connecting their own laptops to the network or downloading translated detainee documents onto them. This would become a critical point in the government’s case against him, which claimed, after later discovering translation files on his personal laptop, that he had downloaded classified information to an unapproved device. Al-Halabi and his lawyers argued that these were not sensitive or classified files, because he had created them himself in order to translate the original letters.

Al-Halabi’s case was further complicated by the fact that the more he learned about the detainees through this work, the more sympathetic he felt to many of them. He thought many of the detainees he met didn’t belong there. They were just insignificant people caught in a big net: a grocery-store owner, a driver, people sold out for cash rewards who had made enemies back home but didn’t know anything about terrorism.

“I’ve spoken to doctors, pharmacists, businessmen volunteering to, like, build a mosque or something,” Al-Halabi told me. “And they just get picked up.”

Al-Halabi began speaking up to his family and his colleagues on the base about how he felt. Once, when a detainee started mouthing off to an intelligence officer, Al-Halabi said to the officer: “How can you blame these guys for feeling this way? They don’t have attorneys and some of them are innocent.”

Those sentiments would later be used against him as prosecutors portrayed him as a terrorist sympathizer. After his own arrest, he said he realized that “a lot of individuals in Guantánamo were arrested and jailed for years on end,” he told me. “And they’re innocent. I immediately thought that could be the case with me.”

In early 2003, Al-Halabi was chosen to go to Afghanistan to pick up more detainees, a plum assignment that his colleagues resented him for, he says; they were convinced Captain Hashim, who oversaw the linguists, had played favorites.

Al-Halabi was given his travel and mission orders, which the military considered sensitive, although, he says, he didn’t understand what that meant at the time. “I wanted a souvenir of my work,” he says, so he kept them. It was dumb, he told me, but insisted it was not malicious. This was, however, one of the charges that stuck: Al-Halabi would later plead guilty to mishandling classified documents by taking them to his Guantánamo quarters in an unsecured manner.

Days after Al-Halabi was arrested, Rana, her parents and her siblings were waiting at the airport in Damascus to meet him and his mother for their wedding. He hadn’t been in contact for a week, and that wasn’t like him. She held bouquets of flowers to present to his mother, and strained to get a look at the people coming off their flights. Finally, she saw her. Al-Halabi’s mother was in tears. Al-Halabi was gone, she said. They hadn’t heard from him and had no idea where he was.

Some of Rana’s friends wondered if Al-Halabi was backing out of the wedding. She did not. “I just thought, Something is wrong,” Rana told me. More than a week later, they learned Al-Halabi had been arrested. Details were scant, and they didn’t know why, but Rana was flooded with relief, “OK, he’s alive,” she told herself.

The wedding was postponed. As worried as she was for Al-Halabi, she had no answers to offer her family and friends about where her groom was. Then, one morning, sitting at breakfast with her family, there was Al-Halabi on television, in his military uniform, accused of being a spy. Rana was in shock. Friends told her to leave him: They hardly knew each other; she was young; she could marry someone else.

“But I believed he was innocent,” she says. “All the world was against him.” She had made a decision: “I will not be against him.”

When I spoke with Rana and Al-Halabi at their home in Dearborn, she had recently recounted those anguished days to Lian, their oldest. Her daughter wanted to know how she could have stood by a man she barely knew and someone charged with spying at that. Rana repeated to her what she found herself saying over and over again: She just believed he was innocent. She told her daughter the same thing she told her own father 20 years earlier, “I will wait for him forever.”

During his months in confinement, she and Al-Halabi were allowed short phone calls with a military translator on the line. They didn’t talk about anything significant but took comfort from the sound of each other’s voices. Sometimes, though, those calls made her scared to leave her family for a strange and seemingly hostile land. What if they were already married when he was arrested? I will be alone by myself in America, she thought.

As the case dragged on, Al-Halabi started to feel his hope slip away. He knew he was not a spy, but he also knew innocent people could be killed by governments. Mistakes were made. America was at war. At one point, he heard that the military executes people by firing squad. He couldn’t sleep for weeks afterward.

“I couldn’t think of anything else,” he told me in Dearborn.

Sitting next to Al-Halabi on their living-room couch, Rana listened closely. “He hasn’t told me some of this,” she said to me.

Every job he applied for fell through. It was easy enough to search for his name on the internet and see that he had been charged with spying.

Among the accusations the government made was that Al-Halabi’s planned trip to Syria to marry Rana was part of his supposed spy mission. The letter he had received from the Syrian embassy approving his travel also gave him permission to go to Qatar, the government said. Why would he travel to Qatar if he were just going to Syria to marry? Al-Halabi’s lawyers showed him the letter in his cell and pressed him for an explanation.

“These people,” he muttered. They had mistranslated a word that meant “homeland” but sounded like Qatar. Not only was it a mistake in translation, but it didn’t even make sense. Why would the Syrian government be able to give him permission to travel to Qatar? The government translator would later acknowledge her mistake.

One by one, nearly every allegation in the case evaporated. The government could not prove that Al-Halabi had emailed classified documents. Arabic writing found in his room was deemed to be typical articles of Islamic faith.

Nearly 10 months into the hearing, as the charges continued to be dismissed, the military judge turned to Al-Halabi and said, “You’re not going to be in confinement tomorrow,” he remembers. It was “the most beautiful sentence” he had ever heard. He had been in custody for 295 days, and he was suddenly, unexpectedly free. He would still need to come back to court, but he would not spend another night in detention.

Al-Halabi eventually pleaded guilty to four violations. He did take unauthorized photos, and he did lie at first to investigators about them. He did move classified documents from his Afghanistan assignment to his Guantánamo quarters improperly. And he did mail documents to his quarters in Travis Air Force Base and retained them without authorization. The military judge sentenced him to time served. After the trial, the Air Force released a statement: “The case demonstrated the fairness and effectiveness of the military justice system,” Col. John Kellogg said. “As the evidence evolved, the charges were reduced accordingly.”

In late November 2004, Rana flew with her father from the U.A.E. to Travis Air Force Base to meet him. On Dec. 1, she and Al-Halabi were married at the Solano County courthouse in California. Al-Halabi would have to spend the next several months being debriefed, but the newlyweds were still thrilled to be in each other’s company.

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Ahmad and Rana Al-Halabi in Lake Tahoe after Rana and her father arrived in the United States in December 2004.Credit...Photograph from Ahmad Al-Halabi

Within a year, though, Al-Halabi had to face the fact that his dream of making a life with Rana in America and rising in the U.S. military was over. Every job he applied for fell through. It was easy enough to search for his name on the internet and see that he had been charged with spying. Who would want to give him a chance?

They decided to move to Dubai, where Rana still had family. Al-Halabi worked as a consultant for a real estate developer. They had children and put the past behind them. “I never thought of coming back to America,” he told me. He was angry about how he was treated, disappointed that all his plans were thrown so far off track.

But when his father’s health started to decline, Al-Halabi decided to return to Dearborn in 2015 to be with him. His father died of cancer four years later. By then, Al-Halabi and Rana had decided they would stay. Enough time had passed. Dearborn seemed different, America seemed different — far from the fear and anxiety of those early post-9/11 years. Al-Halabi, who now works for a nonprofit group helping refugees, started to think back on his military service with pride.

Al-Halabi tailgates at University of Michigan football games, where he has joined a veterans’ group. He recently translated a document that a war-memorabilia collector brought to show the group. “I told him, ‘This is letterhead from Saddam Hussein’s desk,’ and he went crazy,” Al-Halabi says. “He was so happy to finally know what it was. And it made me happy.”

He says he sometimes thinks about working for the government again, if they could use him. He would translate, he says, but not just language: culture. The world could use that now, he thinks.

In a way, he says, his first instinct on the very day of his arrest turned out to be true: It was all a misunderstanding. And somehow, in the end, as he had felt sure it would be — but not before the days and nights of anxiety and not before the dashing of his early dreams — it was all cleared up.

For more about Ahmad Al-Halabi and the history of Guantánamo, listen to the new season of “Serial” on the NYT Audio app, Apple Podcasts, Spotify or anywhere else you get your podcasts.

Tamara Audi is a journalist based in Los Angeles who has reported and edited for The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. Wayne Lawrence is a documentary photographer and visual artist based in Brooklyn, New York. His work is in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture.

A version of this article appears in print on April 7, 2024, Page 34 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: The 9 ⁄11 SpyWho Wasn’t. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

8. Benjamin Franklin Taught America a Lesson It Needs to Hear

The above is the teaser for the OpEd on the NY Times website. I liked it better than the title below.

Conclusion:

Some 250 years after Franklin’s French errand, Congress is again debating the entanglement of a young republic — one that actually does border the Black Sea — with a wealthy benefactor. Political considerations aside, it pays to remember that the United States itself was, with its own bid for freedom, once the infant republic in dire need of munitions. No one at Versailles knew that the man waving about a 38-page shopping list would be remembered as one of the greatest diplomats in our history. Nor did anyone suspect that granting his requests would help to create an “arsenal of democracy,” a power that might one day, for the most high-minded and the most self-serving of reasons, assist another nation in its struggle for autonomy. Neither mattered when it came to the French calculus, based on something more fundamental. As one French gunrunner reminded Congress in September, 1776, “The enemies of our enemies are more than half our friends.”

OPINION

GUEST ESSAY

America Was Once the Country Begging Richer Allies for Help

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/07/opinion/america-foreign-aid-power-congress.html

April 7, 2024, 

7:00 a.m. ET\

Credit...Nicholas Stevenson

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By Stacy Schiff

Ms. Schiff is the author of “A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France and the Birth of America.”

Even before they declared their independence, it was clear to the American colonies that in their struggle against Great Britain they would need a wealthy benefactor. The colonies were desperately short of men, money and materiel. There was little by way of an American Navy, and barely an engineer on the continent. In 1776, the most gifted orator in Congress called for a declaration not by choice but by necessity, “as the only means by which foreign alliance can be obtained.” In that light, our founding document nearly qualifies as an SOS.

It was no secret to Congress that France secretly favored the American experiment. With General George Washington’s army down to a handful of rounds of powder per man, all eyes turned to Benjamin Franklin. No one had more experience with the world beyond American shores. Already Franklin had crossed the ocean six times. He was dimly understood to speak French. He sat on the secret committee that had dispatched an earlier envoy to Paris.

The unanimous choice on one side of the ocean, he was the ideal choice on the other. Celebrated across Europe as the tamer of lightning, Franklin met in Paris streets with cheering crowds and in theaters with thunderous ovations. His celebrity assisted little with his clandestine mission, however. The French government could not openly receive him without provoking their powerful rival, Great Britain.

Eager though he was to shrink the British sphere of influence, the French foreign minister, the Comte de Vergennes, was unimpressed by the Americans. He doubted their resolve for the task at hand, a fear on which the British ambassador in Paris played, advertising the colonists as a cowardly band of thieves and muggers. Vergennes was less impressed still by General Washington. He seemed to proceed from defeat to defeat.

In America, too, there remained varying degrees of discomfort with the idea of a foreign partner. John Jay hoped to win the war without French involvement of any kind. John Adams hoped to win the war without French funding. Washington hoped to win the war without French troops. Franklin hoped to win the war.

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Though he knew the situation to be dire, he waged in Paris a war of disinformation. The farther the British penetrated the continent, Franklin crowed, the more resistance they would meet. He boasted that Washington would soon command a force of 80,000 expertly trained men.

The truth was closer to 14,000 amateurs, beset by desertions, discontent and disease. You would think we might have destroyed General Howe’s forces by now, the financier Robert Morris wrote to Franklin, “and we undoubtedly should had we an army to do it.” As France waited for an American army on which to bank and Washington waited for French aid with which he might deliver a victory, Franklin solicited secret arms, arranging for their covert dispatch to America.

With whispers of munitions sales swirling around Paris, the British ambassador raced to Versailles for an explanation. What was all that French military equipment doing in America? Could a shipment of 30,000 muskets, 5,000 tents, 60 cannons and 400 tons of gunpowder truly be said to represent a gift from a nation at peace? Britain would not tolerate such subterfuges. He made it his business to discredit the colonists in the drawing rooms of Paris. The French, he assured anyone who would listen, would soon tire of and abandon the ruffians on the other side of the ocean. Vergennes recognized the British strategy for what it was: They were leading the Americans to despair by crushing their hopes for French support.

The Continental Army’s victory at Saratoga changed everything. In February 1778, France and America entered into an official alliance; Franklin could at last deal openly with Versailles. At one point he submitted a 38-page shopping list. Along with a frigate and a ship of the line, Congress requested clarinets and trumpets, paint and thimbles. Vergennes was floored by the scale of the demand, reminding Franklin that it was equivalent to one-tenth of the French government’s annual budget.

Smitten though they were with Franklin, few Frenchmen could locate the American colonies on a map. It seemed equally likely that they bordered the Black Sea or were part of India. Nor did the two countries make for natural partners. “I cannot deny that the Americans are somewhat difficult to handle, especially for a Frenchman,” was the candid verdict of the Marquis de Lafayette. The partnership was held together by various illusions about the past and a general misunderstanding about the future. Even Lafayette at one point assumed that Washington would eventually be appointed dictator.

Vergennes engaged throughout in a familiar calculation: The only danger greater than not helping the Americans at all, he insisted in discussion after discussion at Versailles, was not helping them enough. He carried the day. The majority of the guns fired on the British at Saratoga had been French. The surrender four years later at Yorktown would be to troops that were equal parts French and American, supplied and clothed by France, all of them protected by a French fleet.

Few 18th-century Europeans expected America ever to play a role on the world stage. Versailles assumed that 13 disparate colonies strung over 1,000 miles of coastline would inevitably quarrel. History had proved republics to be fragile. This new one was unlikely, Vergennes contended, to develop any great appetite for expansion. Before it did, French vices would have infected America, stunting its growth and progress.

It would be well over a century, to cries of “Lafayette, nous voici,” before America acknowledged its French debt. A generation later, with the Lend-Lease Act of 1941, Franklin Roosevelt appointed America the “arsenal of democracy,” a role we have since reprised regularly. The rhetoric soared but the logic was as self-serving as had been that of the Comte de Vergennes. These outlays were investments in what Mitch McConnell recently called “cold, hard American interests.” The idea was “to help degrade the military of a major adversary.” The 1941 Act is known more fully as “An Act to Promote the Defense of the United States.”

Some 250 years after Franklin’s French errand, Congress is again debating the entanglement of a young republic — one that actually does border the Black Sea — with a wealthy benefactor. Political considerations aside, it pays to remember that the United States itself was, with its own bid for freedom, once the infant republic in dire need of munitions. No one at Versailles knew that the man waving about a 38-page shopping list would be remembered as one of the greatest diplomats in our history. Nor did anyone suspect that granting his requests would help to create an “arsenal of democracy,” a power that might one day, for the most high-minded and the most self-serving of reasons, assist another nation in its struggle for autonomy. Neither mattered when it came to the French calculus, based on something more fundamental. As one French gunrunner reminded Congress in September, 1776, “The enemies of our enemies are more than half our friends.”

More on foreign aid

Opinion | Ross Douthat

What the Ukraine Aid Debate Is Really About

Feb. 21, 2024

Opinion | Ross Douthat

The Best Case for Ukraine Aid

Feb. 17, 2024

Opinion | Bret Stephens

The Isolationist G.O.P., Again

Feb. 13, 2024

Stacy Schiff is the author of six books, including “A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France and the Birth of America.” The Apple TV+ series “Franklin,” based on the book, is forthcoming in April.

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

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9. Help Ukraine Hold the Line

Excerpts:

Ukraine is already suffering the consequences of America’s faltering support. Russian forces took the eastern city of Avdiivka in February, and U.S. intelligence officials warned Congress that this happened because Ukraine ran out of artillery shells. The Russian command is doubtlessly aware of this as it plans its next moves.

Mr. Putin gambled from the outset that the United States would not go the distance in its support for Ukraine, and he must be reveling in the goings-on in Congress.

Allowing Russia to impose its will on Ukraine would be a devastating blow to America’s credibility and leadership — fulfilling one of Mr. Putin’s long-term goals. That, in turn, would risk encouraging him to test waters further afield, whether in the Baltic States, in western Europe or to the south, and would signal to Xi Jinping that China, too, can throw its weight around.

Mr. Trump and his followers may argue that the security of Ukraine, or even of Europe, is not America’s business. But the consequence of allowing a Russian victory in Ukraine is a world in which authoritarian strongmen feel free to crush dissent or seize territory with impunity. That is a threat to the security of America, and the world.

Help Ukraine Hold the Line

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/06/opinion/ukraine-aid-congress.html

April 6, 2024

Credit...Illustration by Rebecca Chew/The New York Times

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By The Editorial Board

The editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values. It is separate from the newsroom.

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After more than two years of brutal, unrelenting war, Ukraine is still ready and has the capacity to defend its democracy and territory against Russia. But it cannot do so without American military assistance, which the United States had assured the Ukrainians would be there as long as it was needed.

A majority of Americans understand this, and believe that curbing the revanchist dreams of Russia’s leader, Vladimir Putin, is America’s duty to Ukraine and to American security. A survey by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and Ipsos found that 58 percent of Americans favor providing economic help to Ukraine and sending more arms and military equipment to the Ukrainian government. And 60 percent of respondents said that the U.S. security relationship with Ukraine does more to strengthen American national security than to weaken it.

While that support has declined somewhat since the beginning of Russia’s invasion, and it is weaker among Republicans, many Republican members of Congress also support continuing military aid. So it is distressing that the fate of Ukraine has fallen prey to internecine Republican politicking. House Speaker Mike Johnson has the power to do the right thing, but time is running critically short.

Without American artillery, as well as antitank and antiaircraft shells and missiles, Ukraine cannot hold off an army that has a far deeper supply of men and munitions. “Russia is now firing at least five times as many artillery rounds as Ukraine,” as Andrew Kramer of The Times reported. As summer approaches, Russia is expected to prepare a new offensive thrust. Mr. Johnson knows this. He also knows that, if he brings it to a vote, a $60.1 billion aid package for Ukraine would most likely sail through the House with bipartisan support. Many Republican members and most Democrats want to pass it. The Senate passed it in February.

Yet so far, Mr. Johnson has avoided a vote, fearing that a clutch of far-right House members, who parrot the views of Donald Trump and oppose any more aid for Ukraine, could topple him from the speaker’s post. To placate them, the speaker has said he will produce a proposal with “important innovations” when legislators return to work on Tuesday. These may include lifting the Biden administration’s hold on liquefied natural gas exports, including a proposed terminal in his home state, Louisiana; calling the aid a loan; or seizing billions of frozen Russian assets.

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None of those conditions are wise. Tying aid for Ukraine to unrelated political goals, such as undoing President Biden’s climate change agenda, may be typical of congressional horse trading, but it turns Ukraine into a pawn in partisan conflict. “This is not some political skirmish that only matters here in America,” Donald Tusk, the Polish prime minister, said on his visit to Washington last month. The speaker’s decision, he said, “will really cost thousands of lives there — children, women. He must be aware of his personal responsibility.”

Nor does it make sense to force Ukraine to take on massive debt when it’s fighting for its life, and its economy is already dependent on aid. Seizing large sums of money from another sovereign nation could also have unpredictable legal and economic consequences.

Given Ukraine’s perilous position, however, most Democrats and Republicans would likely accept what Mr. Johnson cobbles together, even measures they have reservations about, particularly since the package also includes aid for Israel and Taiwan. Those lawmakers are right to pursue a reasonable compromise. The House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, has also suggested that Democrats will support Mr. Johnson as speaker to avoid yet another damaging and pointless fight over the speakership. Those moves are welcome steps to try to loosen the grip of Republican extremists on America’s ability to support its allies.

Of course, recalcitrance in Congress is not Ukraine’s only problem. Europe has been slow to step in to meet Ukraine’s military needs, and the country’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, may have taken too long to lower the recruitment age to 25 in the face of a shortage of soldiers.

But American weapons and artillery are essential to Ukraine’s ability to hold the line and, eventually, to negotiate for an end to hostilities from a position of strength. No country has the stockpiles or the production capabilities to match the United States in producing and providing the 155-millimeter artillery shells, HIMARS (High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems) or air defense systems that Ukraine requires to hold the Russians at bay. Russia, by contrast, has successfully ramped up military production and is receiving supplies from North Korea and Iran, and Mr. Putin has used the recent terror attack on a concert hall in Moscow to ramp up recruitment.

Ukraine is already suffering the consequences of America’s faltering support. Russian forces took the eastern city of Avdiivka in February, and U.S. intelligence officials warned Congress that this happened because Ukraine ran out of artillery shells. The Russian command is doubtlessly aware of this as it plans its next moves.

Mr. Putin gambled from the outset that the United States would not go the distance in its support for Ukraine, and he must be reveling in the goings-on in Congress.

Allowing Russia to impose its will on Ukraine would be a devastating blow to America’s credibility and leadership — fulfilling one of Mr. Putin’s long-term goals. That, in turn, would risk encouraging him to test waters further afield, whether in the Baltic States, in western Europe or to the south, and would signal to Xi Jinping that China, too, can throw its weight around.

Mr. Trump and his followers may argue that the security of Ukraine, or even of Europe, is not America’s business. But the consequence of allowing a Russian victory in Ukraine is a world in which authoritarian strongmen feel free to crush dissent or seize territory with impunity. That is a threat to the security of America, and the world.

Congress is prepared to stand up to this aggression; it is Mr. Johnson’s duty to bring this effort to a vote.

More on the war in Ukraine

Opinion | Olena Stiazhkina

We Ukrainians Are Fighting to Be Free

Feb. 19, 2024

Opinion | Serge Schmemann

Ukraine Doesn’t Need All Its Territory to Defeat Putin

Dec. 27, 2023

Opinion | Ross Douthat

The Best Case for Ukraine Aid

Feb. 17, 2024

Source photograph by Andrew Mayovskyy, via Getty Images.

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

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A version of this article appears in print on April 7, 2024, Section SR, Page 11 of the New York edition with the headline: Help Ukraine Hold the Line. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

10. China Providing Geospatial Intelligence to Russia, US Warns

Let north Korea get its hands dirty providing lethal aid. China can deny providing its high tech non-lethal aid (which of course contributes significantly to lethal fires).

China Providing Geospatial Intelligence to Russia, US Warns

• Blinken briefed European allies on scope of Chinese support
• China said to have stepped up help for Russian war on Ukraine

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-04-06/china-is-providing-geospatial-intelligence-to-russia-us-warns?sref=hhjZtX76

By Alberto Nardelli and Jennifer Jacobs

April 6, 2024 at 9:21 AM EDT

Updated on April 6, 2024 at 3:26 PM EDT

The US is warning allies that China has stepped up its support for Russia, including by providing geospatial intelligence, to help Moscow in its war against Ukraine.

Amid signs of continued military integration between the two nations, China has provided Russia with satellite imagery for military purposes, as well as microelectronics and machine tools for tanks, according to people familiar with the matter.

China’s support also includes optics, propellants to be used in missiles and increased space cooperation, one of the people said.

President Joe Biden raised concerns with Xi Jinping during their call this week about China’s support for the Russian defense industrial base, including machine tools, optics, nitrocellulose, microelectronics, and turbojet engines, White House National Security Council spokesperson Adrienne Watson said.

China’s foreign ministry didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment during a holiday weekend.

Beijing has sought to portray itself as mostly neutral in the face of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, now into its third year, yet it’s established a deep alliance with Moscow as part of what Xi and Vladimir Putin termed a “no limits” friendship ahead of the 2022 Winter Olympic Games in Beijing.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs building at sunrise in Kyiv.Photographer: Ethan Swope/Bloomberg

Trade between the two countries reached a record $240 billion in 2023. Russia’s neighbor has become the supplier of everything from clothes to machinery and cars after an exodus of Western manufacturers and multiple rounds of sanctions. At the same time, Russia has boosted exports of commodities such as coal and oil to China.

Crucially, China and Hong Kong have also become key gateways for Moscow to access restricted technologies, including chips and integrated circuits, used in weapons or needed to build them. The US and European Union have listed several Chinese firms for enabling those transfers, but the trade shows little sign of dropping off.

Last year, the Biden administration also sanctioned a Chinese company for providing satellite images to a Russian technology firm which in turn then supplied them to the Wagner mercenary group.

Beijing has also yet to indicate whether it will participate in a summit Ukraine has been organizing to agree on key principles upon which to build a future peace settlement with Russia.

Read More About China-Russia Relations:Russia to Bolster Famed Eastern Railroads as China Trade BoomsEU Proposes Curbs on Three Chinese Firms for Aiding RussiaMost of Russia’s War Chips Are Made by US and European CompaniesUS and Japan Team Up to Warn Against Nuclear Weapons in Space

China’s support for Russia has deepened in recent months, said the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss private matters. Secretary of State Antony Blinken briefed European allies this week on the scope and significance of China’s support and on the need to do more to curtail it, one of the people said.

Blinken asked allies to raise the problem directly with China and to take actions against Chinese entities and companies, another person familiar with the discussions said.

The Financial Times first reported some of the messages communicated by Blinken at meetings with NATO allies.

The US and its allies will be looking to convey their concerns to Beijing and to ramp up efforts to crack down on China’s support for Russia’s defense industry, the people said.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen also warned of “significant consequences” this week if companies, including those in China, were found to provide material support for Russia’s war against Ukraine and its military-industrial base.

Read more: Moscow Is Outpacing Ukraine’s Allies in the Race for Ammunition

The worries come as Ukraine faces a critical artillery shortage and its allies are flailing in their efforts to resupply Kyiv. Russia, meanwhile, has been able to boost its domestic arms production, continues to import key components via a network of third countries, and is getting shells and other weaponry from the likes of North Korea and Iran.

The Biden administration previously warned Beijing not to provide Russia with weapons, and there’s no sign it has so far done so.

— With assistance from Peter Martin

(Updates with White House comment in fourth paragraph.)

11. Journalist Who Broke Story on Israel’s AI Warfare Discusses the Technology

Making mistakes and admitting to them is quite a bit different than willfully violating international law to achieve specific objectives. For example deliberate use of rape of civilians (or anyone) to terrorize the public to create specific political condistion is a violation of international law. The unintentional and mistaken (and sanctioned by the military or government) killing of aid workers, while very tragic and unfortunate, is not a violation of international law. But I will leave that for the lawyers to parse.

Excerpts:

AMY GOODMAN: Let me play for you a clip of National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby being questioned on Tuesday about Israel’s killing of seven aid workers in three cars from Chef Andrés’s World Central Kitchen. This is Kirby.

NIALL STANAGE: Is firing a missile at people delivering food and killing them not a violation of international humanitarian law?

JOHN KIRBY: Well, the Israelis have already admitted that this was a mistake that they made. They’re doing an investigation. They’ll get to the bottom of this. Let’s not get ahead of that. … The State Department has a process in place. And to date, as you and I are speaking, they have not found any incidents where the Israelis have violated international humanitarian law.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that’s the U.S. top spokesperson, John Kirby, saying Israel has never broken international law so far since October 7th. And again, this is in response to a question about the killing of the seven aid workers, one Palestinian and six international aid workers. Can you talk about your response to this attack, three different missiles hitting all three cars, and then what Kirby said?

YUVAL ABRAHAM: Yeah. Wow! It’s quite shocking, in my mind, I mean, what he said, you know, based on the evidence that exists. The first thought that popped up to my mind when he was talking about, you know, Israel is investigating it, since I know the statistics — so, if you take the 2014 bombing and war in Gaza, so, you know, 512 Palestinian children were killed. Israel said that it will investigate. There were like hundreds of claims for war crimes. Like, only one file the Israeli military actually prosecuted a soldier about, and it was about looting of like 1,000 shekels. Everything was closed. This happens, you know, 2018, 2019. Two hundred thirty Palestinians are shot dead at the border. Again, tens of — one file prosecuted. Like, to claim that because Israel is having an investigation, it somehow means that they are getting to the bottom of this and changing something, it’s just mocking our intelligence, I think.

The second thing that I would say is that it’s true that the state of Israel has apologized for it. But if you actually look at the track record of people being killed around aid trucks, this has happened over and over again for Palestinians. I mean, in the beginning of March, 112 Palestinians were killed around the flour aid truck. The Guardian reported at the time that 14 such cases happened, like in February and January. So it’s clear to me that the Israeli military is apologizing not because of the crime, but because of the identity of the people who were killed in the crime. And I think that’s really hypocrisy.

And to answer the question about my findings, I mean, I don’t know if artificial intelligence was involved in that strike. I don’t want to say something that I’m not, you know, 100% sure of. But what I have learned from Israeli intelligence officers makes me not be surprised that this strike took place, because the firing policy is completely permissive. And we’re seeing it. I mean, we’re seeing, you know, unarmed civilians being bombed to death. We saw that video of four people walking and being bombed to death. We have doctors, you know, talking about how in hospitals they’re seeing young children, like, with bullet holes, like The Guardian investigation who spoke to nine doctors that spoke about that. So, this extreme permissiveness is not surprising to me.

Journalist Who Broke Story on Israel’s AI Warfare Discusses the Technology

Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham says entire Palestinian families are being wiped out inside their homes.

By Amy Goodman , DEMOCRACYNOW!

PublishedApril 5, 2024

truthout.org · by Amy Goodman · April 5, 2024

The Israeli publications +972 and Local Call have exposed how the Israeli military used an artificial intelligence program known as Lavender to develop a “kill list” in Gaza that includes as many as 37,000 Palestinians who were targeted for assassination with little human oversight. A second AI system known as “Where’s Daddy?” tracked Palestinians on the kill list and was purposely designed to help Israel target individuals when they were at home at night with their families. The targeting systems, combined with an “extremely permissive” bombing policy in the Israeli military, led to “entire Palestinian families being wiped out inside their houses,” says Yuval Abraham, an Israeli journalist who broke the story after speaking with members of the Israeli military who were “shocked by committing atrocities.” Abraham previously exposed Israel for using an AI system called “The Gospel” to intentionally destroy civilian infrastructure in Gaza, including apartment complexes, universities and banks, in an effort to exert “civil pressure” on Hamas. These artificial intelligence military systems are “a danger to humanity,” says Abraham. “AI-based warfare allows people to escape accountability.”

TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

The Israeli publications +972 Magazine and Local Call have exposed how the Israeli military used an artificial intelligence known as “Lavender” to develop a “kill list” in Gaza that includes as many as 37,000 Palestinians who were targeted for assassination with little human oversight. The report is based in part on interviews with six Israeli intelligence officers who had firsthand involvement with the AI system.

+972 reports, quote, “Lavender has played a central role in the unprecedented bombing of Palestinians, especially during the early stages of the war. In fact, according to the sources, its influence on the military’s operations was such that they essentially treated the outputs of the AI machine ‘as if it were a human decision.’”

Related Story

Report: Israeli Army Uses AI to Produce Palestinian Targets for Assassination

Officers described being pressured to approve as many AI-generated targets as possible to meet daily quotas.

April 3, 2024

Truthout

A second AI system known as “Where’s Daddy?” tracked Palestinian men on the kill list. It was purposely designed to help Israel target individuals when they were at home at night with their families. One intelligence officer told the publications, quote, “We were not interested in killing operatives only when they were in a military building or engaged in a military activity. On the contrary, the IDF bombed them in homes without hesitation, as a first option. It’s much easier to bomb a family’s home. The system is built to look for them in these situations,” they said.

Today we spend the hour with the Israeli investigative journalist Yuval Abraham, who broke this story for +972 and Local Call. It’s headlined “‘Lavender’: The AI machine directing Israel’s bombing spree in Gaza.” I spoke with Yuval Abraham yesterday and began by asking him to lay out what he found.

YUVAL ABRAHAM: Yeah. Thank you for having me again, Amy.

It is a very long piece. It’s 8,000 words. And we divided it into six different steps. And each step represents a process in the highly automated way in which the military marks targets since October. And the first finding is Lavender. So, Lavender was designed by the military. Its purpose was, when it was being designed, to mark the low-ranking operatives in the Hamas and Islamic Jihad military wings. That was the intention, because, you know, Israel estimates that there are between 30,000 to 40,000 Hamas operatives, and it’s a very, very large number. And they understood that the only way for them to mark these people is by relying on artificial intelligence. And that was the intention.

Now, what sources told me is that after October 7th, the military basically made a decision that all of these tens of thousands of people are now people that could potentially be bombed inside their houses, meaning not only killing them but everybody who’s in the building — the children, the families. And they understood that in order to try to attempt to do that, they are going to have to rely on this AI machine called Lavender with very minimal human supervision. I mean, one source said that he felt he was acting as a rubber stamp on the machine’s decisions.

Now, what Lavender does is it scans information on probably 90% of the population of Gaza. So we’re talking about, you know, more than a million people. And it gives each individual a rating between one to 100, a rating that is an expression of the likelihood that the machine thinks, based on a list of small features — and we can get to that later — that that individual is a member of the Hamas or Islamic Jihad military wings. Sources told me that the military knew, because they checked — they took a random sampling and checked one by one — the military knew that approximately 10% of the people that the machine was marking to be killed were not Hamas militants. They were not — some of them had a loose connection to Hamas. Others had completely no connection to Hamas. I mean, one source said how the machine would bring people who had the exact same name and nickname as a Hamas operative, or people who had similar communication profiles. Like, these could be civil defense workers, police officers in Gaza. And they implemented, again, minimal supervision on the machine. One source said that he spent 20 seconds per target before authorizing the bombing of the alleged low-ranking Hamas militant — often it also could have been a civilian — killing those people inside their houses.

And I think this, the reliance on artificial intelligence here to mark those targets, and basically the deadly way in which the officers spoke about how they were using the machine, could very well be part of the reason why in the first, you know, six weeks after October 7th, like one of the main characteristics of the policies that were in place were entire Palestinian families being wiped out inside their houses. I mean, if you look at U.N. statistics, more than 50% of the casualties, more than 6,000 people at that time, came from a smaller group of families. It’s an expression of, you know, the family unit being destroyed. And I think that machine and the way it was used led to that.

AMY GOODMAN: You talk about the choosing of targets, and you talk about the so-called high-value targets, Hamas commanders, and then the lower-level fighters. And as you said, many of them, in the end, it wasn’t either. But explain the buildings that were targeted and the bombs that were used to target them.

YUVAL ABRAHAM: Yeah, yeah. It’s a good question. So, what sources told me is that during those first weeks after October, for the low-ranking militants in Hamas, many of whom were marked by Lavender, so we can say “alleged militants” that were marked by the machine, they had a predetermined, what they call, “collateral damage degree.” And this means that the military’s international law departments told these intelligence officers that for each low-ranking target that Lavender marks, when bombing that target, they are allowed to kill — one source said the number was up to 20 civilians, again, for any Hamas operative, regardless of rank, regardless of importance, regardless of age. One source said that there were also minors being marked — not many of them, but he said that was a possibility, that there was no age limit. Another source said that the limit was up to 15 civilians for the low-ranking militants. The sources said that for senior commanders of Hamas — so it could be, you know, commanders of brigades or divisions or battalions — the numbers were, for the first time in the IDF’s history, in the triple digits, according to sources.

So, for example, Ayman Nofal, who was the Hamas commander of the Central Brigade, a source that took part in the strike against that person said that the military authorized to kill alongside that person 300 Palestinian civilians. And we’ve spoken at +972 and Local Call with Palestinians who were witnesses of that strike, and they speak about, you know, four quite large residential buildings being bombed on that day, you know, entire apartments filled with families being bombed and killed. And that source told me that this is not, you know, some mistake, like the amount of civilians, of this 300 civilians, it was known beforehand to the Israeli military. And sources described that to me, and they said that — I mean, one source said that during those weeks at the beginning, effectively, the principle of proportionality, as they call it under international law, quote, “did not exist.”

AMY GOODMAN: So, there’s two programs. There’s Lavender, and there’s Where’s Daddy? How did they even know where these men were, innocent or not?

YUVAL ABRAHAM: Yeah, so, the way the system was designed is, there is this concept, in general, in systems of mass surveillance called linking. When you want to automate these systems, you want to be able to very quickly — you know, you get, for example, an ID of a person, and you want to have a computer be very quickly able to link that ID to other stuff. And what sources told me is that since everybody in Gaza has a home, has a house — or at least that was the case in the past — the system was designed to be able to automatically link between individuals and houses. And in the majority of cases, these households that are linked to the individuals that Lavender is marking as low-ranking militants are not places where there is active military action taking place, according to sources. Yet the way the system was designed, and programs like Where’s Daddy?, which were designed to search for these low-ranking militants when they enter houses — specifically, it sends an alert to the intelligence officers when these AI-marked suspects enter their houses. The system was designed in a way that allowed the Israeli military to carry out massive strikes against Palestinians, sometimes militants, sometimes alleged militants, who we don’t know, when they were in these spaces in these houses.

And the sources said — you know, CNN reported in December that 45% of the munitions, according to U.S. intelligence assessments, that Israel dropped on Gaza were unguided, so-called dumb bombs, that have, you know, a larger damage to civilians. They destroy the entire structure. And sources said that for these low-ranking operatives in Hamas, they were only using the dumb munitions, meaning they were collapsing the houses on everybody inside. And when you ask intelligence officers why, one explanation they give is that these people were, quote, “unimportant.” They were not important enough, from a military perspective, that the Israeli army would, one source said, waste expensive munitions, meaning more guided floor bombs that could have maybe taken just a particular floor in the building.

And to me, that was very striking, because, you know, you’re dropping a bomb on a house and killing entire families, yet the target that you are aiming to assassinate by doing so is not considered important enough to, quote, “waste” an expensive bomb on. And I think it’s a very rare reflection of sort of the way — you know, the way the Israeli military measures the value of Palestinian lives in relation to expected military gain, which is the principle of proportionality. And I think one thing that was very, very clear from all the sources that I spoke with is that, you know, this was — they said it was psychologically shocking even for them, you know, like it was — yeah.

So, that’s the combination between Lavender and Where’s Daddy? The Lavender lists are fed into Where’s Daddy? And these systems track the suspects and wait for the moments that they enter houses, usually family houses or households where no military action takes place, according to several sources who did this, who spoke to me about this. And these houses are bombed using unguided missiles. This was a main characteristic of the Israeli policy in Gaza, at least for the first weeks.

AMY GOODMAN: You write that they said they didn’t have as many smart bombs. They were more expensive, so they didn’t want to waste them, so they used the dumb bombs —

YUVAL ABRAHAM: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: — which kill so many more.

YUVAL ABRAHAM: Yeah, exactly. Exactly, that’s what they said. But then I say, if the person, you know, is not important enough for you to waste ammunition on, but you’re willing to kill 15 civilians, a family?

AMY GOODMAN: Yuval Abraham, I wanted to read from the Israeli military statement, the IDF statement, in response to your report.

YUVAL ABRAHAM: Please.

AMY GOODMAN: They say, quote, “The process of identifying military targets in the IDF consists of various types of tools and methods, including information management tools, which are used in order to help the intelligence analysts to gather and optimally analyze the intelligence, obtained from a variety of sources. Contrary to claims, the IDF did not use an artificial intelligence system that identifies terrorist operatives or tries to predict whether a person is a terrorist. Information systems are merely tools for analysts in the target identification process.” Again, that’s the IDF response, Yuval Abraham, to your report. Your response?

YUVAL ABRAHAM: I read this response to some of the sources, and they said that they’re lying, that it’s not true. And I was surprised that they were — you know, usually they’re not so, you know, blatant in saying something that is false.

I think this can very easily be disproven, because, you know, a senior-ranking Israeli military official, the head of the 8200 unit’s AI center, gave a public lecture in last year, in 2023, in Tel Aviv University — you can google it, anybody who’s listening to us — where he spoke about, quote — I’m quoting him in that lecture — “an AI system that the Israeli military used in 2021 to find terrorists.” That’s what he said. So, to have that on record, to have — I have the presentation slides showing how the system is rating the people — and then to get a comment from the IDF spokesperson saying, “We do not have a system that uses AI to…” I really don’t know. Like, I almost thought, “Do I put this in the piece or not?” Because, you know, like, I know — in the end, you know, I gave them the space in the piece to make those claims, like I think I tried to be as dry as possible in the way that I was reporting. But, really, like, I am very, very confident in those findings. They are verified from from numerous sources that I’ve spoken with.

And I think that people who read the full investigation, read the depth of it — the commander of the 8200 unit wrote a book in 2021, titled Human-Machine Teams: How Synergy Between AI and Human Beings Can Revolutionize the World. And in the book, he’s talking about how militaries should rely on artificial intelligence to, quote, “solve the problem of the human bottleneck” in creating new targets and in the decision-making to approve new targets. And he wrote in that book, he said — and this is another quote from him — he says that “no matter how many intelligence officers you have tasked with producing targets during the war, they still will not be able to produce enough targets per day.” And he gives a guide in that book as to how to build these AI systems. Now, I want to emphasize, you know, he writes in the book very, very clearly that these systems are not supposed to replace human judgment. He calls it, you know, a mutual learning between humans and artificial intelligence. And he says — and the IDF still maintains this — they say it is intelligence officers who look at the results and make a decision.

From what I heard from numerous sources, after October 7th, that stopped being the cases, at least in some parts of the IDF, where, again, Amy, as I said before, sources were told that if they check that the target is a man, they can accept Lavender’s recommendations without thoroughly looking at them, without checking why the machine made the decision that it made.

And I think, you know, when speaking with sources, like, just to describe — like, many of these sources, you know, they were drafted to the military after October 7th. Many of them were shocked by atrocities that happened on October 7th, their families, their friends. Some of them did not think they would be drafted to the military again. They said, “OK, we have to go now.” There was this sense that — and gradually, when they realized what they were being asked to do, the things that they are involved in, not — I wouldn’t say that all six are like this, but at least some of them felt, again, shocked by committing atrocities and by being involved in things and killing families, and they felt it’s unjustifiable. And they felt a responsibility, I think. And I felt this also in the previous piece that I wrote, “’A mass assassination factory,’” which spoke about another AI machine called The Gospel. They felt a need to share this information with the world, out of a sense that people are not getting it. You know, they’re hearing the military spokesperson and all of these narratives that we’ve been hearing for the past six months, and they do not reflect the reality on the ground.

And I really believe, I really believe — you know, there’s a looming attack now on Rafah — these systems could be used there again to kill Palestinians in massive numbers, these attacks, and, you know, it’s placing the Israeli hostages in danger who are still unjustifiably held in Gaza and need to be released. There needs to be a ceasefire. It cannot go on. And I hope that this investigation, that exposes things so clearly, will help more people all around the world call for a ceasefire, call to release the hostages and end the occupation and move towards a political solution there. For me, there is no — there is no other way forward.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask if U.S. military, if U.S. technology is playing a role in Israeli AI, artificial intelligence.

YUVAL ABRAHAM: So, I don’t know. And there is some information that I cannot fully share, like, at this moment. I’m investigating, like, you know, who is involved in developing these systems.

What I can tell you is, you know, based on previous experience of the 2014 war and the 2021 war, when the wars end, these systems are then sold to militaries all over the world. And I think, regardless of, you know, the horrific results and consequences of these systems in Gaza, alongside that, I really think there is a danger to humanity. Like, this AI-based warfare allows people to escape accountability. It allows to generate targets, really, on a massive — you know, thousands, 37,000 people marked for potential assassination. And it allows to do that and maintain a sort of aesthetic of international law, because you have a machine that makes you a target file with, you know, commander or, like, target, collateral damage, but it loses all meaning.

I mean, take the principle of distinction under international law. When you design a system that marks 37,000 people, and you check, and you know that 10% of them are actually not militants — right? — they’re loosely related to Hamas or they’re not related at all — and you still authorize to use that system without any meaningful supervision for weeks, I mean, isn’t that a breach of that principle? When you authorize to kill, you know, up to 15 or up to 20 civilians for targets that you consider, from a military point of view, not especially important, isn’t that a clear breach of the principle of proportionality? You know, and I don’t know, like, I think international law really is in a crisis right now. And I think these AI-based systems are making that crisis even worse. They are draining all of these terms from meaning.

AMY GOODMAN: Let me play for you a clip of National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby being questioned on Tuesday about Israel’s killing of seven aid workers in three cars from Chef Andrés’s World Central Kitchen. This is Kirby.

NIALL STANAGE: Is firing a missile at people delivering food and killing them not a violation of international humanitarian law?

JOHN KIRBY: Well, the Israelis have already admitted that this was a mistake that they made. They’re doing an investigation. They’ll get to the bottom of this. Let’s not get ahead of that. … The State Department has a process in place. And to date, as you and I are speaking, they have not found any incidents where the Israelis have violated international humanitarian law.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that’s the U.S. top spokesperson, John Kirby, saying Israel has never broken international law so far since October 7th. And again, this is in response to a question about the killing of the seven aid workers, one Palestinian and six international aid workers. Can you talk about your response to this attack, three different missiles hitting all three cars, and then what Kirby said?

YUVAL ABRAHAM: Yeah. Wow! It’s quite shocking, in my mind, I mean, what he said, you know, based on the evidence that exists. The first thought that popped up to my mind when he was talking about, you know, Israel is investigating it, since I know the statistics — so, if you take the 2014 bombing and war in Gaza, so, you know, 512 Palestinian children were killed. Israel said that it will investigate. There were like hundreds of claims for war crimes. Like, only one file the Israeli military actually prosecuted a soldier about, and it was about looting of like 1,000 shekels. Everything was closed. This happens, you know, 2018, 2019. Two hundred thirty Palestinians are shot dead at the border. Again, tens of — one file prosecuted. Like, to claim that because Israel is having an investigation, it somehow means that they are getting to the bottom of this and changing something, it’s just mocking our intelligence, I think.

The second thing that I would say is that it’s true that the state of Israel has apologized for it. But if you actually look at the track record of people being killed around aid trucks, this has happened over and over again for Palestinians. I mean, in the beginning of March, 112 Palestinians were killed around the flour aid truck. The Guardian reported at the time that 14 such cases happened, like in February and January. So it’s clear to me that the Israeli military is apologizing not because of the crime, but because of the identity of the people who were killed in the crime. And I think that’s really hypocrisy.

And to answer the question about my findings, I mean, I don’t know if artificial intelligence was involved in that strike. I don’t want to say something that I’m not, you know, 100% sure of. But what I have learned from Israeli intelligence officers makes me not be surprised that this strike took place, because the firing policy is completely permissive. And we’re seeing it. I mean, we’re seeing, you know, unarmed civilians being bombed to death. We saw that video of four people walking and being bombed to death. We have doctors, you know, talking about how in hospitals they’re seeing young children, like, with bullet holes, like The Guardian investigation who spoke to nine doctors that spoke about that. So, this extreme permissiveness is not surprising to me.

AMY GOODMAN: Your piece doesn’t talk about drones, but, Yuval, can you talk about how the AI systems interact with unmanned attack drones?

YUVAL ABRAHAM: Yeah, so, you know, I said this last time, Amy. Like, I can’t speak about everything, also because we are sort of — always have to think of the military censor in Israel. As Israeli journalists, we’re very much, you know, binded by that.

But the systems interact. And, you know, if somebody is marked to be killed by Lavender, then that person could be killed by a warplane, they could be killed by a drone, and they could be killed by a tank that’s on the ground. Like, there is like a sort of policy of sharing intelligence between different — yeah, different units and different weapon operators.

Like, I wouldn’t be surprised if — because Israel said, you know, there was a target, like somebody that we suspected. Of course, the aid workers and — like, they completely rejected that. But, like, I wouldn’t be surprised if the flagging, you know, that the Israeli system received was somehow related to a faulty automated mechanism that is, you know, mass surveilling the area and picked up on something and had, you know, not the highest precision rate. Again, from what I’m hearing from sources, this is the atmosphere. This is the case.

AMY GOODMAN: Investigative reporter Yuval Abraham on his latest piece for +972 Magazine and Local Call headlined “‘Lavender’: The AI machine directing Israel’s bombing spree in Gaza.” He’s speaking to us from Jerusalem.

When we come back, I ask Yuval about a film he co-directed, which won the prize for best documentary at the Berlinale, the Berlin film festival in Germany. In his acceptance speech, Yuval said Israel was guilty of apartheid. He’ll talk about what happened next. Stay with us.

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Amy Goodman

Amy Goodman is the host and executive producer of Democracy Now!, a national, daily, independent, award-winning news program airing on more than 1,100 public television and radio stations worldwide. Time Magazine named Democracy Now! its “Pick of the Podcasts,” along with NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

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truthout.org · by Amy Goodman · April 5, 2024

12. Iran is winning the Gaza war

We should reflect deeply on this concluding paragraph.

Excerpts:

In the meantime, new threats emerge each day. On Friday, the CIA reportedly warned Israel that Iran is planning to launch an attack with a “rain” of drones, in revenge for its strike on Zahedi. If that happens, Israel will have to respond to an attack on its territory. Iran knows this, and likely calculates that any response, no matter how justified, will be seen as yet another example of belligerence from Jerusalem.

Yet much of this has been lost beneath the noise created by the focal point of the Gaza war. This week, Britain has been in understandable uproar over the death of seven aid workers, three of whom were British nationals. Condemnation piles upon Israel at the UN. Talk of sanctions grows. Washington, once the guarantor of international security, appears unable to stop the violence on both sides. And all the while, Tehran, the Middle East’s most murderous regime, continues to exploit events to its own advantage, and our cost.

Iran is winning the Gaza war

Tehran's violent strategy could soon escalate

unherd.com · by David Patrikarakos · April 5, 2024

The war has highlighted the depth and scope of Iran’s capacity to mobilise its proxies: Hezbollah, the Houthis, and the Islamic Resistance in Iraq

Amid the continuing destruction in Gaza and the surrounding global fallout, one thing becomes ever clearer. Even as Israel’s war stutters, Iran’s broader campaign against it, and by extension what we might call the American-led order, is growing in strength.

Six months on from October 7, it’s hard to see how Israel can achieve its stated goals of dismantling Hamas and rescuing its remaining hostages. The IDF has only rescued three hostages during its ground operations in Gaza, which is a good indicator of how unrealistic the latter always was. But Hamas is also far from defeated: the terror group’s top three commanders remain at large, and its fighters are already re-emerging in areas of Gaza City that were supposedly cleared. Israel claims to have killed approximately half of its 40,000 fighters, but given the amorphous nature of the terror campaign, and the radicalising effects of Israel’s operations on the Gazan population, the notion of totally eliminating Hamas remains fanciful.

According to the February 2024 US Annual Threat Assessment report compiled by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Hamas will be able to continue as “lingering armed resistance… for years to come, and the military will struggle to neutralise Hamas’s underground infrastructure, which allow insurgents to hide, regain strength, and surprise Israeli forces”. And all of this for near-universal global outrage and condemnation.

Israel had not just a right but a duty to respond to the October 7 atrocities. No state could stand by and do nothing. No nation could suffer such a loss and not respond. But the events set in motion by October 7 were always going to be about more than just Israel and Gaza. A localised war has now become perhaps the primary front in a much broader conflict between the American-led order on the one hand and, on the other, a loose axis of states with little in common except a common desire to oppose that order. In the Middle East, the primary player is Iran — and it is exploiting events with sadistic ruthlessness and efficacy.

As ever, its strategy is somewhat ad hoc — especially given its own internal unrest and dying Supreme Leader — and based around opportunism as much as forethought. As ever, it also combines political and military objectives. Beyond Iran’s longstanding armed support for both Hamas and Lebanese Hezbollah, its major concern — and indeed that of Hamas and all states opposed to Israel — was the apparent integration of Israel into the Arab world following the 2020 Abraham Accords, which saw normalisation (as opposed to peace) treaties between Jerusalem and the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan. Next up on the diplomatic slate was an even greater prize: normalisation with the Sunni Lion and home of Islam’s two holiest sites, Saudi Arabia. The thought was simply too nauseating for Hamas or Tehran to bear, and it was their desperate desire to sabotage further Israeli-Arab rapprochement that, in part, triggered October 7.

And it worked. For the moment, the Abraham Accords are holding. But a daily stream of the most visceral suffering from Gaza is enraging Arab populaces across the Middle East. For now, there is no talk of further normalisation. The February US threat report also assessed that “Iran will seek to use the conflict in Gaza to denounce Israel, decry its role in the region, and try to dissuade other Middle Eastern states from warming ties with Israel.” It was spot on. Tehran, which had arguably been more isolated in the region than Israel, has used the war to expand its regional diplomatic relations. In November of last year, el-Sisi of Egypt and Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi had a meeting on the side of the Arab Summit in Riyadh to discuss a possible expansion of bilateral relations. Then, this February, the Iranian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, went on a tour of Lebanon, Syria and Qatar. Tehran is on the diplomatic offensive.

Beyond other Arab states, Iran is bringing its influence to bear on what is a key constituency for all those who oppose the US order: the imperfectly termed Global South. It has found an appreciative audience there. It was not just South Africa but also Mexico and Chile who referred “the situation of the State of Palestine” to the ICC. Taken together, states totalling 60% of the Global South’s population have either directly or indirectly supported legal action on this issue. If those who oppose the status quo are to battle it efficiently, the states once known as “non-aligned” — now, instructively, a majority of the world — will be critical in the fight ahead.

Then, of course, there is Iran’s violent military strategy. If Hamas was disappointed that the Quds Force didn’t come charging to their aid to fight the Israelis head-on (always a foolish notion), the war has highlighted the depth and scope of Iran’s capacity to mobilise its proxies. Hezbollah, the Houthis, and the Islamic Resistance in Iraq (ISI) have all combined to strike the US and its allies across the Gulf and Middle East, significantly disrupting their international commerce flows. If nothing else, Gaza has allowed Iran to show the world the potency of its “forward defence” strategy. Even though Hezbollah has not opened an all-out second front on Israel’s northern border, it continues to divert thousands of IDF soldiers, and prevents the return home of 95,000 internally displaced persons in Israel. Meanwhile, there are many in the region who see the attacks committed by ISI and others on American forces as being the catalyst for the beginning of Washington’s talks with Iraq on the withdrawal of its final 2,500 troops there — something Iran has wanted for years. Once the US pulls out fully, there is only one power who will fill that void. The result is yet another expansion of Iranian power.

Israel is fighting back. A series of strikes against Iranian targets reached a climax (for now) on Monday, when Israel droned General Mohammad Reza Zahedi and various assorted underlings. Little-known in the West, Zahedi was an important figure to Iranian regional ambitions, until recently commanding the Quds Force unit responsible for operations in Lebanon, Jordan, Syria and Palestinian territories. Inevitably, the Iranians are vowing revenge. Khamenei promised that “the evil regime will be punished by the hands of our brave men. We will make them regret this crime and others like it.” Iranian state television also reported that, because part of the Iranian embassy was struck, the attack constitutes an attack on Iran.

Iran is matching this rhetoric with moves on the ground. On Monday, Hussein Moanes, a spokesman for the Iranian-aligned militia group, Kata’ib Hezbollah, announced that the Islamic Resistance in Iraq is preparing to “equip” 12,000 “Islamic Resistance in Jordan” fighters with a significant supply of weapons so that Iraq and Jordan can jointly attack Israel to defend the Palestinian cause. It is instructive that the Iranians feel that they can openly announce the presence of a proxy in a Sunni Arab state. The Sunni Arabs have far more ideological and historical enmity with Iran than Israel does (under the Shah of Iran, Tehran and Jerusalem were allies). But these are not normal times, and Iran is exploiting this fact relentlessly. Jordan, which is in essence a Palestinian state, has witnessed tremendous unrest over the war. Since 24 March there have been near-constant protests outside the Israeli embassy in Amann. Protestors routinely chant pro-Hamas slogans and call for Jordan’s withdrawal from its 1994 peace treaty with Israel. Once more, the Iranians step gratefully in.

“Iran is matching this rhetoric with moves on the ground”

A presence in Jordan is of serious strategic value to Iran. It affords greater opportunity for direct strikes into Israel, which it now also surrounds with its proxies. The Islamic Resistance in Iraq has already used Jordanian airspace for drone strikes into Israel — one shot down over Irbid in northern Jordan on 12 March was believed to be targeting Ben Gurion Airport. But more than this, it will allow Iran to stir political and social unrest in the West Bank, and to move equipment and materiel more easily over the border. Compared to Hamas, terrorists in the West Bank have limited resources or capacity to attack Israel. If Iran can make a success of its Jordanian proxy, that will change.

In the meantime, new threats emerge each day. On Friday, the CIA reportedly warned Israel that Iran is planning to launch an attack with a “rain” of drones, in revenge for its strike on Zahedi. If that happens, Israel will have to respond to an attack on its territory. Iran knows this, and likely calculates that any response, no matter how justified, will be seen as yet another example of belligerence from Jerusalem.

Yet much of this has been lost beneath the noise created by the focal point of the Gaza war. This week, Britain has been in understandable uproar over the death of seven aid workers, three of whom were British nationals. Condemnation piles upon Israel at the UN. Talk of sanctions grows. Washington, once the guarantor of international security, appears unable to stop the violence on both sides. And all the while, Tehran, the Middle East’s most murderous regime, continues to exploit events to its own advantage, and our cost.

David Patrikarakos is UnHerd‘s foreign correspondent. His latest book is War in 140 characters: how social media is reshaping conflict in the 21st century. (Hachette)

dpatrikarakos

unherd.com · by David Patrikarakos · April 5, 2024

13. Video: Crafty quadcopter sits on power lines to recharge

Fascinating concept.

Of course in wartime we (or the enemy) can cut off power to the power lines. But in the US, think of the surveillance (or attack) potential for any bad actor to conduct long duration (or unlimited?) operations because we will not shut down the power. (Unless we want to be like north Korea and limit the flow of electricity around the country).

I guess to defend against this Joe and Billie Bob will be out patrolling the powerlines with their shotguns to shoot down these quadcopters. (with only half sarcasm).

Photo and video at the link: https://newatlas.com/drones/drone-operate-indefinitely-recharging-power-lines/

Video: Crafty quadcopter sits on power lines to recharge

By Ben Coxworth

April 05, 2024

New Atlas · April 5, 2024

Battery life wouldn't be an issue for drones if they could just recharge on power lines as needed. That's exactly what an experimental new quadcopter can now do, allowing it to stay aloft pretty much indefinitely.

Developed by scientists from the University of Southern Denmark, the charging technology could be utilized by drones carrying out a wide variety of tasks. That said, it's intended first and foremost for use by autonomous drones performing power line inspections. After all, those copters are already going to be within easy reach of the lines at all times.

Viet Duong Hoang and colleagues started with a commercial Tarot 650 Sport carbon fiber drone frame, then added an electric quadcopter propulsion system, a 7,000-mAh lithium-polymer battery, and electronic components such as a Raspberry Pi 4 B microcomputer, a Pixhawk V6X autopilot module, plus a millimeter-wave radar unit and an RGB video camera.

Importantly, they also installed a passively actuated power-line-gripper on top of the drone. This device sits within a cable guide consisting of two widely spread inward-sloping arms.

When the drone's onboard software detects that its battery is getting low, the aircraft uses its camera and radar to spot the closest power line. The aircraft then flies straight up toward that line from underneath.

Upon reaching the power line, the drone's cable guide directs the line into the gripper. As the line goes in, it pushes down on two elastomer ribbons spanning the open space between the gripper's two rubber sides. This action causes those sides to quickly close together overtop of the power line – no electricity required.

That said, once the line has been gripped, a magnetic control circuit kicks in to power the gripper, keeping it firmly closed around the line as the drone hangs beneath. A top-located inductive charger on the drone then starts drawing current from the power line. Once the aircraft's battery is fully charged, the gripper opens and the drone can resume its line-inspecting duties.

It should be noted that only a small amount of upward thrust by the drone is required to initially trip the gripper. Additionally, if the voltage of the power line is sufficient, it serves as the power source for the control circuit – otherwise, the drone's battery is used.

In field tests performed on power lines at Denmark's HCA Airport, the 4.3-kg (9.5-lb) demonstrator drone was able to operate for over two hours, recharging its battery five times between line-inspection sessions. The scientists are now working on boosting the system's robustness, and hope to test it in both more remote locations and in adverse weather conditions.

You can see the drone in power-line-gripping action, in the video below. A paper on the research is being presented at The 2024 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

And for another take on power-line-inspecting drone-like things, check out the LineRanger robot, which crawls along lines instead of flying overtop of them.

Autonomous Overhead Powerline Recharging for Uninterrupted Drone Operations - ICRA 2024

New Atlas · April 5, 2024

14. Opinion: Ukraine's Victory Remains in Reach By Alexander Vindman

Opinion: Ukraine's Victory Remains in Reach

kyivpost.com · by Alexander Vindman · April 6, 2024

Implementing Critical Policy Changes in the Third Year of War

By Alexander Vindman

April 6, 2024, 3:14 pm |

The negative news coverage of the Ukraine-Russia conflict has unleashed a flood of dire predictions. However, doomsayers’ forecasts are overly grim and the outcome can be much more favorable for Ukraine with the right support and proper adjustment of both the United States’ and Ukraine’s strategy.

The single most important factor outside of Ukraine’s control determining outcomes in the third year of war will be Western - and specifically American - military support. No single country or combination of countries can match the United States’ security assistance. Currently, American security aid is frozen in a political battle over congressionally appropriated funds.

And while Ukraine aid is frequently presented as if Ukraine controls the funding, the reality is very different. Most of this funding is neither sent to Ukraine nor used to purchase weapons sent to Ukraine. Instead, the aid is used to replenish stocks of antiquated American equipment with new material rolling off defense industry production lines. In fact, it is the connection between the drawdown of old equipment and the replenishment of U.S. military storehouses with new equipment that has arrested the flow of support to Ukraine. The U.S. still retains massive stockpiles of weapons and ammunition in the European theater that could be transferred to Ukraine, but will not drawdown these stocks because Congress hasn’t authorized replenishment.

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Other Topics of Interest

Eurotopics: Zelensky Lowers Age for Reservist Call-up

After nine months of hesitating over the issue, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has agreed to lower the draft age for calling up reservists from 27 to 25. The reactions in the press are mixed.

Like with the Lend-Lease programs of World War II, the U.S. can and should transfer military material even absent the congressionally appropriated replenishment funds. By sending material without replenishment funds the U.S. would be accepting a small risk to our military in the event that our soldiers would need the equipment to fight an adversary, but that is an unlikely “what if” scenario. Instead of fixating on this hypothetical situation, we should be supporting Ukraine - a partner that is already in the fight and actively destroying Russia’s conventional military capability.

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On the topic of material support, there is a secondary challenge that is also very fixable. Currently, Russia outguns Ukraine by firing 5 or more rounds of artillery for every rationed shell fired by Ukraine. American and European assistance can fix that lopsided ratio by marrying European dollars with U.S. ammunition production lines. We have the arsenal of democracy, but no funding because of our political paralysis. Europe has the funds, but not the manufacturing base to produce shells. Such an arrangement would combine our strengths to help Ukraine. The EU, led by Czechia, has made great strides already in closing the gap by scouring the globe and finding 1.5 million rounds of ammunition for Ukraine. But that is still a one-off solution. It’s time for the EU to invest in a long-term solution through the U.S. arsenal.

Another issue is the median age of the Ukrainian Armed Forces (UAF). Wars are fought by the young. The current median age for the UAF is estimated to be 43 years old. For the Russian Armed Forces, the current median age is estimated at 35. Since Russia has four times the population of Ukraine, this gap will likely continue to grow and tilt the military advantage towards Russia. Ukraine needs more soldiers to ensure sufficient troop strength and adequate reserves to rotate worn-out forces from the frontlines. The Government of Ukraine has taken the initial steps to close draft loopholes and reduce the draft age from 27 to 25. However, Ukraine will need to go even further to ensure adequate military manpower for a war expected to run well into 2025. If implemented, these policies will have a meaningful impact on Ukraine’s ability to both defend this year and attack next year and thus bring the war to a close.

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Ukraine’s former top military officer General Zaluzhny argued that Ukraine’s limited ability to conduct offensive operations was partially due to disparities between the Ukrainian and Russian industrial and technological bases. While this may be true, major deficiencies in logistics and training are at least as important as technological factors or production lines for new equipment. These necessary reforms are within Ukraine’s power to improve.

The lack of focus on sustainment and repair of Western-donated equipment and the inadequate logistical preparations are both an American and Ukrainian shortfall. Ukraine remains too focused on acquiring new material instead of keeping its current inventory at maximum functional status. Kyiv should be aggressively advocating for the expansion of its repair and maintenance capabilities - particularly when more than half of the donated equipment is currently damaged or nonfunctional due to wear and tear.

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The U.S. Department of Defense has also been negligent in its support of donated equipment. Almost all the maintenance support for Ukraine is conducted outside of its territory in massive depots in Poland. Fighting a war with your repair facilities 800km from the frontlines is a recipe for disaster. There is a recommendation from the Department of Defense teed-up for the President to ease the restriction and allow defense contractors to come into Ukraine to improve the logistical tail. POTUS should not delay and make a move in this direction immediately.

The lack of proper training is another critical shortfall. The West has been focused on training Ukraine’s fighting troops but has neglected training effective commands and staffs. To break through Russian defenses, Ukraine will have to mass forces, breach obstacles, and suppress enemy artillery, airpower, and drones. Ukrainian forces will need to ensure they can communicate and operate under electronic warfare assaults while simultaneously using their own systems to jam Russian communications and disrupt the operations of loitering munitions and FPV drones.

These tasks require a well-trained staff capable of synchronizing and orchestrating these complex operations. The U.S. invests enormous resources into providing our troops sufficient training to conduct synchronized operations - creating an effective command and staff should become a training priority in Ukraine. If Washington is looking to err on the side of caution, the U.S. can conduct this training in Ukraine with former military personnel working as contractors rather than active-duty troops.

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Despite the criticality of the aforementioned policy changes, the most important action the U.S. and the West can take is to mobilize political support. Generating the political will to pursue a Ukrainian victory and Russian defeat must be prioritized. This can be achieved by fully recognizing the risk of a Russian triumph and Ukrainian defeat for the U.S. and NATO. The simple fact is if the U.S. doesn’t want troops fighting in Europe, it should send Ukraine maximum material support. Furthermore, to prevent the perpetual threat of Russian aggression towards Ukraine, the West will need to offer Kyiv ironclad security guarantees through NATO and European Union membership.

There are tangible benefits to Kyiv’s entry into the alliance. Firstly, Ukrainian NATO membership would act as a bulwark against a still-aggressive Russia. Secondly, NATO membership would eliminate a decades-long flashpoint in the region through Ukraine’s unambiguous inclusion in a Western security structure. Finally, the Ukrainian army would be an asset and example to European powers given that it is now the most battle-hardened in Europe. NATO membership would also enable the reconstruction and transformation of Ukraine and help establish a powerful model for other former Soviet states to emulate.

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Failure by the U.S. and EU to effectively support Ukraine will embolden Russia to pursue future military aggression. Donald Trump has already expressed his willingness to allow Russia to attack a NATO member. If the West and Ukraine cooperate in reforming training regimes to enable more complex combined arms operations, alleviating the logistical challenges of maintenance and providing the Ukrainian Armed Forces the political and material support they need, Kyiv could build the capacity to win decisive battles, regain strategically vital areas of lost territory, and position itself for meaningful peace negotiations. The bottom line is that the combination of Western support and Ukrainian reforms will significantly improve Ukraine’s outlook for 2024.

Reprinted from the author’s blog Why It Matters. See the original here.

The views expressed are the author’s and not necessarily of Kyiv Post.

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Alexander Vindman

Alexander Vindman, a career U.S. Army officer, served on the National Security Council as the director for Eastern European, Caucasus and Russian affairs, as the Russia political-military affairs officer for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and as a military attaché in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow.

kyivpost.com · by Alexander Vindman · April 6, 2024

15. Do our leaders, ‘experts’ and pundits want World War III?

I am no longer in a leadership position, nor I do not consider myself an expert, but I guess I could be a pundit. However, this citizen surely does not want World War III.

But the author raises some good questions about "censorship by "legacy media." Are we getting accurate news about the wars in Ukraine and Gaza?

However, I disagree with a number of his points. I do think we must help Ukraine and Israel prevail. Failing to do so is what could bring us closer to World War III. And while I do not want nuclear conflict (limited or otherwise - I do not think you can use limited and nuclear in the same sentence), I believe, paradoxically, our great fear of a nuclear exchange and myopic focus on it, actually could create the conditions that could lead to a war or wars we do not want. Every time we publicly discuss our desire to prevent escalation and nuclear conflict we are demonstrating weakness and ceding the initiative to malign actors around the world.

Do our leaders, ‘experts’ and pundits want World War III?

BY DOUGLAS MACKINNON, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR - 04/06/24 12:00 PM ET

https://thehill.com/opinion/international/4577779-do-our-leaders-experts-and-pundits-want-world-war-iii/

At least within the circles I run, people who encounter purposely-created insanity and danger openly acknowledge the insanity and danger and, for reasons of self-protection and survival, want it stopped as fast as possible.

At the very top of all the insane and dangerous things upon the planet that can threaten us, I would list triggering World War III. But the more I believe that to be true, the more irrelevant the subject and threat seems to be for many others. Including some leaders, foreign policy “experts,” liberal and conservative pundits and much of celebrity-dom. 

In a piece earlier this week for Fox News titled “Morning Glory: Israel’s war of survival” highly respected conservative commentator Hugh Hewitt wrote, “Bottom line, I’d have half as many facts and views of the war if I only listened to two of these four podcasts focused mostly on Israel’s war of survival. If I relied only on American legacy media, I would have a terribly distorted view of the war and would be blind and dumb to vast amounts of crucial data about the war.” 

I happen to strongly agree with Hewitt regarding the American legacy media’s censorship of news coming out of that war and the deliberate shading of Israel. That acknowledged, my initial two questions for Hewitt — who seems to be (like so many) in favor of Ukraine fighting to the last Ukrainian in the war against Russia — are: Why isn’t he making the same point about the legacy media censoring all the news coming out of the war between Ukraine and Russia? And second, why isn’t he reporting all the news coming out of Ukraine himself?

Most specifically, why isn’t he reporting on the shocking and obscene casualty numbers coming out of that war? I believe Hewitt to be one of the best in the business, but even the best can have blind spots.

Last August, U.S. officials estimated that approximately 500,000 Russian and Ukrainian troops had been killed or wounded since Russia’s invasion in February 2022. Recently, a former intelligence official in the U.S. told me that troop casualties are now over 1 million. If the intent by some to call for Ukraine to march into the teeth of the Russian war machine was to use its people as cheap disposable pawns to be sacrificed in a proxy war to weaken Putin and Russia, then those people need to reevaluate their siloed thinking. While the Ukrainian pawns are being crushed, Russia may be turning the tide. 

Many who are cheerleading Ukraine to fight to the last Ukrainian — from thousands of miles away from the battlefield, while existing in bubbles of luxury known only to a sliver of 1 percent on the planet — seem to be singing from the same hymn sheet: “Putin is evil and must be destroyed at all costs.” Okay.

That bumper-sticker policy might sound great being delivered from the back of a limo or a private jet on the way to Aspen, but what are the consequences? I guess we would know more if that “American legacy media” Hewitt rightfully castigated honestly and consistently reported those horrific casualty numbers. But … they don’t. It seems that many of them don’t want tens of thousands of dead and maimed bodies to get in the way of a bumper-sticker narrative.

While many of our leaders, experts and pundits have been continually pushing Ukraine to prosecute the war — while U.S and U.K. defense contractors are enriching themselves — others have been screaming out for an immediate cease-fire to prevent World War III. Unfortunately, for the most part, those voices have gone unheard.

Unheard because the American legacy media chose to ignore them. As did most “leaders,” “experts” and pundits the world over.

But, of late, others are now thankfully willing to say the quiet part out loud. One is Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk. As World War III creeps closer and closer to reality, Tusk said: “War is no longer a concept from the past. It is real, and it started over two years ago. The most worrying thing at the moment is that literally any scenario is possible. We haven’t seen a situation like this since 1945.”

“Any scenario is possible.” And that “any scenario” gets more dangerous by the day. As Newsweek reported last month: “NATO Moving Missiles Closer to Russia’s Borders.”

While Hewitt and others might cheer on such a move, I find it blood-chilling. Just last month, President Vladimir Putin told the West that Russia was technically “ready for nuclear war” and that if the U.S. sent troops to Ukraine, it would be considered a significant escalation of the conflict. Also last month, we had this exclusive from CNN: “US prepared ‘rigorously’ for potential Russian nuclear strike in Ukraine in late 2022.”

This is the fuse of insanity burning down to an inevitable explosion. 

As we in the United States get all worked up over identity politics, lawfare interfering in a presidential election or the mental fitness of our president, we are one mistake or miscalculation away from nuclear war.

Our leaders, the “experts” and various pundits are very bright people and surely have gamed this out. Which invites the question: Would some not mind a limited nuclear war?

How else can one explain the constant ignoring or brushing off of the unthinkable?Douglas MacKinnon, a political and communications consultant, was a writer in the White House for Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, and former special assistant for policy and communications at the Pentagon during the last three years of the Bush administration.

16. Stopping Online Terrorism: Pulling the Plug on the Russian Imperial Movement

Excerpt:

The Russian Imperial Movement thrives in the virtual world. It utilizes social media to coordinate future attacks across the United States as it did in Gothenburg. However, this digital reliance is also the organization’s greatest vulnerability. Formally engaging alternative social media platforms’ parent companies would enable the United States to improve and diversify existing public-private partnerships and pull the plug on the Russian Imperial Movement. It would remain in darkness, and our security’s future would brighten.

Stopping Online Terrorism: Pulling the Plug on the Russian Imperial Movement — THE INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS REVIEW

Apr 5 

Written By Ethan Ingram, Contributing Writer

iar-gwu.org · April 5, 2024

From November 2016 to January 2017, Gothenburg’s citizens lived in fear. Explosions tore through the Swedish city’s streets, maiming a civilian and destroying a migrant center and a left-wing bookstore. When the Swedish Security Service finally apprehended the bombers, their identities as members of the neo-fascist Nordic Resistance Movement shocked nobody due to the group’s public willingness to employ violence against their ideological enemies. But even with these connections to domestic radicals, the explosive schematics’ foreign origin and clear connections to extremist rallying calls across cyberspace affirmed this plot’s true mastermind: The Russian Imperial Movement.

The Russian Imperial Movement is a far-right terrorist organization first organized in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse. It champions ultranationalist monarchism, Orthodox Christian supremacy, and the Russian Empire’s return. The group’s online tactical guidance and propaganda facilitate attacks and take advantage of law enforcement’s limited capacity to regulate these terrorists’ enduring presence. A better public-private partnership is necessary to stop this online threat before further attacks are conducted across Western states. The United States would eliminate the Russian Imperial Movement’s strongholds in the virtual world by formally engaging alternative social media platforms' parent companies in dialogue.

The Russian Imperial Movement actively threatens the security of the United States and its allies because, unlike its far-right predecessors and contemporaries, the Russian Imperial Movement perfects long-standing trends in right-wing tendencies. Far-right extremists are infamous for both their early adoption of social media and decentralized terrorist cells numbering in the hundreds. But the Russian Imperial Movement’s core membership of hardened fighters, estimated in the thousands, is fervently supported by over 50,000 online followers. Their prolific Internet usage also establishes transnational connections to other more disorganized far-right organizations, like the Nordic Resistance Movement or The Base, which the Russian Imperial Movement trains and inspires to commit attacks in friendly states. Finally, the Russian Federation tacitly grants the Russian Imperial Movement freedom to act so long as its operations address mutual objectives, like destabilizing its enemies.

Unfortunately, current policy only addresses the Russian Imperial Movement’s physical presence. In 2020, the Departments of State (DOS) and the Treasury (USDT) designated the organization as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist Group— organizations or individuals whose devastating potential for terrorist activity requires financial restrictions based on Executive Order 13224— because of its grey-zone activity in Central Africa, Libya, Syria, and Ukraine. Along these lines, the USDT identified high-level members, such as Stanislav Shevchuk and Alexander Zhuchkovsky, as Specially Designated Global Terrorists subject to sanctions. However, a spree of letter bombings across Spain in 2022 shows that the Russian Imperial Movement remains capable of exerting its will abroad despite U.S. policy actions. These limitations in levying such constraints point to a neglected cyber frontier where oversight is needed most: the Internet.

The United States faces constraints in the digital space, as it must uphold freedom of speech when prosecuting transnational terrorist activities online. Private social media companies that enforce terms of service are far more successful in decreasing such groups' online presence. However, restrictions on mainstream Western platforms only push the Russian Imperial Movement onto alternative social media, like Telegram and VKontakte (VK). Its operations continue in relative safety online, so integrating these companies into broader anti-terrorism initiatives is necessary.

A key reason the United States should work with alternative social media companies is to address the blind spots in technological regulation that terrorists commonly exploit. Applications with encryption technology and limited community guidelines are attractive terrorist havens, allowing these groups to operate with impunity. Pressing these companies to join broader initiatives, like the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT), would compel them to demonstrate self-regulatory efforts before attaining membership. This move would significantly reduce the Russian Imperial Movement’s online scope.

Alternative social media companies are also an excellent pathway toward effective regulation since private companies do not face the same legal hurdles as federal authorities. The First Amendment prevents government regulation of extremist activities that do not constitute explicit threats or imminent violence, as ruled in Brandenburg v. Ohio. In contrast, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act allows private companies far greater scope to remove violent or offensive content from their platforms.

Finally, engaging alternative social media services encourages companies of all sizes to act responsibly. Large companies like Amazon, Facebook, and Twitter often significantly contribute to initiatives challenging terrorist operations online. This overreliance on major businesses potentially minimizes the role of smaller corporate entities. Intentionally diversifying involvement would rectify imbalances and unify all actors behind the common goal of enhanced regulatory efforts. The United States can achieve this incorporation by mediating conversations surrounding coordination and leadership between diverse companies. It can also make formal suggestions for the membership composition of particular projects within organizations like GIFCT. Overall, policymakers must treat these initiatives as partnerships, which require leadership through mediation and compromise rather than delegation.

As with VK and its Russian government shareholders, alternative social media controlled by unyielding organizations will reject U.S. government proposals. Yet outlining the benefits of public-private partnerships may entice more amenable alternative platforms in the United States, Canada, and the United Arab Emirates. For companies struggling to regulate their sites independently, further integration facilitates sharing helpful software and expertise that would rapidly improve enterprises’ regulation capabilities. For companies needing additional funding, the United States’ vocal desire to enhance standardization indicates that it would be open to assisting cooperative firms. All ventures have a price, and these perks would win support from groups inclined to listen.

The Russian Imperial Movement thrives in the virtual world. It utilizes social media to coordinate future attacks across the United States as it did in Gothenburg. However, this digital reliance is also the organization’s greatest vulnerability. Formally engaging alternative social media platforms’ parent companies would enable the United States to improve and diversify existing public-private partnerships and pull the plug on the Russian Imperial Movement. It would remain in darkness, and our security’s future would brighten.

Author: Ethan Ingram

Managing Editor: Sebastian Reyes

Web Editor: Kate Maughan

iar-gwu.org · April 5, 2024

​17. The Next Frontier? Philosophy in Space.

​A fascinating "debate." STEM vs humanities/philosophy in space.

Excerpts:

The educational requirements for the astronaut program are clear: Applicants must possess at least a master’s degree in a STEM field (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics), a doctorate in medicine or a test pilot school graduate patch. Though I have a Ph.D., it’s in philosophy. (And though I’m an Air Force pilot, I’m not a test pilot.)

I hesitate to tell NASA its business. But I think its requirements are closing the astronaut program off from important insights from the humanities and social sciences.

OPINION

GUEST ESSAY

The Next Frontier? Philosophy in Space.​

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/05/opinion/nasa-astronauts-stem-humanities.html?

April 5, 2024

Credit...Mathieu Larone

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By Joseph O. Chapa

Dr. Chapa is a U.S. Air Force officer and the author of “Is Remote Warfare Moral?”

The window to apply to be a NASA astronaut — a window that opens only about every four years — closes this month, on April 16. Though I’ve submitted an application, I don’t expect to make the cut.

The educational requirements for the astronaut program are clear: Applicants must possess at least a master’s degree in a STEM field (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics), a doctorate in medicine or a test pilot school graduate patch. Though I have a Ph.D., it’s in philosophy. (And though I’m an Air Force pilot, I’m not a test pilot.)

I hesitate to tell NASA its business. But I think its requirements are closing the astronaut program off from important insights from the humanities and social sciences.

Of course, the requirement for astronauts to have technical training makes some intuitive sense. NASA was founded in 1958 “to provide for research into problems of flight within and outside the earth’s atmosphere.” Who better to solve flight problems than scientists and engineers? What’s more, NASA’s space missions have long conducted science experiments to learn how plant and animal life behaves in the far-flung emptiness between us and the moon.

But the need for STEM in space might be waning — just as the need for humanities and the social sciences waxes. After all, the “problems of flight” that once tethered us to this planet have largely been solved, thanks in no small part to all those scientist and engineer astronauts who blazed the trail to space.

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By contrast, the future of our relationship with the cosmos — a colony on the moon? Humans on Mars? Contact with intelligent alien life? — will require thoughtful inquiry from many disciplines. We will need sociologists and anthropologists to help us imagine new communities; theologians and linguists if we find we are not alone in the universe; political and legal theorists to sort out the governing principles of interstellar life.

Naturally, some scholars can study these topics while still earthbound. But so can many of today’s astronauts, who often end up working on projects unrelated to their academic training. The idea behind sending people with a wider array of academic disciplines into the cosmos is not just to give scholars a taste of outer space, but also to put them in fruitful conversation with one another.

My own discipline, philosophy, may be better suited for this kind of exploration than some might think. To be sure, much philosophy can be done from an armchair. Descartes arrived at his famous conclusion, “I think, therefore, I am,” while warming himself by the fire and, as he noted, “wearing a winter dressing gown.”

But some of the greatest philosophical breakthroughs occurred only because their authors had firsthand experience with extreme and uncomfortable conditions. We might not have the Stoic philosophy of Epictetus had he not faced the hardship of slavery in Nero’s court. We might not have Thomas Hobbes’s “Leviathan” (and his principle of the “consent of the governed,” so central to the American experiment), but for his flight from the English Civil War. And we might not have Hannah Arendt’s insights on the “banality of evil” had she not attended the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a chief architect of the Holocaust​.

Not all philosophers who want to learn what it means to be human in this vast and expanding universe need to experience living in space. But perhaps some of us should.

Throughout the history of Western philosophy, space has often served as stand-in for life’s deepest truths. Plato thought that the things of this world were mere images of true reality, and that true reality existed in the heavens beyond. What inspired admiration and awe in Immanuel Kant was not just the moral law within all of us but also the “starry heavens above.” The Platos and Kants of today are in a position to take a much closer look at those very heavens.

In general, the work of philosophy is to ask, “And suppose this proposition is right, what then?” When faced with a proposition — say, “The mind and body are separable,” or “One must always act to achieve the greatest happiness for the greatest number” — the philosopher takes another step and asks, “What are the implications of such a view?”

Though Earth has been our only home, it may not be our home forever. What are the implications of that proposition? What might that mean for our conception of nationhood? Of community? Of ourselves and our place in the world? This would be the work of space philosophers.

These days, unfortunately, the prestige of STEM continues to eclipse that of the social sciences and humanities. It seems unlikely that NASA will buck this trend.

That would be bad news for me, personally — but I think also for humanity at large. One day we may all echo Jodie Foster’s character in the sci-fi movie “Contact.” When the mysteries of space-time were unfurled before her, all she could manage to say was, “They should have sent a poet.”

More on outer space

Opinion | Rebecca Boyle

What We Do to the Moon Will Transform It Forever

Jan. 21, 2024

Should We Still Be Sending Astronauts to Space?

Nov. 15, 2022

Opinion | Neil M. Maher

Not Everyone Wanted a Man on the Moon

July 16, 2019

Joseph O. Chapa (@JosephOChapa) is a U.S. Air Force officer and the author of “Is Remote Warfare Moral?”

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A version of this article appears in print on April 7, 2024, Section SR, Page 8 of the New York edition with the headline: NASA Could Use Some Philosophers. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com