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Quotes of the Day:
“Finally, I hope this book shows that we human beings—despite our most noble of ideas and aspirations—are still capable of the most appalling miscalculations. And of the most terrible of atrocities against those who do not look or think like us.”
- White Sun War: The Campaign for Taiwan (Casemate Fiction) by Mick Ryan
"You cannot carry out fundamental change without a certain amount of madness, In this case, it comes from the nonconformity, the courage to turn your back on the old formulas, the courage to invent the future."
- Thomas Sankara
"The key is to keep company only with people who uplift you, whose presence calls forth your best."
- Epictetus
1. 'Gotta be there early': American special ops lessons from Ukraine
2. Sabotage in Russia will increase amid counteroffensive: Ukraine adviser
3. Joint Philippines-US patrols in South China Sea may begin by third quarter: Envoy
4. Ukraine War: US Removes 'Sensitive Tech' From M1 Abrams Tanks Fearing Russia Could Seize One Of Its MBTs
5. Tomorrow’s Hyper-Enabled Special Operator Will Be Less Iron Man, More 007
6. China v America: how Xi Jinping plans to narrow the military gap
7. US busts Russian cyber operation in dozens of countries
8. U.S. Provides Ukraine $1.2 Billion for Air Defense, Artillery
9. Biden Administration Announces Additional Security Assistance for Ukraine
10. Retired NATO commander says the West is afraid of a Ukrainian victory
11. Special ops turn to data, space tech to gain ‘decisive advantage’
12. Disappearing Act: Integrated Training with Air and Ground Forces
13. An Interview With the Prime Minister of Mongolia
14. Can the Russian Opposition Foment Regime Change?
15. SOCOM wants new industry pitches to connect autonomous tech
16. This SOCOM program has cut proposal to prototype timelines by half
17. Battles shake Sudan's capital as power struggle escalates
18. China hones its Global South diplomacy
19. Opinion | Ukraine’s offensive is coming. Keep your expectations in check.
20. Beyond Ukraine’s Offensive
21. How to Spot an Autocrat’s Economic Lies
22. The New Washington Consensus
23. McConnell predicts US aid will flow to Ukraine ‘for a good deal longer’
24. Who was General Mark Milley before he was 'The Chairman'?
1. 'Gotta be there early': American special ops lessons from Ukraine
A Principle of Special Warfare: "Go early, go small, go local, go long” LTG(R) Charles T. Cleveland remarks at NDU November 30, 2015
We really have to understand the "SOF way:" unconventional, irregular, asymmetric, asynchronous, and executed alongside and in support of the US interagency team and through and with allies and partners.
And the excerpt below is how mature special operators think - they know they can learn from their counterparts - and then they can share those lessons with counterparts in other potential conflict areas.
Excerpt:
Fenton half-joked that some of the time the US is working with partner nations, the Americans learn more than they teach. And while he suggested some specific, tactical lessons wouldn’t necessarily translate to a different conflict, namely a fight in the Pacific, he said US special operations forces were already “employing now” some of what Ukrainian forces have taught them.
I like to think about the "SOF way" in terms of the two SOF trinities:
First is "irregular warfare, unconventional warfare, and support to political warfare"
And the second is the comparative advantage of SOF: "influence, governance, and support to indigenous forces and populations."
https://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/two-special-operations-trinities
'Gotta be there early': American special ops lessons from Ukraine - Breaking Defense
Building special forces relationships with other countries requires being on the ground and meeting the partner where they are, SOCOM chief Gen. Bryan Fenton said.
breakingdefense.com · by Lee Ferran · May 9, 2023
Incoming U.S. Special Operations Command Commander (USSOCOM) Army Gen. Bryan Fenton speaks during a USSOCOM Change of Command ceremony at the Tampa Bay Convention Center in Tampa, Fla., Aug. 30, 2022. (DoD photo by U.S. Navy Petty Officer 2nd Class Alexander Kubitza)
SOF WEEK 2023 — The head of US special operations says he doesn’t necessarily see a “direct linkage” between some of the lessons learned in Ukraine and those useful in a potential conflict with China, but Kyiv’s defense of its country has emphasized another, more general rule: When it comes to international partner forces, “be there early.”
USSOCOM chief Gen. Bryan Fenton was referring to the American special operations relationship with the Ukrainian military, dating back to shortly after the end of the Cold War. In the mid-1990s, he said, someone from the special operations community was there ” to shake the hand of this new nation, Ukraine, and talk to their military and say, ‘We want to be a partner.'”
“You gotta be there,” Fenton told the audience at SOF Week 2023 here in Tampa, Fla. “You gotta be there early.”
The second lesson, he told the audience, was to be “persistent” in developing capabilities that meet Ukraine’s needs as the country moved along its “own journey.” It’s at that point the third lesson comes in: improve that capability by teaching relevant lessons from America’s own experience from combat in Iraq and Afghanistan. (Previously, observers have noted that the structure of Ukrainian forces, mirroring those of US forces, allow greater flexibility and effectiveness on the ground — lessons Moscow never appeared to learn.)
After all that, the last lesson is perhaps the most obvious: listen, and learn from the partner’s experience.
Fenton half-joked that some of the time the US is working with partner nations, the Americans learn more than they teach. And while he suggested some specific, tactical lessons wouldn’t necessarily translate to a different conflict, namely a fight in the Pacific, he said US special operations forces were already “employing now” some of what Ukrainian forces have taught them.
Elsewhere in the talk, Fenton said the US was facing an unprecedented collision of threats to the international order, what he called “waves of consequence,” from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, to China’s assertiveness in the Indo-Pacific, to Iran and North Korea’s destabilizing actions “in their respective regions” to the lingering threat from non-state actors like ISIS and al Qaeda.
When it comes to strategic competition, he said that competition is “in action at both ends of the spectrum,” with conventional military threats on one end, to activities in the gray zone — below the threshold of conflict — on the other.
Helping to counter those threats, Fenton said, is the special operations community’s focus on emerging technology — integrating artificial intelligence, natural language processing, “data-driven” capabilities, robotic and autonomous uncrewed systems. Later, in response to a question, Fenton noted the importance of cyberspace and space itself in modern operations — so integral that they form a SOF-cyber-space triad.
Still, the SOCOM chief struck an optimistic tone about the waves of change crashing all around. SOF operators, he said, are big wave surfers.
breakingdefense.com · by Lee Ferran · May 9, 2023
2. Sabotage in Russia will increase amid counteroffensive: Ukraine adviser
For the Glorious Ukrainian Resistance
https://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/glorious-ukrainian-resistance
Sabotage in Russia will increase amid counteroffensive: Ukraine adviser
Newsweek · by David Brennan · May 9, 2023
Kyiv has hinted at an intensification of sabotage inside Russia as Ukrainian troops prepare to launch their long-awaited spring counteroffensive and as Moscow seemingly struggles to stop attacks on vital oil and transport infrastructure.
Anton Gerashchenko, adviser to the Ukrainian Internal Affairs Ministry, told Newsweek that the Kremlin's apparent inability to ensure security on its own soil will help chip away at national support for Moscow's disastrous ongoing war against its western neighbor.
"We can only assume that the partisan activity on Russia's territory regarding the logistical centers—oil infrastructure and transport infrastructure—will increase its intensity," said Gerashchenko.
"Ukraine doesn't confirm the alleged drone strikes on Russian oil infrastructure," he added about recent suspected unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) attacks on major oil sites in occupied Crimea and Russia's southwestern Krasnodar region, which is close to the Black Sea port of Novorossiysk and about 125 miles from Crimea.
More than 20 suspected drone attacks have reportedly occurred inside Russian territory since the start of 2023. In addition, purportedly Russian anti-government groups have claimed responsibility for several bomb attacks on targets including railways close to the Ukrainian border.
A "No Drone Zone" sign sits just off the Kremlin in central Moscow as it prohibits unmanned aerial vehicles flying over the area, on May 3, 2023. More than 20 suspected drone attacks have reportedly occurred inside Russian territory since the start of 2023. NATALIA KOLESNIKOVA/AFP via Getty Images
Last week, two suspected drones detonated above the Kremlin compound, in what Moscow said was a Ukrainian assassination attempt on President Vladimir Putin. Kyiv denied any involvement.
Ukrainian leaders have always refused to confirm or deny responsibility for most sabotage attacks inside Russian territory. Mykhailo Podolyak—an adviser to the head of Ukraine's presidential office—wrote on Twitter on May 5 that the recent spate of incidents is a signal of the "growing governance weakness of the state," hinting at the involvement of "aggressive and paramilitary protest (guerrilla) groups."
Gerashchenko told Newsweek he does not expect such attacks to stop.
"It's difficult for Russians to hide these high-visibility attacks. And they also serve a psychological purpose, showing that unknown partisan groups are successfully functioning on Russia's territory. We see that the Russian population already sees suspicious 'drones' in stars, birds and suitcases."
Russian nerves and disrupted supply lines will be welcomed by Kyiv as it prepares its spring counteroffensive, which will for the first time involve NATO-made heavy-armor platforms like the Challenger 2 and Leopard 2 main battle tanks.
Ukrainian troops have fought a fierce defensive campaign through winter—particularly around the now-infamous town of Bakhmut—hoping to wear down Russian capabilities and set the stage for another successful drive, akin to those that liberated tens of thousands of square miles of territory in 2022.
But Gerashchenko said Kyiv still faces significant challenges.
"Disrupting or complicating supplies and logistics of the enemy is important," he said. "However, we must remember that oil reserves in Russia are vast, and these events might cause disruptions, not block Russian military capacity."
"The most welcome thing for the Ukrainian counteroffensive remains steady, stable and timely weapon supplies for the Ukrainian army from our allies," he added. "A well-armed and trained Ukrainian army is capable of degrading Russian military capacity, as we have proved many times already."
A Ukrainian soldier loads dummy grenades onto a drone for target practice in the region of Dnipro, Ukraine, on April 18, 2023. Kyiv has prepared 10,000 drone pilots for upcoming combat operations. Scott Peterson/Getty Images
The kinds of drones linked to recent sabotage attacks are also playing a significant role at the front. Mykhailo Fedorov—Ukraine's deputy prime minister and minister for innovation and technology—said on May 4 that Kyiv has prepared 10,000 drone pilots for combat operations.
"This is quite significant as drones play a crucial role in modern combat," Gerashchenko said of the news. "Trained and skilled drone operators and an ample number of drones can save many lives on the frontlines and cause significant damage to the enemy."
"Drones are superweapons," he added. "If we calculate the cost of a drone and cost of equipment it can strike—plus the destruction of the enemy's soldiers—drones come out as highly effective. But unfortunately, drones are susceptible to damage and losses and they require constant replenishment of their stock."
Newsweek has contacted the Russian Foreign Ministry by email to request comment.
Newsweek · by David Brennan · May 9, 2023
3. Joint Philippines-US patrols in South China Sea may begin by third quarter: Envoy
Joint Philippines-US patrols in South China Sea may begin by third quarter: Envoy
straitstimes.com · by cue · May 8, 2023
MANILA - Joint patrols between the Philippines and the United States in the South China Sea may begin later this year, a top diplomat said on Monday, just days after Washington clarified its commitment to defend Manila from an attack at sea.
Discussions were continuing on the joint maritime patrols, which were announced in February, said Philippine ambassador to the United States, Mr Jose Manuel Romualdez.
“An estimate would be no later than the third quarter of this year. We should have that in place,” he told CNN Philippines.
US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin announced in February he and his Philippine counterpart, Mr Carlito Galvez, have agreed to restart joint maritime patrols in the South China Sea, which former president Rodrigo Duterte, who sought warmer ties with China, had suspended after he took office in 2016.
But Philippine Defence Secretary Galvez told reporters on Monday, there were no formal discussions on the joint patrols with the United States and Australia.
Ties between the Philippines and the United States are seeing a reinvigoration under Mr Duterte’s successor, Mr Ferdinand Marcos Jr, who last week met President Joe Biden on a four-day visit to Washington.
During the visit, the Pentagon issued guidelines that laid out in clear terms the extent of US defence treaty commitments to the Philippines that refer specifically to attacks in the South China Sea, including on its coast guard.
When asked about the timing of the joint patrols, a spokesman at US Embassy in Manila, Mr Kanishka Gangopadhyay, said on Monday: “Our conversations on combined maritime activities with the Philippines are continuing, and our military planners are working hard on specific issues like logistics”.
Australia may also participate in the combined maritime activities, Mr Romualdez said.
China claims most of the South China Sea, through which more than US$3 trillion (S$3.98 trillion) of world trade is shipped every year. Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei, the Philippines and Taiwan have rival claims. REUTERS
straitstimes.com · by cue · May 8, 2023
4. Ukraine War: US Removes 'Sensitive Tech' From M1 Abrams Tanks Fearing Russia Could Seize One Of Its MBTs
Ukraine War: US Removes 'Sensitive Tech' From M1 Abrams Tanks Fearing Russia Could Seize One Of Its MBTs
eurasiantimes.com · by EurAsian Times Desk · May 8, 2023
US-made Abrams tanks will not be included in Ukraine’s spring offensive as the United States works to strip the system of sensitive technologies that could be exploited by Russia, USA Today reported on Monday.
Abrams tanks are months away from reaching the frontlines of the conflict in Ukraine, excluding them from an expected offensive later this year by Ukrainian forces, the report said, citing US officials and military experts.
The delivery timeline is in part determined by the US’ attempt to remove sensitive technologies from the tanks due to concerns about the systems falling into the hands of Russian forces, the report said.
However, even if the retrofitting process were completed today, Ukrainian forces are still not prepared to take the tanks into combat, US Army Europe and Africa spokesperson Col. Martin O’Donnell reportedly said.
Ukrainian troops will need approximately ten weeks of training on the tanks, which will begin in Germany later this month, the report said. Ukrainians will train on refitted Abrams models similar to those being prepared in the US, the report added.
ABRAMS Tank
Western Technology Could Fall Into Russian Hands
The Abrams tank is equipped with advanced composite armor, which offers a compelling defense against hostile fire. To defend the crew from the possibility of the tank’s ammo exploding if the tank is destroyed, fuel and ammunition are stored in separate compartments.
The Abrams is equipped with an inbuilt computerized fire control computer that allows the gunner to engage targets by simply “pointing and shooting.” The Abrams can attack targets at great distances, day or night, and even in bad weather, thanks to this capability and a powerful sensor package.
These tanks feature 120mm main guns, although they have different armor, sensor, communications, and other equipment setups. There are thousands of M1 tanks in storage with the US Army.
Ukraine believes these tanks would be critical to overpower Russian defenses. The US has pledged to send 31 M1 Abrams tanks to Kyiv.
Earlier, the Russian ambassador to the United States, Anatoly Antonov, had said, “If a decision to transfer M1 Abrams to Kyiv is made, American tanks without any doubt will be destroyed as all other samples of NATO military equipment.”
Experts believe that Russia will try its best to destroy or, ideally, seize a Western-made tank, primarily for propaganda purposes and to gain access to its secrets.
eurasiantimes.com · by EurAsian Times Desk · May 8, 2023
5. Tomorrow’s Hyper-Enabled Special Operator Will Be Less Iron Man, More 007
Tomorrow’s Hyper-Enabled Special Operator Will Be Less Iron Man, More 007
But first, SOCOM must reverse a trend of “falling behind, not just linearly but exponentially.”
defenseone.com · by Patrick Tucker
TAMPA—A couple of years after Navy SEALs raided Osama bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad, Adm. William McRaven announced a bold new vision for special operations. Troops in Iron Man-like exoskeletons would burst through walls, facing down a pelting rain of bullets before dispatching terrorist cells in seconds. That vision never came to be, but ten years later, U.S. Special Operations Command is pursuing a new set of superpowers, topped not by bulletproof suits but by something like omniscience.
There are practical reasons for the shift in focus, not least the difficulties of recreating comic-book physics in real life. But they also reflect SOCOM’s changing expectations about where its operators will be and what roles they will play.
Speaking at Global SOF’s SOF Week conference here, Col. Jarret D. Mathews laid out the command’s effort to create hyper-enabled operators.
“I'm going to try to orient you to the competition space, the gray zone, the integrated deterrent,” said Mathews, who leads SOCOM’s Joint Acquisition Task Force. “A possible mission set will be for internal defense under a [theater special operations command]-driven irregular warfare campaign and with the objective of integrated deterrence with our partners.”
Operators on future missions, especially ones to build partner capacity, will likely lack some crucial tools of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, such as missile-armed drones overhead.
“Everyone's talking about UAVs and theater-based assets,” said Mathews, but: “The soft teams that are in these 80 countries” where special operations are deployed quietly, “they don't have the benefit of those tools. So picture [Special Operations Forces] in any country without, you know, unblinking UAV assets and we're still there to, you know, to help our partners achieve their objectives.”
Mathews went on to present a video where an operator used augmented-reality glasses to look around their environment and immediately translate all written language, collect data from nearby sensors on the location of adversaries, and rapidly change or hide electronic signatures. Matthews described it as the ability “a little bit to see around corners.”
Artificial intelligence will play a big role in that. SOCOM’s Automate the Analyst effort aims to produce a kind of always-on advisor in an operator’s ear or sightline.
Of course, the general public now has access to something a little similar. ChatGPT and similar generative AI and large language models can answer virtually any question, if often incorrectly. But those require access to key public datasets and enormous cloud capabilities, things SOCOM operators can’t count on having.
That’s why SOCOM is working on an instant translator that doesn’t require the internet to operate. A demonstration on Tuesday showed that the effort remains a work in progress. Some of those constraints are hardware-based. SOCOM is working with Nvidia and other partners to build devices that need not resort to off-device computation.
In some tech realms, SOCOM is playing catch-up to China and Russia, said Brian Sisco, the command’s Futures team leader. His office was established in 2020 to identify how adversaries might develop new technologies and where the United States needed to go to counter.
“We're falling behind not just linearly but exponentially,” Sisco said.
The reason is that the United States was too rooted in the counterterrorism mission when it should have been pivoting to counter high-tech adversaries. A big part of his job: “Moving [SOCOM] a little bit away from the concept of effects-based work and how to blow people up and blowing things up, and turning it into something that looks a lot more like what Q does for James Bond.”
The United States is only beginning to realize that some adversaries develop tech faster than others and so the U.S. military must increase its rate of innovation. “Our adversaries are not increasing their capability now at the same level they were over the course of the counterterrorism play. If you think of the bad guy with the AK-47 and the IED and maybe some remote-control devices, they didn't have the same increase in capability year over year as people who have dedicated science and technology labs. We have dedicated government programs for increasingly new technology, buys, and research,” he said.
defenseone.com · by Patrick Tucker
6. China v America: how Xi Jinping plans to narrow the military gap
Graphics at the link.
Excerpts:
There is still, of course, a risk that Mr Xi goes to war before his armed forces are ready. The most likely triggers for that would be Taiwan formally declaring independence or America taking steps to significantly enhance the island’s status or defences. As he grows older and more vulnerable to ill health and political challenges, there is the possibility that he miscalculates or grows impatient, as Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, apparently did over Ukraine.
Some see signs of such impatience already in Mr Xi, who American officials say has ordered his armed forces to develop the capability to take Taiwan by 2027, the PLA’s centenary. But that does not mean he plans to attack by then, says the CIA. Many PLA experts believe that 2027 is more of a short-term milestone designed to maintain momentum towards the medium-term target of complete PLA modernisation by 2035. His ultimate goal is still to build a “world class” fighting force by 2049, the centenary of Communist rule.
Recent war games suggest that China could perhaps win a conflict over Taiwan this decade, but not for sure, and losses on all sides would be devastating. The longer Mr Xi waits, the more the military balance tips in China’s favour—and not just in conventional terms. The Pentagon predicts China’s nuclear arsenal will almost quadruple in size by 2035. Chinese strategists hope that will facilitate a peaceful solution by persuading both Taiwan and America that conflict would be too costly. “Peak China” proponents may be correctly predicting a fraught decade ahead. But Mr Xi still has time on his side.
China v America: how Xi Jinping plans to narrow the military gap
From subs to nukes he is adding firepower despite a slower economy
https://www.economist.com/china/2023/05/08/china-v-america-how-xi-jinping-plans-to-narrow-the-military-gap
May 8th 2023
The Economist
EVER SINCE British troops vanquished Qing dynasty forces in the Opium Wars of the 19th century, Chinese modernisers have dreamed of building world-class armed forces with a strong navy at their core. China’s spears and sailing ships were no match for steam-powered gunboats, wrote Li Hongzhang, a scholar-official who helped set up the country’s first modern arsenal and shipyard in Shanghai in 1865. If China systematically studied Western technology, as Russia and Japan had, it “could be self-sufficient after a hundred years”, he wrote.
It took longer than Li imagined, but today his dream is within reach. China’s navy surpassed America’s as the world’s largest around 2020 and is now the centrepiece of a fighting force that the Pentagon considers its “pacing challenge”. The question vexing Chinese and Western military commanders is this: can China continue on the same path, relentlessly expanding its capacity to challenge American dominance? Or does a slowing Chinese economy, and a more hostile, unified West, mean that China’s relative power is peaking?
In recent months, some American scholars have made the latter case, arguing that China might soon attack Taiwan, the self-governed island that it claims, as its relative advantages erode. “We live in an age of ‘peak China’,” write Hal Brands and Michael Beckley, two American political scientists, in a book released in August. “Beijing is a revisionist power that wants to reorder the world, but its time to do so is already running out.”
China’s supreme leader, Xi Jinping, certainly faces severe challenges, including an ageing population, runaway local-government debt and an American government bent on curbing the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) access to advanced Western technology. America is also overhauling its armed forces and galvanising alliances to prepare for a war over Taiwan. Yet there is still plenty of evidence that, in military terms, Chinese power is far from topping out.
Take China’s defence budget. It has risen by an average of over 9% annually since Chinese leaders launched an ambitious military modernisation programme in the late 1990s. In 2023 China’s official military budget is projected to be $224bn, second only to America’s, which is about four times bigger (see chart). Increasing defence spending at such a pace is harder with a slowing economy.
Nonetheless defence spending is budgeted to rise this year by 7.2%, roughly in line with China’s forecast rate of nominal GDP growth. The military budget excludes some key items such as weapons development. Still, it is a useful trend indicator, suggesting that Mr Xi is ring-fencing core defence spending at 1.6-1.7% of GDP—roughly the same as for the last decade.
If he can maintain that, based on the IMF’s current GDP forecasts, China’s annual military spending will still be far smaller than America’s by 2030, according to the Asia Power Index compiled by the Lowy Institute, an Australian think-tank. But China will narrow the gap substantially by then, it predicts, increasing military expenditure in purchasing-power-parity terms by $155bn, compared with America’s $123bn.
Even if his economy grows slower than forecast, Mr Xi has considerable leeway to divert resources to the armed forces from the civilian economy. And within the armed forces, he can prioritise areas that he considers more strategically important, for example by downsizing the army, which accounts for almost half of the PLA’s 2.2m active-duty personnel.
Naval gazing
Defence spending does not always translate into military power. That depends on many other factors, including technology, alliances and goals. But in China’s case, another useful indicator is the navy. It uses lots of different equipment, including missiles and aircraft, and would spearhead any effort to take Taiwan or project power globally. Building ships is costly and needs a strong industrial base, so it reflects economic health. It is also possible to compare China’s naval shipbuilding plans with America’s, which are made public.
So what do the numbers show? China’s navy has grown in the last two decades from a puny coastal force of outdated ships to a largely modern, home-made one that can conduct some missions far from China’s shores, such as evacuating its citizens from Sudan in April. But it still falls short of Mr Xi’s needs in several key ways—in particular by not having enough large amphibious ships to guarantee a successful invasion of Taiwan.
That will change over this decade, the Pentagon predicts, as the Chinese navy retires the last of its older ships and adds larger, modern, multi-role ones. It now has about 340 “battle force” vessels (ones that can contribute to combat), including carriers, submarines, frigates and destroyers. That number is likely to reach 400 by 2025 and 440 by 2030, according to the Pentagon (see chart). Among the new ships will be about a dozen more large amphibious ships.
Even assuming low defence-budget growth, China’s navy would still grow to an estimated 356 ships by 2033, adding three carriers and nine big amphibious ships, according to the Centre for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA), a think-tank in Washington that has designed a digital tool for assessing China’s military procurement choices. “I don’t think the resource constraints are so formidable that Chinese leaders will begin to think that their relative power advantages are eroded,” says Jack Bianchi of CSBA.
America’s navy, by comparison, had a battle force of 296 ships in April (about half its cold-war peak) and expects that number to drop to about 290 by the end of this decade. Thereafter, America may start to narrow the gap. Its navy still has an official goal of 355 ships. But budget constraints, political changes and other factors could make that difficult to achieve even by 2040. And while China is focusing its military build-up on Taiwan, America has to maintain a global presence.
Ship numbers can be misleading. America’s vessels are still bigger and more capable. Yet China is likely to catch up on those counts too in the coming decade. It is already “largely composed of modern multi-role platforms featuring advanced anti-ship, anti-air, and anti-submarine weapons and sensors,” says the Pentagon. The Office of Naval Intelligence states that Chinese naval-ship design and material quality is in many cases comparable to America’s “and China is quickly closing the gap in any areas of deficiency.”
One of China’s advantages is its vast shipbuilding industry, which is the world’s largest, accounting for 44% of commercial ships produced worldwide in 2021 (see chart). A single state-run company, the China State Shipbuilding Corporation (CSSC), accounted for more than a fifth of global orders that year. But it also produces most of China’s navy ships, often at the same shipyards as commercial vessels. For instance, the CSSC-owned Jiangnan shipyard (the one founded by Li Hongzhang in 1865) completed China’s third aircraft-carrier in 2022 but has also made dozens of cargo ships, including for Taiwanese customers. Combining production in this way helps to sustain the shipyards in economic downturns, to apply civilian technology and mass-production techniques to naval shipbuilding, and to circumvent sanctions targeting the PLA, says Monty Khanna, a retired rear-admiral in the Indian navy. America’s naval shipbuilders, meanwhile, focus almost exclusively on defence contracts, making it hard to scale up production or to sustain a stable supply of skilled workers.
Forged in battle
Yet there is one crucial area in which China will struggle to match America for many years, if not decades: experience. China has not been to war since one with Vietnam, fought largely on land, in 1979. It has not yet perfected carrier operations in peacetime, let alone combat. And it has not mastered the art of keeping its submarines hidden, while tracking potentially hostile ones. America, by comparison, has honed those capabilities over decades. China is also struggling to attract enough well-educated recruits to operate its new ships.
There is still, of course, a risk that Mr Xi goes to war before his armed forces are ready. The most likely triggers for that would be Taiwan formally declaring independence or America taking steps to significantly enhance the island’s status or defences. As he grows older and more vulnerable to ill health and political challenges, there is the possibility that he miscalculates or grows impatient, as Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, apparently did over Ukraine.
Some see signs of such impatience already in Mr Xi, who American officials say has ordered his armed forces to develop the capability to take Taiwan by 2027, the PLA’s centenary. But that does not mean he plans to attack by then, says the CIA. Many PLA experts believe that 2027 is more of a short-term milestone designed to maintain momentum towards the medium-term target of complete PLA modernisation by 2035. His ultimate goal is still to build a “world class” fighting force by 2049, the centenary of Communist rule.
Recent war games suggest that China could perhaps win a conflict over Taiwan this decade, but not for sure, and losses on all sides would be devastating. The longer Mr Xi waits, the more the military balance tips in China’s favour—and not just in conventional terms. The Pentagon predicts China’s nuclear arsenal will almost quadruple in size by 2035. Chinese strategists hope that will facilitate a peaceful solution by persuading both Taiwan and America that conflict would be too costly. “Peak China” proponents may be correctly predicting a fraught decade ahead. But Mr Xi still has time on his side.■
The Economist
7. US busts Russian cyber operation in dozens of countries
Excerpt:
The Justice Department, using a warrant this week from a federal judge in Brooklyn, launched what it said was a high-tech operation using a specialized tool called Perseus that caused the malware to effectively self-destruct. Federal officials said they were confident that, based on the impact of its operation this week, the FSB would not be able to reconstitute the malware implant.
US busts Russian cyber operation in dozens of countries
militarytimes.com · by Eric Tucker, The Associated Press · May 9, 2023
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Justice Department said Tuesday that it had disrupted a long-running Russian cyberespionage campaign that stole sensitive information from computer networks in dozens of countries, including the U.S. and other NATO members.
Prosecutors linked the spying operation to a unit of Russia’s Federal Security Service, or FSB, and accused the hackers of stealing documents from hundreds of computer systems belonging to governments of NATO members, an unidentified journalist for a U.S. news organization who reported on Russia, and other select targets of interest to the Kremlin.
“For 20 years, the FSB has relied on the Snake malware to conduct cyberespionage against the United States and our allies — that ends today,” Assistant Attorney General Matthew Olsen, the head of the Justice Department’s National Security Division, said in a statement.
The specific targets were not named in court papers, but U.S. officials described the espionage campaign as “consequential,” having successfully exfiltrated sensitive documents from NATO countries and also targeted U.S. government agencies and others in the U.S.
The Russian operation relied on the malicious software known as Snake to infect computers, with hackers operating from what the Justice Department said was a known FSB facility in Ryazan, Russia.
U.S. officials said they’d been investigating Snake for about a decade and came to regard it as the most sophisticated malware implant relied on by the Russian government for espionage campaigns. They said Turla, the FSB unit believed responsible for the malware, had refined and revised it multiple times as a way to avoid being shut down.
The Justice Department, using a warrant this week from a federal judge in Brooklyn, launched what it said was a high-tech operation using a specialized tool called Perseus that caused the malware to effectively self-destruct. Federal officials said they were confident that, based on the impact of its operation this week, the FSB would not be able to reconstitute the malware implant.
8. U.S. Provides Ukraine $1.2 Billion for Air Defense, Artillery
U.S. Provides Ukraine $1.2 Billion for Air Defense, Artillery
defense.gov · by Jim Garamone
The United States will provide Ukraine with a $1.2 billion package to bolster the country's air defenses and sustain its artillery needs, Pentagon Press Secretary Air Force Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder said today.
Press Briefing
Pentagon Press Secretary Air Force Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder conducts a conducts a press briefing at the Pentagon, May 9, 2023.
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The grant is part of the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative.
"This package underscores the continued U.S. commitment to meeting Ukraine's most urgent requirements by committing critical capabilities — such as air defense systems and munitions — while also building the capacity of Ukraine's armed forces to defend its territory and deter Russian aggression over the long term," Ryder said during a news conference.
Spotlight: Support for Ukraine
The money will procure more 155 mm artillery rounds and provide sustainment support to enable Ukraine to better maintain its on-hand systems and equipment, Ryder said.
Other capabilities include additional air defense systems and munitions equipment to integrate Western air-defense launchers, missiles and radars with Ukraine's air-defense systems. The Russians have launched waves of missiles into Ukraine, whose military has been adept at knocking them down. The package also contains ammunition to shoot down unmanned aerial systems, commercial, satellite-imagery services and support for training, maintenance and sustainment activities, the general said.
"The United States will continue to work with our allies and our partners to provide Ukraine with capabilities to meet its immediate battlefield needs and longer-term security assistance requirements," he said.
The Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative looks to bolster the medium- and long-range defenses of Ukraine. The presidential drawdown authority allows the United States to send equipment already in military stocks to Ukraine. The initiative allows the Defense Department to let contracts for equipment to be delivered later.
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"Today's announcement … represents, rather, the beginning of a contracting process to provide additional, priority capabilities to Ukraine, which will entail exploring options as how to best support them," Ryder said. "The USAI gives us the ability to leverage the power and the capabilities of the private sector in order to support Ukraine's medium- and long-term security assistance needs."
But equipment by itself is not enough. The United States is one of many nations providing training for Ukrainian forces. U.S. training continues at Grafenwoehr Training Area in Germany.
"We will be able to maintain that support and that capability to train Ukrainians as long as the demand is there," Ryder said, adding that providing equipment along with training gives the Ukrainians a capability, as opposed to just having equipment.
defense.gov · by Jim Garamone
9. Biden Administration Announces Additional Security Assistance for Ukraine
A 3 page single spaced fact sheet listing all the equipment is at this link: https://media.defense.gov/2023/May/09/2003218471/-1/-1/0/UKRAINE-FACT-SHEET-RUE.PDF
Biden Administration Announces Additional Security Assistance for Ukraine
defense.gov
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Immediate Release
May 9, 2023 |×
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Today, the Department of Defense (DoD) announced a new security assistance package to reaffirm the steadfast U.S. support for Ukraine, including to bolster its air defenses and sustain its artillery ammunition needs. This package, which totals up to $1.2 billion, is being provided under the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative (USAI).
This USAI package underscores the continued U.S. commitment to meeting Ukraine's most urgent requirements by committing critical near-term capabilities, such as air defense systems and munitions, while also building the capacity of Ukraine's Armed Forces to defend its territory and deter Russian aggression over the long term. This includes committing additional 155mm artillery rounds and sustainment support to enable Ukraine to better maintain its on-hand systems and equipment.
Unlike Presidential Drawdown authority (PDA), which DoD has continued to leverage to deliver equipment to Ukraine from DoD stocks at a historic pace, USAI is an authority under which the United States procures capabilities from industry or partners. This announcement represents the beginning of a contracting process to provide additional priority capabilities to Ukraine.
The capabilities in this package include:
- Additional air defense systems and munitions;
- Equipment to integrate Western air defense launchers, missiles, and radars with Ukraine's air defense systems;
- Ammunition for counter-Unmanned Aerial Systems;
- 155mm artillery rounds;
- Commercial satellite imagery services;
- Support for training, maintenance, and sustainment activities.
The United States will continue to work with its Allies and partners to provide Ukraine with capabilities to meet its immediate battlefield needs and longer-term security assistance requirements.
Publication: Ukraine Fact Sheet – May 9
defense.gov
10. Retired NATO commander says the West is afraid of a Ukrainian victory
Excerpts:
On a tangible level, he says it means that the West has kept Ukraine in a difficult place. "We are giving Ukraine enough that it is not being defeated on the battlefield. But I believe, it's not stated, but it's very clear from what we see, that we are not giving Ukraine what it needs to win."
In the wake of the U.S. military's major intelligence leak, Ukraine is keeping its plans for a counteroffensive close. And Gen. Breedlove believes the strategy could mean cutting off Crimea as a staging base for Russia's attacks. "I would hope that Ukraine uses their capability to cut the land bridge to Crimea, to retake the water supply to Crimea, to cut the Kerch Strait Bridge, and then to bring all of Crimea under attack. And I don't necessarily mean land attack, but precise long-range fires, push as far south as they can on the continent and then fire into Crimea and bring it at risk."
Retired NATO commander says the West is afraid of a Ukrainian victory
scrippsnews.com · by Sasha Ingber
Europe
Retired NATO Supreme Allied Commander says Western fear of Russia using a nuclear weapon has prevented countries from offering decisive support.
Retired NATO commander says the West is afraid of a Ukrainian victory
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May 9, 2023
"The West has built a sanctuary for Mr. Putin," retired four-star Air Force Gen. Philip Breedlove tells Scripps News. He was NATO's Supreme Allied Commander for Europe when Russia invaded Crimea in 2014. He says that the West, forbidding Ukraine from using NATO weapons to strike Russia, is guaranteeing Russia safety. He says the U.S. is falling for Vladimir Putin's war of words.
"Mr. Putin's military has failed him on the ground. But his war of words, his war of intimidation — or as we say in the military parlance, his deterrence — is working wildly. We in the West are afraid of a Ukrainian win. Because Mr. Putin threatens us over and over with what we told him in the beginning of this war we're afraid of. We're afraid of nuclear expansion and we're afraid of this war expanding into Europe," says Gen. Breedlove. "And what does he play back to us almost on a daily basis? Someone highly placed in Russia, almost four to five times a week, is talking about if this happens, it's nukes. If this happens, it's nukes. If we lose, it's nukes."
On a tangible level, he says it means that the West has kept Ukraine in a difficult place. "We are giving Ukraine enough that it is not being defeated on the battlefield. But I believe, it's not stated, but it's very clear from what we see, that we are not giving Ukraine what it needs to win."
In the wake of the U.S. military's major intelligence leak, Ukraine is keeping its plans for a counteroffensive close. And Gen. Breedlove believes the strategy could mean cutting off Crimea as a staging base for Russia's attacks. "I would hope that Ukraine uses their capability to cut the land bridge to Crimea, to retake the water supply to Crimea, to cut the Kerch Strait Bridge, and then to bring all of Crimea under attack. And I don't necessarily mean land attack, but precise long-range fires, push as far south as they can on the continent and then fire into Crimea and bring it at risk."
scrippsnews.com · by Sasha Ingber
11. Special ops turn to data, space tech to gain ‘decisive advantage’
Special ops turn to data, space tech to gain ‘decisive advantage’
militarytimes.com · by Todd South · May 9, 2023
TAMPA, Fla. — U.S. Special Operations Command is increasingly using cyber, space and data-based technology to support its missions, gauge equipment readiness and maintain its end strength, according to the organization’s leader.
Gen. Bryan Fenton told attendees of SOF Week, a special operations force-focused event taking place May 8-11 in Florida, that recruiting for positions such as data scientists, data stewards, cyber and space experts, and technologists is nonnegotiable.
“Data — not to be too trite here — data is the oil, the oxygen we all need to have a decisive advantage,” Fenton said Tuesday.
The command is “harnessing data like never before,” Fenton added. As an example, he said that in a recent mission targeting a senior leader of the Islamic State group, special operations teams navigated “near-peer air defense” and integrated cyber defense capabilities.
“Unfamiliar to us in the past, but becoming the norm in the future,” he explained.
Natural language processing, data-driven processing, artificial intelligence and collaborative autonomy — the latter of which teams human operators with robotic technology and data — are giving commanders ways to track vehicle maintenance and the readiness of equipment and personnel, Fenton said. The general himself has a so-called digital dashboard that summarizes much of what is happening across his command for regular checkups.
Furthermore, the command aims to use space and cyber assets to better inform mission planning in the various counterterrorism, integrated deterrence and irregular warfare missions it faces, Fenton said.
In a subsequent presentation, Jim Smith, an acquisition executive with the command, said the organization uses a software-designed approach for electronic gear in nearly all new acquisitions. Part of that is to avoid electronic fratricide, where one piece of equipment’s signal interferes with another, effectively canceling out the utility of both pieces of technology.
One example in which data improves operations, Smith said, is a program meant to provide a mission command system and a common-operating picture for leaders in the field so they receive continuous, real-time updates shared across a formation.
Smith also said there are efforts underway to include special operations-specific space-based payloads on satellites.
Fenton said incorporating such features gives Special Operations command an outsized advantage across its various missions. At SOCOM, he added, leaders are using data to see how their teammates are doing, as well as evaluating how to manage the command’s budget and what types of equipment is required for future missions.
By using “algorithmic approaches” to assess itself, SOCOM can solve a lot of challenges, he said.
About Todd South
Todd South has written about crime, courts, government and the military for multiple publications since 2004 and was named a 2014 Pulitzer finalist for a co-written project on witness intimidation. Todd is a Marine veteran of the Iraq War.
12. Disappearing Act: Integrated Training with Air and Ground Forces
The argument that has always been made to me is that it is better to tackle quarterbacks for a loss (deep attack/strategic attack) rather than having to continually make goal line stands (close air support). Therefore, the argument follows, we need to prioritize resources and training for the former rather than the latter.
Excerpts:
In 2016, Mike Pietrucha published an article describing high-threat close air support as impractical. He rightly pointed out that the environments where this could occur would only be against Russia or China. U.S. forces are now deployed in Taiwan and islands rimming mainland China. Russia has invaded its neighbor and the United States is subsidizing the Ukrainian military. Airpower may now be called upon to provide immediate fire support as part of a combined defensive effort where risk to aircraft is deemed subordinate to the risk to ground forces. Stand-off and suppression weapons are likely to be used in this scenario in what is known as weapon-centric close air support. If this were to play out, it needs to be rehearsed in an integrated training environment to have any reasonable chance of success.
A need to reprioritize for high-end conflict does not supplant the need to maintain the connective tissue between air and ground forces to remain truly joint or combined. The close air support barometer is falling fast, accelerated by aviation leaders’ convictions of the next war’s character. It would be naïve to think that the future will be unlike the past. Every single conflict since the invention of the airplane involving U.S. ground forces required some type of air support. Beware of the gathering storm.
Disappearing Act: Integrated Training with Air and Ground Forces - War on the Rocks
warontherocks.com · by Trevor Phillips Levine · May 10, 2023
During the Korean War, the atrophy of close air support skills following World War II undermined the war effort. With post-World War military budgets constricting, airpower services made choices about where to allocate increasingly scarce resources, and deprioritized close air support. Instead, the service chiefs prioritized air superiority, strategic bombing, and sea control. Caught flat-footed and on the defensive, the United States and its allies were nearly pushed off the Korean peninsula in 1950. Close air support proved instrumental in breaking the assault and helped forces to reclaim territory from a determined enemy. However, lessons in the requirements for interoperable communications, unified command and control, and the need for integrated training identified from the Pacific campaigns of World War II were relearned. These challenges underscored the faults in prevailing assumptions regarding the nature of warfare, equipment, and the level of training required for air-ground integration.
After the end of the U.S.-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the risk is that the United States military will make the same choices and critical skills learned in the last two decades will atrophy. Naval aviation has turned its focus to the Indo-Pacific theater and could undermine hard-earned competencies in ground force integration. Like the Air Force, the Navy is reprioritizing and focusing on missions other than close air support. While the Navy can claim they are training for the mission, a more accurate barometer for the health of the close air support competency is the opportunities for integrated training with ground forces. However, our observations indicate that integration between air and ground forces is in a state of decline.
Navy leadership should be wary about deprioritizing close air support. The risk is that leadership will face an unexpected crisis that demands close integration between air and ground forces, and that the captured lessons of close air support will have atrophied. The Navy should provide resources for an integrated training venue for close air support within its Strike Fighter Advanced Readiness Program or the Carrier Air Wing Integrated Training Program Air Wing Fallon exercise.
Become a Member
To ensure that the U.S. military is prepared for any contingency, relevant close air support training should incorporate contemporary threats, enemy electronic surveillance counter-targeting capability, and effective command and control to practice allocating platforms and weapons. Training should also include anti-radiation missile and stand-off weapon employment and deconfliction, anti-jam waveforms, and digital close air support system utilization.
The Falling Barometer
The Navy has an incentive to adjust its training priorities. After years of deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, de-emphasizing close air support is warranted to reallocate some of its finite resources to strengthen other competencies. However, a wholesale departure from integrated close air support training is concerning because the Navy is still directed to maintain a capability in close air support. Eliminating structured integrated training opportunities leaves the Navy unprepared for future contingencies and effective execution of the mission when called upon.
Close air support is one of the few venues for inclusive air-ground integration training and the exercise of most of a fighter aircraft’s air-to-ground weapons systems. This includes alternative communication pathways, targeting systems, and time compression of air-to-surface ordnance employment. Previously, ground forces from around the world traveled to train with carrier air wings at Air Wing Fallon or the air-to-surface Strike Fighter and Readiness Program events. The training and interactions between air and ground forces allowed each to become familiar with each other’s capabilities, equipment, terminology, and expectations. The two sides debriefed in formal settings or informally over a beer at the officers’ club to improve tactics and communication.
These interactions also helped build trust. Familiarity and trust are required in advanced ground integration concepts. Also, naval airpower may be called upon to execute close air support in contingency operations at a moment’s notice. Despite the focus on competition with China, the United States still faces contingencies involving irregular forces or an indirect proxy conflict where airpower is required. The U.S. military cannot assume that close air support will only occur after a sustained campaign against a peer adversary to win air superiority and sea control. For example, suppose allied forces are on the defensive and about to be overrun or pushed from key terrain. In that case, commanders may be forced to accept higher risk to aircraft to preserve strategic toeholds. And if high-intensity conflict did break out, would the level of training offered even be relevant to offer acceptable survivability to aircraft and reduce fratricide potential for ground forces?
Ebbs and Flows Throughout History
U.S. ground forces periodically grumble about the air services’ commitment to the close air support mission. These reservations have waxed and waned throughout history. The concerns about the commitment to close air support historically are most acute when budgets are tight during interwar periods. For example, close air support was an afterthought in the years leading up to World War II. The Army Air Corps focused on strategic bombardment and air superiority missions, and the Navy focused on sea control. For the Navy, this resulted in training emphasis on fleet defense for its aviators, which prioritized air-to-air interception.
The focus on fleet defense led to the Marine Corps creating its own air arm and naval airpower dominated by fighters optimized for aerial combat. During World War II’s Guadalcanal and Tarawa Pacific campaigns, the Navy struggled to provide effective close air support. An important lesson learned was that a “trained close air support force had to be created if landing forces were to receive the full benefit of support.” Chief among the observations were ineffective ground attacks by fighter aircraft and instances of fratricide. By the time of the invasion of Okinawa, the Navy and Marine Corps had worked out their close air support command and control network and emphasized ground attack training to their aircrews. Overall, the effectiveness of close air support vastly improved.
Unfortunately, lessons from the Pacific were lost to the U.S. military after World War II. These deficiencies revealed themselves during the Korean War. The Air Force mostly ignored integrated ground-attack training during the preceding inter-war period. The lack of ground-attack training proved detrimental to Air Force effectiveness, just like the Navy’s close air support efforts from Guadalcanal and Tarawa. Army commanders came to prefer Navy and Marine Corps aircrew, most of whom were veterans of World War II and had maintained ground-attack training. Despite the initial shortcomings, close air support proved instrumental in the land campaign. The commander of U.S. 8th Army Korea later stated, “if it had not been for the air support we received … we could not [sic] have been able to stay in Korea.”
After the Korean War, the U.S. military downsized again when budgets declined. While budgets and equipment did not decline as much as after World War II, the Department of Defense was forced to make hard choices about training. Modernization and divestiture of legacy platforms was prioritized. The policy of containment eventually led to the military intervention in Vietnam, and close air support featured prominently. As in Korea, close air support proved a decisive advantage for U.S. forces. However, as was the case during the Korean War, the U.S. military needed to increase training in ground support, supply tailored capabilities to the mission, and modify existing doctrine to improve integration and overall effectiveness.
After Vietnam, priorities shifted again, but close air support training remained a staple feature for naval aircrews throughout the rest of the Cold War. For example, in the 1980s and 1990s, A-6 Intruder aircrews practiced radar beacon bombing with ground controllers and performed close air support in Desert Storm. The 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act did much to improve joint doctrine and increase integration. In 1995, the first edition of Joint Publication 3-09.3, the modern-day bible for close air support procedures, was published. And the Global War on Terror reaffirmed the lessons from Vietnam and the Cold War, exemplifying the effectiveness of what an adequately trained and equipped integrated air-ground team could deliver on the battlefield.
The Disappearing Act of Integrated Training with Ground Forces
The decreasing emphasis on close air support creates unease in the ground force and resurrects old grievances and accusations that the Air Force and now the Navy are attempting to leave the ground support mission behind. Today, the relative importance of close air support is waning with airpower leaders as it has historically during other interwar periods, with acute, pacing threats gathering the most attention. The military is beset with resource constraints and forecasted flat or declining budgets. To compensate, the services are divesting legacy platforms, including reducing servicemember specialties like attack controllers. Air Force Special Operations Command, characterized by direct support to special operations forces, is retooling to support the broader Air Force mission.
Within the last few years, the Naval Aviation Warfighting Development Center stopped dedicated training for close air support during Air Wing Fallon. In 2023, the Strike Fighter and Readiness Program will also cease training for the mission. Before the syllabus revision, carrier air wing integrated training held three events called offensive air support. During these events, command-and-control aircraft vectored Navy fighters to support concurrent close air support with special operations forces and dynamic targeting along a fictional frontline. In many respects, it offered plausible scenarios for a potential regional conflict. In the Strike Fighter Weapons and Tactics course, close air support has been reduced to a single training event in the wingman and flight-lead syllabi. Previously, each training continuum included three close air support flights, focusing on urban close air support, medium-threat close air support, and high-threat close air support. Bucking the trend, the Navy Fighter Weapons School still holds dedicated close air support training events and is experimenting with advanced concepts, inviting special operators to participate in these events.
Impacted by aviator shortfalls and a time management problem, the Navy is plodding along on a familiar path and is turning inwards to solve glaring deficiencies now manifest in its ability to obtain air superiority and sea control. Unlike the Navy, the Marine Corps, tasked with ensuring amphibious access as a core mission, continues to maintain close air support as integral to its training continuum.
Previously, close air support schools, like the Navy’s Joint Terminal Attack Controller Course, counted on dedicated and reliable air support from the services to support terminal attack controller training. Over the last five years, this support has evaporated, and schoolhouses within the Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force are now heavily reliant on contracted air support. Part of the Navy’s reason is an emphasis on procuring advanced red air training aircraft, consisting of F-16s, which are not cleared to support air-to-ground missions. While contracted air support provides excellent training aids and talented pilots and crews, these are not the aircrew that ground forces will communicate and integrate with during potential conflict. This is simply a lost opportunity for air and ground force integration. Ground controllers now have the potential to never talk with or control actual military aircrew and aircraft until they are deployed.
Exercising Air-to-Ground Skillsets
It is not just about atrophy in close air support skillsets, but also in familiarity with systems not normally utilized unless integrating with ground forces. Advanced units that provide data for broader targeting networks are reemerging as missions for ground teams. Traditional intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance assets may be destroyed, degraded, or denied access in high-intensity combat with a peer adversary. This makes ground forces a convenient hedge against high-technology neutralization.
The variable message format is a military standard that provides for data and messaging protocols. In the F/A-18, this format allows target coordinates to be passed directly into the aircraft’s weapon systems or informational text messages in a digital data burst of less than one second in duration. The variable message format system suffered from neglect because ground teams did not use it in theater. Recently, the message format garnered renewed interest from ground forces due to the protocol’s low probability of detection and intercept aspects. Concerned with enemy counter-surveillance capabilities, ground forces are the most invested in signature management since the Cold War. Another system gaining favor with ground teams is NATO’s SATURN radio, an anti-jam waveform. Unfortunately, familiarity with these systems within carrier air wings is lacking, and the primary demand for use is being pushed from ground forces.
Absent integrated training, the impetus to use these essential systems is unrealized and delays wider and necessary adoption. The simple truth is that close air support training did more to exercise and hone the breadth of aircrew air-to-ground skills than any other single mission set. Close air support training provides opportunities for dynamic weapon employment, time-compressed attacks, radio and electronic systems utilization, and aggregation of all available information for proper target correlation. It is a difficult mission to execute correctly and reliably without practice.
The ability to exercise multiple air-to-ground competencies in close air support training makes it a great core competency to maintain. For example, the Navy Fighter Weapons School still places heavy emphasis on basic fighter maneuvers or dogfighting at close range. While close-range, swirling dogfights are unlikely today, the reason for this emphasis is based upon exercising a pilot’s handling or “feel” of their aircraft across multiple flight regimes. This builds confidence and muscle memory, pervading into the rest of their training as a fundamental building block.
Should Ground Forces Be Worried About Naval Commitment?
Do these events portend ill consequences and an unready force in the future? Close air support procedures are simple. For experienced crews, regaining currency requires little time. Established joint doctrine mostly eliminated command-and-control friction points and standardized procedures for air-ground interoperability. But while close air support is procedurally simple, communicating effectively with a ground force that possesses a different perspective than an aircrew is not. The stressors of combat, unfamiliar terrain, increasing reliance on digital close air support systems and procedures, and frames of reference compound the challenges the aircrew faces. Whether the current deprioritized status of close air support and corresponding decreases in integrated training opportunities are leading to a decline in readiness to perform the mission is more convoluted. As time marches on and veteran aircrews retire, the ability to rapidly regain proficiency without integrated training fades.
Terminal attack controllers providing unit-level readiness training to Navy squadrons observed increased doctrinal and procedural errors with weapon systems during close air support. The current readiness requirements for proficiency in close air support were ossified by two decades of conflict characterized by counter-insurgency operations. Already, ground forces are retooling for high-intensity conflict, reverting to historical Cold War mission sets characterized by intelligence gathering through deep reconnaissance, establishing networks, and conducting sabotage. Yet close air support training scenarios for aircrew are not doing the same.
Despite the removal of most integrated training opportunities with ground teams for Navy exercises, the Air Force still hosts Green Flag, a dedicated air-ground integration exercise. The Navy also hosts an exercise called Resolute Hunter, which integrates with ground units. However, the exercise is geared towards command-and-control and reconnaissance aircraft, not tactical fighter-attack aircraft. Unit-level training opportunities exist but are coordinated on an ad hoc basis and require fleeting personal connections between individual units within the Navy. In our experience, short-fused requests often prevent U.S. or allied ground units from supporting close air support training. This leads Navy squadrons to rely on their airborne forward air controller aircrews to simulate ground forces. The result is a lack of the integrated air and ground force experience that is so critical for developing camaraderie and testing the ability to communicate in simulated battlefield conditions. While Air Wing Fallon does include events for ground team integration supporting targeting networks, most ground forces are still required to maintain close air support readiness. We have observed that many units decline to participate or commit to long-term support without the ability to perform close air support currency events with aircraft. The lack of commitment results in Navy attack controllers assigned to Air Wing Fallon staff fulfilling the role of ground forces. Unfortunately, these attack controllers are not the forward units that aircrews will likely integrate with on their deployment.
Discussions regarding airpower’s commitment to close air support based on their investment in purpose-built bespoke platforms are misplaced. Aircraft designed to be survivable in high-threat environments will be survivable in all threat environments. Instead, airpower’s commitment to the mission is measured by the training opportunities afforded to integrate with ground forces. While the focus on high-end capabilities is warranted, as such preparations do much to deter conflict, the Navy should be wary of cutting too much air-ground integrated training. One common thread between Korea, Vietnam, and the Global War on Terror is that all are wars that the U.S. military entered optimized for a different kind of warfare. In each case, the services prepared for one type of war but got another. It would be naive to think that the future will be unlike the past.
The Return of High Threat
In 2016, Mike Pietrucha published an article describing high-threat close air support as impractical. He rightly pointed out that the environments where this could occur would only be against Russia or China. U.S. forces are now deployed in Taiwan and islands rimming mainland China. Russia has invaded its neighbor and the United States is subsidizing the Ukrainian military. Airpower may now be called upon to provide immediate fire support as part of a combined defensive effort where risk to aircraft is deemed subordinate to the risk to ground forces. Stand-off and suppression weapons are likely to be used in this scenario in what is known as weapon-centric close air support. If this were to play out, it needs to be rehearsed in an integrated training environment to have any reasonable chance of success.
A need to reprioritize for high-end conflict does not supplant the need to maintain the connective tissue between air and ground forces to remain truly joint or combined. The close air support barometer is falling fast, accelerated by aviation leaders’ convictions of the next war’s character. It would be naïve to think that the future will be unlike the past. Every single conflict since the invention of the airplane involving U.S. ground forces required some type of air support. Beware of the gathering storm.
Become a Member
Trevor “Mrs.” Phillips-Levine is a U.S. naval aviator and a special operations joint terminal attack controller instructor. He currently serves as the Joint Close Air Support branch officer at the Naval Aviation Warfare Development Center, which has purview over the Navy’s joint terminal attack controller and airborne forward air controller programs.
Andrew “Kramer” Tenbusch is an F/A-18F Forward Air Controller (Airborne) and Halsey Alfa research fellow at the U.S. Naval War College. He is a graduate of the Navy Fighter Weapons School (TOPGUN) and previously served as a carrier air wing integration instructor at the Naval Aviation Warfighting Development Center.
Commentary
warontherocks.com · by Trevor Phillips Levine · May 10, 2023
13. An Interview With the Prime Minister of Mongolia
A geostrategic location between China and Russia. I am looking forward to traveling there next month.
Excerpts:
The previous “National Anti-Corruption Strategy” ended with 75 percent of all recommendations implemented. The latest strategy is highly ambitious in its recommendations, with 10 goals, 45 objectives, and, 224 anti-corruption activities outlined in the strategy.
The government has welcomed the latest strategy, and while it still needs to make its way through the parliamentary process, we have committed to working with the anticorruption state agency (IAAC) on its implementation through 2030.
The key difference with this strategy is that it doesn’t stand alone. We have already committed to a number of actions that align with the recommendations of the strategy in this, the “Year of Fighting Corruption.”
These include strengthening a corruption-free public service, effective participation of citizens, the involvement of civil society and media in this work, the independence of state institutions, reducing the risk of corruption in the budgeting and procurement process, and tackling theft, embezzlement, and waste.
We are making significant progress in our anti-corruption efforts, but there is more to do. This strategy gives us a clear pathway to continue and enhance our anti-corruption measures and confirms we are on the right track to building a society of trust and confidence in government and our country.
An Interview With the Prime Minister of Mongolia
Prime Minister Oyun-Erdene Luvsannamsrai discusses his government’s plans for fighting corruption, attracting investment, and navigating a worrisome security environment.
thediplomat.com · by Bolor Lkhaajav · May 9, 2023
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The incumbent prime minister of Mongolia, Oyun-Erdene Luvsannamsrai took office in 2021. While the new administration was under immediate pressure to strategize a post-COVID economic recovery plan, both internal and external challenges continue to soar.
The prime minister answered questions from The Diplomat’s Bolor Lkhaajav on his administration’s policies and solutions for fighting corruption, maintaining a strong foreign policy, and streamlining foreign direct investment (FDI). The interview below has been lightly edited for clarity.
Considering Mongolia’s mining-dependent economy, diversification is necessary. What are some of the diversification plans and investment opportunities Mongolia is currently initiating with third neighbors?
We have a number of diversification plans in place to boost investment opportunities in Mongolia stemming from our landmark “New Recovery Policy,” which will create an investment-friendly climate. Our overarching message to foreign investors is clear: Mongolia is open for business.
Due to our policies, we have ensured that GDP grew by 4.8 percent in 2022, an uptick of 2.2 percentage points over predicted growth, and we expect to achieve an increase to 5.4 percent growth in 2023. Mongolia is well on track to becoming the fifth-fastest growing economy in Asia. Greater economic growth lifts people out of economic hardship, raises living standards, and ensures a growing middle class – one of the key elements of the New Recovery Policy.
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There are so many opportunities to invest in Mongolia. In 2022, we launched “Mindgolia,” an innovative platform showcasing our thriving tech sector and shifting digital transformation.
Additionally, we are consistently benchmarking our successes in attracting and hosting FDI, such as the Oyu-Tolgoi project, one of the largest copper mining projects in the world. We are clear in our view that FDI is one of the key pillars to grow our economy and will contribute to our future sustainability, building a better future for generations to come.
Tourism is also critical to diversifying the economy and is responsible for the same amount of revenue as the total income of Mongolia’s non-mining sector. Tourism, mining, and agriculture represent the three key pillars of a future Mongolian economy. In November last year, the government unveiled a major package of new measures to showcase Mongolia as a growing tourist destination. As such, we are proud to have recently launched our “Welcome to Mongolia” campaign, as well as designating 2023-2025 as the years to visit Mongolia. Our campaign will encourage overseas travelers to visit Mongolia for both business and tourism.
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Our landmark Tourism Bill also contains further proposals to open more travel routes, modernize Mongolia’s visa system, and reduce the cost of flights to and from the country. Measures in the Tourism Bill include introducing a VAT refund for tourists upon departure from Mongolia on purchases during their stay, including hotel and accommodation costs.
Additionally, this bill aims to increase the number of countries in which an “e-visa” will be issued online within 48 hours of application. The bill will allow for a significant increase in the number of flights to and from Mongolia, as well as establish a Tourism Development Fund to support sector financing while also designating parts of Mongolia as strategic regions for tourism development.
What are some of the legal issues your administration is solving or addressing in order to increase the confidence of investors?
We have settled our tax arbitration issue with Rio Tinto and, as investors will have seen, resolved many outstanding issues related to Oyu Tolgoi, thereby allowing the commencement of underground production. The agreed funding plan ensures value for the government of Mongolia and the Mongolian people. The continued successful cooperation between Oyu Tolgoi and Rio will continue to inspire confidence in foreign investors.
We are also making great strides to boost investor confidence by tackling corruption through a range of measures as identified in the recently announced anticorruption strategy and our five-point plan to root out corruption in the country and business operating environment.
Our efforts to tackle corruption through our Whistleblower Law have shown that the government’s priorities are the people’s priorities. This is why we have announced 2023 as the year of anti-corruption.
During the recent protests, it was the Mongolian government that uncovered and shone a light on historical corruption leading us to introduce the Commodity Exchange Law for the transparent public trading of mining products. It is vital that we continue to fight and root out corruption wherever it exists.
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Transparency builds better societies, and we are boosting transparency through our E-Business platform while working to create a unified electronic registration database for the intellectual property sector as part of the digitization of services provided by the government to citizens. We have passed a law on regulating money lending systems to improve the legal protections afforded to consumers, as well as a law on permitting, which will reduce the number of special licenses and permits from more than 1,600 to 360.
Additionally, we have passed a law on Public-Private Partnerships as part of a series of reforms to support economic growth in line with international standards. We know that investors require a robust legal framework to facilitate foreign direct investment in a functioning democracy that is stable. We are guaranteeing that framework and business environment.
The prolonged Russia-Ukraine war has placed Mongolia in a challenging position, considering Ulaanbaatar’s bilateral relations with both Moscow and Kyiv. From Mongolia’s foreign policy standpoint, how will your administration manage its short- and medium-term effects if the security environment were to escalate?
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We regret that the situation has deteriorated to the extent that it has and hope for a swift end to the conflict.
We continue to maintain good relations with all our neighbors as well as actively promote our third neighbor policy, through which Mongolia seeks to develop enhanced economic and bilateral ties with all countries.
As a democratic, peaceful nation, our foreign policy will reflect our values, and will do everything that we can to make sure that the world returns to stability.
Given Mongolia’s friendly relations with all nations around the world, our policy is clear.
The regional geopolitical environment certainly has changed in the last five years. Defense expenditures are increasing in almost all East Asian countries. Mongolia, too, increased its defense budget, although Mongolia’s foreign policy supports peaceful resolutions and diplomatic dialogue via many channels. What are some of the innovative ways or new mechanisms that Ulaanbaatar is looking into to balance these destabilizing factors and maintain strong relations with third neighbors?
The New Recovery Policy is the ultimate endorsement of Mongolia’s Third Neighbor Policy, as we promote inward investment such as that seen by Rio Tinto at the Oyu Tolgoi mine. Trade and investment are key to enhancing our energy security, building further cultural exchanges, and boosting our economy and growth prospects.
The regional and global geopolitical situation is one we are always mindful of. We will not exacerbate or take steps that will heighten tensions or destabilize both our country and key relationships. However, in line with the government’s New Recovery Policy, we continue to seek to explore new markets and create enhanced bilateral relationships with key allies globally. Whilst our existing relationships will remain, ultimately, this will focus more and more further afield through key multilateral organizations and partnerships.
What actions has your government taken since the December 2022 protests to try to address the demands made? Do you foresee further protests or unrest in 2023?
Mongolia is proudly democratic, and freedom of speech is vital to Mongolian society. The government uncovered and brought to the fore the historical issue of corruption as witnessed through the coal theft case, which we continue to pursue in earnest, including justice for guilty parties. Both protesters and the government were and are completely aligned in our joint wish to fight corruption and right a historical wrong. It is for this reason that I went out to speak directly speak to the demonstrators.
The government will continue to ensure that corruption is rooted out and that we will never see these issues again regarding corruption.
As for protests, Mongolia, as a free country, we vociferously defend the rights of citizens to protest and exercise their rights to free speech.
The Ministry of Justice recently submitted Mongolia’s Anti-Corruption Strategy. What are some of the improvements in comparison to the 2016 version? At what level these anti-corruption measures can show its effects?
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The previous “National Anti-Corruption Strategy” ended with 75 percent of all recommendations implemented. The latest strategy is highly ambitious in its recommendations, with 10 goals, 45 objectives, and, 224 anti-corruption activities outlined in the strategy.
The government has welcomed the latest strategy, and while it still needs to make its way through the parliamentary process, we have committed to working with the anticorruption state agency (IAAC) on its implementation through 2030.
The key difference with this strategy is that it doesn’t stand alone. We have already committed to a number of actions that align with the recommendations of the strategy in this, the “Year of Fighting Corruption.”
These include strengthening a corruption-free public service, effective participation of citizens, the involvement of civil society and media in this work, the independence of state institutions, reducing the risk of corruption in the budgeting and procurement process, and tackling theft, embezzlement, and waste.
We are making significant progress in our anti-corruption efforts, but there is more to do. This strategy gives us a clear pathway to continue and enhance our anti-corruption measures and confirms we are on the right track to building a society of trust and confidence in government and our country.
Bolor Lkhaajav
Bolor Lkhaajav is a researcher specializing in Mongolia, China, Russia, Japan, East Asia, and the Americas. She holds an M.A. in Asia-Pacific Studies from the University of San Francisco.
thediplomat.com · by Bolor Lkhaajav · May 9, 2023
14. Can the Russian Opposition Foment Regime Change?
One can hope and dream. But it does beg questions: What comes next? Are we ready to exploit what comes next?
Can the Russian Opposition Foment Regime Change?
jamestown.org · by Ksenia Kirillova · May 9, 2023
The Kremlin continues to experience failures on the frontlines in Ukraine at a time when conflicts between various private military companies and the regular Russian army are turning sharper and more public. The founder of the so-called Wagner Group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, recently recorded an emotional, uncensored video directed at the Russian military leadership demanding supplies for his forces. Prigozhin even threatened to retire his group from the Bakhmut front on May 10 if his demands are not met (ВВС Russian Service, May 5). And only after the intervention of Ramzan Kadyrov did he decide to stay (Gazeta.ru, May 7).
In the meantime, representatives of the Russian opposition have been discussing unification, though not in the sense of creating a single party prepared to participate in elections. Rather opposition groups seek to develop a united approach on what a post-Putin Russia would look like and how it might be possible to foment regime change following his departure or death. In Berlin, at the end of April 2023, a human rights conference was convened in the name of the late Russian attorney Yuri Schmidt and included the participation of diverse representatives of the Russian political diaspora from various countries (Shmidtconference.org, accessed May 9). At the conclusion of the conference, a declaration of the Russian democratic forces was signed proclaiming inter alia the creation of a free, legal and federated Russia. Participants also noted the criminal character of the Putin regime and its war, as well as Ukraine’s undisputed territorial integrity (Change.org, April 30).
The conference’s organizer, former political prisoner Mikhail Khodorkovsky, repeatedly voiced the principles he favors for the opposition’s unification. Khodorkovsky is convinced that, even if some “revolutionary party” takes power after Putin, its leadership would be authoritarian regardless of the party’s ideology. This is conditioned by the fact that such a party in and of itself would have an authoritarian structure, and under conditions of struggle and political turbulence, it would not change (YouTube, May 3). Moreover, to hold onto centralized power, any Russian leader needs a clearly defined external enemy (Schwingen.net, November 4, 2022).
In connection with this inevitable outcome, Khodorkovsky and his allies envision the transformation of Russia into a parliamentary republic with a strong federalized structure. This is the kind of transformation, they say, that the coalition of democratic forces should seek from Putin’s possible successors; and without such a transformation, participation in elections organized by the current Kremlin regime does not make sense (YouTube, May 3). Thus, participants in the Berlin conference see the primary task of the Russian opposition during any transitory period not as a struggle for power but rather as taking advantage of the split in the Russian elites and being ready to negotiate even with people “on the other side of the barricades” (Poligonmedia.io, April 2).
Furthermore, Khodorkovsky emphasized that, since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale aggression against Ukraine, a peaceful transfer of power in Russia has been impossible, and therefore, the only real means to influence the situation is by force or the threat of force (Forum Daily, May 5). One main source of this, according to the former political prisoner, lies in Russia’s regions, which he believes must become the basis for a new, better federalized government (Meduza, October 31, 2022). In terms of the regions’ role in a post-Putin Russia, Khodorkovsky admitted that 15, 20 or even 25 united regions would participate in the “re-establishment” of Russia (Forum Daily, February 22).
This plan may be the most realistic of all previously proposed plans by the opposition, though its authors emphasize that the “window of opportunity” after Putin’s departure will be small and the united opposition will have to confront radical patriotic groups that also rely on force (YouTube, May 3). Another problem is the Kremlin’s purposeful policy to destroy the national and regional elites. For example, the former governor in Sverdlovsk region, Eduard Rossel, who was in office from the early 1990s through 2009, advocated for the creation of a Ural Republic. Rossel said that his goal was not the sovereignty of the Sverdlovsk region, but rather its economic and legal independence (Kommersant, July 1, 2020).
Yet, the republic was not officially recognized, and, after 2014, its proponents were accused of “working for the CIA” and hoping for the break-up of Russia (Cont.ws, February 24, 2015). Since 2009, the oblast’s governors have not been representatives from the local elite, but rather authorities from other regions. One of the last remaining popular Ural politicians, Yevgeny Roizman, is currently under investigation for allegedly “discrediting the army” (RBC, April 26). Similar situations can be observed in other oblasts as well.
Yet, practice has shown that even authorities sent from other regions do, in time, begin to stand up for local interests. For example, last year, the current governor of Sverdlovsk region, Yevgeny Kuyvashev, openly clashed with notorious Russian propagandist Vladimir Solovyov (see EDM, June 7, 2022). Thus, it is clear that the formation of regional elites is possible even under the “Putin vertical.”
Another problem may be the impossibility of defining the true motives of today’s Russian elites (federal or regional), who might express the wish to reach an agreement with the opposition. The intelligence services of various countries regularly report on attempts by the Kremlin to penetrate opposition movements (Delfi.lt, March 9, 2022). Along with this, Russian intelligence sometimes works under a false flag of “systemic liberals.” Logically, when some intra-elite groups find themselves in a difficult situation, they will have to negotiate rather than resort to “spy games.” However, the likelihood of such games and possible cheating cannot be ruled out.
A third problem is the fact that several opposition groups do not desire such a coalition, preferring to act as a “revolutionary party.” In particular, oppositionist Ilya Krasilshchik, in an article titled “Why I am a Navalny Supporter,” wrote that the Anti-Corruption Foundation is the only “opposition force with real support,” and, as such, everyone should rally around it and nothing else (Twitter.com/Ikrasil). Of all these, this problem directly depends on the Russian opposition. The sooner the anti-war forces find a compromise in terms of the desired image for a future Russia, the greater the chance that they will be able to effectively influence the situation in post-Putin Russia.
jamestown.org · by Ksenia Kirillova · May 9, 2023
15. SOCOM wants new industry pitches to connect autonomous tech
SOCOM wants new industry pitches to connect autonomous tech
Defense News · by Todd South · May 9, 2023
TAMPA, Fla. — A futuristic-looking small boat cuts through the water near an unnamed adversary’s shoreline, releasing smaller automated boats and firing tube-launched drones as it goes.
The video shown by Bill Innes, deputy director for acquisitions at U.S. Special Operations Command, is meant to highlight technology leaders at his organization want in their near-term future combat scenarios.
The term at the top of the wish list for those who build and buy special operations forces technology on the first day of Global SOF Foundation’s SOF Week here is “collaborative autonomy.”
And it’s driving how the command views nearly all the new tech it wants to bring into units.
Innes displayed a single PowerPoint slide with six domain areas, including ground, air and maritime systems on the left and cyber, communication, computers and intelligence alongside special reconnaissance and data/software on the right.
In total, the slide referenced 256 programs or projects currently run by SOCOM.
The left side items included 145 such programs or projects, all hardware, for moving material or weapons for destroying targets. Think rocket launchers, helicopters, kitted-out gunships such as the AC-130J, loitering munitions and submersibles for combat divers.
The right side? Think sensor-laden tactical drones and tactical assault kits on smartphones and software. Those 111 programs or projects work like a nervous system for the other platforms.
Or, as Innes put it, “the left side is heavy on platforms, the right side brings it all together.”
Making those varied pieces of equipment “collaborate” with the humans running them means industry officials must consider how their tech fits into the big picture.
“For all of that to be tied together, it’s going to have to be open systems,” Innes said.
Government program managers too must think about their specific technology in a larger ecosystem, he said.
“Where it all starts is mission command in [Program Executive Office SOF] digital applications,” Innes said. “But all of the PEOs should be able to talk about how they contribute to collaborative autonomy.”
The collaborative concept goes a bit further than a similar line of thinking in recent years known as manned-unmanned teaming. The manned part is still there, but the concept includes more systems and equipment.
Defense officials envision and are building autonomous wingmen and drone swarms to extend the strike, reconnaissance and surveillance abilities of fighter jets. The concept uses fewer manned aircraft in a squadron, but more robot helpers to protect and fight where needed.
The Next Generation Air Dominance platform under development by the Air Force expects to deliver a sixth-generation aircraft with a complement of “loyal wingmen,” Defense News recently reported.
About Todd South
Todd South has written about crime, courts, government and the military for multiple publications since 2004 and was named a 2014 Pulitzer finalist for a co-written project on witness intimidation. Todd is a Marine veteran of the Iraq War.
16. This SOCOM program has cut proposal to prototype timelines by half
It seems like SOCOM puts its money (and action) where its mouth is:
A "moneyball approach" (analytical, evidence-based, sabermetric approach) - "dragging technology over the valley of death" ( the struggle by entrepreneurs to keep new ideas and products alive during the initial research and development cash-burn phase until proof of concept and commercial scaling are achieved) and most important getting the right gear at the right time - to its people (and SOCOM R&D and acquisitions benefits the other services as well).
This SOCOM program has cut proposal to prototype timelines by half
Defense News · by Todd South · May 9, 2023
TAMPA, Fla. — Since 2020, a small business innovation program used by U.S. Special Operations Command has doubled the speed at which proposals from this slice of the industry see their pitches become prototypes in operators’ hands, officials said.
That’s according to data shared by Leslie Babich, director of the special operations forces nonprofit SOFWERX. The entity serves as a public-private partnership that also has its own small-scale laboratory and “foundry” for manufacturing, based out of Ybor City, Florida.
Babich, alongside Glen Cullen, program manager at SOF Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics, shared the figures and other details during a session at Global SOF Foundation’s SOF Week here. The session was aimed at teaching industry, and especially small businesses, how to work with the organization to get their ideas to operators and units in need.
Since its creation in 2015, the SOFWERX program has contracted $116.1 million in 749 purchase orders and business-to-business agreements, according to SOCOM,
The nonprofit has used the small business innovation research program, which extends to research and development across all federal agencies, to fuel some of this outreach, Babich said.
Until 2020, the average annual proposals from small businesses received by SOCOM through SOFWERX numbered fewer than 20. That number doubled the following year and remained at that level since.
But the number isn’t necessarily the focus, it’s the accelerated timeline that draws attention.
The average lifespan of a proposal to prototype ran 40 months. That’s been cut by nearly half to slightly more than 22 months, Babich said.
“We’re faster; we can award agreements within three to four weeks versus three to four months,” she said.
And SOFWERX is seeing more proposals from nontraditional vendors within industry, many who’d never previously sought out defense contracts.
A likely helpful change was when Lisa Sanders, director of science and technology at SOCOM, got approval from Congress to spend up to 10% of her office’s annual $20 million budget for small businesses through SOFWERX, Babich said.
That’s only $2 million, but those dollars can make a substantial impact on smaller companies, she said. And the figure has grown.
During an earlier presentation Bill Innes, deputy director for acquisitions at U.S. Special Operations Command, noted about one-third, or $1.38 billion of SOCOM’s annual acquisition budget for fiscal 2022, was spent on small business contract awards.
Babich also said efforts aimed at explaining to industry how to work with the SOCOM and establishing a regular one-on-one pitch session for innovative ideas helped accelerate the process.
Those efforts translated into a small business boot camp, both in-person and online, which walks new small business staff through the contracting process.
In May 2020, SOFWERX launched “Tech Tuesday,” which serves as a forum for individuals to present technologies to SOCOM and other government agencies in an online call.
Industry participants get 15 minutes to pitch followed by 10 minutes of questions. Beyond defense programs, the calls often include agencies such as the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI, Babich said.
But it’s not a guarantee, she cautioned.
“Tech Tuesday is not like ‘Shark Tank;’ nobody gets funding at the end of the day,” she said. “However, it might spark some ideas for those government stakeholders.”
About Todd South
Todd South has written about crime, courts, government and the military for multiple publications since 2004 and was named a 2014 Pulitzer finalist for a co-written project on witness intimidation. Todd is a Marine veteran of the Iraq War.
17. Battles shake Sudan's capital as power struggle escalates
Battles shake Sudan's capital as power struggle escalates
Reuters · by Reuters
- Summary
- Residents report fighting in several neighbourhoods
- Army pounding targets to root out paramilitary forces
- Conflict has created humanitarian crisis
KHARTOUM, May 10 (Reuters) - Fighting in Sudan's capital escalated on Wednesday with fierce clashes and air strikes, witnesses said, as delegations of rival military factions continued talks in Saudi Arabia aimed at securing a ceasefire and humanitarian relief.
Residents reported ground battles in several neighbourhoods of Khartoum between the army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), as well as heavy gunfire in the north of Omdurman and the east of Bahri, two adjacent cities separated from Khartoum by the River Nile.
Since Tuesday, the army has been pounding targets across the three cities as it tries to root out RSF forces that have taken control of large residential areas and strategic sites since early in the conflict that erupted on April 15.
"There's been heavy air strikes and RPG fire since 6.30 a.m.", said Ahmed, a resident of the Bahri neighbourhood of Shambat. "We're lying on the ground and there are people living near us who ran to the Nile to protect themselves there under the embankment."
The conflict has created a humanitarian crisis in Africa's third largest nation by area, displacing more than 700,000 people inside the country and prompting 150,000 to flee to neighbouring states. It has also sparked unrest in Sudan's western Darfur region.
The U.N. World Food Programme said on Wednesday that up to 2.5 million more Sudanese were expected to fall into hunger in the coming months because of the current conflict, raising the number of people suffering acute food insecurity to 19 million.
Army and RSF delegations have been meeting since the end of last week in talks sponsored by the United States and Saudi Arabia in the Saudi Red Sea port city of Jeddah.
Negotiations aim to secure an effective truce and allow access for aid workers and supplies after repeated ceasefire announcements failed to stop the fighting.
A Western diplomat familiar with the talks in Jeddah said there had been no concrete outcome so far but mediators intended to keep going until they could secure a result.
There had been "difficult atmospherics" at the start of the talks, and mediators were trying to keep delegations tightly focussed on a ceasefire and humanitarian access rather than wider political issues, the diplomat said.
Reuters Graphics Reuters Graphics
Since the battles began, the RSF have dug in across Khartoum neighbourhoods, set up checkpoints, occupied state buildings and placed snipers on rooftops.
The army has been using air strikes and heavy artillery to try to dislodge them.
Late on Tuesday the RSF said the historic presidential palace in central Khartoum, which has symbolic importance and is in a strategic area that the RSF says it controls, had been hit by an air strike and destroyed, a claim the army denied.
Drone footage filmed on Wednesday and verified by Reuters appeared to show the building, known as the Old Republican Palace, intact, though smoke could be seen coming from the southeast edge of the palace compound.
The fighting has left more than 600 people dead and 5,000 injured, according to the latest death toll from the World Health Organization, though the real figure is thought to be much higher.
Witnesses have reported seeing bodies strewn in the streets. Most hospitals have been put out of service and a breakdown of law and order has led to widespread looting. Fuel and food supplies have been running low.
"Our only hope is that the negotiations in Jeddah succeed to end this hell and return to normal life, and to stop the war, the looting, the robbery and the chaos," said Ahmed Ali, a 25-year-old resident of Khartoum.
Conflicts are not new to Sudan, a country that sits at a strategic crossroads between Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia and the volatile Sahel region.
But most unrest in the past occurred in remote areas. This time intense fighting in Khartoum, one of Africa's biggest cities, has made the conflict far more alarming for Sudanese.
The United Nations has projected that 5 million additional people will need emergency assistance inside Sudan while 860,000 are expected to flee to neighbouring states.
Reporting by Khalid Abdelaziz in Dubai and Mohamed Noureldin in Khartoum; Writing by Aidan Lewis; Editing by Edmund Blair
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
Reuters · by Reuters
18. China hones its Global South diplomacy
We must recognize Chinese strategy(ies), understand it, EXPOSE it, and attack the strategy with superior political warfare.
Excerpts:
What we see in these two regions is playing out across the entire Global South and demonstrating that China’s new active diplomacy focused on cooperation rather than division is proving quite attractive.
In this context, public disagreements between the US and Global South countries (Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Bangladesh, to name a few) are used effectively by China to expand its influence.
If the United States wishes to counter this trend, it should adopt a more constructive approach and manage disagreements behind closed doors. Otherwise, the US will find itself caught unaware in future developments as well.
China hones its Global South diplomacy
China’s mediating role in Iran-Saudi deal signals a wider shift from wolf warrior to more constructive diplomacy
asiatimes.com · by Joseph Rozen · May 10, 2023
Iran and Saudi Arabia’s agreement to resume diplomatic relations after years of clashes caught many by surprise – especially due to the Chinese role in mediating between the parties, leaving the United States on the sidelines.
The deal was described by some as a ground-breaking achievement that will change the entire geopolitical architecture in the Middle East, with ramifications for the United States’ posture in the region.
In fact, the agreement did not turn Iran and Saudi Arabia from foes to friends, nor did it change the multifaceted approach of Middle East countries.
Moreover, China’s active diplomacy should not have come as a surprise; rather, it signaled another step away from “wolf warrior” to more constructive diplomacy, not only regarding the Middle East but globally.
To be realistic, China is not trying to replace the United States as a global peace broker but it is very capable of identifying global opportunities to extend its influence and enjoy the fruits of work done by others.
In addition, any promotion of stability is crucial to the Chinese economy – and equally important is to improve its global image.
For example, recently China presented a “peace plan” to end the war in Ukraine. Although that was mostly a smoke screen to legitimize Xi Jinping’s visit to Moscow, it is worth paying attention to China’s efforts to present itself as a balanced and responsible power.
Another example is the Chinese proposal to mediate between Israel and the Palestinians, recycling old principles that other countries already tried with zero success.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (right) and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu shake hands ahead of their talks at Diaoyutai State Guesthouse in Beijing on March 21, 2017. Photo: AFP / Etienne Oliveau / Pool
Beijing’s renewed diplomatic activism is aimed at shaping a new diplomatic narrative of China’s global role, primarily focused on the Global South.
Early signs of this diplomatic activism could be found at the Chinese Communist Party’s 20th National Congress last October. The changes made to the party and its organs were meant to create a clearer separation between the defense apparatus and the diplomatic circle.
The appointments made in March this year to China’s diplomatic cadre showed Xi’s focus on relations with the US and economic development.
Qin Gang, the new minister for foreign affairs and former ambassador to the US, was promoted to the rank of state councilor. Both Qin and his immediate predecessor Wang Yi, also a state councilor, have extensive experience in American affairs and both hold more power within the party than Wang’s predecessors.
In contrast, Zhao Lijian, who as Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman had personified more confrontational wolf warrior diplomacy, was demoted in January to a position overseeing ocean affairs.
Since March, the two senior diplomats have been pushing harder to realize an updated diplomatic vision advanced by President Xi in three core documents: Global Civilization Initiative, Global Security Initiative and Global Development Initiative.
All three emphasize the importance of worldwide cooperation and development while respecting the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all countries.
Although the three initiatives align with United Nations’ sustainable development goals, many Western countries remain skeptical about China’s real intentions or its ability to realize them. In the Global South, however, countries that are not willing to choose sides in the great power competition but need financial support are much more receptive.
Although Global South countries are aware of the complexity of engaging China, they are concerned more about solving their immediate economic challenges. China can offer them solutions without preconditions – capital for infrastructure projects and investments in manufacturing and services sectors.
In the Middle East, the symbolic mediation between Iran and Saudi Arabia is a sign of China’s growing influence in the region over the last decade. Last month, it was reported that China has resumed construction on a military base in the United Arabs Emirates. Earlier this year, China sealed several deals and agreements with Saudi Arabia, including US$50 billion worth of investments.
This trend is very evident in South Asia as well, with China already deeply invested in Sri Lanka and Pakistan while also extending its reach to Nepal and Bangladesh.
Pakistan is deeply involved in China’s Belt and Road. Image: AFP
In the case of Bangladesh, China acknowledges the geostrategic importance and bright prospects the growing economy can offer but faces strong competition from India and Japan. The prime minister of Bangladesh is wisely balancing between these powers to promote win-win cooperation.
What we see in these two regions is playing out across the entire Global South and demonstrating that China’s new active diplomacy focused on cooperation rather than division is proving quite attractive.
In this context, public disagreements between the US and Global South countries (Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Bangladesh, to name a few) are used effectively by China to expand its influence.
If the United States wishes to counter this trend, it should adopt a more constructive approach and manage disagreements behind closed doors. Otherwise, the US will find itself caught unaware in future developments as well.
Joseph Rozen served for a decade in the Israeli National Security Council as the director for Asia-Pacific affairs. There he was a driving force behind the Israeli foreign investments-screening mechanism and the development of Israel’s bilateral relations with Asian powers.
asiatimes.com · by Joseph Rozen · May 10, 2023
19. Opinion | Ukraine’s offensive is coming. Keep your expectations in check.
Wise counsel.
Excerpts:
Putin has calculated, probably correctly, that time is his ally and that the West’s commitment to Kyiv will sooner or later be subverted by “Ukraine fatigue,” exacerbated by the cost to European and American taxpayers. Ukrainian leaders agree with that assessment and therefore are fully aware that they are underdogs not just on the battlefield but also in the parallel struggle over expectations management. Making major territorial gains will not only be a boost to the morale of Ukraine’s own troops and citizens; it might also be a necessary precondition of maintaining the West’s flow of arms. “I believe that the more victories we have on the battlefield, frankly, the more people will believe in us, which means we will get more help,” Mr. Zelensky told The Post in Kyiv last week.
That is a clear-eyed assessment. It is simultaneously true that whatever obstacles, setbacks, reversals and disappointments that Ukraine might suffer — and it will surely suffer some — should not lead to premature conclusions that its counteroffensive has failed. In fact, Ukraine, with the West’s help, has already won an enormous strategic victory by standing up to Mr. Putin’s unwarranted, bloody-minded aggression and exposing Russia’s military as the poorly trained, badly motivated, ill-disciplined and ineptly led force that it is.
The Kremlin has tried to dismember and erase a sovereign state from the map. It has failed. But the fight to force the further retreat of Russia’s troops continues. Ukraine’s fight is the free world’s fight — for the bedrock right of any country to choose its destiny as part of the family of democratic, pluralistic and tolerant nations. The West should not waver — before or after Ukraine’s offensive — whether it moves the front line miles or mere inches.
Opinion | Ukraine’s offensive is coming. Keep your expectations in check.
The Washington Post · by Editorial Board · May 9, 2023
Unlike many TV series, most military battles do not feature tidy endings. The long history of warfare includes few fights that conclusively settled the larger struggle, which is why we know the names of the relative handful that did: Yorktown, Waterloo, Hastings.
That’s a useful historical context for considering Ukraine’s long-telegraphed counteroffensive against Russia’s heavily dug-in forces, which might begin in the coming days or weeks — depending partly on how long it takes for fields to dry after heavy spring rains. Much as it might frustrate Ukraine’s allies, its chances of a decisive victory, let alone a quick one, are rated by most analysts as slim. The West should prepare to continue supporting Ukraine even if the counteroffensive’s results are meager.
It bears repeating, though, that most analysts expected a swift Russian victory when Vladimir Putin unleashed his ruinous invasion nearly 15 months ago. They were wrong. Ukraine’s military forces — highly motivated, ably led, technically agile and fighting, it’s worth remembering, for their homes, families and very national identity — have shocked the world with their success. Despite massive numerical inferiority, they held off a far more powerful invader intent on a land grab. And over the course of a few months last summer and fall, they pushed Moscow’s forces back from more than 10,000 square miles of territory taken in the war’s initial weeks.
It’s also worth recalling that much of their success took place before the United States and its NATO allies provided much of the staggering quantities of arms and munitions as well as training that have now been rendered to Kyiv’s forces. The coming clash will be a measure not only of Ukraine’s resolve and skill, which it has already proved in spades, but the effective use to which it can continue to put some of the West’s most advanced weapons.
Also on the Editorial Board’s agenda
- The Biden administration releases a review on the Colorado River.
- The misery of Belarus’s political prisoners should not be ignored.
- Biden has a new border plan.
- The United States should keep the pressure on Nicaragua.
- America’s fight against inflation isn’t over.
- The Taliban has doubled down on the repression of women
Unfortunately, the stress in that assessment needs to be on the word “some.” Because while the gusher of Western materiel to Ukraine has been impressive, it has also been too slow and barely adequate to the task at hand: forcing the retreat of one of the world’s five biggest militaries.
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Ukraine’s top military commander, Gen. Valery Zaluzhny, said in December his forces needed 300 main battle tanks, an assessment some analysts regarded as conservative. His forces have received about 230. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and his government have pleaded for long-range missiles, specifically a U.S.-made system known as ATACMS. Those have been denied by President Biden. So have F-16 fighter jets, which the Ukrainians also badly want. And the West’s ability to produce and ship artillery ammunition, which has been the Ukrainian military’s bread and butter for most of the war, has been all too finite.
That does not mean Ukraine’s offensive is doomed. It does mean that Washington and its European allies have not quite matched their full-throated rhetorical support of Ukraine with an unbridled supply of the weapons that Kyiv, and many military experts, say Ukraine’s soldiers need. Ukraine has been helped enormously by Western provisions. An imponderable of the future fighting will be how things might have gone differently, or better, if the West had sent more.
Despite Ukraine’s astonishing battlefield successes so far, Putin’s forces still occupy about 18 percent of Ukrainian territory, including Crimea, which Moscow seized in 2014 and then annexed, illegally. Kyiv’s coming counteroffensive is aimed at regaining as much of that territory as possible. Given Russia’s inherent advantages — especially the sheer size of its forces and an unfettered industrial mobilization in support of the war — Ukraine should get credit for recapturing any territory. Unfortunately, that is not likely.
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Putin has calculated, probably correctly, that time is his ally and that the West’s commitment to Kyiv will sooner or later be subverted by “Ukraine fatigue,” exacerbated by the cost to European and American taxpayers. Ukrainian leaders agree with that assessment and therefore are fully aware that they are underdogs not just on the battlefield but also in the parallel struggle over expectations management. Making major territorial gains will not only be a boost to the morale of Ukraine’s own troops and citizens; it might also be a necessary precondition of maintaining the West’s flow of arms. “I believe that the more victories we have on the battlefield, frankly, the more people will believe in us, which means we will get more help,” Mr. Zelensky told The Post in Kyiv last week.
That is a clear-eyed assessment. It is simultaneously true that whatever obstacles, setbacks, reversals and disappointments that Ukraine might suffer — and it will surely suffer some — should not lead to premature conclusions that its counteroffensive has failed. In fact, Ukraine, with the West’s help, has already won an enormous strategic victory by standing up to Mr. Putin’s unwarranted, bloody-minded aggression and exposing Russia’s military as the poorly trained, badly motivated, ill-disciplined and ineptly led force that it is.
The Kremlin has tried to dismember and erase a sovereign state from the map. It has failed. But the fight to force the further retreat of Russia’s troops continues. Ukraine’s fight is the free world’s fight — for the bedrock right of any country to choose its destiny as part of the family of democratic, pluralistic and tolerant nations. The West should not waver — before or after Ukraine’s offensive — whether it moves the front line miles or mere inches.
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The Washington Post · by Editorial Board · May 9, 2023
20. Beyond Ukraine’s Offensive
Excerpts:
Some may hope that a successful offensive may soon thereafter lead to a negotiated armistice, but this must be balanced against the prospect that a cease-fire will simply yield a rearmament period, after which Moscow will likely seek to renew the war. Whether an armistice favors Russia or Ukraine is debatable. Russia will certainly seek to rearm, but the extent of continuing Western military assistance to Ukraine is uncertain. Consequently, the way this war ends could lead to a follow-on war. After all, the current conflict is a continuation of the original 2014 Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Among Western countries, there are competing visions for how the war might end. A defeat for Moscow is not the same as victory for Kyiv, and one does not have to travel widely in Europe to discover that not everyone defines a Ukrainian victory in the same way. Some see the present situation as already a strategic defeat for Moscow; for others, this outcome remains indeterminate. As it stands, what follows the coming offensive will reveal whether Western countries are arming Ukraine to help Kyiv fully restore territorial control or just to put it in a better position for negotiations.
Although the coming Ukrainian offensive will do much to set expectations for the future trajectory of this war, the real challenge is thinking through what comes after. The offensive has consumed planning, but a sober-minded approach would recognize that supporting Ukraine will be a long-term effort. It is time, then, for the West to start planning more actively for the future, beyond the coming offensive. History shows that wars are difficult to end and often go on well beyond the decisive phases of fighting, including as negotiations continue. For Ukraine and its Western backers, a working theory of victory must be premised on endurance, addressing Ukraine’s long-term force quality, capability, and sustainment needs. The United States and Europe must make the necessary investments to support the war effort well beyond 2023, develop plans for successive operations —and avoid pinning their hopes on any single offensive effort.
Beyond Ukraine’s Offensive
The West Needs to Prepare the Country’s Military for a Long War
May 10, 2023
Foreign Affairs · by Michael Kofman and Rob Lee · May 10, 2023
As the Russian winter offensive reaches its culmination, Ukraine is poised to seize the initiative. In the coming weeks, it plans to conduct an offensive operation, or series of offensives, that may prove decisive in this phase of the conflict. This is not Ukraine’s only remaining opportunity to liberate a substantial amount of territory, and inflict a major defeat on Russian forces, but the upcoming offensive may be the moment when available Western military equipment, training, and ammunition best intersect with the forces set aside by Ukraine for this operation. Ukraine is also eager to demonstrate that, despite months of brutal fighting, its military is not exhausted and remains able to break through Russian lines.
Policymakers, however, have placed an undue emphasis on the upcoming offensive without providing sufficient consideration of what will come afterward and whether Ukraine is well positioned for the next phase. It is critical that Ukraine’s Western partners develop a long-term theory of victory for Ukraine, since even in the best-case scenario, this upcoming offensive is unlikely to end the conflict. Indeed, what follows this operation could be another period of indeterminate fighting and attrition, but with reduced ammunition deliveries to Ukraine. This is already a long war, and it is likely to become protracted. History is an imperfect guide, but it suggests wars that endure for more than a year are likely to go on for at least several more and are exceedingly difficult to end. A Western theory of success must therefore prevent a situation in which the war drags on, but where Western countries are unable to provide Ukraine with a decisive advantage.
Ukraine may well achieve battlefield success, but it will take time to translate military victories into political outcomes. The West must also prepare for the prospect that this offensive may not achieve the kinds of gains seen during Ukraine’s successful operations in Kharkiv and Kherson. By placing too many bets on the outcome of this offensive, Western countries have not effectively signaled their commitment to a prolonged effort. If this operation proves to be the high point of Western assistance to Kyiv, then Moscow could assume that time is still on its side and that bedraggled Russian forces can eventually wear down the Ukrainian military. Whether Ukraine’s next operation is successful or not, Russia’s leader may have few incentives to negotiate. For Ukraine to sustain momentum—and pressure—Western states must make a set of commitments and plans for what follows this operation, rather than maintain a wait-and-see approach. Otherwise, the West risks creating a situation whereby Russian forces are able to recover, stabilize their lines, and try to retake the initiative.
A BRUTAL WINTER
After successive defeats in Kharkiv and Kherson, the Russian military was vulnerable heading into the winter. But the Ukrainian armed forces also sustained losses and expended ammunition in those operations, which forced them to focus on their own reconstitution. Despite earlier optimism that Ukraine could press its advantage into the winter, the Ukrainian military was not in a strong position to sustain its offensive and achieve further battlefield gains. Mobilization and the successful withdrawal from the right bank of Kherson helped Russia stabilize its lines, build a reserve, and develop a more sustainable rotation for units off the frontline. The Russian military also began building more sophisticated defenses across the frontline in Ukraine with minefields, antitank obstacles, and trenches. By shortening the front and upping the number of personnel deployed, the Russian military also increased the force density relative to the terrain it was defending. What followed was a period of grinding attrition where neither side had a significant advantage.
Fortunately for Ukraine, Russia’s political leadership proved impatient, abandoning a defensive strategy and replacing the more competent General Sergey Surovikin with Valery Gerasimov, the Russian chief of general staff, as the commander of its forces in Ukraine. Gerasimov launched an ill-conceived and ill-timed offensive across the Donbas starting in late January. The Russian military, still recovering, was in no position to conduct offensive operations given its deficits in force quality, equipment, and ammunition. Moscow had mobilized more than 300,000 personnel, which it quickly used to replenish the Russian forces, but it could not restore sufficient offensive potential. Quantity matters, but a military cannot rebuild its quality in just a few months.
In practice, then, Russia’s winter offensive was dependent on a small percentage of its military, primarily naval infantry and airborne units, which had taken heavy losses throughout the war and were increasingly relying on mobilized personnel as replacements. At Bakhmut, most of the fighting was done by the state-affiliated Wagner paramilitary organization instead of the regular armed forces, which largely played a supporting role. In general, the Russian military demonstrated that it was no longer capable of large-scale combat operations. Instead, it conducted localized attacks with smaller formations and assault detachments.
The Russian military nonetheless attempted to attack along six axes—Avdiivka, Bakhmut, Bilohorivka, Kreminna-Lyman, Marinka, and Vuhledar—hoping to strain Ukrainian armed forces across a broad front. But compared with the battle of the Donbas in 2022, Russia had a weaker advantage in artillery during these campaigns, and this deficiency further limited its offensive potential. Russian forces did regain the initiative through these assaults and fixed Ukrainian forces in place, but despite thousands of casualties, the Russian military gained little territory and the offensive did not result in a significant breakthrough. Instead, Russia’s offensive further weakened its military by expending manpower, materiel, and ammunition. These losses will give Ukraine its best opportunity to launch a counteroffensive. Russia’s attempts to seize the Donbas this year also illustrated that Moscow’s strategy continues to suffer from a mismatch between political aims and military means.
THE BATTLE FOR BAKHMUT
Yet in the battle for Bakhmut, over time, Ukraine’s position became precarious. The Ukrainian armed forces have been partially enveloped since February, and they no longer enjoy as favorable an attrition ratio as they once did. Bakhmut is surrounded by high ground, which gave Russian forces an advantage once they seized the southern and northern flanks in January and February, respectively. The situation looked dire in early March. Although Ukraine stabilized the flanks by committing additional forces, allowing it to secure the remaining main supply route into the city, Russian forces have now captured most of the city. Moscow did not have the forces required to encircle Bakhmut, which could have led to a significant victory, so it instead focused on the more symbolic win of taking the city itself.
Compared with the battle of Vuhledar and other parts of the front during Russia’s winter offensive, Ukraine’s attrition ratio in Bakhmut is less favorable, and a smaller share of Russia’s casualties are from elite units. Elements from Russia’s 106th Guards Airborne Division and other Russian military units are operating along the Bakhmut front, but Wagner is leading the fight, particularly in the city itself. The majority of Russian casualties sustained in Bakhmut are from Wagner, and the majority of Wagner’s losses have been from minimally trained convicts. Those losses matter, but losing convicts affects Russia’s overall war effort much less than losing regular soldiers or mobilized personnel, especially outside settings like Bakhmut. Wagner convicts represent a minimal investment and are not individuals taken out of the economy, and so their losses lack political ramifications. Given Wagner’s heavy reliance on convicts, it is not clear that approach would have proven effective outside an urban setting like Bakhmut.
During Ukraine’s previous offensives, the backstop for the Russian military was its airborne and naval infantry, not Wagner forces. For Russia, then, it may turn out that the heavy losses sustained among elite units in Vuhledar, such as the 40th Naval Infantry Brigade and 155th Naval Infantry Brigade, were more strategically important than the relative losses in Bakhmut. The losses in Vuhledar could make it difficult for Russian forces to defend against Ukraine’s upcoming offensive. But Ukraine may also find that the forces and ammunition it expended to defend Bakhmut, in relatively unfavorable terrain, will impose a constraint on operations later this year. Furthermore, Wagner’s assaults fixed a significant number of Ukrainian forces over the winter, giving the Russian military time to stabilize their lines and entrench.
Bakhmut is mostly significant for political and symbolic reasons. Strategically, it is a gateway to Slovyansk and Kramatorsk, but Ukraine continues to hold better defensive terrain west of the city. Capturing it does little to help Russian forces further advance and they may be hard pressed to defend it afterward. But in the end, military strategy is political, as it bridges military operations with political objectives. Ukraine’s leadership is keen to avoid giving Russia any kind of victory which might bolster Russian morale, and it has chosen to continue defending Bakhmut.
It is therefore too early to judge the effect of the battle for Bakhmut on this war. The result will be clearer in hindsight. Ukrainian forces avoided encirclement and managed to inflict high costs on the Russian military, even if most of the losses appear to be among Wagner units. Long term, the significance of the resources both sides expended in the battle will likely be the most important factor. Whether Ukraine could have pursued a better approach in this instance will be a subject for historians to debate.
GRAPPLING WITH UNCERTAINTY
Ukraine has sought to build a force capable of conducting an offensive on top of its currently deployed formations. Kyiv has assembled three corps comprised of mechanized (or motorized) infantry brigades. These new units include roughly nine maneuver brigades armed largely with Western-provided equipment and at least three generated by Ukraine. These brigades will likely consist of newly mobilized personnel, perhaps with a core of experienced soldiers. The units will be backed by several assault brigades, as part of the Ukrainian Ministry of Interior effort to stand up an ‘Offensive Guard” force in support. But as the offensive draws near, it is not clear what percentage of these units will be completed for the operation, or if the supporting brigades will be assembled in time.
The challenge Ukraine faces is that, despite an influx of Western equipment, its force is largely mobilized, uneven in quality, and training on a compressed schedule. And over the course of the past year, the Ukrainian military has taken significant casualties. Many junior officers, noncommissioned officers, veteran soldiers, and troops previously trained by NATO have been lost in the fighting. This is a very short amount of time for newly mobilized soldiers to master new equipment and conduct combined-arms training as a unit. In general, Ukraine’s advantage has been that as a force it has proven more adaptable, much better motivated, and more rewarding of initiative than the Russian military.
Ukraine has fought the war its own way, with a mixture of mission command at junior levels and at times Soviet-style centralized command at the top. It has placed a strong emphasis on artillery and attrition over maneuver in warfare, while also integrating Western precision and intelligence for long-range strikes. The Western approach has been to train Ukrainian forces in combined-arms maneuver in an effort to have them fight more like a NATO military would, similar to what the West has taught in past train-and-assist programs. The challenge with this approach is that NATO militaries are unaccustomed to fighting without air superiority, especially air superiority established and maintained by American airpower, or at least with the logistics and enabling capabilities that the United States typically brings to the fight. As a result, Ukrainian soldiers must tackle Russia’s prepared defenses without the kind of air support and logistics that their Western instructors have long been accustomed to.
It is up to the loser to decide when a war is over.
Russia’s defenses are not impenetrable, but they could be strong enough to attrit Ukrainian forces over multiple defensive lines, while buying time so reinforcements can arrive. Their defense-in-depth is designed to prevent a tactical breakthrough from achieving strategic effects- in particular, to stop a Ukrainian breakthrough from generating momentum. The upcoming offensive will therefore test the current theory of success in Kyiv and across contributing Western capitals: that Ukrainian forces, trained and equipped with Western systems, can fight more effectively and break through fortified Russian lines.
Both the new Ukrainian formations and the Russian defensive preparations will be largely untested at the start of the offensive, making the course of the coming battles difficult to predict. Similarly, it is unclear whether the West has provided sufficient enabling capabilities for Ukraine’s offensive, such as breaching equipment, mine-clearing machines, and bridging gear. Despite the commonplace focus on big-ticket items like tanks or fighter jets, it is enablers, logistics, and training that often have the largest effect over time.
Russia’s sizable, mobilized force proved to be ineffective at conducting offensive operations over the winter, but it is easier for poorly trained units to defend than to attack. It is unclear what effect attrition in elite Russian units and ammunition expenditure during Russia’s winter offensive will have on Ukraine’s upcoming offensive. Although the Russian military is preparing for Ukraine’s counteroffensive, Russia has misspent valuable resources, and Russian morale may be low—leaving its forces vulnerable. Soft factors and intangibles, which are difficult to measure, are likely in Ukraine’s favor. Nonetheless, the situation is less propitious for Ukrainian forces than it was in Kharkiv in September. Ukraine’s task is daunting. It must not only succeed, but must also avoid overextension.
THE LONG ROAD AHEAD
The challenge with the upcoming offensive is that, despite being saddled with high expectations, it appears to be a one-shot affair. Ukraine is likely to receive a substantial injection of artillery ammunition ahead of this operation, but this package will offer a window of opportunity rather than a sustained advantage. Western efforts to support Ukraine suffer from short-term thinking, delivering capabilities just in time, or as a surge for the offensive operation, but with little clarity on what will follow.
Whether successful or not, Ukraine may witness another period of indeterminate fighting after this offensive, comparable to what followed its successes in Kharkiv and Kherson. The reason for this is twofold: Western countries made key investments in production capacity late into this war, and much of the West’s support appears to be focused on the short term—then seeing what happens next. The gap between Western efforts is filled by Russian efforts to stabilize the lines and reconstitute, along with prolonged periods of attrition. Indeed, Ukraine may be forced to fight with less artillery or air defense ammunition late this year than it was expending during the Russian winter offensive.
Yet what has remained constant is that analysts and policymakers who believe that the next weapon system sent to Ukraine would prove to be a game-changer have consistently been disappointed. Conventional wars on this scale require large numbers of equipment and munitions and scaled-up training programs. Capability matters, but there are no silver bullets. Ukraine will likely retake territory in its upcoming offensive and may significantly breach Russia’s lines. But even if Ukraine attains a military victory, or a series of victories, this does not mean that the war would end at that point. It is up to the loser to decide when a war is over, and this conflict is just as likely to continue as a war across the Russian-Ukrainian border.
At this point, there is little evidence that Russian President Vladimir Putin will willingly end the conflict, even if the Russian military is facing defeat. He may seek to continue it as a war of attrition, no matter the prospects for Russian forces on the battlefield. Putin may assume that this offensive represents the high point of Western assistance and that, over time, Russia may still exhaust the Ukrainian military, perhaps in the third or fourth year of the conflict. These assumptions may be objectively false, but as long as Moscow believes that the next offensive is a one-off affair, it may reason that time is still on Russia’s side. Similarly, if Ukraine is successful, then neither its society nor its political leadership will be keen to settle for anything other than total victory. In short, it is unlikely that the coming offensive will create good prospects for negotiations.
Among Western countries, there are competing visions for how the war might end.
That said, Russia does not seem well positioned for a forever war. Russia’s ability to repair and restore equipment from storage appears so constrained that the country is increasingly reliant on Soviet gear from the 1950s and 1960s to fill out mobilized regiments. As Ukraine acquires better Western equipment, the Russian military has increasingly come to resemble an early Cold War–period museum. There are also growing signs of strain on the Russian economy, where energy sale revenues are becoming constrained by sanctions and Europe’s pivot away from Russian gas. Even if Moscow can keep mobilizing manpower and bringing old military equipment onto the battlefield, Russia will face growing economic pressures and shortages of skilled labor.
Russian forces in Ukraine still face a structural manpower problem, and despite a national recruitment campaign, Moscow will likely need to mobilize again to sustain the war. It is desperate to avoid doing so. If the West can sustain Ukraine’s war effort, then despite its resilience and mobilization reserves, Russia may find its disadvantage growing over time. In recent months, European countries have begun making the necessary investments in artillery production and issuing procurement contracts, although some of these decisions are coming more than a year into the war.
Some may hope that a successful offensive may soon thereafter lead to a negotiated armistice, but this must be balanced against the prospect that a cease-fire will simply yield a rearmament period, after which Moscow will likely seek to renew the war. Whether an armistice favors Russia or Ukraine is debatable. Russia will certainly seek to rearm, but the extent of continuing Western military assistance to Ukraine is uncertain. Consequently, the way this war ends could lead to a follow-on war. After all, the current conflict is a continuation of the original 2014 Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Among Western countries, there are competing visions for how the war might end. A defeat for Moscow is not the same as victory for Kyiv, and one does not have to travel widely in Europe to discover that not everyone defines a Ukrainian victory in the same way. Some see the present situation as already a strategic defeat for Moscow; for others, this outcome remains indeterminate. As it stands, what follows the coming offensive will reveal whether Western countries are arming Ukraine to help Kyiv fully restore territorial control or just to put it in a better position for negotiations.
Although the coming Ukrainian offensive will do much to set expectations for the future trajectory of this war, the real challenge is thinking through what comes after. The offensive has consumed planning, but a sober-minded approach would recognize that supporting Ukraine will be a long-term effort. It is time, then, for the West to start planning more actively for the future, beyond the coming offensive. History shows that wars are difficult to end and often go on well beyond the decisive phases of fighting, including as negotiations continue. For Ukraine and its Western backers, a working theory of victory must be premised on endurance, addressing Ukraine’s long-term force quality, capability, and sustainment needs. The United States and Europe must make the necessary investments to support the war effort well beyond 2023, develop plans for successive operations —and avoid pinning their hopes on any single offensive effort.
- MICHAEL KOFMAN is Research Program Director of the Russia Studies Program at the Center for Naval Analyses and an Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Center for a New American Security.
- ROB LEE is a Senior Fellow in Foreign Policy Research Institute’s Eurasia Program.
Foreign Affairs · by Michael Kofman and Rob Lee · May 10, 2023
21. How to Spot an Autocrat’s Economic Lies
ahhhh... the nighttime lights.
Excerpts:
Based on official figures, autocracies tend to grow at higher rates than do democracies. Between 1992 and 2013, countries classified as “not free” by Freedom House grew at an average aggregate rate of 85 percent, whereas countries classified as “free” grew at an average aggregate rate of just 61 percent. Nine out of the 14 countries with the highest GDP growth during this period were “not free.” However, these long-run figures change once they are adjusted based on the estimates derived from my study of night-time lights: “not free” countries grew at an aggregate rate of 55 percent during the period in question, while “free” countries grew at a rate of 56 percent. These figures suggest that the autocratic tendency to overstate GDP growth—not actual economic performance—accounts for most of the difference in official growth rates between democracies and autocracies in recent decades.
These findings also shed light on a question that occupies many analysts: when will China’s GDP overtake that of the United States and make China the largest economy in the world? Recent estimates have suggested that China could reach that milestone as soon as 2035. Despite the country’s unprecedented economic growth over the past 40 years, my research suggests that many current estimates may be excessively optimistic, since they do not account for autocrats’ habitual overstatement of GDP growth. Although China’s economic miracle is undeniable and the country’s economy seems on track to one day overtake that of the United States, its leaders will likely try to speed the arrival to this milestone by relying on bloated numbers and hopeful accounting.
How to Spot an Autocrat’s Economic Lies
In China and Elsewhere, Forget the Numbers—Look at the Lights
May 10, 2023
Foreign Affairs · by Luis R. Martínez · May 10, 2023
Winston Smith, the protagonist of George Orwell’s 1984, spends his days as an employee at the Ministry of Truth adjusting documents to conform to the fluctuating political needs of Big Brother’s regime. “Who controls the past controls the future, who controls the present controls the past,” Orwell wrote, drawing a connection between a government’s ability to influence what the public perceives as the truth and that government’s political survival. Although he leaned to the political left, Orwell was deeply wary of the tyranny coalescing in the Soviet Union, which sought to bend reality to its needs. Joseph Stalin had a penchant for manipulating photographs, airbrushing out figures whom he had purged. He also wanted to rule untrammeled over the field of official statistics. Stalin had the bureaucrats in charge of the 1937 census arrested and executed after their findings displeased him; the initial results suggested that the Soviet population had not grown as much as expected in the preceding years, mostly as a result of the 1932–33 famine caused by Stalin’s collectivization of agriculture.
Governments of all stripes remain preoccupied by such statistics, and many leaders feel compelled to cook the books. In a December 2022 address, Chinese President Xi Jinping claimed that his country’s GDP was expected to exceed 120 trillion yuan ($17 trillion, around $6 trillion less than that of the United States) for the year. If true, this figure implied an annual growth rate for the economy of approximately 4.4 percent, much higher than the 3.3 percent growth rate that independent forecasters had expected. It also suggested that the Chinese economy is well on its way to matching its American counterpart, at least in absolute terms, and could overtake the U.S. economy in as little as a decade. Such a feat would be the culmination of what is already the greatest economic success story of recent times and would further increase China’s geopolitical heft.
But there is good reason to doubt the magnitude of Beijing’s economic achievements. The Chinese government and those of other autocracies are especially prone to inflating statistics regarding their performance. Of course, leaders in democracies try to burnish their records in all sorts of cynical and even deceitful ways, but their statements tend to face greater scrutiny and resistance. Autocrats can lie much more easily. My research, which parses satellite images of night-time lights in order to provide a more accurate measure of economic activity, finds that autocracies habitually overstate their economic success. China’s GDP growth, in truth, is not as high as its leaders insist, and the country is not as close to catching up with the United States as is commonly presumed.
COOKING THE BOOKS
China’s statistics have long inspired doubt. Academics have debated for years whether the numbers produced by the Chinese government on topics as diverse as air pollution and workplace safety should be trusted. Beijing’s decision to abruptly end its strict zero-COVID policies at the end of 2022 prompted questions about the credibility of its official COVID-19 mortality figures, which remained impossibly low.
When it comes to GDP figures, there are good reasons to be skeptical. Chinese local officials produce data on economic growth within their jurisdictions, which central authorities then weigh in decisions about whether to promote those same local officials. The inextricably politicized nature of these figures has forced many leaders to take them with a pinch of salt. The unreliability of some of China’s official economic statistics seems to be an open secret among high-ranking officials, as evidenced by former Premier Li Keqiang’s acknowledgment in 2007 that railway cargo volume, electricity consumption, and loan disbursements were more credible measures of economic activity than blunt GDP figures.
Unlike official GDP growth statistics, night-time lights cannot be manipulated.
To be sure, this impulse to manipulate official records to paint a rosy picture is not exclusive to nondemocracies. In the early 2000s, several member states of the European Union engaged in creative accounting in order to artificially comply with supranational fiscal rules. At the end of the same decade, inflation measured through online prices in Argentina was three times larger than the official estimates, a discrepancy that was not observed for other large economies in Latin America. In Colombia, the head of the National Statistical Agency resigned in 2004 amid allegations that he had been pressured by the government of then President Alvaro Uribe not to release the results of a survey on security perceptions, a sensitive topic for a government centered on law and order.
There are, however, several important differences between the distortions that occur in democracies and those that occur in autocracies. Democracies tend to allow public officials to speak up against the government without fear of reprisals and, more generally, create an environment that facilitates scrutiny and accountability. Officials in democracies and autocracies may both have incentives to overstate government performance, but leaders in democracies have a harder time getting away with it. A well-functioning system of checks and balances allows for the examination of official statistics by political opponents, judicial institutions, the news media, and the public at large. Moreover, the protection of basic civil liberties facilitates the publicization of evidence of misreporting.
These institutional constraints are largely absent in authoritarian regimes, which allow for greater control and manipulation of information. As the economist Sergei Guriev and the political scientist Daniel Treisman argue in Spin Dictators, the desire and capacity to manipulate information is the defining feature of present-day autocrats. For instance, the Soviet government initially denied the catastrophic nuclear accident at Chernobyl in 1986 and admitted the magnitude of the disaster only when radioactivity measures skyrocketed in other countries. In recent times, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan have put a tight muzzle on all news media in their countries. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s government has engaged in a massive misinformation campaign regarding its invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
THE VIEW FROM ABOVE
In recently published research, I examined whether autocracies are more prone to overstating economic growth than democracies by analyzing both official GDP figures and the spread of night-time lights as recorded by satellites. Scholars have begun to use such lights as a proxy for economic activity. An economic expansion leads to an increase in private and public infrastructure (more houses, more factories, more roads) and higher electricity consumption. All of these factors produce more lights in the night, which the U.S. Air Force’s defense meteorological satellite program can measure at a highly granular level in publicly available data sets. This form of data has several key advantages for the study of economic activity: it covers much of the globe, it allows for easy comparison across locations and over time, and it can be aggregated to different units of observation, such as villages, provinces, and entire countries. Most important, unlike official statistics regarding GDP growth, night-time lights cannot be manipulated.
I parsed the available data on night-time lights in 184 countries between 1992 and 2013, comparing changes in the relative brightness of a country with its reported GDP data. Autocracies reported higher GDP growth figures than democracies did for the same amount of growth in night-time lights, overstating yearly GDP growth by a factor of 1.35 relative to democracies. (This means that when the true growth rate is 1.0 percent, the authoritarian government reports 1.35 percent, or when the true growth rate is 10 percent, it reports 13.5 percent.)
These exaggerations of GDP growth are not constant across time or space. I found, for instance, that the discrepancy between night-time lights and GDP is not apparent in developing countries during years that they benefited from concessionary loans and grants from the World Bank’s International Development Association. But once their gross national incomes grow beyond the point where they are eligible for these programs, they begin to inflate their statistics. This makes sense. Governments that derive a relatively large share of their revenue from the fact that they are poor have a weaker incentive to overstate how well their economies are doing. But once they no longer have much to gain from being poor, they seek the consolation of inflated numbers.
Governments exaggerate their GDP growth to a larger degree when their economies are underperforming relative to the rest of the world. Last year was by all accounts a difficult year for the Chinese economy, following three years of strict pandemic-related restrictions. It may be a coincidence, but just as China’s political elite gathered in Beijing for the 20th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, the country’s National Bureau of Statistics announced a highly unusual delay in the publication of the official GDP figures. In his December address, Xi reported the robust figure of 4.4 percent GDP growth; if that figure is reduced by the factor of 1.35, as suggested by my research, China’s real growth rate would stand at 3.3 percent, the rate that was predicted by independent analysts.
REAL NUMBERS
Based on official figures, autocracies tend to grow at higher rates than do democracies. Between 1992 and 2013, countries classified as “not free” by Freedom House grew at an average aggregate rate of 85 percent, whereas countries classified as “free” grew at an average aggregate rate of just 61 percent. Nine out of the 14 countries with the highest GDP growth during this period were “not free.” However, these long-run figures change once they are adjusted based on the estimates derived from my study of night-time lights: “not free” countries grew at an aggregate rate of 55 percent during the period in question, while “free” countries grew at a rate of 56 percent. These figures suggest that the autocratic tendency to overstate GDP growth—not actual economic performance—accounts for most of the difference in official growth rates between democracies and autocracies in recent decades.
These findings also shed light on a question that occupies many analysts: when will China’s GDP overtake that of the United States and make China the largest economy in the world? Recent estimates have suggested that China could reach that milestone as soon as 2035. Despite the country’s unprecedented economic growth over the past 40 years, my research suggests that many current estimates may be excessively optimistic, since they do not account for autocrats’ habitual overstatement of GDP growth. Although China’s economic miracle is undeniable and the country’s economy seems on track to one day overtake that of the United States, its leaders will likely try to speed the arrival to this milestone by relying on bloated numbers and hopeful accounting.
LUIS R. MARTÍNEZ is Assistant Professor at the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago.
Foreign Affairs · by Luis R. Martínez · May 10, 2023
22. The New Washington Consensus
Conclusion:
Whatever the shortcomings of the policy, the conceptual change is real and significant. In a recent column, The New York Times’ Gail Collins distilled the prevailing wisdom about the 2024 race: “Donald Trump’s terrible and Joe Biden’s boring.” That widely shared description of Biden is an aesthetic judgment and strangely at odds with the substance of this presidency. The Biden administration is doing nothing less than rejecting the economic orthodoxy of the past 50 years and proposing a new theory of capitalism.
The New Washington Consensus
Both Trump and Biden have positioned themselves as economic nationalists, self-consciously abandoning the precepts of the old order.
By Franklin Foer
The Atlantic · by Franklin Foer · May 9, 2023
Earlier this month, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan delivered a speech at the Brookings Institution that historically would have made for front-page material but barely registered in the world beyond wonkdom. His address was a muscular statement of ideological intent.
He argued that President Joe Biden’s agenda channeled a set of ideas Sullivan called the “new Washington consensus.” There was a bit of cheek in his use of that term. The Washington Consensus was a phrase that entered circulation at the very end of the 1980s, describing the emerging bipartisan faith in globalization, deregulation, and the wisdom of markets, suited to an era of optimistic triumphalism. But that era is ending. Or, as Sullivan put it, “The last few decades revealed cracks in those foundations.”
What Sullivan championed in the speech was something like the antithesis of that old paradigm. He said that ever-greater global interdependence is no longer desirable. One reason is China, which participates in global capitalism without fairly playing by its rules. Another is the realization, exposed by the pandemic-induced crisis in the intricate global supply chain, that the American economy is vulnerable to even small disruptions on the other side of the planet. That crisis was an indication that the world has gone too far in a libertarian direction and needs the sort of regulation and government investment that only a short while ago were highly unfashionable in the Washington policy sphere.
Although he didn’t justify his use of the term this way, he could get away with describing his views as representative of a new “consensus: Both Trump and Biden have positioned themselves as economic nationalists, self-consciously abandoning the precepts of the old order.
Franklin Foer: What Joe Biden knows about America
That’s not to describe the Trump and Biden versions of economic nationalism as equivalent. Although Trump delivered vituperative speeches, inflected by xenophobia, about elites destroying American manufacturing, he didn’t really have any ideas about how to reverse course beyond jacking up tariffs. Biden’s national-security adviser, by contrast, put a big idea at the center of his speech. He extolled the virtues of industrial strategy: a new role for the state in directing the trajectory of the economy.
Industrial strategy begins with the premise that the national interest demands that certain industries flourish domestically. The United States can’t rely on, say, semiconductors produced in Taiwan when China could plausibly invade that island and abruptly cut off access to the chips that run every car, laptop, and weapon system. To bolster such essential sectors of the economy, industrial strategy uses public investment, in the form of tax credits and subsidies, to prod firms to produce goods that the public needs.
The Sullivan speech was not just a policy wish list but a statement of values, a rejection of the idea that efficiency is the most important end of economic policy. All growth is not good growth, he argued, if it leaves America’s supply chains vulnerable to foreign adversaries and impedes the prospects of the American worker. The goal of industrial strategy is a safer, more equitable pattern of growth that better serves the national interest.
Many highfalutin speeches by presidential appointees are wishful projections. What made Sullivan’s different is that he described policy already in motion—based on all initial indications succeeding beyond expectations.
Biden’s industrial strategy has emerged in a patchwork of legislation and regulation. First came the CHIPS bill, with its $52.7 billion in subsidies for the semiconductor industry. Then came the Inflation Reduction Act, which funds various tax credits intended to spur demand for electric vehicles and designed to rapidly grow the supply of alternative energies. All the while, Biden has left Trump-era tariffs on China in place.
Semiconductor plants are intimidatingly expensive projects even with abundant government largesse; new energy infrastructure requires time-consuming permits, a strong disincentive against investment in the sector. Despite those obstacles, however, the administration’s strategy is yielding nearly instant results. Last month, the Financial Times published a report titled “‘Transformational Change’; Biden’s Industrial Policy Begins to Bear Fruit.” The article showed that firms have gone on a building spree since the passage of the two bills, committing $204 billion in large-scale projects in both the clean-energy and semiconductor industries. That’s twice what firms in those sectors spent in 2021—and 20 times what they spent in 2019. In this same time period, companies have launched 75 large-scale manufacturing projects. The FT couldn’t be sure whether these projects could be attributed to the new tax credits. But the sudden avalanche of capital investment suggests causation.
Franklin Foer: How Joe Biden wins again
The Inflation Reduction Act was passed last August. Now there’s ample reason to believe that far more companies will avail themselves of the program than the accountants assumed. Where the Congressional Budget Office initially estimated that the IRA would fund nearly $390 billion worth of tax credits, it now anticipates that the government will spend $180 billion more than that.
High demand is creating a sense of panic about the expansiveness of the IRA. Joe Manchin regrets that the legislation, which he co-authored, doesn’t include any caps on the tax credits, which might have limited the sum the government will spend on clean energy. And he’s not the only hand-wringer. This week, The New York Times ran a piece headlined “Business Fervor Driving Up Costs.”
If the program does indeed result in far more spending than the initial estimate, that might not be healthy for government coffers. But it will be plausible evidence that the transition to clean energy is transpiring at an even faster clip than the Biden administration imagined. Because the IRA places no upper limit on tax credits, there won’t be a moment in the next 10 years when the government suddenly takes its foot off the accelerator. And by the end of the decade, that accelerator will be propelling electric vehicles.
Industrial strategy will fail to deliver on everything Sullivan promised—and, in some respects, may already have failed. The limits were visible in the United Auto Workers’ recent decision not to endorse Biden’s reelection. It was an understandable expression of self-interest. Much of the capital racing into the electric-vehicle business is destined for South Carolina and other states where firms don’t have to contend with nettlesome unions. The UAW is not wrong to fear that the new Washington consensus will replicate the sins of the old. The jobs may be green, but they will continue to be low paying and precarious.
Whatever the shortcomings of the policy, the conceptual change is real and significant. In a recent column, The New York Times’ Gail Collins distilled the prevailing wisdom about the 2024 race: “Donald Trump’s terrible and Joe Biden’s boring.” That widely shared description of Biden is an aesthetic judgment and strangely at odds with the substance of this presidency. The Biden administration is doing nothing less than rejecting the economic orthodoxy of the past 50 years and proposing a new theory of capitalism.
The Atlantic · by Franklin Foer · May 9, 2023
23. McConnell predicts US aid will flow to Ukraine ‘for a good deal longer’
McConnell predicts US aid will flow to Ukraine ‘for a good deal longer’
BY ALEXANDER BOLTON - 05/09/23 10:31 AM ET
The Hill · by Brad Dress · May 9, 2023
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) says U.S. military and economic aid will continue to flow into Ukraine despite calls from some in his party for the United States to pull back from the war.
The future of U.S. support for Ukraine in its war against Russia has been clouded by some uncertainty since Republicans took control of the House in last year’s midterm election and Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) pledged there would be no “blank check” for Ukraine if Republicans gained the lower chamber.
McConnell in an interview with Bloomberg News predicted, however, that there is enough support in Congress to sustain Ukraine’s defense.
“I do think that we have enough support within Congress to sustain this for a good deal longer,” McConnell said. “All the leadership in the House and Senate in my party is very much in favor of defeating the Russians.”
And he predicted the traditional Republican view of the need for a muscular national security policy to contain Moscow’s ambitions — as epitomized by former President Reagan’s policies — would become increasingly popular among GOP officeholders and voters.
“I do think the party of Ronald Reagan is coming back here,” he said. “I think the one good thing that’s come out of this is a renewed belief that national security is important.”
Congressional leaders included $45 billion for military and economic aid to Ukraine in the $1.7 trillion omnibus spending package that President Biden signed in December.
They opted for such a large aid package in part because they anticipated difficulty passing spending legislation this year in a divided Congress, with Democrats in charge of the Senate and Republicans in control of the House.
Leaked U.S. intelligence documents that came to widespread public attention last month warned that Ukraine was running out of air defense missiles to keep Russian attack jets and helicopters away from ground forces, raising the question of whether Congress would need to pass another Ukraine aid package before year’s end.
Pakistani judge rules Imran Khan can be held for 8 days Gun-toting gold miners resist Brazil’s attempt to take back the Amazon
So far, there has been little talk of providing more assistance to Ukraine as the president and leaders in Congress have focused more in recent weeks on the looming expiration of the debt ceiling.
McConnell praised McCarthy last week for reiterating his support for the war effort when a Russian reporter attempted to assert that the Speaker does not favor open-ended U.S. involvement in Ukraine’s defense.
“No, I vote for aid for Ukraine. I support aid for Ukraine. I do not support what your country has done to Ukraine. I do not support your killing of the children either,” McCarthy said. “And I think for one standpoint, you should pull out. And I don’t think it’s right. And we will continue to support.”
The Hill · by Brad Dress · May 9, 2023
24. Who was General Mark Milley before he was 'The Chairman'?
A very long read with a lot of details.
A lot to unpack in this anecdote about his Special Forces experience.
After Milley graduated from Special Forces training in 1982, he was on the captain’s list, meaning his next promotion was in sight. He was assigned to the 2nd Battalion, 5th Special Forces Group as the commander of ODA 543, a 12-man combat diver-qualified Special Forces team. As he made his way to the team room for the first time, he found one soldier inside sitting at a desk.
It was the team’s senior enlisted leader, Master Sgt. Henry “Hank” Beck. Beck remembers that first meeting well:
“Who’s in charge here?” Milley asked.
“Well, I am. I’m Hank.” Beck replied.
“Don’t you stand when a lieutenant’s present?”
“Let me tell you something,” Beck remembers saying. “This is Special Forces and this is run completely different than the Army. You’ll get all your due respect of the salutes and the hurrahs when we’re out in front of people. Here, your main job is to keep the man off my back”
With the ground rules established, Beck gave Milley a quick lay of the land, including what to say at meetings with the battalion commander, and how to say it — absolutely no profanity and should one of the unit’s leaders suggest something that sounded like a bad idea, Beck suggested saying “It sounds reasonable, but I’d like to look into it.”
He explained to Milley that, as the small unit’s senior enlisted leader, he needed the team’s sole officer to be someone who didn’t make waves, didn’t make their lives harder with their superiors, and who could provide top cover when it was needed.
“He took everything under his belt and he walked back out and came back in and goes ‘Hi, I’m Mark, who’s this?’ And right after that, we hit it off real good,” Beck recalled.
Over the next year two years, the pair worked together constantly, enduring a breakneck training cycle, which included days at the range, 80-pound ruck runs, jump training, requalification courses, and nights out in the field where they’d split a canteen cup of MRE coffee and cocoa — MoCo, they called it. They grew to be inseparable, and to this day remain in touch, with Beck attending every one of Milley’s promotions from when he picked up his first star, to when he was named chairman of the Joint Chiefs.
With combat experience that spanned multiple tours downrange during the Vietnam War, one of which involved a harrowing firefight that would later see Beck awarded the Distinguished Service Cross — which Milley pinned on him during a ceremony in 2017 — Beck was both an advisor and mentor to Milley. He saw a capable officer with a promising future in the force in Milley, so Beck took every opportunity to help him along, from that initial unofficial counseling session to helping Milley prepare for the Combat Diver Qualification Course in Key West, Florida.
“He came to the team assigned to me, to 543, as non-scuba,” Beck said. “And he came to me non-scuba qualified because I couldn’t get an officer — they’d failed pre-scuba, every time.
“And pre-scuba is, ooh boy,” he added with a whistle and a long exhale to emphasize the point. The seven-week course is infamous for its grueling training and high rate of attrition: one out of every three candidates fail.
To help Milley prepare, Beck, along with the team medic, measured his height and weight, and gave him the basic physical to find out where he stood.
“And he was in very good shape,” Beck said. “I told my team medics, I said, ‘this is Mark, he’s going through pre-scuba. We need to get his mindset and his heart ready to go.’ And they went ahead and put him on a diet and gave him exercises, because pre-scuba, oh boy, they smoke you. They smoke you worse than a cheap cigar. It’s designed that way. It’s to get the guys — the guys who wanna quit — to get them out before they go to Key West because once you’re in Key West, that costs big money to the Army.”
The training paid off. Milley passed, earning the coveted dive bubble — he made it through on his first try.
Who was General Mark Milley before he was 'The Chairman'?
From blue collar Boston to the military's highest ranking officer, we took a look at the man behind the stars.
BY JAMES CLARK | PUBLISHED MAY 9, 2023 3:23 PM EDT
taskandpurpose.com · · May 9, 2023
Army Gen. Mark Milley has been a lightning rod for scrutiny and controversy as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. But, strangely, the nation he has served for more than 40 years doesn’t know much about the man who so often finds himself in the crossfire of a red-hot culture war.
Until now, few people knew Milley once ran across a minefield in Iraq to stop an M1 Abrams tank seconds before the vehicle rolled over an IED. Almost no one knew that one of his soldiers put Milley up for a valor award for his actions that day.
It was April 2, 2005, and the war in Iraq was in its second full year. Milley was a colonel charged with commanding the 10th Mountain Division’s 2nd Brigade Combat Team in Baghdad, Iraq. The brigade’s area of operations swelled in recent weeks, encompassing the town of Sabaa Al Bour along the Grand Canal, the Baghdad International Airport, Abu Ghraib prison, and all the space in-between and further out. In short, the unit found itself overseeing a large swath of ground in the capital city of a country enduring an active insurgency underway against the Iraqi government and U.S. troops.
That evening — at 8 p.m., or thereabouts — a call came over the radio that there had been a vehicle-borne explosive device, or VBIED, attack on a patrol with the 1st Battalion, 41st Infantry regiment. The explosion had damaged a Bradley Fighting Vehicle and injured two soldiers near Abu Ghraib prison.
As Milley and his security detail arrived at the site of the explosion, gunfire echoed in the distance, punctuated by the deep thud of explosions coming from the West. Unbeknownst to them, insurgent forces were launching a coordinated attack against Abu Ghraib prison. The VBIED strike was the opening shot, an attempt to interdict U.S. forces and hamper their response to the assault on the prison.
As radio chatter began to come in and lift the fog of war, Milley and his team received more troubling news. A nearby bridge on the brigade’s main supply route had been booby-trapped.
Commando 6 patrol in Iraq, 2004. (Courtesy photo)
Milley, bearing the call sign Commando 6, and the 20 soldiers who made up his security team and command staff moved 300 hundred or so meters to the bridge and attempted to get a handle on the situation. What they found were half a dozen anti-tank mines, believed to be Italian-made, that had been laid out along the bridge to block both lanes of traffic. Comms were quickly established with a contingent of soldiers from a military police unit in the area, who set up a cordon on the far side of the bridge to ensure nobody crossed over and set off the explosives. Milley and his team did the same on their end and waited until engineers and explosive ordnance disposal technicians could deal with the munitions.
The bridge was out of commission, right as an enemy attack was underway, and a bottleneck had formed as patrols and convoys converged and left unable to maneuver.
Then the unexpected: a pair of M1 Abrams tanks slipped into view coming from the opposite side of the bridge. The tanks were evacuating wounded from an earlier firefight.
“As we’re monitoring the net, it’s becoming very apparent that this unit has no clue what the situation is on the ground,” recalled Ross Davidson, Milley’s operations officer at the time. “We have no direct comms with this unit moving up and we have all these anti-tank mines and anti-vehicle mines strewn all over this bridge and it’s past midnight now. It’s a freaking goat rope. We’ve got trucks backed all the way up. And now we hear the tanks coming.”
Unaware of what lay ahead, the tanks breezed right past the MPs on the far side of the bridge, straight toward Milley, his men, and the waiting mines. If the tanks made it onto the bridge, they would likely trigger the mines, and the result would be catastrophic.
Knowing this, Milley turned and ran toward them. Right across the bridge. As his feet pounded on dust-caked steel, the EOD team’s sergeant followed close on his heels. They made their way past the first mine. Then the next. Then the one after that.
“Hey, what the fuck is the boss doing?’” Davidson said, watching in disbelief at what was happening right in front of him. Milley physically placed himself between the tanks and the mines, stopping them seconds before they reached the bridge.
“The man saw what the only solution was to prevent catastrophe and he took action,” Davidson said. “No hesitation.”
Once the tanks had stopped, Milley directed the Abrams to wait while EOD finished clearing the mines, which they detonated in place. Afterward, the convoy continued along its way.
Two months later, Davidson submitted a recommendation that Milley be awarded an Army Commendation Medal with “V” for valor. Milley’s actions were one of the bravest things Davidson had seen on that deployment. But Milley was Davidson’s superior, and the award had to pass his desk before being sent higher up the chain of command for review. Moments after submitting the paperwork, Milley came to Davidson’s office. He refused to be seen as the type of officer who padded his chest with medals.
“Ross, we can’t submit this,” Milley told Davidson at the time. “There’s no freaking way. That’s just what we do, that’s how we roll. Those kinds of awards are for soldiers.”
‘Milley time’
Milley exited a black GMC Yukon and his shiny black Corfam shoes click-clacked on the pavement as he made his way through a gated entryway at Philadelphia’s Lincoln Financial Field for the 2022 Army-Navy Game on December 10. A gaggle of staffers and advisors followed. Among the group: a Marine, Gunnery Sgt. Randy Bascom, was tasked with lugging around a black canvas bag stuffed to the brim with approximately 700 challenge coins — which equates to roughly 43 pounds — for the chairman to hand out during the game.
Milley stopped, and turned to a different aide, “Hey, what’re we doing?”
As the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Milley is the top-ranking service member in the United States military; a four-star general who’s held the ear of two presidents and several defense secretaries; a combat-proven infantry officer and Green Beret upon whose shoulders rests immense power. But when it comes to public events — dog and pony shows, as they’re pejoratively called among the rank and file — he is not the master of his destiny. A staffer-in-tow holds that responsibility.
Army Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Senior Enlisted Advisor to the Chairman (SEAC) Ramon “CZ” Colon-Lopez attend the 123rd Army-Navy game in Philadelphia, Dec. 10, 2022. (DoD photo by Navy Chief Petty Officer Carlos M. Vazquez II)
Satisfied with the answer he received, the 64-year-old soldier straightened himself and kept walking. His wife, Hollyanne, came up to join the entourage as the gaggle of click-clacking dress shoes moved toward a group of grey-uniformed West Pointers — his first stop of the day.
Among high-ranking government officials, meet and greets are deliberately arranged and time is painstakingly accounted for, with so many minutes here, so many there, all dolled out according to some calculus known only to the official in question and their staff. So much so, that in the case of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, his entourage had made several traversals of the stadium grounds the day prior, tallying the precise amount of time it would take to get from one interview or media function to the next along a zig-zagging route through the stadium’s 15 acres. A few minutes were set aside here and there for brief breaks and deviations, or the inevitable trip to the bathroom — certain restrooms with heating had been noted in advance, given that the weather that day was in the 30s.
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But no plan survives contact with the enemy, and when it comes to the chairman’s schedule, the enemy is none other than the chairman himself. You see, Milley likes to talk — a lot. This is known as “Milley time,” among those who work for and with him.
“He can definitely be a little long-winded, but his speeches are brilliant,” said Sgt. Maj. of the Army Michael Grinston, the service’s top enlisted leader. Milley once interviewed Grinston to serve as his sergeant major when Milley commanded the 10th Mountain Division. Milley hired someone else. “I think it worked out,” Grinston now says.
Regarding the chairman’s gift for gab, he blends a mix of self-deprecating humor with light-hearted jabs, delivered in his customary Boston accent, as his default gruff expression softens momentarily to a smile that curls slightly at the edges, before being tugged back down into a resting half-frown.
“He’ll go in and he’ll find dirt on folks, especially when they’re doing a change of command and it’ll leave you cracking up,” said Grinston. “You may be standing there for a while listening, but it’s really funny.”
At the football game, the chairman approached a group of Cadets and immediately began a good-natured grilling on who was graduating in what year. He then pivoted to interrogating each one about their favorite sports team.
“I mean, I’m a Patriots fan,” Milley said, before noting matter of factly that if you’re from the area “your loyalty should remain in Boston, I expect that.”
“I’m Patriots, Red Sox, Bruins, Celtics,” he continued. “That’s how we roll, right? That’s how we all roll. You can take the kid out of Boston, but you can’t take the Boston out of the kid.”
After the sports talk, Milley moved to waxing on about the riveting topic of modernization. In this case, by going over the capabilities of the Army’s Mobile Protected Firepower vehicle — a tracked vehicle with a 105 mm main gun that the Army refuses to call a tank. The idea of anyone excitedly talking about a weapons development program may feel like a stretch, but this is Milley, a man who once enthusiastically expounded for 1,000 words about how the advent of rifling can be directly tied to every major tactical and strategic development among ground combat troops for the last several hundred years.
Army Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, standing among West Point cadets during the 123rd Army-Navy game in Philadelphia, Dec. 10, 2022. (DOD Photo by Navy Chief Petty Officer Carlos M. Vazquez II)
Finally, with his captive audience of West Pointers, Milley launched into a discussion of the topic his term as Chairman might be longest remembered for: his views on the Constitution.
“You got the Constitution that says, ‘We the people;’ that’s what you got to take an oath to graduate,” Milley told the soon-to-be graduates of West Point. “So, on graduation coming up, that’s what you’re going to swear to protect and defend, no matter what the cost, right?” he asked the students rhetorically. “You’ve got to stay true to that all your life, okay?”
Though 12 of the 19 Chairmen before Milley attended West Point or the Naval Academy, Milley did not. As a top student in high school, he considered it, but timely intervention by his father stopped him. Alexander Milley had fought in World War II as a Navy Corpsman alongside Marines at Saipan, Kwajalein, Tinian, and Iwo Jima. He did not want his son to don a uniform. As the story goes, during a tour of the campus, the elder Milley enlisted a cadet to give Milley an unvarnished tour, with a heavy emphasis on the regulations, long days, and the generally uptight nature of a service academy.
Milley went to Princeton instead, making him the first Chairman to have spent his undergraduate years on an Ivy League campus (he earned his commission through the school’s ROTC).
Still, Milley connects easily with the young West Pointers. But he brightens again when he spots a tent manned by Special Forces soldiers.
“There’s my Green Berets!” Milley boomed. He beelined past his staff toward the half-dozen special operators, who were all doing their best to both maintain a respectful posture, feet wide set, hands crossed at the front or behind their backs, while also stamping their feet and bending their knees to stave off the cold.
Milley’s insistence on cutting a path toward the nearest group of operators continued throughout the day: After the Army and Navy parachute teams landed on the field before kickoff, he found them in one of the interior walkways and asked “Where my SEALs at?” and “Where are my Army Rangers, Green Berets?” before handing challenge coins to each one he could find.
Back at the tent, one soldier is singled out immediately: Sgt. 1st Class Louie Cruz, a tank-of-a-man clad in green and brown multicam with a low fade, a strong jaw, and a clean shave, which Milley remarks upon instantly.
“He’s grown his hair long,” Milley tells his wife Hollyanne, before turning back to Cruz and jabbing a finger toward the soldier, who begins to crack a smile. “Where’s your beard?” Milley asks rhetorically, before giving a nod of approval and noting that “no beard is good.”
Milley and Hollyanne frequently visited the wounded at Walter Reed. They met Cruz back in 2020 after the latter was injured in Afghanistan.
“Throughout our time there, we had a couple of minor issues within Walter Reed and Gen. Milley was there to help support us and get things taken care of for us,” Cruz recalled, adding that Hollyanne spent time with the other service members spouses while their soldiers recovered.
After a round of interviews with broadcasters and sports anchors ahead of the game, Milley and his team made their way into the interior of the stadium — with the inevitable pauses and stops along the way to talk to families and vets, soldiers and sailors, and a 10-minute detour to look at a range of small arms and optics laid out on a static display of the arms and equipment fielded by Army infantrymen. It’s unclear if the day’s schedule, so carefully crafted by Milley’s dedicated staff, had accounted for that.
Once Milley is ushered inside one of the stadium’s foyers, he’s guided to a service door and into the stadium’s interior, then out onto the field for a lengthy walk to the other side, stopping here and there for more photos, quick chats, glad-handing, more photos, a couple of waves to the crowd and the cadets at the front, before reaching a gauntlet of TV cameras and stands manned by hosts and sports anchors.
Army Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is interviewed during the 123rd Army-Navy game in Philadelphia, Dec. 10, 2022. The Army beat the Navy Midshipmen 20-17 in overtime. (DoD photo by Navy Chief Petty Officer Carlos M. Vazquez II)
What followed was a half hour of rapid-fire back-to-back interviews, including one last-minute television spot with a host who approached Milley’s staff and asked for a few minutes with the general, before leaning back over to ask who Milley was. As chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley is the highest-ranking member of the U.S. military, but to most Americans, he’s no more recognizable than a C-list celebrity.
A short while later, after the pre-game festivities had wrapped up — the West Point cadets and Naval Academy midshipmen had marched around the field, the Army and Navy’s parachute teams had sailed through the skies and landed neatly on the gridiron, and the final verses of the National Anthem belted out by the crowd, Milley took to the sidelines to watch his seventh Army-Navy game in a row.
His first, however, took place more than 60 years ago in front of an old television back at their home in Massachusetts.
“I have a clear, distinct memory of it,” Milley said, clearly nostalgic. “It was a big deal. It still is a big deal. It was something my dad watched every year.”
You can take the kid out of Boston, but…
Born June 20, 1958, in Winchester, Massachusetts to Alexander and Mary Milley, Mark Milley was the youngest child of three. He grew up in a family of blue collars, which was not uncommon in Boston back then.
“Neither one of our parents went to college,” Milley said. “My father probably made maybe at the most $10,000 a year, or something like that. He didn’t have any money. My father worked as a telephone operator when they used to have actual operators.”
Like his children, the elder Milley didn’t come from means either.
“He used to shine the shoes at the Harvard gates,” Sandy Milley, Gen. Milley’s brother, said. “He’d go over and take the Harvard kids’ shoes and shine them. He’d give them to his friends to wear for three days, and then he’d charge three different guys.”
As boys, Sandy and Milley would play outside and whenever able, sneak indoors to watch television, presumably on that same old black and white TV where Milley had caught his first academy game, with preference given to shows like Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C., Hogan’s Heroes, and Combat!
“He loved the Army ever since he was a kid,” Sandy said. “We both played Army men in the backyard. That’s all we could do. They wouldn’t let us go anywhere else. We were hostage, so we played Army in the backyard, and Mark used to play with my father’s souvenir flag, and he would sit, and we used to watch Sarge Saunders on Combat! on TV.”
Separated by six years, Sandy and Milley did their best to fill the hours at home in a way that aligned with their parent’s expectations, and the family’s financial limitations.
“My father said, ‘No girls, no car, no money. Period. End of it. I’ll get ya’ sticks and a skate sharpening, the rest is up to you guys,’” Sandy recounted.
Young Milley on the ice for Belmont Hill School. (Courtesy photo)
And the two made good use of the skates and hockey sticks, playing in their adolescence, on through high school, and later in college, with Sandy attending Harvard and Milley going to Princeton, both through the use of financial aid.
In college, the two continued to play sports, particularly hockey, and within a minute of broaching the topic they immediately fall into a back-and-forth repartee common among siblings.
“I have a record that can’t be broken at Harvard,” Sandy boasts, prompting Milley to interject and declare “Then he rode the pines the rest of the year.”
For Milley, his time on the ice was formative in that it instilled a decisive nature early on — the ability to not only react to a rapidly evolving situation but to think critically, often at a breakneck pace. He also got very used to taking hits.
Despite, or perhaps because of the beating he took on the ice, “he was a heck of a defenseman,” Sandy said, approvingly. “He really covered the ice laterally. Front of the ice, in front of the net. He was a tiger.”
“I lost four teeth, broke my jaw in three spots, I’ve got stitches all over. You don’t see them anymore,” Milley said nonchalantly when asked about his hockey war wounds. “I’ve got a hundred stitches in my face.”
Milley shares a background in hockey with Gen. James McConville, the Army Chief of Staff. Like Milley, McConville was born in Massachusetts, and played hockey in college, though the two never crossed paths on the ice.
“The thing about hockey players is, it’s good life skills development because you’re used to getting knocked down and getting back up,” said McConville.
Among the Milleys, athletics was one of two core pillars in the family, the other being academics.
“He’s an avid reader which, I don’t know if people think of a young infantry soldier as reading a book or two a week but Mark has always been a reader,” Hollyanne said of her husband. “And he always talks to the athletes about combat and the sports that they do, and he can explain it much better, but how fast and dynamic and how you have to think quickly.”
Milley on the ice for Princeton University. (Courtesy photo)
Milley’s balance of books and the hockey rink eventually led him to Princeton. It was there that Milley’s path began to diverge from what his parents — particularly, his father — may have had in mind when he joined the University’s Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC).
Both of Milley’s parents served during World War II; his mother as a nurse with the Navy WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service); and his father as a Navy Corpsman who saw heavy combat in the Pacific theater, from Saipan to Iwo Jima in some of the bloodiest fighting of the war.
The war instilled two things in Alexander Milley: One was a love of Marines — a loyalty that he passed down to his youngest; the other was a deep distrust of officers.
“Oh, he hated officers,” Milley said of his father. One notable exception was his company commander, with Bravo Company, 1st Battalion, 24th Marine Regiment, who appeared to hold a place of rare esteem in the elder Milley’s enlisted heart.
“He said, ‘All you officers ever do is lie to us and we do all the bleeding and you guys pin medals on each other.’ I said, ‘That’s not true, Dad,’” recalled Milley, who noted that this view existed before he joined ROTC, and continued long after.
“My mother, too, by the way, wasn’t a big fan of officers,” Milley said. “She was Navy enlisted.”
That disdain may have been a source of some friction between Milley and his parents, particularly his father. However, his parent’s views also appeared to have been influential when it comes to Milley’s leadership approach.
“One of the things my dad said was, and this is not a negative comment about anybody from World War II, but he said none of his officers, except that one company commander, ever talked to him,” Milley said. “That was just one of those things. So he never ever saw a general officer or any of that kind of stuff. It always stuck in my mind to make sure that you circulate and get out there […] because it makes a difference. They see you as a human being.”
By 1980 Milley had graduated from Princeton with a bachelor’s degree in political science, received his commission as a second lieutenant through the college’s ROTC program, and began his career as an Army infantry officer.
The brave men of the Green Beret
Milley never intended to make the Army a career. It’s something he’s said over the years, and that day at the Army-Navy Game, wearing four stars on his collar and standing before the stands of roaring cadets and midshipmen — would-be officers among whose ranks there might be a future chairman of the Joint Chiefs — he repeats it.
“I took the military in essentially five-year chunks,” he said. “And anyone who gets commissioned the second time … I would counsel and advise them to focus on their current job, try to do the best you can at your current job, and then, at most, you might think about your next job. Try to do the best you can, make sure you take care of the material you got, the weapons and equipment, and focus on the training and the mission at hand. And everything else will take care of itself.”
For Milley, that first five-year “chunk” in the Army began with his first billet as a second lieutenant, when he served as an assistant battalion maintenance officer in the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. By his second year in the service, now as a first lieutenant, Milley set his sights on Special Forces.
Milley during the Army’s Basic Airborne Course in 1978. (Courtesy photo)
After Milley graduated from Special Forces training in 1982, he was on the captain’s list, meaning his next promotion was in sight. He was assigned to the 2nd Battalion, 5th Special Forces Group as the commander of ODA 543, a 12-man combat diver-qualified Special Forces team. As he made his way to the team room for the first time, he found one soldier inside sitting at a desk.
It was the team’s senior enlisted leader, Master Sgt. Henry “Hank” Beck. Beck remembers that first meeting well:
“Who’s in charge here?” Milley asked.
“Well, I am. I’m Hank.” Beck replied.
“Don’t you stand when a lieutenant’s present?”
“Let me tell you something,” Beck remembers saying. “This is Special Forces and this is run completely different than the Army. You’ll get all your due respect of the salutes and the hurrahs when we’re out in front of people. Here, your main job is to keep the man off my back”
With the ground rules established, Beck gave Milley a quick lay of the land, including what to say at meetings with the battalion commander, and how to say it — absolutely no profanity and should one of the unit’s leaders suggest something that sounded like a bad idea, Beck suggested saying “It sounds reasonable, but I’d like to look into it.”
He explained to Milley that, as the small unit’s senior enlisted leader, he needed the team’s sole officer to be someone who didn’t make waves, didn’t make their lives harder with their superiors, and who could provide top cover when it was needed.
“He took everything under his belt and he walked back out and came back in and goes ‘Hi, I’m Mark, who’s this?’ And right after that, we hit it off real good,” Beck recalled.
Over the next year two years, the pair worked together constantly, enduring a breakneck training cycle, which included days at the range, 80-pound ruck runs, jump training, requalification courses, and nights out in the field where they’d split a canteen cup of MRE coffee and cocoa — MoCo, they called it. They grew to be inseparable, and to this day remain in touch, with Beck attending every one of Milley’s promotions from when he picked up his first star, to when he was named chairman of the Joint Chiefs.
With combat experience that spanned multiple tours downrange during the Vietnam War, one of which involved a harrowing firefight that would later see Beck awarded the Distinguished Service Cross — which Milley pinned on him during a ceremony in 2017 — Beck was both an advisor and mentor to Milley. He saw a capable officer with a promising future in the force in Milley, so Beck took every opportunity to help him along, from that initial unofficial counseling session to helping Milley prepare for the Combat Diver Qualification Course in Key West, Florida.
“He came to the team assigned to me, to 543, as non-scuba,” Beck said. “And he came to me non-scuba qualified because I couldn’t get an officer — they’d failed pre-scuba, every time.
“And pre-scuba is, ooh boy,” he added with a whistle and a long exhale to emphasize the point. The seven-week course is infamous for its grueling training and high rate of attrition: one out of every three candidates fail.
To help Milley prepare, Beck, along with the team medic, measured his height and weight, and gave him the basic physical to find out where he stood.
“And he was in very good shape,” Beck said. “I told my team medics, I said, ‘this is Mark, he’s going through pre-scuba. We need to get his mindset and his heart ready to go.’ And they went ahead and put him on a diet and gave him exercises, because pre-scuba, oh boy, they smoke you. They smoke you worse than a cheap cigar. It’s designed that way. It’s to get the guys — the guys who wanna quit — to get them out before they go to Key West because once you’re in Key West, that costs big money to the Army.”
The training paid off. Milley passed, earning the coveted dive bubble — he made it through on his first try.
The course, which served to solidify Milley’s place with the scuba-qualified ODA team, also put his life on a new trajectory. When he returned later for additional training, he met his wife, Hollyanne.
Milley (top left) and his Special Forces team in Key West, Florida for training. (Courtesy photo)
“We were at Key West, Florida on a prequalification and we were, somewhere — I forget where we were, but we were coming back to where we were bivouacked and we saw Hollyanne and her mom, her mom was a nurse,” Beck recounted. Milley looked at Beck and then looked at her.
“Gosh, that’s the girl I’m going to marry,” Milley said as he pointed to Hollyanne.
“You don’t even know her,” Beck replied.
Milley introduced himself and arranged a date.
“And next thing I know, when we get back to the team room, he’s going back and forth to Atlanta, Georgia,” Beck said of Milley’s commutes from Fort Bragg to visit Hollyanne in Atlanta, where she grew up. It wasn’t long before Milley asked Hollyanne to be his wife.
Milley ended up making captain and would lead two Special Forces teams during his time at 5th Group. Despite the tough training and breakneck pace of special operations, Milley looks back on that time fondly.
“Well, the spirit and the camaraderie and the tightness — cohesion of the units — for me, those were formative years,” he said.
Hearing Milley, and others, speak about the intimacy of those early days of command, whether it be with Special Forces, or later with line infantry units, it’s hard not to get the impression that Gen. Milley likely has moments that he misses as a young captain back then, still at a level that he could spend the day on the range, or out training as just another one of the guys.
As that first five-year block ended and bled into the next, Milley continued to move upward and onward in his career, attending training course after training course and knocking out deployments as they came, like a stint in Egypt in 1987 with 5th Battalion, 21st Infantry Regiment, 7th Infantry Division (Light), followed by another deployment with the same battalion, this time to Panama in late 1989 and into 1990 as part of Operation Just Cause, which marked Milley’s first time under fire.
Milley reconnects with one of his children after returning from a deployment. (Courtesy photo)
By the decade’s end, Milley was a young husband and father of a growing family. Mary, his eldest, was born around that time, and his youngest, Peter, was just a few years away. He was a Ranger-tabbed Special Forces captain, a graduate of the Combat Diver Qualification Course, with a host of other accolades and badges ranging from jump wings to his combat infantryman badge. After running through a few more training courses — Foreign Area Officer Training Program in Bogota, Colombia, and spending some time as a student at Columbia University in New York as well as at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California — Milley found himself in upstate New York at Fort Drum with the 2nd Brigade, 10th Mountain Division (Light). It’s a unit that he’d return to repeatedly throughout his career.
And while Milley may go out of his way to greet every operator within line of sight, that particular unit — 2nd Brigade, 10th Mountain Division— seems to hold a special place for him, so much so that it’s etched on his skin.
“I have a tattoo on my arm, upper arm,” he says. “It is a tattoo from my 2nd Brigade, 10th Mountain Division. I’m very proud of that brigade.”
By 1993, Milley, now a major, was serving as the brigade’s operations officer, and it was there that he met then-Maj. Mike Ellerbe, the operations officer for the Brigade’s 2nd Battalion. The two hit it off immediately.
“From the first encounter, it seems like we’ve always been friends,” Ellerbe said of Milley, who he lived next door to at Fort Drum, and who he spoke to multiple times a day for years on end. They were both at the same point in their life, each married with kids, and they were also at similar stages in their military careers, an early middle ground where they’d moved away from a small unit or company but were still at the operational level. Like all soldiers, each had plenty to gripe about at the end of a particularly grueling day.
“We probably talked every day, four, five six times a day. Some of it was related to operations, some it was just related to two majors bitching,” Ellerbe said. “We talked about lots of stuff. We talked about family, you know, and raising kids and teaching our kids,” Ellerbe added. “I mean, we were young and we had young families at the time and we had the challenge and problems of young fathers who were not around a lot and we had, you know, great families to shore us up, and that’s really what happened because we were gone a lot.”
Milley in Haiti in 1994. (Courtesy photo)
During the three years from 1993-1996, the brigade endured a rigorous operations tempo, with non-stop operations and training exercises even though the current era of decades-long wars had yet to begin. Ellerbe himself deployed to Somalia for seven months immediately after arriving at Fort Drum. Upon returning from his Somalia deployment, he immediately went through another round of predeployment training and shipped out to Haiti in 1994 for Operation Uphold Democracy alongside Milley for another seven months, and on and on the rotations went, he said.
“We were there, probably in garrison, for three months,” Ellerbe said, adding that it was during this cycle he and Milley grew particularly close and came to lean on and trust one another.
“You need to have that release, and this really talks to Mark as an individual — you know when you have a best friend in an organization, and no matter what happens in life, you can always trust him? That’s who he is,” Ellerbe said. “He’s that guy, who no matter how screwed up shit gets, he will stand behind you.”
Ellerbe recounted how after their deployment to Haiti they returned stateside and moved into new roles, with Milley becoming the brigade’s executive officer, and Ellerbe moving into the former’s old role as the brigade’s operations officer. Following that transition, they headed to Fort Riley, Kansas for a command post exercise.
“We went out — two majors went out to have a beer,” Ellerbe said. “We didn’t know that when we walked in, it was a biker bar. And what we didn’t realize, was that in this biker bar, the bikers didn’t appreciate the fact that I was there, because I was Black. There was almost a very large altercation, in which this biker group, gang, guys, whatever — it was one of those times where the kids were about to throw down.”
“Not very many people know this story, but the only guy in there who I knew was Mark Milley, and Mark was like ‘Okay, I guess this is gonna happen, but this is what we’re gonna do together: If we’re gonna fight this fight, we’re gonna fight this fight together.’ And I never forgot it.”
Fortunately, the situation quieted down after a group of enlisted soldiers who’d been sitting in the bar stood up and joined Milley and Ellerbe.
“They all stood up and said ‘Well, if you’re gonna go after our officers, you’ve gotta go after us, too.’ And at that point, the biker gang stood down and we ended up having a beer,” Ellerbe added. “The message, or the lesson, the nugget if you will — and this goes back to understanding who’s standing behind you — that’s kind of a reflection of who Mark is at his core. It doesn’t really matter how bad it gets, he’s the best friend you could have.”
But that grizzly infantry officer that Milley appears to be to those who serve under and alongside him, and even today, to the millions who know him only as the barrel-chested Boston-accented general at hearings broadcast on cable news, may give a false impression of bravado. Though his confidence certainly appears genuine, it may not have always been so easy to maintain.
“What’s so funny about it, is that Mark was probably always the best of us,” Ellerbe said. “And throughout his career, he’d always doubted whether he was good enough […] He was and is the Renaissance warrior that all of us would like to think we are, but he was it, and he actually did the work that many of us did not do.”
By the mid-90s, Milley had finished his time at 2nd Brigade, 10th Mountain, and was on his way to his first battalion-level command with 1st Battalion, 506th Infantry Regiment, 2nd Infantry Division, an air assault battalion in South Korea.
Milley in Korea. (Courtesy photo)
That command, which Milley took over in 1996, would mark the last time that he, a leader who insisted on earning the trust of his soldiers face-to-face, would be in a role where he maintained close proximity to the rank and file.
“I would argue that battalion command is the last place where you get that really close personal touch as a commissioned officer,” Milley said. “You’re looking at an organization that’s between five and seven hundred depending on that type of battalion. So that’s really the last point at which you have a lot of personal interaction. So the lower you go, the higher the personal interaction. The higher you go, the less personal interaction. You really have to work at it.”
In the ensuing years, Milley would continue to work at maintaining that connection. That effort was most apparent in Baghdad, Iraq in 2004 where he once again found himself assigned to the 10th Mountain Division, this time as the commander of the 2nd Brigade Combat Team.
The Forever War
The workup for Milley’s first Iraq deployment began as many did in the early days of the Iraq War: It was a clusterfuck.
Originally slated for Afghanistan to begin training the Afghan National Security Forces, those orders were changed, and instead, the brigade received orders to Najaf, a city in central Iraq.
They had 45 days to prepare.
Milley and his command staff, which included Ross Davidson, the brigade operations officer, deployed from Fort Drum to the area of operations they’d be overseeing ahead of their deployment; a standard practice and one designed to give incoming leaders a chance to see the area they’d be charged with, and get a feel for what’s in store for their unit when the main element arrives.
After 10 days in-country, Milley and the other brigade leaders returned to Fort Drum to finish planning. Milley was so anxious to start fine-tuning their plan that, in the middle of the airport in Germany, Milley gathered everyone around, and started drafting up a gameplan for the upcoming mission, which Davidson hastily scrawled out on the only thing he had: A pile of napkins.
But it was all for naught. Shortly after returning home and with their deployment date looming, the orders were changed again: They would not be heading to Najaf. Instead, they were going to Baghdad, and to get there, they’d have to push through Kuwait to the capital, and along routes that were likely prime targets for ambushes. And, they’d be doing it in second-hand vehicles, many of which were “shot to shit” and half of which needed “a major maintenance overhaul,” Davidson said.
Davidson recalled Milley’s response was to give a resigned shrug and say “Okay.”
Despite the abrupt changes in plan, the convoy into Baghdad went off without a hitch and by September 2004 the brigade was firmly established and operating, ostensibly, out of Forward Operating Base Liberty, near Baghdad International Airport. Though the Brigade’s headquarters moved throughout the deployment, it didn’t matter much to Milley and his staff: They were rarely there.
“Mark Milley is the kind of leader, where he is not going to sit in his command post in some protected headquarters divorced from his battle space and merely taking reports daily,” Davidson said.
Milley, Davidson, and the other soldiers assigned to brigade headquarters spent most of their day riding around Baghdad in their four up-armored Humvees throughout their year-long deployment. Often working at night, they’d don their PVS-7 night vision goggles, flash on their Humvee’s infrared headlights, and make their way to each battalion in the brigade. Milley rode in the passenger side of the second Humvee, alongside the driver. Davidson sat in the back left seat, with another soldier in the security detail to his right, their radios and comms gear creating a berm of wire between them and the awkwardly dangling legs of the Humvee’s turret gunner — nicknamed the “Trunk Monkey” after a series of television commercials in the early 2000s.
Milley representing Boston during a deployment to Iraq. (Courtesy photo)
“Operationally, we ran all the command and control from our Humvees,” Davidson explained. “Felt like every day, but probably 5 days out of the week, we were out.”
While a full-bird colonel showing up to far-flung outposts to press the flesh with rank-and-file soldiers isn’t uncommon, to those who don’t get to leave said outpost, the visits can, at times, come off as performative: An attempt to be seen being there, in the shit, rather than being in it.
By Davidson’s account, this couldn’t be further from the truth in Milley’s case.
“He is, and was, and clearly demonstrated at this point in time, a boots on the ground, out on the front lines with his soldiers in their mission areas, kind of leader,” Davidson said.
“And I am telling you, man, we put some miles down.”
That time out traversing the brigade’s sprawling area of operations also had a practical purpose with a strategic aim: To put pressure on insurgent forces who had managed to seize the initiative in the area.
“We had a belief and I believe it was a correct one, that the former units that had the battlespace we were in, kind of bunkered up and ceded a lot of initiative to the insurgents out West of Baghdad,” Davidson said. “I believe that to have been validated by the spike and increase in IED attacks along the main supply routes, the increase in small arms fire attacks, the increase in indirect fires coming into the Baghdad International Airport, a critical hub there in Baghdad. You see this increase in indirect fire attacks of all varieties coming in there. And [Milley] was determined to put a stop to that, and was like ‘we’re gonna go hard and we’re gonna take the initiative back. And that was job one.”
Taking the initiative back came with increased risk.
“I’ve been personally blown up with Mark Milley by IED strikes nine times,” Davidson said. “We’ve been shot at in firefights rolling into some of the most horrific things you’d ever want to see. He literally would move to the sound of the guns. It was nonstop. I would say on average we spent more time out in the battle space than we did in our own command post. If there was a major attack or something happening, it’d be ‘saddle up, we’re going.’”
By the end of the tour, the pace caused Davidson to look back and remark “Holy fuck, how did we do that?”
However, the deployment took its toll. According to Davidson, 29 soldiers with the brigade were killed in action, and a further 400 were wounded during their 2004 to 2005 tour in Iraq. Their deaths weighed on Milley, as did the loss of others throughout his career.
“He cares so deeply about these men and women,” Former Secretary of the Army Ryan McCarthy said. “I mean, over half a dozen years in combat, [he’s] lost 242 soldiers under his various commands, so it’s his family. It’s his life.”
The brigade’s experience in Iraq was well documented, ranging from reports by journalists embedded with the brigade to anecdotes by fellow soldiers.
“I think what set him apart is, first of all, he leads from the front. He would never ask his troops to do anything he would never do,” Gen. James McConville said. “What you find from great combat leaders is that when things get really hard, they’re very cool and calm under pressure and they move to the decisive point on the battlefield and they’re not afraid to take the same risks as their subordinate soldiers are doing. He’s someone you can trust, he’s someone that will be there for you and he is courageous, and he’s incredibly competent. He has tremendous character and he does really care about his troops.”
Milley with his family after returning from Iraq. (Courtesy photo)
After his deployment to Iraq, Milley left Fort Drum and headed to the Pentagon, serving first with the Global Force Management Division, then as the military assistant to the secretary of defense.
Within a few short years, he was overseas once more, this time to Afghanistan as the deputy commanding general of the 101st Airborne Division. He was well on his way to picking up his first star — which he pinned on in June 2008
For that 15-month deployment, the 101st Airborne’s area of operations was Eastern Afghanistan, responsible for what “was basically the size of Pennsylvania plus another state about that same size,” said retired Maj. Gen. Jeff Schloesser, the commanding general of the 101st at the time and Milley’s direct superior on that deployment.
To get a sense of how operations were unfolding on the ground, as opposed to how they appeared to be within the confines of the sprawling Joint Operations Center at Bagram, Milley would regularly travel to remote outposts. On several occasions, Schloesser said, Milley would return from a trip and give a frank assessment of how things were going, including stating flatly that they were not, in fact, going well.
On one occasion, “He came back, and at the time it was a National Guard base, and he said ‘Boss, you need to go on out there, but I need to fix some things beforehand, it’s a shit show. They haven’t had decent food in a lengthy period of time, they haven’t showered, they don’t have enough ammo, their crew-served weapons are in the wrong spot. If they needed mortars they wouldn’t be able to use them,’” Schloesser said. “And he said ‘You go out and check it out in about two or three weeks,’ and he said ‘Meanwhile we’re gonna get it fixed.’ And three weeks later I went out and I was almost gonna give a medal to the mortar team because they had, in two weeks, just changed things over. There was food, hot showers, the weapons were placed the right way.”
“I got used to this,” Schloesser added.
That kind of feedback was invaluable when it was available, and sorely missed when it wasn’t, Schloesser noted.
“In hindsight, I think the thing I wish I’d done was send Milley out to Wanat in the first two days or so, and I think I would have been able to have a much better idea of what in fact was happening and what had not happened on the ground prior to that,” Schloesser said.
“We lost nine U.S. soldiers in the space of about two hours and when I was told about it,” Schloesser said. “It was about 5:30 in the morning and I went immediately to our joint operations center where Milley was basically running it and being very concise, very targeted about the questions he had, that we needed to know how we could help resource the reinforcement of the place.”
Milley’s focused approach during that battle is far from an outlier, but the norm, Schloesser said.
“I would just say that he tends to be very deliberate and calm under extreme stress,” Schloesser continued. “He’ll tell jokes, and you can see that sometimes. His mannerisms, he tries to come across as a rough-hewn guy, your proverbial hockey player or something like that, yet he’s much more polished than that. He’s nuanced, he’s historic, in the sense that he has a sense of history and a great deal of knowledge about it, and he applies it to just about everything he does, including combat operations.”
Following that tour, Milley left the 101st and returned to D.C. once more, this time to serve as the Deputy Director for Regional Operations from June 2009 until November 2011. He picked up his second star in March 2011. The following year he’d get his third when he assumed command of III Corps at Fort Hood, which sent him once more to Afghanistan. By the time he returned and left Fort Hood, Milley had donned his fourth star, which he wore as he headed to Fort Bragg, North Carolina to serve as the head of United States Army Forces Command from 2014 to 2015.
Milley became the Army’s chief of staff in 2015. (Courtesy photo)
On August 14, 2015, Gen. Milley — relatively unknown, as far as the American public was concerned — was selected as the Army’s chief of staff, a role he held until 2019. On December 8, 2018, he was nominated by then-President Donald Trump to be the 20th chairman of the Joint Chiefs. He was confirmed by the Senate 89-1 on July 25, 2019, making him directly responsible for advising the president, secretary of defense, and the national security council. Despite all that he’d been through at that point in his career, his life was about to dramatically change.
A quiet professional thrust into the spotlight
Milley has long been a passionate advocate for an apolitical military, but the past few years have tested civil-military relations in ways this country has not seen in decades. In an age defined by hyper-partisanship, Milley has been criticized by both Republicans and Democrats.
On January 31, 2020, President Donald Trump declared a public health emergency in response to the rapid spread of COVID-19. On March 13, 2020, he declared a national emergency, with widespread lockdowns implemented across the country in the following days. On May 25, 2020, with the world still embroiled in a worldwide pandemic, George Floyd Jr. was murdered while in police custody in Minneapolis, sparking nationwide civil rights protests, and in some cases, violent riots. A week later, on June 1, protests continued across the country, including in Washington D.C.’s Lafayette Square.
At approximately 6:33 PM, “violent protestors” began throwing projectiles “including bricks, frozen water bottles and caustic liquids,” according to a National Park Service statement. Police responded with tear gas and began pushing the crowd back. Almost 20 minutes later, Trump concluded a speech in the Rose Garden addressing the ongoing unrest in response to the Floyd murder. At 7:01 PM, Trump departed the White House on foot, with a variety of administration officials in tow.
Among them, was Milley, dressed in military fatigues.
The president and his entourage crossed the North Lawn and walked into Lafayette Park, where protestors were cleared less than a half hour prior. At 7:06 PM, Trump arrived in front of St. John’s Church and posed for photos, Bible in hand.
The controversial spectacle sparked outrage among the president’s critics, and many questioned why the chairman of the Joint Chiefs took part.
“I should not have been there,” Milley said in a video addressing his appearance. “My presence in that moment, and in that environment, created a perception of the military involved in domestic politics. As a commissioned uniformed officer, it was a mistake that I’ve learned from.”
According to NBC News, Milley considered resigning over the incident, going so far as to draft a resignation letter to the president, obtained by The New Yorker, stating, “It is my belief that you were doing great and irreparable harm to my country. I believe that you have made a concerted effort over time to politicize the United States military. I thought that I could change that. I’ve come to the realization that I cannot, and I need to step aside and let someone else try to do that.”
The letter was never delivered.
The Lafayette Square incident may have been the pinnacle of the chairman’s controversial highlight in the public eye, but far from the only one. His first notable controversy preceded his time as chairman of the Joint Chiefs when he was still the Army’s chief of staff. The topic in question? The color of a beret.
In 2017, the Army’s new Security Force Assistance Brigades were still in their infancy. The units were controversial as they were seen as a Special Forces-like unit, and the criticism grew even louder after images leaked online of the unit’s new beret, which looked too close to a green beret for comfort.
“All of these decisions — beret color, patch, flash, crest, name, etc. — came from General Milley,” one NCO assigned to 1st SFAB told Task & Purpose at the time.
The controversy culminated in an online petition that gained over 89,000 supporters. In the comments section of an Army Times story on the matter posted to Facebook, Milley weighed in on the controversy:
“I want to assure everyone that the color of the SFAB Beret will be brown and will not be green or any shade of green,” Milley wrote. “There was no intent to dishonor or misappropriate the Green Beret of US Army Special Forces and all it stands for.”
After being appointed as chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Milley started drawing fire from both sides of the aisle in Congress. Democrats criticized him for the Department of Defense’s response (or lack thereof, depending on who you ask) to the January 6 riots in the capitol following the 2020 presidential election results. Republicans criticized him after he rebuked accusations from Reps. Matt Gaetz and Mike Waltz that was directed at Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin concerning accusations the military was teaching Critical Race Theory, part of a narrative alleging a scourge of “wokeness” taking root in the Pentagon.
“I’ve read Mao Zedong, I’ve read Karl Marx, I’ve read Lenin. That doesn’t make me a communist,” Milley said. “So what is wrong with understanding — having some situational understanding about the country that we are here to defend? And I personally find it offensive that we are accusing the United States military, our general officers, our commissioned and noncommissioned officers of being ‘woke’ or something else because we’re studying some theories that are out there.”
President Trump criticized Milley after authors Bob Woodward and Robert Costa reported Milley assured his Chinese counterpart that the United States had no plans to attack China in their book “Peril”. Col. Dave Butler, a spokesman for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, explained Milley’s conversations with the Chinese as “conveying reassurance in order to maintain strategic stability.”
“As a public figure, General Milley realizes he’ll be subject to public scrutiny,” Butler said. “He’s also proud to communicate with Congress, who are the American people’s representatives. What we are seeing over the past few years are personal attacks, name-calling, and otherwise that only lessen the quality of public debate.”
Even though the U.S. military and its leaders are charged with maintaining an apolitical posture, we live in an era of hyper-partisanship where 24-hour cable news hosts are always on the hunt for ratings via outrage. It’s no surprise that, After serving under both a Republican and Democrat president, history may view Gen. Mark Milley as one of the most controversial chairmen of the Joint Chiefs. It is not a distinction he covets.
“But I want you to know, and I want everyone to know, I want America to know that the United States military is an apolitical institution, we were then and we are now,” Milley told reporters at a 2021 Pentagon news briefing. “And our oath is to the Constitution, not to any individual at all. And the military did not and will not and should not ever get involved in domestic politics.”
Milley’s tenure as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff ends in October when he is expected to be replaced by Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. CQ Brown Jr. The combat veteran who did not want to approve his own valor award has spent the past four years fighting a much different adversary: The erosion of the public’s trust in the military amid a toxic political climate.
His decisions as this country’s highest-ranking military officer will likely be the source of debate for years, but there can be no doubt that he spent his long career placing himself where the risk, both literal and figurative, was greatest, from a bridge in Iraq strewn with anti-tank mines to the halls of the Pentagon during civil-military strife. For Milley, the men and women in uniform deserved nothing less of him.
Although many critics will remember Milley’s time in the Trump administration most clearly, his time in the Biden administration may be the most consequential. Over the course of the summer of 2021, the phased withdrawal from Afghanistan began. Major bases were shut down, until eventually, the last American presence left was in Kabul.
A U.S. Marine with Joint Task Force – Crisis Response assists evacuees at an Evacuation Control Check Point (ECC) during an evacuation at Hamid Karzai International Airport, Kabul, Afghanistan, Aug. 26. (U.S. Marine Corps photo by Staff Sgt. Victor Mancilla)
On August 16, 2021, chaos enveloped the Kabul airport after the Taliban took the city. Images of desperate Afghans clinging to the sides of taxiing C-17s, and in some cases, falling to their death, reached American living rooms. For the next two weeks, the Kabul evacuation forced young American servicemembers and Afghans alike into a terrible situation, a hell that was unlike anything seen in America’s longest war up to that point.
On August 26, the terror of the evacuation reached a climax after an ISIS-K terrorist detonated a suicide vest at Abbey Gate, killing over 200 people — including 13 Americans. Three days later, on August 29, an American drone targeted what was believed to be those responsible for the attack. Instead, the strike killed 10 innocent civilians — seven were children. It was a deeply sad, disturbingly appropriate capstone to the two-decade American experience in Afghanistan.
On August 30, 2021, the last American C-17 departed Kabul.
Almost a month later, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley, and Commander of U.S. Central Command Gen. Kenneth McKenzie testified before Congress. They faced bipartisan criticism of how the Afghan evacuation was conducted, with Milley testifying the operation that evacuated 124,000 people was “a logistical success but a strategic failure.”
But the most notable moment of the testimony came after Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) asked Milley why he didn’t resign after the Biden administration didn’t listen to his advice.
“My dad didn’t get a choice to resign at Iwo Jima, and those kids there at Abbey Gate, they don’t get a choice to resign,” Milley said. “And I’m not going to turn my back on them. They can’t resign, so I’m not going to resign. There’s no way.”
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taskandpurpose.com · . · May 9, 2023
De Oppresso Liber,
David Maxwell
Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy
Senior Fellow, Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation
Editor, Small Wars Journal
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
Phone: 202-573-8647
email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com
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