Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

"The future promise of any nation can be directly measured by the present prospects of its youth."

– John F. Kennedy

"Sooner or later I'm going to die, but I'm not going to retire."

– Margaret Mead

"Good judgment comes from experience, and experience - well, that comes from poor judgment."

– A.A. Milne

1. The Unstoppable Revolution: Burma 2024 (Update from Tim Heinemann)

2. Shifting focus to threats from China and Russia starts with people, not tech, US special operations leaders say

3. Mental Health Challenges for SOF Veterans | SOF News

4. “The Battle of the Straits: A Geopolitical Maelstrom”

5. Israel–Hamas War (Iran) Update, April 7, 2024

6. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, April 7, 2024

7. Army Announces FDA Clearance of Whole Blood Rapid Test to Help with Assessment of Traumatic Brain Injury

8. WWIII could start over Philippines dispute in South China Sea, China 'not respecting' treaties, expert says

9. Massive container ship loses power near NYC’s Verrazzano Bridge days after Baltimore Key Bridge disaster

10. Anonymous users are dominating right-wing discussions online. They also spread false information

11. Ukraine’s drone tactics have inspired Taiwan, but US support remains critical

12. Drone Strikes on Myanmar Military Capitol Signify Deteriorating Situation

13. Ukraine to lose war with Russia if US Congress withholds aid, says Zelensky

14. Opinion | In the shadow war with Iran, Biden just scored an unheralded victory by Max Boot

15. Top Republican warns pro-Russia messages are echoed ‘on the House floor’

16. Israel withdraws most troops from south at six-month mark of Gaza war

17. Inside Donald Trump’s secret plan to end the Ukraine-Russia warInside Donald Trump’s secret plan to end the Ukraine-Russia war

18. Hamas’s Feud With Palestinian Rivals Adds to Doubts Over Gaza’s Postwar FutureHamas’s Feud With Palestinian Rivals Adds to Doubts Over Gaza’s Postwar Future

19. ‘Social Order Could Collapse’ in AI Era, Two Top Japan Companies Say‘Social Order Could Collapse’ in AI Era, Two Top Japan Companies Say

20. Great Power Competition Will Drive Irregular Conflicts

21. The Bipartisan Consensus in Favor of Israel Is Broken, But When Will It Change U.S. Policy?

22. Iran's Order of Chaos

1. The Unstoppable Revolution: Burma 2024 (Update from Tim Heinemann)

Please see this message from COL (RET) Tim Heinemann about his work in Burma. For full transparency, Tim was my battalion XO in 2-1SFG in the late 1980s when I was a young team leader and later was my first monograph director at SAMS (he mentored both Ken Tovo and me on our first monographs). Although we have corresponded over the years, the last time I saw him was at Fort Liberty (Bragg) about 16 years ago when I was the USASOC G3. Jack Jenson, who was the commander of the Training Group at SWCS, vinted Tim to conduct a leader development session for officers and NCOs and Tim provided one of the most UW relevant presentations I have ever received. What I recall most from it was that Tim said he was simply conducting pilot team operations to prepare for the day when the US would finally deploy 1st Special Forces Group to Burma to conduct conventional warfare in support of the resistance.

If we are going to conduct strategic competition with China in the gray zone Burma is one of the geostrategic locations we should consider. Note China's interests in Burma. And of course the success of the resistance in Burma could be a game changer for regional stability in Southeast Asia some day in the future. If ever there was a place for an economy of force operation with SF, PSYOP and CA as force multipliers conducting unconventional warfare in support of indigenous forces, Burma is like that place.

Tim's work complements the work of other retired special operators in Burmaq to include Dave Eubanks and family with the Free Burma Rangers as well as Kristine Gould (former CA officer).

The 4 page detailed report is at this link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Vay7ViNqHTQ9S7D7O3EL60IZqBouyjWq/view?usp=sharing. Note his triage guidance in the first paragraph of his message. But the entire report is a lesson in revolution and resistance from an actual UW practitioner and worthy of detailed study

Below this message I have pasted links to two relevant articles which make Tim's report timely and relevant.

This update addresses American competition with China through the lens of ongoing revolution in Burma as “competitive space”. The first two and last three pages of this report are for American public and private sector decision-makers. The bulk of the report provides details for those trying to “connect the dots” across revolutionary Burma. This is because of USA’s flawed record of success in complex irregular contexts.

The Unstoppable Revolution: Burma 2024. An Executive Summary

This report is about the USA effectively competing with the Chinese Communist Party through the proxy lens of revolutionary Burma. Totalitarian old guard Burman generals guilty of crimes against humanity, are ironically the change agents giving the United States opportunity to turn things around. The generals are still the existential threat “to be driven into the sea”, just as Americans were first compelled to do to the Brits in the late 1700s. US precision assistance in Burma is critical in 2024.

America has strategic opportunity to contest the extreme conservative Chinese Communist Party leadership at its front door to the Indian Ocean. The challenge lies in stepping up the game morally and organizationally to compete in ways that the CCP cannot contest. Precedents set in supporting revolutionaries in Burma can undercut the CCP’s expansionism agenda before a world audience.

This is about USA effectively competing in The New Dark Ages, a term used by Dr Phil Williams in a Strategic Studies Institute monograph, From the Middle Ages to The New Dark Ages. The primary strategic reality today is that everyone faces an open-ended era of “No rules unrestricted irregular competition for perpetual positional advantage”. The CCP, for its part, is the grand master in weaponizing economics with vicious finesse. By contrast, Burman generals in their 1 February 2021 coup, began wielding a bloody club against all opponents. Both kinds of tyranny create ideal competitive space for USA and allies to exploit.

The generals blew their game, as well as the CCP’s. The military regime had been manipulating all sides in Burma to steadily gain coercive power. The CCP had also been manipulating all sides (including the generals) for direct access to the Indian Ocean basin. This was by creating dependencies on coercive military and economic aid. However, when the military junta started killing anyone and everyone refusing to kneel to despots, it unleashed unstoppable revolutionary rage. This unified factional Burma as never before in history. Coercion Rule #1: “Don’t create too many losers at one time.” Revolutionary success today in Burma arouses fear in CCP leadership for good reasons. This can “go viral” globally and at home.

The modern democratization of irregular warfare and irregular competition empowers losers, high and low, in and beyond Burma. Similarly, the CCP has badly over-played its hand by creating “too many losers”. Most countries around the world have common core interests which the CCP violates. Moreover, there are strong stakeholders from the Philippines to India, seeking to protect and advance these interests. This is happening at a time when the CCP has internal divisions, perpetuates failed economic practices at home, alienates its military leaders worried about Mainland China’s instability, and faces international pushback on “Made in China”. Consequently, the United States can exploit perfect storm conditions in Burma.

Today Burma represents three things: 1 - It is sadly SE Asia’s final “cash cow” frontier exploited by a globalized world. 2 - More importantly, revolutionary Burma in 2024 is exactly where revolutionary America was in 1780 - it can either win or lose its revolution. 3 - Most compellingly, revolutionary Burma is the unheralded leader of the free world today by contesting tyranny – unlike many countries which have sold out to the economic enticements of predatory Communist China. American leaders’ best option is to be decisive on which side of the increasingly competitive world they are on. This starts with revolution “on the winds” in Burma.

Of all things in Burma, the single most important is the establishment and sustainment of a collaborative communications architecture to harness the full might of interactive revolutionaries and societies. Refer to the report’s section on Low Hanging Fruit. This assures sustainment of Revolutionary Mass and Momentum.

Please refer to this link:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Vay7ViNqHTQ9S7D7O3EL60IZqBouyjWq/view?usp=sharing

Timothy S. Heinemann is a retired US Army officer and was an advisor on ethnic matters in Burma to Founding Chairman of Business Executives for National Security (BENS) from 2010 to 2021, and remains advisor to pro-democracy and states’ right groups in Burma from 2004 to present.

Point of contact information: tsh5252@hotmail.com and tsh5252@gmail.com

Countering China’s Influence in Myanmar

https://nationalinterest.org/feature/countering-china%E2%80%99s-influence-myanmar-210438

Shifting focus to threats from China and Russia starts with people, not tech, US special operations leaders say

https://www.businessinsider.com/shifting-socom-focus-to-china-russia-starts-with-people-leaders-2024-4?utm

2. Shifting focus to threats from China and Russia starts with people, not tech, US special operations leaders say

A question I have is whether the SOF units that have a regional focus on China and Russia (SF, PSYOP, and CA) are being sufficiently resourced to sustain and enhance their regional expertise (to include language, culture and immersion through long duration engagement in the regions?

On the other hand are those regionally aligned organizations for Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East and Southwest Asia developing sufficient expertise to compete with Russia and China in those regions?

We cannot think simply in terms of direct conflict with China and RUssia in large scale combat operations. Certainly we must prepare for such operations to support the joint force but the joint force (and DOD) should also recognize the strategic value of employing SOF to support strategic competition in the gray zone in direct operations versus China and Russia.

And although counterintuitive to some, these types of operations my benefit from a bottom up perspective, e..g, from those who have actual time on the ground in the region rather than those who are applying theory at high HQ (there must be a synergistic effect between the on the ground operators/experts and the higher HQ who must support prioritization and resourcing and the gaining of authorities and permissions to allow operations to be conducted on the ground (or at sea or in the air).

Shifting focus to threats from China and Russia starts with people, not tech, US special operations leaders say

Business Insider · by Stavros Atlamazoglou

Military & Defense

Stavros Atlamazoglou

2024-04-07T12:30:01Z

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Members of U.S. Naval Special Warfare Task Unit Europe (NSWTU-E) reload their Colt Mk 18 Carbines during shooting drills at a range in Cyprus, September 29, 2021. U.S. Army Photo by Sgt. Patrik Orcutt

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The US military is adjusting to what it sees as the two most pressing national security threats: China and Russia.
US Special Operations Command emphasizes the importance of people over hardware in its operations.
Special operators are focusing on new threats but still having to maintain a counterterrorism posture.

China and Russia. In that order, these two rivals are the two most pressing national security threats the US faces today. Taking note, the US military is adjusting for a new era of near-peer warfare against these adversaries after more than 20 years of counterterrorism operations in the Middle East.

As the military's tip of the spear, US Special Operations Command (SOCOM) is also changing for this new era of warfare.

In a talk earlier this year with the Defense Writers Group, Army Gen. Bryan Fenton and Army Command Sgt. Major Shane Shorte, respectively SOCOM's commander and senior enlisted advisor, shared their views on how the special operations community is changing and adjusting for a new era of warfare.

What they highlighted the most is that during this period of change, some things remain constant.

The special operations community tries to live and die by its five core values. Perhaps the most important of these is the adage that "people are more important than hardware."

At the heart of any special operations unit is the idea that it is the operators and support personnel that make the difference. Equip them with swords and spears, and they will likely still somehow manage to pull their mission off, or so the argument goes.

'People are More Important than Hardware'

"The most important line of effort that we have in our headquarters is still our people," Shorte said. "We're not a platform-centric organization, we're a people-centric organization."

This core value is one of the many reasons why special operations units place so much emphasis on their selection and assessment processes. Weeding out the inadequate or incompatible candidates leaves a small cadre of physically hardened and mentally tough commandos who have the right attitude to accomplish the objective.

The selection and training processes for special operations are arduous because, as Fenton said, they only want people who "really want to be at the leading edge."

U.S. Army photo by Spc. Sara Wakai/ Released

Fenton emphasized that SOCOM's successful transformation for a new era of warfare will hinge on its people. The special operators of today and tomorrow should be ready for a changing operational environment.

"If we have one more dollar to spend, we're spending it on our people, and then we'll wrap the technology around them," Fenton stated.

Before becoming the head of SOCOM, Fenton led the secretive Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC). Nominally part of SOCOM, JSOC is comprised of the tier 1 units of the special operations community—the Army's Delta Force, the Navy's Naval Special Warfare Development Group, the Air Force's 24th Special Tactics Squadron, as well as the Army's Intelligence Support Activity. Fenton comes from the intelligence side of JSOC and also has experience in the Indo-Pacific area of operations.

Special operators think about "how we're going to be prepared, not only in equipment or some level of technology to meet the world, but how are we thinking about the world differently," Fenton said.

"We have to hold these different ideas in our head and actually still complete the mission, even though it doesn't look the same as it did 20 years ago. But the outcome has still got to be the same. We've got to succeed for the nation," the head of the spec ops command added.

The two men said that the bulk of America's special operators are focused on threats posed by China and Russia and are studying these potential adversaries. Additionally, they are watching the war in Ukraine closely as it provides invaluable lessons on how warfare is evolving with modern technology like drones and also offers an opportunity to, at least indirectly, experiment with new warfighting concepts due to their very close relationship with the Ukrainian commandos.

Shifting focus isn't easy though as the continued challenge of other persistent threats continuously pull the US back. Although China and Russia present the biggest national security threats to the US right now, counterterrorism remains an ever-present danger. As evidenced by the Islamic State's terrorist attack in Moscow in March, terrorists around the world possess the means and desire to carry out large-scale violent attacks against soft targets, and rogue actors like the Houthi rebels have shown they can threaten things like trade routes on which the global economy relies.

So, the SOCOM of tomorrow will still need to maintain a credible counterterrorism posture that will anticipate and counter terrorist threats anywhere in the world.

Changing and adapting to something as complex as a new era of warfare or a rapidly evolving battlespace is never easy. And it is that much harder for a large organization with tens of thousands of people. But SOCOM depends on just that—people—to ensure that it will be ready for the challenges of tomorrow.

China Russia

Business Insider · by Stavros Atlamazoglou

3. Mental Health Challenges for SOF Veterans | SOF News

Mental Health Challenges for SOF Veterans | SOF News

sof.news · by Guest · April 7, 2024

By Shannon Campbell.

What makes special operations unique cannot be fully described by words. This is due to the difficulty of depicting the actions of special operators involved in secret operations while experiencing insurmountable risks unfathomable to the civilian population. True grit and resiliency are the needed attributes to engage in a training program for the coveted position of special operations operator.

United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) pours millions of dollars into the training and maneuverability of each task force as well as the specialized equipment needed to ensure top-tier performance. Physical and mental health are prioritized as essential, with several programs to ensure safety and stability while service members are a part of USSOCOM.

However, after years of unwavering dedication from the special operator, the compounding effects of both the grueling physical demands and mental strain culminate to showcase the lack of supportive mental healthcare that is desperately needed to ensure stability once the SOF operator transitions to civilian life.

The U.S. Congress enacted the “Veteran Community Care Program” in 2020, allowing many veterans to choose their healthcare providers with some caveats when TRICARE is no longer an option. While this policy has been valuable to many veterans in helping address medical and mental healthcare needs, the USSOCOM veterans’ issues may need more expertise because of the intensive training and combat experience.

In 2020, Christopher Frueh et al. (2020) coined the phrase “operator syndrome,” referring to the healthcare needs of Special Operation Forces (SOF). Frueh et al. (2020) identified the interrelated issues seen with medical healthcare, such as the endocrine system, chronic pain, sleep issues, and mental health disorders stemming from the “extraordinarily high allostatic load” (Frueh et al. 2020, p. 282) SOF incur in their lifetime of service. Rivera et al. (2022) underscore combat experience in Army Special Forces that negatively affected overall health outcomes and combat that involved “fighting, killing, threat to oneself, death, and injury of others” increased the risk of mental health disorders and alcohol abuse. The incredible trauma that SOF members take on daily has a severe outcome after service, which creates the “operator syndrome” that continues to plague SOF veterans.

The USSOCOM reported a total of 69,000 service members within the branches of the military (USSOCOM Fact Book, 2023). Of the 18.3 million veterans, only a tiny percentage are USSOCOM as of 2023. The multifaceted needs of the USSOCOM veterans can be challenging to address through the VA. The special operators of the SOF, who have given their minds and bodies to the safety of our country, need to have care that is equitable to their sacrifices. A new policy for the veterans of USSOCOM to have TRICARE benefits for mental healthcare for life seems dismal as compared to the significant investment provided by the U.S. Government for the service members during their time of service.

Addressing mental health issues with veterans of SOF can give them freedom from stigma and tools to live healthier lives after military service. The mental health services offered to veterans within the USSOCOM community can be expanded. Advocacy and education to the U.S. Congress of the exceptionally rare men and women embodying the USSOCOM community can start the process of providing lifelong mental healthcare through TRICARE for civilian life.

**********

Author: Shannon Campbell is an advocate for members of the special operations community. She is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker and has been providing psychotherapy to military service members as a private clinician in Dallas/Fort Worth, Texas, since 2015. She is enrolled in the University of Kentucky Doctor of Social Work program, specializing in military behavioral health, which has provided a foundation to advocate for change in how mental healthcare is addressed in the USSOCOM community. Shannon’s spouse is a current member of the special operations community.

Photo: Participants observe an LOC during Ridge Runner Irregular Warfare Exercise 23-01 in West Virginia. Photo by Staff Sgt. Jake Seawolf, WV NG, June 15, 2023.

References:

Frueh, B. C., Madan, A., Fowler, J. C., Stomberg, S., Bradshaw, M., Kelly, K., Weinstein, B., Luttrell, M., Danner, S. G., & Beidel, D. C. (2020). “Operator syndrome”: A unique constellation of military special operation forces’ medical and behavioral health-care needs. International Journal of Psychiatry in Medicine, (4), pp. 281–295. https://doi.org/10.1177/0091217420906659

Rivera, A. C., LeardMann, C. A., Rull, R. P., Cooper, A., Warner, S., Faix, D., Deagle, E., Neff, R., Caserta, R., & Adler, A. B. (2022). Combat exposure and behavioral health in U.S. Army Special Forces. PLOS One, 17(6), e0270515–e0270515. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0270515

USSOCOM. (2023). Fact Book 2023. Www.socom.mil. https://www.socom.mil/FactBook/2023%20Fact%20Book.pdf

Veterans Community Care Program. (2023, January 23). Federalregister.gov. https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-38/chapter-I/part-17/subject-group-ECFRdb26058010ca01a

sof.news · by Guest · April 7, 2024

4. “The Battle of the Straits: A Geopolitical Maelstrom”

“The Battle of the Straits: A Geopolitical Maelstrom” | Small Wars Journal

Small Wars Journal

“The Battle of the Straits: A Geopolitical Maelstrom”

A Useful Fiction Short Story

By Isaiah (Ike) Wilson III, PhD

This near-future vignette posits a scenario where maritime chokepoints become the stages for a new brand of warfare—a conflict fought in the shadows, where the weapons are as likely to be cyber as they are to be traditional arms. It underscores the fragility of global trade networks and the precariousness of geopolitics in a multipolar world where strategic waterways have become the chessboard for Great Power confrontation.

In this scenario, "The Battle of the Straits" would drastically reshape the global geo-economic landscape. Nations would grapple with the impact of increased military expenditure at the expense of economic development, high commodity prices causing economic hardships, and shifts in trade alliances that could alter the balance of global power. The interconnected nature of global trade means that even localized disruptions can have cascading effects, highlighting the need for peaceful navigation and cooperation across the world's maritime chokepoints. This fiction underscores the delicate balance of global trade, the fragility of which could lead to catastrophic consequences in the face of rising geopolitical tensions.

Year: 2028

The world teeters on the brink of a new form of conflict, where old rivalries ignite over the jugular veins of global trade: the world’s strategic maritime chokepoints. Tensions have been simmering, and a series of incidents across the globe signals the escalation of what future historians will call "The Battle of the Straits."[1]

Strait of Hormuz:

A covert cyber-attack attributed to Russian hackers cripples the navigational systems of oil tankers traversing the Strait of Hormuz. The ensuing chaos results in multiple collisions, effectively blocking the Strait and halting a substantial portion of the world's oil supply. In a dizzying response, the United States dispatches Carrier Strike Groups to the region while appealing to the UN for sanctions. To counter the move, China begins an aggressive diplomatic campaign to broker a resolution, positioning itself as a neutral peacekeeper.

Suez Canal:

As the tension escalates, a sudden drone strike by an unknown actor on a mega-container ship in the Suez Canal paralyzes one of the busiest waterways in the world. Initially suspected to be an isolated terrorist act, intelligence reports later reveal the involvement of Chinese military advisors. The USA responds by increasing its military presence in the Mediterranean, and Russia responds by conducting naval exercises in the Black Sea, hinting at a response should their access through Turkish Straits be compromised.

South China Sea:

In the South China Sea, artificial intelligence-enabled underwater drones, presumably of Chinese origin, begin aggressively patrolling disputed waters, harassing international commercial vessels traveling through the Strait of Malacca. The United States calls for a coalition of Southeast Asian nations to form a united front, but the countries are hesitantly noncommittal, fearing economic reprisals from China.

Panama Canal and US Gulf Coast:

Meanwhile, Latin American proxy conflicts intensify. Hackers destabilize the Panama Canal's lock systems, resulting in severe delays and rerouting of traffic around Cape Horn. Tensions rise as accusations fly towards Russia, which has recently deepened relations with certain Latin American regimes. This move strains the United States’ influence in its hemisphere, forcing it to divert naval assets from the Pacific to safeguard the Gulf Coast ports and the Caribbean Sea routes.

Northern Passage:

In a surprising twist, Russia and China announce a joint venture to develop the Northern Sea Route, arguing that climate change has opened new shipping possibilities that will reduce dependency on traditional chokepoints controlled by Western allies. This announcement comes with a subtle show of military force in the Arctic Circle, showcasing a budding Sino-Russian alliance and a direct challenge to the naval supremacy of the United States.

The world stands on a precipice as the Great Powers engage in this "Battle of the Straits." Global trade is in disarray, with supply chains disrupted and economies suffering. Minor and non-aligned nations find themselves forced to choose sides in a conflict where sovereignty and autonomy are at stake.

The Black Sea: As the USA bolsters its forces in Eastern Europe in reaction to the Black Sea naval exercises, a cyber-physical attack on Turkish Straits navigation controls creates another maritime standstill. With accusations against Russia mounting and Turkey demanding NATO support, the USA finds another front opened against them.

Brazil's Southern Ports: Not to be sidelined in global strategic maneuvering, China increases investments in Brazil's infrastructure, attempting to cultivate an economic counterbalance in America's backyard. With influence over Brazil's southern ports, China secures a foothold in the Atlantic, much to the consternation of both Washington and Moscow.

In the throes of "The Battle of the Straits," the intensifying standoffs and incidences of disruption ripple out into the world economy with a number of dire consequences. Here's an exploration of the implications from this fictional scenario from various perspectives:

Implications on Global Commercial Shipping and Trade:

The blockades in pivotal chokepoints like Suez and Hormuz cause immediate and severe supply chain disruptions. Commercial shipping is forced to take longer, alternative routes, increasing transit times and fuel costs significantly.
The inability to predict safe passage creates a sharp decrease in shipping efficiency, causing a spike in global shipping rates which in turn inflates the prices of goods.
A shift in trade patterns emerges as countries seek to become less reliant on chokepoints by diversifying supply chains or increasing production domestically.
Economies heavily reliant on maritime exports, such as oil-exporting countries in the Middle East or manufacturing giants in East Asia, face considerable economic downturns.

Geo-Economic Consequences as Drivers of Local Fragility:

The disruption of global trade exacerbates economic fragility in chokepoint countries, leading to increased unemployment, inflation, and potential civil unrest as economies shrink.
Varying capacity to respond to these shocks leads to a widening economic divide between nations, potentially increasing the chance of local conflicts as competition for dwindling resources intensifies.
Political stability in countries depending on the revenue from transit fees, like Egypt for the Suez Canal or Panama for the Panama Canal, is undermined, leading to calls for more nationalistic policies and protectionism.

Trans-Regional War and Warfare:

Military posturing and forced alliances in response to the "Battle of the Straits" accelerates an arms race, with increased naval deployments and land-based anti-ship missile systems in littoral states.
Shadow conflicts and proxy wars could ignite around the world as Great Powers seek to undermine each other's positions in strategic regions.
An increased likelihood of accidental conflicts or escalations due to the presence of military forces in close proximity along contested maritime corridors.

Implications on Global Financial Risks:

The uncertainty and instability lead to volatile financial markets. Energy prices skyrocket, and stocks of global shipping companies plummet.
Insurers raise their premiums for shipping through or near conflict zones, which in turn affects the costs of goods.
Credit risks increase as importers and exporters face difficulties fulfilling contracts, leading to a rise in trade finance costs.
Countries and companies increasingly seek alternative routes and methods of transportation, investing in infrastructure such as overland routes or Arctic shipping lanes, which come with their own sets of financial risks and environmental concerns.
Rising protectionism and regional alliances could potentially lead to a decoupling of economic ties, with long-term impacts on globalization. Nations might resort to barter trade systems or localized currencies to bypass the US dollar's domination and related financial markets fluctuations.

Global Economic Rebalance:

Economies previously at the periphery may gain newfound importance if they can offer alternative routes and resources, leading to a potential economic rebalance.
The developing alliances between countries like Russia and China might solidify new economic corridors, such as the Northern Sea Route promoted by Russia, leading to shifts in global shipping lanes.

Global Response:

Faced with escalating confrontations, the United Nations calls for an emergency meeting. Countries on every continent voice their concern over the standoff that threatens to evolve into open conflict—a war that could lay waste to economies and destabilize the geopolitical order that has been in place since the end of the Cold War.

To avert disaster, a clandestine group of diplomats from neutral states work tirelessly to mediate behind the scenes, resulting in a fragile agreement around the governance of maritime chokepoints. However, trust is eroded, and the framework for international maritime law now hangs by a thread, with Great Powers continuing their shadow struggle for control over the waterways of the world.

In 2022, the Joint Special Operations University (JSOU) partnered with P.W. Singer and August Cole, the co-authors of Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War and Burn-In: A Novel of the Real Robotic Revolution. The goal of this collaboration was to leverage their “useful fiction” approach to create near-future narratives envisioning how our Nation may use its special operations forces in the decades to come and demonstrating the unique value proposition these forces bring to the Nation. The anthology, The Fourth Age: The Future of Special Operations, published in fall of 2023, is one product from this collaboration. In that volume, the originator of this project and collaboration – Dr. Isaiah “Ike” Wilson III, then President of the JSOU – wrote the prologue to the Anthology; and in that prologue, introduced the scenario of a future years “The Battle of the Straits.” This paper picks up on that ‘Useful Fiction’ theme.

About the Author(s)

Isaiah Wilson III

Isaiah (Ike) Wilson III earned his PhD in Government (Intl Relations and American Politics) from Cornell University and is a professor of practice with the School of Politics & Global Affairs at Arizona State University (ASU). He is president emeritus of the Joint Special Operations University (JSOU), a partner with Gainful Solutions Ventures Inc., and president and CEO of Wilson W.i.S.E. Consulting LLC, which provides advisory services on strategy and operational planning, technology & teaming integration, transitions (change) leadership coaching and organizational re-design and innovation. A decorated combat veteran with combat tours in the Balkans, Iraq, and Afghanistan, and direct strategic and operational planning and advisory service to six (6) 4-Star Commanders, three Secretaries of Defense, numerous ambassadorial chiefs of mission, and the presidents of three foreign country partner nations, Wilson’s civil-military career has spanned troop-leading, staff-planning, strategic advisory and teaching assignments. He has published extensively on organizational politics, civil-military relations, national security (defense) policy, and grand strategy. His book, Thinking beyond War: Civil-Military Relations and Why America Fails to Win the Peace, along with his service on the 2003 Operation Iraqi Freedom Study Group, helped to increase public attention to the problems and errors in U.S. post-war planning for the Iraq War and sparked governmental movement toward policy reforms. He founded the West Point Grand Strategy Program and has executive directed, taught, and conducted research at several top-tier and top-ranked colleges and universities, including Yale, Columbia, West Point, and the National War College. He is a Lifemember of the Council on Foreign Relations and a Senior Future Security Initiative Fellow with New America. (Bio Sketch: LinkedIn) (Website: https://wilsonwise.com/)

5. Israel–Hamas War (Iran) Update, April 7, 2024

I really wish ISW and others would stop using the axis of resistance to describe these terrorist organizations.

I have noted some questions about the actual size of the IDF forces in Gaza and the reports of withdrawal.

Excerpts;

Israel withdrew most of its forces from the Gaza Strip on April 7. Israeli officials and media sources have framed the withdrawals as part of their preparations for conducting a clearing operation into Rafah. Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant announced on April 7 that Israeli “forces came out” of the Gaza Strip “and are preparing for future missions” into Rafah.[1] Israeli military correspondents similarly interpreted the withdrawal as part of an IDF effort to reconstitute ahead of advancing into Rafah.[2] Israeli media close to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) clarified that the IDF 98th Division withdrew from the southern Gaza Strip on April 7.[3] Israeli brigades and units operating under the command of the 98th Division were previously the only Israeli forces remaining in the southern Gaza Strip. Palestinian sources posted images of areas in which the 98th Division recently operated, suggesting that Israeli forces had withdrawn from those areas.[4]

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/iran-update-april-7-2024

Key Takeaways:

Gaza Strip: Israel withdrew most of its forces from the Gaza Strip. Israeli officials and media sources have framed the withdrawals as part of their preparations for conducting a clearing operation into Rafah. Hamas and other Palestinian militias will likely try to exploit the Israeli withdrawal to reconstitute militarily and reassert Hamas governing authority around Khan Younis.
West Bank: Israeli forces have engaged Palestinian fighters in at least four locations in the West Bank.
Southern Lebanon and Golan Heights: Lebanese Hezbollah has conducted at least seven attacks from southern Lebanon into northern Israel.
Iraq: The Islamic Resistance in Iraq claimed that it conducted a drone attack targeting an unspecified “vital target” in Eilat, Israel.
Yemen: The Houthis claimed that they conducted five drone and missile attacks targeting civilian and military vessels over the previous 72 hours.

IRAN UPDATE, APRIL 7, 2024

Apr 7, 2024 - ISW Press

Download the PDF

Iran Update, April 7, 2024

Andie Parry, Peter Mills, Annika Ganzeveld, Amin Soltani, 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 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.

Hamas and other Palestinian militias will likely try to exploit the Israeli withdrawal to reconstitute militarily and reassert Hamas' governing authority around Khan Younis. Israeli officials and media sources have framed the withdrawals as part of their transition toward a raid-based model around Khan Younis—similar to what the IDF has done in the northern Gaza Strip since December 2023.[5] Israeli military correspondents asserted that the IDF has destroyed Hamas’ Khan Younis Brigade and will accordingly transition to conducting raids to target the remaining militia forces and infrastructure there.[6] Hamas conducted a multi-stage attack that killed four Israeli soldiers in Khan Younis on April 6, however, demonstrating that Hamas retains some combat effectiveness there.[7] CTP-ISW has reported extensively on how Hamas and other Palestinian militias have exploited the withdrawal of Israeli forces in the northern Gaza Strip to infiltrate and rebuild their networks there.[8] The IDF has redeployed to several areas in the northern Gaza Strip in recent months to re-clear those areas of Palestinian fighters and militia infrastructure.[9] Hamas and the other Palestinian militias will likely see an opportunity to pursue similar effects around Khan Younis following the Israeli withdrawal there.

Unspecified Israeli sources claimed that the IDF withdrawal from the southern Gaza Strip will enable displaced Palestinians in Rafah to migrate to parts of Khan Younis and the central Gaza Strip.[10] The migration of Palestinians from Rafah to other parts of the Gaza Strip would facilitate an Israeli clearing operation into Rafah, according to Israeli military correspondents.[11] Israel and aid organizations have not yet constructed encampments in the southern and central Gaza Strip to which Gazans could migrate. Israeli media indicated that the construction of such encampments was part of the IDF humanitarian plan.[12]

The withdrawal of the IDF 98th Division means that the Nahal Brigade is the only remaining Israeli unit in the Gaza Strip.[13] The Nahal Brigade operates around the border of the central and northern Strip to secure Israeli-built highway Route 749, which bisects the northern and southern Gaza Strip and three nearby forward operating bases for future raids and operations in the Gaza Strip.[14] The role of the Nahal Brigade in securing the divide between the central and northern Gaza Strip is consistent with the IDF’s full transition to a raid-based model. Israeli military correspondents have reported that the IDF uses the road to quickly launch raids into the Gaza Strip, such as the al Shifa Hospital operation that the IDF chief of staff called a “great achievement” for leading to the capture and death of many senior Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) fighters on March 30.[15]

Key Takeaways:

Gaza Strip: Israel withdrew most of its forces from the Gaza Strip. Israeli officials and media sources have framed the withdrawals as part of their preparations for conducting a clearing operation into Rafah. Hamas and other Palestinian militias will likely try to exploit the Israeli withdrawal to reconstitute militarily and reassert Hamas governing authority around Khan Younis.
West Bank: Israeli forces have engaged Palestinian fighters in at least four locations in the West Bank.
Southern Lebanon and Golan Heights: Lebanese Hezbollah has conducted at least seven attacks from southern Lebanon into northern Israel.
Iraq: The Islamic Resistance in Iraq claimed that it conducted a drone attack targeting an unspecified “vital target” in Eilat, Israel.
Yemen: The Houthis claimed that they conducted five drone and missile attacks targeting civilian and military vessels over the previous 72 hours.

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

The IDF 89th Commando Forces (98th Division) cleared al Amal neighborhood, western Khan Younis, before withdrawing on April 7. The 89th Commando forces located over 100 militia sites during operations in al Amal.[16] Israeli forces detonated and destroyed a 900-meter tunnel equipped with living rooms and weapons stores.[17] The IDF conducted raids to seize weapons and kill Palestinian fighters, including a Hamas squad commander.[18]

Palestinian fighters conducted two indirect fire attacks from the Gaza Strip into Israel on April 7. PIJ targeted towns in southern Israel with a five-rocket barrage shortly after all Israeli forces withdrew from the southern Gaza Strip.[19] An Israeli military correspondent said that the Iron Dome intercepted all the rockets.[20] The Palestinian Mujahideen Movement separately targeted the IDF Gaza Division headquarters in Reim, southern Israel.[21]

The Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine mortared Israeli armor near the Israel-Gaza Strip border northeast of Qarara on April 7.[22] Palestinian militias did not claim additional attacks targeting Israeli forces on April 7, likely due to the IDF withdrawal from the southern Gaza Strip and a lack of target availability.

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 four locations in the West Bank since CTP-ISW's last data cut off on April 6.[23]

A Palestinian fighter fired upon an Israeli bus and wounded two individuals, including an IDF soldier, near Nabi Elias on April 7.[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 since CTP-ISW's last data cutoff on April 6.[25]

The IDF conducted airstrikes targeting Hezbollah air defense systems in Baalbek, Lebanon, after Hezbollah intercepted an IDF drone over southern Lebanon on April 6.[26]

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

Iran and the Axis of Resistance

The Islamic Resistance in Iraq—a coalition of Iranian-backed Iraqi militias—claimed that it conducted a drone attack targeting an unspecified “vital target” in Eilat, Israel, on April 6.[27] Israel media reported on April 7 that “hostile aircraft intrusion sirens” went off in Eilat.[28] The IDF later announced that these sirens were a “false alarm.”[29]

The Houthis claimed on April 7 that they conducted five drone and missile attacks targeting civilian and military vessels over the previous 72 hours.[30] The Houthis claimed that they conducted anti-ship missile attacks targeting a Marshall Islands-flagged “British ship” in the Red Sea and two Panamanian-flagged “Israeli ships” in the Arabian Sea and Indian Ocean.[31]

The United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations (UKMTO) reported that international coalition forces intercepted a missile and that a second missile fell into the water near a vessel approximately 60 nautical miles southwest of Hudaydah, Yemen, on April 6.[32] US Central Command (CENTCOM) confirmed that a coalition vessel engaged and destroyed an anti-ship missile on April 6.[33] UKMTO separately reported that a missile impacted the water near a vessel approximately 59 nautical miles southwest of Aden, Yemen, on April 6.[34]

The Houthis also claimed that they conducted two drone attacks targeting unspecified US “military frigates” in the Red Sea.[35] CENTCOM announced that it intercepted a Houthi drone over the Red Sea on April 6.[36]

US Central Command (CENTCOM) destroyed a mobile, surface-to-air missile in Houthi-controlled territory in Yemen on April 6.[37]

6. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, April 7, 2024

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-april-7-2024

Key Takeaways:

Ukrainian Main Military Intelligence Directorate Head Lieutenant General Kyrylo Budanov reported that Ukraine anticipates Russian offensive operations to intensify in late spring and early summer.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov will meet with Chinese officials in China on April 8 and 9 amid Western warnings that China is increasingly helping Russia’s defense industrial base (DIB) and even providing China with geospatial intelligence.
Russian forces reportedly continue to systematically use prohibited chemical weapons in Ukraine and are attacking Ukrainian positions with chemical substances almost daily throughout the frontline.
Russian officials accused Ukraine of launching a series of drone strikes against the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP) on April 7, but the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) did not attribute responsibility for the strikes.
Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief Colonel General Oleksandr Syrskyi openly condemned and is taking action following reports that members of Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU) may have purposefully intimidated a Ukrainian journalist investigating corruption within the SBU by issuing the journalist a draft summons.
Russian forces recently made confirmed advances near Avdiivka amid continued positional fighting along the entire line of contact on April 7.
Chieftan of the All-Russian Cossack Society and Deputy Chairman of the State Duma Committee on Nationalities Nikolai Doluda claimed on April 7 that more than 30,000 Cossack personnel have fought in Ukraine.

RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, APRIL 7, 2024

Apr 7, 2024 - ISW Press

Download the PDF

Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, April 7, 2024

Nicole Wolkov, Christina Harward, Riley Bailey, Kateryna Stepanenko, and George Barros

April 7, 2024, 4:15pm 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 11:40am ET on April 7. ISW will cover subsequent reports in the April 8 Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment.

Ukrainian Main Military Intelligence Directorate Head Lieutenant General Kyrylo Budanov reported that Ukraine anticipates Russian offensive operations to intensify in late spring and early summer. Budanov stated in an interview with German broadcaster ARD published on April 7 that Ukraine expects that Russian offensive operations will especially intensify in the Donbas.[1] Budanov also reported that Russian forces will likely attempt to advance to Chasiv Yar (west of Bakhmut) and in the direction of Pokrovsk (about 43km northwest of Avdiivka). Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky previously stated in a CBS News interview published on March 28 that the major Russian offensive effort may start in late May or June.[2] ISW has recently observed that Russian forces intensified the tempo of their offensive operations across the theater, including by conducting a roughly reinforced company-sized mechanized assault toward Chasiv Yar on April 4, and continues to assess that the Russian military appears to be successfully mitigating likely increased manpower and materiel losses.[3] Zelensky and senior Ukrainian military officials have recently warned that delays in security assistance have forced Ukraine to cede the battlefield initiative to Russia and that the Ukrainian military cannot plan a successful counteroffensive or defensive effort without knowing when and what kind of aid Ukraine will receive. ISW continues to assess that delays in Western military assistance have forced the Ukrainian military to husband materiel and that Ukrainian forces likely must make difficult decisions prioritizing certain aspects of its defense at the expense of contesting the initiative to constrain Russian military capabilities or plan for future counteroffensive operations as prolonged US debates about military aid continue.[4]

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov will meet with Chinese officials in China on April 8 and 9 amid Western warnings that China is increasingly helping Russia’s defense industrial base (DIB) and even providing Russia with geospatial intelligence. The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) stated that Lavrov will meet with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi to discuss bilateral cooperation and “hot topics,” including the war in Ukraine.[5] NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg told the BBC on April 6 that China is “propping up the Russian war economy” and supporting the Russian DIB.[6] Bloomberg reported on April 6 that unspecified sources stated that China’s support for Russia has “deepened” recently.[7] Bloomberg reported that US Secretary of State Antony Blinken briefed unspecified European allies on China’s support and asked them to directly speak to China about the issue. Bloomberg’s sources reportedly stated that China and Russia have increased space cooperation and that China has given Russia microelectronics, optics, machine tools for tanks, and propellants for missiles. Bloomberg reported that White House National Security Council Spokesperson Adrienne Watson said that China has also provided Russia with nitrocellulose — an intermediary good used in producing gunpower and explosives — and turbojet engines. Bloomberg reported that China is also providing Russia with geospatial intelligence, including satellite imagery which the Russian military likely uses to support military operations in Ukraine. The Atlantic reported on March 18 that Ukrainian military sources believe that Russia may be using unspecified third parties to buy satellite imagery from US companies for targeting data to conduct long-range strikes.[8]

Russian forces reportedly continue to systematically use prohibited chemical weapons in Ukraine and are attacking Ukrainian positions with chemical substances almost daily throughout the frontline. The Telegraph published an investigation into the systematic use of Russian chemical weapons in Ukraine on April 6 and found that Ukrainian soldiers report near daily Russian attacks using K-51 grenades with CS-gas — a riot control agent (RCA) that causes harmful but not necessarily lethal effects and that is prohibited under the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), to which Russia is a signatory.[9] Ukrainian soldiers told the Telegraph that these attacks are not immediately incapacitating but do usually cause panic at Ukrainian positions that Russian forces try to exploit when conducting assaults.[10] A Ukrainian commander near Robotyne, Zaporizhia Oblast reportedly stated that soldiers in his unit regularly carry gas masks due to the high frequency of Russian CS attacks in the area.[11] The Telegraph reported that there are unconfirmed reports that Russian forces have used chlorine, chloropicrin, and possibly even hydrogen cyanide substances against Ukrainian forces.[12] The Ukrainian Support Forces Command stated on April 5 that Ukrainian forces had recorded 371 cases of Russian forces using munitions containing chemical substances during March 2024 alone and 1,412 cases of Russian forces using chemical weapons between February 2023 and March 2024.[13] The Russian 810th Naval Infantry Brigade acknowledged in a now-deleted post that elements of the brigade deliberately used K-51 grenades with CS gas on Ukrainian positions near Krynky in the east (left) bank of Kherson Oblast in December 2023.[14]

Russian officials accused Ukraine of launching a series of drone strikes against the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP) on April 7, but the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) did not attribute responsibility for the strikes. ZNPP occupation officials claimed that a Ukrainian drone struck a canteen located on the territory of the ZNPP and damaged a truck unloading food in the area.[15] ZNPP occupation officials claimed that other Ukrainian drones later struck the ZNPP’s cargo port area and the dome of the 6th Power Reactor, which did not result in any critical damages or casualties.[16] Russian officials called on the international community to condemn Ukraine for “nuclear terrorism.”[17] IAEA Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi stated that ZNPP occupation authorities informed IAEA experts that a drone detonated at the ZNPP and that the report is consistent with IAEA observations.[18] Grossi did not specify the party responsible for the drone strike and called on both parties to refrain from such actions in order to not “jeopardize nuclear safety.”[19] Russian authorities have repeatedly attempted to use Russia’s physical control over the ZNPP to force international organizations, including the IAEA, to meet with Russian occupation officials to legitimize Russia’s occupation of the ZNPP and by extension Russia’s occupation of sovereign Ukrainian land.[20]

Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief Colonel General Oleksandr Syrskyi openly condemned and is taking action following reports that members of Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU) may have purposefully intimidated a Ukrainian journalist investigating corruption within the SBU by issuing the journalist a draft summons. Ukrainian outlet Slidstvo.Info stated on April 6 that some SBU personnel may have instructed employees of a military registration and enlistment office to deliver draft summons to a Slidstvo.Info journalist who had been investigating corruption in the SBU’s cybersecurity department.[21] Syrskyi condemned the reported intimidation scandal, denounced any attempts by Ukrainian military officials to harass or otherwise compromise the integrity of journalists, and ordered an official investigation into the matter on April 7.[22] ISW continues to assess that corruption is endemic to rapid wartime mobilization in any country and that Ukrainian officials are actively and openly identifying and resolving corruption problems, including by leveraging the robust and expansive Ukrainian community of non-governmental organizations (NGOs).[23]

Key Takeaways:

Ukrainian Main Military Intelligence Directorate Head Lieutenant General Kyrylo Budanov reported that Ukraine anticipates Russian offensive operations to intensify in late spring and early summer.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov will meet with Chinese officials in China on April 8 and 9 amid Western warnings that China is increasingly helping Russia’s defense industrial base (DIB) and even providing China with geospatial intelligence.
Russian forces reportedly continue to systematically use prohibited chemical weapons in Ukraine and are attacking Ukrainian positions with chemical substances almost daily throughout the frontline.
Russian officials accused Ukraine of launching a series of drone strikes against the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP) on April 7, but the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) did not attribute responsibility for the strikes.
Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief Colonel General Oleksandr Syrskyi openly condemned and is taking action following reports that members of Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU) may have purposefully intimidated a Ukrainian journalist investigating corruption within the SBU by issuing the journalist a draft summons.
Russian forces recently made confirmed advances near Avdiivka amid continued positional fighting along the entire line of contact on April 7.
Chieftan of the All-Russian Cossack Society and Deputy Chairman of the State Duma Committee on Nationalities Nikolai Doluda claimed on April 7 that more than 30,000 Cossack personnel have fought 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)

Positional fighting continued west of Kreminna near Terny and south of Kreminna near Bilohorivka on April 7.[24] A Russian milblogger claimed that elements of the 20th Combined Arms Army ([CAA], Moscow Military District [MMD] [formerly Western Military District]) are attacking near Terny and that the Russian command may have withdrawn elements of the 25th CAA (Central Military District [CMD]) from the area, though it remains unclear if any redeployments of elements of the 25th CAA have occurred.[25] A Ukrainian brigade reported that Ukrainian forces destroyed 11 Russian armored vehicles during a roughly reinforced platoon-sized assault near Terny on April 3.[26] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces have recently significantly increased glide bomb strikes in Kharkiv Oblast and conducted 100 glide bomb strikes in the area on April 5 alone as compared to 900 glide bomb strikes per month previously.[27]

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

The Ukrainian General Staff reported on April 7 that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian attacks in the Siversk direction (northeast of Bakhmut) near Spirne, Vyimka, Rozdolivka, Fedorivka, and Vesele.[28]

Russian forces reportedly advanced northwest and west of Bakhmut on April 7, but there were no confirmed changes to the frontline. A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces seized Bohdanivka (northwest of Bakhmut), while other Russian milbloggers claimed that fighting is ongoing in Bohdanivka and that Ukrainian forces maintain positions in the western outskirts of the settlement.[29] ISW has not yet observed visual evidence indicating that Russian forces entirely seized Bohdanivka. Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian forces, namely elements of the Russian 98th Airborne (VDV) Division, with support from elements of the 11th Separate VDV Brigade and 150th Motorized Rifle Division (8th Combined Arms Army [CAA], Southern Military District [SMD]), advanced in the Kanal Microraion on the eastern outskirts of Chasiv Yar (west of Bakhmut), although ISW has not observed visual evidence of this claim.[30] Positional engagements continued northwest of Bakhmut near Bohdanivka, west of Bakhmut near Ivanivske, and southwest of Bakhmut near Klishchiivka and Andriivka.[31] Ukrainian military observer Kostyantyn Mashovets reported on April 7 that elements of the Russian 7th Reconnaissance and Assault Brigade (Volunteer Corps) and 331st VDV Regiment (98th VDV Division) are operating near Bohdanivka and attempting to advance in the direction of Kalynivka (northeast of Bakhmut).[32] Mashovets stated that elements of the Russian 11th Separate VDV Brigade, 102nd Motorized Rifle Regiment (150th Motorized Rifle Division, 8th CAA, SMD), and 217th and 299th VDV Regiments (98th VDV Division) are conducting the most aggressive attacks near Ivanivske and east of Chasiv Yar. Mashovets stated that elements of the Russian 6th Motorized Rifle Division and 72nd Motorized Rifle Brigade (both of the 3rd Army Corps) and elements of the 88th Motorized Rifle Brigade (2nd Luhansk People’s Republic [LNR] Army Corps) are attempting to bypass Klishchiivka and push Ukrainian forces west of the Siverskyi-Donets Donbas Canal.

Russian forces recently made a confirmed advance west of Avdiivka on April 7, amid ongoing positional fighting in the area. Geolocated footage published on April 7 indicates that Russian forces recently advanced northwest of Pervomaiske (southwest of Avdiivka).[33] A prominent Kremin-affiliated Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces currently control at least 80 percent of Pervomaiske, which is consistent with ISW’s current assessment of Russian advances into the settlement.[34] Positional engagements continued northwest of Avdiivka near Novokalynove, Novobakhmutivka, and Berdychi; west of Avdiivka near Tonenke and Semenivka; and southwest of Avdiivka near Pervomaiske, Nevelske, and Vodyane.[35]

Russian forces reportedly advanced southwest of Donetsk City amid continued positional engagements west and southwest of Donetsk City on April 7. Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian forces advanced in central Novomykhailivka (southwest of Donetsk City) and north and south of the settlement, but ISW has not observed visual confirmation of these claims.[36] Positional engagements continued west of Donetsk City near Krasnohorivka and Heorhiivka and southwest of Donetsk City near Pobieda and Novomykhailivka.[37] Elements of the Russian 238th Artillery Brigade (8th CAA, SMD) are reportedly operating near Krasnohorivka.[38]

Positional engagements continued in the Donetsk-Zaporizhia Oblast border area on April 7, but there were no confirmed changes to the frontline in this area. Positional engagements continued near Staromayorske and Urozhaine (both south of Velyka Novosilka).[39] Elements of the Russian 38th Motorized Rifle Brigade (35th CAA, Eastern Military District) are reportedly operating in the Donetsk-Zaporizhia Oblast border area.[40]

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

Positional engagements continued in western Zaporizhia Oblast near Robotyne and northwest of Verbove (east of Robotyne) on April 7 but did not result in any confirmed frontline changes.[41] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces captured an unspecified Ukrainian position northwest of Verbove, advanced one kilometer in a windbreak, and nearly pushed Ukrainian forces towards the T0803 (Novodanylivka-Pavlivske) highway.[42] ISW has not observed visual evidence confirming these claims. A Russian milblogger implied that elements of a reconnaissance detachment of the Russian 56th Guards Airborne (VDV) Regiment (7th Guards VDV Division) are operating in the Verbove area.[43]

Russian forces reportedly recently attempted to attack Ukrainian positions in the east (left) bank of Kherson Oblast with a relatively larger number of small assault groups.[44] Ukraine’s Southern Operational Command Spokesperson Colonel Nataliya Humenyuk stated that Russian forces recently temporarily changed their tactics and attacked Krynky in the east bank of Kherson Oblast with a larger number of small assault groups from different directions. Humenyuk stated that these attacks were unsuccessful in pushing Ukrainian forces from their positions in Krynky and that Russian forces have since switched back to conducting a lower number of assaults in the area. Positional engagements continued in the east bank of Kherson Oblast near Krynky on April 7.[45]

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

Ukrainian Air Force Commander Lieutenant General Mykola Oleshchuk reported that Russian forces launched one Kh-31 air guided missile from occupied Luhansk Oblast, one Iskander-M ballistic missile from occupied Crimea, and 17 Shahed-136/131 drones from Cape Chauda on the night of April 6 to 7.[46] Oleshchuk reported that Ukrainian forces shot down all Shahed drones over Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk, and Poltava oblasts. Ukraine’s Southern Operational Command stated that Russian forces struck port infrastructure in Odesa City, likely with the Iskander-M missile.[47] Ukrainian officials reported that Russian drones struck Kharkiv City and damaged civilian infrastructure.[48] Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian forces struck a fuel and lubricant warehouse and aviation school in Kharkiv City, with one Russian milblogger claiming that Russian forces used FAB glide bombs with unified planning and correction modules (UMPC).[49]

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

Chieftain of the All-Russian Cossack Society and Deputy Chairman of the State Duma Committee on Nationalities Nikolai Doluda claimed on April 7 that more than 30,000 Cossack personnel are currently fighting in Ukraine.[50] Doluda that Cossack detachments are subordinated to motorized rifle units under the authority of the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD).[51] Doluda added that almost all of Russia’s 13 Cossack organizations have formed their own volunteer detachments to fight in Ukraine.[52]

Russian sources continue to report that select Russian units are plagued by drunkenness, extortion, and fratricide. Russian independent outlet Bereg reported on April 5 that six Russian soldiers in the 164th Motorized Rifle Brigade (25th Combined Arms Army [CAA], Central Military District [CMD]) deployed near occupied Hrechyskyne, Luhansk Oblast tortured another Russian soldier for 14 hours before killing him, possibly to settle a commander’s personal vendetta.[53] Bereg reported that the six Russian personnel are part of an “extortion gang” that exploits widespread drunkenness in the unit to routinely beat, torture, and extort money from drunken colleagues.[54]

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

General Director of Rostec subsidiary High-Precision Complexes Oleg Ryazantsev claimed on April 7 that Russian forces used the Pantsir-M naval air defense system for the first time in Ukraine when shooting down a Storm Shadow missile that targeted a Russian ship on an unspecified date.[55] Russian state newswire RIA Novosti stated that the Cyclone Karakurt-class corvette is the only ship in the Black Sea Fleet (BSF) equipped with the Pantsir-M system.

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 officials and state media amplified a long-standing information operation on April 7 that falsely portrays Russia’s 2014 military intervention and hybrid war in Donbas as a Ukrainian “insurrection.”[56] This information operation seeks to convince domestic and foreign audiences that Russia was not the initiating belligerent in Ukraine, despite robust documented evidence that the Russian Main Directorate of the General Staff (GRU) astroturfed “local uprisings” in occupied Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts in 2014.[57] Russian Foreign Ministry (MFA) Spokesperson Maria Zakharova falsely claimed that occupied Donetsk Oblast declared itself the Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) on April 7, 2014, in response to an alleged US-backed radical “coup” in Ukraine.[58] Russian state media outlet Sputnik News Africa similarly claimed that Ukraine launched an anti-terrorist operation to “crush the fledging independence movement” in eastern Ukraine, deliberately misrepresenting Ukraine’s efforts to defend itself against the initial Russian invasion in 2014.[59] The Kremlin has long weaponized this information operation to mask its initial invasion of Ukraine as a “local conflict” or a “civil war” to mislead the international community about Russia’s unprovoked aggression against Ukraine starting in 2014, and to obfuscate Moscow’s long-term objective of regaining dominant control over all of Ukraine.

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)

Nothing significant to report.

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.

7. Army Announces FDA Clearance of Whole Blood Rapid Test to Help with Assessment of Traumatic Brain Injury

Is this another example of the Army/Military making a contribution to civil society as well? Can this test be used by all who may have suffered concussions? E.g., young people as well as professional athletes who suffer concussion playing sports? And of course anyone who suffers a head injury whether at work or in an accident?

Check out this statistic:

Nearly 500,000 U.S. troops worldwide experienced a TBI resulting from military training, deployment, or day-to-day activities—such as sporting events—between 2000 and 2023, according to DoD statistics. Developing a field-deployable solution for the detection and evaluation of TBIs among service members stationed at home and abroad is, therefore, a top priority for the U.S. military health system.

Army Announces FDA Clearance of Whole Blood Rapid Test to Help with Assessment of Traumatic Brain Injury

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Courtesy Photo | U.S. Army Sgt. Raymond Calzada, a medical laboratory specialist with 566th Medical...... read more

Courtesy Photo | U.S. Army Sgt. Raymond Calzada, a medical laboratory specialist with 566th Medical Company Area Support, 61st Multifunctional Medical Battalion, 1st Medical Brigade, waits for test results from the Analyzer Traumatic Brain Injury (ATBI) system as part of a simulated casualty scenario during Global Medic, a combat support training exercise, Fort Hunter Liggett, Calif., June 18, 2023. Members of the U.S. Army Medical Materiel Development Activity and the Medical Capability Development Integration Directorate participated in the exercise to gain feedback from end users on the portable, deployable TBI biomarker assessment system. On April 1, 2024, USAMMDA and Abbott announced that the company’s whole blood TBI cartridge for use on the ATBI received clearance from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The new test allows clinicians to obtain lab quality results for TBI assessment using whole blood in 15 minutes. Previous tests to help with the assessment of concussion were only cleared for use with plasma or serum, requiring samples to be sent to a laboratory for processing and results. The new test allows for bedside use and can aid in evaluating patients up to 24 hours after injury, a significant improvement from previously available tests. (U.S. Army Courtesy Photo/Released) | View Image Page

FORT DETRICK, MD, UNITED STATES

04.01.2024

Story by Caree Vander Linden

U.S. Army Medical Materiel Development Activity (USAMMDA)

U.S. Army officials, in partnership with Abbott, announced today that the company’s i-STAT® TBI (Traumatic Brain Injury) cartridge has received clearance from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to be used with whole blood.

The newly cleared device can run whole blood testing at the patient’s bedside, allowing clinicians to obtain lab quality results for patients suspected of concussion in 15 minutes, according to company officials. Previous tests to help with the assessment of concussion were only cleared for use with plasma or serum, requiring samples to be sent to a laboratory for processing and results. In addition, patients can be evaluated up to 24 hours after injury, a significant improvement from previously available tests.

"TBIs are a major concern for Warfighter health, readiness, and resiliency,” said U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Edward H. Bailey, commanding general of the U.S. Army Medical Research and Development Command (USAMRDC). “This milestone accomplishment demonstrates how Army medical developers can partner with industry to deliver solutions for frontline medical personnel caring for our injured service members.”

Nearly 500,000 U.S. troops worldwide experienced a TBI resulting from military training, deployment, or day-to-day activities—such as sporting events—between 2000 and 2023, according to DoD statistics. Developing a field-deployable solution for the detection and evaluation of TBIs among service members stationed at home and abroad is, therefore, a top priority for the U.S. military health system.

Abbott developed the i-STAT TBI blood test in collaboration with the U.S. Army Medical Materiel Development Activity (USAMMDA), part of USAMRDC. The command has been dedicated to developing a solution for detecting and evaluating TBIs for more than two decades.

U.S. Army Col. Andy Nuce, commander of USAMMDA, said the assay will enhance the ability of frontline medical staff to quickly assess service members with suspected TBIs. Since not all patients will require head CT scans, the new method will prevent unnecessary medical evacuations and improve TBI case management in the field.

“During future large-scale combat operations, enemy weapons and exposure to blast or concussive events will present challenges to frontline medical providers,” said Nuce. “We are constantly working to investigate, develop, and field modern medical solutions to protect the Warfighters of 2030, 2040, and beyond.”

U.S. Army Lt. Col. Bradley Dengler, Neurosurgical Consultant to the Office of the Surgeon General, called the test one of the most significant steps forward in the care of traumatic brain injury patients in the past 20 years.

“Given the large numbers of expected casualties with all severities of traumatic brain injury in future large-scale combat operations, this test can help maintain combat power far forward by helping to eliminate unnecessary evacuations,” Dengler said.

“Additionally, and just as important given the limited number of neurosurgeons available in theater, ongoing research demonstrates that a future version of this test could be used to triage more severely injured patients, as the blood biomarker elevations correlate with the severity of their intracranial injuries,” he commented. “This can help get the most severely injured service members to neurosurgeons faster and ultimately save lives.”

About the Test

A small venous blood sample is applied to the i-STAT TBI test cartridge, which is then inserted into the portable i-STAT Alinity® instrument. The test measures the presence of two biomarkers that may be released into the bloodstream, indicating a possible brain injury. Testing for these two biomarkers—ubiquitin C-terminal hydrolase L1 (UCH-L1) and glial fibrillary acidic protein (GFAP)—in the aftermath of an injury can provide clinicians with essential information about a patient’s condition and can help healthcare providers decide on an appropriate treatment plan.

Funding and Development

The i-STAT TBI blood test was developed by Abbott in collaboration with USAMMDA. Development of this capability was managed by the Analyzer, Traumatic Brain Injury (ATBI) integrated product team (IPT) led by USAMMDA’s Warfighter Readiness, Performance, and Brain Health Project Management Office. Subject matter experts from USAMMDA, the Combat Casualty Care Research Program, and the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research continuously monitored and participated in the program’s development. The Transforming Research and Clinical Knowledge in Traumatic Brain Injury (TRACK-TBI) research team was the first to demonstrate how this TBI blood test can be used for the benefit of TBI patients in clinical care. Spanning the USAMRDC and broader Department of Defense community, these multifaceted teams were unified by the common goal of developing a TBI product that meets the needs of the Warfighter.

About USAMMDA

The U.S. Army Medical Materiel Development Activity, part of the U.S. Army Medical Research and Development Command, develops, delivers, and fields critical drugs, vaccines, biologics, devices, and medical support equipment to protect and preserve the lives of Warfighters across the globe. USAMMDA project managers guide the development of medical products for the U.S. Army Medical Department, other U.S. Services, the Joint Staff, the Defense Health Agency, and the U.S. Special Forces community. The process takes promising technology from DoD, industry, and academia to U.S. Forces, from the testing required for U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval or licensing to fielding and sustainment of the finished product.

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Date Taken: 04.01.2024 Date Posted: 04.01.2024 09:54 Story ID: 467469 Location: FORT DETRICK, MD, US Web Views: 1,247 Downloads: 1

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8. WWIII could start over Philippines dispute in South China Sea, China 'not respecting' treaties, expert says

Political warfare. Make us think WWIII will start here. Let's consider unrestricted warfare.

Excerpts:

First reported by MEMRI's China Media Studies Project, the state-owned and -operated news outlet China Daily earlier this week published an op-ed titled "Manila must be warned against horrors of war" by Yang Xiao, deputy director of the Institute of Maritime Strategy Studies at the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations.

Yang, a frequently featured expert in a range of China Daily articles, drew connections between the current tensions between China and the Philippines and tensions in Pre-World War I Europe.

The article notes at the bottom that "the views don’t necessarily reflect those of China Daily," but Yang engages in an inflammatory discussion of history and current tensions, referring to the "Sarajevo gunshot" after warning against Philippine politicians' "flirtation with the U.S. in the hope of gaining the upper hand in the maritime dispute with China."

"The lessons of World War I should be heeded, especially by small states, because triggering a conflict will serve no country’s interest," Yang wrote.

Later in the piece, Yang wrote that American "decision-makers" should realize that "the U.S.’s military intervention on behalf of the Philippines would also be disastrous for neighboring countries. The South China Sea has been a sea of peace and cooperation."

"Only a handful of leaders in the Philippines, ignoring the increasing challenges, such as rising prices, at home, are stirring up the extreme sentiments of the people by feeding them anti-China rhetoric," Yang wrote. "What they don’t realize is that once the "Sarajevo gunshot" is fired in Asia, the innocent people in East and Southeast Asian countries will become the biggest victims of war."

WWIII could start over Philippines dispute in South China Sea, China 'not respecting' treaties, expert says

foxnews.com · by Peter Aitken Fox News

Video

Chinese ships attempt to block Philippines supply ships

Fox News chief national security correspondent Jennifer Griffin reports on China’s growing aggression in the South China sea.

Beijing warned that World War III could break out in the South China Sea as it increasingly shifts its attention to the Philippines, with territorial disputes driving tensions ever higher.

"Although we have a mutual defense treaty with the Philippines, China is not respecting it," Gordon Chang, a China expert and fellow at the Gatestone Institute, told Fox News Digital.

"It was twice last month, on the 5th and the 29th, that the State Department issued written warnings to China that we were prepared to use force to discharge our obligations pursuant to article four of the U.S. Philippines Mutual Defense Treaty," Chang explained. "That's a warning that we are prepared to go to war."

First reported by MEMRI's China Media Studies Project, the state-owned and -operated news outlet China Daily earlier this week published an op-ed titled "Manila must be warned against horrors of war" by Yang Xiao, deputy director of the Institute of Maritime Strategy Studies at the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations.

CHINA SENDS WARPLANES, BOATS AROUND TAIWAN FOLLOWING PHONE CALL BETWEEN XI AND BIDEN

Yang, a frequently featured expert in a range of China Daily articles, drew connections between the current tensions between China and the Philippines and tensions in Pre-World War I Europe.

Filipino soldiers take part in a flag raising ceremony on Mavulis Island during a trip of the chief of staff of the Armed Forces of the Philippines, in Batanes, Philippines, June 29, 2023. Batanes, a group of idyllic islands at the country’s northernmost tip, lies just 140 kilometers from Taiwan. (Ezra Acayan/Pool via Reuters/File Photo)

The article notes at the bottom that "the views don’t necessarily reflect those of China Daily," but Yang engages in an inflammatory discussion of history and current tensions, referring to the "Sarajevo gunshot" after warning against Philippine politicians' "flirtation with the U.S. in the hope of gaining the upper hand in the maritime dispute with China."

"The lessons of World War I should be heeded, especially by small states, because triggering a conflict will serve no country’s interest," Yang wrote.

Chinese President Xi Jinping reviews the honor guard during a welcome ceremony at The Great Hall of the People on November 22, 2023, in Beijing, China. (Florence Lo - Pool/Getty Images)

Later in the piece, Yang wrote that American "decision-makers" should realize that "the U.S.’s military intervention on behalf of the Philippines would also be disastrous for neighboring countries. The South China Sea has been a sea of peace and cooperation."

INDONESIAN PRESIDENT-ELECT MEETS WITH JAPAN'S PRIME MINISTER, COMMITS TO STRENGTHENING RELATIONS

"Only a handful of leaders in the Philippines, ignoring the increasing challenges, such as rising prices, at home, are stirring up the extreme sentiments of the people by feeding them anti-China rhetoric," Yang wrote. "What they don’t realize is that once the "Sarajevo gunshot" is fired in Asia, the innocent people in East and Southeast Asian countries will become the biggest victims of war."

In this screen grab from video provided by the Armed Forces of the Philippines, a Chinese coast guard ship uses water cannons and closely maneuvers beside a Philippine resupply vessel Unaizah May 4 as it approaches Second Thomas Shoal, locally called Ayungin shoal, at the disputed South China Sea on Saturday, March 23, 2024. (Armed Forces of the Philippines via AP)

China has most recently hassled the Philippines over disputed fishing shoals, with Chinese coast guards trying to chase Filipino fishermen away and leading to tense standoffs between the two.

Last year saw a series of near-clashes between the two coast guards near the Second Thomas Shoal. The Philippine authorities protested China’s use of a water cannon and military-grade lasers.

FILE: In this handout photo provided by the Philippine Coast Guard, a Chinese coast guard ship approaches a Philippine coast guard ship, foreground, causing a minor collision, in the vicinity of Second Thomas Shoal on Tuesday, March 5, 2024. (Philippine Coast Guard via AP)

China established a claim to the Scarborough Shoal in 2012, after which the Philippines formally launched a protest that went before a United Nations-backed tribunal. A 2016 ruling went against China, rejecting Beijing’s claims on "historical grounds," but Beijing rejected the arbitration and its outcome.

NORTH KOREA LAUNHCES BALLISTIC MISSILE OFF ITS EAST COAST: OFFICIALS

The U.S., Japan, Australia and the Philippines on Apr. 7 will conduct the first full-scale joint naval exercise between the nations in the disputed territories to demonstrate fleet interoperability and provide a show of strength for China. The nations will then hold a summit in which they are expected to announce plans for joint patrols in the area later this year, according to Politico.

This image, released by the Armed Forces of the Philippines, shows a Chinese militia vessel, top, near Philippine coast guard vessel BRP Cabra as they approach Second Thomas Shoal, locally called Ayungin Shoal, in the disputed South China Sea on Sunday Oct. 22, 2023. (Armed Forces of the Philippines via AP)

Chang argued that this kind of scattershot approach to stirring up tensions with neighboring countries is unsurprising as China "is probing its neighbors, especially Japan, Taiwan and the Philippines, and it shifts its attention, all the time."

"China ramped up pressure on the Philippines and then pressure … sort of died down in the last couple of days, and now they're ramping up pressure on Taiwan," Chang said. "And while all of this is going on, we've now had more than 100 continuous days of Chinese vessels intruding into Japan's waters in the East China Sea around the senkakus."

In this handout photo provided by the Philippine Coast Guard, suspected Chinese militia ships stay near the Philippine-claimed reef called Whitsun, locally known as Julian Felipe reef, at the disputed South China Sea on Saturday Dec. 2, 2023. The Philippine Coast Guard said on Dec. 3 that they have monitored more than a hundred suspected Chinese militia ships have gathered around the reef near Palawan province, Philippines. (Philippine Coast Guard via AP)

"So, really what they're doing is they are pressuring, and then they'll let up, and they'll go someplace else and pressure at that place," he explained.

Chang stressed, though, that the Philippines remain "the weakest militarily" of those three targets, despite the agreement of mutual defense with the United States.

"Biden himself, on October 25th issued a warning from the steps of the White House when the Australian prime minister was visiting him that the United States was prepared to use force, so the Chinese just don't believe Biden at all," Chang argued.

CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP

"There are a lot of people out there who say we will be fighting China this year or next year," Chang added. "I'm not saying we will, but I'm saying if we will, it's more likely that the fight starts over the Philippines than it starts over Taiwan or Japan."

"If you look at the situation involving the Philippines, it's easier to construct an argument or a scenario that we're going to go to war with [China] over the Philippines … because you got all the elements in place," he concluded. "You've got all the elements in place for a great power war that starts in the Philippines."

Peter Aitken is a Fox News Digital reporter with a focus on national and global news.

foxnews.com · by Peter Aitken Fox News

9. Massive container ship loses power near NYC’s Verrazzano Bridge days after Baltimore Key Bridge disaster

Coincidence? Or is this a follow-on "attack?"

Massive container ship loses power near NYC’s Verrazzano Bridge days after Baltimore Key Bridge disaster

New York Post · by Social Links for Chris Nesi View Author Archive Get author RSS feed · April 7, 2024

A massive container ship lost propulsion power in the waters around New York City and was brought to a rest near the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge Friday night — less than two weeks after failure on another massive cargo vessel caused it to smash into Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge.

The US Coast Guard confirmed that its Vessel Traffic Service received a report that the 89,000-ton M/V APL Qingdao lost propulsion about 8:30 p.m. as it traversed Kill Van Kull waterway — the shipping lane between Staten Island and Bayonne, New Jersey.

An image shared on X by John Konrad, CEO of maritime-focused news outlet gCaptain, shows the 1,100-foot APL Qingdao floating uncomfortably close to the span that connects Brooklyn and Staten Island.

BREAKING: A NY tugboat captain has reported to @gCaptain “container ship APL QINGDAO lost power while transiting New York harbor. They had 3 escort tugs but 3 more were needed to bring her under control. They regained power & were brought to anchor near the verrazano bridge” pic.twitter.com/Z2IP04xmLs

— John Ʌ Konrad V (@johnkonrad) April 7, 2024

In response to the power failure, three tug boats that were escorting the APL Qingdao guided the vessel until it regained propulsion a short time later.

The vessel was brought to a position just north of the bridge where it anchored.

“Coast Guard Vessel Traffic Service New York received a report from the M/V APL Qingdao around 8:30pm, Friday, that the vessel had experienced a loss of propulsion in the Kill Van Kull waterway. The vessel regained propulsion and was assisted to safely anchor in Stapleton Anchorage, outside of the navigable channel just north of the Verrazano Bridge, by three towing vessels,” the Coast Guard said.

“These towing vessels were escorting the vessel as a routine safety measure, which is a common practice for large vessels departing their berth.”

A container ship lost power near the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge on April 6, 2024. Gregory P. Mango

The Kill Van Kull waterway is a narrow 3-mile long tidal strait separating Newark Bay — home to the Port Newark Container Terminal — and Upper New York Bay. It is one of the Port of New York and New Jersey’s busiest waterways.

The Coast Guard required the vessel’s propulsion system to be certified that it had been repaired and was fully operational.

The crew was also required to provide a detailed casualty report documenting precisely what contributed to the loss of propulsion.

After meeting those requirements, the vessel was allowed to resume its voyage to Charleston, South Carolina.

The M/V Qingdao lost propulsion as it traveled through the Kill Van Kull waterway between Staten Island and Bayonne, New Jersey. Future Publishing via Getty Images

Despite the unsettling optical illusion, the image instantly brings to mind last month’s deadly Francis Scott Key Bridge disaster in Baltimore, in which six construction workers were killed when cargo ship Dali rammed one of the 1.9-mile bridge’s supports, sending it tumbling into the Patapsco River.

The collapse ground maritime transit to a halt in the vital Port of Baltimore. Speaking on CBS’ “Face the Nation” Sunday morning, Maryland Gov. Wes Moore said it was “realistic” that normal operations would resume on the waterway as early as May.

“It is an aggressive timeline, but we are going to work around the clock to make sure we hit this timeline,” Moore said.

The Dali appeared to suffer loss of power leading up to the Baltimore crash. The APL Qingdao, by contrast, just lost propulsion.

The APL Qingdao is registered in Malta and owned by French shipping and logistics company CMA CGM. It was bound for Norfolk, Virginia at the time it lost power.

CMA CGM could not be reached Sunday. Konrad did not respond to messages from The Post seeking comment.

New York Post · by Social Links for Chris Nesi View Author Archive Get author RSS feed · April 7, 2024

10. Anonymous users are dominating right-wing discussions online. They also spread false information

Anonymous users are dominating right-wing discussions online. They also spread false information

AP · by ALI SWENSON · April 6, 2024

1 of 4 |FILE - The X logo is shown on a computer screen in Belgrade, Serbia, July 24, 2023. Social media accounts who shield their real identities behind clever slogans and cartoon avatars have come to dominate right-wing political discussion online, even as they spread false information. (AP Photo/Darko Vojinovic, File)

ALI SWENSON

Swenson reports on election-related misinformation, disinformation and extremism for The Associated Press.

twitter

MELISSA GOLDIN

Goldin debunks, analyzes and tracks misinformation for The Associated Press. She is based in New York.

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AP · by ALI SWENSON · April 6, 2024

11. Ukraine’s drone tactics have inspired Taiwan, but US support remains critical

Ukraine’s drone tactics have inspired Taiwan, but US support remains critical

By Liu Zhen South China Morning Post7 min

April 6, 2024

View Original

Over the course of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the battle for control at sea has repeatedly tilted in Kyiv’s favour. Without warships of its own, Ukraine has sunk or disabled several vessels from the vaunted Russian navy using only drones. Has the conflict signalled a new era in battle tactics, and are there lessons for Taiwan?

Asymmetrical warfare

Remote-controlled unmanned boats were first used in warfare in World War II. In the decades since, many countries have advanced the technology.

Now, maritime drones are widely considered as a game changer in naval battles as observers watch Ukraine’s successes in hitting the Russian Black Sea Fleet – despite the fact the country had lost almost all of its surface vessels when Russia occupied Crimea in 2014.

Since full scale war broke out in 2022, Ukraine claims to have sunk or damaged 24 surface ships and one submarine – a third of the Russian fleet – with many of the attacks carried out by its sea drones. The latest hit was in early March when naval drones sank Russia’s newest patrol ship, the Sergei Kotov.

An undated photo provided by the Ukrainian government shows a Magura V5 unmanned boat designed and built in Ukraine. The Ukrainian military said a special operations unit destroyed the Russian patrol ship Sergey Kotov in March with a Magura V5. Photo: AP

The 1,300-tonne vessel, which was launched in 2021, was destroyed by a group of Ukrainian Magura V5 drones, or “maritime autonomous guard unmanned robotic apparatus V-type”. The 1-tonne weapons are 5.5 metres (18 feet) long, battery-powered, and can carry up to 800kg (1,764lbs) of explosives.

They are demonstrating that control of the sea could be obtained without stronger warships

Ni Lexiong, military analyst

Ukraine has also deployed sea-based drones and conducted successful attacks on key Russian infrastructure such as vital ports and the Kerch Bridge to Crimea. Such efforts enabled the partial resumption of Ukraine’s essential grain exports by sea which had been hampered by the Russian navy.

“Ukraine’s tactics are surely inspiring to all navies,” said Shanghai-based military analyst Ni Lexiong. “They are demonstrating that control of the sea could be obtained without stronger warships.”

Halfway around the world, the Taiwan Strait has become a potential flashpoint that observers fear may draw in the United States. As relations with Beijing have soured, Taiwan, whose military muscle is clearly no match for that of the People’s Liberation Army, has increasingly looked to the US for weapons and support.

While the PLA Navy has made significant progress in expanding and improving its aircraft carrier fleet, it still lags behind the US in both quantity and quality. Still, the Pentagon still sees the PLA as a clear and present threat to its large, costly and predominantly manned surface warships deployed in the region.

“All parties need to advance their own asymmetrical capabilities,” Ni said.

The Beijing scenario

Beijing sees Taiwan as a breakaway province to be reunified by force if necessary. The US, which is committed to supplying the island with weapons, and most of its allies, do not recognise the self-governed island as an independent state but oppose any attempt to use force to change the status quo. Beijing, however, has not renounced the use of force, insisting that reunification is an “internal affair” and that any interference by external forces must be prevented.

To realise that goal, the PLA has for nearly three decades been building anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) capabilities.

As mainland China becomes one of the world’s top military and civilian drone makers, it has unveiled a number of Unmanned Surface Vessels (USV) and Unmanned Underwater Vehicles (UUV) at air shows and weapon exhibitions in recent years. The weapons vary in size, range, speed and purpose – including maritime reconnaissance, strike, logistics, communication, among others.

Two such models that have caught the attention of military observers is a 200-tonne trimaran stealth drone boat, which is benchmarked to the US Sea Hunter USV, and the 2,000-tonne autonomous research vessel Zhu Hai Yun, which could serve as a “mother ship” for over 50 unmanned air, surface and undersea vehicles.

The Zhu Hai Yun made an appearance in the Taiwan Strait late last year when it sailed around the island and crossed into Taiwan’s 24 nautical mile contiguous zone. According to a report in February by the Washington-based think tank Centre for Strategic and International Studies, the ship was equipped with advanced instrumentation for military/civilian dual-use.

In the case of a military campaign against Taiwan, it is expected that the PLA’s unmanned surface and underwater fleets would be deployed in the western Pacific as part of an A2/AD line. Loaded with missiles or loitering munition, these drones would carry out patrols and intercept and attack foreign warships and submarines – likely from the US Navy – preventing them from reaching the island.

More drone fleets could be configured with various functional payloads to assist in other PLA operations, such as minesweeping, electronic warfare, ground attacks or simply decoys.

According to an article published in the military mouthpiece PLA Daily last year, the unmanned boats will be integrated into the combat system in three battle modes: “swarm” – a mass attack that overwhelms the enemy with sheer numbers; “hound” – in which the weapons are controlled by crewed ships in assisting roles; and “drone clusters” – where autonomous task groups consisting of USVs, UUVs and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are deployed for long-term surveillance missions, reconnaissance and attacks.

The US scenario

In May, the US Navy will formally establish its second USV squadron, Sam Paparo, the head of the US Pacific Fleet, announced in February.

“There are battlespaces where it may not be necessary to contest air and maritime superiority one for one, but simply to deny its use to an enemy that wants to use that battlespace for its own purposes,” Paparo said.

The US Navy has already set up a drone fleet – the Unmanned Surface Vessel Division ONE (USVDIV-1) – which was officially stood up in 2022 and has been testing four ships in the Indo-Pacific: USVs Mariner and Ranger, and medium USVs Sea Hunter and Seahawk.

While the USVDIV-1 mainly experiments with medium and large USVs, the second division will focus on smaller surface vessels, and defence contractors have been asked to make pitches for small, lethal surface drones.

Last year, the US Department of Defence announced an ambitious “Replicator Initiative”, which is focused on “fielding thousands of autonomous systems across multiple domains within two years. The first tranche of the drones were reportedly selected in March.

The initiative is “part of the Pentagon’s strategy to counter China’s rapid armed forces build-up,” according to Kath Hick, the deputy secretary of defence.

Taiwan races to catch up with mainland China’s military drone capabilities

In the event that the PLA launches a mass amphibious invasion across the Taiwan Strait, the US sea drones and loitering munitions could play a key role in disrupting Beijing’s landing plan, according to the Pentagon.

“In an amphibious landing operation, the troop embarkation, ship crossing and beach arrival are the three most vulnerable points and could be easily targeted and damaged by either drones or missiles,” Ni said.

The Taiwanese scenario

If the PLA Navy carries out an amphibious operation on the island, remote-controlled Taiwanese maritime drones would also form one of multiple lines of defence, mainly targeting incoming warships or near its coastline, since the island’s small and antiquated warships are no match for such attackers.

Inspired by Ukraine’s successes against the Russian navy, Taiwan’s defence industry has also ramped up mobilisation, though it still relies heavily on US supplies.

In terms of quantity and quality, [Taiwan] has already fallen far behind even some third world countries

Antony Wong Dong, military expert

The National Chung-Shan Institute of Science and Technology, the island’s government-owned institution for weapon development, has launched a two-year, NT$812 million (US$25 million) “unmanned attack vessel” development programme, which is expected to begin production of at least 200 boats in 2026.

The boats – which are under 4 tonnes, less than 10 metres long, and will have a draft of up to 0.5 metre – could be remotely controlled from up to 70km (43.5 miles) away. According to local media reports, they would be operated by the island’s land force and deployed for suicide attacks against PLA vessels.

Taiwan is developing another, bigger and more lethal suicide drone

Private companies in Taiwan are also working on similar projects. Last year, Thunder Tiger Corporation showed off its Seawolf 400 autonomous underwater vehicle and Shark 400 autonomous unmanned surface vessel last year. Both can be equipped with customisable payloads to be strike capable, defence magazine Janes reported.

But as a latecomer to the drone era of warfare, Taiwan has been slow to adapt, according to Macau-based military expert Antony Wong Dong.

“In terms of quantity and quality, [Taiwan] has already fallen far behind even some third world countries. Without the support of US unmanned weapons, the situation would be completely one-sided (to Beijing’s advantage),” Wong said.

12. Drone Strikes on Myanmar Military Capitol Signify Deteriorating Situation

Still a long way to go. It might get a little shorter with some very precise and effective support.

Excerpts:

Yet despite the undoubted boost to resistance morale this attack should excite, the battle for middle Myanmar has a long way to go. The regime has been collapsing along its frontiers, especially in recent weeks with an offensive by the Kachin Independence Army (KIA) and its Operation 0307 that has dislodged the Tatmadaw from key bases, but targeting them in the flat central plains of the country, with major military bases and industrial capacity, airfields and reserves, utilizing a strategic depth that is often underestimated, they can sustain themselves for some time.

But in response to battlefield losses, the military has been increasingly turning to punitive airstrikes, artillery bombardment, and increasingly sophisticated UAV strikes of their own, with more military-grade equipment sourced from its close relationship with Russia. The strike underscores Naypyidaw’s relative vulnerability and should rattle the regime and its supporters that their central redoubt could be targeted more in the coming months. The regime will likely have to divert resources to tighten Naypyidaw’s defenses, which should ideally shake the internal complacency at a higher command level. But then the generals have demonstrated a consistent cognitive obtuseness to the conflict since the coup three years ago. But a drone strike right on your headquarters should rattle any complacency.

Drone Strikes on Myanmar Military Capitol Signify Deteriorating Situation

asiasentinel.com · by Asia Sentinel

By David Scott Mathieson

Photo from NBC News

Myanmar’s civil war entered a dramatic new phase late last week with an attack by multiple drones against the capital Naypyidaw. An estimated 23 fixed-wing drones targeted the military headquarters and the air force runway at Naypyidaw airport, and reportedly also targeted the residence of the head of the State Administration Council (SAC), Senior General Min Aung Hlaing.

While the military impact apparently was negligible, the impact is likely a psychological blow for the regime. Months of battlefield losses for the military have followed the rebels’ major Operation 1027 offensive in Northern Shan State, robust insurgent gains in Arakan, Karen, and Karenni State with Operation 1111, with the loss of some 50 towns, scores of bases of various sizes, hundreds of soldiers killed and captured. Foreign backing for the regime has continued to peel away, especially with Beijing having gone neutral, with only Moscow continuing to provide support.

For the junta to have its inner sanctum violated so dramatically delivers a symbolic shock wave that supersedes its military value. By one count, more than 300 bases and towns in total have been wrested from military control by anti-junta forces since the 2021 coup, including crucial border crossings. Residents of Yangon, which remains the commercial capital of the country, have told Asia Sentinel they are afraid of venturing outside the city.

The Ministry of Defense of the opposition National Unity Government, formed by the rebels in the wake of the junta’s February 2021 military coup, claimed responsibility for the attack several hours afterwards. In a brief statement, the rebels claimed that “Special Force units of the People's Defense Force, alongside Shar Htoo Waw's Kloud Drone Team, targeted the military headquarters. Similarly, the Special Forces of the People's Defense Force (PDF) and the Shar Htoo Waw's Lethal Prop Weapon Team launched attacks on Alar Air Base.” There are unconfirmed reports that a number of officers were injured in the attack on the military HQ.

The junta’s state media claimed that the military air defense system “successfully intercepted all the fixed-wing aircraft. As a result of this prevention, two of the aircraft exploded in the air before reaching their targets, and the remaining fixed-wing planes were shot down. Thirteen of the aircraft that crashed to the ground after being intercepted were seized.” Photos published show several fixed-wing drones, some seemingly intact and others clearly damaged. There were no reports of damage to installations or military aircraft at the airport.

This attack seemed less a ‘drone swarm’ than a ‘drone wave,’ but it does indicate a level of sophistication and battlefield innovation that has become more prominent in recent months. Clearly, the resistance has been steadily augmenting its drone strike capability, both for surveillance and dropping increasingly heavy ordnance. In multiple locations, the conflict in Myanmar has become a drone war, with the SAC and the resistance increasingly using sophisticated drones which are both commercially sourced and craft-built by the People's Defense Force.

It appears that the fixed-wing drones are craft-manufactured, possibly from established kits or through 3D printing, which various resistance forces have been using for some time. Many PDFs and ethnic armed groups (EAOs) in Myanmar assemble drones by studying YouTube videos and sourcing online shopping options. These are then modified by young technicians from tech-savvy resistance fighters who have modified quadcopters, multi-rotor drones, and fixed-wing craft, attaching mortar rounds to bomb SAC bases, convoys, and personnel, and in a number of dramatic incidents also helicopters. There are literally scores of rebel drone units operating around Myanmar with names such as Federal Wings and Salingyi Spaceman Drone Army, often sustained by donations from the Myanmar diaspora around the world. In an asymmetric conflict, the drone is helping to equalize the battlescape, and is a clear indication that the resistance has been methodically making progress.

Min Aung Hlaing acknowledged the scale of the UAV threat in a major speech in late November 2023 to the military council, in reference to Operation 1027. “In reviewing incidents which happened in the northeast area of Shan State, excessive strengths and technologies were deployed, and military drones were used to drop bombs in attacks. They have so far used more than 25,000 drop bombs.” ‘Drop bombs’ has entered the Myanmar military vernacular.

Yet despite the undoubted boost to resistance morale this attack should excite, the battle for middle Myanmar has a long way to go. The regime has been collapsing along its frontiers, especially in recent weeks with an offensive by the Kachin Independence Army (KIA) and its Operation 0307 that has dislodged the Tatmadaw from key bases, but targeting them in the flat central plains of the country, with major military bases and industrial capacity, airfields and reserves, utilizing a strategic depth that is often underestimated, they can sustain themselves for some time.

But in response to battlefield losses, the military has been increasingly turning to punitive airstrikes, artillery bombardment, and increasingly sophisticated UAV strikes of their own, with more military-grade equipment sourced from its close relationship with Russia. The strike underscores Naypyidaw’s relative vulnerability and should rattle the regime and its supporters that their central redoubt could be targeted more in the coming months. The regime will likely have to divert resources to tighten Naypyidaw’s defenses, which should ideally shake the internal complacency at a higher command level. But then the generals have demonstrated a consistent cognitive obtuseness to the conflict since the coup three years ago. But a drone strike right on your headquarters should rattle any complacency.

David Scott Mathieson is an independent analyst working on conflict, humanitarian, and human rights issues in Myanmar

asiasentinel.com · by Asia Sentinel

13. Ukraine to lose war with Russia if US Congress withholds aid, says Zelensky

Ukraine to lose war with Russia if US Congress withholds aid, says Zelensky

By AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE South China Morning Post2 min

April 7, 2024

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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Sunday that Kyiv will lose the war against Russia if the US Congress does not approve military aid to battle Moscow’s invasion.

Republicans in Congress have been blocking tens of billions of dollars in military assistance for Kyiv for months.

“It is necessary to specifically tell Congress that if Congress does not help Ukraine, Ukraine will lose the war,” Zelensky said during a video meeting of Kyiv-organised fundraising platform United24.

Zelensky said it would be “difficult” for Ukraine to “stay” (survive) without the aid.

He said that “if Ukraine loses the war, other states will be attacked”.

Meanwhile, Ukraine struck the dome above a shutdown reactor at the Russian-controlled Zaporizhzhia nuclear station on Sunday, although radiation levels were normal and there was no serious damage, the plant’s Russian-installed administration said.

It was not immediately clear what weapon was used against the nuclear plant, which was taken by Russian forces shortly after their full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The plant said earlier it had been attacked by Ukrainian drones.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which has experts at the site, said it had been informed by the Russian-run plant that a drone had detonated at the site and the information was “consistent” with IAEA observations.

IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi said both sides should refrain from actions which “jeopardise nuclear safety”.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has dragged on for more than two years.

Kyiv said on Sunday that a strike on the town of Gulyaipole in the southern Zaporizhzhia region killed three people.

“Two men and a woman died under the rubble of their own private house, which was hit by a Russian shell,” the head of the region, Ivan Fedorov, said on social media.

Ukraine’s drone tactics have inspired Taiwan, but US support remains critical

Officials said another civilian, a woman, was killed in the city of Kupiansk, in the northeastern Kharkiv region that has seen increased attacks in recent months.

“A woman died under the rubble in an apartment on the fourth floor of a high-rise building,” Ukraine’s state emergency services said, adding that it was a residential building.

Authorities in the main city of Kharkiv said Russia launched another attack on Sunday, wounding five civilians, a day after a deadly attack there.

Russia, meanwhile, said a young woman was killed by a Ukrainian drone strike on the Belgorod border region.

Russia’s Lavrov, who will visit China soon, calls Ukraine peace plan ‘reasonable’

Belgorod governor Vyacheslav Gladkov said shrapnel hit a car with a family of six inside in the village of Shagarovka, some 35km (20 miles) from the border with Ukraine.

“Unfortunately, a girl died,” Gladkov said, without specifying whether she was a minor. “She died from her wounds on the spot.”

Gladkov said her father had a head wound and that two children were taken to hospital.

Additional reporting by Reuters

14. Opinion | In the shadow war with Iran, Biden just scored an unheralded victory by Max Boot

Excerpts;

It’s high time for the United States and its coalition partners undertake a more sustained air campaign against Houthi military installations — and even Houthi leaders — to persuade the militia group to finally end its attacks on shipping. Those strikes have led to an 80 percent decline in the volume of freight passing through the Red Sea since November.

It’s not a question of “winning” the shadow war with Iran. It’s simply a matter of convincing Iran to decrease its attacks across the board, not just in Iraq and Syria. This is one of those international problems so difficult that it cannot be solved, at least not in the foreseeable future. It can only be managed, which is why I’m relieved to have a prudent and experienced president in the White House, surrounded by prudent and experienced advisers. That might not be true next year.

Opinion | In the shadow war with Iran, Biden just scored an unheralded victory

The Washington Post · by Max Boot · April 8, 2024

Iran and its proxy groups did not launch an all-out assault against Israel and its allies, as Hamas leaders might have hoped, following Hamas’s brutal Oct. 7 incursion into Israel. But Hezbollah, which is trained and armed in Lebanon by Iran, did intensify its rocket attacks on northern Israel; the Houthis in Yemen did begin attacking shipping in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden with drones and missiles; and other Iranian-backed proxy groups targeted U.S. military outposts in Iraq and Syria with a barrage of missile and drone strikes.

That semi-covert Iranian campaign reached a dangerous turning point on Jan. 28, when a drone launched by a Tehran-backed militia struck a small U.S. base in Jordan, known as Tower 22, killing three U.S. service members and wounding dozens more. Iran had crossed a U.S. red line. How would Washington respond?

Republican hawks came out in full-throated cry demanding that the U.S. military “strike targets of significance inside Iran” (Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina) or even “Target Tehran” (Sen. John Cornyn of Texas). We don’t know what would have happened if President Biden had taken the senators’ rash advice, but it might have led to a larger war between the United States and Iran.

Luckily, Biden, with his decades of foreign policy experience, chose a more prudent path — but one that still represented a considerable escalation beyond ineffectual U.S. responses to earlier strikes against American bases that had not produced any fatalities.

On Feb. 2, U.S. forces dropped more than 125 precision munitions on 85 targets in Iraq and Syria belonging to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Quds Force and its affiliated militia groups. The U.S. Air Force even deployed giant B-1 bombers that flew all the way from the continental United States. According to U.S. Central Command: “The facilities that were struck included command and control operations centers, intelligence centers, rockets, missiles, unmanned aerial vehicle storage, and logistics and munition supply chain facilities of militia groups and their IRGC sponsors who facilitated attacks against U.S. and Coalition forces.”

Five days later, on Feb. 7, a U.S. airstrike in Baghdad killed a senior commander of Kataib Hezbollah, one of the most dangerous Iranian-backed terrorist groups. This demonstrated not only how precise U.S. weapons systems are but also how successful U.S. intelligence was in tracking the movements of senior Iranian operatives.

The clear message was that other Iranian commanders would be next if they didn’t knock off their attacks against U.S. troops. And guess what? Iran did stop. Things could change at any moment, but a senior U.S. defense official told me last week that there hasn’t been an Iranian-directed attack against a U.S. military base in either Syria or Iraq since Feb. 4. By contrast, there were at least 170 such attacks between Oct. 7 and Feb. 4.

This is an important and unheralded — if likely transitory — victory in the long-running shadow war between the United States and Iran, which stretches all the way back to 1979. “It’s by far the longest pause in such attacks since the start of the Israel-Hamas war,” the U.S. official told me, “and we believe it reflects a deliberate decision by Iran to rein in attacks by its forces in order to avoid escalation with the United States.”

If this had been the Trump administration, the president would probably be taking victory laps in crude, all-caps social media posts. Biden is more cautious, probably because he knows the attacks could resume at any time. “We’re not under any illusions,” the defense official told me. “Iran continues to pose a serious threat to the United States and our interests in the region. Under certain circumstances, attacks could restart, but we demonstrated that we’re willing and able to defend our forces.”

In the meantime, the Iranians and their proxies continue to test the United States in other ways. The Houthis, in particular, continue their strikes against shipping in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, forcing U.S. naval forces to regularly shoot down their drones and missiles and to bomb their launch sites — although a U.S. commander told reporters on Wednesday that the Houthis appear to be running low on munitions.

Administration officials say the Houthis are not as responsive to Iranian directions to stand down as other militia groups are, but a former senior U.S. intelligence officer suggested to me that the Iranians are simply up to their old tricks. “Imagine a four-burner stove, and one burner has become very hot,” this savvy ex-spook said, referring to attacks against U.S. bases. “Iran knows not to put its hand on that burner but to move to other burners — they could be other geographies or other tools. Eventually, the first burner cools down and they return to that location, and the process continues.”

There is no lasting solution to the Iranian problem as long as that country continues to have a fundamentalist regime hostile to the United States and its allies — and there is no way for Washington to overthrow the Iranian regime without risking becoming embroiled in another Iraq- or Afghanistan-style quagmire. Indeed, in many ways, Iran is becoming more dangerous: It is ramping up its nuclear program to near weapons-grade levels of enrichment, and it is supplying Russia with drones, artillery shells and missiles for its war against Ukraine.

But recent events make clear that the mullahs are too cautious to be drawn into a direct war with the United States or even with Israel. Iran prefers to keep hostilities at a low simmer. Even after an Israeli airstrike last week demolished the Iranian Consulate in Damascus, killing two Iranian generals and five other officers, Iran has not ordered Hezbollah to mount an all-out assault on Israel with its estimated arsenal of 150,000 rockets and missiles. One senior U.S. official suggested to me that Iran was actually surprised that the attack on Tower 22 killed any U.S. personnel, and it wants to avoid such mishaps in the future.

But while the United States has convinced Iran to back off, at least a bit, in Syria and Iraq, it hasn’t had any such success with the Houthis. As retired Gen. Joseph Votel, a former head of U.S. Central Command, told me, “We have not imposed sufficient costs on either the Houthis or Iran, and until the costs associated with perpetrating these attacks outweigh the benefits, we will continue to be mostly defensive in the Red Sea/Bab al Mandab Strait.”

It’s high time for the United States and its coalition partners undertake a more sustained air campaign against Houthi military installations — and even Houthi leaders — to persuade the militia group to finally end its attacks on shipping. Those strikes have led to an 80 percent decline in the volume of freight passing through the Red Sea since November.

It’s not a question of “winning” the shadow war with Iran. It’s simply a matter of convincing Iran to decrease its attacks across the board, not just in Iraq and Syria. This is one of those international problems so difficult that it cannot be solved, at least not in the foreseeable future. It can only be managed, which is why I’m relieved to have a prudent and experienced president in the White House, surrounded by prudent and experienced advisers. That might not be true next year.

The Washington Post · by Max Boot · April 8, 2024

15. Top Republican warns pro-Russia messages are echoed ‘on the House floor’

Recognize adversary strategy and propaganda, understand them, EXPOSE them to inoculate the target audiences, and attack them with a superior political warfare/information strategy.

Excerpts:

The more that the propaganda “takes hold,” Turner said, “it makes it more difficult for us to really see this as an authoritarian versus democracy battle — which is what it is.”

Turner’s comments come amid a GOP impasse over additional funding for Ukraine’s defense against Russia’s invasion. Turner and some of his Republican colleagues have been pushing for more Ukraine aid — a top priority for the White House and Democrats.

Top Republican warns pro-Russia messages are echoed ‘on the House floor’

The latest remarks come after another GOP member said Russian propaganda has ‘infected’ the Republican base

By Yvonne Wingett Sanchez and Abigail Hauslohner

Updated April 7, 2024 at 8:23 p.m. EDT|Published April 7, 2024 at 7:52 p.m. EDT

The Washington Post · by Yvonne Wingett Sanchez · April 7, 2024

Rep. Michael R. Turner (R-Ohio), who chairs the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, said Sunday that it was “absolutely true” that some Republican members of Congress were repeating Russian propaganda about the invasion of Ukraine instigated by Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Turner did not specify which members he was referring to, but he said he agreed with House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Michael McCaul (R-Tex.), who said in an interview with Puck News last week that Russian propaganda had “infected a good chunk of my party’s base” and suggested that conservative media was to blame.

When asked on Sunday, Turner said he agreed with McCaul’s sentiments.

“We see directly coming from Russia attempts to mask communications that are anti-Ukraine and pro-Russia messages — some of which we even hear being uttered on the House floor,” Turner said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “I mean, there are members of Congress today who still incorrectly say that this conflict between Russia and Ukraine is over NATO, which of course, it is not.”

The more that the propaganda “takes hold,” Turner said, “it makes it more difficult for us to really see this as an authoritarian versus democracy battle — which is what it is.”

Turner’s comments come amid a GOP impasse over additional funding for Ukraine’s defense against Russia’s invasion. Turner and some of his Republican colleagues have been pushing for more Ukraine aid — a top priority for the White House and Democrats.

But it has faced stiff opposition from many Republicans, including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), who has led calls to remove House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) should he move forward with a vote on an aid package and has made several baseless claims about the conflict.

When Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in December traveled to Washington to try to secure a breakthrough for additional U.S. military aid, Greene suggested that the United States should instead try to broker peace.

Greene wrote on X, formerly Twitter, “Why doesn’t anyone in Washington talk about a peace treaty with Russia?? A deal with Putin promising he will not continue any further invasions.”

U.S. allies and NATO members are also growing increasingly worried about future Russian aggression. The Washington Post reported this weekend that if Donald Trump wins the November election, he is proposing to push Ukraine to cede wide swaths of its territory to Russia, thus expanding the reach of Putin’s dictatorship.

Still, some lawmakers are more optimistic about getting some type of deal passed. Rep. French Hill (R-Ark.), an outspoken Republican supporter of Ukraine aid, told CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday that he believed Johnson will prioritize passing supplemental security assistance for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan after Congress returns on Tuesday from a two-week recess.

“I believe he’s fully committed to bringing it up to the floor immediately” after addressing the reauthorization of a contentious national security surveillance program when Congress returns to work, Hill said.

The Senate earlier this year approved a $95.3 billion funding package. Many senators have echoed the White House’s warnings that without a fresh infusion of weapons from the United States, Ukraine risks ceding its war to Russia.

But Johnson, amid fierce opposition from his far-right flank, has so far refused to bring the Senate package to a vote on the House floor.

Hill, who sits on the House Intelligence Committee, hinted Sunday that Johnson would likely introduce a version of the supplemental national security package that includes an additional provision to redirect certain frozen Russian assets toward paying for Ukraine’s reconstruction.

However, any changes to the legislation in the House would necessitate significant further delays to the provision of aid, by forcing the chambers to reconcile and approve the differences. But Hill said he believed there is widespread bipartisan support for the new provision, known as the REPO Act.

The Washington Post · by Yvonne Wingett Sanchez · April 7, 2024

16. Israel withdraws most troops from south at six-month mark of Gaza war

Israel withdraws most troops from south at six-month mark of Gaza war

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/04/07/israel-hamas-war-news-gaza-palestine/

By Louisa Loveluck, Abigail Hauslohner, Claire Parker, Hajar Harb, Niha Masih and Jennifer Hassan

Updated April 7, 2024 at 4:29 p.m. EDT|Published April 7, 2024 at 12:55 a.m. EDT

Thousands of people protest Saturday in Tel Aviv, calling for the release of hostages held in the Gaza Strip and criticizing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. (Heidi Levine for The Washington Post)

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JERUSALEM — Israel said on Sunday — the six-month mark of the ruinous conflict in Gaza — that it was withdrawing all but one brigade from the south of the enclave, describing the move as an opportunity for troops to rest and retool for the next chapter of the war.

The Israel Defense Forces said in a statement that its 98th commando division, which consists of special ground forces, had “concluded its mission” in the city of Khan Younis and left Gaza “to recuperate and prepare for future operations.” The Nahal brigade, made up of ground troops stationed along a corridor that divides northern and southern Gaza, would continue to operate, the army said.

The drawdown announcement Sunday seemed to mirror a withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza City earlier this year, after the army said it had dismantled Hamas brigades in the north and was pivoting to more targeted operations.

On a tour of the IDF’s Southern Command with U.S. ambassador Jack Lew, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said soldiers would now be preparing for the “mission in the Rafah area” along the Egyptian border, home to some 1.4 million displaced Palestinians.

Israel has insisted it must invade Rafah to finish off Hamas’s remaining battalions; the Biden administration has said Israeli officials must first come up with a plan to evacuate civilians in the line of fire.

“The war in Gaza continues, and we are far from stopping,” Herzi Halevi, IDF chief of the general staff, said in a statement Sunday. “We will not leave any Hamas brigades active — in any part of the Gaza Strip. We have plans and will act when we decide.”

Israel’s punishing military campaign, launched after Hamas killed some 1,200 people and abducted 253 more in a surprise attack on Oct. 7, has yet to fully achieve its key objectives. Most of Hamas’s senior leaders are still at large, and more than 100 Israeli hostages are still held by the group.

Skip to end of carouselIsrael-Gaza war

(Said Khatib/AFP/Getty Images)

Israeli strikes that killed seven World Central Kitchen workers in Gaza were “carried out in serious violation” of the military’s procedures, according to the findings of an Israeli military investigation.

For context: Understand what’s behind the Israel-Gaza war.

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More than 33,000 people in Gaza have been killed in the fighting, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants but says the majority of the dead are women and children. The damage caused by Israel’s air and ground campaign in northern Gaza is so extensive that, in satellite views, whole city blocks resemble wastelands of powdered brown and gray.

Humanitarian officials say Israeli restrictions on aid have created famine conditions in northern Gaza more swiftly than anywhere they have worked in decades. Israel denies limiting aid and has accused humanitarian groups of exaggerating the hunger crisis.

But President Biden appeared last week to suggest for the first time that his administration’s near-unconditional support for Israel may be wavering, after IDF drone pilots hit a convoy of World Central Kitchen employees, killing six foreign nationals and one Palestinian. Nearly 200 aid workers have been killed during the conflict, the United Nations says.

Palestinians inspect a vehicle with the World Central Kitchen logo that was wrecked by an Israeli airstrike in Deir al-Balah last week. (Ismael Abu Dayyah/AP)

Israel responded quickly to the American pressure, dismissing two officers for their role in the WCK attack — calling it a “serious failure” — and saying Israel would significantly increase the flow of humanitarian aid to Gaza, including by reopening a northern border crossing.

“We have been asking [Israel] for these concessions for months to avert the looming famine in Gaza. We need to see them implemented,” said Jamie McGoldrick, the United Nations’ humanitarian coordinator in the Palestinian territories.

COGAT, the Israeli agency that oversees the Palestinian territories, said 322 trucks crossed into Gaza on Sunday, the highest one-day figure since the start of the war. Aid officials say the enclave needs 500 trucks a day, at minimum, to stave off widespread starvation.

“The president and the White House have yet to lay out what consequences they have and they want to impose,” Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), among Biden’s fiercest domestic critics during the Gaza war, said Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” He called on the administration to cut off military transfers to Israel until it ensures that people are “not starving to death … [are] able to get medical equipment, [and] kids are not having amputations without anesthesia.”

For Gazan civilians, the war seems endless. “We do not sleep or eat, and the sounds of airplanes surround us from everywhere,” said Muhammad al-Atrash, 44, a father of three, reached by phone Sunday in the southern city of Rafah.

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“Our lives are not humane.”

The drawdown of troops from the north, and now from Khan Younis, is an indication that the IDF believes it has accomplished most of its major goals in the area, experts said, but could still return if militants come back.

“Obviously Israel is not saying that it is going out of Gaza, shutting the gates without any intention to go back, under any circumstances. It is saying the opposite, that it will retain operational freedom,” said Eran Etzion, former deputy head of Israel’s National Security Council.

“We are talking about a very small place,” said Kobi Michael, a senior researcher at the Tel Aviv-based Institute for National Security Studies. “When we have the intelligence, the forces are deployed along the border and it’s a matter of minutes to reach the places we want to reach.”

A recent standoff between the IDF and Hamas militants in and around Gaza City’s al-Shifa Hospital underscored how quickly armed groups are able to regroup in a security vacuum — and how destructive even the most “targeted” operations can become.

A man pushes a bicycle amid rubble in the devastated area around Gaza's al-Shifa Hospital on Wednesday. (AFP/Getty Images)

Israeli troops recounted fierce battles against Hamas militants, who they said barricaded themselves inside the complex. Humanitarian officials and civilians trapped in the area described two weeks of terror, during which at least 21 patients died inside the hospital as fighting raged around them. Gaza’s largest hospital was reduced to ruins.

As Israeli troops pulled out of the south, CIA chief William J. Burns was in Cairo on Sunday for a new round of talks over a potential cease-fire deal, a sign that diplomatic momentum was picking up again, according to a former Egyptian official familiar with the negotiations, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive subject.

Last week, Biden called Egyptian President Abdel Fatah El-Sisi and the emir of Qatar — whose countries are key interlocutors with Hamas — to urge them to put more pressure on the militant group to reach a deal.

“The problem is Sinwar is in Gaza and the other [Hamas leaders] are in Qatar,” the former Egyptian official said, referring to Hamas leader Yehiya Sinwar, widely believed to be hiding in tunnels below Gaza. “The decision comes from Sinwar.”

Israeli officials believe Sinwar and the group’s other top officials are in the Rafah area, possibly using the remaining Israeli captives as human shields.

“Hamas, now they have the golden card: the hostages,” the former Egyptian official said. “But they’re short on ammunition, rockets and drones and are now fighting guerrilla warfare that is not sustainable.”

Pressure for a deal is also mounting in Israel, where thousands of demonstrators were back on the streets Saturday night, calling for fresh elections. Among the crowd were family members of hostages, who accuse Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of dragging out the negotiations to retain his hold on power.

“Time is of the essence,” a group representing the hostage families said in a statement, “leaving no choice but to bring them all back now!”

WHO releases video of 'destroyed' al-Shifa Hospital

1:08

The World Health Organization released footage of a “completely nonfunctional" al-Shifa Hospital on April 6, after its team visited the facility. (Video: World Health Organization)

Hauslohner reported from Washington, Parker from Cairo, Masih from Seoul and Hassan and Harb from London. Lior Soroka in Tel Aviv contributed to this report

17. Inside Donald Trump’s secret plan to end the Ukraine-Russia war

I think all we have to do is read Heritage reports and we will understand the former president's domestic and foreign policies.

Inside Donald Trump’s secret plan to end the Ukraine-Russia war

Foreign policy experts and some Republicans warned that pressuring Ukraine to cede land would reward Putin

By Isaac Arnsdorf, Josh Dawsey and Michael Birnbaum

Updated April 7, 2024 at 2:34 p.m. EDT|Published April 7, 2024 at 8:00 a.m. EDT

The Washington Post · by Isaac Arnsdorf · April 7, 2024

Former president Donald Trump has privately said he could end Russia’s war in Ukraine by pressuring Ukraine to give up some territory, according to people familiar with the plan. Some foreign policy experts said Trump’s idea would reward Russian President Vladimir Putin and condone the violation of internationally recognized borders by force.

Trump’s proposal consists of pushing Ukraine to cede Crimea and the Donbas border region to Russia, according to people who discussed it with Trump or his advisers and spoke on the condition of anonymity because those conversations were confidential. That approach, which has not been previously reported, would dramatically reverse President Biden’s policy, which has emphasized curtailing Russian aggression and providing military aid to Ukraine.

As he seeks a return to power, the presumptive Republican nominee has frequently boasted that he could negotiate a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine within 24 hours if elected, even before taking office. But he has repeatedly declined to specify publicly how he would quickly settle a war that has raged for more than two years and killed tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians.

Trump-aligned foreign-policy thinkers have emphasized addressing threats to U.S. interests from China and seeking ways to reverse Russia’s increasing dependence on China for military, industrial and economic assistance. They have also embraced limiting NATO expansion.

Privately, Trump has said that he thinks both Russia and Ukraine “want to save face, they want a way out,” and that people in parts of Ukraine would be okay with being part of Russia, according to a person who has discussed the matter directly with Trump.

Accepting Russian control over parts of Ukraine would expand the reach of Putin’s dictatorship after what has been the biggest land war in Europe since World War II. Some of Trump’s supporters have been trying to persuade him against such an outcome.

“I’ve been spending 100 percent of my time talking to Trump about Ukraine,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), a onetime Trump critic turned ally. “He has to pay a price. He can’t win at the end of this,” Graham added, speaking of Putin.

Russia has previously declared it was annexing Ukrainian land beyond the Donbas region and Crimea and Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, has said he would not accept surrendering any territory. Exchanging territory for a cease-fire would put Ukraine in a worse position without assurances that Russia would not rearm and resume hostilities, as it has in the past, said Emma Ashford, a senior fellow at the Stimson Center, a nonpartisan think tank. “That is a terrible deal,” she said of Trump’s proposal.

The Trump campaign declined to directly address questions for this article. “Any speculation about President Trump’s plan is coming from unnamed and uninformed sources who have no idea what is going on or what will happen,” campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said in a statement. “President Trump is the only one talking about stopping the killing.”

Biden said in his State of the Union address that Putin is “on the march, invading Ukraine and sowing chaos throughout Europe and beyond,” and that Ukraine is trying to defend itself. The president has outlined a long-term plan of support for Ukraine that would build up its military capabilities this year so that it is in a better place to go on the offensive next year. But U.S. aid is already in jeopardy as House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) faces a revolt from Republican hard-liners who are digging in against any more funding and clamoring to oust him.

Out of office, Trump has pressured congressional Republicans to resist additional American support for Ukraine’s war effort and a return to the White House would significantly expand his influence over the debate. Seeing the political dynamics in the U.S., European allies have jump-started military industry to a point where they hope to supplant a significant portion of the current U.S. assistance to Kyiv. But analysts said that realistically, Ukraine’s capacity to keep fighting would be weakened if Trump succeeds in blocking further U.S. aid.

In many ways, Trump’s plan is in line with his approach as president. His preference for splashy summits over policy details, confidence in his own negotiating skills and impatience with conventional diplomatic protocols were all hallmarks of how he approached foreign affairs in his first term.

In his eight years as the GOP’s standard-bearer, Trump has led a stark shift in the party’s prevailing orientation to become more skeptical of foreign intervention such as military aid to Ukraine. Trump has consistently complimented Putin, expressed admiration for his dictatorial rule and gone out of his way to avoid criticizing him, most recently for the death in jail of political opponent Alexei Navalny. He has not called for the release of Evan Gershkovich, the Wall Street Journal reporter held in Russia for a year without charges or a trial.

Trump has refused to acknowledge Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and falsely blamed Ukraine for trying to help Democratic rival Hillary Clinton — a smear spread by Russian spy services. His attempt in 2019 to withhold aid to Ukraine unless Zelensky announced an investigation into Biden led to Trump’s first impeachment.

In a phone call with Zelensky that year that Trump said was “perfect,” the U.S. president pressured Zelensky to investigate Biden and the discredited theory that Ukraine and not Russia sought to interfere with the 2016 election. The GOP-controlled Senate later acquitted Trump.

“Former president Trump’s inexplicable and admiring relationship with Putin, along with his unprecedented hostility to NATO, cannot give Europe or Ukraine any confidence in his dealings with Russia,” said Tom Donilon, President Barack Obama’s national security adviser. “Trump’s comments encouraging Russia to do whatever it wants with our European allies are among the most unsettling and dangerous statements made by a major party candidate for president. His position represents a clear and present danger to U.S. and European security.”

Graham said he has warned against giving Russia desired land and wants Trump to embrace a pathway forward to Ukraine to join NATO.

“The way you end this war to me is you make sure Ukraine gets into NATO and the E.U.,” he said. “He doesn’t say much about that. I don’t know if he’s thought too much about it.”

In his public promises to end the war, Trump has pointedly withheld the specifics on how he would negotiate with Putin and Zelensky. “I will say certain things to each one of them that I wouldn’t say to the rest of the world, and that’s why I can’t tell you much more than that,” Trump said in a March interview with former aide Sebastian Gorka.

His public silence on his negotiating tack has left room for others to fill in the blanks. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who has antagonized European allies with his autocratic and pro-Russian tendencies, met with Trump last month and afterward claimed Trump told him he will force the war to end because “he will not give a penny” to help Ukraine. Orban’s statement was false, but the former president didn’t want to publicly contradict him after entertaining him all night at his Mar-a-Lago Club and admiring his toughness and anti-immigration positions, according to a person close to Trump, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a private conversation.

During the meeting, Orban spoke at length about Soviet history, Russia’s desire for Ukrainian territory and the military challenges facing Ukraine, the person said. Trump listened but was noncommittal, the person said. An Orban spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.

Word of Trump’s plan for Ukraine circulated in Washington last November at a meeting at the Heritage Foundation between right-of-center foreign policy figures and a visiting delegation from the European Council on Foreign Relations. Former Trump White House aide Michael Anton described the expected contours of Trump’s peace plan as Ukraine ceding territory in Crimea and Donbas, limiting NATO expansion and enticing Putin to loosen his growing reliance on China, according to multiple people present for the meeting, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a private discussion.

Reached by phone in March, Anton said he hadn’t spoken with Trump in 18 to 24 months and denied knowing anything about Trump’s plan for Ukraine. He did not respond to further questions.

James Carafano, a Heritage Foundation fellow who convened the meeting, declined to comment on the private discussion but criticized the idea of splitting Russia from China. “That is stupid idea 101,” he said. “Anything you could give Russia that they would really value would compromise all your other interests. The way to deal with the Russia-China relationship is to make Russia a weaker partner.”

Peeling Russia away from China would presumably involve sanctions relief, since the Kremlin has turned toward Beijing to try to offset broad-based Western sanctions on its energy, defense and financial sectors, said Jeremy Shapiro, head of the Washington office of the European Council on Foreign Relations, who brought the group’s delegation to the meeting in November. Shapiro declined to comment on the specifics of the conversation, citing ground rules of the November event that prohibited attributing anything that was said, but he said that Trump’s Ukraine peace plan did not appear to be detailed.

“Trump people feel as if one of the great sins of the Ukrainian war and the Russia policy, generally speaking, is to push Russia toward China and to make it all the more dependent on China,” he said. Trump’s “fundamental approach with all things is to get men in a room together to discuss,” without necessarily having detailed plans in advance, Shapiro said.

Russia experts doubted Trump’s peace efforts could succeed. Fiona Hill, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who was Trump’s top Russia adviser and has since emerged as a prominent critic, said it reminded her of 2017 — when unvetted foreigners and business executives approached Trump with various peace plans, and he thought he could sit down with Russia and Ukraine and mediate on the strength of his personal charisma.

Trump’s team “is thinking about this very much in silos, that this is just a Ukraine-Russia thing,” Hill said. “They think of it as a territorial dispute, rather than one about the whole future of European security and the world order by extension.”

Even drawing an armistice line might not be so straightforward. The Kremlin in September 2022 declared that it was annexing four southern and eastern Ukrainian provinces, including the Donbas region but extending well beyond it. Since Kyiv still controls much of the territory, any attempt to resolve the war with territorial concessions is likely to involve extensive haggling — unless both sides simply agree to freeze the front lines that are in place at the moment of a deal.

Ukraine and European allies would probably resist Trump’s efforts to strike a deal with Moscow, Hill said. She said the Europeans have jump-started their military industry to a point where they hope to supplant a significant portion of the current U.S. assistance to Kyiv. She added that the U.S. has limited leverage for a unilateral deal because meaningful sanctions relief would rely on European cooperation.

“No amount of leverage the United States has is likely to compel Ukrainian leadership to engage in policies that would constitute domestic political suicide,” said Michael Kofman, an analyst of the Russia-Ukraine war at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a nonpartisan research center. “And no amount of leverage the United States has can compel Ukraine to cede territory or engage in these types of concessions. This is a situation where if you’re willing to give a hand, the other side will very quickly want the rest of the arm.”

The Washington Post · by Isaac Arnsdorf · April 7, 2024

18. Hamas’s Feud With Palestinian Rivals Adds to Doubts Over Gaza’s Postwar FutureHamas’s Feud With Palestinian Rivals Adds to Doubts Over Gaza’s Postwar Future

Could rivals do what Israel likely cannot and oust Hamas from power?

Hamas’s Feud With Palestinian Rivals Adds to Doubts Over Gaza’s Postwar Future

Simmering confrontation with West Bank-based Palestinian Authority is fresh sign of deep divisions over who will manage the enclave

https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/hamass-feud-with-palestinian-rivals-adds-to-doubts-over-gazas-postwar-future-a364b468?mod=hp_lead_pos4

By Omar Abdel-Baqui

Follow, Fatima AbdulKarim and Benoit Faucon

Updated April 8, 2024 12:01 am ET

Much of the friction dates back to 2007, when Hamas forcibly ousted Fatah, the party that controls the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority, from Gaza after winning legislative elections. PHOTO: TANYA HABJOUQA/NOOR IMAGES FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

RAMALLAH, West Bank—Signs of a civil conflict between Hamas and its Palestinian rivals are beginning to build, raising far-reaching questions about what a postwar government in Gaza might look like—and how long it might last.

Hamas late last month detained several Palestinian Authority officials in Gaza and tried to prevent an aid convoy overseen by Palestinian Authority staff from traveling in the enclave, accusing them of working with Israel in the first standoff between the two groups since the Oct. 7 attacks that triggered the war. Hamas also said it would set out to arrest more people affiliated with the Palestinian Authority in Gaza.

Meanwhile Fatah, the party that controls the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority, last week issued a rare public rebuke of Iran, one of Hamas’s primary funders and supporters. It said it rejects Tehran’s attempts to dictate what happens in the region while also criticizing the creeping influence of other foreign powers in Palestinian affairs.

The spat is a sign of the deep-seated animosity between Hamas and Fatah and how it might complicate any attempt to establish a new administration in Gaza once Israel concludes its military campaign in the strip, now entering its seventh month.

Much of the friction between the two dates back to 2007, when Hamas forcibly ousted Fatah from Gaza after winning legislative elections in the Palestinian territories the year before. Since then the split has widened, with the hard-line Islamists of Hamas periodically accusing the largely secular, Fatah-led Palestinian Authority in the West Bank of working with Israel and the West.

The tension now appears to be deepening. The U.S. and other Western powers have been looking to a reformed Palestinian Authority, which favors achieving Palestinian statehood through diplomacy, to take a significant leadership role in Gaza and prevent a power vacuum from forming that could allow Hamas to continue in some form.

Palestinians lifted flags during a rally marking the 59th anniversary of the Fatah movement foundation in Ramallah in the occupied West Bank in December. PHOTO: ZAIN JAAFAR/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, strongly opposed to a Palestinian state, is wary of the Palestinian Authority governing both the West Bank and Gaza, though some senior Israeli officials haven’t ruled out working with the Ramallah-based body or Fatah members.

“The general understanding is that in one way or another we’re going to have to work with people who are somewhat related to the PA,” an Israeli official said. “It doesn’t mean that PA in its current form will be the authority leading Gaza.”

Hamas, for its part, is stepping up its efforts to ensure it will still play a future political role by limiting the authority’s access to the narrow strip of land.

Hamas’s interior ministry told Hamas-affiliated Al-Aqsa TV that its police on March 30 arrested six people from a “suspicious force” managed by Palestinian Authority intelligence officials that entered Gaza with the Egyptian Red Crescent Society. It said that the security force coordinated with Israel, and that Hamas will seek to arrest more people involved in the group.

Adding fuel to what was already an incendiary accusation, Hamas accused Palestinian Authority intelligence agents of plotting to sow chaos and division in Gaza, echoing its longstanding practice of labeling anyone who works with Israel as a traitor. “We call on the leadership of Fatah and the [Palestinian] Authority in Ramallah to return to the national side,” Hamas said in a statement. “The Zionist enemy is in front of you. Fight it instead of your destructive war against Gaza and its people.”

The Future of Gaza: What Happens When the Israel-Hamas War Ends?

Hamas’s Feud With Palestinian Rivals Adds to Doubts Over Gaza’s Postwar Future

Simmering confrontation with West Bank-based Palestinian Authority is fresh sign of deep divisions over who will manage the enclave

https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/hamass-feud-with-palestinian-rivals-adds-to-doubts-over-gazas-postwar-future-a364b468?mod=hp_lead_pos4

By Omar Abdel-Baqui

Follow, Fatima AbdulKarim and Benoit Faucon

Updated April 8, 2024 12:01 am ET

Hamas, for its part, is stepping up its efforts to ensure it will still play a future political role by limiting the authority’s access to the narrow strip of land.

The Future of Gaza: What Happens When the Israel-Hamas War Ends?

‘Social Order Could Collapse’ in AI Era, Two Top Japan Companies Say

Telecommunications company NTT and leading newspaper Yomiuri to issue manifesto calling for new laws to restrain generative AI

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/social-order-could-collapse-in-ai-era-two-top-japan-companies-say-1a71cc1d?mod=hp_lead_pos6

By Peter Landers

April 7, 2024 10:30 pm ET

NTT and Yomiuri made the proposal in an AI manifesto that will be released Monday. PHOTO: TORU HANAI/BLOOMBERG NEWS

TOKYO—Japan’s largest telecommunications company and the country’s biggest newspaper called for speedy legislation to restrain generative artificial intelligence, saying democracy and social order could collapse if AI is left unchecked.

Nippon Telegraph and Telephone, or NTT, and Yomiuri Shimbun Group Holdings made the proposal in an AI manifesto to be released Monday. Combined with a law passed in March by the European Parliament restricting some uses of AI, the manifesto points to rising concern among American allies about the AI programs U.S.-based companies have been at the forefront of developing.The Japanese companies’ manifesto, while pointing to the potential benefits of generative AI in improving productivity, took a generally skeptical view of the technology. Without giving specifics, it said AI tools have already begun to damage human dignity because the tools are sometimes designed to seize users’ attention without regard to morals or accuracy.

Unless AI is restrained, “in the worst-case scenario, democracy and social order could collapse, resulting in wars,” the manifesto said.

It said Japan should take measures immediately in response, including laws to protect elections and national security from abuse of generative AI.

A global push is under way to regulate AI, with the European Union at the forefront. The EU’s new law calls on makers of the most powerful AI models to put them through safety evaluations and notify regulators of serious incidents. It also is set to ban the use of emotion-recognition AI in schools and workplaces.

The Biden administration is also stepping up oversight, invoking emergency federal powers last October to compel major AI companies to notify the government when developing systems that pose a serious risk to national security. The U.S., U.K. and Japan have each set up government-led AI safety institutes to help develop AI guidelines.

Still, governments of democratic nations are struggling to figure out how to regulate AI-powered speech, such as social-media activity, given constitutional and other protections for free speech.

NTT and Yomiuri said their manifesto was motivated by concern over public discourse. The two companies are among Japan’s most influential in policy. The government still owns about one-third of NTT, formerly the state-controlled phone monopoly.

Yomiuri Shimbun, which has a morning circulation of about six million copies according to industry figures, is Japan’s most widely-read newspaper. Under the late Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and his successors, the newspaper’s conservative editorial line has been influential in pushing the ruling Liberal Democratic Party to expand military spending and deepen the nation’s alliance with the U.S.

The two companies said their executives have been examining the impact of generative AI since last year in a study group guided by Keio University researchers.

The Yomiuri’s news pages and editorials frequently highlight concerns about artificial intelligence. An editorial in December, noting the rush of new AI products coming from U.S. tech companies, said “AI models could teach people how to make weapons or spread discriminatory ideas.” It cited risks from sophisticated fake videos purporting to show politicians speaking.

NTT is active in AI research, and its units offer generative AI products to business customers. In March, it started offering these customers a large-language model it calls “tsuzumi” which is akin to OpenAI’s ChatGPT but is designed to use less computing power and work better in Japanese-language contexts.

An NTT spokesman said the company works with U.S. tech giants and believes generative AI has valuable uses, but he said the company believes the technology has particular risks if it is used maliciously to manipulate public opinion.

Write to Peter Landers at Peter.Landers@wsj.comExcerpts:

The two companies said their executives have been examining the impact of generative AI since last year in a study group guided by Keio University researchers.

The Yomiuri’s news pages and editorials frequently highlight concerns about artificial intelligence. An editorial in December, noting the rush of new AI products coming from U.S. tech companies, said “AI models could teach people how to make weapons or spread discriminatory ideas.” It cited risks from sophisticated fake videos purporting to show politicians speaking.

NTT is active in AI research, and its units offer generative AI products to business customers. In March, it started offering these customers a large-language model it calls “tsuzumi” which is akin to OpenAI’s ChatGPT but is designed to use less computing power and work better in Japanese-language contexts.

An NTT spokesman said the company works with U.S. tech giants and believes generative AI has valuable uses, but he said the company believes the technology has particular risks if it is used maliciously to manipulate public opinion.

‘Social Order Could Collapse’ in AI Era, Two Top Japan Companies Say

Telecommunications company NTT and leading newspaper Yomiuri to issue manifesto calling for new laws to restrain generative AI

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/social-order-could-collapse-in-ai-era-two-top-japan-companies-say-1a71cc1d?mod=hp_lead_pos6

By Peter Landers

April 7, 2024 10:30 pm ET

NTT and Yomiuri made the proposal in an AI manifesto that will be released Monday. PHOTO: TORU HANAI/BLOOMBERG NEWS

Unless AI is restrained, “in the worst-case scenario, democracy and social order could collapse, resulting in wars,” the manifesto said.

It said Japan should take measures immediately in response, including laws to protect elections and national security from abuse of generative AI.

Still, governments of democratic nations are struggling to figure out how to regulate AI-powered speech, such as social-media activity, given constitutional and other protections for free speech.

The two companies said their executives have been examining the impact of generative AI since last year in a study group guided by Keio University researchers.

Write to Peter Landers at Peter.Landers@wsj.com

20. Great Power Competition Will Drive Irregular Conflicts

Another important article on why we must have sufficient focus on and capability to conduct irregular warfare.

Two things about irregular warfare that the authors point out: paradoxically it does not require large financial outlays (likely a major reason the military industrial congressional complex ignores IW for the most part.). The second is embodied in this famous T.E. Lawrence quote:

"Irregular warfare are is far more intellectual than a bayonet charge."

We will not gain proficiency in IW if we do not educate for it. Why is educating for IW important: Because strategic competition can be described as political warfare in the gray zone below the threshold of large scale combat operations. Irregular warfare is the military contribution to political warfare (and special warfare, primarily conducted by Special Forces, PSYOP, and CA forces, is the SOF contribution to IW). And IW will always play a role in large scale combat operations before, during, and after conflict in the combat zone as well as in the territory of friends, partners, and allies.

Excerpts:

But beyond these particular items, the U.S. National Defense Strategy is clearly focused on building a military to counter China and Russia, to the point that both it and the National Security Strategy largely dispense with preparation for irregular warfare. The unclassified version of the National Military Strategy makes no direct reference to irregular warfare at all. And in our own experience, we have seen that honing and capturing lessons from the past two decades of irregular warfare is all too often viewed as a distraction from, rather than complementary to, the current focus on strategic competition.

...

There is another problem: The establishment of U.S. Special Operations Command following the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986 may have had the unintended consequence of locking in the military’s overinvestment in large-scale combat operations. By encouraging a small portion of the military to specialize in irregular warfare and other “non-traditional” missions, the law drastically reduced incentives for the rest of the military to invest in this domain. Returning to the previous analogy, this has left the military in a position where Special Operations Command invests almost completely in bonds while the rest of the military invests almost completely in stocks. Arguably, this might still enable systematic consideration of the right mix between preparing for irregular warfare and conventional operations if Special Operations Command had the same heft on the civilian side of the Department of Defense as the military services, but it does not. The special operations portfolio is managed at the assistant secretary level (the third level of the civilian bureaucracy) and does not have a civilian service secretary — as do the Air Force, Army, and Navy — which reduces its ability to influence policy and resource allocation.

...

What Cold War Cases Should Teach Us

Some important observations are emerging from our Cold War case studies that can help U.S. decision-makers understand and prepare for conflicts on the horizon.

The most important centers on the fact that some of the irregular warfare capabilities that were important for U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War did not involve major financial outlays. They were modest long-term investments that did not allow U.S. allies to “win” their military competition outright in the near term — e.g., the small-but-critical deployment to El Salvador — but shaped the political possibilities in their favor over the medium term. Such long-term investments also led to favorable conflict resolution in post-Cold War Colombia. In fact, research by one of us suggests that the military is more likely to be successful when it is forced to stay small with a cap on its forces. It may be counterintuitive, but having too many forces is often counterproductive, as witnessed in Vietnam and Afghanistan. Information provision and relationship building also played a central role during the Cold War, often led by civilian government agencies.

...

A second observation is that some of the most strategically consequential Cold War failures for the United States and the Soviet Union came down, in large part, to handling irregular warfare environments badly.

...

Finally, preparing for the wars the United States will almost surely fight, alongside being ready to fight the wars it hopes to deter, means investing in U.S. military and civilian officials’ intellectual capital for the diplomatic and military aspects of irregular conflict.

...

If the nation fails to diversify its national security investments to retain hard-earned irregular warfare skills and capabilities, the United States will have more costly failures and fewer inexpensive successes. And the Cold War teaches us that this combination is a recipe for failure in long-run great-power competition.

Great Power Competition Will Drive Irregular Conflicts - War on the Rocks

JACOB SHAPIRO AND LIAM COLLINS

warontherocks.com · by Jacob Shapiro · April 8, 2024

If the United States is drawn into a new war in the next few years, what will that look like? Will the government deploy troops and heavy arms to a front in Eastern Europe or naval forces to the Taiwan Strait? Or will it engage in the kinds of activities that have been central to recent conflicts: special operations teams conducting drone strikes on insurgents, security force assistance brigades training partner militaries, development professionals running small-scale projects in remote villages, and diplomats learning the fine details of local politics?

The U.S. National Defense Strategy argues that preparing for the former is the best way to stave off major conflicts, and the Department of Defense is overwhelmingly emphasizing preparing for conventional warfare with China or Russia. This is a risky strategy in one key respect: Historically, irregular warfare has been a major part of great-power competition.

Building up conventional arms may contribute to deterrence, but having too narrow of a focus creates its own problems, as several colleagues have pointed out. The situation parallels having an overly concentrated investment portfolio: A wise investor will buy stocks for growth but supplement that with bonds to provide reliable income regardless of how the market performs. Similarly, as the United States invests massively in conventional deterrence, it should continue preparing for the irregular environments where strategic competition is most likely to turn violent.

So, where should U.S. leaders look to figure out what the right mix is and which bonds to invest in, so to speak? They don’t have to depend solely on their imaginations to decide, as they can utilize almost 50 years of evidence from the last era of strategic competition: the Cold War.

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Lessons from the Last Great-Power Faceoff

Why should we look to Cold War case studies to inform policy today? While it is essential not to over-read similarities between then and now, the two eras have important parallels.

Then, two major superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, were in competition, while a third major power, the People’s Republic of China, also played an important role. Each of these countries had nuclear weapons, serving to keep direct conflict off the table. Today, the United States and China are the two superpowers, while Russia is a major power seeking to reverse its decline. While there are important differences between the periods, we can surely learn from how the great powers competed before.

When we look back at the Cold War, it turns out that irregular warfare was a central feature of almost all conflicts involving the great powers. Civil wars and other kinds of irregular conflict accounted for 107 of the 123 armed conflicts active around the world from 1975 to 1991, according to the Uppsala Conflict Data Program. The great powers supported at least one side in a majority of these: 61 percent in the Middle East and 60 percent in Africa.

Cold War-era conflicts involving a great power on one or both sides were vastly more intense. At least two thirds of battle deaths in the second half of the Cold War came in conflicts with two or more great powers involved. If past is prologue, we can anticipate that the consequences of similar “small wars” today will be anything but modest and likely worse because the great-power competition provides strong incentives for reciprocal interventions.

One way to see how much worse wars with two great powers involved can be is to notice that while the 26 conflicts with two or more great powers supporting combatants represent less than one quarter of irregular conflicts active from 1975 to 1991, they caused 64 to 70 percent of the battle deaths during this period. Exceptionally violent conflicts happened around the world, from Afghanistan and Ethiopia to Cambodia and El Salvador. But all shared some common traits: they lasted for more than a decade, one great power supported the government and one supported at least one rebel faction (often more), and most settled shortly after the end of the Cold War when support to at least one side dried up. What this all implies is that in a world with competing great powers we should expect there to be multiple extended, brutal conflicts for which irregular warfare competency will be critical. This is a world we are sadly already living in.

The Current, Pivotal Moment

Given that many leaders in Washington started their careers during the Cold War, why isn’t preparing for irregular warfare a larger part of the narrative about strategic competition?

Experts have warned Congress that irregular warfare will likely be a major type of struggle between the United States and its competitors. President Joe Biden’s prologue to the implementation plan for the Global Fragility Act states that the United States will “consider how U.S. engagement in fragile states can affect and is affected by our broader geopolitical interests” such as competing with China and Russia. Senior Defense Department leaders have recently outlined how irregular warfare supports campaigning and deterrence, core principles in U.S. efforts at strategic competition.

But beyond these particular items, the U.S. National Defense Strategy is clearly focused on building a military to counter China and Russia, to the point that both it and the National Security Strategy largely dispense with preparation for irregular warfare. The unclassified version of the National Military Strategy makes no direct reference to irregular warfare at all. And in our own experience, we have seen that honing and capturing lessons from the past two decades of irregular warfare is all too often viewed as a distraction from, rather than complementary to, the current focus on strategic competition.

Without a clear perspective on irregular warfare’s importance to great-power competition, decision-makers will not even consider a range of potential tradeoffs. There are dozens of opportunities for investing slightly less in the expensive tools needed to fight and win a conventional war to gain huge amounts of capacity for irregular conflict. For instance, buying one fewer C-17 military transport aircraft would have saved more than $300 million — which in turn could have enabled relatively large investments in tools for irregular warfare environments such as training hundreds of foreign service officers in languages used on the African continent (or more than 1,000 in Russian, based on 2013 costs), or doubling the usually small complement of foreign commercial officers at U.S. embassies across Africa. Federal budgeting is a complex process in which State Department training priorities are not typically substituted for Defense Department acquisitions, but surely leaders on Capitol Hill and in the executive branch could establish a process to explicitly consider these kinds of budgetary tradeoffs.

There is another problem: The establishment of U.S. Special Operations Command following the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986 may have had the unintended consequence of locking in the military’s overinvestment in large-scale combat operations. By encouraging a small portion of the military to specialize in irregular warfare and other “non-traditional” missions, the law drastically reduced incentives for the rest of the military to invest in this domain. Returning to the previous analogy, this has left the military in a position where Special Operations Command invests almost completely in bonds while the rest of the military invests almost completely in stocks. Arguably, this might still enable systematic consideration of the right mix between preparing for irregular warfare and conventional operations if Special Operations Command had the same heft on the civilian side of the Department of Defense as the military services, but it does not. The special operations portfolio is managed at the assistant secretary level (the third level of the civilian bureaucracy) and does not have a civilian service secretary — as do the Air Force, Army, and Navy — which reduces its ability to influence policy and resource allocation.

Looking at recent events through this lens shows how operating effectively in irregular warfare settings can support U.S. national interests. The United States made a modest investment in Ukraine from 2015 to 2021, no more than $500 million in any given year (compare that to the billions the United States is spending every year to support Ukraine since Russia’s full-scale invasion). This involved a combination of special operations, National Guard, Ministry of Defense, and other advisors and trainers from the United States and other countries. Although this effort by itself did not deter Russia from invading in 2022, if you consider it a success that Ukraine didn’t immediately fall to Russia, as had been widely predicted, then you should see value in the long-run U.S. investment in providing security assistance to the country — a key irregular warfare capability.

And if you worry that Russia’s increased clout in the Sahel region of Africa is a threat to political stability and potentially critical mineral supplies, that too relates to irregular warfare and broader questions of the importance of sustained engagement in fragile states. Starting in the Trump administration, the United States signaled a decreased interest in Africa as it “rebalanced” its attention toward Asia and viewed the Sahel primarily as a locus of counterterrorism and irregular warfare. The 2022 National Defense Strategy, at 80 pages, mentions the entire continent of Africa only four times, and the Sahel never. But in the past two years, Russia has been steadily gaining partners there. In this region, one country after another experienced a coup, often precipitated by the civilian government’s perceived inability to control the jihadist threat in the country. Russian actors appeared in many capitals with an offer of stabilizing muscle for the new leadership. Now that Russia is gaining friends across the region, it’s clear that if the United States had foreseen how instability there might enable Russian encroachment, policymakers may have viewed its significance differently.

In addition, with the current segregation of strategic competition from irregular warfare and stabilization, policymakers may miss the opportunity to leverage irregular warfare toolkit toward strategic competition. For example, currently, the U.S. Agency for International Development invests about $23.6 million annually on stabilization and peacebuilding programs in the Democratic Republic of Congo — a relatively modest sum for the largest country, geographically, in sub-Saharan Africa. A limited investment makes sense if the objective is to achieve a stable, accountable government in the Congo — unfortunately, an uphill battle for decades. But Congo is no longer just a peacebuilding concern for U.S. interests: China’s dominant role in resource extraction and influence in the country’s affairs make it a strategic challenge, as well. Imagine if policymakers had seen stabilization investment in terms of both advancing accountable governance in the Congo and cultivating deeper engagement in this crucial strategic arena. The conversation — and the resulting investment — may have been very different.

What Cold War Cases Should Teach Us

Some important observations are emerging from our Cold War case studies that can help U.S. decision-makers understand and prepare for conflicts on the horizon.

The most important centers on the fact that some of the irregular warfare capabilities that were important for U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War did not involve major financial outlays. They were modest long-term investments that did not allow U.S. allies to “win” their military competition outright in the near term — e.g., the small-but-critical deployment to El Salvador — but shaped the political possibilities in their favor over the medium term. Such long-term investments also led to favorable conflict resolution in post-Cold War Colombia. In fact, research by one of us suggests that the military is more likely to be successful when it is forced to stay small with a cap on its forces. It may be counterintuitive, but having too many forces is often counterproductive, as witnessed in Vietnam and Afghanistan. Information provision and relationship building also played a central role during the Cold War, often led by civilian government agencies.

A second observation is that some of the most strategically consequential Cold War failures for the United States and the Soviet Union came down, in large part, to handling irregular warfare environments badly. For the United States in Vietnam, this was a result of putting huge effort into an intervention which ran counter to powerful long-run local political dynamics. For the Soviet Union, the draining 10-year war in Afghanistan would never have happened if it had been sufficiently savvy about local politics to discourage its Afghan allies from mounting a coup in 1978, if it refrained from the 1979 invasion that inflamed the nascent national resistance movement, or if it had been able to quell Islamic insurgent groups, who eventually became well-supplied by the United States and other players.

Many of these cases also highlight the importance of realistic strategic patience. Indeed, taking the long, and broad, view will be essential: To compete with China and Russia, it is important to focus on actors beyond the Chinese Communist Party and the Kremlin. The United States will need to pursue engagement around the world in places whose strategic importance is not immediately clear to the public — but where, as a consequence, U.S. engagement may have outsized impact.

Finally, preparing for the wars the United States will almost surely fight, alongside being ready to fight the wars it hopes to deter, means investing in U.S. military and civilian officials’ intellectual capital for the diplomatic and military aspects of irregular conflict. Since the Korean War, the United States has fought only two large-scale combat operations that did not involve significant irregular conflict (the Gulf War, and arguably the first weeks of the invasion of Iraq), yet it has spent trillions of dollars and thousands of lives in irregular conflicts around the world. Like so many aspects of preparing for the irregular aspects of great-power competition, the required investments are modest. Some inexpensive options include: reforming professional military education to include more analysis of the kinds of wars officers are most likely to fight in; placing flag officers in the lead in security force assistance missions (perhaps if that had been done in Ukraine before the invasion it might have deterred Russia); and creating a mechanism for the combatant commands to identify critical language needs among their civilian counterparts and leverage the interagency personnel assignment process to provide training to personnel in the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development.

If the nation fails to diversify its national security investments to retain hard-earned irregular warfare skills and capabilities, the United States will have more costly failures and fewer inexpensive successes. And the Cold War teaches us that this combination is a recipe for failure in long-run great-power competition.

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Jacob N. Shapiro is Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University where he directs the Empirical Studies of Conflict Project, a multi-university consortium that studies politically motivated violence in countries around the world. His research covers conflict, economic development, and security. He is the author of The Terrorist’s Dilemma: Managing Violent Covert Organizations and co-author of Small Wars, Big Data: The Information Revolution in Modern Conflict.

Liam S. Collins is the executive director of the Viola Foundation, the executive director of the Madison Policy Forum, a senior fellow with New America, and a permanent member with the Council on Foreign Relations. He was the founding director of the Modern War Institute at West Point and served as a defense advisor to Ukraine from 2016 to 2018. He is a retired Special Forces colonel with deployments to Iraq, Afghanistan, Bosnia, the Horn of Africa, and South America. He is co-author of the book Understanding Urban Warfare.

Image: Wikimedia

warontherocks.com · by Jacob Shapiro · April 8, 2024

21. The Bipartisan Consensus in Favor of Israel Is Broken, But When Will It Change U.S. Policy?

Excerpts:

Long-Term Policy Impacts

As long as the older generation of Democratic policymakers remains in power, U.S. policy is likely to continue favoring Israel, perhaps with a few modest changes. As younger Democrats rise to influential positions in the White House, Congress, and the bureaucracy, foreign policy will likely change to reflect their views. That does not mean that the United States would become anti-Israel or pro-Palestinian. Rather, future Democratic leaders will be more likely to place conditions on aid to Israel or reduce the amount of funding, less staunchly defend Israel in the United Nations, and be more willing to criticize the Israeli government publicly.

Some Democratic politicians have suggested that Netanyahu is the problem. Schumer — a long-time supporter of Israel — recently called for new elections in Israel. If Netanyahu was no longer in power, it might blunt some of the criticism within the Democratic Party. However, the Israeli government currently includes many further right figures, and centrist politician Benny Gantz may not share U.S. goals such as a two-state solution. It is unlikely that changes in Israeli leadership would tamp down growing Democratic willingness to criticize Israel for long.

Much may also depend on developments in the region. If Israel maintains a hard-right government and the civilian death toll in the current conflict continue to rise, it will reinforce these trends. If Palestinian militants embrace a new wave of international terrorism, as some did in the years after the 1967 war, it could swing public opinion back in Israel’s favor.

Moving away from decades of bipartisan unconditional support for Israel will take time and will likely occur in fits and starts. It will only happen if Democrats control or strongly influence foreign policy. Nonetheless, Israel should no longer assume that it automatically has the full backing of the United States.

The Bipartisan Consensus in Favor of Israel Is Broken, But When Will It Change U.S. Policy? - War on the Rocks

warontherocks.com · by Kerry Anderson · April 8, 2024

Recently, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer warned that making support for Israel partisan hurts “ the cause of helping Israel.” Around the same time, Donald Trump offered a different perspective, saying, “The Democrat Party hates Israel.”

When it comes to Israel, a decades-long bipartisan consensus in favor of unconditional support for Israel has badly eroded. President Joe Biden is facing growing pressure within the Democratic Party to do more to help Palestinian civilians in Gaza. So far, his administration has made the type of modest shifts in rhetoric and policy that appear important to some foreign policy practitioners but feel deeply inadequate to voters and activists who are angry about the war in Gaza.

Fundamental changes to U.S. policy are unlikely until a younger generation of Democratic policymakers gains influence. If they do, U.S. policy is unlikely to become anti-Israel, but senior policymakers are likely to become more circumspect about sending billions of dollars in aid to Israel and will give increased attention to Palestinian viewpoints. Republican policymakers, on the other hand, will remain staunchly pro-Israel far into the future, which is likely to reinforce the growing partisan divide.

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New Landscape

Frustration with the Israeli government is nothing new among U.S. leaders. Henry Kissinger, for example, used some very colorful insults when referring to Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and other Israeli officials. However, for decades, there was a dominant consensus within U.S. foreign policy circles that Israel was a crucial ally and Palestinians were primarily responsible for the failure of peace efforts. The broader American public — including Republicans and Democrats — was strongly supportive of Israel. For example, in 2001, 51 percent of Americans said they sympathized more with Israelis, compared to only 16 percent who sympathized more with Palestinians, with only a small partisan difference.

Today, Americans remain broadly favorable toward Israel, but that support is less widespread than in the past. In 2023, 54 percent of Americans said they sympathized more with Israelis, but the poll also found that 31 percent of Americans sympathized more with Palestinians — a notable increase from 2001.

Polling from Gallup, the Pew Research Center, Quinnipiac University, and the New York Times/Siena College has shown that the biggest changes in attitudes have occurred among young Americans and Democrats. For example, the New York Times found that 46 percent of registered voters between the ages of 18 and 29 sympathized more with the Palestinians, compared to 27 percent who sympathized more with Israel. In contrast, 63 percent of respondents over 65 sympathized more with Israel, while only 11 percent sympathized more with the Palestinians. The same poll found that 34 percent of Democrats sympathized more with the Palestinians (compared to 31 percent with Israel), while only 4 percent of Republicans sympathized more with the Palestinians.

These trends among the electorate are playing out among foreign policy practitioners as well. A notable number of mid-level and junior officials in federal agencies, as well as staffers on Capitol Hill, have raised concerns about unconditional U.S. support for Israel. In the past, raising such objections was often taboo and could even pose a risk to a staffer’s career. Today, though some risks remain, staff are more willing to raise objections, both anonymously and publicly. More than 1,000 U.S. Agency for International Development staff signed a letter calling for a ceasefire, and current and former staff publicly confronted the head of the agency in January. State Department officials have used the internal dissent channel to raise concerns about the impacts of support for Israel on other U.S. interests. Congressional staff and employees in other federal agencies have signed onto open letters and participated in protests.

Within the broader Washington foreign policy community, there also is more space for critiques of Israel than in the past. Twenty-five years ago, there were few Arab — let alone Palestinian — voices involved in foreign policy discussions in elite mainstream Washington institutions and substantial public criticism of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians was rare. Things have changed. Today, it is acceptable to express at least moderate criticism of Israel in the conference rooms, websites, and podcasts of foreign policy institutions.

What Changed?

Changes in media, generational differences, and partisan polarization have combined to significantly reshape how younger Americans and Democrats view the U.S. relationship with Israel. A new information landscape has allowed Palestinian voices to reach a wider audience. For decades, a relatively small number of television channels and newspapers dominated global news coverage, and Palestinians — and those who shared their concerns — often felt that their voices were seen as less credible or shut out altogether. Internet availability and the diffusion of media in the last few years have started to change that. Today, Americans can easily access Palestinian perspectives directly through social media and a much more diverse range of media outlets, including Al Jazeera English, +972 Magazine, Medium, and more. As those voices have increasingly filtered through, some of the more traditional news outlets have started to take a more balanced approach.

The widespread availability of smartphone cameras, combined with social media, has also played an important role. Previously, Palestinians often struggled to prove their experiences. In 2007, for example, the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem started giving video cameras to Palestinians in the West Bank, so they could record attacks by Israeli settlers. Today, many Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza can record videos and images on their phones and place them on social media, allowing them far more ability to provide their own perspectives and evidence.

Concurrent with increased access to Palestinian perspectives, the lenses that some Americans apply to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict shifted. Different lenses on current versus historical realities play a role. Baby Boomers came of age at the same time as the state of Israel, and their generation remembers Israel as a young country of Holocaust survivors trying to establish a state amidst wars with Arab countries. For example, Schumer recently talked about growing up in New York City knowing Holocaust survivors, listening to radio reports about the 1967 war, and fearing Israel’s destruction. But many Millennial and Generation Z Americans view modern Israel as a powerful, well-established state with a world-class military that is capable of defending itself.

Another factor is that younger Americans, especially on the political left, are more likely to apply a social justice lens to the world, particularly after the Black Lives Matter movement further enhanced young Americans’ focus on principles of social justice. Taking a social justice approach to U.S. foreign policy, they are much more likely to see Israel as the actor with the most power and to see Palestinians as the oppressed group. The highly disproportionate death tolls in recent Israel-Hamas wars — certainly including the current one — reinforce this perspective.

Declining Christian identity is another factor. White evangelical Christian communities have been very influential in promoting pro-Israel policies. However, their percentage of the population is in decline; for example, a PRRI poll found that only 13.6 percent of the population identified as white evangelical Christians in 2022 compared to 23 percent in 2006.

Partisan differences embody another fundamental change that now threatens the bipartisan consensus in favor of Israel. Today, Republican voters are much more likely than Democratic voters to fully support Israel. In 2001, 51 percent of Democrats said they sympathized more with Israelis, while only 16 percent said they sympathized more with Palestinians, according to Gallup. In March 2023, for the first time, Gallup found that more Democrats sympathized with Palestinians (49 percent) than with Israelis (38 percent). Meanwhile, the percentage of Republicans who sympathize with Israelis has grown, from 59 percent in 2001 to 78 percent in 2023.

Several factors have made these views increasingly partisan. Israel’s own politics have shifted strongly to the right over the last 20 years, making it more difficult for American liberals to perceive shared values. During Barack Obama’s presidency, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — who has a long history of close relations with Republicans but also had cultivated relationships with Democrats — openly embraced Republicans in ways that alienated many Democrats. This culminated with a 2015 speech to Congress in which Netanyahu disparaged Obama’s policy toward Iran. Trump poured fuel on the partisan flames, taking unabashedly pro-Israel policy moves. Today, for many Americans, especially younger ones, unquestioning support for Israel has become coded as “Republican.”

Consequences for Biden’s Policy

The bipartisan consensus in favor of unconditional support for Israel is seriously weakened within the electorate. However, it is less clear whether that consensus is fading among policymakers and what the impacts will be for the future of U.S. policy.

Erosion in Democratic voters’ support for Israel, combined with the intensity of Israel’s military campaign against Gaza, has put a new level of pressure on the Biden administration to use U.S. influence to demand that Israel does more to protect civilians. Biden has faced calls for a ceasefire and to consider putting conditions on U.S. military support.

So far, the administration has somewhat shifted its rhetoric. For example, after defending Israel for months, in February, Biden referred to Israel’s response in Gaza as “over the top.” He has become more openly critical of Netanyahu, including saying that, “He has a right to defend Israel, a right to continue to pursue Hamas, but he must … pay more attention to the innocent lives being lost as a consequence of the actions taken…” That shift reflects domestic political pressures as well as growing frustration among U.S. officials with Netanyahu’s government.

However, the administration has only made surface-level policy changes. It imposed sanctions on a few Israeli settlers. In February, Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced the United States would return to the decades-long official position opposing settlement expansion, which was overturned under Trump. The United States began airdrops of aid into Gaza in early March, and Biden announced plans for the U.S. military to build a “temporary pier” on Gaza’s coast to facilitate aid deliveries. The administration has continued to call for a temporary ceasefire that would include the release of Israeli hostages held in Gaza. On March 25, the United States abstained on — rather than vetoing — a U.N. Security Council resolution calling for a ceasefire. Tensions increased after an Israeli strike killed several humanitarian workers on April 1, including an American. During a call with Netanyahu on April 4, Biden reportedly said that the U.S. approach toward Gaza depends on Israel doing more for civilians. In response, Israel said it would open the Erez crossing to allow more aid deliveries.

The core components of U.S. policy toward Israel — the ones that really matter on the ground — have not changed. Biden largely continues to support Israel at the United Nations and quickly suspended aid to the U.N. Relief and Works Agency based on Israeli allegations against some agency employees. The United States continues to supply substantial aidand weapons to Israel. Moreover, Biden is unwilling to threaten cutting this aid as a form of leverage. Rather than using such leverage to back up demands that Israel allow more aid into Gaza via ground crossings, Biden plans to spend more U.S. resources to pursue a less-effective maritime delivery mechanism. Biden continues to call for a two-state solution, but Netanyahu and several senior Israeli politicians appear unconcerned about the consequences of openly rejecting the idea. In an interview, Biden said that an Israeli military push into Rafah would be a “red line” but then added that “I’m never going to leave Israel. … So, there’s no red line [in which] I’m gonna cut off all weapons…”

Electoral Pressure

Among some Democrats, there is growing concern that anger over Biden’s determined support for Israel will cost him crucial votes in the presidential election. His support among Arab Americans and Muslim Americans has plummeted. They comprise a very small portion of the electorate, but their votes could be consequential in Michigan, which is a crucial state for Biden to win. Also, many other social justice activists, including some within the African American community, have come to see the Palestinians as oppressed, expanding the issue’s potential resonance beyond the Arab or Muslim American communities.

Beyond voters who are focused on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Biden’s support for Gaza further weakens him in other areas where he might struggle to turn out voters. The generational gap among Democrats on this issue reinforces the perception that Biden is old and holds outdated ideas. The president’s position on Israel adds to the sense among many progressives that he is not taking their concerns on issues such as immigration, climate change, and foreign policy seriously.

However, faced with a likely contest between Biden and Trump, voters who care about Palestinian concerns will have a choice between a pro-Israel president and a more pro-Israel candidate. Biden’s campaign hopes that the reality of that choice will lead its critics to choose Biden, but it might dampen Democratic turnout, especially among younger voters. Older voters usually have higher turnout rates than younger voters, but younger voters helped Biden win against Trump in 2020 and are important in 2024. Anger over the war in Gaza is unlikely to cost Biden the election on its own. However, the election is likely to be close, and if this issue combines with one or two others to lower votes for Biden, it could be consequential.

Long-Term Policy Impacts

As long as the older generation of Democratic policymakers remains in power, U.S. policy is likely to continue favoring Israel, perhaps with a few modest changes. As younger Democrats rise to influential positions in the White House, Congress, and the bureaucracy, foreign policy will likely change to reflect their views. That does not mean that the United States would become anti-Israel or pro-Palestinian. Rather, future Democratic leaders will be more likely to place conditions on aid to Israel or reduce the amount of funding, less staunchly defend Israel in the United Nations, and be more willing to criticize the Israeli government publicly.

Some Democratic politicians have suggested that Netanyahu is the problem. Schumer — a long-time supporter of Israel — recently called for new elections in Israel. If Netanyahu was no longer in power, it might blunt some of the criticism within the Democratic Party. However, the Israeli government currently includes many further right figures, and centrist politician Benny Gantz may not share U.S. goals such as a two-state solution. It is unlikely that changes in Israeli leadership would tamp down growing Democratic willingness to criticize Israel for long.

Much may also depend on developments in the region. If Israel maintains a hard-right government and the civilian death toll in the current conflict continue to rise, it will reinforce these trends. If Palestinian militants embrace a new wave of international terrorism, as some did in the years after the 1967 war, it could swing public opinion back in Israel’s favor.

Moving away from decades of bipartisan unconditional support for Israel will take time and will likely occur in fits and starts. It will only happen if Democrats control or strongly influence foreign policy. Nonetheless, Israel should no longer assume that it automatically has the full backing of the United States.

Become a Member

Kerry Boyd Anderson writes a weekly column for Arab News and is the production editor for the Texas National Security Review. She also provides political risk analysis through Kerry Boyd Anderson Consulting LLC. Previous positions include deputy director for advisory with Oxford Analytica, managing editor of Arms Control Today, and junior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She received an M.Sc. in international relations from the London School of Economics and Political Science and a B.A. in global studies from the University of Iowa. All opinions stated here are her own.

Commentary

warontherocks.com · by Kerry Anderson · April 8, 2024

22. Iran's Order of Chaos

Conclusion:

In a sense, Iran now has the default advantage over the United States because it does not actually have to achieve anything material in the near term. Chaos itself will constitute a victory. By contrast, the bar for U.S. success is high. Like it or not, however, the United States remains an indispensable player in the region despite its dubious record over the past several decades. Standing by its allies—and safeguarding access to oil that remains vital to the world economy—with a delicate balance of support and restraint requires commitment. Several U.S. presidents hoped to downsize America’s role in the Middle East on the cheap—in Biden’s case, to focus on China’s challenge and Russia’s growing threat. But Hamas and Iran have drawn the United States back in.

Iran's Order of Chaos

How the Islamic Republic Is Remaking the Middle East

By Suzanne Maloney

May/June 2024

Published on April 8, 2024

Foreign Affairs · by Suzanne Maloney · April 8, 2024

The Israel-Hamas war—and the possibility that it may explode into a wider conflagration—has upended the determined efforts of three U.S. presidents to pivot American resources and focus away from the Middle East. Immediately after Hamas’s October 7 attack, U.S. President Joe Biden moved quickly to support Israel, a critical American ally, and deter the expansion of hostilities. But as of this writing, the conflict has become a hellish impasse. The security imperatives driving the war command wide support among the Israeli public, yet months of intense Israeli operations have failed to eliminate Hamas, killed tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians, and precipitated a humanitarian catastrophe in the Gaza Strip. And as the crisis expands, so, too, have the United States’ engagements in the Middle East. In the months after October 7, Washington delivered aid shipments to besieged Gazans, launched military operations to protect maritime transit, worked to contain the Lebanese Shiite militia Hezbollah, strove to degrade the capabilities of other disruptive militias from Iraq to Yemen, and pursued ambitious diplomatic initiatives to foster the normalization of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia.

Reengaging with the Middle East presents risks for Biden, especially as he campaigns for reelection against his predecessor, Donald Trump, whose critiques of the human and economic costs of America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan resonated with voters and boosted his 2016 presidential campaign. In a Quinnipiac poll conducted three weeks after Hamas’s attack, an overwhelming 84 percent of Americans expressed concern that the United States could be drawn into direct military involvement in the Middle East conflict, and only one in five respondents to a February 2024 Pew survey agreed that the United States should make a “major” diplomatic push to end the Israel-Hamas war. But the risks posed by timidity are even greater. One regional actor particularly benefits from Washington’s hesitation or disengagement: the Islamic Republic of Iran. In fact, the quagmire in the Middle East presents an opportunity for a breakthrough in a four-decade strategy by Tehran to debilitate one of its foremost regional adversaries, Israel—and to humiliate the United States and drastically diminish its influence in the region.

Iran’s Islamic regime aimed to inspire copycat religious uprisings after its own 1979 revolution, and to many observers, it may appear to have failed. Indeed, the conventional wisdom in Washington and elsewhere has often held that Iran has become contained, even isolated. But this was never true. Instead, Tehran developed a calculated strategy to empower proxy militias and to influence operations in its neighborhood while maintaining plausible deniability—a scheme whose canniness was vindicated by the devastating scope of Hamas’s assault and subsequent attacks by Iranian-affiliated militias in Iraq, Lebanon, and Yemen.

The post–October 7 strategic landscape in the Middle East is one that was largely created by Iran and that plays to its strengths. Tehran sees opportunity in chaos. Iranian leaders are exploiting and escalating the war in Gaza to elevate their regime’s stature, weaken and delegitimize Israel, undermine U.S. interests, and further shape the regional order in their favor. The truth is that the Islamic Republic is now in a better position than ever to dominate the Middle East, including by attaining the ability to disrupt shipping at multiple critical chokepoints.

Left unchecked, the dramatic expansion of Iran’s influence would have a catastrophic impact on Israel, the wider region, and the global economy. To disrupt this amplification of Iranian power, Biden urgently needs to articulate and then implement a clear strategy to protect Palestinian civilians from bearing the brunt of Israel’s military operations, counter Iran’s corrosive war-by-proxy strategy, and blunt the capabilities of Tehran’s accomplices. Achieving these goals will require a tricky set of moves by Washington, and Americans are weary of the military, economic, and human toll of their country’s commitments in the Middle East. But no world power other than the United States has the military and diplomatic capacity to frustrate Iran’s most destructive ambitions by managing the spiraling conflict between Israel and Hamas and containing its most devastating long-term consequences.

CHAOS THEORY

Since Hamas’s 2007 takeover of Gaza, Iran has served as the group’s primary patron. Tehran proffered money, materiel, and other support that made the October 7 attack possible, including military technologies, intelligence, and as much as $300 million per year in financial assistance. It provided drones and rockets as well as infrastructure and training to help Hamas build its own weapons—weapons Hamas used to continue striking Israel for several months after the initial attack.

After October 7, Iranian-backed militias also quickly ramped up hostile activities targeting Israeli and U.S. forces in the region. These assaults have caused well over a hundred casualties among U.S. service members. The Houthis, the Iranian-backed armed group ruling much of Yemen’s population—have attacked ships sailing in the Red Sea, causing transit through the Suez Canal to fall by 50 percent in the first two months of 2024. According to Congressional testimony in March by General Michael Kurilla, head of U.S. Central Command, the escalation in strikes by Iran’s allies and subsequent U.S. military responses have emboldened terrorist organizations not aligned with Tehran, prompting an uptick in attacks by groups such as the Islamic State, also known as ISIS.

Iran also made explicit moves to raise its diplomatic profile in the wake of October 7. Days after Hamas’s attack, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi spoke directly by phone for the first time with the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, and in November, he participated in a regional summit in Riyadh. Other Iranian officials, such as Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, have ricocheted around the region and beyond, seeking to position their country as a trusted mediator even as the regime maintains its support for Hamas.

None of these developments are merely the result of Iran’s glimpsing new openings in turmoil and making opportunistic, impulsive moves. They are the product of a time-tested playbook. From the inception of the Islamic Republic, Iran’s leadership has harbored expansive ambitions. Since 1979, the country has viewed chaos and volatility, whether at home or nearby, as an opportunity to advance its interests and influence. Even Iraq’s 1980 invasion of Iran worked to the fledgling theocracy’s advantage by rallying internal support for the new order in Tehran, providing the occasion to build a strong domestic defense industry, and enabling the regime to survive its infancy.

Tehran has used successive conflagrations in its neighborhood to strengthen its position. Historically, some of the most valuable openings have come as a result of missteps by Washington and its partners in the region, such as the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. That conflict, which brought 150,000 U.S. troops to Iran’s doorstep, quickly broke in Tehran’s favor. Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, the Iranian leadership’s most existential threat, was deposed, and his regime was replaced by a weak state led by disaffected Shiites with existing ties to Tehran. Iran made the most of other moments of regional chaos in the years that followed. Beginning in 2013, the country’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) worked with its primary surrogate, Hezbollah, to mobilize brigades of Afghan and Pakistani Shiites into a larger transnational Shiite militia to defend Bashar al-Assad’s embattled regime in Syria. Tehran eventually built an effective partnership with Russia during the Syrian civil war, which expanded into a broader strategic cooperation after Russian President Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine.

A key component of Iran’s strategy in its neighborhood has been the cultivation of an “axis of resistance,” a loose network of regional militias with discrete organizational structures, overlapping interests, and ties to Iran’s security and religious establishments. The Islamic Republic’s founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, maintained that exporting the revolution was necessary for its survival, arguing that if the theocracy remained “in an enclosed environment” it would “definitely face defeat.” Determined to spark a wider wave of Islamist-led upheavals against secular monarchies and republics in the Middle East, Khomeini and his acolytes developed an infrastructure dedicated to toppling the status quo across the Muslim world. During the Islamic Republic’s initial two decades in power, its leaders worked with proxy groups in the Persian Gulf and elsewhere to help incite a 1981 coup attempt in Bahrain, the 1983 bombings of the U.S. Embassy and other American interests in Kuwait, a 1985 assassination attempt against Kuwait’s emir, incendiary anti-Saudi and anti-American rallies during the annual Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca, the 1996 bombing of a U.S. military barracks in Saudi Arabia, and other subversive actions against its neighbors.

Since 1979, Iran has viewed chaos as an opportunity.

The revolutionary wave Khomeini hoped for never materialized. Although Iranian leaders’ expectations for a wide-scale revolt against the existing regional order were disappointed, they would find their aspirations validated by the emergence of sympathetic militant groups that sought the revolutionary state’s patronage. And the Islamic Republic’s early investments yielded a valuable asset that has served as a model for its later efforts: Hezbollah. After Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, Iran’s fledgling IRGC began training and coordinating Hezbollah, an incipient Shiite armed group. Iran’s assistance immediately made Hezbollah more potent: the group mounted a series of devastating suicide bombings of French and U.S. government facilities in 1983 and 1984 in Lebanon, as well as kidnappings, hijackings, and violence further afield, such as the bombing of a Jewish community center in Argentina in 1994 and the suicide bombing of a bus in Bulgaria that killed five Israeli tourists in 2012.

Through its political wing, Hezbollah insinuated itself deep into the Lebanese government, installing members in the parliament and the cabinet. This political role did not temper the group’s reliance on violence: several Hezbollah members were convicted in the 2005 assassination of the former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri. Despite Israeli and U.S. efforts to eliminate the militia, it maintains tens of thousands of active fighters, and with Tehran’s help, has amassed an arsenal of some 150,000 mostly short- and medium-range rockets and missiles, as well as drones and antitank, antiaircraft, and antiship artillery. Tehran continues to provide Hezbollah with $700 million to $1 billion per year in support, and the group remains the paramount social, political, and military actor in Lebanon.

Hezbollah has proved extraordinarily useful to Iran. Its head, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, is one of the few regional power players who openly pay homage to Iran’s supreme leader as their organizations’ spiritual guide, although Hezbollah no longer espouses its early objective of establishing an Islamic state in Lebanon. Hezbollah’s role in driving Israel’s withdrawal from southern Lebanon, completed in 2000, earned the group brief regional acclaim and enduring domestic legitimacy, and its global reach continues to amplify Tehran’s leverage. Since the early 1990s, it has played a vital role in funneling funds, training, and arms from Iran to a variety of other groups, including but hardly limited to Hamas.

THE LONG GAME

With its cultivation of Hezbollah as a template, Iran then invested an enormous amount of effort and resources in cultivating militant groups across the Middle East. The support it has given to Palestinian militant groups, especially Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hamas, paid tremendous dividends over subsequent decades, as did its aid to Shiite opponents of Saddam in Iraq. These relationships provided the springboard for Iranian influence at key turning points for regional stability. In the 1990s, PIJ terrorist attacks disrupted the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and nudged Israeli politics rightward. After the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, Tehran’s patronage of the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council and the Dawa Party, both significant Shiite factions, positioned Iran as the most influential player in Iraq’s contentious postwar polity.

The Syrian civil war elevated Hezbollah’s status to the jewel in the crown of the Iranian proxy network. Working closely with the IRGC, Hezbollah trained and coordinated the wider network of Iranian-backed Shiite militias that flooded into Syria from Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, and Yemen. Iran has proved remarkably flexible and pragmatic in developing this network, enabling it to align itself with partners and surrogates on multiple continents. Sometimes, Tehran uses umbrella groups and joint operation rooms to coordinate diverse factions, and at other times intentionally fragments existing groups to maintain its influence over them. Iran’s money and materiel have long been a central dimension of its relationships with individual militias. Increasingly, however, Tehran not only transfers finished weaponry but also the means for its proxy groups to manufacture and modify weapons independently.

Iran’s national security establishment sees investing in asymmetric warfare as an economical means of gaining leverage against more powerful adversaries, especially the United States. Iran’s influence over militias has been boosted by the elimination of most of its radical competitors in the Middle East. After deep-pocketed dictators such as Saddam and Libya’s Muammar al-Qaddafi were removed from power, the Islamic Republic became one of the few regional players possessing the interest and the resources to back armed militias.

In many respects, the relationship between Iran and its proxies reflects shared preferences for autonomy and self-interest. The evolutionary nature of Iranian investments in its clients has worked to its advantage, enabling the security establishment to sustain partnerships of enduring value that can withstand disruptions. For example, even as Hamas distanced itself from Iran for several years after the eruption of the Syrian civil war, Iran continued to provide the group with residual funding, and in time the relationship rebounded.

ARC OF TRIUMPH

In the aftermath of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Tehran sought to more fully establish itself as a power broker in a region in turmoil. Israel waged a determined campaign to blunt Iranian influence by “mowing the lawn,” or routinely striking Iranian positions in Syria to disrupt the Islamic Republic’s attempt to develop a land bridge to supply Hezbollah and its wider network of surrogates. This campaign scored a number of tactical successes, yet it does not seem to have had a meaningful deterrent impact on Iran and its proxies.

The United States, meanwhile, was seeking to deepen its relationship with alternative power centers and foster new alignments to counter Tehran. From President Bill Clinton’s “dual containment” (which sought to isolate both Iran and Iraq while advancing Arab-Israeli peacemaking) to President George W. Bush’s “forward strategy for freedom” (which focused on advancing democratization in the Middle East and beyond), Washington has repeatedly invested in schemes intended to excise Iranian-backed violent extremism from the Middle East, to little effect. In a November 2023 speech, Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, reflected on these efforts, sneering that Washington had “failed completely in trying to create a ‘New Middle East.’” He went on: “Yes, the region’s geopolitical map is undergoing a fundamental transformation, but not to the benefit of the United States. It is to the benefit of the resistance front. Yes, West Asia’s geopolitical map has changed—but it has changed in favor of the resistance.”

Since October 7, Iran’s leaders have exulted in Israelis’ terror and grief and exploited the immense suffering of Palestinian civilians in Gaza to further elevate their status as power brokers. The war has provided an opening for the Islamic Republic to resume a formal role in pan-Muslim and cross-regional consultations. As they often do, Iranian leaders have coupled active diplomacy with a show of force intended to test America’s resolve.

Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir Abdollahian and Palestinian Islamic Jihad Secretary-General Ziyad al-Nakhalah, Tehran, March 2024

Majid Asgaripour / West Asia News Agency / Reuters

Attacks by Iran’s surrogate militias pose a devilishly complex challenge for Washington and the world. From October 2023 through mid-February 2024, attacks by Iranian-backed proxies resulted in at least 186 casualties among U.S. troops serving in the Middle East. These included 130 traumatic brain injuries, the loss of three army reservists in Jordan, and the deaths of two navy SEALs on a mission to interdict illicit Iranian weapons off the coast of Somalia.

Before October 7, the Biden administration had invested considerable time, energy, and political capital in a plan to help normalize relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia. Such a deal would have represented a huge breakthrough for both governments and the wider region by opening up new economic opportunities and, over time, helping marginalize the influence of malign actors, including Tehran and its proxies. Biden’s effort to achieve an Israeli-Saudi normalization deal was the most recent component of a long American campaign to strengthen cooperation between self-described moderate regional actors. The normalization talks built on the success of the 2020 Abraham Accords, which paved the way for the establishment of diplomatic relations between Israel and Bahrain, Morocco, Sudan, and the United Arab Emirates and opened unprecedented opportunities for bilateral trade, military cooperation, and people-to-people engagement. The opening with Riyadh would have boosted this trend, putting Iran on the back foot even as it strove to secure its own rapprochement with Riyadh.

The case for establishing full diplomatic ties between Israel and Saudi Arabia remains compelling. But the Israel-Hamas war added staggering complexities to what was already going to be a historically ambitious undertaking. For many Israelis in and outside of government, Hamas’s horrific attack only reinforced the conviction that Palestinian sovereignty presents an unacceptable security threat. Israel’s subsequent operations in Gaza, however, triggered new Saudi demands for a meaningful effort to redress Palestinian suffering. And the U.S. contribution to the proposed rapprochement—security commitments to Saudi Arabia and investments in the kingdom’s civil nuclear infrastructure—requires buy-in from American lawmakers that has become harder to secure amid concerns that an escalation of the Israel-Hamas war could draw U.S. forces directly into another Middle East conflict.

The combination of rhetoric, diplomacy, and terrorism that Iran has deftly employed since October 7 advances some of its most long-standing ideological and strategic priorities. Like Hamas, Iran’s leadership clamors for Israel’s destruction and for the triumph of the Islamic world over what it sees as a West in decline. Its views are not opportunistic or transient; anti-Americanism and antipathy toward Israel are ingrained in the Islamic Republic’s bedrock. But the monumental scale of destruction in Gaza has breathed new life into Tehran’s anti-Western and anti-Israeli invective. This rhetoric now holds fresh appeal for regional audiences who were otherwise unsympathetic toward a Shiite theocracy and gives Iran a convenient opportunity to shame its Sunni Arab rivals. Tehran sees regional assertiveness as a chance to align itself yet more closely with Russia and China, too. Those countries’ interests are, for the most part, served by keeping Washington mired in a crisis in the Middle East that damages its reputation and bleeds its military capacity. Notably, China, Iran, and Russia launched a small joint naval drill, the fourth of its kind in the past five years, in the Gulf of Oman in early March.

FIGHT RISK

From Tehran’s perspective, the Israel-Hamas war is only accelerating a shift in the power balance away from U.S. hegemony and toward a new regional order that benefits the Islamic Republic. Ten days after Hamas’s attack on Israel, Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, the speaker of the Iranian parliament, warned that a ground invasion of Gaza could “open the gates of hell”—that is, trigger an overwhelming response directed not just at Israel but also at American interests and assets in the region. Still, for Iran’s pugnacious revolutionaries, regime survival trumps every other priority, so their approach from October to March was guided by careful targeting. After the Biden administration dispatched two aircraft carrier strike groups to the eastern Mediterranean in October, Iran and its allies took pains to avoid a precipitous escalation. Hezbollah deftly calibrated its attacks on Israel’s north, seemingly to avoid drawing Israel into a hotter fight that could erode Hezbollah’s ability to deter an Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear program.

Biden’s rapid deployment of U.S. military assets to the region, together with his diplomatic overtures in Lebanon and other key regional actors, helped avert the wider war that Hamas may have hoped to precipitate. A series of U.S. strikes on Iranian-backed militias in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen degraded those groups’ capabilities and signaled to Tehran’s partners that they will pay a price for continued aggression against Americans. Yet the risk of American miscalculations and overconfidence will creep up over time. Iran’s militias have a long record of tenacity and adaptability, and the weapons at their disposal are relatively plentiful and inexpensive, especially compared with the costs of the American strikes to eliminate them.

Over the decades, Iran and its proxies have developed keen instincts for calibrating risk. Now, having gauged the waning American interest in the Middle East, Iranian leaders see an advantage to be gained by gambling. With their attacks, they seek to provoke the United States to make mistakes that give Tehran and its allies an advantage—mistakes similar to the ones Washington made two decades ago, when it invaded Iraq, or in 2018, when Trump withdrew from President Barack Obama’s Iran nuclear deal. A miscalculation by any of the actors involved, including Iran itself, could ignite a much wider and more intense conflict across the Middle East, causing profound damage to regional stability and the global economy.

Iran is now in a better position than ever to dominate the Middle East.

To counter Iran’s ambitions, the Biden administration must work with Israel and regional allies to further erode Hamas’s ability to launch another shock attack against Israeli civilians while ensuring that humanitarian assistance reaches desperate Palestinian civilians and outlining a path to a postwar future that ensures peace and stability for both Israelis and Palestinians. As of late March 2024, Washington was continuing to press for an agreement that would require Hezbollah to pull its elite forces back from Lebanon’s border with Israel, facilitating the return of thousands of Israeli civilians whose homes have come under bombardment by Hezbollah rockets since October 7. Achieving such an agreement is critical to prevent a wider conflict, and Washington must press hard for it, leveraging the obvious interests of all parties involved to forestall escalation. In 2022, the United States had success in negotiating a maritime border deal between Israel and Lebanon to permit gas exploration, which suggests there are other opportunities for pragmatic compromise.

The Biden administration has already begun to take a more forceful role in addressing the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Tragically, these efforts may prove to be too little and too late to forestall famine. A famine in Gaza would constitute both a strategic and a moral failure for the United States as well as for Israel, and Biden must not repeat the errors that have allowed the specter of such a cataclysm to grip the region. Any truly successful effort to put a stop to the threat from Hamas—which, in turn, would curb Iran’s ability to inflict violence on Israel—will require mitigating the devastating fallout for Palestinian civilians.

Working with nongovernmental organizations and partner governments, the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development must rush assistance to Palestinian civilian authorities independent of Hamas and other Iranian-backed militias—including aid to ensure they have the resources to undertake a reconstruction effort in Gaza when the armed conflict stops. After the 2006 war between Israel and Lebanon, Iran’s rapid delivery of aid enabled Hezbollah to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat and outmaneuver the Lebanese government by providing instantaneous compensation and rebuilding programs. The United States must not allow Tehran or its proxies a similar opening after the war in Gaza ends.

Compounding the challenge for Washington is the reality that Iran has accelerated the development of its nuclear program since Trump’s 2018 withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal. It is vital for American officials to cultivate a sense of realism. The grand strategic play to align Saudi Arabia and Israel may yet come to pass. Normalizing Israeli-Saudi relations is an appealing way to undergird peace and stability in the region and to counter Iran’s malign influence in the long term, but accomplishing it requires complicated political scaffolding that has yet to be fully designed, much less erected. Achieving that normalization requires more effective short- and medium-term game plans to provide governance and security in Gaza, open the way for leadership transitions in both the Palestinian territories and in Israel, and contain the pressures that a variety of actors, especially Iran, are exerting to expand conflict in the Middle East. These must be Washington’s priorities over the next year.

In a sense, Iran now has the default advantage over the United States because it does not actually have to achieve anything material in the near term. Chaos itself will constitute a victory. By contrast, the bar for U.S. success is high. Like it or not, however, the United States remains an indispensable player in the region despite its dubious record over the past several decades. Standing by its allies—and safeguarding access to oil that remains vital to the world economy—with a delicate balance of support and restraint requires commitment. Several U.S. presidents hoped to downsize America’s role in the Middle East on the cheap—in Biden’s case, to focus on China’s challenge and Russia’s growing threat. But Hamas and Iran have drawn the United States back in.

SUZANNE MALONEY is Vice President of the Brookings Institution and Director of its Foreign Policy program.

Foreign Affairs · by Suzanne Maloney · April 8, 2024

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

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

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

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