Quotes of the Day:
"It is infinitely better to have a few good men than many indifferent ones."
- George Washington
"The will to win, the desire to succeed, the urge to reach your full potential... these are the keys that will unlock the door to personal excellence."
-Confucius
"Change your life today. Don't gamble on the future, act now, without delay."
- Simone de Beauvoir
1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, MAY 17 (PUTIN'S WAR)
2. Ukraine has retaken the region around Kharkiv. Here’s why that’s such a big deal.
3. Fate of hundreds of Ukrainian soldiers unclear as Azovstal resistance ends
4. Is America’s military headed down the same path as Russia’s?
5. Special Operations Command Turns Attention to Indo-Pacific
6. Special ops leader issues warning over information warfare capabilities, funding
7. Pentagon’s high-level group to aid Ukraine is rooted in Iraq and Afghanistan fight
8. US soldiers model river crossing in contrast to Russians’ Donbas disaster
9. Ex-Green Berets Say Horse Soldier Lessons Ring True In Ukraine
10. Iran Is in Position for a Surprise Nuclear Breakout
11. Philippines' Marcos wants China ties to 'shift to higher gear' under his presidency
12. Review finds US troops didn’t violate law in Syria airstrike
13. SOF-TEC Training Site at White Sands Missile Range | SOF News
14. Debunking Rumors of a 'Xi-Li Split' in China's Leadership
15. NATO chief hails 'historic moment' as Finland, Sweden apply
16. Russian commanders killing their own wounded in Ukraine: Report
17. An Anti-War Underground Emerges in Russia
18. Why the West Needs to End the War in Ukraine Soon
19. U.S. Special Forces Now Need to Fight Anywhere, At Anytime
20. Tyrannical dictator Putin gives new life to NATO
21. FDD | Russian Disinformation and Propaganda in Relation to the War Against Ukraine
22. US special ops to get vehicle converter kits for the Arctic by early 2023
23. Foreboding Army PSYOPS recruitment video shows ‘who’s pulling the strings’
24. Don’t Let Over-the-Horizon Counterterrorism Eliminate the Premier Security Force Assistance Product: Partner Special Operations Forces
25. Why Finland Joining NATO Is More Shocking Than Anyone Realize
26. Understanding—and Fixing—the Army’s Challenge in Keeping Cyber Talent
27. What Southeast Asia Wants From America
28. Why Taiwan Can’t Copy Ukraine’s Civil Defense Blueprint
29. Opinion | The Long Game of White-Power Activists Isn’t Just About Violence
1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, MAY 17 (PUTIN'S WAR)
RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, MAY 17
May 17, 7:00 pm ET
Mariupol defenders trapped in the Azovstal Steel Plant likely surrendered after Ukrainian officials negotiated evacuation measures with the Kremlin. Russian forces began evacuating wounded Ukrainian forces to Russian-occupied settlements in Donetsk Oblast on May 16 after the Russian Defense Ministry proposed the agreement earlier in the day. Ukrainian officials said that they will seek to return the Mariupol defenders to Ukraine in a prisoner exchange and continue to undertake appropriate measures to rescue all Ukrainian servicemen from Azovstal.
The Kremlin might have agreed to the conditional surrender of the Azovstal defenders to accelerate Russia’s ability to declare Mariupol fully under its control. The Ukrainian Military Intelligence Directorate (GUR) reported that the Russian Defense Ministry’s Department of Information and Mass Communications is hastily preparing a press tour of foreign journalists through occupied territories of Ukraine between May 18 and May 21.[1] The Kremlin also could have agreed to such a deal to secure a victory in order to deflect criticism on social media of the failed Russian Siverskyi Donets River crossings and the overall slow pace of the invasion.
The Kremlin might refuse to exchange the Mariupol defenders. Some Russian State Duma members are petitioning to pass laws that would prohibit prisoner exchanges for individuals accused of “Nazism.”[2] Russian State Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin claimed that the Mariupol defenders must be charged with war crimes and cannot be exchanged for Russian prisoners of war.[3] The Kremlin may ignore the Russian State Duma’s concerns or use them to sabotage negotiations with Ukraine.
The surrender agreement generated some outrage and confusion on pro-Russian social media, rather than the celebration of the full capitulation of Mariupol that the Kremlin likely expected—possibly undermining Russian information operations. Some Russian Telegram channels ridiculed the Russian Defense Ministry for negotiating with Ukrainian “terrorists” and “Nazis.”[4] Some bloggers criticized the Donetsk People’s Republic for organizing the evacuation proceedings and blamed negotiating authorities for creating conditions for Ukrainian martyrdom.[5] Several Russian bloggers also called for the imprisonment or murder of surrendered Ukrainian servicemen.[6] Russian audiences are likely dissatisfied with the surrender agreement because they expected Russian forces to destroy Ukrainian defenders at Azovstal. The Kremlin has created large amounts of propaganda that portrayed successful Russian assaults on Azovstal without clearly setting conditions for surrender negotiations. Some Russians may find it difficult to reconcile the triumphant messaging with the abrupt negotiations leading to a negotiated surrender.
Russian forces have intensified artillery fire on Ukrainian border settlements in Chernihiv and Sumy oblasts over the past few weeks. The Ukrainian Northern Operational Command reported that Russian forces shelled the border between Sumy Oblast and Russia over 70 times on May 17.[7] Sumy Oblast Administration Head Dmytro Zhyvytskyi said that Russian saboteurs unsuccessfully attempted to break through the Ukrainian border on May 17.[8]
Key Takeaways
- The Ukrainian military command ordered the remaining defenders of Azovstal to surrender, likely conditionally, in hopes of returning them to Ukraine as part of yet-to-be-negotiated prisoner exchanges.
- The announcement of the likely conditional surrender generated outrage in the Russian information space and demands in the Russian Duma for laws prohibiting exchanging the surrendered defenders of Azovstal.
- Russian forces continued to make limited advances in Donbas, primarily focused on setting conditions for the Battle of Severodonetsk.
We do not report in detail on Russian war crimes because those activities are well-covered in Western media and do not directly affect the military operations we are assessing and forecasting. We will continue to evaluate and report on the effects of these criminal activities on the Ukrainian military and population and specifically on combat in Ukrainian urban areas. We utterly condemn these Russian violations of the laws of armed conflict, Geneva Conventions, and humanity even though we do not describe them in these reports.
ISW has updated its assessment of the four primary efforts Russian forces are engaged in at this time. We have stopped coverage of supporting effort 4, “Sumy and northeastern Ukraine,” because it is no longer an active effort.
- Main effort—Eastern Ukraine (comprised of one subordinate and three supporting efforts);
- Subordinate main effort- Encirclement of Ukrainian troops in the cauldron between Izyum and Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts
- Supporting effort 1—Mariupol;
- Supporting effort 2—Kharkiv City;
- Supporting effort 3—Southern axis.
Main Effort—Eastern Ukraine
Subordinate Main Effort—Southern Kharkiv, Donetsk, Luhansk Oblasts (Russian objective: Encircle Ukrainian forces in Eastern Ukraine and capture the entirety of Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts, the claimed territory of Russia’s proxies in Donbas)
Russian forces unsuccessfully attempted to improve their tactical positions south of Izyum to resume offensive operations in that sector. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces are replenishing troops and accumulating reserves to renew their drive on Slovyansk.[9] Russian forces likely did not secure the highway east of Dovhenke—a village approximately 30 km south of Izyum; that highway is necessary to continue the advance toward Slovyansk. Russian aviation attacked Ukrainian positions near Izyum, and Russian ground forces made limited territorial advances in the Lyman district.[10] Ukrainian artillery reportedly destroyed Russian equipment just 15 km north of Izyum on May 17.[11]
Russian forces continued their efforts to secure highways to Lysychansk from the south and Bahmut from the east with insignificant progress. Russian forces advanced a small distance north of Popasna in an effort to reach a major road connection to Severodonetsk.[12] The Luhansk People’s Republic claimed to have seized Novozvanivka just southwest of Popasna on the way to the Bahmut-Lysychansk highway but have likely not entered the settlement judging from reports of Russian shelling in the area, which suggest that Ukrainian defenders are still there.[13] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces conducted an unsuccessful assault on a settlement 6 km southeast of Severodonetsk on May 17.[14]
Russian forces may be pushing hard to win the Battle of Severodonetsk in part to forestall emerging criticism of the Russian military campaign in the domestic information space. Russian State Duma Deputy from the Communist Party Viktor Sobolev expressed surprise over the lack of significant victories in Donbas compared to a number of successful operations in 2014.[15] Sobolev said that Russian forces must finally finish up the “special military operation” in Donbas and at least create an effective cauldron (encirclement) in Severodonetsk. Sobolev also criticized the Russian command for initiating a large-scale offensive operation without destroying Ukrainian strike capabilities. Luhansk Oblast Head Serhiy Haidai claimed that Russian forces are committing most of their combat power to a shallow encirclement to reassure the Russian population of Russian successes in Ukraine.[16] Pro-Russian Telegram channels began celebrating the arrival of a BMPT “Terminator” urban warfare vehicle in Severodonetsk’s vicinity, portraying it as a Russian wonder weapon.[17]
Russian forces also conducted a series of unsuccessful ground assaults in western Donetsk Oblast on May 17. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces unsuccessfully attempted to seize a segment of the N20 highway to Slovyansk east of Avdiivka.[18] Russian forces also reportedly attempted to advance in settlements east of Avdiivka but did not make any territorial gains.[19] Russian forces attempted to break Ukrainian defenses and reach the N15 highway to Zaporizhia without success.[20]
Supporting Effort #1—Mariupol (Russian objective: Capture Mariupol and reduce the Ukrainian defenders)
The Ukrainian military command ordered defenders at the Azovstal Steel Plant to surrender to Russian forces.[21] Russian officials likely accepted the Ukrainian surrender and evacuated over 260 wounded servicemen on May 16. The Ukrainian Military Intelligence Directorate (GUR) announced that Ukrainian officials will attempt to negotiate prisoner exchanges for Mariupol defenders and undertake further unspecified measures to rescue the remaining servicemen.[22] The Russian Defense Ministry posted videos of a mass evacuation of the Azovstal on May 17, but ISW cannot confirm if all of Mariupol’s defenders left the plant.[23] Reuters reported that at least seven buses with Ukrainian servicemen who did not appear wounded left Mariupol on May 17.[24] Russian media also filmed the Donetsk People’s Republic forces reportedly demining Azovstal.[25]
Supporting Effort #2—Kharkiv City (Russian objective: Withdraw forces to the north and defend ground lines of communication (GLOCs) to Izyum)
Ukrainian forces continued to push the remaining Russian forces northeast of Kharkiv City on May 17. Kharkiv Oblast Administration Head Oleg Synegubov reported that Russian forces are attempting to repel Ukrainian counteroffensives in the direction of Vovchansk, a border settlement approximately 90 km northeast of Kharkiv City.[26] Ukrainian forces are continuing to threaten Russian ground lines of communication (GLOCs) to Izyum via Vovchansk. Pentagon officials noted that Russia may still hold positions close to Kharkiv City, likely referring to occupied settlements along the Belgorod-Kharkiv highway in the north.[27] Ukrainian forces downed a Russian attack helicopter just east of Kharkiv City on May 16.[28]
Supporting Effort #3—Southern Axis (Objective: Defend Kherson against Ukrainian counterattacks)
Russian forces did not conduct offensive operations throughout the southern axis on May 17.[29] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces continued to reinforce defense lines with concrete structures and fired on Ukrainian positions.[30] The Russian Defense Ministry claimed that Russian forces prevented a large-scale Ukrainian counteroffensive in a settlement approximately 30 km west of the Donetsk and Dnipropetrovsk oblasts, but ISW cannot independently verify these claims.[31]
Russian forces are continuing to pressure Ukrainian civilians into accepting Russian occupation in southern Ukraine. The Zaporizhia Military Administration reported that Russian forces are preparing for a referendum in Enerhodar.[32] The Ukrainian Southern Operational Command said that Russian forces are continuing to set information conditions to promote the creation of a proxy republic or a Russian province in occupied settlements of Kherson and Mykolaiv oblasts.[33] The Ukrainian Resistance Center reported that locals found two Russian soldiers dead in Melitopol, likely due to Ukrainian partisan activity in the area.[34]
Russian forces continued to launch rocket- and airstrikes on Odesa and Mykolaiv oblasts in an effort to disrupt transportation infrastructure in the region. The Ukrainian Southern Operational Command reported that Russian forces launched two cruise missiles at a bridge over the Dniester estuary on May 17.[35] The bridge connects Odesa Oblast with the highway to Romania and has reportedly been damaged and out of operation for over two weeks. Russian forces likely seek to destroy the bridge beyond the possibility of repair to disrupt Ukrainian supply lines from Romania. The Ukrainian Southern Operational Command also reported that Russian forces struck maritime infrastructure 70 km southwest of Mykolaiv Oblast.[36]
Immediate items to watch
- Russian forces will likely complete their withdrawal from the vicinity of Kharkiv City but attempt to hold a line west of Vovchansk to defend their GLOCs from Belgorod to Izyum. It is unclear if they will succeed.
- The Russians will continue efforts to encircle Severodonetsk and Lysychansk at least from the south, possibly by focusing on cutting off the last highway connecting Severodonetsk-Lysychansk with the rest of Ukraine.
2. Ukraine has retaken the region around Kharkiv. Here’s why that’s such a big deal.
Excerpts:
Such an advance on Russia’s western flank would have been unthinkable just a few weeks ago. But with Western military aid flowing into Ukraine and Russian troops bogged down by low morale and logistical challenges, it is the latest in a string of setbacks for Moscow and an indication that the war is still not going President Vladimir Putin’s way.
“Guys, Kharkiv,” Zelenskyy said to the troops on his Instagram account shortly after the video of the soldiers was released. “I am sending you thanks from all the Ukrainians. … My gratitude knows no borders.”
The Russian Defense Ministry did not respond to a request for comment about the video of Ukrainians reaching the border.
It is a big deal. Not only is Kharkiv close to Russia, but it is also home to many ethnic Russians and Russian speakers — the very people Putin promised to “liberate” from what he falsely claims to be Kyiv’s “Nazi” regime.
“If Russia isn’t even welcome in such an area, it really tells you something about … the multiethnic Ukrainian nation that is much more attached to Ukraine as a state than any nostalgic thought about the Soviet Union or Russia,” said Stefan Wolff, a professor of international security at the U.K.’s University of Birmingham.
The series of stumbles provided a healthy dose of reality for Putin and indicated the degree to which Russia’s campaign has backfired on him, Wolff added.
Ukraine has retaken the region around Kharkiv. Here’s why that’s such a big deal.
“They realize that they lost a blitzkrieg,” said an expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, referring to the initial Russian offensive.
NBC News · by Yuliya Talmazan · May 17, 2022
The grainy video shows 12 smiling soldiers ducking into a shot around a yellow and blue marker and giving the thumbs-up.
“We have made it. We are here, Mr. President,” one of the soldiers says, addressing Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
The video, which Ukraine’s Defense Ministry shared Sunday, is most likely evidence of something once thought unthinkable: Russian forces are being driven back to their border, if not over it.
Ukrainian soldiers appear at the border of Russia in a video posted to the Ukrainian Defense Ministry's official Telegram account.Ukrainian Defense Ministry
NBC News could not confirm where and when the video was shot.
Ukrainian officials said it showed territorial defense troops who had recently reached the border near the heavily bombed city of Kharkiv. A U.S. defense official confirmed Monday that Ukraine had gained ground around the city, pushing Russians to within a couple of miles of the border.
Such an advance on Russia’s western flank would have been unthinkable just a few weeks ago. But with Western military aid flowing into Ukraine and Russian troops bogged down by low morale and logistical challenges, it is the latest in a string of setbacks for Moscow and an indication that the war is still not going President Vladimir Putin’s way.
“Guys, Kharkiv,” Zelenskyy said to the troops on his Instagram account shortly after the video of the soldiers was released. “I am sending you thanks from all the Ukrainians. … My gratitude knows no borders.”
The Russian Defense Ministry did not respond to a request for comment about the video of Ukrainians reaching the border.
It is a big deal. Not only is Kharkiv close to Russia, but it is also home to many ethnic Russians and Russian speakers — the very people Putin promised to “liberate” from what he falsely claims to be Kyiv’s “Nazi” regime.
“If Russia isn’t even welcome in such an area, it really tells you something about … the multiethnic Ukrainian nation that is much more attached to Ukraine as a state than any nostalgic thought about the Soviet Union or Russia,” said Stefan Wolff, a professor of international security at the U.K.’s University of Birmingham.
The series of stumbles provided a healthy dose of reality for Putin and indicated the degree to which Russia’s campaign has backfired on him, Wolff added.
“They realize that they lost a blitzkrieg,” said Alexander Baunov, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, referring to the initial Russian offensive, which sought to capture the capital, Kyiv, and topple Zelenskyy’s government within days.
After it retreated from Kyiv, Russia said the new focus of its so-called special military operation — it refuses to call it a war — was the industrial region of Donbas. The region was already partly controlled by separatists whom Moscow has been backing for eight years. But even there it has failed to gain any substantial territory despite initial small-scale advances.
Residents check the remains of a destroyed Russian helicopter in the village of Malaya Rohan on Monday.Bernat Armangue / AP
“It looks like the Russians have overextended themselves and by concentrating on the Donbas left themselves too thinly spread around Kharkiv,” said Phillips O’Brien, professor of strategic studies at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. “Big-picture problem for Russia is that they have to protect a very large area of seized territory but might not have the soldiers to do it.”
Still, Wolff said, Russian military leaders have modified their tactics and should not be discounted.
“Russian forces are more systematic in their approach now and are trying to overwhelm Ukrainian forces in specific areas,” he said. “This does not mean that they have scaled back their overall plans, but they may be sequencing and prioritizing differently.”
In the end, he said, Ukraine stares down what will likely be a prolonged, intense and bloody battle in the Donbas. The Ukrainian military confirmed Monday that Russia continues to make advances in several areas in the region.
With everything thrown at the Donbas now, any retreat there will be hard to mask.
“The Donbas is everything. It’s the last goal that you cannot cancel,” Baunov said. “The rest you can maybe move aside or forget. But not this.”
NBC News · by Yuliya Talmazan · May 17, 2022
3. Fate of hundreds of Ukrainian soldiers unclear as Azovstal resistance ends
Yes, we should be concerned for their fate.
There are two key points as to why these fighters will not be returned.
As noted they are useful to Russian propaganda to support their narrative. But if they are returned they will be given hero status in Ukraine and this will support Ukraine messaging. So I am not optimistic that the Russians would agree to an exchange.
Excerpts:
Azov has been a key part of the Russian propaganda narrative about the war in Ukraine, which was originally launched with the supposed goal of “denazification”. It was formed in 2014 as a volunteer militia to fight Russia-backed forces in east Ukraine and many of its original members had far-right extremist views. Since then, the unit has been integrated into the Ukrainian national guard and its commanders say it has moved away from its far-right origins.
The defence of Mariupol has come to symbolise heroism in the face of the Russian attack for many millions of Ukrainians. As well as the boost to morale, Ukrainian military sources have claimed that by putting up such a fierce fight for Mariupol, the Russian army’s advance was stalled.
Fate of hundreds of Ukrainian soldiers unclear as Azovstal resistance ends
Ukraine says there will be prisoner swap but some Russian officials have said forces could be tried or executed
The fate of hundreds of Ukrainian soldiers who have ended weeks of resistance at the Azovstal steelworks in Mariupol remains unclear, after the fighters surrendered and were transferred to Russian-controlled territory.
Ukraine’s deputy defence minister said they would be swapped in a prisoner exchange, but some Russian officials said on Tuesday they could be tried and even executed. MPs in Russia’s State Duma said they would propose new laws that could derail prisoner exchanges of fighters who Moscow claims are “terrorists”.
Russian investigators have said they plan to interrogate the soldiers and could charge them with “crimes committed by the Ukrainian regime against the civilian population in south-east Ukraine”.
On Tuesday evening, seven buses carrying Ukrainian soldiers left the Azovstal plant in the port city and arrived at a former prison colony in the Russian-controlled town of Olenivka in Donetsk, Reuters reported.
Russia called the Azovstal operation a mass surrender, while the Ukrainian army said the soldiers defending the steel plant had “performed their combat task” and that the main goal was now to save their lives.
“Ukraine needs Ukrainian heroes alive,” said the president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, in a video address.
For weeks, hundreds of troops have been holed up in a warren of tunnels and bunkers underneath the steelworks, as Russian forces took control of the rest of the city after turning much of it into an uninhabitable wasteland. Many of those stuck at Azovstal had serious injuries, with limited medical care and dwindling supplies.
In the last few weeks, civilians who had also taken cover in the plant were rescued after a deal was brokered by the International Committee of the Red Cross to allow them to leave for Ukrainian-controlled territory.
Ukraine had been pushing for a deal that would also allow the fighters to retreat to Ukrainian-controlled areas, or for their evacuation to a neutral country. However, with that not forthcoming, Ukrainian officials announced in the early hours of Tuesday that the defence of the plant was in effect over. “This was the only option,” said the deputy defence minister, Hanna Maliar.
Russia’s defence ministry said 265 Ukrainian fighters surrendered at the plant, including 51 seriously injured soldiers who would be transferred to hospitals in Novoazovsk in Russian-controlled territory in east Ukraine. It was not immediately clear how many Ukrainian troops remained in the plant.
Footage purports to show Ukraine soldiers leaving Azovstal steelworks – video
Footage shared by pro-Russia social media accounts showed groups of soldiers carrying out the wounded on stretchers amid the devastation outside the plant.
“An exchange procedure will take place for their return home,” said Maliar. Ukraine’s deputy prime minister Iryna Vereshchuk also said the fighters would be exchanged. “God willing, everything will be fine,” she wrote.
Zelenskiy sounded a more cautious note. “The work of bringing the boys home continues, and this work needs delicacy – and time,” he said.
Details of the agreement that led to the evacuation remain unclear, and a flurry of hardline statements from Russian officials suggested an exchange could still be some way off.
Vladimir Putin’s spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, promised that the fighters who surrendered would be treated “in accordance with international standards”, but this was immediately undermined by statements from two other Russian officials.
Leonid Slutsky, a Russian MP who took part in negotiations with Ukraine earlier in the war, suggested Russia should lift its moratorium on the death penalty for fighters from the Azov regiment, one of the main forces defending the steelworks, calling them “animals in human form”.
“Nazi criminals should not be exchanged,” said Vyacheslav Volodin, one of Russia’s most powerful officials and the chair of the State Duma, during a speech on Tuesday. “Our country treats those who surrendered or were captured humanely. But with regards to Nazis, our position should be unchanged: these are war criminals and we must do everything so that they stand trial.”
Volodin did not directly address the surrender of the troops at Azovstal in his statement, but the context was clear as Russia’s defence ministry released video of the evacuation of the Ukrainian fighters on Tuesday morning, saying some of them were members of the Azov battalion.
Russia’s justice ministry appealed to the supreme court to declare the Azov regiment a terrorist organisation on Tuesday, possibly introducing another hurdle to a potential exchange.
On Tuesday evening Russia’s investigative committee said it would interrogate the captured fighters and could seek to charge them with crimes against civilians in the Donbas region of east Ukraine.
“Russian investigators will identify the nationalists, check them for involvement in crimes committed against the civilian population, and the information obtained during the interrogations will be compared with other data available,” the committee said in a statement.
Azov has been a key part of the Russian propaganda narrative about the war in Ukraine, which was originally launched with the supposed goal of “denazification”. It was formed in 2014 as a volunteer militia to fight Russia-backed forces in east Ukraine and many of its original members had far-right extremist views. Since then, the unit has been integrated into the Ukrainian national guard and its commanders say it has moved away from its far-right origins.
The defence of Mariupol has come to symbolise heroism in the face of the Russian attack for many millions of Ukrainians. As well as the boost to morale, Ukrainian military sources have claimed that by putting up such a fierce fight for Mariupol, the Russian army’s advance was stalled.
Demonstrators at a rally in support of the Azovstal defenders in Kyiv on Tuesday. Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images
On Twitter, the Zelenskiy adviser Mykhailo Podolyak compared the Azovstal defenders to the small force of Spartans who held out against a much larger attacking force in the battle of Thermopylae in the fifth century BC. The defence of Mariupol “completely changed the course of the war” and “ruined Russia’s plans to capture the east of Ukraine”, he wrote.
Sandra Krotevych, the sister of Azov’s chief of staff, Bohdan Krotevych, said she had been in contact with her brother at 5am on Tuesday and he was still on the territory of Azovstal, but since then she had not heard from him. In recent weeks, she said, as the supplies hoarded in the steelworks began to dwindle and Russian strikes on the plant continued, the soldiers had been eating only once a day and had been drinking water from pipes and other unclean sources.
Sandra Krotevych said the fighters had long realised Mariupol no longer had strategic importance for the Ukrainian army and were hoping to be able to bury their dead and evacuate their injured, but they had been holding out for a deal that would have allowed them to leave to Ukraine-controlled territory or a third country.
“To put it mildly, I’m a bit surprised. I am not happy about it and I would have liked to hear security guarantees before this happened,” she said in a telephone interview.
Now the fighters are at the mercy of Russian authorities, with hardline commentators demanding they are not exchanged. On the state-funded RT, the commentator Anton Krasovsky called the evacuees “wounded terrorists” and demanded they should not be handed over to Ukraine.
“Any Azov member given to Kyiv will be treated as our defeat, as our Russian capitulation,” said Krasovsky. He called on his viewers “not to allow this”, saying there should be a trial and “RT can hold a livestream for their wives”.
Amid such rhetoric from Russia, Krotevych called on the international community to find a way to ensure the soldiers were returned to Ukraine. “Their lives are in the hands of international leaders. If they can find a way to save them, then all the citizens of Ukraine will be extremely grateful. They are heroes for the whole of Ukraine,” she said.
4. Is America’s military headed down the same path as Russia’s?
Some key points in this article.
Learn, adapt,and anticipate.
Excerpts:
This means the United States is less able to deter conflict and fight to win if necessary. That is one reason why Putin felt emboldened to invade Ukraine. He sensed weakness in U.S. and NATO forces, and pressed forward with his aggression. We see the Chinese making similar calculations in the Pacific by seizing and militarizing neutral territory and flaunting international norms without an adequate U.S. response; freedom of navigation missions won’t cut it.
This should be a wake-up call to rebuild the U.S. military.
...
The United States does not need to double its defense budget, but it does need to reverse the decline in its capacity and capabilities to credibly deter and, if necessary, defeat both China and Russia simultaneously. Only then will we be able to deter those fights from occurring.
Is America’s military headed down the same path as Russia’s?
Defense News · by Lt. Gen. David Deptula (ret.) · May 17, 2022
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s failure to rapidly defeat a much smaller foe is not just a failure of strategy, but an overestimation of his military’s capability, training and prowess. U.S. leaders need to take a hard look in the mirror and question whether we are treading similar ground with a set of military capabilities too small and too old given current threats.
American leaders are fond of saying ours is the best military in the world. They fail to realize that key elements of our forces have shrunk by half since our last clear-cut victory: 1991′s Operation Desert Storm. Furthermore, the U.S. has been unfocused on great power competition for over three decades as it overprioritized and overspent on counterinsurgency operations.
This means the United States is less able to deter conflict and fight to win if necessary. That is one reason why Putin felt emboldened to invade Ukraine. He sensed weakness in U.S. and NATO forces, and pressed forward with his aggression. We see the Chinese making similar calculations in the Pacific by seizing and militarizing neutral territory and flaunting international norms without an adequate U.S. response; freedom of navigation missions won’t cut it.
This should be a wake-up call to rebuild the U.S. military.
The threat of sanctions did not deter Putin, nor did Europe’s newfound unity change his mind. Diplomacy that is not backed by military might will fail. It all comes down to credibility behind the words. The U.S. has lost its edge in that regard from both a military capability and capacity perspective.
The choices Putin made with respect to his military’s force structure left him with the wrong force design and poor readiness for the war he chose to fight. Likewise, the choices the U.S. has made in recent years — and the ones it makes today — are inadequate to the challenges posed by its competitors.
Nor will we be able to build needed military power once the enemy triggers a tripwire. Today’s world moves too fast and is too complex to allow for a reactive buildup. F-35 fighter jets, B-21 bombers and Virginia-class submarines, plus their highly trained crews, do not manifest overnight. Unless we make the right defense choices today, there will be no time to recover when an adversary requires us to fight.
President Joe Biden’s fiscal 2023 defense budget plan steers America down the wrong path. Rather than reversing America’s 30-year decline in defense capability and capacity, it accelerates that decline. With inflation properly included, defense funding goes down from last year.
Defense News convened with defense community thought leaders and experts to break down the fiscal year 2023 budget.
The effects of the proposed defense budget are corrosive. Consider that the Air Force is currently the oldest, smallest and least ready in its history. The FY23 budget plan calls for it to retire roughly 1,500 aircraft over the next five years while buying only 500 replacements. That reduces it a further 25%.
The Navy is set to shed 24 ships over the same period. In FY23 alone, the armed services combined are reducing personnel by 25,000. This is a recipe for disaster, not only for the United States but for Western democracies in general.
Unless the United States and its allies can achieve the strength necessary to defeat both Chinese aggression in Asia and Russian aggression in Europe in near simultaneous time frames, we cannot hope to deter our rivals.
However, defense leaders across multiple administrations, driven by budget concerns and nondefense priorities, have abandoned this approach. They now plan for wars to occur one at a time. Reality likely will not work like they expect. The only thing we will 100% achieve is not accurately forecasting the future. The ability to only handle one war at a time incentivizes our opponents — China, Russia, North Korea, Iran and a broad range of nonstate actors — to strike when we are consumed by the first crisis.
Germany and Japan get this. They understand the threats on their doorsteps, and that is why they both declared their intent to double their defense budgets. Their resolve to reinvest in their own defense reflects the pragmatic realization that only through investment and preparation can they hope to ward off those threats.
The United States does not need to double its defense budget, but it does need to reverse the decline in its capacity and capabilities to credibly deter and, if necessary, defeat both China and Russia simultaneously. Only then will we be able to deter those fights from occurring.
Retired U.S. Air Force Lt. Gen. David A. Deptula is dean of the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies and a senior scholar at the Air Force Academy. He helped plan the Desert Storm air campaign, commanded no-fly zone operations over Iraq and orchestrated air operations over Afghanistan.
5. Special Operations Command Turns Attention to Indo-Pacific
After spending most of my military career in Asia this is gratifying to hear. I remember how the Asia focused scenarios in the QDRs in the 1990s and early 2000s were viewed skwptically and only served to support force structure since there were two numbered war plans that could justify forces (back when you had to be apportioned to a numbered war plan to remain relevant). No one seemed to take Korea or the then called Asia-Pacific very seriously PACOM was known as the "economy of force" theater.. But rather than only considering a war with China we need to consider the indirect approach in strategic competition and engage and support countries threatened by Chinese actions and activities.
We should consider this threat and how to respond to it:
My thesis: "China seeks to export its authoritarian political system around the world in order to dominate regions, co-opt or coerce international organizations, create economic conditions favorable to China alone, and displace democratic institutions." The question is how to employ SOF in support of a US national strategy to counter China's strategy.
From a friend and colleague: "Chinese unification by force is untenable., Chinese peaceful unification is impossible. So the only option is unification by coercion." That is a brilliant insight in my opinion and we must recognize the Chinese strategy, understand it, expose it, and attack the strategy,
Special Operations Command Turns Attention to Indo-Pacific
5/17/2022
By
Clarke
EPNAC photo
TAMPA, Florida — Special Operations Command is in lockstep with the latest National Defense Strategy that calls China the U.S. military’s most pressing threat, its leader said in a keynote speech May 17.
“In the coming years, China will become the most capable adversary, and they are rapidly modernizing,” Army Gen. Richard Clarke, commander of Special Operations Command, said in his remarks at the Special Operations Forces Industry Conference, which is organized by the National Defense Industrial Association.
“Capabilities to prevail in the Indo-Pacific are our priorities. Every investment we make will support this strategy,” he told attendees at the conference, the first in-person version of trade show since 2019.
SOCOM is transitioning from two decades of counter-terrorism operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and looking at peer and near-peer competitors such as China. And despite Russia attacking Ukraine, Clarke echoed what other leaders have said in recent weeks —and what the National Defense Strategy stated — that the focus must remain on China.
SOCOM is in the process of writing a Special Operations Forces 2040 document that will look at some of the challenges the command will face at the end of the next decade, Clarke said.
“We’ve got to look at the pacing threat [of] China — that they’re going to continue to evolve,” he said. SOCOM will have to develop unique capabilities needed for the Indo-Pacific, he added.
If a technology “is not moving us in a position or capability to assist us with the Chinese fight, then we need to look at it,” he said.
“The Indo-Pacific is a big place and there is a lot of water to cover,” he noted. One of the command’s development priorities will be maritime mobility, both underwater and on the surface, he said. “We’re very good in this space,” he added.
Working with the Navy will give SOCOM opportunities to develop new capabilities, which will give it an advantage in the region, he said.
Another technology priority will be divesting single-use intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance platforms such as small unmanned aerial vehicles, he said. SOCOM will be looking at vehicles that can not only sense but shoot and also fuse the intelligence they gather with other overhead sensors such as space-based systems, he said.
UAVs and space-based intelligence should also fuse with data gathered from the internet to give special operators a more complete picture of its area of operations, he said.
The command also needs tools to help it conduct operations in the information space. The war in Ukraine has emphasized the need to be able to push back against adversaries employing information operations. The Ukraine government has been doing a “masterful” job of showing the world what Russia is doing, but that is easy to see, he said.
However, SOCOM may have to go up against an adversary more adept at info-ops.
“There’s a reluctance sometimes to operate in that space…. As we go forward, we need to look at: what are the authorities we’re going to use? And what capabilities are we going to need as a nation to use in the information environment?” he said.
“I still don’t think we have all the tools that we need,” he added.
One of the tools is “sentiment analysis,” he said. He referred to a “major brand” that every day measures how it is faring in public opinion compared to its competitors.
“Where is our sentiment analysis?” He asked.
The command wants to use artificial intelligence and machine learning so it can sense what populations are feeling, so it can in turn send out targeted messages, he said.
6. Special ops leader issues warning over information warfare capabilities, funding
Excerpts:
“I still don’t think we have all the tools that we need to develop and continue to develop at speed [to help] push back inside the information space,” Clarke said.
To fight disinformation and own the information environment, the force needs funding, he said, noting that if his command’s budget doesn’t see 3-5% budget growth over the next five years, then it will struggle to develop, continue its counterterrorism role, and shift to peer and near-peer competition.
SOCOM’s vision and strategy, the most recent version of which was published in April, notes these challenges and risks the command faces, including a loss of access to areas, budget shortfalls, degradation of agreements with partners and allies, insufficient investment, and more.
Special ops leader issues warning over information warfare capabilities, funding
TAMPA, Fla. — Special operations forces had one hell of a February.
In the span of the year’s shortest month, operators from across U.S. Special Operations Command killed the leader of the Islamic State group, Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi, in northwest Syria with mebers of the Syrian Democratic Forces.
That was a more complex raid than the 2012 operation that killed al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, according to Gen. Richard Clarke, the head of SOCOM, who spoke Tuesday at the annual Special Operations Forces Industry Conference.
And much of that month represents existing and future priorities for the operation-loaded command. The force faces a range of challenges, including pulling together data and sensor feedback, hiring personnel, and improving information gathering beyond aerial drones, Clarke said.
Later that month, operators were simultaneously conducting training in Alaska and Norway above the Arctic Circle. Navy SEALs dropped in a freefall parachute jump onto ice 200 miles offshore via a U.S. Navy submarine that broke ice to reach them.
That SEAL unit linked up with U.S. Army Green Berets who had trekked and skied across the frozen tundra.
Before February ended, Clarke visited his troops during the exercise Flintlock, which involved more than 10 African and other allied nations to train organizations dedicated to countering violent extremism. But Clarke didn’t get much of a break; at about 4 a.m. local time on Feb. 24, he got a call from Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley, notifying him that Russia had invaded Ukraine.
That’s a lot packed into 28 days, but any given month from this year would highlight the work of SOCOM’s 70,000 personnel, Clarke said.
Though operational commitments keep the force moving and present their own hurdles, progress comes down to affordability.
Clarke fielded audience questions for half of the hourlong speaking event before 4,000 participants at SOFIC, an event expected to have 14,000 attendees this week. The general highlighted work his command must do to improve maritime capabilities, sensing and intelligence gathering. But the classic “what keeps you up at night” question centered on one area: information.
“I still don’t think we have all the tools that we need to develop and continue to develop at speed [to help] push back inside the information space,” Clarke said.
To fight disinformation and own the information environment, the force needs funding, he said, noting that if his command’s budget doesn’t see 3-5% budget growth over the next five years, then it will struggle to develop, continue its counterterrorism role, and shift to peer and near-peer competition.
SOCOM’s vision and strategy, the most recent version of which was published in April, notes these challenges and risks the command faces, including a loss of access to areas, budget shortfalls, degradation of agreements with partners and allies, insufficient investment, and more.
At a granular level, the CRS report highlighted recent events in Ukraine as another factor for SOCOM to consider. The report noted training assistance from special operations forces for Ukraine’s military after Russian annexed Crimea in 2014, among subsequent incursions into eastern Ukraine.
“With some predicting a long conflict in Ukraine, and others suggesting that the conflict might spread, U.S. SOF’s role in the region could potentially increase not only in duration but in scope as well,” the report read.
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.
7. Pentagon’s high-level group to aid Ukraine is rooted in Iraq and Afghanistan fight
Whenever we create these special task forces to take on important tasks we should be asking the question of why are not our established bureaucracy and bureaucratic processes not sufficient for support of contingencies?
Excerpts:
The SIG-Ukraine is adapted from the little known Warfighter Senior Integration Group, which the Pentagon launched in the middle of the war on terror to answer the urgent needs of battlefield commanders. The Ukraine group’s predecessor rapidly fielded surveillance aerostats, working dogs and ballistic underwear used to protect troops from roadside bombs and much more, according to former officials.
“Effective immediately, I am establishing a Senior Integration Group-Ukraine (SIG-Ukraine), to focus on facilitating the provision of lethal and non-lethal support to enable Ukraine to more effectively defend itself against Russian aggression,” Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks, one of the group’s co-chairs, said in her May 11 memo authorizing the group, which was already at work.
Pentagon’s high-level group to aid Ukraine is rooted in Iraq and Afghanistan fight
WASHINGTON ― The Pentagon has modeled a new high-level team focused on rushing military aid to Ukraine on the group it used to speed supplies to troops in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, according to a memo obtained by Defense News and sources familiar with the matter.
Pentagon leaders several weeks ago quietly convened the group ― co-chaired by the Pentagon’s No. 2 civilian and military leaders ― to cut through its notoriously unwieldy bureaucracy. Called the Senior Integration Group-Ukraine, its mandate is to hustle military equipment to Ukraine from its own stocks, replenish those stocks, coordinate aid with NATO, support partner nations and address humanitarian issues.
The SIG-Ukraine is adapted from the little known Warfighter Senior Integration Group, which the Pentagon launched in the middle of the war on terror to answer the urgent needs of battlefield commanders. The Ukraine group’s predecessor rapidly fielded surveillance aerostats, working dogs and ballistic underwear used to protect troops from roadside bombs and much more, according to former officials.
“Effective immediately, I am establishing a Senior Integration Group-Ukraine (SIG-Ukraine), to focus on facilitating the provision of lethal and non-lethal support to enable Ukraine to more effectively defend itself against Russian aggression,” Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks, one of the group’s co-chairs, said in her May 11 memo authorizing the group, which was already at work.
Hinting at “significant challenges ahead,” Hicks directed senior Pentagon leaders to cooperate with the SIG-Ukraine “in this very important effort to defend democracy and help defeat Russian aggression.”
RELATED
In its effort to quickly arm Ukraine against Russia, the Pentagon has announced the equivalent of an open casting call for companies to offer weapons and commercial systems that can be rushed to the fight.
While it’s been widely reported the Pentagon has been rushing weapons to Ukrainian forces, the bureaucratic mechanism hasn’t previously been made public. Former officials said the SIG format derives its power from the involvement of senior leaders and has long been a way to make and implement decisions within days that might otherwise take months or years.
“The key attribute is the seniority attendant to that forum and the speed and agility with which it identifies and drives actions,” said Greg Kausner, a former Biden administration defense official who in 2021 temporarily assumed the duties of undersecretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment, including chairing the Warfighter SIG.
The new group is functionally co-chaired by Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment Bill LaPlante and the Joint Staff’s director of operations, Lt. Gen James Mingus, as stand-ins for Hicks and Joint Chiefs vice chairman Adm. Christopher Grady. Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Colin Kahl, Comptroller Mike McCord, U.S. European Command’s leadership and top armed services acquisition chiefs are also in the group.
The SIG Ukraine is meant to respond to needs identified by U.S. European Command and handles items procured under the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative. “The SIG addresses items such as the latest operational needs, and resolves issues impeding the urgent material and logistics requirements that is required to support EUCOM and support to Ukraine,” said Jessica Maxwell, a Pentagon spokeswoman.
The U.S. is leading a flood of western weaponry into Ukraine that’s helped blunt Russia’s initial offensive and is expected to be critical in the next phase of fighting in eastern and southern Ukraine. On Tuesday, hundreds of Ukrainian soldiers were evacuated from Mariupol, appearing to cede control of the city to Russia after 82 days of bombardment.
Congress is poised to pass a $40 billion Ukraine package that authorizes the Biden administration to send another $11 billion in U.S. military equipment to Ukraine and includes $9 billion to backfill stocks already sent.
That equipment includes 20,000 weapons designed to defeat armored vehicles, some 1,400 shoulder-fired Stinger missiles to shoot down aircraft and more than 50 million rounds of ammunition, among many other items. Heavy weaponry for the latest phase of the war includes 90 howitzers, 200,000 artillery rounds and roughly 20 radar systems to detect incoming artillery.
Without a fast-tracked process, answering Ukraine’s requests for equipment could take Washington’s bureaucracy months, with a request winding its way through the State Department and Pentagon’s security cooperation channels.
Addressing urgent needs
In 2009, Defense Secretary Robert Gates launched the 50-member Warfighter SIG to answer joint urgent operational needs statements, or JUONS, from downrange. Ash Carter, then the Pentagon’s acquisition chief, said in his 2019 book the SIG’s weekly meetings included “everybody who mattered in the whole department, from top generals to senior staffers.”
“We brought the need for camera-equipped balloons to the SIG, marking it as a super-urgent challenge on which American lives depended,” Carter said. “The officers in charge of budgeting, ordering, and shipping equipment were instructed to make it a top priority. Within days, dozens of aerostats were on their way to Afghanistan.”
RELATED
U.S. Army officials hitting supply chain snags on their way to restocking Stinger anti-aircraft missiles and Javelin anti-tank weapons sent to Ukraine may get a reprieve.
A flexible group, it has changed members, frequency and mandates ― even playing a role to arm proxy forces fighting the Islamic State group at one point ― but a common thread has been the seniority of its members and its mandate to solve the problems of commanders in war zones as they pop up, according to sources familiar with it.
Andrew Hunter, now the Air Force’s acquisition chief and formerly the director of the Joint Rapid Acquisition Cell, told Congress in 2015 the SIG was a model for cutting red tape. He described it then as “a giant room, tons of people around a table” with battlefield commanders participating by video teleconference.
“Everyone around the table, with the deputy secretary of defense there, and the question is not a debate about should we or shouldn’t we: We are going to do it. That is the bottom line,” Hunter, now the Air Force’s representative to the SIG-Ukraine, said at the time. “And everyone who has a role in the system is there, and a decision is made. The deputy secretary says, here is how we are going to do it. Everyone go out. These are the marching orders.”
As the U.S. wound down its presence in Iraq and Afghanistan, the group wound down as well and focused mainly on withdrawing people and equipment, but also procuring intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance services, said Ellen Lord, the undersecretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment in the Trump administration.
“In the days before mega Zoom meetings, it was highly unusual, but we had the combatant commanders and whoever the [U.S. military] leadership in-country in Iraq or Afghanistan would be,” Lord said. “The way I handled it is if there was a priority issue, maybe money wasn’t being freed up, was you would turn to the comptroller and see what we could do to resolve it.”
On Tuesday, Lord lauded the Pentagon’s new adaptation of the SIG model as a sign Ukraine has the attention of the Pentagon’s senior leaders, in a holistic way.
“It shows an enormous focus, a unity of action and a priority within the department,” Lord said.
Joe Gould is senior Pentagon reporter for Defense News, covering the intersection of national security policy, politics and the defense industry.
8. US soldiers model river crossing in contrast to Russians’ Donbas disaster
Crossing any obstacle is complex and dangerous and rivers are among the most complex and dangerous obstacles.
But we need to check our hubris. Our training was not subject to the full effects of actual fires.
Excerpt:
A well-timed U.S. Army tweet highlighted the difference.
“In case anyone was wondering what a successful ‘wet gap crossing’ looks like, courtesy of the @USArmy,” U.S. Army Europe and Africa said Monday on Twitter in what could be taken as a not-so-subtle jab at a disastrous river operation last week for Russian troops.
On Tuesday, USAREUR said the tweet was “not directed at anyone or any organization.”
US soldiers model river crossing in contrast to Russians’ Donbas disaster
Ukrainian aerial photographs of the May 11, 2022, attack on a Russian army unit shows blown-up tanks and other combat vehicles on both sides of the Siversky Donets River and a pontoon bridge under water. (Twitter/Defense of Ukraine)
Days after dozens of Russian armored vehicles were obliterated during an attempted river crossing in eastern Ukraine, U.S. and allied soldiers launched a training version of a similar maneuver across Poland’s peaceful Vistula River.
A well-timed U.S. Army tweet highlighted the difference.
“In case anyone was wondering what a successful ‘wet gap crossing’ looks like, courtesy of the @USArmy,” U.S. Army Europe and Africa said Monday on Twitter in what could be taken as a not-so-subtle jab at a disastrous river operation last week for Russian troops.
On Tuesday, USAREUR said the tweet was “not directed at anyone or any organization.”
The crossing was part of a logistics drill that involved soldiers from NATO allies Poland, France and the United States, as well as Sweden, which was prompted by Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine to seek NATO membership after two centuries of neutrality.
— U.S. Army Europe and Africa (@USArmyEURAF) May 16, 2022
Soldiers from the Fort Hood, Texas-based 74th Multi-Role Bridge Company and other allied forces were part of the exercise in Poland, where the absence of enemy fire all but guaranteed success.
The same can’t be said for a Russian battalion tactical group of hundreds of soldiers that was trying to cross the Siversky Donets River in eastern Ukraine. The unit came under withering fire from Ukrainian forces.
Aerial photographs of the Wednesday attack provided by the Ukrainian armed forces reveal blown-up tanks and other combat vehicles on both sides of the riverbank and a pontoon bridge under water. Hundreds of troops were likely killed in the operation, according to military analysts.
“This Russian river crossing has gained attention because it resulted in the loss of (probably) a battalion tactical group and some critical engineer equipment. The reality is, it is worse than that,” wrote retired Australian Maj. Gen. Mick Ryan in an analysis of the debacle.
Military vehicles roll over a float ribbon bridge system set up by the 74th Multi-Role Bridge Company, deployed from Fort Hood, Texas, to cross the Vistula River between Ryki and Kozienice, Poland, May 13, 2022. (Michal Czornij/DVIDS)
U.S. soldiers with the 1st Battalion, 66th Armored Regiment, 3rd Armored Brigade Combat Team, 4th Infantry Division, get a tank across the river on the ribbon bridge during a wet gap crossing during Defender Europe 2022 at Dęblin, Poland, May 12, 2022. (Javen Owens/U.S. Army)
The 74th Multi-Role Bridge Company, deployed from Fort Hood, Texas, to Poland employs a float ribbon bridge system across the Vistula River between Ryki and Kozienice, Poland, May 13, 2022. The float bridge, which came from Army Field Support Battalion-Benelux’s APS-2 worksite in Zutendaal, Belgium, was used by U.S., Polish, French and Swedish military forces to cross the river as part of the Defender-Europe 22 exercise. (Michal Czornij/DVIDS)
An M1A2 Abrams Tank crosses the ribbon bridge during a wet gap crossing as a part of Defender-Europe 2022 at Dęblin, Poland, May 12, 2022. (Javen Owens/U.S. Army)
Ukrainian aerial photographs of the May 11, 2022 attack on a Russian army unit shows blown up tanks and other combat vehicles on both sides of the Severskyi Donets riverbank and a pontoon bridge under water. (Twitter/Defense of Ukraine)
For any army, river crossings are regarded as among the riskiest and most complicated maneuvers a unit can perform on the battlefield.
American soldiers have increasingly incorporated such missions into exercises in Europe, as the U.S. military looks for ways to operate better on a continent with a vast network of rivers.
For the Russians, the failed maneuver on the Siversky Donets cost them valuable assets and complicated their effort to gain the initiative against a smaller Ukrainian force, which by many experts’ accounts has outperformed their Russian counterparts.
“Perhaps most importantly, defeating this assault river crossing has probably denied the Russians an axis of advance they clearly thought was going to be productive for them in their eastern offensive,” Ryan tweeted. “This is a significant setback for them.”
For a river crossing to succeed, multiple factors come into play. There must be extensive advance reconnaissance and surveillance, given how vulnerable soldiers are when setting up and traversing mobile bridges.
Carrying out a mission at night or using smoke, electronic jamming and feints at other possible crossing points are some of the ways to reduce exposure, Ryan said.
Supporting combat aviation and artillery also must be ready in preparation for the river advance.
It’s unclear how much preparation the Russians did or what tactics they did or didn’t use in their failed crossing, but the Ukrainian military said in a Wednesday statement after the artillery attack that “holiday season” had been opened on Russian soldiers, who “bathed in” the river and were “burned by the May sun.”
9. Ex-Green Berets Say Horse Soldier Lessons Ring True In Ukraine
I still recall Simpkin's book from the early 1980s, Race to the Swift. He made the point that the most important person on the battlefield in the future would be a soldier in the enemy's rear area with a radio who could call for precision fires. A small mobile team with communications who could survive behind enemy lines for long periods of time would be crucial to operational a success.
Ex-Green Berets Say Horse Soldier Lessons Ring True In Ukraine
Standing in the production room of a Florida distillery he partly owns, Mark Nutsch recalls a seminal action in America’s response to 9/11 with parallels to Ukraine’s defense of Russia’s invasion.
Two decades ago, Nutsch was an Army captain, leading a team of U.S. Army Special Forces soldiers, or Green Berets, assigned to Operational Detachment Alpha (ODA) 595 on a mission to help a disparate group of Afghans overthrow the Taliban.
They were more famously known as the “Horse Soldiers,” a highly fictionalized version of which was depicted in the 2018 movie “12 Strong.”
The real story - which Nutsch and fellow ODA 595 member Bob Pennington tell in their new book,“Swords of Lightning” - has a number of similarities to how Ukraine has managed to inflict tremendous damage on a large and well-equipped Russian army, the ex-Green Beret says.
“We were outgunned, outnumbered and out-equipped,” Nutsch, who along with several of his teammates just wrapped up signing copies of the book, tells The War Zone.
The Taliban and al-Qaeda, he says, “had the more modern and motorized armored and mechanized former Soviet force."
They had T-55 and T-72 tanks, D30 howitzers, and 23 mm anti-aircraft guns, says Nutsch.
“Yeah, we were the outlaws with our Northern Alliance militia force between the Uzbeks, Tajiks, and Hazaras,” he says with a laugh.
But riding horses offering quick and nimble mobility and lightly armed with Soviet-era weapons like AK-47s, PKMs and rocket-propelled grenades, the Green Berets and their Afghan allies helped quickly topple the Taliban.
“Working with the Uzbeks, Tajiks, Hazaras, we united them together and orchestrated an uprising across the six northern provinces,” says Nutsch.
That, he says, was considered a “catalyst for toppling the Taliban regime."
“In less than 90 days, less than 100 Green Berets on the ground helped topple the Taliban,” he says. “And we were a small part of that early success. But our story really, to me, is about small teams being empowered and resourced and sent on incredible missions. And we demonstrated what can be achieved.”
Fast forward to today.
Small teams of Ukrainian troops, empowered by their leadership to act and increasingly resourced with arms from the west, are demonstrating what is being achieved. They’ve helped Ukraine devastate Russia's military, which has lost massive amounts of troops and equipment. And their efforts across Ukraine are bogged down.
Small teams of Ukraine forces making quick hits have taken a toll on Russian armor. (Photo by Genya SAVILOV / AFP) (Photo by GENYA SAVILOV/AFP via Getty Images)
The parallels, says Nutsch, are clear.
Empowering and trusting small teams to carry out the mission is one of them, he says.
So too is leveraging new technology.
“Our post 9/11 mission that we did, we didn't have unmanned aerial vehicles overhead 24/7,” says Nutsch. “The way we fought right after 9/11 is very different ... [to] how our Special Operations community goes at the mission now, with all these tools and enablers. But you're seeing the Ukrainians use UAVs in a very, very strategic, very impactful and effective way. And that's impressive, to see how they've evolved.”
Scott Neil, Nutch’s business partner in the American Freedom Distillery in St. Petersburg, Florida, also sees the similarities between what the Green Berets did against the Taliban and al-Qaeda and what Ukraine is doing against the Russians.
While Nutsch and his team were in the north, Neil was a sergeant first class with ODA 511 in Kandahar.
The parallels, he tells The War Zone, start with Russia being an invading force, not as familiar with much of the territory, trying to fight with unmotivated conscripts facing poor logistics.
“Let’s start with a comparison of the Taliban and the Russian forces,” says Neil. “You had conscription, you had mobile, mechanized infantry, augmented by rocket launchers, artillery, and tank formations, right? But you also had this long logistical tail.”
Conversely, Ukrainians, like the Northern Alliance, largely enjoy what Neil calls the “home-field advantage."
“They know the terrain, they know the people, they know what motivates them, they know the weather cycles,” he says. “They know everything that's important that sometimes outliers don't realize, right, they're waiting for some piece of data to tell them whereas indigenous people know.”
All those factors combined into success for both the forces fighting the Taliban and Ukrainians fighting Russia.
Another factor, Neil states, is Russia’s top-down leadership and lack of an effective cadre of junior officers and noncommissioned officers.
“In the second phase, we began to target just al-Qaeda and Taliban senior leadership. Because just like the Russian forces, once you took out that decision-making, the whole Borg stopped,” says Neil. “They didn't know what to do.”
By comparison, “in America, you have the five-paragraph op order. The commander's intent is briefed all the way down to the squad level. We rehearse routinely. Your lieutenant your shot? We have team NCOs.“
Swords of Lightning, written by ODA 595 members Mark Nutsch, Bob Pennington and author Jim DeFelice, offers a view into history with some lessons for today. (Simon & Schuster photo)
“The 10 Special Forces Group has done an amazing job preparing the Ukrainian special operations forces and their military for what's been horrifically happening in Ukraine,” says Nutsch. “But you're seeing the results of that have a partner. They're the force doing it, you know, but we've resourced them with lethal and non-lethal aid. And we've taught them and helped to empower them and their leadership to act and they obviously appear to be doing it very effectively.”
Afghanistan, says Neil, was not the only place where smaller, more nimble forces were able to take out a larger, better-armed foe with a reputation apparently far exceeding capability.
The Republican Guard in Iraq, he says, was similarly seen as a formidable enemy ahead of the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.
There are, of course, some big differences between 2001 and 2022.
The battle in the Donbas and Ukraine’s south has bogged down Russian troops, which continues to take heavy losses. This is particularly true of the recent debacle on the Donets, that may have limited Russia’s ability to encircle Ukrainian troops. You can read more about that attack in our full report.
Ukraine’s efforts have been greatly aided by an influx of Javelins, Stingers, and other shoulder-fired weapons systems. But they’ve also greatly benefited from an increasing supply of heavier weapons like M777 howitzers. And Ukraine continues to ask for longer-range air defense systems, longer-range rocket artillery, and more tanks and other armored vehicles.
The ELEEK Atom Military electric motorbike is being fielded by Ukrainian forces. (ELEEK photo)
That’s why many of the lessons of ODA 595 ring true today, Nutsch says.
“You got to trust in those people that they've been trained properly, that you've selected the right people into that team, and you send them out on that mission with the confidence that they're going to succeed, but they're going to return,” he says.
Contact the author: howard@thewarzone.com
10. Iran Is in Position for a Surprise Nuclear Breakout
Excerpts:
President Biden can start by declaring the nuclear talks dead. The JCPOA never did more than postpone the inevitable reckoning. The deal loosens restrictions on Iranian enrichment starting in 2024, which would only increase the risk of breakout.
Instead, the administration should announce that it will begin a zero-tolerance campaign of sanctioning state and private buyers of Iranian oil. The administration will need to alert the shipping industry that transporting Iran’s oil will once again be subject to swift penalties.
Next, Western powers must snap back into place the previous U.N. sanctions resolutions on Iran that were lifted by the JCPOA and use them as a basis to penalize Chinese and Russian assistance to Iran’s nuclear, missile, and military programs. The further Iran progresses, the more they must tighten the economic noose. Thankfully, the Iranian economy remains vulnerable to renewed pressure despite oil sales.
At the IAEA Board of Governors, which next meets in June, Washington and its European allies should spearhead a resolution condemning Iran’s nuclear advances. The agency’s director general is also due to report that Iran has not been cooperating with a four-year IAEA inquiry into Tehran’s illicit nuclear work. A two-thirds vote of the board is needed to pass censure, so there is not a moment to lose in corralling votes.
Washington must also re-establish a credible threat of military strikes using deep-penetrating bombs should Iran attempt to divert nuclear assets.
The Islamic Republic’s international language is aggression, expansion, and provocation, which can only be countered via pressure, containment, and deterrence. It is time the Biden administration accept that its policies have not worked. The president must turn the tables before Iran goes too far.
Iran Is in Position for a Surprise Nuclear Breakout
No wonder it’s in no rush to renegotiate a nuclear deal.
Ebrahim Raisi. (Photograph by Majid Saeedi/Getty Images.)
“Our nuclear program is advancing as planned and time is on our side,” an unnamed Iranian official bluntly told Reuters on May 5. “Oil sales have doubled,” noted Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi last Monday. In short, since the election of Joe Biden, Tehran has not only made impressive strides toward a nuclear weapons capability but repaired much of the financial damage done by U.S. sanctions.
It’s plain to see the clerical regime is in no rush to negotiate a revised nuclear deal. What’s the hurry when both oil exports and enriched uranium stockpiles are surging? But the risk here is not just that Tehran keeps stalling. It is that protracted negotiations may provide cover for a nuclear breakout—that is, the production of enough weapons-grade uranium for one or more bombs.
How Biden Let It Happen
The Biden administration has a standard response when reporters ask why Iran is enriching uranium to higher and higher levels or deploying more advanced centrifuges: It’s all Donald Trump’s fault. Tehran’s provocations are just an ongoing response to Trump’s withdrawal from the 2015 nuclear deal formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).
A bit of history shows this is a hollow excuse. Before Biden won the 2020 election, the clerical regime made cautious and incremental moves on the nuclear front. Sensing Biden’s avid interest in restoring the JCPOA, the regime in Tehran began to test him. Would he stay at the table and keep relaxing sanctions enforcement even as the clerical regime ramped up its nuclear program? He would.
On the one hand, this was a sharp negotiating tactic. Nuclear advances are bargaining chips Tehran can trade for American concessions. Yet taken together, these advances are also positioning Iran for a nuclear breakout.
In January 2021, Iran reactivated its fortified underground enrichment plant at Fordow and began enriching uranium to 20 percent purity. That February, it ended International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) monitoring at sites associated with certain nuclear infrastructure. Then, under a dubious civilian pretext, Tehran produced uranium metal, a sensitive material used in the core of atomic bombs.
In April 2021, Iran breached unofficial Western red lines by enriching uranium to 60 percent—highly enriched uranium that, according to the Institute for Science and International Security, is itself technically usable in a crude nuclear weapon. Tehran did all this despite international safeguards at the above-ground Natanz pilot enrichment plant—essentially rubbing the act in the world’s face—and used centrifuge arrangements that look to experts like practice for breakout.
By December 2021, the regime had used for the first time hundreds of its fastest IR-6 centrifuges at Fordow, the likely model of choice for a sprint to nuclear weapons. Iran now possesses more than 2,200 advanced centrifuges, compared to some 1,200 machines in 2015, at least 500 of which are the more productive IR-6 models.
Iran also took steps to fortify its enrichment supply chain after alleged foreign sabotage. It relocated two centrifuge manufacturing and assembly facilities underneath mountains—one near the Natanz enrichment plants and another in a tunnel complex at Esfahan—where they are invulnerable to military strikes.
Since February 2021, IAEA inspectors have been unable to monitor how many advanced centrifuges Tehran has made—meaning the regime could be squirrelling away untold quantities at a secret location. Maintaining such an inventory is critical, since, using existing enriched uranium stocks, Iran would need only 650 IR-6 machines at a clandestine facility to enrich uranium to 90 percent, the ideal purity level for nuclear weapons.
Thus, all the necessary elements have aligned for the Islamic Republic to move for nuclear weapons: reduced international monitoring, substantially improved atomic assets that are increasingly hardened against aerial strikes, an absence of international penalties, a reviving economy, and brutal ultra-hardliners in charge of the government who might be eager to go nuclear. The help of China, Russia, the United Arab Emirates, and others, who would continue to buy goods and oil, albeit at a discount, might convince the regime that it can weather inevitable Western sanctions against a breakout.
How Breakout Could Happen
As part of its pre-2003 nuclear weapons program, known as the Amad Plan, Tehran sought to build an initial five nuclear weapons and develop the ability to conduct an underground demonstration test. While it is unlikely that Iran would opt to demonstrate a crude nuclear weapon based on 60-percent enriched uranium, it has technically amassed enough of that material for one bomb. Overall, the regime may have enough low-enriched and high-enriched uranium that if further enriched would yield sufficient material for five or more atomic weapons. Unhindered by the threat of American military intervention, Tehran might opt to cross the nuclear threshold.
If Iran dashed to nuclear weapons, it would likely pursue weapons-grade enrichment in either a hidden facility or a known, heavily fortified one. It could obstruct IAEA access to its declared facilities at Natanz and/or Fordow and move existing enriched uranium stocks from one or both to an undisclosed site. A clandestine enrichment plant might be at a military site and highly fortified against prying satellites, and potentially, air strikes. The IAEA would sound an alarm about potential diversion, but Western powers may not have reliable information about the location of a hidden facility.
Iran could also opt to centralize its enriched uranium at Fordow, where the regime is enriching uranium to 20 percent in cascades that it could quickly reconfigure to make weapons-grade material. Fordow is fortified against all but so-called “bunker-busting bombs,” which only the United States possesses. The IAEA would report the activity at Fordow, but with force as one of few options to prevent a breakout, Washington might accept the breakout as a fait accompli.
A nuclear breakout is not the same as having a functional weapon, although once a proliferator has weapons-grade uranium, preventing weaponization must happen quickly. Tehran could finalize a weapon at a site adjacent to its enrichment facility, a process likely to require several months, given what is known about Iran’s weaponization progress since 2003. Incorporating an atomic weapon on a missile would take substantially longer.
Meanwhile, foreign powers would waver about what to do. The U.N. would convene meeting after meeting, demanding Iran grant the IAEA access to suspect sites. But gone are the days of unanimous U.N. Security Council action—such as that seen in response to North Korea’s 2006 nuclear test or against the first revelations of Iran’s clandestine enrichment program in 2002.
In the end, a U.S. president could be left with the undesirable choice of conducting military strikes, possibly with Israeli help, or accepting a nuclear Iran.
The Path Forward
President Biden can start by declaring the nuclear talks dead. The JCPOA never did more than postpone the inevitable reckoning. The deal loosens restrictions on Iranian enrichment starting in 2024, which would only increase the risk of breakout.
Instead, the administration should announce that it will begin a zero-tolerance campaign of sanctioning state and private buyers of Iranian oil. The administration will need to alert the shipping industry that transporting Iran’s oil will once again be subject to swift penalties.
Next, Western powers must snap back into place the previous U.N. sanctions resolutions on Iran that were lifted by the JCPOA and use them as a basis to penalize Chinese and Russian assistance to Iran’s nuclear, missile, and military programs. The further Iran progresses, the more they must tighten the economic noose. Thankfully, the Iranian economy remains vulnerable to renewed pressure despite oil sales.
At the IAEA Board of Governors, which next meets in June, Washington and its European allies should spearhead a resolution condemning Iran’s nuclear advances. The agency’s director general is also due to report that Iran has not been cooperating with a four-year IAEA inquiry into Tehran’s illicit nuclear work. A two-thirds vote of the board is needed to pass censure, so there is not a moment to lose in corralling votes.
Washington must also re-establish a credible threat of military strikes using deep-penetrating bombs should Iran attempt to divert nuclear assets.
The Islamic Republic’s international language is aggression, expansion, and provocation, which can only be countered via pressure, containment, and deterrence. It is time the Biden administration accept that its policies have not worked. The president must turn the tables before Iran goes too far.
Andrea Stricker is a research fellow on nonproliferation issues at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD). Follow her on Twitter @StrickerNonpro. FDD is a Washington, D.C.-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
11. Philippines' Marcos wants China ties to 'shift to higher gear' under his presidency
Excerpts:
"The way forward is to expand our relationship not only diplomatic, not only trade, but also in culture, even in education, even in knowledge, even in health to address whatever minor disagreements that we have right now," Marcos said in a statement.
"I told him, we must not allow what conflicts or difficulties we have now between our two countries to become historically important."
Philippines' Marcos wants China ties to 'shift to higher gear' under his presidency
MANILA, May 18 (Reuters) - Philippines president-elect Ferdinand Marcos Jr on Wednesday said his country's relations with China will expand and shift to a higher gear under his administration, and Beijing had assured him of its support for his "independent foreign policy".
Marcos, who won last week's Philippines election by a landslide, said he held "very substantial" talks by phone on Wednesday with China President Xi Jinping, who agreed to hold more comprehensive discussions of issues. read more
The 64-year-old son and namesake of the notorious former Philippines dictator said Xi also acknowledged his late father's role in opening diplomatic relations between the two countries.
"The way forward is to expand our relationship not only diplomatic, not only trade, but also in culture, even in education, even in knowledge, even in health to address whatever minor disagreements that we have right now," Marcos said in a statement.
"I told him, we must not allow what conflicts or difficulties we have now between our two countries to become historically important."
The Philippines and China have had a rocky relationship in recent years over Beijing's vast territorial claims and actions of its coast guard and fishing fleets in the South China Sea, through which at least $3.4 trillion of annual trade passes.
Their phone conversation focused on bilateral ties and regional development, the Chinese embassy in Manila said in a separate statement.
Marcos won the presidency with nearly 59% of the votes last week. He will take office late in June.
Many analysts expect Marcos to seek stronger ties with Beijing, continuing outgoing President Rodrigo Duterte's policy of rapprochement, while maintaining close relations with defence ally and former colonial power the United States. read more
Reporting by Karen Lema and Neil Jerome Morales; Editing by Martin Petty
12. Review finds US troops didn’t violate law in Syria airstrike
I do not want to minimize this tragedy or gloss over how the outcome will be exploited for propaganda purposes by our adversaries. Although you cannot prove a negative, I wonder how many tragedies have been averted because the disciplined processes and procedures prevented them. Few militaries operate with the speed and firepower of the US military. Tragedies like this are inevitable because of the human factor and chance. but I am convinced so many more were prevented. Unfortunately, such an argument will not be useful for convincing policy makers and the public.
Review finds US troops didn’t violate law in Syria airstrike
A U.S. military investigation found that American troops did not violate the law of war or deliberately cause civilian casualties in a 2019 airstrike in Syria that killed dozens of people, including women and children. It did find that the military committed procedural mistakes in the aftermath of the attack.
The Pentagon said Tuesday that no one, including the ground force commander, was disciplined as a result of the strike, which was launched in support of Syrian partner forces who were under heavy fire from the Islamic State group near the town of Baghuz, in eastern Syria.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, who ordered a new review of the airstrike last November, said he was “disappointed” with deficiencies in the handling of the initial review of the operation, which missed deadlines and led to delays in reporting to Congress and the public about civilian casualties.
“The process contributed to a perception that the Department was not committed to transparency and was not taking the incident seriously — a perception that could have been prevented by a timely review and a clear explication of the circumstances surrounding the strike,” Austin said in a memo released Tuesday.
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Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin pledged to review strike procedures to better avoid casualties.
The investigation comes amid new scrutiny on the U.S. military for strikes that cause innocent deaths. And it has all prompted Austin to order the department to create a new “Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Action Plan” to better prevent civilian deaths in military operations. He also ordered Army Gen. Michael Garrett, currently the head of U.S. Army Forces Command, to do an independent review of the Baghuz strike.
Late last year, another independent review concluded that a U.S. drone strike that killed innocent Kabul civilians and children in the final days of the Afghanistan war was not caused by misconduct or negligence. It found breakdowns in communication and in the process of identifying and confirming the target of the bombing.
The strike killed a longtime employee of an American humanitarian organization and nine of his family members, including seven children. The U.S. has promised to pay financial reparations to the family, and potentially get them out of Afghanistan, but none of that has happened yet.
In the Tuesday memo, Austin directed department leaders to meet deadlines in reporting civilian casualties, conduct thorough reviews, and reinforce the importance of the procedures to commanders across the force.
The initial investigation into the attack concluded that the strike constituted legitimate self-defense in support of Syrian partner forces under fire from the Islamic State group. Garrett, in his investigation, agreed with that conclusion.
According to Garrett’s investigation, 52 enemy combatants were killed and two were injured, and four civilians were killed and 15 were injured. Of the civilians, one female and three children were killed, and 11 women and four children were wounded. One of the enemies killed was a child.
Asked why no one was being held personally accountable for the civilian deaths, Pentagon press secretary John Kirby said Tuesday that Austin was holding the department accountable, and that’s why he ordered changes in the process.
“I understand the questions about accountability, I get it,” Kirby told Pentagon reporters. “In this case, Gen. Garrett found that the ground force commander made the best decisions that he could, given the information he had at the time, given a very lethal, very aggressive (Islamic State) threat, in a very confined space. It is deeply regrettable ... we apologize for the loss of innocent life.”
Garrett, in an unclassified summary of his report, said that the ground force commander “did not deliberately or with wanton disregard cause civilian casualties.” He said the decision to strike was necessary to defend the Syrian Democratic Forces and that “multiple efforts to distinguish civilians” from Islamic State insurgents were made.
Garrett added, however, that information not available to the commander at the time, showed that he relied on data “that was not fully accurate.” But he said the commander’s actions can’t be judged on information available only in hindsight.
Garrett, in his review, also said that while he found problems with policy compliance, “I found no evidence to support the allegation that these deficiencies were malicious or made to conceal decisions or actions.”
13. SOF-TEC Training Site at White Sands Missile Range | SOF News
SOF-TEC Training Site at White Sands Missile Range | SOF News
The Special Operations Forces Training and Experimentation Center (SOF-TEC) at White Sands Missile Range at Fort Bliss, Texas was formally activated during a ceremony in March 2022. The event took place at the SOF-TEC Campus. The site has been a location where special forces pre-mission training has taken place in the past at Fort Bliss, Texas. It is now to become a premier irregular warfare training and experimentation center. Units from all U.S. and many partner special operations forces are expected to conduct training at SOF-TEC.
White Sands Missile Range is a unique location – a place where a variety of training can be conducted that is not available in many other parts of the United States. WSMR is located 100 miles north of Fort Bliss, Texas (Google maps). Units have the ability to train in an area that spans 2 million acres and where the airspace is controlled by the military.
Units from the Army, Navy, Marines, and Air Force have been training there for years. In addition, organizations like Space Force, NASA, and others frequent the training location. SOF-TEC is now a tenant directorate on WSMR and is under the operational control of 1st Special Forces Command (Airborne) located at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.
Currently, SOF-TEC hosts Sage Eagle exercises each year. Special Forces detachment-level training and testing takes place on a regular basis. In addition, MARSOC and AFSOC tactical training events take place at the location. The training campus enables special operations forces to complete the required certification, validation, and verification process prior to conducting special operations in support of theater and national objectives at overseas locations. The location can support small twelve-man Special Forces operational detachments (SFODAs) up to Special Operations Task Forces (SOTFs).
SOF-TEC can support a wide range of training and experimentation activities. These include cyber, space, electronic warfare, decentralized mission command, joint force training, and more. In mid-2020, the 1st Special Forces Command (Airborne) began the process to establish a premier warfighting training venue. in 2021 the location was designated as the Special Operations Forces – Training Center (SOF-TC). At the time, a smaller army SOF pre-mission training site already existed aft Fort Bliss, Texas.
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Photo: U.S. Soldiers from 3rd Battalion, 3rd Special Forces Group (Airborne) and Security Forces Airmen from the Air Force Reserve Component conduct vehicle convoy operations during Sage Eagle in White Sands, New Mexico Jan. 19, 2022. Sage Eagle is designed to assist Special Forces battalions on validating subordinate units on pre-mission training by focusing on foreign internal defense. (U.S. Army photo by Sgt. Kacie Benak)
References:
WSMR SOF-TEC
Video – SOF-TEC Activation Ceremony, DVIDS, March 8, 2022, 31 minutes.
Podcast – SOF-TEC: The Premier IW Training and Experimentation Location for USSOF, The Indigenous Approach, March 18, 2022, 22 Minutes.
14. Debunking Rumors of a 'Xi-Li Split' in China's Leadership
Excerpts:
Another sign of brewing discontent towards Xi can be inferred from a new set of regulations veteran and retired Party cadres. Issued by the CCP General Office on May 15, the regulations instruct retired cadres and Party members “not to have improper discussions of Party Central’s major policies, not to spread political negative remarks, not to participate in illegal social organization activities, and not to use their former authority or position influence to seek benefits for themselves and others,” as well as to “resolutely oppose and resist various erroneous ideological trends.”
That veteran and retired Party cadres are explicitly being warned against the following indicates that such activities have been taking place. The Xi leadership’s effort to shut down “improper discussions” and other quasi-mutinous activities is likely an effort to stop his enemies from mobilizing politically against him in the lead-up to the 20th Party Congress. As previously indicated, internal contradictions detrimental to the regime are escalating within the CCP.
Xi and the CCP may have their crises to face, but opponents of the regime cannot afford to engage in wishful thinking when dubious information about fractures in the Party elite emerge. In his interview with The Epoch Times, the Chinese dissident Yuan Hongbing cautioned against accepting rumors and gossip that are inconsistent with the Communist Party’s internal operating logic.
Such information will lead people to “live in fantasy,” and too much fantasy will render them unable to effectively resist the CCP, Yuan warned.
Debunking Rumors of a 'Xi-Li Split' in China's Leadership
Though various crises have tested the Communist Party’s image and ruling ability, the rumors often lack credibility when considered alongside normal CCP operations and the reality of factional struggle and political developments in the regime.
Larry Ong is a senior analyst with SinoInsider, a New York-based risk consultancy that focuses on Chinese elite politics.
Published: May 17, 2022
Xi Jinping’s dismal handling of COVID-19 outbreaks in Shanghai and other parts of China have put the nation’s leader in such serious trouble that even his closest colleagues no longer respect his authority, according to myriad online rumors that began circulating around the end of April.
Prominent among this speculation — which has proliferated in both Chinese and English-language circles — has been talk of a split between Xi and China’s premier, Li Keqiang.
Though various crises have tested the Chinese Communist Party’s image and ruling ability, the rumors often lack credibility when considered alongside normal CCP operations and the reality of factional struggle and political developments in the regime. However, the timing and popularity of the rumors suggest that many both inside and outside China want to see Xi’s exit, and that the Chinese leader does indeed face risks to his “strongman” rule.
POLITICS IN COMMUNIST CHINA
Is Xi losing his grip?
Chinese President Xi Jinping, bottom, is applauded by members of the government as he arrives at the closing session of the Chinese Peoples Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) at the Great Hall of the People on March 10, 2022 in Beijing, China. (Image: Kevin Frayer/Getty Images)
On April 23, a rumor emerged in Chinese-speaking circles that multiple National People’s Congress deputies had written to NPC Standing Committee chairman Li Zhanshu demanding that the “bandit Jinping” (賊近平) be removed from office.
A day later, a rumor that CCP General Office director Ding Xuexiang and Guangdong governor Wang Weizhong had replaced Shanghai Party secretary Li Qiang and Shanghai governor Gong Zheng began making the rounds.
On May 2, it was rumored that Xi Jinping announced that he was relinquishing power and retiring at the 20th Party Congress during an enlarged meeting of the Politburo Standing Committee (PbSC), which heads the Communist Party. The rumor added that Li Keqiang would take over the running of the central government, as well as officially take over as the leader of China and the CCP at the Party Congress.
The hearsay was later reported by several Chinese “self-media” personalities, including the Canadian-based blogger “Lao Deng,” who claimed that a Party security source told him that a “coup” had led to Xi stepping aside.
On May 11, The Wall Street Journal reported that Li Keqiang is “helping press” Xi Jinping to “dial back some measures that steered the country away from Western-style capitalism and contributed to China’s economic slowdown,” citing “government officials and advisers close to decision-making.”
The Journal’s sources claimed that Li was behind Xi’s recent efforts to ease property restrictions, relax the crackdown on private technology firms, and help manufacturers impacted by the “zero-COVID” policy to resume production.
The article added that Li is trying to influence the selection of his replacement while Wang Yang and Hu Chunhua “may be gaining ground.” Meanwhile Xi’s “desired candidate” Li Qiang “being criticized by some inside the Party for his handling of COVID-19 outbreaks” in Shanghai.
BEIJING, CHINA – MARCH 06: Li Qiang, the secretary of the Shanghai Municipal Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC) attends the Shanghai delegation’s group meeting during the annual National People’s Congress at the Great Hall of the People on March 6, 2019 in Beijing, China. (Image: Lintao Zhang/Getty Images)
Wang Yang is a member of the seven-man PbSC, while Hu is on the 25-member Politburo and one of four vice-premiers under Li Keqiang.
In the Journal article, Li is presented as a “pragmatic” official who learned about the disasters caused by Xi’s political campaigns after going on inspection tours and is striving to undo the damage. Meanwhile, Xi is framed as a totalitarian leader in the vein of the regime’s founder Mao Zedong, putting “ideology over practical steps to keep the economy strong.” The article saw some traction in the English-speaking China-watching community.
Actual developments
Much as these rumors capture the imagination, they are easily debunked when juxtaposed alongside the standard workings of the Communist Party or actual developments in the Chinese political scene.
First, there have been no recent purges in the ranks of NPC deputies; Xi’s ally Li Zhanshu would hardly let a grievous insult to his political patron go unpunished. There have also been no changes in Shanghai’s top leadership; Li Qiang and Gong Zheng remain very much in charge.
The rumor that Xi Jinping had been replaced by Li Keqiang, either voluntarily or via a “coup,” is debunked by the former presiding over a May 5 Politburo Standing Committee meeting where he doubled down on “correctness” of the “zero-COVID” policy. Official Party and state media would proceed for days to hammer home Xi’s mantra of “persistence is victory.”
READ MORE
Meanwhile, Party organs like the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection and the People’s Liberation Army would release articles calling for “unswerving adherence” to “dynamic zero-COVID.” In particular, the PLA’s article, which was published on May 6, urged all officers and soldiers to “align their thinking and actions with the decisions and deployments of Party Central and Chairman Xi,” a call to action that would be impossible had Xi been marginalized per the rumor.
The Wall Street Journal’s article about Li Keqiang “re-emerging as a force in his own right” does not stand up to scrutiny in considering regular Party operations. As PRC premier, it is part of Li’s job to handle the daily running of economic affairs, make policy recommendations to Xi, and go on inspection tours to assess the situation on the ground after policy is passed to see if adjustments need to be made.
Chinese Premier Li Keqiang speaks during a news conference following the closing of the second session of the 13th National People’s Congress (NPC) at the Great Hall of the People on March 20, 2018 in Beijing, China. (Image: Lintao Zhang/Getty Images)
More importantly, none of Li’s policies and recommendations would see the light of day without Xi’s approval. Despite the Journal’s framing, the article actually confirms that Xi is pragmatic enough to approve policy shifts in reaction to changing circumstances and that Li has been carrying out his duties as befitting his position. There is also nothing untoward about Li pushing certain candidates to replace him as premier; again, Li can offer recommendations, but Xi makes the final decision.
Yuan Hongbing, an Australia-based Chinese dissident and jurist familiar with developments in the CCP elite, told the Chinese language edition of The Epoch Times on May 12 that Xi Jinping is in “full control” over the Party’s apparatus, including the military, domestic security, propaganda, and anti-corruption agencies. Given the circumstances, Li Keqiang and others lack the ability to effectively check Xi’s actions per the logic of CCP’s political operations even if they wanted to.
Yuan also believes that Li has no say over who his replacement will be. “If Li fully obeys Xi’s political arrangements, he could retain an honorary position in future, such as chairman of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference. If Li fails to cooperate [with Xi], it’ll be the end of his political career,” Yuan said.
Who benefits from a ‘Xi-Li split’?
Observers have been talking about a so-called “Xi-Li split” or “Xi-Li struggle” for several years. They cite as evidence what seems like differences between the two in public rhetoric and policy to justify the notion of a fracture. Like the recent rumors, however, many of the “differences” between Xi Jinping and Li Keqiang are discredited by subsequent developments or turn out to be misreadings of what are actually mundane Party operations and protocol.
Xi and Li almost certainly have their differences over policy. It is also possible that the mounting pressures of strongman rule have made Xi more paranoid of Li and other officials. However, signs of an obvious rift between Xi and Li have yet to publicly manifest.
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From the perspective of factional politics in the CCP elite, there is little incentive for either man to turn on each other. Unlike Xi Jinping the Party princeling, Li Keqiang hails from a “commoner” background. Even if Li harbored designs against Xi, he would find it hard to muster support for action within the Party elite, who, to quote Orwell, certainly believe that “some animals are more equal than others.”
Xi and Li are also political allies against the once highly influential Jiang Zemin faction, who attempted a coup against Li’s political patron Hu Jintao and incoming General Secretary Xi in 2012 after the Wang Lijun incident. While the Jiang faction is losing influence and Xi has been growing in strength, both Xi and Li would be wary of efforts to drive a wedge between them and split the Xi leadership, which only benefits the Jiang faction and others in the “anti-Xi coalition.”
Indeed, there is reason to believe that Xi’s political rivals are behind the recent negative rumors about Xi and Li, or at least the wide circulation of those rumors. Former senior State Department policy planning official Miles Yu told The Washington Times that such rumors, regardless of their veracity, are “often weaponized and used by feuding CCP factions in frequent power struggles.”
Mounting discontentment
Their validity notwithstanding, the various political rumors concerning Xi Jinping point to rising discontentment within the Party over the disastrous policies implemented on his watch. Hints that Xi is facing a degree of pushback internally can also be glimpsed from the use of certain phrases in official propaganda.
For instance, Xi’s call to “unswervingly adhere to the general policy of dynamic zero-COVID, and resolutely oppose all distortions, doubts, and denials” during the Politburo Standing Committee meeting on May 5 and the subsequent repeating of this phrase in state and Party media indicates that there are “doubts and denials” being expressed about Xi’s “zero-COVID.”
Pandemic staff seen wearing personal protective equipment (PPE) as they transfer daily food supplies and necessities for local residents during the COVID-19 lockdown in Shanghai on April 5, 2022. (Image: STR/AFP via Getty Images)
Further, Xi’s demand that Party committees, governments and sectors of society at all levels “align their thinking and actions with the decisions and deployments of Party Central,” as well as “consciously maintain a high degree of consistency in ideology, politics, and action” with Party Central, indicates that the contrary situation is occurring with enough frequency to concern Beijing.
Another sign of brewing discontent towards Xi can be inferred from a new set of regulations veteran and retired Party cadres. Issued by the CCP General Office on May 15, the regulations instruct retired cadres and Party members “not to have improper discussions of Party Central’s major policies, not to spread political negative remarks, not to participate in illegal social organization activities, and not to use their former authority or position influence to seek benefits for themselves and others,” as well as to “resolutely oppose and resist various erroneous ideological trends.”
That veteran and retired Party cadres are explicitly being warned against the following indicates that such activities have been taking place. The Xi leadership’s effort to shut down “improper discussions” and other quasi-mutinous activities is likely an effort to stop his enemies from mobilizing politically against him in the lead-up to the 20th Party Congress. As previously indicated, internal contradictions detrimental to the regime are escalating within the CCP.
Xi and the CCP may have their crises to face, but opponents of the regime cannot afford to engage in wishful thinking when dubious information about fractures in the Party elite emerge. In his interview with The Epoch Times, the Chinese dissident Yuan Hongbing cautioned against accepting rumors and gossip that are inconsistent with the Communist Party’s internal operating logic.
Such information will lead people to “live in fantasy,” and too much fantasy will render them unable to effectively resist the CCP, Yuan warned.
Larry Ong is a senior analyst with New York-based political risk consultancy SinoInsider. He was part of the SinoInsider team that forecasted the 19th Party Congress and 2018 Two Sessions personnel reshuffles with a high degree of accuracy.
15. NATO chief hails 'historic moment' as Finland, Sweden apply
Historic. Game-changing.
Will this lead to greater European security or cause Russia to continue to act dangerously?
NATO chief hails 'historic moment' as Finland, Sweden apply
AP · by LORNE COOK · May 18, 2022
BRUSSELS (AP) — NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said Wednesday that the military alliance stands ready to seize a historic moment and move quickly on allowing Finland and Sweden to join its ranks, after the two countries submitted their membership requests.
The official applications, handed over by Finland and Sweden’s ambassadors to NATO, set a security clock ticking. Russia, whose war on Ukraine spurred them to join the military organization, has warned that it wouldn’t welcome such a move, and could respond.
“I warmly welcome the requests by Finland and Sweden to join NATO. You are our closest partners,“ Stoltenberg said. “All allies agree on the importance of NATO enlargement. We all agree that we must stand together, and we all agree that this is an historic moment which we must seize.”
“This is a good day at a critical moment for our security,” a beaming Stoltenberg said, as he stood alongside the two envoys, with NATO, Finnish and Swedish flags at their backs.
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Russian President Vladimir Putin has demanded that the alliance stop expanding toward Russia’s borders, and several NATO allies, led by the United States and Britain, have signaled that they stand ready to provide security support to Finland and Sweden should he try to provoke or destabilize them during the time it takes to become full members.
The countries will only benefit from NATO’s Article 5 security guarantee — the part of the alliance’s founding treaty that pledges that any attack on one member would be considered an attack of them all — once the membership ratification process is concluded, probably in a few months.
The move is one of the biggest geopolitical ramifications of the war and will rewrite Europe’s security map. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson welcomed it in a tweet and said that “Putin’s appalling ambitions have transformed the geopolitical contours of our continent.”
If his objections are overcome, and accession talks go as well as expected, the two could become members soon. The process usually takes eight to 12 months, but NATO wants to move quickly given the threat from Russia hanging over the Nordic countries’ heads.
Canada, for example, says that it expects to ratify their accession protocol in just a few days — while in the Baltic region, Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas tweeted: “I encourage a rapid accession process. We in Estonia will do our part fast.”
Stoltenberg said that NATO allies “are determined to work through all issues and reach rapid conclusions.”
The fact that the Nordic partners applied together means they won’t be losing time by having to ratify each other’s membership application.
“That Sweden and Finland go hand in hand is a strength. Now the process of joining the talks continues,” Swedish Foreign Minister Ann Linde told the Swedish news agency TT.
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It shouldn’t take long to win approval in the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Their prime ministers issued a joint statement on Wednesday saying that they “fully endorse and warmly welcome the historic decisions” taken in Helsinki and Stockholm.
Public opinion in Finland and Sweden has shifted massively in favor of membership since Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24.
Finland and Sweden cooperate closely with NATO. They have functioning democracies, well-funded armed forces and contribute to the alliance’s military operations and air policing. Any obstacles they face will merely be of a technical, or possibly political nature.
NATO’s membership process is not formalized, and the steps can vary. But first their requests to join will be examined in a sitting of the North Atlantic Council (NAC) of the 30 member countries, probably at ambassadorial level.
The NAC will decide whether to move toward membership and what steps must be taken to achieve it. This mostly depends on how well aligned the candidate countries are with NATO political, military and legal standards, and whether they contribute to security in the North Atlantic area. This should pose no substantial problem for Finland and Sweden.
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Moving forward, during accession talks that could be concluded in just one day once the terms of those negotiations are set, the two will be asked to commit to uphold Article 5 and to meet spending obligations concerning the NATO in-house budget, which runs to around $2.5 billion dollars, split proportionally among what would be 32 member countries.
Finland and Sweden would also be made aware of their role in NATO defense planning, and of any other legal or security obligations they might have, like the vetting of personnel and handling of classified information.
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Jari Tanner in Helsinki and Jan M. Olsen in Copenhagen contributed to this report.
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AP · by LORNE COOK · May 18, 2022
16. Russian commanders killing their own wounded in Ukraine: Report
If true, this is just another indication of the evil nature of Putin's regime.
Russian commanders killing their own wounded in Ukraine: Report
Rather than treating wounded troops, Russian commanders are shooting their own soldiers on the battlefield.
As Russian troops scramble to keep fighting a stiff Ukrainian resistance, leaders are not only leaving their wounded for dead but are contributing to the killing, according to a report. A video of captured Russian intelligence troops, made by Ukrainian journalist Volodymyr Zolkin and obtained by the Mirror, shows the captured troops explaining how commanders “finished off their wounded.”
“It was a young man. He was wounded,” one of the captured soldiers says. “He was on the ground. He was asked if he could walk, so he was shot dead with a gun.”
Another soldier in the video reportedly says the instance wasn’t the first time a commander had shot one of his wounded men. The lieutenant colonel was walking around and “shot four or five like this,” according to a third soldier.
Last week, Ukrainian soldiers said Russia was leaving troops’ bodies behind rather than gathering their dead.
"If they (Russian forces) won’t do what they were supposed to do as a matter of honor, then we will do it out of respect for the dead," a soldier going by the call sign "Mukhomor" told AFP. "It doesn’t matter if he is the enemy or not — we don’t judge. These are the rules of international humanitarian law.”
Early on in the conflict, Ukrainians accused Russian forces of using mobile crematoriums to cover “their tracks.”
In February, British Defense Secretary Ben Wallace said the crematoriums could be used for Russia to cover up its own losses. At the time, there were reports that Russians were being buried in unmarked graves inside Ukraine to cover up their presence there before the invasion Feb. 24.
17. An Anti-War Underground Emerges in Russia
Yes these are key questions. Also can this be supported and expanded? Can it cause change?
Questions remain whether this anti-war underground will grow or whether the Russian police responds to such actions by becoming even more repressive. The latter is likely in the short term; but if the war drags on, such increased repression will almost certainly compel ever more Russians to choose underground methods as the best or perhaps only way to protest a war they oppose, thereby creating a dangerous and potentially explosive situation.
An Anti-War Underground Emerges in Russia
Publication: Eurasia Daily Monitor Volume: 19 Issue: 72
May 17, 2022 04:49 PM Age: 15 hours
Since Russia’s President Vladimir Putin launched his expanded invasion of Ukraine on February 24, fires at military bases and train accidents inside the Russian Federation have increased, military draft offices have been set aflame there, and draft resistance has spiked, as have cases in which soldiers in uniform are refusing to obey orders to deploy to Ukraine. Telephone bomb threats have become more frequent throughout the country, and hackers have posted anti-war messages on Kremlin propaganda sites. Taken together, those developments have led the Ekho Kavkaza portal to conclude that “anti-war protest in Russia” has acquired a powerful, new “underground” dimension, with many Russians opposed to what Putin is doing evidently prepared to take far more radical actions than in the past. This trend is prompting new crackdowns by the authorities (Ekho Kavkaza, May 13).
Like the continuing public protests against the war, which marred even May 9 Victory Day last week, the “underground” events appear not to have any single controlling center; moreover, at least some of them may be taking place for reasons other than to protest the war. Thus, for example, fires at military bases and oil depots in Russia continue to be described as “mysterious” rather than assumed to be the work of anti-war activists or Ukrainian special forces (Kyiv Post, April 27; Daily Record, April 25). But enough of the actions obviously are intended to send an anti-war message. And at a minimum, they are viewed as such by the Russian authorities, who are taking steps to clamp down hard. These merit attention as an indication of just how opposed some Russians are to the war and how many risks they are prepared to take in the current repressive climate to demonstrate that opposition.
Perhaps the most widely visible underground activity of this sort has been the hacking of pro-Kremlin media sites, on which at least briefly in the last week anti-war messages were posted for all to see. The authorities quickly took them down but so far have not been able to track down and arrest all those responsible (Graniru.org, May 13; Meduza [1] [2], May 9). In addition, graffiti artists have taken to the streets to leave anti-war messages on the walls of buildings (Kavkaz.Realii, May 15).
More dramatic but less widespread in their impact have been firebombings of about a dozen military commissariats. These are the offices where the Russian military draft is carried out, and attacking them is clearly intended to make the conduct of that operation more difficult as well as to protest the war (Ekho Kavkaza, May 13). Many of these incidents, such as the firebombing of a commissariat in Volgograd on May 15, occur far from Moscow and seldom receive much coverage beyond local media (Hu-f.ru, May 15).
Several years ago, Russia was overwhelmed by a rash of mystery telephone bomb threats that forced the emptying out of buildings or houses while the alleged danger had to be investigated (see EDM, January 31, 2019). Now this tactic seems to have returned, with a surge of new incidents. Many who make telephone bomb threats may not be protesting the war, but two developments suggest that at least some are and that the authorities in Moscow increasingly view them that way. On the one hand, the number of bomb threats appears to have grown significantly since the expanded invasion of Ukraine began, particularly in places known for their anti-war sentiments (Kavkaz.Realii, May 13, 2022). And on the other hand, police in St. Petersburg and possibly elsewhere are now charging people whom they believe are going to take part in anti-war protests with making such threats and thus taking them off the streets before they can hold their protests (Meduza, May 14).
Two more serious forms of protest against Putin’s war in Ukraine that may fall into this broader category are draft resistance and the refusal of personnel already in service to obey orders to be sent to the front lines to fight. The incidence of both has certainly increased since February 24; Ukrainian officials claim that, combined, they amount to 7,000 Russians, while Russian sources document fewer cases but offer numbers still in the hundreds (The Moscow Times, May 12; TRT, April 7, May 13). Many young Russians do not want to serve in the military—and not only because of Ukraine. They see conscription as an unfair burden on them that delays the launch of their careers. Yet at least some of those seeking the assistance of draft resistance groups are doing so because of the war in Ukraine and fears that they may be sent there despite Putin’s promises to the contrary (see EDM, March 31).
One indication of how critical this problem is becoming is now on public view in the North Caucasus republic of Kabardino-Balkaria. There, the authorities have opened a court case against 115 men from the North Caucasus who have refused to serve in Ukraine. These defendants almost certainly will be convicted and sentenced to long prison terms, but undoubtedly they and their parents knew that risk in advance. That they chose to nevertheless resist shows how opposed they are to the war (NatPress, May 11).
Questions remain whether this anti-war underground will grow or whether the Russian police responds to such actions by becoming even more repressive. The latter is likely in the short term; but if the war drags on, such increased repression will almost certainly compel ever more Russians to choose underground methods as the best or perhaps only way to protest a war they oppose, thereby creating a dangerous and potentially explosive situation.
18. Why the West Needs to End the War in Ukraine Soon
Excerpts:
Critics charge that any outcome short of total defeat would embolden Putin. Allowing him to claim victory by retaining control of even a small slice of Ukraine, the arguments run, would only encourage his next land grab. So, too, might China interpret any outcome shy of a rout of Russia as encouragement for testing the West’s readiness to defend Taiwan.
But Putin will remain a troublemaker no matter how this war ends. And he has already been dealt a setback more than sufficient to drive home the costs of further adventurism. The Russian military is reeling as the country’s economy shrinks. Ukrainians have soundly rejected any future that entails subjugation to Moscow’s sphere of influence. And Russian aggression has prompted previously neutral Finland and Sweden to head for membership in NATO, an alliance that has integrated more than a dozen countries (encompassing some 100 million people) that were once part of the Soviet bloc.
Putin’s back is up against the wall. Pushing him further is both unnecessary and unnecessarily risky. And China can hardly be interpreting the blowback against Russia—in particular, Russia’s detachment from the global economy—as anything but a stark warning against Beijing’s own expansionism.
Putin’s errant invasion of Ukraine has produced no winners, but one clear loser: Russia. Even as the West continues to provide Ukraine the means to defend itself, it’s time for the Atlantic democracies to turn their focus to bringing the war to an end.
Why the West Needs to End the War in Ukraine Soon
Strategic prudence argues in favor of pocketing successes, rather than pressing the fight and running the tantamount risks.
The war in Ukraine is entering a more dangerous phase. Even though Russia appears to have downsized its goals after Kyiv blunted Moscow’s initial invasion, the Kremlin is now determined to enlarge the chunk of eastern and southern Ukraine that it grabbed in 2014. Meanwhile, NATO allies are pouring in arms, providing intelligence, and savoring the prospect of a “victory” that entails expelling Russia from Ukraine.
With both sides doubling down, NATO must engage in a forthright dialogue with the Ukrainian government about its goals and how best to bring the bloodshed to a close sooner rather than later. Russia has already been dealt a decisive strategic defeat. Ukrainian forces have rebuffed the advance on Kyiv and retain control of most of the country; the West has hit Russia with severe economic sanctions; and NATO has reinforced its eastern flank, while Finland and Sweden now seek to join the alliance. For NATO and Ukraine alike, strategic prudence argues in favor of pocketing these successes rather than pressing the fight and running the tantamount risks.
So far, the United States and its allies have shied away from pushing Kyiv to limit its strategic objectives. NATO has instead focused on providing Ukraine the means to defend itself—more anti-tank and antiaircraft missiles, more drones, more artillery, more intelligence. The Biden administration legitimately argues that Ukrainians must decide their own war aims. It’s also true that Kyiv is fully justified, on both moral and legal grounds, to seek to restore Ukraine’s full territorial integrity by retaking Crimea and the section of the Donbas that Russia occupied in 2014.
But Kyiv’s right to fight for complete territorial sovereignty does not make doing so strategically wise. Nor should Ukraine’s remarkable success in repelling Russia’s initial advance be cause for overconfidence about the next phases of the conflict. Indeed, strategic pragmatism warrants a frank conversation between NATO and Ukraine about curbing Kyiv’s ambitions and settling for an outcome that falls short of “victory.”
Several considerations call for such restraint. First, the longer the war continues, the greater the death, destruction, and dislocation it will reap. Russia’s invasion has already taken tens of thousands of lives, forced some 12 million Ukrainians to flee their homes (about 6 million have left the country), and destroyed some $60 billion of Ukraine’s infrastructure. Sanctions against Russia and the war’s disruption to supply chains are fueling rising prices in many countries and could spawn a global food shortage.
Second is the risk of escalation. If Russian forces fare well in the east and the south, the Kremlin could eventually decide to enlarge its own war aims and seek to swallow more of Ukraine. Alternatively, if Russian forces falter in the coming weeks and Vladimir Putin faces a further defeat, he could well look to use weapons of mass destruction, or to trigger a wider conflict to change the course of the war. Accidental escalation is also a real risk, with Russia already carrying out strikes near NATO territory and Russian and NATO forces operating in close proximity.
Third, even though the West has demonstrated impressive unity in supporting Ukraine and standing up to Russian aggression, the West’s solidarity may wane over time. Inflation is spiking on both sides of the Atlantic, fueled in part by the knock-on effects of the war. Rising prices are weighing down President Joe Biden’s popularity—despite his strong handling of the war—and his earlier focus on improving the lot of working Americans has effectively been sidelined. Bipartisan cooperation on standing up to Putin could erode.
Differences are starting to emerge among transatlantic allies. The leaders of France, Germany, and Italy last week talked up the need for a cease-fire and a negotiated settlement. Meanwhile, Washington and London appear to be backing Ukraine’s intention to achieve, in the words of its foreign minister, “the liberation of occupied territories.”
Electoral outcomes since the war began do not bode well for the West’s collective staying power, either. Viktor Orbán, the self-proclaimed defender of “illiberal democracy,” won reelection in Hungary. He has so far blocked the European Union’s effort to impose an oil embargo on Russia. Although the centrist candidate Emmanuel Macron was reelected in France, the hard-right and pro-Russian candidate, Marine Le Pen, garnered more than 40 percent of the vote. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz initially outlined a bold shift in German foreign policy to counter Putin’s move into Ukraine. But Berlin has since wavered on following through, and the Scholz government has been weakened by a political setback in regional elections over the weekend.
In the U.S., buoyed by Donald Trump’s endorsement, J. D. Vance recently won a hotly contested Senate primary in Ohio. His views of the war in Ukraine are rather blunt: “I think it’s ridiculous that we are focused on this border in Ukraine. I got to be honest with you, I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or the other.” Amid rampant inflation, the “America First” wing of the Republican Party is poised to surge in the November midterms.
Finally, the West needs to begin looking beyond the war to salvage a relationship with Russia that keeps the door open to a modicum of collaboration. Even if a new cold war is opening, dialogue will be even more important than it was during Cold War 1.0. In a more interdependent and globalized world, the West will need at least a measure of pragmatic cooperation with Moscow to tackle common challenges, such as negotiating arms control, arresting climate change, managing the cybersphere, and promoting global health. To that end, bringing the war to an expeditious close through a cease-fire and negotiated settlement is far preferable to either a war that drags on or a new frozen conflict that ends in a hostile stalemate.
Critics charge that any outcome short of total defeat would embolden Putin. Allowing him to claim victory by retaining control of even a small slice of Ukraine, the arguments run, would only encourage his next land grab. So, too, might China interpret any outcome shy of a rout of Russia as encouragement for testing the West’s readiness to defend Taiwan.
But Putin will remain a troublemaker no matter how this war ends. And he has already been dealt a setback more than sufficient to drive home the costs of further adventurism. The Russian military is reeling as the country’s economy shrinks. Ukrainians have soundly rejected any future that entails subjugation to Moscow’s sphere of influence. And Russian aggression has prompted previously neutral Finland and Sweden to head for membership in NATO, an alliance that has integrated more than a dozen countries (encompassing some 100 million people) that were once part of the Soviet bloc.
Putin’s back is up against the wall. Pushing him further is both unnecessary and unnecessarily risky. And China can hardly be interpreting the blowback against Russia—in particular, Russia’s detachment from the global economy—as anything but a stark warning against Beijing’s own expansionism.
Putin’s errant invasion of Ukraine has produced no winners, but one clear loser: Russia. Even as the West continues to provide Ukraine the means to defend itself, it’s time for the Atlantic democracies to turn their focus to bringing the war to an end.
19. U.S. Special Forces Now Need to Fight Anywhere, At Anytime
I have heard a rumor that AFSOC is divesting the FID mission completely. I only have one report of that. Has anyone else heard any reports of this?
U.S. Special Forces Now Need to Fight Anywhere, At Anytime
U.S. special forces – or officially known as US special-operations forces – are preparing for a very different world than in the last 20 years: During a Senate hearing at the end of April, US special-operations leaders provided insight into how the US special-operations community is gearing up for future challenges.
Near-peer adversaries — mainly China, but also Russia — are the primary threats to US national security, and the US military, including US Special Operations Command, is adjusting accordingly.
When asked how the shift from counterterrorism and counterinsurgency operations to great-power competition is affecting their planning and investment decisions, the commanders emphasized a shift to supporting operations.
The leaders of US Air Force Special Operations Command and Naval Special Warfare Command in particular described a desire for the special-operations component commands to more closely support their parent branch — the Air Force and the Navy, respectively.
“I believe that the service components of SOF are most effective when we’re closest to our parent services,” said Lt. Gen. James Slife, the head of US Air Force Special Operations Command.
The AFSOC boss went on to say that there is value in “enabling our broader service” and helping it “to be effective.”
“So I think for AFSOC there’s a lot of work to be done in the integrated-air-defense area as well as the counter-space mission area,” Slife added.
Howard acknowledged that over the past 20 years NSW has lost some ground “in the distinctive things that only we can do, and we are moving with urgency to make the main thing the things that only we can do in the maritime domain.”
The special-ops leaders’ comments indicate a shift back to the role those special operators have played throughout their history: supporting their conventional brethren.
Cyber, space, and SOF
The special-operations leaders are also looking into the future, and especially in the cyber and space domains, which are increasingly important for facilitating operations in other domains and as domains of warfare on their own.
US Marine Corps Maj. Gen. James Glynn, commander of Marine Forces Special Operations Command, emphasized his command’s “examination” of its cyber and space capabilities and “the integration with special operations going forward to narrow that gray zone,” referring to the space in which threatening activities short of war often take place.
“I cannot envision a future where that does not increase in importance, affecting target audiences, general populations, governments, armies, morale, and eroding their overall effectiveness,” US Army Lt. Gen. Jonathan Braga, commander of US Army Special Operations Command, said of information operations.
The renewed focus on near-peer adversaries means that special-operations forces will need to reappraise their mission sets and priorities.
In shifting from counterterrorism to great-power competition, the focus “must shift from sensing, identifying, and targeting small underground terrorist networks to being able to initially provide a deterrence through a wide and formidable array of partnerships with our military alliances, not only in the Pacific but from across the globe,” retired Marine Raider Maj. Fred Galvin told Insider.
Galvin is the author of “A Few Bad Men,” a non-fiction account of the first Marine Special Operations combat deployment to Afghanistan and how they overcame attacks from all sides.
“SOCOM has a large task in shaping each phase of the future fight through imposing costs to our competitors during the crisis and conflict phases,” Galvin said.
A “primary” difference in how US special-operations forces will conduct crisis and conflict operations during great-power competition will be those forces’ “reliance on and coordination with conventional and allied forces vs. conducting separate, small-scale unilateral operations” as they did during the war on terror, Galvin added.
Although US special operators will still train partner forces and help foreign militaries increase their capacities, near-peer competition likely means those operators will be conducting “more direct engagements vs. the preponderance of advise and assist missions that have occurred over the previous 20 years,” Galvin said.
Stavros Atlamazoglou is a defense journalist specializing in special operations, a Hellenic Army veteran (national service with the 575th Marine Battalion and Army HQ), and a Johns Hopkins University graduate.
20. Tyrannical dictator Putin gives new life to NATO
We can demote Putin from KGB Colonel to Major Miscalculation.
Excerpts:
The U.S. will continue to be the major power within NATO. There’s no alternative. But we should insist that, over time, its European members bear more of the burden for European security so we can focus on Asia.
And, longer term, NATO should grapple with the fact that Mr. Putin’s ally, Xi Jinping, ruler of neo-imperialist China, poses as much of a threat to Europeans as he does to Americans.
Big picture, here’s the choice we must make: Do we leave our children a world shaped by free peoples, or a world shaped by the tyrannical dictators in Moscow and Beijing, along with their allies in Tehran, Havana, Caracas and Managua? There’s no third option.
Tyrannical dictator Putin gives new life to NATO
OPINION:
Of course, boosting NATO was not the Russian dictator’s intention. He expected his invasion of Ukraine to divide and perhaps destroy this beneficial international community.
NATO was founded in 1949 to prevent the Soviet Union — an ally against the Nazis but only after Hitler broke his pact with Stalin — from subjugating Western Europe as it had Eastern Europe.
Even after the collapse of the Soviet empire in 1991, many East European nations were eager to join NATO. They believed that membership ensured independence — come what may.
West Europeans, by contrast, tended to see NATO’s mission as accomplished. Many embraced the delusion that peace had become natural and war unnatural — at least in their corner of the world.
Disagreements — including with post-Soviet Russia — surely would be susceptible to “diplomatic solutions.” So western Europeans allowed their military capabilities to weaken. (To be fair, the U.S. did too, though starting from a higher plane and not descending as far.)
A few years ago, I rudely suggested to a senior German diplomat that his country was free riding at America’s expense while growing increasingly dependent on Mr. Putin’s fossil fuels. That dependence, I added, would sharply increase upon completion of Nord Stream 2, the underwater pipeline that was to deliver huge quantities of gas directly from Russia to Germany.
“We’re not becoming dependent on their gas!” he protested. “They’re becoming dependent on our money!”
A year ago this month, President Biden waived sanctions on the pipeline. Sen. Bob Menendez, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, called out the mistake. He said he failed to see “how today’s decision will advance U.S. efforts to counter Russian aggression in Europe.”
He was right, but it required Russia’s latest barbaric aggression to cap the pipeline and prompt German Chancellor Olaf Scholz to renew his commitments to NATO and pledge to contribute more to the collective defense.
But the big story is this: Finland and Sweden now want to join the club.
“Finland must apply for NATO membership without delay,” President Sauli Niinisto and Prime Minister Sanna Marin said in a joint statement last week. “NATO membership would strengthen Finland’s security. As a member of NATO, Finland would strengthen the entire defense alliance.” Mr. Niinisto also addressed Mr. Putin directly: “You caused this. Look in the mirror.”
“There is a before and after 24 February,” Swedish Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson told a reporter, referring to the date when Russia’s invasion began. “The security landscape has completely changed.”
Sweden’s decision strikes me as the more surprising. It has a two-century-long history of neutrality, including during the Second World War and the Cold War. After the collapse of the Berlin Wall, most Swedes thought land invasions by European armies were as outmoded as Viking raids.
Sweden doesn’t share a border with Russia, but there is a Russian fleet just 200 miles away in Kaliningrad, formerly the Prussian city of Konigsberg, now a Russian possession separated from the “mainland” by Belarus, currently a Russian vassal, and Lithuania, a NATO member formerly ruled from the Kremlin.
Finland’s border with Russia is 830 miles long. The Finns were under Russian rule for more than a century, achieving independence in 1917. Less than a generation later, in 1939, the Soviets launched the Winter War.
Vastly outnumbered, with few tanks or aircraft, and little support from European countries preoccupied with the Nazi onslaught, the Finns defended themselves valiantly — many on skis, camouflaged in white, staining snow-covered forests with the blood of tens of thousands of Soviet soldiers, and tossing Molotov cocktails (a Finnish invention) into the turrets of Soviet tanks.
James Brooke, my FDD colleague, spent years as a correspondent in Moscow and Kyiv. In a recent essay on the Winter War, he recalled how Simo Hayha, a Finnish farmer turned sniper, “settled in his snow pits, tamping down the snow to avoid powder puffs from a shot. … To minimize telltale breath clouds, Hayha filled his mouth with snow … he managed to kill 500 Soviet soldiers in less than 100 days. One day, he shot 28. On the Soviet side, this invisible sniper was known as ‘Belaya Smert’ — ‘White Death.’”
In the end, the Finns were not conquered. But they lost 11% of their territory. And they dared not offend or provoke the Kremlin. “Finlandization” became the term of art for a nation surrendering some of its sovereignty to a bully in exchange for peace. Unlike many NATO members, however, Finland has never let down its military guard.
It would serve the U.S. national interest for NATO to become a stronger community — willing and able to defend the independence, rights and core values of its members.
The United Nations was meant to be such an organization. But despots now dominate many if not most U.N. agencies. The U.N. Human Rights Council is only the most obvious example.
The U.S. will continue to be the major power within NATO. There’s no alternative. But we should insist that, over time, its European members bear more of the burden for European security so we can focus on Asia.
And, longer term, NATO should grapple with the fact that Mr. Putin’s ally, Xi Jinping, ruler of neo-imperialist China, poses as much of a threat to Europeans as he does to Americans.
Big picture, here’s the choice we must make: Do we leave our children a world shaped by free peoples, or a world shaped by the tyrannical dictators in Moscow and Beijing, along with their allies in Tehran, Havana, Caracas and Managua? There’s no third option.
• Clifford D. May is the founder and president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a columnist for The Washington Times.
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21. FDD | Russian Disinformation and Propaganda in Relation to the War Against Ukraine
FDD | Russian Disinformation and Propaganda in Relation to the War Against Ukraine
Subcommittee on Security and Defence; Special Committee on Foreign Interference in all Democratic Processes in the European Union, including Disinformation
fdd.org · by Ivana Stradner Advisor · May 17, 2022
Ladies and Gentlemen:
I am honored to appear before you today to discuss Russia’s information warfare playbook.
As you all well know, the impact of Russia’s war in Ukraine extends far beyond Ukraine’s borders. This is not just a war on Ukraine; this is a war on Europe’s cultural and civilizational values. The scale of this threat requires a proportional response. Europeans have the power to determine the outcome of this conflict, if only we have the courage to use it.
The threat that Russia poses to Europe is clear. President Vladimir Putin has invaded two of his neighbors, Georgia and Ukraine, partly to stop them from aligning with NATO and the West. He has given cover to Bashar al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons, and Russian agents have used chemical weapons in attempted assassinations in Europe. Moscow has frequently threatened the use of nuclear weapons. And Moscow has interfered in elections and domestic political discourse across the globe, including in the West.
I will focus my testimony today on three key points. First, I will explain how Russia strategically uses information operations. Second, I will show how Russia is attempting to use these operations to shape global perceptions of the war in Ukraine, at the expense of Europe. Third, I will discuss how Russia is exploiting Europe’s vulnerabilities in the information space.
Putin seeks to replace the rules-based liberal international order with an order that is safe for authoritarianism and features Russia as a global power and power broker, entitled to a sphere of influence over its “near abroad.” Putin’s quest to dominate Ukraine is at the forefront of this broader struggle.
Given Russia’s military shortcomings in Ukraine, many in the West are already celebrating his failure. However, it is too early to do so, in part because Putin still has a powerful non-military tool at his disposal: information weapons. The Kremlin does not limit itself to hacking our computers — it also wants to hack our minds, aiming to disrupt our democracies, polarize our societies, and sow fear and doubt among our populations.
The importance of information operations is clear to anyone who follows Russia closely. The Soviets were known for “active measures.” They used disinformation campaigns to shape the information space abroad and influence events in other countries; they often referred to these campaigns as “political warfare.”
Russian active measures today do not differ in their goals. The only difference is in the technology used to pursue them. Social media platforms allow Russia both to increase its reach and to target specific audiences when conducting information operations, which Moscow uses both for political warfare and to augment conventional military operations. Last year, Russia published a new National Security Strategy, in which it devoted an entire section to “information security.” Similarly, Russian Minister of Defense Sergey Shoigu declared that “information has become a weapon.” In 2017, Russian officials acknowledged the establishment of information warfare troops.
Moscow’s information operations and other hybrid warfare undertakings in Europe aim to undermine European security and NATO unity.
Russia’s information campaigns are integral part of its hybrid warfare strategy. Russian information operations against Ukraine kicked into high gear in 2014. When the war started, Russia used disinformation to shape the information space. For instance, Moscow claimed that NATO’s enlargement was a threat to Russia. Russia and Putin have spread a long line of such falsehoods about Ukraine. Moscow claimed that Russian-language speakers in Ukraine faced “genocide” at Kyiv’s hands and would welcome a Russian invasion. Moscow denied Ukrainian statehood, claiming Ukraine has always been part of Russia and framing its “special military operation” as necessary to “liberate” Ukrainians from their “Nazi leader.” This messaging was intended to be consumed inside Russia, in Ukraine, and globally. Ukraine, which has been strengthening its information operations tools for over a decade, has achieved notable victories in this space since the war began.
fdd.org · by Ivana Stradner Advisor · May 17, 2022
22. US special ops to get vehicle converter kits for the Arctic by early 2023
Looks like a vehicle from a science fiction movie.
US special ops to get vehicle converter kits for the Arctic by early 2023
WASHINGTON — Polaris has developed a kit to convert the MRZR Alpha — used by U.S. Special Operations Command as its Lightweight All-Terrain Vehicle — for the Arctic and is gearing up to be able to produce it for customers early next year.
The Arctic kit is currently in government validation testing, and a production decision will be made at the start of next year on how many kits the command will buy for its LATV fleet, according to Polaris executives.
Polaris won the contract to supply the MRZR Alpha as the command’s LATV in 2020 for $109 million.
The kit — which Polaris displayed at Modern Day Marine in Washington, D.C., this month — provided tracks instead of wheels, plus a cab that keeps passengers less exposed to the elements, the company said.
“Obviously improving the over-snow capability where a wheeled vehicle is somewhat limited” is a reason customers want this capability, Nick Francis, Polaris’ vice president for government and defense, told Defense News in a recent interview. “But there are other types of transitionary terrain or loose soil conditions that a tracked vehicle can also help with.”
Francis noted the cab system can be used separately, with or without tracks.
“The vehicles are expeditionary in nature,” he said, and “having a single vehicle that can be used for a wide variety of missions is very important. … If you can have one vehicle perform in the desert, and then modify that vehicle quickly within two to three hours, and then have it perform in the Arctic environment, you’re able to do more with one asset, so it greatly reduces the logistics burden, maintenance burden, those types of things.”
The track installation is “pretty straightforward,” said John LaFata, an MRZR engineer with Polaris, as they simply take the place of the wheels and tires through an adapter. There is one additional component that provides anti-rotation features to keep the tracks from over-rotating, he added.
“The cab itself is a bit more work from that side of things because we went down the path of designing a cab that would provide really good protection and sealing capability to those elements, whether it’s an Arctic mobility … and other sorts of environments where you’d like to have some occupant protection from ... dust, debris or other sorts of hazards,” LaFata said. “So it contains a number of components.”
These include a front and rear hard-coat polycarbonate windshield, a roof, and a rear panel. The doors are steel structures with a paintable surface so they can be camouflaged for different environments, according to LaFata.
The doors have additional venting to allow for airflow into the vehicle, and there’s a vent in the rear panel to allow for airflow out of the vehicle. The package also includes a defroster as well as windshield wipers and a spray for clearing debris from the front windshield. The cab also comes with a heating feature through floor vents.
The Arctic kit is an option that U.S. Special Operations Command can exercise as part of the base contract for LATVs. Polaris is now entering its third year of the seven-year contract.
“Polaris and government validation testing is underway on the tracks, and the cab will start very, very shortly,” Francis said. “Typically, the validation process can take anywhere from three to six months depending on weather and different conditions, so we expect we’ll be able to offer production kits, I would say, likely early next year.”
The Arctic kit will be on display at the special operations conference SOFIC in Tampa Bay, Florida, this week, and will make appearances at other trade shows over the course of the year, including the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual conference in Washington in the fall.
Jen Judson is an award-winning journalist covering land warfare for Defense News. She has also worked for Politico and Inside Defense. She holds a Master of Science in journalism from Boston University and a Bachelor of Arts from Kenyon College.
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Strategic reconnaissance and irregular warfare are the future.
23. Foreboding Army PSYOPS recruitment video shows ‘who’s pulling the strings’
The controversy this is generating is a testament to the power of the video and the capabilities of US PSYOP forces. Remember this video was produced by soldiers and not contractors who actually produce most of the content for national and other US messaging. Imagine what the PSYOP professionals could do in support of national messaging if they were given specific direction on national messaging and empowered to develop themes, messages, content, and products to support it. But the PSYOP haters will continue to hate.
Foreboding Army PSYOPS recruitment video shows ‘who’s pulling the strings’
The video kicks off with a quote from Sun Tzu’s Art of War and cyclically transitions from footage of modern-day cities, a forest and a black-and-white cartoon, to 20th Century conflicts and speeches all tied together under the concept of being “a ghost.”
The recruiting video, which was published by 4th Psychological Operations Group and caught the attention of warfare futurists, gives off a slightly creepy, surreal vibe. Its message: join Army PSYOPS to find, manipulate and become the ghost puppeteer pulling the world’s strings, especially those of hot-button national security threats like the Chinese and Russian governments.
The field of PSYOPS may be more relevant than ever as the world reaches the third month of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the U.S. comes out of years of questioning whether Russia was involved in its democratic elections in 2016 and 2020.
Given the number of references in the video to Russia and China, it’s also hard not to view this PSYOPS recruiting video itself as a bit of a PSYOP aimed at an overseas audience.
Information warfare has been thrust to the forefront of strategic analyses and conversation surrounding the war in Ukraine, with many experts hailing the efforts of the Ukrainian government’s use of propaganda to garner international support and boost Ukrainian nationalism.
Consider the Ghost of Kyiv, a supposed Ukrainian fighter pilot notorious for shooting down Russian planes. The Ghost quickly became an internet sensation, bolstered by official Ukrainian social media accounts, and a symbol of Ukrainian strength and resiliency when facing a much stronger Russian military foe. That’s all well and good, but it should be noted that the pilot wasn’t real.
Ukrainian Air Force officials admitted May 1, two months into the invasion, that the Ghost of Kyiv was just a myth. But that icon, similar to the story pushed and initially verified by the Ukrainian government about the defenders of Snake Island all dying in defiance of a Russian warship’s order to surrender, has arguably been one of the greatest boons to the Ukrainians’ fight against Russia.
Both “urban legends” were pushed as part of Ukraine’s information warfare campaign, a campaign so successful that researcher Sinan Aral wrote in an article for the Washington Post that, “Ukraine and its partisans are running circles around Putin and his propagandists in the battle for hearts and minds, both in Ukraine and abroad.”
Old tools of information warfare, like leaflets and loudspeakers, already looked archaic compared to media savvy ISIS propagandists or Taliban Twitter accounts. Bots, spammers, memes and more could be the future of this controversial mission.
For those interested in Army PSYOPS, it’s important to note that the field is incredibly competitive. According to the Army, candidates have to score higher than 85 on the Defense Language Aptitude Battery test. Soldiers also must pass a 10-day selection course before they can begin the 43-week official qualification course.
But those who successfully make it into the specialty do qualify for language pay and Airborne pay, a more than $50,000 allowance for further education, and initial and reenlistment bonus packages of up to $21,000 for enlisted personnel, according to the Army.
Rachel is a Marine Corps veteran, Penn State alumna and Master's candidate at New York University for Business and Economic Reporting.
24. Don’t Let Over-the-Horizon Counterterrorism Eliminate the Premier Security Force Assistance Product: Partner Special Operations Forces
We have to be careful of the article divide we seem to have created that SOF only trains, advises, and assists partner SOF and conventional forces only train, advise, and assist conventional forces.
In many cases SOF has appropriately trained, advised, and assisted partner conventional forces because that is what the mission called for. The right forces need to be used for the right mission. And sometimes that includes SOF with conventional partnered forces. And of course when necessary to be done at scale the mission will be larger than SOF and will require additional forces.
Excepts:
At the same time, the United States has faced great difficulty creating strong conventional forces because it could not achieve this close relationship with partner regular forces. More often, US advisors to conventional forces strove to work within cultural and political constraints. In the early half of the Iraq War (2003–2007), for example, US trainers acquiesced to, or practiced, promotion based on sectarian considerations in the Iraqi army. As Rachel Tecott has observed, this “rapport-based” approach to “coax and cajole” partner forces cannot succeed without the application of carrots and sticks. The US Army’s conventional forces have also long viewed SFA as a secondary activity, whereas SOF members see it as a core competency. As a result, the US Army has faced difficulties finding the right people for the job. The US concept of dedicated SFA conventional units in the security force assistance brigades remains important, but trainers must be aware of and correct these issues.
This is not to say that US-created special operations forces are the only effective partner forces. US-backed conventional armies have, in some cases, performed well. During the war with the Islamic State, the Iraqi army served as a generally effective flank-security element, rearguard, and holding force, and it sometimes contributed positively to offensive actions, such as the Iraqi 9th Division’s securing of the outskirts of western Mosul in 2017. The United States has also established fruitful military relationships with local irregular forces, including the Iraqi Kurdish Peshmerga, the predominantly Syrian Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces, and Iraqi Anbar Awakening militias. Yet ultimately, the most consistently reliable and effective US partners have been the special operations forces that the United States itself created, affirming the importance of long-term, hands-on commitments to the success of SFA.
Don’t Let Over-the-Horizon Counterterrorism Eliminate the Premier Security Force Assistance Product: Partner Special Operations Forces - Modern War Institute
In the early weeks of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a forty-mile-long Russian military convoy set out toward Kyiv from the north. But the convoy soon ground to a halt—in large part because of the efforts of Ukrainian special operations forces. Under cover of darkness, thirty special operators, accompanied by surveillance and strike drones, ambushed the convoy from its front and two sides, disabling the lead vehicles and stopping it in its tracks. They remained there for two more nights, destroying more vehicles and crippling the convoy. Strikes like this one have given Ukrainian special operations forces a noticeable role in reversing the Russian advance. Indeed, Ukrainian SOF were one of the main beneficiaries of US security force assistance (SFA) to Ukraine over the past several years—an instance of the United States’ robust ability to train partner special forces.
Ukrainian SOF are only one example of this trend. For instance, as Abdi Yusuf and the author of this article detail in a new study, the United States created and trained the Somali Danab Advanced Infantry Brigade that now conducts most offensive operations against the al-Qaeda-linked terrorist group al-Shabaab. Similar cases exist in the Iraqi Counter Terrorism Service (CTS), Afghan commandos, and Colombian special operations forces, among others. The United States’ success in creating “small, hard forces” stands in contrast to its lackluster record building indigenous conventional formations in parallel to these elite units—namely the Iraqi, Afghan, and Somali regular armies.
In Iraq, Somalia, and Afghanistan, regular forces were incapable, broke en masse, or disintegrated altogether in critical moments while the special operations forces held their ground and sometimes reversed enemy advances. In Iraq, when the Islamic State swept through the northern part of the country from 2013 to 2014, four of the Iraqi army’s fourteen divisions collapsed virtually without a fight. Meanwhile, the CTS stood firm, fought, and in some instances repelled Islamic State attacks before acting as the primary force in the US-backed counteroffensive to liberate Islamic State–occupied territories. After the US withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021, regular army units disintegrated, leaving only the commandos—who had long filled in for an ineffective regular army—to fight against the Taliban. In Somalia, the regular army is so dysfunctional that African Union forces need to hold the country’s major cities while Danab conducts the hard offensive ground fighting against al-Shabaab.
These cases demonstrate the success of SFA in establishing reliable and effective partner special operations forces. This success, however, required sustained, hands-on efforts—the type of commitment that would not be possible with remote solutions such as the over-the-horizon approach promoted by the administration of President Joe Biden. As US policymakers rethink strategies for countering terrorist organizations and other irregular threats, they should consider the unique utility of foreign special operations forces that the United States itself creates. In particular, three key factors behind these forces’ resilience and efficacy are attributable to SFA and only possible with on-the-ground presence: cultivation of professionalism, insulation from political misuse, and strong relationships with US advisors.
Professionalism Yields Power
First, partner special operations forces’ motivation to fight derived from deliberate US efforts to maintain professionalism and mitigate the structural weaknesses that often hobbled regular formations. The key to imbuing partner special operations forces with this level of professionalism was the level of control the US military exerted over their creation and management. The US military founded these units, which existed in strict separation from conventional army units, and US special operations forces personnel, rather than local officers, usually trained them. They enjoyed close relations with US advisors, who lived near their advisees and provided intelligence, logistical, and operational support—including crucial air and fire support. The US military also often provided salaries for partner forces and facilitated professional development, thus avoiding absenteeism and morale issues associated with mismanagement and corruption. This allowed them to develop their own esprit de corps, absorb the professionalism that is a hallmark of US military tradition, and develop strong officer-soldier relations that translated to sustained determination and aggression in battle.
At the same time, US advisors mitigated factors that often threatened this situation in local regular forces. In Somalia, army brigades were organized along clan lines, with officers using their official mandates to serve clan interests. As a result, army clan brigades mostly did not follow any central direction and could not fight outside their localities. US advisors therefore deliberately recruited members of Danab from multiple clans, with officers often commanding troops from various other clans. The same concept drove US SOF advisors in the creation of the CTS as a nonsectarian fighting force in Iraq.
Insulation from Politics
The second key component of SFA was to insulate partner forces from political misuse. In Afghanistan, Iraq, and Somalia, rampant corruption, clientelism, and cronyism led to deep dysfunction in the armed forces that left the regular armies brittle or hollowed out.
In Somalia, for example, clan politics ruled the army, and politicians would regularly use forces loyal to them or their clans to undermine opponents. US advisors circumvented this problem by creating separate command-and-control systems for partner special operations forces. For instance, every operation Danab planned, at least while US forces were present in Somalia, was subject to US veto, which advisors did not hesitate to exercise if a given mission appeared too political. For example, in early 2020, President Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed sent Danab personnel to oppose local militiamen in the Gedo region, but the United States blocked their use for this partisan purpose. After US forces departed Somalia and Mogadishu assumed more control over Danab, the government used part of the unit in an operation to take the town of Guriel from a formerly allied local militia. This move prompted the United States to review its support for Danab, demonstrating the importance of having US forces present on the ground to preserve the integrity of partner special operations forces.
The Somali case provides an analogue to the Turkish-trained Gorgor SOF unit, which had similar training and capabilities to Danab but lacked the insulated command-and-control structure. This opened the door for political misuse, such as the February 19, 2021 deployment of Gorgor members to disperse opposition demonstrators at Daljirka Dahsoon square in Mogadishu.
Relations with US Forces
Finally, partner special operations forces developed great respect for their US advisors that evolved into an interdependent relationship when conflicts with shared adversaries intensified. This enabled troops to adapt quickly as new challenges arose.
In Iraq, for example, the interplay between US advisors and the CTS facilitated the latter’s adaptation to a campaign of conventional warfare against an innovative adversary. At different points in the war, the CTS learned how to integrate close air support into its operations, fight in urban environments, and employ combat engineering to breach minefields. Perhaps most importantly, the US recommitment of its SOF units to Iraq to assist the Iraqi military in mid-2014 significantly boosted CTS morale. As then-commander of Special Operations Command Central Michael K. Nagata told me, “The celebration in the Iraqi CTS headquarters was something to behold. What that did was it gave the CTS a level of confidence in fighting ISIS that the Iraqi Army was never able to achieve.” The United States, in turn, relied primarily on the CTS to conduct the ground war in Iraq. In sum, the close relations US advisors developed with partner special operations forces set the groundwork for quick adaptation when it was most needed.
Lessons for US Policymakers
The United States has achieved tangible policy gains by building partner special operations forces proficient in aggressive light infantry tactics. The CTS deprived the Islamic State of territory in Iraq, the Afghan commandos spearheaded operations against the Taliban, and Danab was the only Somali military unit capable of taking the fight to al-Shabaab. These accomplishments were possible due to sustained investment and long-term commitment of personnel on the ground to foster and operationally support the partner forces. This hands-on approach is necessary to garner the trust, professionalism, and adaptability needed to fight determined foes like jihadist groups. The over-the-horizon approach promoted by the Biden administration—in which the United States conducts air operations remotely with no boots on the ground—will simply not suffice in the long term, and may even prove counterproductive.
At the same time, the United States has faced great difficulty creating strong conventional forces because it could not achieve this close relationship with partner regular forces. More often, US advisors to conventional forces strove to work within cultural and political constraints. In the early half of the Iraq War (2003–2007), for example, US trainers acquiesced to, or practiced, promotion based on sectarian considerations in the Iraqi army. As Rachel Tecott has observed, this “rapport-based” approach to “coax and cajole” partner forces cannot succeed without the application of carrots and sticks. The US Army’s conventional forces have also long viewed SFA as a secondary activity, whereas SOF members see it as a core competency. As a result, the US Army has faced difficulties finding the right people for the job. The US concept of dedicated SFA conventional units in the security force assistance brigades remains important, but trainers must be aware of and correct these issues.
This is not to say that US-created special operations forces are the only effective partner forces. US-backed conventional armies have, in some cases, performed well. During the war with the Islamic State, the Iraqi army served as a generally effective flank-security element, rearguard, and holding force, and it sometimes contributed positively to offensive actions, such as the Iraqi 9th Division’s securing of the outskirts of western Mosul in 2017. The United States has also established fruitful military relationships with local irregular forces, including the Iraqi Kurdish Peshmerga, the predominantly Syrian Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces, and Iraqi Anbar Awakening militias. Yet ultimately, the most consistently reliable and effective US partners have been the special operations forces that the United States itself created, affirming the importance of long-term, hands-on commitments to the success of SFA.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.
Image credit: Staff Sgt. Zoe Russell, US Air Force
25. Why Finland Joining NATO Is More Shocking Than Anyone Realize
Excerpts:
In yet one more way, then, Putin has stirred to life his most dreaded nightmares. Ever since the 1917 Revolution, Soviet (and now Russian) leaders have worried—all of them sincerely, often for good reason—about “encirclement” by their capitalist foes. The invasion of Ukraine reawakened NATO as a military alliance, stiffened its trans-Atlantic ties to the United States, and even compelled Germany to new heights in defense spending. Now with Finland and Sweden about to join as NATO’s 31st and 32nd members, Russia finds itself almost literally encircled—right up to its borders from the south, west, and north.
Regardless of how much longer Putin lasts or what sort of leader succeeds him, his tenure—two decades of a wannabe-strongman nostalgic for empire—is likely to be viewed as a disaster for Russian security, the steepest setback since the shattering of the Soviet Union. Given the history between the two countries, it’s fitting that Finland is driving in the stake.
Why Finland Joining NATO Is More Shocking Than Anyone Realize
Slate · by Fred Kaplan · May 16, 2022
Vladimir Putin greets Finland’s President Sauli Niinisto at the Kremlin, Moscow, on October 29, 2021 in happier times. Mikhail Klimentyev/Getty Images
The fact that Finland and Sweden are about to join NATO is even more remarkable than many media accounts portray. Not only have both countries maintained a studied neutrality for many decades, they—especially Finland—have done so under the thumb of pressure from Moscow.
During the Cold War, the term “Finlandization” was coined to describe a nominally independent country whose foreign (and, to some extent, domestic) policies were dictated by a neighboring Great Power.
In the 1970s, when West Germany led the way in pursuing friendly relations with the Soviet Union, some U.S. officials feared that Moscow would exploit the overtures and “Finlandize” our frontline ally in the East-West standoff. Just a few months ago, when Vladimir Putin was surrounding Ukraine with military forces, some suggested Finlandization as a way to stave off an invasion.
This is why it ranks so high in the catalogue of unlikely events, in this era of unlikely events, that Finland—along with its neighbor in neutrality, Sweden—stands poised to join not just the world’s most powerful military alliance but an alliance whose main purpose is to contain Russian aggression.
Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is the impetus of this move. Applying for NATO membership wasn’t on any Finnish or Swedish politicians’ to-do list before Feb. 24 of this year; nor did the idea entice a majority of their populations, as it very much does now.
Still, the move isn’t exactly sudden. In 1995, both nations (along with Austria, the other bulwark of neutrality) joined the European Union. By that time, they had also joined the Partnership for Peace, a program devised by President Bill Clinton to help the former nations of the Soviet bloc—as well as neutral powers—integrate with the West through free markets and democratic institutions. Though PfP wasn’t a military alliance, one of its planks also helped those countries reform their armed forces—which, among other things, meant buying and training with the same weapons that NATO countries bought and used.
Ivo Daalder, President Barack Obama’s first NATO ambassador, recalls that by the time he took office, in 2009, Finland and Sweden were both “very much up to snuff” on NATO standards and practices—one of the key qualifications that applicants must pass before gaining admission into the alliance. They had deployed troops to Kosovo and Afghanistan; Sweden even supplied intelligence and surveillance to NATO’s 2011 operation in Libya.
Still, they had no inclination to join NATO. This was despite the fact that the most blatant days of Finlandization had ended with the Cold War: no Russian leader had the leverage to influence Finland’s or Sweden’s foreign policy; and both countries had gone a long way toward becoming full-fledged westerners. However, Finland shared (and still shares) an 800-mile border with Russia; its leaders were well aware that Russian troops could cross that border with little difficulty; and they understood the benefits of keeping that border stable—of not provoking the Kremlin’s leader or making him feel surrounded.
This was no abstract matter. In November 1939, three months after the outbreak of World War II, the Soviet Union invaded Finland, mainly to keep Saint Petersburg—then called Leningrad and a mere 20 miles from the Finnish border—secure. The Finns resisted for more than three months, fighting off Soviet tanks with ambush tactics (which some see as a precursor to Ukraine’s tactics today). The “Winter War,” as it was called, ended with a treaty that gave Russia 10 percent of Finland’s land in exchange for assurances of Finnish territory. This deal—which codified a mix of mutual interest, leeriness, and respect—marked the beginning of Finlandization.
For the next 80 years, Finns and Swedes were inclined to respect Russian security interests, as the Kremlin defined them, even as they joined every Western institution except for NATO—the most binding alliance—and they steered clear of that for two reasons. They knew it would ignite the Kremlin’s paranoia; and they didn’t think they needed NATO’s protection as long as relations with the Kremlin stayed calm.
Putin’s invasion of Ukraine changed all that. It revealed an inflamed paranoia in the Kremlin; and, given the realities of geography alone, it made Finns and Swedes realize they could use some protection after all—especially Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, which obliges members to treat an attack on one as an attack on them all.
The inclusion of Finland and Sweden would also help NATO considerably, bolstering the defenses of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—among the smallest and most vulnerable alliance members—from the north and across the Baltic Sea.
Photo illustration by Slate. Image by PeterHermesFurian/iStock/Getty Images Plus.
In yet one more way, then, Putin has stirred to life his most dreaded nightmares. Ever since the 1917 Revolution, Soviet (and now Russian) leaders have worried—all of them sincerely, often for good reason—about “encirclement” by their capitalist foes. The invasion of Ukraine reawakened NATO as a military alliance, stiffened its trans-Atlantic ties to the United States, and even compelled Germany to new heights in defense spending. Now with Finland and Sweden about to join as NATO’s 31st and 32nd members, Russia finds itself almost literally encircled—right up to its borders from the south, west, and north.
Regardless of how much longer Putin lasts or what sort of leader succeeds him, his tenure—two decades of a wannabe-strongman nostalgic for empire—is likely to be viewed as a disaster for Russian security, the steepest setback since the shattering of the Soviet Union. Given the history between the two countries, it’s fitting that Finland is driving in the stake.
Slate · by Fred Kaplan · May 16, 2022
26. Understanding—and Fixing—the Army’s Challenge in Keeping Cyber Talent
Conclusion:
In Daniel Pink’s book, Drive, he suggests that employees are much more likely to stay with their employers if their jobs provide them with three things: autonomy, mastery, and purpose. This is especially true with highly talented employees that work in cognitively challenging roles. Autonomy is important because it signifies trust in employees’ ability to effectively manage their time to meet mission needs and desired outcomes. Mastery, and the resources to achieve mastery in their fields, is important to employees because it indicates employers’ willingness to invest in their employees and their professional development. Finally, purpose is like mission, and when the purpose of work is successfully communicated to employees, they can apply meaning to their own work, allowing them to understand how their contributions impact overall mission accomplishment. For DoD to compete for cyber talent, it should seek to provide autonomy, mastery, and purpose for its cyber warriors.
Understanding—and Fixing—the Army’s Challenge in Keeping Cyber Talent - Modern War Institute
This article is part of the series “Compete and Win: Envisioning a Competitive Strategy for the Twenty-First Century.” The series endeavors to present expert commentary on diverse issues surrounding US competitive strategy and irregular warfare with peer and near-peer competitors in the physical, cyber, and information spaces. The series is part of the Competition in Cyberspace Project (C2P), a joint initiative by the Army Cyber Institute and the Modern War Institute. Read all articles in the series here.
Special thanks to series editors Capt. Maggie Smith, PhD, C2P director, and Dr. Barnett S. Koven.
During the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition called war; and such a war, as if of every man, against every man.
– Thomas Hobbes
Competition, mutual distrust, and glory combine to create Thomas Hobbes’s “state of nature,” a state of war with the tragic consequence that human life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” The current competition for cyber talent among entities within the United States government and the private sector exhibits many Hobbesian characteristics as organizations engage in the grisly battle over scarce and precious resources. Despite the expressed support from government leaders for a whole-of-society cyber strategy to streamline lateral linkages across agencies and levels of government, the hypercompetitive war for cyber talent remains, creating an environment that is nasty and brutish—just like Hobbes’s state of nature. Of course, talent in any field is a scarce commodity worth competing for, but this small supply of cyber talent in the United States increases the severity of these attacks by limiting the options government and commercial organizations have in responding to and defending against this increasing onslaught of malicious attackers.
Success in cyberspace is not just about having the latest technology—the talented human beings that creatively use the technology to create effects in and through cyberspace are what provide the United States with its strategic advantage in cyberspace. However, the ongoing competition over cyber talent in the United States makes it extremely difficult for government and private sector organizations to sustain their competitive advantages because mature and experienced human capital is increasingly in short supply. Unfortunately, the talent competition puts mid-sized and smaller organizations, and the US government, at a disadvantage because they struggle to attract and retain the necessary talent to maintain a competitive advantage in cyberspace.
However, the human dimension is only a fraction of the strategy. To counter and defeat complex adversaries, who are increasingly sophisticated and multidimensional, the overall US cybersecurity strategy must leverage innovative technological solutions, maximize cyber human capital, and continuously evaluate and assess these threats with an evolving and dynamic strategy. While innovative technical solutions and evolving threat assessments receive considerable attention, cyber human capital efforts are inconsistent and challenging. Without properly skilled people to conduct threat assessments or to employ new technologies, cybersecurity efforts will remain mainly reactive and uncoordinated. To be effective, the United States must leverage its cyber talent across all sectors to meet evolving cybersecurity demands that are critical to actively enabling the National Cyber Strategy.
The Cyber State of Nature
Within the United States, there is a highly competitive talent marketplace for cyber professionals, giving talent a high level of control over where and how they work. To compete for this talent, the US government has had to partake in this marketplace. However, the mechanisms of government hiring and the inflexible pay and promotion cycles have exacerbated the cyber talent shortage within the governmental ranks. Organizations within the US government cyber ecosystem are engaged in cutthroat competition against one another for a limited pool of US citizens with the requisite skills, education, ability to acquire a government security clearance, and—most importantly—a desire to serve and defend the nation in cyberspace. In essence, the battle for cyber talent is like Hobbes’s state of nature: chaotic and anarchic.
What we can learn from Hobbes is that absent a social contract—between the governed and the governing—that legitimizes a sovereign power and the rule of law in exchange for personal guarantees of safety and protection, order will never be achieved. And while there is much to debate about Hobbes’s choice of an autocracy or monarchy as the ideal solution to the state of nature, he is still appreciated for identifying the benefits of a communal, centralized defense against foreign threats. For Hobbes, an anarchic world characterized by violence and chaos is susceptible to foreign aggression and takeover, and it is only when a central authority provides for the collective defense that safety is ensured. Alexander Hamilton reiterated in Federalist No. 8, “The perpetual menacings of danger oblige the government to be always prepared to repel it.” Taking Hobbes and Hamilton into account, the US government should be united in its effort to deter and defend against malicious cyber activity instead of getting distracted from this goal by leaving organizations to compete with one another for limited talent.
USCYBERCOM and Defending the Nation
Defending the Department of Defense’s information systems and strengthening the nation’s ability to withstand and react to a cyber attack are some of the main focuses of United States Cyber Command (USCYBERCOM). As an organization, USCYBERCOM leverages the talent of the service cyber commands’ capabilities to protect the nation’s critical systems and infrastructure, while also holding adversary assets at risk and imposing cost when necessary. These organizations also pull from the same pool of cyber talent as the rest of the government and private sector organizations. Overall, this makes recruitment into the cyber workforce difficult and retaining them even more challenging due to the market competition.
USCYBERCOM leverages many tools and unique infrastructure to meet its mission, but it prioritizes cyber talent because a skilled workforce ready to respond and defend the nation in cyberspace is often the limiting factor of operations. China is on track to produce double the number of high-end STEM graduates the United States does by 2025, and could arguably produce the same ratio of qualified cyber professionals in a single year. Additionally, the 2020 Homeland Threat Assessment highlights how China is actively recruiting outside talent and seeking foreign actors to support China’s objectives in cyberspace. It is employing aggressive tactics to grow and diversify China’s capabilities in cyber-related fields beyond its organic workforce, and the United States should be concerned.
To counter China’s growing cyber capacity and other foreign threats, the 2018 Department of Defense Cyber Strategy established a proactive approach to homeland defense in cyberspace. USCYBERCOM’s strategy of defending forward is designed to halt malicious cyber campaigns that threaten US military superiority by intercepting and halting cyber threats and “by strengthening the cybersecurity of systems and networks that support DoD missions.” Defending forward shifts USCYBERCOM’s posture from a defensive one to the offensive and moves the point of conflict closer to adversarial networks. Doing so meets the intent of USCYBERCOM’s commander, General Paul Nakasone, who envisions a persistent cyber force that imposes greater costs on adversaries and their decision calculus. To achieve US national security goals, the strategy of defending forward and persistent engagement implies that USCYBERCOM needs to maintain a mature, experienced, and capable cyber workforce nested within the broader US cybersecurity ecosystem.
US Cyber Talent: An Army Snapshot
Despite the universal shortage of cyber talent, the Army does attract highly qualified personnel. In internal Army analysis that hasn’t been publicly released (and research supported by RAND), the Army has identified that within its cyber operations specialty, 23 percent of Army enlistees possess a bachelor’s degree and 35 percent achieve scores in or above the 93rd percentile on the Armed Forces Qualification Test. Additionally, the average age for new cyber recruits is twenty-three, far older than the traditional eighteen-year-old enlistees that join right out of high school. For the officer corps, commissioning as a cyber operations officer is extremely competitive, with nearly 7,500 individuals competing for roughly 120 annual available cyber slots. To augment this process, the Army has successfully been accepting direct commissions for over five years, which has proven Army Cyber Command’s ability to bring in highly experienced and advanced degree–holding professionals at higher ranks.
All potential candidates for cyber operations positions take assessments and undergo extensive interviews to assess their skill sets and abilities. Upon selection, the entry level and professional military education required after assessing as a cyber operations enlistee or officer is lengthy and rigorous. Those assessed as most qualified are given the opportunity to attend additional schooling and training to become interactive operators, or Army hackers. These students end up receiving around $500,000 in specialized education over the course of nearly three years. However, the challenge for the Army after educating and training this highly effective cyber workforce is retaining them beyond their mandatory service commitments.
The Understaffed US Cyber Workforce
According to Cyber Seek—a project supported by the National Initiative for Cybersecurity Education, a program of the National Institute of Standards and Technology in the US Department of Commerce—the total employed cybersecurity workforce in the United States consists of a little over a million people. Currently, there are nearly six hundred thousand vacant positions (public and private organizations), a figure estimated to grow significantly through 2025. Overall vacancies in the US government are not publicly available—a search on USAJOBS for roles within data or IT will show over ten thousand results, but only 480 for cyber. From a recent Government Accounting Office report, this is because many governmental organizations have yet to properly label their positions based on updated guidance. Overall, the competition for qualified cyber personnel is extremely high and should be a shared burden across US government organizations and better coordinated with the private sector throughout the United States.
Research conducted by RAND found that retention of the cyber workforce in the military is a particular problem since the more skills and experience these cyber warriors gain, the more marketable they are and the less likely they are to stay within the force. Because of the education and training military cyber professionals receive on globally recognized standards, they can easily translate their military service experience to civilian careers. Unlike infantry soldiers, for example, the skills acquired on active duty by cyber soldiers are skills that directly correspond to civilian work roles, enabling soldiers to transition from military service into high-paying, competitive careers more easily than their infantry peers. The problem for DoD is how to incentivize its cyber workforce to stay on active duty and how it can compete with the broader US government and private sector to retain talent. General Nakasone indicated that retention was one of his top priorities for USCYBERCOM in a recent congressional hearing.
Why is the Army’s Cyber Talent Leaving?
Overall, according to an internal and not publicly released survey of US Army Cyber Command’s cyber workforce in 2019, the top three factors that would encourage Army cyber personnel to stay in the military were the opportunity to focus on their mission (which they really enjoyed) without administrative distractions, greater time to build their tradecraft and receive additional training, and improved compensation and recognition for their work. Their responses indicate that the military’s mission resonates with service members and their civilian counterparts, and this is one of the reasons they joined the service. The survey also indicates that a factor in their decision to leave after their contracts or service obligations expired was their inability to focus on the mission or tradecraft (i.e., time spent on keyboard) due to the constant distractions from administrative requirements. This is difficult for a force that has an extremely high operational tempo and is constantly on mission.
Respondents indicated a desire for more opportunities and time to build mastery, like improving tradecraft and learning new skills; time to take advantage of professional development opportunities; time to tinker with mission-related projects and to develop innovative approaches to mission-related problems; and time to attend conferences and training to expand their knowledge and networks. This also included a desire for clear and concise career and professional development plans that demonstrate the Army’s willingness to invest in their progression and development throughout their careers. As indicated above, a challenge to providing these opportunities is the high operational tempo of cyber missions for personnel that are fully qualified in their work roles and experts in their fields, since mission requirements have a higher priority for time than self-improvement initiatives. Therefore, finding a more appropriate balance between mission requirements and personal development is critical for cyber personnel moving forward because it will build a better workforce and provide opportunities to decompress and grow outside the demanding cyberspace environment they constantly work within.
Compensation and recognition also play a role in Army retention numbers. Respondents leaving the Army were, in many cases, leaving for higher paid work roles in the private sector. Additionally, recognition for work well done, innovation and research, and obtaining new skills is typically rewarded with a bonus, an award, or a raise in the private sector. Unfortunately, this is usually unavailable in the Army due to the egalitarian human resources restrictions and the limited capacity to provide bonuses outside reenlistment or specific skill compensation packages. While the Army is leveraging many tools to partially mitigate the differences in compensation packages with the private sector, survey responses indicate that despite loving the mission, they thought they have better job opportunities and compensation out of uniform.
Finally, an underlying concern indicated in several questions by respondents is autonomy. The military structure is inflexible and despite finding purpose in their work, the survey indicates that soldiers want more say in their careers and life. Family stability and quality of life are important to all service members but for the cyber workforce, it presented as a major factor in the respondents’ choice to leave the military. Researchers have found that highly skilled and educated people increasingly marry other highly skilled and educated people, making the military model of permanent change of station moves every three years, on average, a unique hardship for those in two-career households. Even though Congress passed the “Military Spouse Employment Act of 2018,” the opportunities for spouses guaranteed under the law are mostly low-skilled jobs that require a high school education. Therefore family-centric quality of life concerns remain a top reason that respondents cited in their decisions to leave military service.
It is important to note that not all private sector cyber professionals are happy and satisfied with their work or employers. In fact, they have concerns that are strikingly similar to their military counterparts: cyber professionals in the private sector cited career advancement, competitive compensation, and leadership’s commitment to cybersecurity as the top three factors affecting job satisfaction and their decisions to leave their organizations. The 2019–20 Nelson Frank Salary Survey also found career development and compensation as the top two reasons for job dissatisfaction among cyber professionals. Another survey, LinkedIn’s 2018 Workforce Learning Report, found 94 percent of personnel would choose to stay at a company longer if it continuously invested in their career development. And finally, the 2020–21 Nelson Frank Survey found that personnel considered leaving their current employers if there was a lack of career and promotional prospects or a low salary or earnings potential. Workers also cited a desire for new challenges as a reason for leaving their current or past employers. When employees had their needs met, it led to increased motivation, job satisfaction, and sense of being valued. Ultimately, the result of happy and engaged employees is intuitive: lower turnover rates and better productivity.
What Can the Army and the Rest of the DoD Do?
In Daniel Pink’s book, Drive, he suggests that employees are much more likely to stay with their employers if their jobs provide them with three things: autonomy, mastery, and purpose. This is especially true with highly talented employees that work in cognitively challenging roles. Autonomy is important because it signifies trust in employees’ ability to effectively manage their time to meet mission needs and desired outcomes. Mastery, and the resources to achieve mastery in their fields, is important to employees because it indicates employers’ willingness to invest in their employees and their professional development. Finally, purpose is like mission, and when the purpose of work is successfully communicated to employees, they can apply meaning to their own work, allowing them to understand how their contributions impact overall mission accomplishment. For DoD to compete for cyber talent, it should seek to provide autonomy, mastery, and purpose for its cyber warriors.
Colonel Chad Bates, PhD, is an instructor at the US Army War College teaching cyber and information advantage. Previously, he was assigned to US Army Cyber Command, where he worked talent management and readiness challenges for the commanding general.
Captain Charlene Rose (Hoadwonic) is a US Army human resources officer and instructor in the Department of Social Sciences at the United States Military Academy where she teaches courses on American politics and political theory.
The views expressed are those of the authors and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.
Image credit: Josef Cole, US Army Cyber Command
27. What Southeast Asia Wants From America
Excerpts:
No American president can (or should) give Asean leaders everything they want, but the gap between the Asean agenda and conventional Democratic ideas about American foreign-policy priorities is dangerously wide. Unless it can be bridged, there is little prospect for successful American policy in a critical region.
The biggest issue is trade. Getting trade wrong while stepping up the moralistic lectures is a surefire strategy for Indo-Pacific failure. When Donald Trump, quickly echoed by Hillary Clinton, turned against the Trans-Pacific Partnership during the 2016 presidential campaign, American power and prestige in the region took a serious hit. Mr. Trump failed to find a way forward during four years in the White House; so far, Mr. Biden has followed his lead. The promotion of free trade has been the most powerful tool for American diplomacy since World War II. If the Biden administration cannot develop a trade agenda that attracts Southeast Asia, it won’t matter how many high-profile summits are held in Washington.
What Southeast Asia Wants From America
WSJ · by Walter Russell Mead
For starters, access to U.S. markets and a military buildup to counter China.
May 16, 2022 6:03 pm ET
President Biden welcomes leaders of several Asean member states to the White House, May 12.
Photo: Adam Schultz/White House/Zuma Press
The Biden administration rolled out the red carpet last week for leaders of eight of the 10 members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. Hosting what the White House described as a “special summit” in Washington was, in theory, an excellent idea.
Asean members like the Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia and Thailand are vital to American policy in the Indo-Pacific. Threatened by Chinese territorial claims in the South China Sea, most Asean states welcome Washington’s presence in the region and fear that an easily distracted American foreign-policy elite lacks a firm commitment to their region. Holding a high-profile Washington summit is one way to telegraph the importance of Asean to Washington’s Indo-Pacific strategy, especially at a time when the war in Ukraine dominates Washington politics.
Unfortunately, the summit highlighted the strategic deadlock that has challenged America’s regional diplomacy during the Biden era. This deadlock has prevented the inauguration of a new era of cooperation between the U.S. and key Southeast Asian regional leaders. There is a fundamental mismatch between what Southeast Asia needs from the U.S. and what, given the state of the foreign-policy debate among Democrats, President Biden can offer.
Unlike the war in Ukraine, which allows Democrats to unite against a ruler they associate with Donald Trump while standing with democratic allies to uphold basic principles of international law, the American strategy in the Indo-Pacific cannot easily be reconciled with the values and priorities internationalist Democrats want to promote.
Most Asean countries are either not democracies, like Vietnam, or are imperfect and often backsliding ones, like the Philippines. They are, for the most part, unashamedly nationalist and want to preserve and deepen their sovereignty, not cede authority to rule-bound international institutions. They don’t trust Western values, institutions or governments, and the legacy of European colonialism and racial arrogance continues to rankle.
Russia’s war in Ukraine is not a priority for them. They see climate change as, at most, a long-term and secondary concern. They think Western concerns about issues like labor standards and “green trade standards” are hypocritical slogans aimed at supporting a protectionist agenda. In any case, they believe that a low-wage, low-regulation economic model offers the best hope for economic development, and they have no desire to walk away from it.
While they worry about the rise of China and hope to see America remain active in the region as an important counterweight, their goal is not to align with the U.S., especially as members of Mr. Biden’s dreamed-of alliance for democracy. Most of these countries look forward to a long and profitable future of nonalignment, balancing between China and the U.S., coaxed and petted by both sides, committing to neither.
On top of this, many Asean governments face problems that have little to do with the big global issues that motivate Democratic foreign-policy activists. The trade and tourism disruptions associated with the Covid pandemic hit these countries hard. Thailand, where tourism accounted for 20% of GDP as recently as 2019, saw tourist arrivals collapse by 99%—from 40 million in 2019 to 430,000 in 2021. Now these nations are looking at a nightmare scenario of rising interest rates and skyrocketing food and fuel prices.
What they want from Washington is simple. They want a major military buildup in the region to counter China. They want a reliable partner in Washington that doesn’t make radical foreign-policy changes from one administration to the next. They want increased access to American markets with no strings attached. They want lower interest rates and help managing the coming economic storms. They want an end to human-rights finger-wagging, and they don’t want any talk about green energy unless it comes with huge, ironclad foreign-aid commitments that offset the costs.
No American president can (or should) give Asean leaders everything they want, but the gap between the Asean agenda and conventional Democratic ideas about American foreign-policy priorities is dangerously wide. Unless it can be bridged, there is little prospect for successful American policy in a critical region.
The biggest issue is trade. Getting trade wrong while stepping up the moralistic lectures is a surefire strategy for Indo-Pacific failure. When Donald Trump, quickly echoed by Hillary Clinton, turned against the Trans-Pacific Partnership during the 2016 presidential campaign, American power and prestige in the region took a serious hit. Mr. Trump failed to find a way forward during four years in the White House; so far, Mr. Biden has followed his lead. The promotion of free trade has been the most powerful tool for American diplomacy since World War II. If the Biden administration cannot develop a trade agenda that attracts Southeast Asia, it won’t matter how many high-profile summits are held in Washington.
Copyright ©2022 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
Appeared in the May 17, 2022, print edition as 'What Does Southeast Asia Want?.'
“Global View” analyzes ongoing developments in foreign affairs, with a particular focus on American strategy and geopolitics. The column appears on the Wall Street Journal’s website every Monday evening and Tuesdays in print.
Walter Russell Mead is the Ravenel B. Curry III Distinguished Fellow in Strategy and Statesmanship at Hudson Institute, the Global View Columnist at The Wall Street Journal and the James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and Humanities at Bard College in New York.
He is also a member of Aspen Institute Italy and board member of Aspenia. Before joining Hudson, Mr. Mead was a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations as the Henry A. Kissinger Senior Fellow for U.S. Foreign Policy. He has authored numerous books, including the widely-recognized Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World (Alfred A. Knopf, 2004). Mr. Mead’s next book is entitled The Arc of A Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Future of the Jewish People.
WSJ · by Walter Russell Mead
28. Why Taiwan Can’t Copy Ukraine’s Civil Defense Blueprint
The key words: "at least for now."
Learn, adapt, and anticipate.
Why Taiwan Can’t Copy Ukraine’s Civil Defense Blueprint
Replicating Ukraine’s Territorial Defense Force is not legally or politically feasible in Taiwan – at least for now.
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Ukraine’s successful deployment of Territorial Defense Forces (TDF) has brought renewed focus to the possibility of creating a similar military reserve in Taiwan. Yet, much of this discussion has ignored the constitutionality of such a move.
A March 15 commentary in War on the Rocks by former Chief of the General Staff of the Republic of China Armed Forces Lee Hsi-Min and academic Michael Hunzeker put forward the case for a “stand-alone service under the aegis of the Ministry of National Defense (MND).” The authors state that Ukraine’s experience “suggests that popular resistance has merit and might be the difference between Taiwan surviving an assault from the mainland and succumbing.”
Because of the MND’s decision to adopt a U.S.-style operational reserve approach, Lee and Hunzeker say that incorporating TDF into the MND’s current reserve reforms will not be possible. They further observe that “Taiwan’s existing patchwork of militias and civil defense groups” will provide neither a deterrent to a Chinese invasion nor meaningful resistance to an occupation by People’s Liberation Army (PLA) forces.
However, in calling for the establishment of TDF under the MND, the authors – and others who have echoed their views – are ignoring a crucial point: As things stand, the MND cannot simply greenlight such a force.
“TDF is just noise for the current government,” says T.H. Schee, a representative of Open Knowledge Taiwan, which focuses on raising awareness of the state of civil defense in Taiwan. “Because civil defense is all about the police, by law. Whereas mobilization is under the Ministry of National Defense, civil defense is totally controlled by the National Police Agency (NPA).”
This renders all discussion of TDF in domestic and international media moot, according to Schee. “If the police don’t come out and talk about civil defense, it’s meaningless,” he says.
Lee Jyun-yi, an associate research fellow at the MND’s Institute of National Defense and Security Research, agrees. He notes that a separate TDF would require “a change of law” because the human resources would have to come from the reservist system. “Currently reservists are used as a complement for regular troops, so there’s little discussion on whether they can be used as a territorial defense unit,” says Lee. “So, there’s a legal constraint there.”
Furthermore, there are deep-rooted reasons for the NPA’s conspicuous silence on the issue. Although Taiwan’s gun laws are strict and ownership is among the lowest per capita in the world, it wasn’t all that long ago that the situation was very different.
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The end of Martial Law in 1987 created a vacuum in law enforcement, which was quickly exploited by organized crime. In his seminal work on the period, “Heijin: Organized Crime, Business, and Politics in Taiwan,” Ko-Lin Chin quotes a former police chief as reflecting that “patrols of the coast became almost nonexistent and, as a result, it was easy to smuggle guns and drugs into Taiwan.”
Chin goes on to document the violence that plagued Taiwan’s cities as a result. “Gun battles among crime figures led to a dramatic increase in homicide rates in the 1980s,” he writes. “In short, the availability of handguns … enabled many desperate and daring young underworld figures to achieve their goal of making money in a society where wealth is so prized.”
Last year, a series of shootings brought the issue to the fore again, with NPA Director-General Chen Ja-chin convening a press conference to announce a “zero-tolerance policy for firearms.” If fears of a return to the dark old days are overstated, the police remain unequivocal in their stance toward arming civilians.
“The police are not happy to share gun ownership,” says Schee. “To buy a spearfishing gun, you need permission from the police station. It’s like a joke. The law for recreational devices hasn’t been modified for 50 years.”
This makes any move toward weapons and live fire training problematic. As an illustration of the obstacles, Schee refers to “a cluster of private companies” in Taiwan providing firearms and hand-to-hand combat training to police forces and private individuals. “They’re doing all sorts of defense stuff,” he says. “Israeli firms doing Krav Maga, and others who are really good with guns – much better than us, so the police need them. But for any private citizen who wants to handle guns – they usually have to train overseas – Guam, Thailand, or the U.S.”
Echoing this point, Lee notes that Taiwan’s stance on firearms means that the comparisons with countries such as Switzerland and Lithuania are inappropriate. “For us to have territorial defense units, we must receive training in peacetime, and that requires the support of infrastructure,” says Lee. “Currently, I don’t think we have that, so, most likely, if Taiwan wants to move toward that direction, it would take the form of reforming the reservist system.”
A related stumbling block is the existing Civil Defense Act (CDA) and its associated office and force, which also fall under the NPA’s remit. Although Lee and Hunzeker’s article makes passing reference to these as part of the aforementioned “patchwork,” there is no suggestion that they are a barrier to a new TDF.
“What people don’t recognize is that we already have civil defense forces in Taiwan,” says Schee. “Sure, most of them are between the ages of 50 and 70, and the annual four-hour training is more like a karaoke session,” he adds. “But they exist.”
It’s unsurprising that much of the public remains in the dark. A quick look through the minutiae of the Civil Defense Act on the Ministry of Justice website makes it obvious that few of the provisions are being properly implemented.
Article 4, which calls for the formation of civil defense teams by municipal and county governments, railways, schools, and factories, among other institutions, makes for startling reading. Anyone familiar with these areas of society could be forgiven for wondering what they’ve missed.
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“Drills are practiced,” says Schee. “But the provisions on the private sector and schools are not enforced.”
Yet the law is there and, regardless of the age and lack of training, the head count is far from negligible. “There are 50,000 of these guys,” says Schee. “You can’t just wipe this figure out. They are certified personnel controlled by the police.”
Finally, there is the Taiwan Military and Police Tactical Research and Development Association (TTRDA). Established as a nongovernmental organization in 2015, this group comprises former, reservists and active military elements, as well as members of Taiwan’s police SWAT teams. A 2019 article in The National Interest referred to the TTRDA as a “paramilitary option,” established, in part, to pressure the MND into upping its game.
While Schee says the TTRDA is “pretty far from a paramilitary group,” he believes President Tsai Ing-wen’s administration is missing a trick by largely ignoring what such elements have to offer.
“There are several groups not being leveraged by the current government and reformists in the military, police, and coastguard,” says Schee, noting that, having studied and worked abroad, members of these groups have been exposed to “modern, novel approaches.”
He mentions ham radio and cybersecurity groups that he believes have also been left out in the cold. “Even though they might not be the ones pitching a handy solution to the problem addressed, they should be taken seriously,” he says.
One of the untapped options could be the relative popularity of airsoft in Taiwan. Richard Limon, a retired U.S. marine who works as a product advisor for VFC, an airsoft gun manufacturer in Taiwan, says training with airsoft is a legitimate alternative. “Handgun wise, it’ll do the job, because statistically most handgun battles happen within seven meters,” says Limon. “So, you can at least get the basics down on how to fight and have a clue.”
Facilities such as CQB, an indoor airsoft kill house in New Taipei City, could be invaluable resources in replicating the kind of close-combat, urban warfare conditions a TDF would be needed for, says Limon. “In terms of how to make tactics work, how to go down a hole without getting yourself killed, how to stand properly when you’re shooting – you sure as hell could use it,” he says. “All those small factors alone might not seem that important. Add them all together, and it’s a big issue.”
Unfortunately, government interest has thus far been “negligible,” says Limon. “It seems like they’re just expecting someone to do the work for them,” he says. “It’s like, you do realize that stuff takes time and money to develop and build up, and you can’t just do it overnight?”
Like Schee, Limon also cites resistance from the police, based on misguided concerns that the airsoft models are ripe for repurposing. “Some people think you can turn them into real guns,” says Limon. “The metal used in these airsoft guns is not designed to take 5,000, let alone 20,000 PSI – depending on the caliber of rounds. I can make a zip gun with a nail and a phone book or a plastic pipe. Doesn’t mean I’m going to do it.”
In the end, any immediate move toward meaningful reform on TDF will likely be stymied by a lack of political will on the part of the outgoing government. “Because Tsai has less than two years left of her second term, nobody wants to touch this,” says Schee.
As for whether a new administration would tackle the issues, Schee remains ambivalent. “I wouldn’t say the idea is bad in itself,” he says. “I would just say there are limitations.”
29. Opinion | The Long Game of White-Power Activists Isn’t Just About Violence
What are we going to do about this cancer infecting US society?
Conclusion:
Clearly this is not a fringe idea anymore. Decades of violence at the hands of extremists tell us that such ideas will lead to further violence; mainstreaming of the idea means that the window for action is closing.
Opinion | The Long Game of White-Power Activists Isn’t Just About Violence
Guest Essay
The Violent Defense of Whiteness
May 17, 2022, 5:00 a.m. ET
A march before the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017.
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Dr. Belew is the author of “Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America.”
It’s not immediately obvious how the “great replacement” theory, often framed as anti-immigrant doctrine meant to preserve predominantly white societies, is connected to the shooting of Black customers and employees at a grocery store in Buffalo last weekend. Those at the store, who lived over 100 miles away from the man accused in the killings, were simply going about their lives (picking up groceries, buying a birthday cake, taking their children for ice cream).
But the explanation for both the choice of targets and the brutality of an attack that killed 10 people can be found in the history of the theory. In the American context, it has in its cross-hairs a host of future targets, among them democracy itself.
The great replacement is the latest incarnation of an old idea: The belief that elites are attempting to destroy the white race by overwhelming it with nonwhite groups and thinning them out with interbreeding until white people no longer exist. This idea is not, at its core, about any single threat, be it immigrants or people of color, but rather about the white race that it purports to protect. It's important to be cautious and not too credulous when reading the writings of assailants in attacks motived by race, but we should note an important pattern: their obsession with protecting white birthrates.
For decades, white power activists have worried about their status as a majority. They see a looming demographic crisis, and talk about when their community, town or the United States will no longer be majority white. Even when demographic change slows, this fear has not abated.
This belief transforms social issues into direct threats: Immigration is a problem because immigrants will outbreed the white population. Abortion is a problem because white babies will be aborted. L.G.B.T.Q. rights and feminism will take women from the home and decrease the white birthrate. Integration, intermarriage and even the presence of Black people distant from a white community — an issue apparently of keen interest in the Buffalo attack — are seen as a threat to the white birthrate through the threat of miscegenation.
A memorial for the victims of the Buffalo grocery store shooting.
In the United States, it is clear that this is never only about immigration; when gunmen write about “replacers,” they might just as easily mean any person of color, whether they have American roots or not. Replacement theory is about the violent defense of whiteness.
The reason we often think of replacement theory as a specifically anti-immigrant ideology is because of two key writings — “The Great Replacement” by Renaud Camus and “The Camp of the Saints” by Jean Raspail. Both have gained currency in white- power and militant-right circles in the last decade. “The Camp of the Saints,” from 1973, is essentially a dystopian, fictional precursor to “The Great Replacement,” published in 2011 in French, which argues that white Europeans are being replaced in their countries by nonwhite immigrants. That “The Camp of the Saints” was recommended by Stephen Miller, who later became an architect of the Trump administration’s cruelest immigration policies, reveals that replacement theory is known, if not embraced, by some in the Republican Party. Both are built around the fear of nonwhite — including Islamic — immigration into Europe as a major threat of cultural collapse and extinction of whiteness.
White-power extremism reveals that the core of this ideology is not the victims it attacks, but rather the thing it attempts to preserve — and the mechanism that transfigures this ideology into racial violence. It imagines that a conspiracy of elites, usually imagined as Jewish “globalists,” are deliberately working to eradicate both white people and white culture. This is why white nationalism is so often virulently antisemitic, and also why it feeds on deep distrust of the media, education, science and other arbiters of expertise.
Replacement theory in America has domestic antecedents much older than Renaud Camus and Jean Raspail. Henry Ford, among other Americans, promoted “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” which — through an entirely fictional depiction of a powerful Jewish conspiracy that controlled world events — has influenced racist theories and beliefs from its initial publication in the early 20th century.
Worries about the body politic and threats to the racial composition of the nation inspired eugenics campaigns, anti-immigration activists, and other Progressives, including Theodore Roosevelt. These ideas have been braided with environmentalism not only by ecofascists in the recent past, but by late 19th- and early 20th-century environmentalists who worried about population burdens and wondered how to preserve nature for white people.
When neo-Nazis, Klansmen, militiamen and skinheads came together in the 1980s and 1990s, they worried about the “Zionist Occupational Government” or the “New World Order.” They also clarified that their nation was not the United States, but a transnational body politic of white people that had to be defended from these conspiratorial enemies and from racial threats — defended through violence and race war. That current still runs through the writings of those associated with the Charleston, Christchurch, Oslo, El Paso, Pittsburgh and Buffalo attacks.
It is impossible to separate replacement theory from its violent implications, as decades of terrorism by its adherents shows us. The mainstreaming of replacement theory, whether through Tucker Carlson’s show or in Elise Stefanik’s campaign ads, will continue to have disastrous consequences.
The long game of white-power activists isn’t just to terrorize and intimidate nonwhites: As “The Camp of the Saints” shows, these activists fear apocalyptic extinction if they don’t take up arms. The American equivalent, “The Turner Diaries,” imagines what it would be like to establish white-dominated world through race war and genocide.
Why wouldn’t people immediately condemn such an idea?
Thoughts and prayers are never enough after a mass shooting, but even these messages seem more sparse than usual. Wendy Rogers, an Arizona state senator and member of the far-right extralegal Oath Keepers militia that was involved in the storming of the Capitol, suggested online that the shooting had been a false flag operation perpetrated by a federal agent.
Clearly this is not a fringe idea anymore. Decades of violence at the hands of extremists tell us that such ideas will lead to further violence; mainstreaming of the idea means that the window for action is closing.
Kathleen Belew is the author of “Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America” and is incoming associate professor of history at Northwestern University.
30.
V/R
David Maxwell
Senior Fellow
Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Phone: 202-573-8647
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
