Quotes of the Day:

"We have only one story. All novels, all poetry, are built on the never-ending contest in ourselves of good and evil,"

- John Steinbeck

"If evil be spoken of you and it be true, correct yourself, if it be a lie, laugh at it."

- Epictetus

"The snake which cannot cast its skin has to die. As well the minds which are prevented from changing their opinions; they cease to be mind."

- Friedrich Nietzsche

1. With Lessons from Ukraine, US Special Forces Reinvents Itself for a Fight with China

2. U.S. military is tracking another mysterious balloon

3. Managed Competition: Finding Answers in U.S.-China Diplomatic History

4. Ukraine live briefing: Russia has suffered 100,000 casualties since December, U.S. says

5. Cyber lessons from Ukraine: Prepare for prolonged conflict, not a knockout blow

6. A Deal With Russia? It Can Only Bring Disaster

7. Short on amphibs for Turkey, Sudan, the Marines grapple with crisis response ethos

8. The little-known group that’s saving Ukraine

9. Biden: US-Philippines 'ironclad' partners amid China tension

10. Army Special Ops Command welcomes first female command sergeant major

11. War in 2050: The Army’s Operating Concept After Next

12. Special Operations News Update - May 1, 2023 | SOF News

13. U.S. Navy Sends Nontraditional Ships to Support Sudan Evacuation

14. An Unerring Sense of Locality: Ukraine and the Future of Armored Warfare

15. U.S. Security Cooperation Deserves a Fair Evaluation

16. An Unerring Sense of Locality: Ukraine and the Future of Armored Warfare

17. Are We Asking Too Much of Cyber?

18. Joint Statement of the Leaders of the United States and the Philippines

19. Washington Must Focus on Asia When Targeting Tehran’s Drone Technology Procurement

20. The United States and Saudi Arabia: A Possible Path Forward

21. Iran Denies Schoolgirls Were Poisoned Despite Overwhelming Evidence

22. Shrinking U.S. Military Capacity Now for Capabilities Later Is A Mistake

23. How to Avoid a Great-Power War

24. Harvard Professor Writes Fawning Piece About the CCP

25. Is America postured for a fight in the Indo-Pacific?

26. Netflix: A Splashy Drama About the Diplomacy of Marriage

27. A “Post-Like-Share” Revolution: Strategic Messaging and Social Media as a Tool of Irregular Warfare

28.  Italy signed up to China's Belt and Road Initiative. Now it's having second thoughts

1. With Lessons from Ukraine, US Special Forces Reinvents Itself for a Fight with China

Reinvent? Or learn, adapt, and anticipate? SF continues to evolve from the sound foundation of SF - it does not need to be "reinvented."

With Lessons from Ukraine, US Special Forces Reinvents Itself for a Fight with China

A recent exercise was Army SOCOM’s first to explicitly name China as the adversary.

defenseone.com · by Sam Skove

FORT BRAGG, North Carolina—The only sign the Switchblade suicide drone was overhead was its mosquito-like whine. Its slim gray body merged into the overcast sky over a U.S. Army training range.

But the presence of the drone, which has been delivered in large numbers to Ukraine, in an exercise explicitly targeting China spoke volumes about how the U.S. Army Special Forces is reinventing itself after decades of operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.

“Everyone is watching the lessons learned from Ukraine,” said Gen. Jonathan Braga, commander of U.S. Army Special Operations Command. “We're trans-regionally applying those lessons learned.”

Among those lessons: Russia can target a Ukrainian artillery battery within a minute of its first barrage. Battlefield decoys still work. Information is king.

“I think the overall macro lesson is the importance of information operations,” Braga said.

Many such lessons are being gleaned in Germany, where U.S. Special Forces are training their Ukrainian counterparts and helping them with information operations, said the U.S. Army special forces officer in charge of work with Ukraine. He spoke by video call to the audience observing the Army exercise here on Thursday. Like others interviewed for this article, the officer was granted anonymity for the sake of security.

Information gleaned from this work with Ukrainian forces is sent on to the training programs run by Army Special Operations Command.

For example, Army special forces have observed Ukrainian forces “detect, fix, and jam” Russian drones, said Lt. Col. Mike Burns, the command’s communications director. That has shaped the command’s new course on robotics and unmanned systems, which teaches students how to build their own drones and counter those of the enemy.

Shorn of the urgency of Ukraine’s wartime environment, some hurdles remain. One small-arms trainer sought to use drones to teach mortar-fire correction, only to be stymied by federal flight regulations on their shooting range.

In Thursday’s scenario, pro-Chinese riots erupted in Taipei, followed by a Chinese military exercise that turned into a full-blown invasion of Taiwan. U.S. Army special forces struck back, working with Taiwanese forces to assault Chinese positions. The scenario is the command’s first capabilities exercise to designate China as the adversary, said Burns.

In a sign of how the Special Forces are innovating, one assault team landed on a rooftop and cleared the building with the aid of a first-person-view drone that put eyes on the lower levels.

The two soldiers operating the drones said they used commercially available models that they had trained on for around 100 hours with the command’s drone instructors.

Robotics is a “very real part of the battlefield now,” said one instructor. “Everyone needs to have a better awareness of how to employ these capabilities.”

The shift has seen the Army also shed some skills learned for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The language schools, for example, no longer teach Dari or Pashto.

At one display stand before the exercise, four students showed off their Chinese- and Russian-language skills. One professor, Alex, is originally from Kherson, a Ukrainian city liberated from Russian control in November.

“We watched with joy, with tears in our eyes, “ he said, recalling news coverage of Ukrainian President Zelenskyy’s arrival in the city. The language school is considering adding Ukrainian.

The lessons come at a cost, with each new piece of information ultimately tied back to the war in Ukraine.

Amid a feverish training pace for Ukrainian forces in Germany, the officer in charge of operations in Germany said he’s well aware of the dangers his students will face when they return on the battlefield.

“You go to sleep at night,” he said, and think, “Did we do all we can do?”

defenseone.com · by Sam Skove

2. U.S. military is tracking another mysterious balloon

If I were conducting subversion operations I suppose I would just launch balloons that have nothing on them and force the US military to divert assets to track them while the reporting on the balloons would contribute to a loss of confidence in the US government and the military and continue to magnify the political divisions within American society.

U.S. military is tracking another mysterious balloon

The military has determined that it poses no threat to aerial traffic or national security, but it's not clear what it is or whom it belongs to, officials said.

NBC News · by Courtney Kube and Carol E. Lee

The U.S. military is tracking a mysterious balloon that flew over American soil, but it’s not clear what it is or whom it belongs to, according to three U.S. officials.

The object flew across portions of Hawaii but did not go over any sensitive areas, the officials said.

The U.S. military has been tracking it since late last week and has determined that it poses no threat to aerial traffic or national security and is not communicating signals, one official said.

It's not clear if it's a weather balloon or something else, the official said, adding that the U.S. could still shoot it down if it nears land.

The object, which does not appear to have maneuverability, is moving slowly toward Mexico, the officials said.

U.S. officials do not believe the balloon belongs to the Chinese, but they are still working to identify the owner.

A spokesperson for the National Security Council referred questions about the object to the Defense Department.

In a statement, a spokesman for U.S. Indo-Pacific Command said, "U.S. Indo-Pacific Command responded to an unidentified radar signature Friday in the vicinity of the island of Hawaii. Pacific Air Forces launched three F-22s to assess the situation and visually identified a spherical object. We monitored the transit of the object and assessed that it posed no threat."

A Pentagon spokesperson said the balloon was floating at 36,000 feet with "no indication that it was maneuvering or being controlled by a foreign or adversarial actor. The balloon did not transit directly over defense critical infrastructure or other U.S. Government sensitive sites, nor did it pose a military or physical threat to people on the ground."

A Chinese spy balloon flew across parts of the U.S. in early February, before being shot down off the Carolina coast.

The device was able to gather intelligence from several sensitive American military sites, despite the Biden administration’s efforts to block it from doing so, officials have said.

NBC News · by Courtney Kube and Carol E. Lee

3. Managed Competition: Finding Answers in U.S.-China Diplomatic History

Conclusion:

Some will push back against these ideas, saying that in the Xi Jinping era mutual animosities run so high that it is impossible to conceive of producing a positive outcome through such interactions. Nonetheless, I believe that the stakes are high enough that we have little choice but to find a way to resurrect a broad framework and a modus vivendi that allows for coexistence as well as intense competition. Presidential phone calls and periodic engagement between the U.S. secretary of state and the Chinese foreign minister are necessary pieces in constructive engagement, as is the use of the military hotline to communicate at the level of the U.S. secretary of defense. However, the current dangers of an inexorable march toward a crisis over Taiwan or even North Korea—which could lead us to the brink of a nuclear conflict—demand that we consider proven ideas from the old playbook of highly personal, intense face-to-face dialogue.

Managed Competition: Finding Answers in U.S.-China Diplomatic History

Dennis Wilder

https://uschinadialogue.georgetown.edu/essays/managed-competition-finding-answers-in-u-s-china-diplomatic-history?s=09

We are in a new era in U.S.-China relations as precarious as any since the Tiananmen crackdown of 1989. Channels of meaningful communication have broken down, mutual trust is at an all-time low, the Chinese Communist Party has become a bipartisan issue of focus in U.S. politics, and senior Chinese officials, including President Xi Jinping, now explicitly assert that the United States is leading a Western effort to “contain and suppress” China. Simply put, the Chinese leaders strongly suspect that the U.S. end game is to destroy Chinese communism. U.S. leaders strongly suspect the Chinese end game is to replace the United States as the world’s leading military and economic power.

So, the question we face is whether there are ways to mute the levels of strategic suspicion while still engaging in intense competition. Is there a way to create an equilibrium so that strategic competition does not become an end unto itself and crowds out efforts to tackle worldwide challenges like climate change, pandemics, and food insecurity in the Global South?

There is no question that this is a large, seemingly impossible, task in the current environment. However, during my four decades of government service I have experienced similar crises before in U.S.-China relations, and I have seen how the use of tried-and-true diplomatic tools has successfully bridged the divide. One of the most successful avenues, for example, has been the intense engagement of the U.S. national security advisor with Chinese counterparts. This has proven incredibly productive because it has cut through the bureaucracies on both sides and taken the discussion to a strategic level authorized by the top leaders—but it does take a greater commitment of time on both sides than periodic virtual meetings.

 As U.S.-China tensions mounted in 1995 and 1996 over the visit of Taiwan President Lee Teng-hui to the United States and subsequent Taiwan elections, U.S. National Security Advisor Tony Lake was convinced by his National Security Council staff that the only way to diffuse the crisis was by face-to-face engagement with his counterpart, Vice Foreign Minister Liu Huaqiu. On President Bill Clinton’s orders, Lake invited Liu to Washington in March 1996, and they held intense negotiations at the estate of Averill and Pamela Harriman in the Virginia countryside, even as Beijing was firing missiles and conducting exercises around Taiwan as an act of intimidation. This first round of talks did not end the crisis, and President Clinton subsequently announced the deployment of two carrier battlegroups near Taiwan to deter Chinese aggression. However, Tony Lake was sent by President Clinton to Beijing in July 1996 and, while no new U.S.-China communiques were issued, his candid discussions were credited with resetting the bilateral strategic framework, in particular the U.S.-China understanding over Taiwan.

Similarly, after the bloody Tiananmen crackdown that led to immediate U.S. sanctions on China, President George H.W. Bush decided to send National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft to Beijing to stabilize ties. Scowcroft went secretly only three weeks after the massacre and met directly with Deng Xiaoping. In his memoirs, Scowcroft recalled that he told Deng, “There had been many ups and downs in the relationship but, overall, it has been a steadily deepening one. Not only because it responded to the basic interests of both sides, but because we respect the diversity between our two societies.” Scowcroft’s trip was considered a success, and Scowcroft later noted, “The purpose of my trip, however, was not negotiations… but an effort to keep open the lines of communication with a people inclined to isolate themselves and whose long experience with foreigners had engendered xenophobia.” Bush did not doubt that Beijing had killed hundreds of its own citizens, but he did not wish to see U.S. actions destroy 20 years of progress bringing China into the international community.

Successful engagement with Beijing does not always require the involvement of White House players, but it does require a commitment to intense face-to-face engagement and dialogue, and there have been many points in the more recent past when it has worked. The most consequential of these that the Biden-Harris administration might look to for ideas was the model created by then-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson in 2006 of the Strategic Economic Dialogue. At a time of great turmoil in the relationship over such issues as Chinese currency manipulation, Paulson created an in-depth channel of discussion first with Chinese trade czar Wu Yi and later with Vice Premier Wang Qishan that met in person twice a year. I was serving in the White House at the time, and I saw firsthand how when Lehman Brothers failed in September 2008, the relationship developed over time between Paulson and Wang helped contain the financial crisis. China agreed not to sell its large holdings in U.S. securities, giving Paulson time to find the means to contain the crisis.

Macroeconomic and financial issues today are just as pressing, and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has signaled a strong interest in working with the Chinese on support for emerging markets and developing countries in their clean energy transitions. In addition to Yellen, other leading officials could be added to this dialogue, such as Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and U.S. special envoy for climate John Kerry. One issue to revive might be the completion of a Bilateral Investment Treaty—a process that was more than 90% complete when Trump halted the negotiations in 2017.

Some will push back against these ideas, saying that in the Xi Jinping era mutual animosities run so high that it is impossible to conceive of producing a positive outcome through such interactions. Nonetheless, I believe that the stakes are high enough that we have little choice but to find a way to resurrect a broad framework and a modus vivendi that allows for coexistence as well as intense competition. Presidential phone calls and periodic engagement between the U.S. secretary of state and the Chinese foreign minister are necessary pieces in constructive engagement, as is the use of the military hotline to communicate at the level of the U.S. secretary of defense. However, the current dangers of an inexorable march toward a crisis over Taiwan or even North Korea—which could lead us to the brink of a nuclear conflict—demand that we consider proven ideas from the old playbook of highly personal, intense face-to-face dialogue.

4. Ukraine live briefing: Russia has suffered 100,000 casualties since December, U.S. says

Excerpt:

The United States estimates Russia has suffered 100,000 casualties since December, including more than 20,000 killed in action, the National Security Council said Monday. Roughly half of those killed, NSC spokesman John Kirby said, were working with the Wagner mercenary group, often ex-convicts who had been recruited from prison.

Ukraine live briefing: Russia has suffered 100,000 casualties since December, U.S. says

By Rachel Pannett, Annabelle Timsit and Adam Taylor

Updated May 1, 2023 at 7:54 p.m. EDT|Published April 30, 2023 at 11:22 p.m. EDT

The Washington Post · by Rachel Pannett · May 1, 2023

Updated May 1, 2023 at 7:54 p.m. EDT|Published April 30, 2023 at 11:22 p.m. EDT

correction

A previous version of this article included information from a Monday briefing where National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said Russia suffered 100,000 casualties, including more than 20,000 killed in action, in Bakhmut since December. NSC deputy spokesman Sean Savett said later Monday that those figure account for all of Russia's losses across Ukraine, not just in Bakhmut, since December. Additionally, a previous version of this article incorrectly stated the day that the White House correspondents’ dinner took place. It was on Saturday night, not Sunday night.

The United States estimates Russia has suffered 100,000 casualties since December, including more than 20,000 killed in action, the National Security Council said Monday. Roughly half of those killed, NSC spokesman John Kirby said, were working with the Wagner mercenary group, often ex-convicts who had been recruited from prison.

The figures were first shared by Kirby on a call with reporters Monday; NSC deputy spokesman Sean Savett said later that the casualty count referred to Russia’s losses across Ukraine since December. The numbers are based on “some information and intelligence that we were able to corroborate over a period of some time,” Kirby said. He declined to discuss Ukrainian casualties. “That’s up to them to speak to,” he said.

Russia targeted Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities with a “massive” wave of missiles overnight, Ukrainian officials said. The assault on the capital lasted several hours early Monday, but no casualties were reported, as local authorities said air defenses worked to intercept most of the missiles. Russia’s Defense Ministry claimed that it carried out strikes against facilities that produce ammunition and weapons for Ukrainian troops. Ukraine said residential areas were hit.

The attack followed a weekend drone strike by Ukrainian forces on an oil depot in Russian-occupied Crimea, as Ukraine prepares for an anticipated counteroffensive.

Here’s the latest on the war and its ripple effects across the globe.

Overnight attacks

• Russian strategic bombers launched 18 Kh-101 and Kh-555 cruise missiles against Ukraine’s territory in an attack that began around 2:30 a.m. Monday, according to the commander of Ukraine’s armed forces, Gen. Valery Zaluzhny. Zaluzhny said the attacks were launched from the Caspian Sea and from the Murmansk region in northwestern Russia. He said that 15 of the missiles were destroyed.
• Russia’s Defense Ministry confirmed the strikes, saying in a statement Monday that its armed forces “carried out a group missile strike with long-range airborne and sea-based high-precision weapons against the facilities of the Ukrainian military-industrial complex.”
• The U.S. ambassador to Ukraine criticized the overnight attack. Bridget A. Brink tweeted, “Russia again launched missiles in the deep of night at Ukrainian cities where civilians, including children, should be able to sleep safely and peacefully.”

Other key developments

• An explosion Monday morning caused a freight train to derail in Bryansk in western Russia, the regional governor said. Alexander Bogomaz said that an “unidentified explosive device” went off around the train tracks near Russia’s border with Ukraine and Belarus. He did not specify who might be responsible. State-owned operator Russian Railways said that “unauthorized persons” illegally interfered with the railway’s operations. The Washington Post couldn’t independently verify the claims.
• A power line was blown up in Russia’s Leningrad region early Monday near the border with Estonia and Finland, regional governor Aleksandr Drozdenko said. According to Drozdenko, the power line in the Gatchinskiy district blew up shortly after midnight, and an unidentified object, “presumably an explosive device,” was found on a second power line. He said emergency crews and government investigators were at the scene.
• At least 34 people, including five children, were injured in overnight missile strikes against Pavlohrad in Ukraine’s Dnipropetrovsk region, regional governor Serhii Lysak said. The strikes caused “significant damage” to the energy network infrastructure in Dnipropetrovsk and the Kherson region, leaving thousands of households without power, Ukraine’s energy minister said.
• Ukrainian officials said the attack on an oil depot in Sevastopol was part of the buildup to Kyiv’s counteroffensive. Natalia Humeniuk, a spokeswoman for Ukraine’s southern command, told local television that undermining Russia’s logistics helps prepare for the “broad full-scale offensive that everyone expects.” Saturday’s strike in Sevastopol, which is home to the Russian navy’s Black Sea Fleet, destroyed more than 10 tanks holding some 40,000 tons of oil products intended for the fleet, according to Ukrainian officials.

Global impact

• Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had a “meaningful conversation” with French President Emmanuel Macron on Sunday, Zelensky’s office said. The leaders discussed French military aid to Ukraine and the upcoming NATO summit in Lithuania, according to a Ukrainian readout of the call. Zelensky has expressed hope that NATO members will agree at the summit to formally invite Ukraine to become a member of the alliance. But leaders of the alliance have avoided giving Kyiv any guarantees on its membership prospects.
• Pope Francis said the Vatican is involved in a secret peace mission. “I think peace is always made by opening up channels; it can never be accomplished by closing [doors]. I’m always urging [everyone] to have new rapports, friendly connections,” the pope told reporters on a weekend flight back from a three-day trip to Hungary, according to Italian news agency ANSA.
• President Biden said he is “working like hell” to bring home Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich. At the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner Saturday night, Biden promised Gershkovich’s family, present in the audience, to work to secure the journalist’s release from prison in Moscow, where the State Department says he is being wrongfully detained on espionage charges. “Evan went to report in Russia to shed light on the darkness that you all escaped from years ago. Absolute courage,” Biden said. “We all stand with you.”

From our correspondents

The rise and violent demise of pro-Russian war blogger Vladlen Tatarsky: The recent killing of a convicted criminal turned popular pro-Russian blogger in an explosion in St. Petersburg underscored the role of a new cadre of propagandists in the vanguard of the Kremlin’s info wars, reports The Post’s Francesca Ebel.

Before his death, Tatarsky had become so well known that he received an invitation to the Kremlin when President Vladimir Putin announced his illegal plans last year to annex four regions in southeastern Ukraine. In a live stream from the September event, he proclaimed: “We will defeat everyone, we will kill everyone, we will rob everyone we have to.”

Karen DeYoung contributed to this report.

The Washington Post · by Rachel Pannett · May 1, 2023

5. Cyber lessons from Ukraine: Prepare for prolonged conflict, not a knockout blow

Excerpts:

That cyber attacks aren’t apocalyptic on their own hardly makes them useless. Cyber cannot physically destroy a target the way a bomb can, Martelle argued, but it can gather intelligence and help locate targets for physical attack, as with Russian officers slain after Ukrainians geolocated their cellphones. “Cyber is not going to be the best tool… to permanently break things or to kill people,” he said. “The most efficient use of computer network access in a shooting war is to provide targeting support to kinetic strikes.”

That kind of support to conventional operations, in fact, is a lot of what Vitiuk says his unit is now doing. Ukrainian hackers tap into security cameras behind enemy lines to spy on Russian troop locations, he said, while ordinary citizens — some in occupied territory, acting at great risk to themselves — can download an app to report enemy movements and precise locations of potential targets. Even Ukrainian cyber criminals have volunteered data stolen from Russian networks.

“You don’t need to pay them, you don’t need to force them,” Vitiuk said. Allied support from Western governments and companies has been essential, he said, as has Ukraine’s hands-on experience of fighting Russian hackers since the initial invasion of 2014. But first and foremost, he said, “is our unwavering will to win — because we had no other options: We need to protect and save our country.”

Cyber lessons from Ukraine: Prepare for prolonged conflict, not a knockout blow - Breaking Defense

Instead of fixating on the apocalyptic possibility of a "cyber Pearl Harbor," experts say, the US should prepare for digital wars of attrition like the one ongoing in Ukraine.

breakingdefense.com · by Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. · May 1, 2023

Firefighters respond to a drone attack on Kyiv in October, 2022. (Photo by Paula Bronstein /Getty Images)

WASHINGTON — Russia’s failed cyber “blitzkrieg” in Ukraine has turned into a long slog that puts a premium on adaptability, resilience, and the will to win, one of Kyiv’s top cybersecurity officials told US audiences on a recent tour. And the strategic lesson for the US, several independent experts said, is that this kind of drawn-out cyber conflict is a more likely model for future wars than the sudden-death visions of a “cyber Pearl Harbor” or “cyber 9/11″ predicted by US officials for over a decade.

Ukrainian networks and their defenders, with extensive Western help, have proven resilient under brutal pressure. “We’ve learned how to use all these tools and techniques in critical circumstances, when sometimes there’s no electricity, there’s no communication, when your city is about to be surrounded, when you [are] under missile attacks or under shelling,” said Illia Vitiuk, who heads the cyber department of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU in Ukrainian). “Sometimes you try to reach the system administrator of the ministry that is under cyber attack, but he’s not here: He disappeared because needed to take his family out of Bucha.”

The Russians weren’t counting on this kind of resilience, said Vitiuk. “They, of course, hoped this was going to be a blitzkrieg, and so they used most of their aces they had in their sleeves just before the invasion,” he told the RSA conference in San Francisco on April 25. That first wave of efforts included “defacing websites, stealing data, wipers and lockers, [and] a vast disinformation campaign.” Russian cyber attacks have ebbed and flowed since, but they never again reached the intensity of January-April 2022, according to Google Cloud’s Mandiant, which has provided extensive assistance to Vitiuk’s team.

It’s a long struggle and far from over, Vitiuk told a Billington cybersecurity forum earlier in April: “If you have 12 rounds in a boxing match…we are in probably round eight now.”

It’s early days to draw sweeping conclusions from the war in Ukraine, warned several experts. “People need to be very, very patient,” said National Security Archives scholar Michael Martelle at a recent Atlantic Council panel. Analyzing Ukraine now, he said, is like analyzing World War II in 1943, when it was still a closely guarded secret that the Allies had broken the German and Japanese codes.

But it is already evident that Russia has failed to land a knockout blow, both on the ground and in cyberspace. That contradicts widespread expectations that cyber offense is stronger than defense and that a sophisticated nation-state could paralyze a target’s networks.

“There’s been sort of this assumption, especially at the beginning of the current war, that there’s just going to be this massive, disruptive, decisive round of disruptions,” Martelle said. “The term ‘cyber Pearl Harbor’ just won’t die, even though it really needs to.”

RELATED: US tech firms should wargame response if China invades Taiwan, warns NSA cybersecurity chief

If you want a World War II Pacific metaphor, Martelle suggested, a better one is the prolonged US submarine campaign that slowly strangled Japanese supply lines, one torpedoed transport at a time. There were no big, dramatic battles like Pearl Harbor or Midway, but rather, he said, “an aggregate, cumulative degradation … at a scope that I believe cyber is actually very well suited for.”

“Martelle’s analogy … with submarine warfare is pretty good,” agreed David Fahrenkrug, who teaches cyber warfare at Georgetown University and has cyber experience inside the Pentagon and Air Force. Like a submarine, a cyber attacker that reveals its presence to attack becomes vastly more vulnerable. “What we can do with cyber power is we can disrupt communications — but not for long periods of time,” Fahrenkrug told Breaking Defense in a recent interview. “You’re relying on stealth to make your effect work, and once they detect you, you’re shit out of luck.”

Illia Vitiuk, Chief of the Cyber Security Department, Security Services of Ukraine (Ukrainian SSU photo)

“People have expected that there’s no limit to what you can do with cyber power: You can hack into any system, collapse that system, and create catastrophes,” Fahrenkrug said, likening the apocalyptic visions to early 20th century advocates of strategic bombing. “The parallel is Douhet imagining if you simply bomb cities then the countries are going to give up. There are deeper mechanisms of resiliency.”

So Fahrenkrug, like Martelle, doubts that a Pearl Harbor-esque blow is likely in the digital world. “What is the ‘decisive battle’ that takes place in cyberspace?” he wondered aloud. “I don’t think it exists.”

“The Paradox Of Cyberspace”

“The paradox of cyberspace,” said Fahrenkrug, is that any given node — a server, a router, a user’s laptop or phone — is highly vulnerable, but when its tied together in a overall network, a system can be incredibly resilient. That’s because the nature of networks is to be decentralized and redundant, with multiple nodes and pathways — and because civilian investment has created a thriving ecosystem with multiple options for most services.

“If you want to suppress an adversary’s communication networks, you have to hit lots of positions and nodes nearly simultaneously,” Fahrenkrug said. “That is a very difficult operation to pull off and requires significant planning and coordination and exquisite timing.”

Consider the Russians’ greatest single cyber success: their Feb. 24 attack on the Viasat satellite communications network, which disrupted users in 55 countries, from multiple Ukrainian security and military agencies — the obvious target — to German wind turbines. Hundreds or thousands of modems had to be physically replaced. But Elon Musk’s SpaceX soon offered its Starlink service, which has become the digital backbone of Ukrainian forces despite Russian attempts to jam it.

While Ukraine was able to recover from the Viasat hack, “it wasn’t that Viasat itself was specifically resilient,” noted Jamil Jaffer, a former Hill and White House staffer who now heads the National Security Institute at George Mason University. “It was that there was another capability — in this case, Starlink — that was brought to bear, with the spending of a lot of money by multiple governments and industry.”

“That’s not always going to be the case,” Jaffer warned. “There are some capabilities that are not immediately replaceable, because while fragile capabilities are an Achilles’ heel, having fully available backup capabilities can get very expensive.”

Despite these vulnerabilities, Jaffer told Breaking Defense that he, too, was skeptical of the possibility of a digital knockout blow. “In my view, a cyber Pearl Harbor is less likely than a war of attrition in the cyber domain,” he said. “To the limited extent that deterrence is actually working in the cyber domain, I think the major nation-states that could pull it off recognize that an attack that has massive consequences would result in some significant form of retaliation.”

That doesn’t mean cyber weapons will never become decisive, Jaffer warned. “I like Martelle’s analogy of early days of submarine warfare, although I’m not sure it’s completely accurate,” he said. “As there, the use of cyber here opened up a new domain of operations, and while it may have been initially inconsistent and hard to coordinate with other arms, it grew much more effective over time.” Like subs and planes, he argued, “cyber is and will be a component of warfare going forward and will be a key part of a combined-arms, joint-force effort.”

That cyber attacks aren’t apocalyptic on their own hardly makes them useless. Cyber cannot physically destroy a target the way a bomb can, Martelle argued, but it can gather intelligence and help locate targets for physical attack, as with Russian officers slain after Ukrainians geolocated their cellphones. “Cyber is not going to be the best tool… to permanently break things or to kill people,” he said. “The most efficient use of computer network access in a shooting war is to provide targeting support to kinetic strikes.”

That kind of support to conventional operations, in fact, is a lot of what Vitiuk says his unit is now doing. Ukrainian hackers tap into security cameras behind enemy lines to spy on Russian troop locations, he said, while ordinary citizens — some in occupied territory, acting at great risk to themselves — can download an app to report enemy movements and precise locations of potential targets. Even Ukrainian cyber criminals have volunteered data stolen from Russian networks.

“You don’t need to pay them, you don’t need to force them,” Vitiuk said. Allied support from Western governments and companies has been essential, he said, as has Ukraine’s hands-on experience of fighting Russian hackers since the initial invasion of 2014. But first and foremost, he said, “is our unwavering will to win — because we had no other options: We need to protect and save our country.”

breakingdefense.com · by Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. · May 1, 2023

6. A Deal With Russia? It Can Only Bring Disaster

Excerpts:

Ukraine learned the hard way when, on December 17, 1917, Russia declared that it “recognizes, without any limits or conditions, and in all respects, the national rights and independence of the Ukrainian Republic.” And then again in the UN Charter, the Helsinki Accords, the Budapest Memorandum, and a dozen other agreements.

But the US always keeps trying. Upon extending diplomatic recognition to Russia in 1933 (at the very time it was starving Ukraine into submission), the Kremlin agreed “to refrain from . . . any act overt or covert liable in any way whatsoever to injure the tranquility, prosperity, order, or security of the whole or any part of the United States, in particular any agitation or propaganda.” How did that work out?

And so on and so on, through the Yalta agreements to the Cold War “Spirit of Geneva,” the “Spirit of Camp David,” the “Spirit of Vienna”, the “Spirit of Glassboro,” and the “Spirit of Helsinki.”

Ever-forgiving and hopeful, the US championed post-Soviet Russia’s membership of the World Bank, IMF, the G7, and - disastrously - the UN Security Council (sidestepping its obligatory admission procedures.) The agreements were for naught.

Russia remains implacable, aggressive, and undeterred. Let’s make a deal? Never again.

A Deal With Russia? It Can Only Bring Disaster

kyivpost.com · by Victor Rud

• Wars end with agreements, we are repeatedly told. But they also need goodwill and a desire to settle, which Russia lacks.

April 23, 2023, 5:35 pm

A Russian flag flies in front of a ruby star atop one of the Kremlin’s towers in downtown Moscow. Kirill KUDRYAVTSEV / AFP

The United States cannot be faulted for trying. For decades after World War II it made pacts, treaties, and agreements with its primary nuclear-armed enemy. It held summits at the very highest level and arranged innumerable meetings between foreign ministers, officials, and military staff. Whole new academic disciplines were created and devoted to understanding and - insofar as was possible - communicating with Russia.

So much for good intentions. The paperwork of those years is now strewn across the geopolitical landscape, and mostly forgotten. The only time anyone recalls a deal with Russia, it’s being torn up by Vladimir Putin and his acolytes.

What role did these agreements actually play? They brought us to this terrible moment where war rampages across Ukraine as Russia seeks to wipe Ukraine from the map. So, another agreement? Really?

There is a sensible argument (which doesn’t play very well in Washington, for obvious reasons) that the US has become a master of self-deterrence. In this outlook, America’s endless disarmament agreements with the Kremlin only resulted in America being the party that was deterred. The US recouped its primacy - and lost it again - after the USSR dissolved and more agreements were reached. What was the US (or the UK) thinking when in 1994 it hectored Ukraine into denuding itself of its nuclear arsenal in exchange for Russia’s “security assurances” in the Budapest Memorandum? Former President Clinton’s epiphanic mea culpa on April 4 came way too late.

Yet we persist. A Defense Department spokesman recently stated: “Our job is to keep supporting Ukraine on the battlefield so they are in the best position at the negotiating table.” To negotiate what? Russia’s war against Ukraine is openly genocidal. The Russian Orthodox Church issued wallet cards to the Russian troops: “Your task is to wipe the Ukrainian nation off the face of the earth,” it stated. The Kremlin’s primetime propagandists make similar chilling statements of genocidal intent. Israel’s former Prime Minister, Golda Meir (coincidently, born in Kyiv), made the point: “They say we must be dead. And we say we want to be alive. Between life and death, I don’t know of a compromise.”

Let us be clear. The current Russian regime might, as in the past, stop shooting for a time. But it will not abandon its imperial ambitions. The question is therefore not peace and war, but the speed of Ukrainian national extinction.

How would a new agreement be enforced? Countries accounting for more than half the world’s economy (Russia’s share is the same as New York City’s), and with the largest military alliance in history, did not prevent Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine and annexation of Crimea. Could the G-7 and NATO have done more this time? Yes, of course. Will they? That’s another matter.

And if we don’t have the will and the enlightened self-interest to help ensure Ukraine’s recovery of its security and sovereignty today, then why would we have it - for Ukraine or any other country - tomorrow?

Here’s the crux. “The business of America is business,” said President Calvin Coolidge. America’s DNA demands and reflects a mercantile environment requiring stability and predictability to make business possible. To that end, restraint and compromise are predicates ensuring the bridal white sanctity of agreements. We celebrate them as a solution to - not the cause of - a problem. We’re hardwired to deal with Russia similarly. But Russia is of a different galaxy. For once, believe Putin when he says: “We have a different genetic and cultural moral code.”

Russia believes authority should be sacred. Compromise is anathema. In 1839, the Marquis de Custine, a French aristocrat and writer, traveled to Russia and wrote: “To converse is to conspire, to think is to revolt; thought is not just a crime, it is a misfortune, also.” Putin’s Russia is a little different in outlook.

It views any agreement as but an aperitif. It exists to deny its very purpose, or to realize it’s very opposite, or to buy time. The only element of predictability is the predictability of its breach.

Ukraine learned the hard way when, on December 17, 1917, Russia declared that it “recognizes, without any limits or conditions, and in all respects, the national rights and independence of the Ukrainian Republic.” And then again in the UN Charter, the Helsinki Accords, the Budapest Memorandum, and a dozen other agreements.

But the US always keeps trying. Upon extending diplomatic recognition to Russia in 1933 (at the very time it was starving Ukraine into submission), the Kremlin agreed “to refrain from . . . any act overt or covert liable in any way whatsoever to injure the tranquility, prosperity, order, or security of the whole or any part of the United States, in particular any agitation or propaganda.” How did that work out?

And so on and so on, through the Yalta agreements to the Cold War “Spirit of Geneva,” the “Spirit of Camp David,” the “Spirit of Vienna”, the “Spirit of Glassboro,” and the “Spirit of Helsinki.”

Ever-forgiving and hopeful, the US championed post-Soviet Russia’s membership of the World Bank, IMF, the G7, and - disastrously - the UN Security Council (sidestepping its obligatory admission procedures.) The agreements were for naught.

Russia remains implacable, aggressive, and undeterred. Let’s make a deal? Never again.

Victor Rud is Past Chair, Ukrainian American Bar Association, and Chair, Committee on Foreign Affairs

Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the position or views of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis.

Victor Rud

Victor Rud is a board member of the Ukrainian American Bar Association and chairman of its Committee on Foreign Affairs. Rud has more than 35-years of experience as an international attorney. Before Ukrainian independence, he was co-counsel, in the West, for members of the Ukrainian Helsinki Accords Watch Group, and for other dissidents in Ukraine. He was also counsel to the US Public Member to the Helsinki Accords Review Conference in Madrid. He is an honors graduate of Harvard College and Duke Law School.

kyivpost.com · by Victor Rud

7. Short on amphibs for Turkey, Sudan, the Marines grapple with crisis response ethos

Excerpts:

At least part of why there were no amphibious ships in the region alludes back to what Heckl, the commandant’s deputy, told lawmakers and what the senior Marine official told Breaking Defense: The number of ships available to be on station, given all the other commitments the Marine Corps has, was simply insufficient.

Bryan Clark, a fellow at the Hudson Institute and formerly a special assistant to the chief of naval operations, said, “ARGs are supposed to support one seven-month deployment every 27-32 months, and be able to deploy again for a few months after they get home. Due to maintenance delays and material failures, every ready amphib is being used for MEU deployments.”

Berger during the Friday hearing encapsulated why he sees the amphibious fleet’s readiness as so critical to both the Pentagon and the United States as a country.

“Here’s my concern, the first time this nation can’t respond to a crisis and one of our adversaries can, [that is] probably the last time we get asked,” he said.

Short on amphibs for Turkey, Sudan, the Marines grapple with crisis response ethos - Breaking Defense

"When things like Turkey or [Sudan] come up, and other aspects of the US Joint Force are responding, it’s uncomfortable because [the Marines] look at it as something that historically they have done," said one analyst.

breakingdefense.com · by Justin Katz · May 1, 2023

The amphibious transport dock ships USS San Antonio and USS New York are underway together in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Virginia. San Antonio is conducting ship handling drills with New York during San Antonio’s second phase of sea trials, which are primarily focused on combat systems testing and developing crew proficiency. (U.S. Navy photo by Petty Officer 1st Class Edwin F. Bryan)

WASHINGTON — In the aftermath of a powerful February earthquake in Turkey, Marine Corps’ leadership was publicly lamenting its response to aid an ally. The service’s “best option,” a Marine Expeditionary Unit hauling shelter, medical supplies and other humanitarian assistance aboard a big deck amphibious ship, was not available.

“When the earthquake happened in Turkey, a NATO ally, the MEU was not on station and it should have been,” Lt. Gen. Karsten Heckl, one of the commandant’s deputies, told lawmakers in March.

The commandant himself, Gen. David Berger, in a separate interview with Defense One said as a service chief, he owes the president and the defense secretary “options…all the time. Here, I felt like the best option, we couldn’t offer them because we have the Marines and the equipment and they’re trained, [but] we didn’t have the ships.”

Now, in the wake of the dramatic evacuation of American diplomats and citizens from Sudan, an African nation with two opposing generals threatening war, the Marines again were unable to provide the combatant commander with its premiere capability for evacuations, a senior official told Breaking Defense.

It’s a perceived failure about which top Marine officials have been unusually and publicly blunt. That bluntness, analysts and former military officials say, has been driven by a cultural ethos that demands they be the nation’s “crisis response force” as well as a genuine need to shore up the embattled amphibious fleet.

“I feel like I let down the combatant commander cause Gen. [Michael] Langley needs options,” Berger said during an April 28 congressional hearing of the four-star Marine Corps general leading US Africa Command. “He didn’t have a sea-based option [from the Marine Corps]. That’s how we reinforce embassies. That’s how we evacuate them. That’s how we deter.”

The USS Truxtun (DDG-103) was one of the Navy ships sent to waters off the coast of Sudan to support the State Department as it managed evacuations of diplomats in April and May 2023. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Scott Barnes/Released)

A Problem, A Commander, A List of Options

In the US military, when a crisis emerges around the world, it’s the region’s combatant commander — in the case of Sudan, that’s Langley at AFRICOM — who is presented with a list of options for ways to respond.

What Berger alluded to during the hearing with House lawmakers, but did not spell out explicitly, is that amphibious ship readiness prevented it from offering the full power of a Marine Expeditionary Unit and Amphibious Ready Group (MEU/ARG) to AFRICOM. A senior official who spoke on the condition of anonymity put it more clearly to Breaking Defense.

“While Marines did provide support to the evacuation of the embassy, it is our MEU/ARG that are trained specifically for evacuations like this,” the senior Marine official said. “Ideally, there would be a consistent MEU/ARG presence in the Mediterranean that could have been an option for the combatant commander. There was no MEU/ARG in the region due to the lack of ready amphibious ships, and so it wouldn’t have been an option in this case.”

Breaking Defense sought comments from the Marine Corps about the situation in Sudan and how ship readiness may have hindered its ability to respond, as it did in February following Turkey’s earthquake. A service spokesman deferred questions to AFRICOM, the Joint Staff and the Office of the Secretary of Defense.

US AFRICOM spokesman Navy LCDR Timothy Pietrack told Breaking Defense that “as a matter of policy and security, we do not speculate on potential future operations or force movements.” A spokeswoman for the Joint Staff declined to comment. A spokesperson for the Office of the Secretary of Defense did not respond by press time.

Responding to Sudan, the US Navy did send three ships to waters near the African nation: the destroyer Truxton (DDG-103), the expeditionary sea base Lewis B. Puller (ESB-3) and the expeditionary fast transport Brunswick (T-EPF-6). A Navy spokeswoman did not respond to Breaking Defense’s questions about the deployment by press time.

Navy brass during the April 28 hearing indicated the number of American citizens who wish to leave Sudan and are seeking the government’s assistance is relatively small. That means that the full capability of a big deck amphibious ship — a vessel capable of holding thousands of people — may not be necessary.

Further, the Pentagon over the weekend announced the defense secretary approved a request from the State Department to assist Americans in leaving Sudan using air and land assets. “We are moving naval assets within the region to provide necessary support along the coast,” said Sabrina Singh, deputy Pentagon press secretary. The prior evacuation of US embassy personnel, announced on April 23, was done largely by special operations forces from other services, mostly by helicopter out of Khartoum to neighboring Djibouti.

That left the Marines, who aim to be ready to respond in an emergency, largely on the sidelines, even as more and more Americans sought a way out.

“We have to be prepared, of course, for the full range of operations in places we might not expect and probably on timelines we did not anticipate,” Berger has previously told lawmakers. “And that’s why your Marine Corps’ ability to respond to crises in any clime and place is essential to our national security.”

The expeditionary mobile base ship USS Lewis B. Puller (ESB 3), left, patrols the Arabian Gulf. (U.S. Army photo by Spc. Duong Le)

An ‘Uncomfortable’ Reality Sinking In

Analysts said that at the heart of the Marines’ frustration is pride: The service bills itself as the nation’s crisis response force, and in both cases, what they called the “best” response it could offer wasn’t ready for the Joint Force or the country’s allies.

Andrew Metrick, a fellow at the Center for New American Security, told Breaking Defense it’s about “cultural ethos,” as well as new questions about the future of the force.

“The fact it’s bothering parts of the Corps, I think is reflective of the larger ongoing debate that you see … around Force Design 2030. There is an ongoing debate within the Corps and within the retired community about Marine Corps identity,” he said. “So, when things like Turkey or things like the current [situation] in Sudan come up, and other aspects of the US Joint Force are responding, it’s uncomfortable because [the Marines] look at it as something that historically they have done.”

Evacuations have been traditionally a Marine Corps mission. One of the most recent high-profile evacuations that took place was the non-combatant evacuation out of Afghanistan in August 2021, closing out the US presence in that country following two decades of conflict. Three infantry battalions, two Marine Corps and one Army, were sent to Kabul International Airport in July 2021 to assist with evacuation efforts. Eleven Marines as well as a Navy corpsman and a soldier were killed by a suicide bomber during the operation.

In 2014, Marines were integral to evacuating Americans from the South Sudanese city of Juba. Before that, the service conducted similar operations in Lebanon, Rwanda, Albania and elsewhere. A Marine Corps University website highlights 15 different non-combatant evacuations the Marines executed between 1975 and 2006.

“The [evacuation] mission is very visible and brings the Corps a bunch of goodwill,” Metrick said. “Same with humanitarian assistance [and] disaster relief.”

But now the US, Metrick said, has a “tremendous amount of capability for crisis response that is not just in the Corps.” And the force’s slimming down as part of Force Design 2030 may now be showing itself, according to John Ferrari, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

“They put themselves on a diet, and all of a sudden when there’s a lot of phone calls, they can’t answer it. Not enough people, not enough units, not enough capacity,” said Ferrari, a retired Army officer. “It’s not a linear descent in capability [and] capacity — a smaller force spins faster to do fewer missions.”

As the Marine Corps describes it, Force Design 2030 has been an ongoing effort to overhaul the service to make it ready for the future fight. When the plan was first published, Berger reined in the service’s longstanding requirement of 38 amphibious ships — now down to 31 — in lieu of a new fleet of “Landing Ship Medium” designed for the island-hopping missions envisioned in the Indo-Pacific.

But the Navy’s new budget goes further, calling for a “pause” in amphib building altogether. Capacity and the risk it pushes down is at the center of the Marines’ relentless lobbying of Congress to maintain that minimum of 31 amphibious ships.

“The inventory is going to go down, the risk is going to go up,” Berger said in March when asked about the Pentagon’s decision to not buy new amphibious ships in the fiscal 2024 budget. “The risk meaning our ability as a nation to respond when needed, and sometimes you can’t predict that the risk goes up — that a combatant commander doesn’t have the right tool for the job. That’s the risk.”

Military Sealift Command expeditionary fast transport USNS Brunswick (T-EPF 6) pulls in to Tawau, Malaysia. The Brunswick joined two other Navy ships headed to Sudanese waters at the end of April. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Joshua Fulton/Released)

A ‘Great Strength’ And A Budget Battle

The Marine Corps has been aggressively making its case to continue purchasing amphibious ships, despite the “strategic pause” the Navy announced earlier this year.

Top Marine officials, Berger included, have not been shy about using Turkey and Sudan as specific evidence of a faltering capability. In his more recent testimony, it was Berger, not lawmakers, who brought up the Marines’ relative inability to respond to Sudan.

The Navy’s ships have apparently been successful so far in their mission near Sudan — with or without an amphib standing by — which raises questions about whether the Marine Corps’ lobbying is overplaying the necessity of the ARG/MEU in either situation.

But analysts said the Marines’ characterizations of the ARG/MEU in terms of its usefulness for evacuations and humanitarian assistance were not overblown.

“Their great strength is that they can wait offshore for extended periods, if necessary, waiting for a crisis to either peak or fade away. They can do this without causing any local disturbance or requiring any foreign government’s permission,” said Mark Cancian, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a retired Marine.

Metrick, the CNAS fellow, said the ARG/MEU possesses numerous capabilities in a single package, such as logistics, engineering, aviation, command and medical.

“This isn’t to say that other parts of the Joint Force can’t be put together to achieve a similar result, just nothing is as self-contained,” Metrick added. However, he argued that the one area where amphibious ships may not be optimal is when the military can secure an airport. In that case, he said, the Pentagon’s airlift options are preferable.

Steven Wills, a naval analyst at the Center for Maritime Strategy, agreed the amphibs would be the “right choice” for evacuation missions, but noted that open-source data shows no expeditionary strike groups were in proximity to Sudan early last week when the decision was made to advise Americans to leave. Over the weekend, hundreds of Americans made an overland trip to the Port of Sudan, where they were picked up by the Navy ships.

At least part of why there were no amphibious ships in the region alludes back to what Heckl, the commandant’s deputy, told lawmakers and what the senior Marine official told Breaking Defense: The number of ships available to be on station, given all the other commitments the Marine Corps has, was simply insufficient.

Bryan Clark, a fellow at the Hudson Institute and formerly a special assistant to the chief of naval operations, said, “ARGs are supposed to support one seven-month deployment every 27-32 months, and be able to deploy again for a few months after they get home. Due to maintenance delays and material failures, every ready amphib is being used for MEU deployments.”

Berger during the Friday hearing encapsulated why he sees the amphibious fleet’s readiness as so critical to both the Pentagon and the United States as a country.

“Here’s my concern, the first time this nation can’t respond to a crisis and one of our adversaries can, [that is] probably the last time we get asked,” he said.

breakingdefense.com · by Justin Katz · May 1, 2023

8. The little-known group that’s saving Ukraine

Excerpts:

Another divisive issue is how defense spending is split among allies. NATO’s annual report released in March showed that despite an entire year of pledging increased defense spending, only seven countries out of 30 have met the nine-year-old goal of spending 2 percent of their GDP on defense — two fewer countries than hit the mark in 2021.

Other trends have emerged at the Ramstein meetings that have also frustrated some participants. According to the two European diplomats, a handful of countries have consistently promised equipment that never seems to arrive but is recycled at each meeting with no timeline attached.

“They somehow never mention when that will happen, and then we have another Ramstein format happen and you are still claiming the same thing,” one of the officials said.

Despite these emerging fissures, sticking with Kyiv for the long haul has been a talking point for all NATO allies since the start of the war, and even with some delays in promised equipment, donations continue to flow over the border to Kyiv. And 14 months in, with new spring and summer offensives on the way, there has been no change in that rhetoric.

“We cannot let war fatigue in our societies and politics take hold,” Latvian Defense Minister Inara Murniece said while visiting Washington just before the latest Ramstein meeting. “We must grab this momentum and do everything possible to make the spring and summer Ukrainian offensive successful. We can’t lose this moment.”

The little-known group that’s saving Ukraine

By LARA SELIGMAN and PAUL MCLEARY

05/01/2023 04:30 AM EDT

Politico

The 40-nation bloc that’s sending weapons to Kyiv seems to have pulled off the impossible. Now comes the hard part.

Sticking with Kyiv for the long haul has been a talking point for all NATO allies since the start of the war, and even with some delays in promised equipment, donations continue to flow over the border to Kyiv. | Efrem Lukatsky/AP Photo

05/01/2023 04:30 AM EDT

RAMSTEIN AIR BASE, Germany — When U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin brings together the defense chiefs of more than 40 nations here in southwest Germany each month, the hours-long gathering typically ends the same way: Celeste Wallander, the Pentagon’s head of international security affairs, calls on each participant to read out what weapons their nation is ready to donate to Ukraine.

It’s a question — perhaps the question — that will help determine Ukraine’s future more than a year following Russia’s invasion.

And it’s made the monthly closed-door grouping of leaders — known by the anodyne bureaucratic title of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group — an under-the-radar yet central force in equipping the Ukrainian military with everything from precision rockets to main battle tanks. It’s also helped the nation create an ad hoc yet astonishingly modern military that would be capable of outgunning some long-standing NATO members.

But on the sidelines of the group’s April 21 meeting in a cavernous, wood-paneled ballroom here at the American-run Ramstein Air Base, it was clear that staying united — which the group has succeeded at for more than a year — will be an increasing challenge.

A number of fissures have emerged recently in the group, particularly over whether and when to send Western fighter jets to Ukraine, and delays in certain weapons shipments — most pressingly, German and Spanish tanks. Meanwhile, the mass transfer of weaponry to Kyiv has left donor nations worried about their own stockpiles, and recent meetings have started to turn to the issue of NATO allies reequipping themselves as well as sustaining the weapons donated to Ukraine for the long haul.

“We have done a lot already in terms of the donations, but now the question is more on sustainability,” Esa Pulkkinen, the permanent secretary, or deputy, in Finland’s defense ministry, said as military leaders gathered at Ramstein last month.

“Besides supporting Ukraine, we also need to replenish our own stocks, right?” one European diplomat said.

Austin, Joint Chiefs Chair Gen. Mark Milley and Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov sit at a head table draped in white tablecloths, flanked by American and Ukrainian flags. Crystal chandeliers hang over their heads. Aides sip coffee and mingle in hushed voices on the sidelines.

The meeting starts, as always, with a battlefield update from the Ukrainians. The other members sit at two narrow tables perpendicular to the leaders’ table, forming three sides of an open rectangle. Each country is represented by a miniature flag next to its member’s microphone.

Austin leads the discussion, making opening and closing comments, but typically spends more time listening to the presentations. Wallander emcees, moving each presenter along. During the latest meeting, members devoted one 90-minute block to discussing sustainment and industrial base challenges; the entire meeting can last more than six hours.

The impetus for the Ramstein gatherings came about without fanfare early on in the conflict. While readying a secret trip to wartime Ukraine just a month after the Russian invasion, the people attending Austin’s daily 6:30 a.m. staff meeting on the third floor of the Pentagon — called a “policy op sync” and modeled off the twice-daily meetings he chaired during the Afghanistan evacuation — realized a major problem was brewing.

Kyiv had survived Russia’s initial onslaught, yet it was becoming clear that the U.S. and other countries would need to overcome past misgivings about arming Ukraine and commit for the long haul. In those early days, no one was coordinating the equipment that countries were quickly beginning to pledge, risking a serious miscalculation for the Western nations aiding Ukraine.

“I did a lot of phone calls talking to countries, ‘can you send this,’ and I think it was at that point that the idea developed that the secretary had, ‘no, we need to bring the key contributors to Ukraine together so we can understand what the scope of this is,’” said Wallander in an interview at the Pentagon.

Austin named it the Ukraine Defense Contact Group, which met on April 26, 2022, at Ramstein. It was the meeting — which was conceived and planned in about a week’s time — that kick-started the process of saving Ukraine.

Although disputes do break out between the participants, the sniping typically stays outside the room — a remarkable feat that members say is due to Austin’s steady leadership, calm presence and deep military knowledge. Austin’s attention to bilateral relations — including always giving countries public credit for their donations — has won him credibility, according to officials involved in the Ramstein meeting.

POLITICO spoke to 17 people directly involved in the discussions for this story, many of whom were granted anonymity to discuss the closed-door meetings.

Tensions brewing

The Ramstein meetings are typically scripted affairs, during which ministers read from prepared notes. But the orderly gatherings mask significant differences between the governments working to arm Ukraine. Eastern European countries such as Poland and Estonia have leaned forward in providing aid, while Germany and France often lag. The United States — specifically Austin — at times must straddle the two sides.

Meanwhile, Kyiv is constantly asking for more — and better — equipment. The ink was barely dry on the decision to send Abrams main battle tanks in January, for example, when Ukrainian officials renewed a push to receive F-16 fighter jets.

The fighter jet question is still a live issue, and the split between the various participants over whether to send Western warplanes was on display at the most recent Ramstein meeting. While Austin and other U.S. officials have been clear that they do not believe F-16s are necessary for the current fight, others say that the group is still debating the issue.

“There’s an ongoing discussion about also other types of jets,” said NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, speaking to reporters on the balcony while participants stretched their legs during a break in the meeting.

Still, others seemed sure that Western jets will be heading to Kyiv at some point.

“Western fighters will be a part of the Western military integration of the Ukraine armed forces, whether the time is now or perhaps later,” Pulkkinen said.

President Joe Biden has at times called on Austin to use the Ramstein meeting to appeal to his counterparts directly to do more to help Ukraine. In January, after German Chancellor Olaf Scholz refused to send Leopard tanks without the U.S. first sending its own Abrams tanks, the president turned to Austin to make one final appeal to his brand-new German counterpart, Defense Minister Boris Pistorius, at that month’s gathering.

Biden had reason to hope Austin could clinch a deal. Throughout the conflict, the defense secretary has consistently managed to turn his relationships into concrete aid for Ukraine. Early in the war, Austin personally brokered a deal with Slovakia’s defense minister for the eastern European country to send one of its Russian-made S-300 air defense systems, in exchange for the U.S. repositioning one of its Patriot missile systems to Slovakia.

But this time, Austin could not break through Berlin’s hesitation. Ultimately, Biden ended up greenlighting the Abrams, paving the way for Germany to send the Leopards.

Some nations are still frustrated with the slow pace of Berlin’s donations.

Germany should be “sending more weapons, sending more ammunition, and giving more money to Ukraine, because they are the richest and the biggest country by far,” Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki told POLITICO. He added that the Germans “were not as generous as they should have been” with Ukraine since the start of the war.

“Collectively we have to, and we can, do more. We all understand what is at stake,” Estonian Defense Minister Hanno Pevkur told POLITICO at Ramstein. Referring to his own government, he said, “we have done a lot definitely.”

Despite differences between the various countries, participants said Austin’s consistency and attention to personal relationships keeps each gathering running smoothly and is the reason the members return to Ramstein time and again to discuss new ways to support Ukraine.

Canadian Defense Minister Anita Anand recalled how Austin encouraged her to donate some of Canada’s 82 Leopard 2 tanks. Parting with those tanks was “no small thing,” she said. Her personal relationship with Austin — who she calls a “constant gentleman” — was crucial in Ottawa’s decision to ultimately send four tanks.

“This is why we have to gather. This is why we have to come together and that’s to say why we have to help Ukraine,” Pevkur said.

But the tensions over the tank decision could foreshadow more angst in the months ahead as Ukraine continues to suck up billions in munitions. Replacing all of that takes time, planning and significant investments.

New challenges

The last several meetings of the Ukraine group have seen allies starting to think hard about how to find the money — and the industrial capacity — to replace the gear sent to battle the Russians.

“It still is the only effective format when it comes to coordination of deliveries but also of the needed materiel,” one senior European diplomat said. “Regardless [of] the differences in opinion.”

Plus, they need to wade through a thicket of parochial interests and find a way to do something even more difficult: jointly manufacture ammunition and other materiel as the war in Ukraine grinds on and individual production lines reach their breaking point.

Another divisive issue is how defense spending is split among allies. NATO’s annual report released in March showed that despite an entire year of pledging increased defense spending, only seven countries out of 30 have met the nine-year-old goal of spending 2 percent of their GDP on defense — two fewer countries than hit the mark in 2021.

Other trends have emerged at the Ramstein meetings that have also frustrated some participants. According to the two European diplomats, a handful of countries have consistently promised equipment that never seems to arrive but is recycled at each meeting with no timeline attached.

“They somehow never mention when that will happen, and then we have another Ramstein format happen and you are still claiming the same thing,” one of the officials said.

Despite these emerging fissures, sticking with Kyiv for the long haul has been a talking point for all NATO allies since the start of the war, and even with some delays in promised equipment, donations continue to flow over the border to Kyiv. And 14 months in, with new spring and summer offensives on the way, there has been no change in that rhetoric.

“We cannot let war fatigue in our societies and politics take hold,” Latvian Defense Minister Inara Murniece said while visiting Washington just before the latest Ramstein meeting. “We must grab this momentum and do everything possible to make the spring and summer Ukrainian offensive successful. We can’t lose this moment.”

Lili Bayer in Brussels contributed to this report.

POLITICO

Politico

9. Biden: US-Philippines 'ironclad' partners amid China tension

Excerpts:

“We are facing new challenges and I couldn’t think of a better partner to have than you.” Biden told Marcos at the start of their Oval Office meeting. “The United States also remains ironclad in our commitment to the defense of the Philippines, including in the South China Sea, and we will continue to support the Philippines military modernization.”

Marcos said the relationship was essential as Philippines and the Pacific finds itself in “possibly the most complicated geopolitical situation in the world right now.”

Monday’s Oval Office meeting is the latest high-level diplomacy with Pacific leaders by Biden as his administration contends with increased military and economic assertiveness by China and worries about North Korea’s nuclear program. Marcos’ official visit to Washington is the first by a Philippine president in more than 10 years.

The U.S. president last week hosted South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol for a state visit during which the two leaders introduced new steps aimed at deterring North Korea from launching an attack on its neighbors. Biden is scheduled to travel to Japan and Australia in May.

Biden: US-Philippines 'ironclad' partners amid China tension

AP · by AAMER MADHANI and JIM GOMEZ · May 1, 2023

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden reiterated U.S. commitment to the Philippines’ security and noted the “deep friendship” of the two nations as he hosted Philippines President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. for White House talks Monday as concerns grow about the Chinese navy’s harassment of Philippine vessels in the South China Sea.

Marcos’ visit to Washington comes after the U.S. and the Philippines last week completed their largest war drills ever and as the two countries’ air forces on Monday will hold their first joint fighter jet training in the Philippines since 1990. The Philippines this year agreed to give the U.S. access to four more bases on the islands as the U.S. looks to deter China’s increasingly aggressive actions toward Taiwan and in the disputed South China Sea.

Meanwhile, China has angered the Philippines by repeatedly harassing its navy and coast guard patrols and chasing away fishermen in waters that are close to Philippine shores but that Beijing claims as its own.

But as Biden sat down with Marcos, the U.S. president went out of his way to note the progress in the U.S.-Philippine relationship—one that has had ups and downs over the years and was in a difficult place when Marcos took office less than a year ago.

“We are facing new challenges and I couldn’t think of a better partner to have than you.” Biden told Marcos at the start of their Oval Office meeting. “The United States also remains ironclad in our commitment to the defense of the Philippines, including in the South China Sea, and we will continue to support the Philippines military modernization.”

Marcos said the relationship was essential as Philippines and the Pacific finds itself in “possibly the most complicated geopolitical situation in the world right now.”

Monday’s Oval Office meeting is the latest high-level diplomacy with Pacific leaders by Biden as his administration contends with increased military and economic assertiveness by China and worries about North Korea’s nuclear program. Marcos’ official visit to Washington is the first by a Philippine president in more than 10 years.

The U.S. president last week hosted South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol for a state visit during which the two leaders introduced new steps aimed at deterring North Korea from launching an attack on its neighbors. Biden is scheduled to travel to Japan and Australia in May.

Following the meeting, the White House announced the transfer of three C-130 aircraft and two coastal patrol vessels to the Philippines. The two countries also said they adopted defense guidelines aimed at deepening cooperation and interoperability between the two nations’ militaries across land, sea, air, space, and cyberspace.

The administration also said it is launching a new trade mission focused on increasing American investment in the Philippines’ innovation economy, new educational programing and more.

Increased Chinese harassment of vessels in the South China Sea has added another dimension to the visit. On April 23, journalists from The Associated Press and other outlets were aboard the Philippine coast guard’s BRP Malapascua near Second Thomas Shoal when a Chinese coast guard ship blocked the Philippine patrol vessel steaming into the disputed shoal. The Philippines has filed more than 200 diplomatic protests against China since last year, at least 77 since Marcos took office in June.

State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller on Saturday called media reporting on the encounters a “stark reminder” of Chinese “harassment and intimidation of Philippine vessels as they undertake routine patrols within their exclusive economic zone.”

“We call upon Beijing to desist from its provocative and unsafe conduct,” Miller said.

U.S. and Taiwanese officials have also been unnerved by recent critical comments by China’s ambassador to the Philippines, Huang Xilian, over the Philippines granting the U.S. military increased access to bases.

Huang at an April forum reportedly said the Philippines should oppose Taiwan’s independence “if you care genuinely about the 150,000 OFWs” in Taiwan, using the acronym for overseas Filipino workers.

China claims the self-ruled island as its own. The Philippines, like the U.S., has a “One China” policy that recognizes Beijing as the government of China but allows informal relations with Taiwan. Marcos has not explicitly said that his country would assist the United States in any armed contingency in Taiwan.

The officials described Huang’s comments as one of many recent provocative actions by the Chinese to put pressure on the Philippines.

One official said that Marcos still desires to work closely with both Washington and Beijing but that he “finds himself in a situation” in which “the steps that China is taking are deeply concerning.”

Close U.S.-Philippines relations were not a given when Marcos took office. The son and namesake of the late Philippines strongman had seemed intent on following the path of his predecessor, Rodrigo Duterte, who pursued closer ties with China.

Before Marcos took office last year, Kurt Campbell, coordinator for Indo-Pacific affairs on the White House National Security Council, acknowledged that “historical considerations” could present “challenges” to the relationship with Marcos Jr. It was an oblique reference to long-standing litigation in the United States against the estate of his father, Ferdinand Marcos.

A U.S. appeals court in 1996 upheld damages of about $2 billion against the elder Marcos’ estate for the torture and killings of thousands of Filipinos. The court upheld a 1994 verdict of a jury in Hawaii, where he fled after being forced from power in 1986. He died there in 1989.

Marcos noted that he last visited the White House when his father was in power.

Biden and Marcos met in September during the U.N. General Assembly, where the U.S. president acknowledged the two countries’ sometimes “rocky” past.

During their private meeting at the UN, Biden, a Democrat, stressed to Marcos his desire to improve relations and asked Marcos how the administration could “fulfill your dreams and hopes” to do that, a senior administration official told the Associated Press.

Marcos is also slated to visit the Pentagon, meet Cabinet members and business leaders and make remarks at a Washington think tank during his visit.

___

Gomez reported from Manila. AP writer Darlene Superville contributed reporting.

AP · by AAMER MADHANI and JIM GOMEZ · May 1, 2023

10. Army Special Ops Command welcomes first female command sergeant major

As I have previously written, I have observed her from afar while she served exceptionally well as the CSM at SOCKOR.  She is an inspirational leader. She used social media very well. I am interested to see how she will positively exploit it as the USASOC CSM.

Excerpts:

“When I came into the SOF (special operations forces) community in 2002, there were very few women,” Naumann said.

Ahead of Monday’s ceremony, Naumann told The Fayetteville Observer that being in special operation forces is more about capability.

“We have all different military occupation specialties in our formation,” she said. “We have genders and races and everything. Everyone is represented in our formation, and it’s about putting everybody on the same playing field and then selecting the best athlete.”

Lt. Gen. Jonathan Braga, USASOS’s commander who oversaw Monday’s ceremony, said he’s known Naumann for decades and described her as a trailblazer.

During Naumann’s most recent assignment, Braga said, she worked with Korean forces that don’t “really have females,” in its special operation forces.

Naumann, Braga said, showed the Korean forces that she would jump with them, go to the range with them and was a value.

“Talk about changing cultures and adding to strategy and international partnerships through sheer perseverance and commitment and leading by example,” he said.

Army Special Ops Command welcomes first female command sergeant major

armytimes.com · by Rachel Riley, The Fayetteville Observer · May 1, 2023

Editor’s Note: This article was published first published in The Fayetteville Observer. It has been updated with additional information from the ceremony.

FORT BRAGG — The U.S. Army Special Operations Command has its first female command sergeant major, while the outgoing top enlisted soldier will be the next sergeant major of the Army.

With more than 30,000 soldiers and civilians, USASOC is the higher command for the 1st Special Forces Command, John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School, Army Special Operations Aviation Command and 75th Ranger Regiment

During a ceremony Monday at Fort Bragg, Command Sgt. Maj. JoAnn Naumann assumed responsibility from Command Sgt. Maj. Michael R. Weimer.

Naumann most recently served as the senior enlisted leader for Special Operations Command-Korea.

U.S. Army Special Operations Command change of responsibility ceremony on Monday, May 1, 2023, on Fort Bragg. (Andrew Craft/The Fayetteville Observer)

She enlisted in the Army in February 1996 as a voice language analyst. She completed the Arabic Basic Course at the Defense Language Institute and Advanced Individual Training at Goodfellow Air Force Base in Texas.

Naumann’s assignments include serving as the Joint Special Operations Command’s senior enlisted advisor, command sergeant major for the 15th Military Intelligence Battalion and command sergeant major for the Joint Special Operations Command Intelligence Brigade. She has completed 14 deployments throughout CENTCOM and AFRICOM.

In an Army interview last year, Naumann said she’s been with special operations since 2002.

“When I came into the SOF (special operations forces) community in 2002, there were very few women,” Naumann said.

Ahead of Monday’s ceremony, Naumann told The Fayetteville Observer that being in special operation forces is more about capability.

“We have all different military occupation specialties in our formation,” she said. “We have genders and races and everything. Everyone is represented in our formation, and it’s about putting everybody on the same playing field and then selecting the best athlete.”

Lt. Gen. Jonathan Braga, USASOS’s commander who oversaw Monday’s ceremony, said he’s known Naumann for decades and described her as a trailblazer.

During Naumann’s most recent assignment, Braga said, she worked with Korean forces that don’t “really have females,” in its special operation forces.

Naumann, Braga said, showed the Korean forces that she would jump with them, go to the range with them and was a value.

“Talk about changing cultures and adding to strategy and international partnerships through sheer perseverance and commitment and leading by example,” he said.

Prior to the ceremony, Naumann said the best advice she received was when she was a staff sergeant and a sergeant major told her she’s done her job when her soldiers don’t need her anymore

“It is about developing our people ... It’s not about me here today, but it’s about who’s going to be here behind me and who’s going to be here in 10 years and growing those future leaders,” she said.

Naumann said she’s honored to lead the Army’s special operation forces “at an inflection point,” when the Army is “challenged by new adversaries and rapidly advancing technology.”

She thanked Weimer for his guidance.

New Sergeant Major of the Army

Weimer is leaving his position as command sergeant major of USASOC to become the 17th sergeant major of the Army in August, a position currently held by Command Sgt. Maj. Michael Grinston.

RELATED

Meet the next Sergeant Major of the Army

Cmd. Sgt. Maj. Michael Weimer currently serves as the top NCO for Army Special Operations Command.

Ahead of the ceremony, Weimer told The Fayetteville Observer that he didn’t start his Army career thinking he’d become the senior enlisted leader of USASOC or the Army.

He said mentors have taught him to focus on being he where is in that moment in time.

“We have a tendency to always be thinking about the next step or the next thing, and it absolutely can be distracting, especially in our line of work,” Weimer said.

Braga said Weimer will be the first Special Forces noncommissioned officer to hold the Army’s top enlisted spot.

Braga recognized Weimer’s wife and daughters for their support and described Weimer as having “courage, candor and commitment,” along with “vulnerability and humility.”

Weimer, Braga said, is similar to the explorer Ulysess in the poems “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey” and also written about by the poet Alfred Tennyson.

Ulysess, Braga said, “lived life to the fullest,” and did not look “for wealth, position in life or fame after death.”

Weimer came to work to make it better, from advocating for child development centers and new barracks on post to “talent management.”

“He left his mark,” Braga said.

Weimer challenged the soldiers to never settle or compromise and to refuse to be comfortable.

According to his official biography, Weimer joined the Army in 1993 and completed Special Forces Assessment and Selection in 1994. He completed the Special Forces Weapons Sergeant Course and earned his Green Beret in 1996.

Weimer previously served as the senior enlisted leader at the U.S. Special Operations Command Central at MacDill Air Force Base, Florida, from August 2020, until assuming his current role with USASOC in August 2021.

He’s also had previous assignments as command sergeant major for the Special Operations Joint Task Force Afghanistan, the 7th Special Forces Group and numerous tours in the U.S. Central and U.S. Southern Command’s area of responsibility.

11. War in 2050: The Army’s Operating Concept After Next

But will there be (or can there be) a "one size fits all" concept? And are technologically focused concepts appropriate for all conditions of war, conflict, and competition?

Excerpts:

This stated, we still need a concept relevant to the strategic context and operational problems of twenty-first-century warfare. We have concept developers in Army Futures Command, and their concepts, properly, continue to update the Army’s capstone doctrine of multi-domain operations. The next exploration to account for the changing conduct of warfare will likely focus on systems and their dislocation. It is imperative to identify the conditions we must consider when developing the concept for the second quarter of twenty-first-century warfare, through 2050.

Regardless of the conditions of war (irregular, conventional, nuclear, or a hybrid of any two or all three), in the Army we will need for 2050, both conventional and special forces units will need to mask their formations, and operate within an assured network of shared information and with a scalable common operating picture, to establish a strike zone or kill web for multiple means of fires and effects on enemy formations, while disrupting similar systems of an enemy—likely a peer enemy. As the current war in Ukraine suggests, such a concept must account for the sustainment of war and the necessity to protect the force in what is sure to be a transparent, lethal environment. Significantly, the concept must also stimulate thinking at all levels of war about how warfare is changing and will continue to do so. But, it must also account for what likely remains the same, that the conduct of warfare remains brutal and expensive in terms of consumption rates of supplies, national treasure, and soldiers.

...

Ultimately, the specific technologies that will emerge between now and 2050 we cannot know. We do know, however, that many of the generals commanding this force of 2050 will be commissioned as second lieutenants in June 2023. Those junior officers will be entering an Army with clear current doctrine, but they should also be entering an Army prepared to develop concepts looking out to the middle of the century. The concept for 2050 must empower the embrace of emerging capabilities and the tactics, techniques, and procedures that employ those capabilities. Additionally, while the operating concept is tactical in nature, it also must establish conditions for thinking about the operational and strategic levels of warfare. It must ensure practitioners think about the conduct of warfare and the waging of war. Indeed, our future-focused operating concepts must, in the words of the 2022 National Security Strategy, empower all levels of command “to innovate and creatively design solutions as battlefield conditions evolve.”

War in 2050: The Army’s Operating Concept After Next - Modern War Institute

mwi.usma.edu · by Kevin Benson, James K. Greer · May 1, 2023

The Army, arguably too often, wraps ideas in layers of buzzwords, jargon that must be navigated to get even the most basic sense of what is actually being said. Dave Johnson, a retired colonel and an intellectual force in the defense community, warned of the danger of this. “I often fear that these terms are employed by those who peddle them to look like they are part of the ‘in’ crowd,” he wrote to a group of strategy professionals. “Or, worse, they do not know the origins and meaning of the ideas and doctrine and do not want to be found out. No matter what the case, it confuses the hell out of the rest of the force.”*

The Army cannot afford for its future-focused operating concept to confuse the hell out of the force. The operating concept should establish the basis for reasoned exploration of emerging operational approaches, tactics, techniques, and procedures that are observable in ongoing conflicts, that develop as a function of new technologies, and that bubble up from the field as units train with what is in the motor pool right now. An operating concept must establish the conditions and provide a framework for the testing of ideas, technology, and even outside-the-box ideas about warfare. The concept must enable experimentation to push the boundary of what is possible with what we have in the force and what might be possible coming from technology and adaptation of new systems. Finally, the concept must offer solution paths to operational problems across the global range of military operations. This is a tall order, to be sure, and we must bear in mind the admonition of Michael Howard that while any concept we are working on now is most likely wrong, the challenge is to not be too badly wrong. And, perhaps most importantly, concepts should not be confused with doctrine.

The 2022 National Security Strategy depends upon the demonstrated capability of US armed forces, particularly their agility to respond to a range of national interests. It states, “Our starting premise is that a powerful U.S. military helps advance and safeguard vital U.S. national interests by backstopping diplomacy, confronting aggression, deterring conflict, projecting strength, and protecting the American people and their economic interests.” This will remain true for future strategies through 2050, the timeframe considered in this exploration of the Army’s operating concept after next.

Our proposed concept must truly empower the practice of mission command. Given the uncertainty of what the future might hold, the start point for concept development must begin with a method of at least determining the range of potential futures our Army might face—again, recalling Howard’s admonition of being not too badly wrong. We must bear in mind that the concept must not optimize the Army for one potential future, but rather establish an Army prepared for any in the full range of potential futures.

A proven method to think about the range of operational problems our Army might face in 2050 is the alternative futures method of critical thinking. This approach is most useful when a situation is viewed as too complex or the outcomes as too uncertain to trust a single outcome assessment. First, the concept development team must recognize that there is high uncertainty surrounding the topic in question, the waging of war in 2050. Second, the team must recognize that its members need to consider a wide range of factors that might bear on the question. And third, they must be prepared to explore a range of outcomes and not be wedded to any preconceived result.

There are multiple ways to begin the process of concept development. A dedicated team can spend months organizing, brainstorming, and developing multiple futures, for example. Alternatively, a larger-scale effort can make use of a multiday workshop bringing together a variety of participants. Such an undertaking often demands the special skills of trained scenario-development facilitators and conferencing facilities. This technique is a sharp contrast to contrarian techniques, which try to challenge the high confidence and relative certitude about an event or trend. Instead, multiple futures development is a divergent-thinking technique that tries to use the complexity and uncertainty of a situation to describe multiple outcomes or futures that should be considered, rather than to predict one outcome. Such an investment in time, energy, and resources is absolutely necessary to successful concept development.

This approach is useful in highly ambiguous situations, when analysts confront not only a lot of known unknowns but also unknown unknowns. What this means is that the concept development team recognizes that there are factors, forces, and dynamics among key actors that are difficult to identify without the use of some structured technique that can model how they would interact or behave. Given the time and resources involved, scenario analysis is best reserved for situations that could potentially pose grave threats or otherwise have significant consequences. Waging war in 2050 clearly meets this description. Based on our experience we know that, difficult as it may be, involving policymakers, or at least staff members who work directly with policymakers, in the alternative futures exercise is the most effective way to (1) communicate the results of this exploration of alternative outcomes and (2) sensitize them to key uncertainties. Most participants find participating in the process of developing such scenarios is as useful as any finished product that attempts to capture the results of the exercise. Policymakers and concept development teams can benefit from this technique. Future operational and organizational concepts—called O&Os—will derive from the results of the critical thinking method.

This stated, we still need a concept relevant to the strategic context and operational problems of twenty-first-century warfare. We have concept developers in Army Futures Command, and their concepts, properly, continue to update the Army’s capstone doctrine of multi-domain operations. The next exploration to account for the changing conduct of warfare will likely focus on systems and their dislocation. It is imperative to identify the conditions we must consider when developing the concept for the second quarter of twenty-first-century warfare, through 2050.

Regardless of the conditions of war (irregular, conventional, nuclear, or a hybrid of any two or all three), in the Army we will need for 2050, both conventional and special forces units will need to mask their formations, and operate within an assured network of shared information and with a scalable common operating picture, to establish a strike zone or kill web for multiple means of fires and effects on enemy formations, while disrupting similar systems of an enemy—likely a peer enemy. As the current war in Ukraine suggests, such a concept must account for the sustainment of war and the necessity to protect the force in what is sure to be a transparent, lethal environment. Significantly, the concept must also stimulate thinking at all levels of war about how warfare is changing and will continue to do so. But, it must also account for what likely remains the same, that the conduct of warfare remains brutal and expensive in terms of consumption rates of supplies, national treasure, and soldiers.

The conditions in which warfare is conducted are changing at an extraordinary speed. The conduct of warfare takes place under the unblinking eye of the video cameras on mobile phones and commercial satellites. Television news companies will use videos under the adage that if it bleeds, it leads, even as news media fact checkers’ job is made exponentially more difficult with the explosion of video footage in circulation. Thus far, the US Army and the entire joint force have been challenged to adapt to such changes, so the next concept must suggest, rationalize, and intellectually lead change.

We must always recognize that every war is unique and that none perfectly predicts the next. Certainly, our way forward must be shaped not just by the current conflict in Ukraine, but also by recent conflicts in Gaza (2021), Nagorno-Karabakh (2020), Crimea and eastern Ukraine (since 2014), Georgia (2008), Lebanon (2006), and of course the US and coalition counterinsurgency and counterterrorism operations of the first two decades of this century. Given this, at a minimum, there are three major implications from the war in Ukraine to date that can and must directly inform the US Army’s development and refinement of its concept for future wars.

The first of those is the necessity for effective conduct of large-scale combat operations over operational distances and extended duration in time. We must recognize that large-scale combat operations can be conducted irrespective of the conditions of warfare and enemy action—conventional, irregular, terrorism, a combination of all three, and even under conditions of the use of weapons of mass destruction. These operations must be linked by strategy to policy objectives, bearing in mind these objectives will change based on shifting political conditions.

The second is the necessity to be able to operate effectively and preserve combat power during the noncontiguous and nonlinear operations that will characterize modern large-scale combat. Again, these conditions of warfare will also include enemy action ranging from irregular warfare to cyberattacks to malign influence and misinformation to terrorism operations.

The third major implication is the necessity to operate effectively against, partner with, and employ hybrid forces—that is, combinations of special operations forces, conventional forces, paramilitary and irregular forces, and others. The area of irregular warfare should not be the exclusive province of the special operations community. It is a form of warfare relevant to the entire force.

Recognizing there are dozens of other observations that have emerged or are emerging, these three major implications are especially relevant and should serve as catalysts for improving US force design, capabilities, operations, and preparedness.

It is important to note, at this point, the relationship between doctrine and concepts. As retired Lieutenant General Don Holder once described it to us, doctrine tells us how to fight, right now, with what we have in the motor pool, while concepts should be a response to the changing conduct of war or strategic context, along with an operational problem existing doctrine won’t solve—in essence, how we might fight, in the future, with the emerging capabilities not yet in the force. In our opinion, we struggle more with concepts than doctrine. But it is crucial to overcome this struggle, not least because concepts can be used in experimentation, to inquire of technology and the industrial base, and, through testing, to act as pathfinders for materiel development.

Here again, learning from current and recent conflicts is instrumental. There are tactics, techniques, and procedures observable in operations in Ukraine, Nagorno-Karabakh, Syria, and Iraq. All of these are worthy of study. For example, from a host of open-source reporting it appears that the Ukrainians exercise fire control through an app on unsecured cell phone lines. The Ukrainians apparently use these lines since secure lines and networks are easily identifiable and targetable by lethal and cyber disruptive fires. There is a rediscovery of code words on unsecured lines reminding us of our Cold War days, when we used PRC-77 FM radios with no encrypting devices. These are just a few of the adaptations that have been made under fire and in contact—and, crucially, accepted swiftly. Our concepts for experimentation must empower such innovation. We must bear in mind that concepts and doctrine are not dogma and must serve as a basis for agile thinking. We must also remember that what works in Ukraine might not work against the People’s Liberation Army or in some future contingency not currently anticipated. When AirLand Battle was a concept no one anticipated its first use would be in Panama and Iraq. The same uncertainty will exist in the future, and concept development must account for it.

Concepts and experimentation must lead to a more comprehensive view of combined arms with no branch or service bias, insofar as we are able. Our Army must have concepts to empower a shift in culture and true experimentation, not simply the next doctrine. We are observing the self-destruction of the Russian armed forces. This situation means the Russians are no longer a pacing threat. That leaves China, against whom the Army has struggled to articulate its value. The next concept must focus on the operational problems posed by the Chinese in the Indo-Pacific theater. In doing so, we have to make the case for how we contribute to the defense of the Indo-Pacific, including Taiwan, Guam, Japan, Korea, the Philippines, and other allies and partners.

This strategic environment and threat present challenges that simple updates of existing doctrine cannot overcome. We must not just think differently but design the force differently across the DOTMILPF spectrum. For example, we may have to be willing to trade infantry battalions for the things we really need (logistics; fires; air, missile, and unmanned systems defense; engineers; or cyber) and restructure combined arms battalions to truly operate effectively in multiple domains from the physical world to cyberspace. The concept after next must establish the intellectual conditions for these considerations.

The Operating Concept for 2050 and Beyond

Our future operations concepts must expand the vision of combined arms at the tactical and operational levels of warfare. The concept must also build on the utility of our current organizations. Traditional landpower echelons—field and theater armies, corps, divisions, and brigades—should be reimagined and empowered by our operating concept. At the same time, it should envision the breadth of their focus and reach on the battlefields of the late twenty-first century. The operating concept must propose a path toward addressing the question: How will Army units conduct maneuver under conditions of continuous observation connected to lethal fires during defensive and offensive operations?

Combined arms has grown beyond the tank-infantry-artillery-engineer team. Combined arms warfare is a proven approach to multi-domain and hybrid operations. In the twenty-first century, it encompasses extended reach of reconnaissance through drones, extended reach of fires through loitering munitions, extended protection from lethal enemy fires and cyber disruption. Twenty-first-century combined arms operations require assured command and control through a variety of means that capitalize on systems that are available, secure or unsecured, and adaptable lines of communication over which resupply is conducted and protected, just like forward combat units. Indeed, the notion of front and rear may no longer be useful when conducting operations over distance and on a nonlinear battlefield.

Combined arms will mean direct and indirect fire, coupled with maneuver, cyber, space, electromagnetic warfare, AI-enabled machine learning, and information operations to project the shock of operations to the enemy’s population and political leaders. The shared common operating picture of 2050 will establish a strike zone. This zone will permit enemy targets to be detected, assessed, assigned the correct munition and delivery system, and then hit accurately. Our vehicles and even our soldiers will be nodes on the information network, giving a high degree of resilience to the expanded command-and-control architecture.

The concept must empower practitioners and industry to think through the challenges of fighting at distance. This is more than simply long-range artillery and missile strikes. Fighting at distance is directing fires, maneuver, cyber, and information throughout the depth and breadth of the zone of action, from operational and even strategic depth. Fighting at distance also ensures that successes, and occasional failures, are all tied to achieving the military conditions for attaining policy objectives.

Moreover, by 2050 every campaign will be a global campaign. Such a global campaign will be conducted under continuous surveillance. Accepting this as a fact of warfare in 2050 means Army units must have the ability to mask their movements, in all spectrums. As retired Colonel John Antal describes it, masking is the full-spectrum, multi-domain effort to deceive enemy sensors and disrupt enemy targeting. Masking is essential to survive and win in the modern battlespace and should be either a tenet of multi-domain operations fusion or, possibly, a principle of war for the twenty-first century. Masking protects Army units from the enemy’s striking power.

The concept must also clearly articulate the underlying assumptions contained in the document. Assumptions must not be statements that wish away challenges. They are made in place of facts to be able to continue planning and concept development. The following assumptions should be included in concept development, the second of which is also a forcing function telling other services and commands the Army is reliant upon them to get the Army to the war.

1. The US Army will have limited forward-based combat forces in any region; the bulk of the Army will be based in the continental United States.
2. The US Navy, US Air Force, US Transportation Command, US Space Command, and US Cyber Command will have the capacity and capability to project and protect landpower through contested sea and air lines of communication.
3. Advances in communications and cyber sciences will allow for secure means of command and control, while some voice and data communications will be disrupted by enemy efforts.
4. The democratization of the means of warfare will continue.
5. AI and robotics will continue to evolve in function and utility.
6. The utility of force as an extension of policy will remain relevant; lower tactical echelons will still rely on fire and maneuver.
7. The recommendations of the Munitions Industrial Base Deep Dive are in place.

The degree to which Ukrainian forces have relied on and adapted apps for things like targeting is noteworthy. By 2050, and possibly earlier, there could be apps for a much wider range of tasks and functions—overall fire control from observer to battery, logistical planning, pattern analysis, and more. We have to embrace such possibilities by overcoming our bias against change and risk. Thus far, we are constrained in our use of apps, and in fact most of the capabilities derived from the internet and AI, by the security fears that continually drive us to higher and higher levels of classification and hard-wired secure lines. We must reimagine what is allowable and necessary in the Information Age.

We know the conditions under which we conduct warfare are changing every day. Our concept after next must explore the utility of levels of command and reimagine corps, division, and brigade commanders and staffs. For example, in World War II, corps were commanded by major generals and were tactical headquarters rather than formations. We must consider a redistribution of functions and responsibilities, as well as capacity, at these echelons of command. This leads naturally to questions like what mix of education and experience ensures that those commanders and staffs in the future will be the best suited for the conditions of warfare we anticipate.

Our current system of staff designation dates back to the reorganization begun by Secretary of War Elihu Root at the beginning of the twentieth century, along with the refinement of the American Expeditionary Force staffs directed by General John J. Pershing prior to entering battle in France in 1917. Our staff system—G-1, G-2, G-3, and so on—is likely at the end of its useful life. For example, during a recent (December 2022) exercise at Fort Leavenworth, which we participated in, a staff section called the multi-domain operations center was proposed for a theater army. When asked why the G-3 current and future operations section could not perform this task the answer was these two existing sections were “too busy” with existing duties and did not have the required skills to consider coordinating multi-domain operations.

In examining the process of developing an operating concept for 2050, our ultimate goal is a return to doctrine as a guide, not dogma or field service regulation, bearing in mind both the Holder’s guidance that doctrine informs us how to fight, right now, with what is in the motor pool, and Howard’s comment that our doctrine should first and foremost aim to not be too badly wrong. Thus, the 2050 operating concept must empower adaptability in the face of unanticipated conditions of warfare. It must open our minds.

The next operating concept must also account for potential factors derived from an emerging strategic environment that will introduce challenges of conducting operations in a specified period of time. The expected or anticipated conditions are not assumptions, but rather extensions of what is extant now and the expectation that what is available now will only be even more sophisticated in the future. The conditions that an operating concept must account for are wide-ranging, but three warrant specific mention here: the constant battle over information and the narrative, the challenge of getting to the fight, and the integration of technology while conforming to law and moral principles.

First, information has always played a role during the conduct of war. The ever-increasing speed of information transfer and the power of social media will therefore be a factor to consider in the future operating concept. The recent swift collapse of Silicon Valley Bank offers a cautionary tale. The run on the bank and the speed at which electronic banking made it possible for account holders to withdraw billions with a few keystrokes and the click of a button nearly caused another enormous banking collapse—all triggered by the wildfire-like spread of news about the bank’s vulnerability. Given unrestricted warfare and economic warfare, how we confront the battle over information, especially mis- and disinformation, will be vital.

Second, the Army of 2050 will most likely have to go to the war. Accepting that the homeland will also become a part of the extended battlefield, the operations concept must stimulate how our Army will contend with network disruptions when moving from fort to port. It must contend as well with cyberattacks on family support group blogs and even individual soldier and family bank accounts. The requirements supporting going to the war will include sustaining the support of the American people to prevent disruption as the Army mobilizes and moves to the war.

Finally, from a technological standpoint, the widespread use of drones, cyber tools, robotics, and AI—the growth of which will always outpace what we have on hand—demands the concept foster the intellectual agility needed to incorporate off-the-shelf technology into our fighting formations. The anticipated extent of man-machine interface and even autonomous systems must be balanced by the requirement to adhere to the laws of land warfare. It must also balance the even more important obligation to live up to the moral principles underpinning why our republic exists. Units losing their grip on morality are not professional fighting forces—they become berserkers and barbarians. The 2050 concept must reinforce the honorable standards by which Americans fight.

Ultimately, the specific technologies that will emerge between now and 2050 we cannot know. We do know, however, that many of the generals commanding this force of 2050 will be commissioned as second lieutenants in June 2023. Those junior officers will be entering an Army with clear current doctrine, but they should also be entering an Army prepared to develop concepts looking out to the middle of the century. The concept for 2050 must empower the embrace of emerging capabilities and the tactics, techniques, and procedures that employ those capabilities. Additionally, while the operating concept is tactical in nature, it also must establish conditions for thinking about the operational and strategic levels of warfare. It must ensure practitioners think about the conduct of warfare and the waging of war. Indeed, our future-focused operating concepts must, in the words of the 2022 National Security Strategy, empower all levels of command “to innovate and creatively design solutions as battlefield conditions evolve.”

Kevin Benson, PhD, is a retired US Army colonel who commanded from company to battalion level and served as a general staff officer from corps to field army. He was the CFLCC J5 (Plans) at the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom and the director of the School of Advanced Military Studies.

James K. Greer, PhD, is a retired US Army colonel and former armor officer who commanded through the brigade level. He is currently an associate professor at the US Army School of Advanced Military Studies, where he previously served as director. He holds a doctorate in education with a focus on military leader development.

*Email from retired Colonel Dave Johnson, PhD, September 14, 2022, to the Army Strategy Loop. Used with permission. Dave died in November 2022. Our Army and republic lost a great man who made superb contributions to our defense, quite literally until just before he died. May he rest in peace. He did his duty.

Image credit: Spc. Christopher Wilkins, US Army (adapted by MWI)

mwi.usma.edu · by Kevin Benson, James K. Greer · May 1, 2023

12. Special Operations News Update - May 1, 2023 | SOF News

Special Operations News Update - May 1, 2023 | SOF News

sof.news · by SOF News · May 1, 2023

Curated news, analysis, and commentary about special operations, national security, and conflicts around the world.

Photo: Project DYNAMO flight boards AMCITs for evacuation from Port Sudan to Egypt on April 30, 2023. Read more about Project DYNAMO under Sudan conflict heading. (photo courtesy Project Dynamo).

Do you receive our daily newsletter? If not, you can sign up here and enjoy it five (almost) days a week with your morning coffee (or afternoon tea depending on where in the world you are).

SOF News

USASOC – First Female CSM. The United States Army Special Operations Command (USASOC) is making history with the appointment of the first woman to be its command sergeant major. Command Sgt. Maj. JoAnn Naumann, the current senior enlisted advisor for Special Operations – Korea, will be appointed on Monday. Naumann entered the Army in 1996 as an Arabic linguist; she has served for 27 years. On May 1, 2023 Command Sgt. Maj. Michael Weimer handed over colors to Command Sgt. Maj. JoAnn Naumann. “1st Woman to Take Top Enlisted Job at Army Special Ops”, Military.com, April 28, 2023.

SOCOM Shopping List. Josh Luckenbaugh describes some of the upgrades that the United States Special Operations Command is looking for in its vehicle fleet. The shift from CT/COIN to near-peer strategic competition has the SOF command upgrading its ground mobility capability to meet the new operating environment. “SOCOM Lays Out Shopping List For Key Vehicle Upgrades”, National Defense Magazine, May 1, 2023.

JSOC Leadership and USASOC. There is a growing trend of officers from the Joint Special Operations Command leading United States Army Special Operations Command (USASOC) units. According to Sal Artiaga, this raises several concerns related to cultural differences, operational focus, and disparities in training and expertise. “Assessing the Impact of JSOC Leadership in USASOC Units”, LinkedIn, April 29, 2023.

New SOF Wing? A Special Operations ‘Power Projection Wing’ is planned for Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Arizona. It will include MC-130s and light attack aircraft. (Air & Space Forces, April 27, 2023). See also “SOCOM’s New Recon Aircraft to Pack Big Punch”, National Defense Magazine, April 27, 2023.

Roger Carstens – Green Beret and Ambassador. The special presidential envoy for hostage affairs has been busy. “To us every day counts’: How top diplomat works to get hostages like Lombard’s Frerichs home”, Daily Herald, April 29, 2023.

Mental Health and NSW. Naval Special Warfare Command is conducting a campaign that focuses on the importance of physical wellness and mental health among NSW personnel and their families. The NSW community offers a range of resources, programs, and services to help operators manage stress, cope with challenges, and enhance their emotional wellbeing. Learn more in “NSW Focuses on Mental Health Awareness”, DVIDS, April 28, 2023.

USAF SWTW. Getting ready for a confrontation with China? Learn more in “Special Warfare Training Wing and Strategic Competition”, Air Education and Training Command, April 25, 2023.

Emerald Warrior. Air Force Special Operations Command is hosting the 16th Annual Emerald Warrior exercise at multiple locations across Florida as well as in Puerto Rico. The exercise lasts about two weeks and will end in mid-May. “16th Annual Emerald Warrior Jumps Into Action”, AFSOC, April 27, 2023.

DTRA, SOF, and CWMD Training. A highly specialized team from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency trained a SOF unit during a countering Weapons of Mass Destruction (CWMD) scenario. “DoD Leaders Observe ‘Nearly Invisible’ CWMD Training Mission”, DVIDS, April 27, 2023.

Next-Gen Tech for SOF. Jennifer Stewart writes about the need for SOF to acquire systems to improve its cyber and space capabilities. “Special Operators Require Next-Gen Technologies”, National Defense Magazine, April 28, 2023.

SOCAFRICA in Uganda. Civil Affairs soldiers recently concluded a JCET alongside the Uganda Wildlife Authority during a six-week period. The training focused on teaching park rangers how to counter illicit trafficking within the country’s national parks. Topics included weapons handling, field medical care, land nav, crime scene investigations, and more. “U.S. Military Hosts JCET With Uganda Wildlife Authority Rangers”, DVIDS, May 1, 2023.

International SOF

Book on Spetsnaz. Read an excerpt from a recent book by Mark Galeotti entitled Putin’s Wars: From Chechnya to Ukraine. The topic is Russia’s Spetsnaz forces – what it is and what it really does. “Moscow’s ‘special’ forces: An inside look at how Russia’s famed Spetsnaz really operate”, Business Insider, April 30, 2023.

SOCSOUTH and Chile. The Chilean Army’s Special Operations Command (COPE) and military personnel form U.S. Special Operations Command South carried out a communications exercise to develop capabilities and integrate communications. The exercise took place in February 2023 and included elements of the U.S. Army’s 112th Special Operations Signal Battalion. “SOCSOUTH Sponsors Exercise with Chilean Army”, Dialogo-Americas, April 26, 2023.

SAS – Myths and Reality. Every once in a while the folks at Action on Armed Violence (AOAV) run an article about the British Special Air Service. While these articles provide information and ‘facts’ about the SAS they also have a bit of a political tone to them. “The myths and reality of the British Special Air Service (SAS)”, AOVA, April 25, 2023.

Video – Czech Joint Tactical Attack Controllers during Close Air Support Training. NATO Allied Air Command, YouTube, May 1, 2023, 2 minutes. (nicely done!)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFRDoFEre0s

SOF History

Video – London Embassy Siege. On April 30, 1980, a group of Arab terrorists seized the Iranian Embassy in London and held its occupants hostage for six days. The British Special Air Service ended the hostage event when it raided the embassy killing 5 of the 6 terrorists. Watch the official trailer of 6 Days, YouTube, 3 minutes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7HthiTi_IcI

UK and NEO History. The current evacuation of foreign nationals from Sudan (see below) has sparked renewed interest in non-combatant evacuation operations (NEO). The United Kingdom has frequently conducted NEOs around the world. Most evacuations by the United Kingdom involved the Royal Air Force, Royal Navy, and one or more of its elite special forces units. Read “From the Archives ` Non-Combatant Evacuation Operations”, Joint Forces.com, April 30, 2023.

LRDG. Stavros Atlamazoglou has published an article about a small British special operations unit established in World War II. Read “The Long Range Desert Group and the Birth of SOF”, Real Clear Defense, April 27, 2023.

Son Tay Raid. Read about one of the most daring special forces operations in U.S. history. (Real Clear Defense, April 26, 2023).

Ukraine Conflict

Conflict Update. In the last few days the pace of Russian missile attacks jumped dramatically. Various targets have been hit including logistics facilities, railway hubs, and fuel depots. In addition, a number of civilian targets have been struck as well. Many of the Russian cruise missiles are intercepted by Ukrainian air defense but still some get through to their targets. A Crimean oil depot was on fire after being struck by two Ukrainian drones. Russia has stiffened penalties for men who are avoiding military service.

Counteroffensive? Russia has been digging in its defenses in anticipation of the expected Ukrainian campaign to take back occupied territory in eastern and southern Ukraine. There has been an increase in sabotage of the Russian logistics system – warehouses, bridges, and rail lines. “Explosion in Russian border area derails freight train”, BBC News, May 1, 2023.

Russian Casualties. There are varying estimates of the Russian personnel losses in the Ukraine conflict since February 2022 as well as during the Battle for Bakhmut. According to the White House tens of thousands of Russian soldiers have been injured since fighting intensified in eastern Ukraine in December. Over 20,000 Russians killed and perhaps as many as 80,000 wounded or injured. Over half of these casualties are likely from the Wagner Group. “US believes 20,000 Russians killed in Ukraine war since December”, Aljazeera, May 1, 2023.

Sudan Conflict and Evac of Foreign Nationals

Update on the conflict between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and Rapid Support Forces (RSF), ceasefire, humanitarian crisis, and evacuation of foreign nationals.

https://www.national-security.info/country/sudan/sudan-neo.html

Project DYNAMO – Evac Flight. Social media reports that almost 100 American citizens were airlifted out on a plane coordinated by Project DYNAMO. The plane landed in Port Sudan, picked up evacuees, and was reported to be ‘wheels up’ at 302200RAPR23. It’s destination was Egypt. Thus far Project DYNAMO has conducted bus and plane evacs for AMCITs in Sudan. The cost to the passengers was zero; Project DYNAMO operates on donations. The U.S. State Department was cooperative and helpful with the coordination needed for the private charter plane to enter Sudan airspace. Project DYNAMO is an international search, rescue, aid and assistance, 501(c)(3) non-profit organization based in the United States. It was founded and is led by U.S. military veterans. It has been active in the Afghan Evac and Ukraine Evac efforts as well.

https://www.projectdynamo.org/

Netherlands Evac. De Marine Spearhead Task Unit (MSTU) participated in the evacuation of 250 people from Sudan. Koninklijke Marine, YouTube, May 1, 2023, 6 minutes. The Dutch conducted a total of 8 flights; including 150 people from 18 different nationalities.

Greece SOF and Sudan. Two C-130 transport aircraft and a C-27j aircraft and a SOF element joined the Sudan Evac effort. There were an estimated 150 Greek nationals in Khartoum. “Greece Deploys Special Forces, Aircraft in Egypt for Sudan Rescue”, Greek Reporter, April 23, 2023.

DoS Evacuation Efforts. The United States government was a little slow to react to the Sudan crisis. Although it quickly and safely evacuated over 100 people during its U.S. Embassy evacuation it, initially, did very little to help the over 16,000 American citizens at risk. Other nations, like India, China, United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia stepped up big-time and picked up the slack for the U.S., evacuating their own nationals as well as U.S. citizens. However, it has now run three U.S. government-facilitated convoys (700 people) on three successive days; April 29th, April 30th, and May 1st. This probably doesn’t mean that U.S. troops or State Department officials were present with the convoys – just that DoS made the appropriate phone calls and spent the necessary cash to make it happen. A press briefing by DoS says the locally employed staff made the arrangements. Or, perhaps, someone from the agency or an SMU was on the ground facilitating the convoy – something we may never get wind of.

The U.S. AMCIT Numbers. The State Department said in a May 1st press briefing that over 1,000 U.S. citizens have been evacuated by either private volunteer groups or allies. In addition, in the 700 who traveled by convoy; some are AMCITS, which would raise the 1,000 evacuated AMCIT figure higher. Over 5,000 of the estimated 16,000 U.S. citizens are requesting evacuation or assistance. The State Department spokesman was grilled on the numbers and failed to provide the clarity needed to understand ‘the numbers’. “Department Press Briefing”, U.S. Department of State, May 1, 2023.

U.S. Navy Support. The Navy did not have an amphibious readiness group in the region to respond to the Sudan crisis. Instead, it sent two unique ships to the Red Sea off the coast of Port Sudan. “U.S. Navy Sends Nontraditional Ships to Support Sudan Evacuation”, USNI News, May 1, 2023.

26th MEU (-) Deploys. A small task-organized element of the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU) is deploying on short notice the United States Central Command (CENTCOM) area of operations on May 2, 2023. As a crisis response force, the 26th MEU is prepared to aggregate forces at a moment’s notice to support operations across the globe. “26th Marine Expeditionary Unit deploys an element to CENTCOM”, DVIDS, April 29, 2023. See also “Marines Update Evacuation Playbook”, Defense One, April 28, 2023. See also “Marines Look to Get Closer to Special Operations Teams While Practicing Extractions”, Military.com, April 25, 2023.

National Security

‘Partners’ or ‘Proxies’. Terms carry a lot of meaning – and the term ‘local proxy forces’ has a little bit of baggage. US defense posture has been emphasizing the benefits of working by, with, and through allies and partners. Some in the national security establishment use the term ‘proxies’. Barbara Elias has some thoughts on that. “Local Partners Are Not Proxies: The Case for Rethinking Proxy War”, Irregular Warfare Initiative, April 20, 2023.

Taiwan and U.S. SOF. At the U.S. Army Special Operations Command (USASOC) annual capabilities exercise (CAPEX) members of the command gamed out a scenario of the PRC invading Taiwan. The commander of USASOC, Lt. Gen. Jonathan Braga, said that the People’s Republic of China is the true pacing challenge faced by the United States. Read more in “Defending a Mock Invasion of Taiwan Signals Shift for Army Special Operations After Years of Counterinsurgency”, Military.com, April 29, 2023.

Army’s Operating Concept. An explanation of the Army’s operating concept and its relationship to doctrine is provided in this article. It explores the importance of having concepts that are looking out to the middle of the century. “War in 2050: The Army’s Operating Concept After Next”, Modern War Institute at West Point, May 1, 2023.

Wagner Group in Africa. The Russian paramilitary group has been active in a number of African countries. The Russians have managed to displace the U.S. and some European nations – extending the influence of its country and protecting its strategic interests. “Forces of Destabilization: Countering Wagner Group in the Sahel”, by Anthony Marco, Irregular Warfare Initiative, April 4, 2023.

Wagner Group – Report. The Foreign Policy Research Institute has published a report entitled “The Wagner Group’s Expanding Global Footprint”, FPRI, April 2023, 36 pages.

Afghanistan

Female Tactical Platoon – Members Seek Legal Status in U.S. A small yet highly effective unit of female Afghan soldiers worked closely with U.S. special operations forces on secret and dangerous missions in Afghanistan. In August 2021 and shortly after, some members of the Afghan National Army’s Female Tactical Platoon (FTP) managed to escape Afghanistan on U.S. military evacuation flights and arrived in the United States. They now are seeking Congressional legislation that will address their precarious immigration status. Currently they are in the U.S. on a temporary two-year humanitarian parole that is set to expire in August. The Afghan Adjustment Act would provide the security needed for the FTP as well as for members of the Afghan Air Force (AAF), Special Mission Wing (SMW), and Afghanistan National Army Special Operations Command (ANASOC). Read more in “Afghan Women Who Fought With U.S. Military Seek Legal Immigration Status”https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/27/us/politics/female-afghan-soldiers-us.html, By Luke Broadwater and Ava Sasani, The New York Times, April 27, 2023. (subscription)

Moral Injury. Veterans are continually receiving messages from former Afghan counterparts and interpreters desperately seeking assistance in fleeing Afghanistan. Some veterans are wondering where the U.S. government is on this issue and don’t believe enough is being done. Many of these veterans have been emotionally and mentally affected by the experience. “Moral Injury – the Ongoing Fight to Bring Our Afghan Allies Home”, Newsweek, May 1, 2023.

Upcoming Events

May 8-11, 2023. Tampa, Florida

SOF Week

USSOCOM

May 16-18, 2023. Fort Bragg, NC and via Zoom

Geostrategic Symposium 2023

USASOC

May 22-26, 2023. Indianapolis, Indiana

Special Forces Association Convention

May 31, 2023. Ijamsville, MD

6th Annual Golf Tournament

Three Rangers Foundation

June 21-22, 2023

Warrior East

ADS

August 5, 2023. Perdido Key, Florida

Deep Dive 2023 Combat Diver Reunion

CDF

Books, Pubs, and Reports

Sentinel. The May 2023 issue of the Special Forces Association Chapter 78 Newsletter is now available online. There are a number of interesting articles to read: MoH recipient Col. (Ret.) Paris Davis, Special Forces Association Convention, Book Review of Break in the Chain, SFQC Graduation – Class 332, Bringing the Wall That Heals, SOF Integration Detachment and the Iraq War, Billy Waugh, and more.

Carrying the Gun. The latest monthly issue is now online. Some interesting perspectives by the author on a host of topics. CTG #30, May 1, 2023.

Special Warfare. A magazine that was once published by the U.S. Army John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center & School should be brought back to life. Zachary Griffiths sees value in getting the magazine published once again. “Bring Back Branch Magazines”, Modern War Institute at West Point, April 27, 2023.

CTC Sentinel. The Combating Terrorism Center at West Point has published the April 2023 issue of its monthly online magazine. This issue examines U.S. counterterrorism in the Sahel and its relation to great power competition, the Islamic State in Somalia, and the digital terror financing of Central Asian Jihadis. PDF, 29 pages.

Podcasts, Videos, and Movies

Video – Former Acting SECDEF and Green Beret Chris Miller. Watch this great interview by The Team House. An interesting and hours-long discussion. One of the topics is Miller’s recently published book. It is amazing just how good cigars and neat whiskey can enhance a conversation about special operations and national security. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WO6k4j1p928

Video – Foreign Nationals in MACV SOG? Lodge Philbin Act. A quick video depicting the names and faces of members of Military Assistance Command Vietnam – Studies and Observations Group who came from foreign countries. MACVSOG69 History, April 30, 2023, 2 minutes. Watch video here.

SEAL Movies. “Why Are These 5 Navy SEAL Movies so Popular?”, Coffee or Die Magazine, April 27, 2023.

Podcasts

SOFCAST. United States Special Operations Command

https://linktr.ee/sofcast

The Pinelander. Blacksmith Publishing

https://www.thepinelander.com/

The Indigenous Approach. 1st Special Forces Command

https://open.spotify.com/show/3n3I7g9LSmd143GYCy7pPA

Irregular Warfare Podcast. Modern War Institute at West Point

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/irregular-warfare-podcast/id1514636385

sof.news · by SOF News · May 1, 2023

13. U.S. Navy Sends Nontraditional Ships to Support Sudan Evacuation

U.S. Navy Sends Nontraditional Ships to Support Sudan Evacuation - USNI News

news.usni.org · by Mallory Shelbourne · May 1, 2023

USS Lewis B. Puller (ESB-3), USNS Brunswick (T-EPF-6)

Without a carrier strike group or amphibious readiness group currently operating in the Middle East, the U.S. Navy has dispatched two little-known ship classes to help the State Department evacuate people from Sudan.

Spearhead-class Expeditionary Fast Transport USNS Brunswick (T-EPF-6) moved about 300 people from Port Sudan to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia on Monday. Meanwhile, Lewis B. Puller-class expeditionary sea base USS Lewis B. Puller (ESB-3) is also operating in the Red Sea, standing by to aid in the evacuation mission.

The EPFs, built by Austal USA in Mobile, Ala., and the ESBs, built by General Dynamics NASSCO in San Diego, Calif., have both received attention from the Marine Corps in recent years as an interim solution to move Marines around for its island-hopping strategy while the Navy pursues the Landing Ship Medium. But both classes are now fulfilling missions typically performed by other U.S. Navy assets like amphibious warships at a time when the fleet is balancing operations between the Indo-Pacific, Mediterranean and the Middle East.

While one of the main Marine Corps missions is crisis response and humanitarian aid and disaster relief, service officials in the last year have highlighted the lack of available and ready amphibious warships to deploy and operate across the globe.

Since there are no nearby ARGs that could respond to the situation in Sudan, the Marine Corps’ senior officer told lawmakers last week that he “let down” U.S. Africa Commander Gen. Michael Langley.

“First, we would have gaps during the year when we would not have an at-sea capability for the combatant commander when something happened. We would not be deterring. We would not be in a position to respond,” Gen. David Berger told the House Armed Services Committee when asked what would happen if the Marine Corps has fewer than 31 amphibious warships, the statutory requirement.

“Here, places like Turkey or [the] last couple of weeks in Sudan, I feel like I let down the combatant commander because Gen. Langley needs options. He didn’t have a sea-based option. That’s how we reinforce embassies. That’s how we evacuate them. That’s how we deter,” he added.

“It opens up risks for the combatant commander. We have to have 31 at a minimum. Nothing less.”

Spearhead-class

USNS Brunswick (T-EPF-6) took part in an interagency, international fire drill at Sembawang Wharves, Nov. 2, 2022. US Navy Photo

The EPFs originally began as a joint program with the U.S. Army known as the Joint High Speed Vessel merging the Army’s Theater Support Vessel program and the Department of the Navy’s own effort to move Marines inside a maritime theater. The Navy and Marine Corps experimented with renting high-speed civilian ferries before settling on a final design.

However, by the time shipbuilder Austal USA delivered the first hull – USNS Spearhead (T-EPF-1) – in 2012, the Navy had taken charge of the program.

The aluminum catamarans are operated under Military Sealift Command and crewed by about 40 civilian mariners. Designed as an intra-theater connector, the EPFs can move troops and equipment at high speeds, with the ability to sail at 35 to 40 knots and a low draft capable of operating in almost any port.

They can transport up to 300 fully loaded combat Marines and an M-1 A2 main battle tank. The ships also have a helicopter deck large enough to land MV-22B Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft.

ESBs

The Navy describes Puller as “the first purpose-built expeditionary sea base vessel” that can perform a variety of missions, ranging from small boat operations to anti-piracy.Originally carrying the USNS designation under Military Sealift Command, in 2017 the Navy commissioned Puller as a warship so it could better support both the numbered fleet and combatant commanders in the Middle East. Then, in 2020, the Navy announced it would commission all ships in the class as warships with the USS designation.

Based on a commercial oil tanker, the U.S. Navy removed the middle of the ship so it could serve as a mission bay and then put a flight deck on the top for the new ESB design. The flight deck has four spots to accommodate both helicopters and tiltrotor aircraft.

The first two hulls in the class were designed to serve as an at-sea transfer point that would allow roll-on/roll-off cargo ships to load military vehicles onto Navy Landing Craft Air Cushion (LCAC) without having to offload the gear at a port. The Navy abandoned the mobile landing platform concept after the first two ships delivered and pivoted to creating a large platform for special operations and mine countermeasure forces.

Following expeditionary transfer docks USNS Montford Point (T-ESD-1) and USNS John Glenn (T-ESD-2), Puller was the first built for the sea base mission.

The idea for the sea bases goes back to the Vietnam and Iran-Iraq wars when barges served as mobile platforms to stage forces without having a footprint ashore.

The Navy now has three ESBs commissioned, with three more under construction.

Related

news.usni.org · by Mallory Shelbourne · May 1, 2023

14. An Unerring Sense of Locality: Ukraine and the Future of Armored Warfare

Conclusion:

The war in Ukraine has affirmed the assumption that unsupported armored warfare will struggle in combat due to blind spot vulnerabilities. However, the war also challenges the assumption that simply attaching infantry will solve these issues, as it has done in past conflicts. The proliferation of surveillance and attack drones makes both the tank and infantry vulnerable to aerial attack and ambush. As a result, these formations will need layers of early warning and security to achieve their objectives. Armored warfare at lower echelons will need to rely less on infantry troops and more on R&S forces. R&S troops provide the reconnaissance and counterreconnaissance capabilities necessary to thwart the advantages armed reconnaissance drones offer. By nesting R&S troops within an armored formation’s scheme of maneuver, and updating the technology and weapons used in counterreconnaissance and local defense, tank formations can retain their ability to influence battlefield conditions and remain effective in modern warfare.

An Unerring Sense of Locality: Ukraine and the Future of Armored Warfare - Modern War Institute

mwi.usma.edu · by Michael P. Losacco · May 2, 2023

Russian tanks are having a bad time of it in Ukraine, suffering high casualties as Ukrainian troops, equipped with antitank guided missiles and armed drones, frequently ambush Russian armored formations unaware of their surroundings and lacking dismounted ground support. Observers in search of lessons are watching the war play out, interpreting the incredible attrition rate imposed on Russia’s tanks as validation of the widely held assumption that armored formations cannot successfully operate alone—an assumption that was similarly solidified fifty years ago, when Egyptian and Syrian forces destroyed Israeli tanks en masse during the 1973 Yom Kippur War.

A conclusion drawn from the destruction suffered by Israeli tanks during that war was that attaching infantry solves the tank’s woes. But the character of warfare has changed since then, and both analysts and decision makers should be cautious that simply adding infantry will solve tanks’ vulnerabilities on the modern battlefield. Evidence from Ukraine suggests that the ubiquity of drones on the battlefield renders the combined infantry-armor formation less effective than in the past. Drones are hard to detect, making it difficult for infantry-armor formations to find and destroy them. This advantage allows an adversary to ambush an infantry-tank formation before it can defend itself. Thus, successful tank operations in the future will involve not only linking infantry to tanks, but ensuring the attachment of reconnaissance and security (R&S) troops. R&S troops can provide early warning and counterreconnaissance capabilities needed to mitigate the drone’s advantage. Together, infantry-tank formations and R&S troops will maintain the tank’s lethality at lower echelons and help armored combat power adapt to the changing characteristics of modern warfare.

Lessons from the Yom Kippur War

A tank’s hardened armor and high-explosive weaponry allow it to destroy enemy positions with speed, mobility, and certainty. These characteristics help the tank penetrate reinforced battle positions, producing a psychological shock in the adversary’s mind.

But, where the tank excels in survivability and firepower, it struggles to keep its crew situationally aware. For example, the US M1A2 Abrams is heavily armored and requires its commander to view and designate targets with an optic. Like a submarine periscope, this optic leaves the tank commander vulnerable to blind spots. This vulnerability worsens in combat when tank commanders retreat from their hatches because of the risk of death or injury and cannot verify their blind spots. These circumstances allow an adversary to exploit the tank’s vulnerability by hiding in the commander’s blind spot and attacking the tank with an antitank guided missile (ATGM) or armed drone.

The 1973 Yom Kippur War provides historical context. Following the success of Israeli armored formations in the Six-Day War, six years prior, Israel Defense Forces leaders assumed the tank could win ground battles alone. This belief led Israeli generals in 1973 to spearhead counterattacks in the Sinai and Golan Heights with unsupported armored formations. The result was devastating—Egyptian and Syrian dismounted troops, armed with Sagger ATGMs, decimated Israeli armor formations as their lumbering profiles moved across the desert. Effective up to two miles, the Sagger allowed Egyptian and Syrian antitank teams to hide within the terrain and exploit the Israeli tank crews’ blind spots. As a result, Israeli tanks ventured blindly into Syrian and Egyptian kill zones without early warning and suffered high casualty rates.

Altogether, Israeli armor units lost over three hundred tanks, and in the Golan Heights, an Israeli tank unit attempting to seize terrain lost twenty-six of its twenty-eight tanks to enemy ATGM teams. These events, coupled with the inherent characteristics of armored platforms, illustrate the difficulty tanks have in locating unobtrusive targets without additional eyes and ears on the battlefield.

Back to the Future

Russian tank operations in Ukraine have reinforced the lesson of 1973—that tanks operating by themselves in combat will be unsuccessful. The opening stages of the war in Ukraine saw large, unsupported Russian tank convoys speeding toward Kyiv. Subsequently, the Russian tank crews fell victim to roving bands of hidden Ukrainian light infantry armed with Javelin and NLAW ATGMs, as well as armed drones. Like the destruction waged by Egyptian and Syrian Sagger teams, these ambushes resulted in the widespread destruction of Russian tanks and contributed to Russia’s operational abandonment of its northern axis of advance. As a result, between February 2022 and March 2023, Russia lost 1,917 of what the International Institute for Strategic Estimate estimated to be a prewar total of 3,417 tanks in active service—an astronomical figure that has led Russia to take drastic measures, such as reactivating its derelict stockpile of Cold War–era T-54 tanks.

Since the first images of destroyed Russian tanks in Ukraine appeared in the media, analysts in the defense and national security community have debated whether Russian tank losses are a sign of the tank becoming obsolete. Supporters of the use of tanks point to the absence of infantry attached to Russian armored formations. “A well-trained NATO armored column would have been accompanied by infantry to stop an ambush,” said retired British Army Brigadier Ben Barry, a senior land warfare fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. Similarly, a recent security blog heading indicated, “The best tank armor is a well-trained infantry.” These claims suggest that if the Russian military paired tanks with infantry units, they would have greater success in repelling Ukrainian antitank ambushes.

Without a doubt, the tank’s characteristics constrain the crew’s situational awareness, providing adversarial ATGM and drone teams a weakness to exploit. Both Israeli tank losses during the 1973 Yom Kippur War and the more recent Russian tank losses in the war in Ukraine support this assumption and affirm the tank’s need for light ground support to reduce vulnerability. US tank operations in a series of battles—from Aachen, Germany in 1945 to Fallujah, Iraq in 2004—illustrate the success of pairing tank formations with infantry units. In each of these two cases, infantry helped tank formations clear and hold urban terrain.

In this regard, the assumption that unsupported armored formations will struggle in combat remains true, and infantry support only furthers the likelihood of battlefield success. However, the war in Ukraine suggests the proliferation and success of drones will challenge the notion of infantry support as the sine qua non for armored warfare.

Closing the Distance

Consider Aerorozvidka, a Ukrainian group that straddles the line between nongovernmental organization and military unit and has been described as a “war startup.” It is known for destroying Russian infantry and tank formations in Ukraine with commercially purchased drones, such as the R18 quadcopter, which carry thermal imaging cameras and up to three RKG-1600 antitank bombs. They are cost-effective, allowing Aerorozvidka to field them in large numbers and provide Ukrainian troops with reliable long-range surveillance and attack capability.

Aerorozvidka’s drones and tactics pose a new challenge for armored warfare. Traditionally, tank formations became threatened in the direct-fire zone. In this area, the tank and its adversary are within range of each other and can utilize their weapons systems against one another. Before entering this zone, the tank was relatively safe and unencumbered. However, the increased prevalence of armed reconnaissance drones, like those utilized by Aerorozvidka, indicates this is no longer true. Drones now extend the direct-fire zone, closing the distance that tanks can operate without being threatened. These factors, combined with the tank’s maintenance and fuel requirements that prevent it from conducting long-distance operations, will create a more persistent threat and leave the tank more vulnerable.

Armor formations will need to ensure their concepts of maneuver include layers of early warning to succeed in future contingencies. While infantry may help, drone attacks like those of Aerorozvidka have been particularly successful against dug-in Russian infantry. These outcomes suggest dismounted infantry, which are also vulnerable against drones, will fare no better as the tank’s primary support. Instead, armored warfare must ensure it includes a force capable of providing warning and counterreconnaissance options to be successful—a tactical task best accomplished by R&S troops.

An Unerring Sense of Locality

In his seminal book On War, Carl von Clausewitz emphasized the importance of terrain and enemy analysis in combat operations. “With a quick, unerring sense locality,” he writes, “[a commander’s] dispositions will be more rapid and assured; he will run less risk of a certain awkwardness in his concepts and be less dependent on others.” In modern warfare, this “unerring sense of locality” is provided by R&S troops.

A commander’s eyes and ears of the battlefield, R&S troops are conventional forces whose mission is to detect enemy positions and provide early warning, rather than seizing and holding terrain. They accomplish this by operating forward and to the flanks of a tank unit, monitoring enemy activity. Smaller in numbers and burdened by less equipment, R&S forces are less vulnerable than infantry units because they operate in dispersed formations and avoid becoming decisively engaged. These characteristics make it harder for drones to detect their presence. In doing so, these troops develop a picture of the local environment into which the main fighting element (in this case, a tank unit) is about to enter. This information includes the trafficability of roads, the composition and disposition of enemy ATGM teams, and potential obstacles, like rough terrain—all of which helps the tank commander gain the situational awareness needed to create an effective scheme of maneuver and avoid an ambush.

Additionally, R&S units are responsible for security operations. Security missions focus on preventing an adversary from observing the main fighting element and establishing hidden forward positions to detect enemy reconnaissance assets. They search for armed reconnaissance drones, enemy observation posts, and the adversary’s R&S troops. They provide early warning and help preserve the armor formation by acting as a control measure for the tank’s vulnerabilities.

Historically, R&S teams have helped armored formations achieve their objectives. During the 1991 Persian Gulf War’s Battle of 73 Easting, American tank formations led by scout platoons operated in a hunter-killer construct. Under this construct, nimble scout platoons would operate ahead and to the flanks of tank formations, serving as the hunters of Iraqi reconnaissance assets and tanks. The scouts’ discreet and agile characteristics allowed a smaller American force to observe Iraqi reconnaissance assets and tanks and report their disposition to the US armored formation in the rear, all while undetected. This enabled the tank formation to assume the killer role and pull forward to destroy Iraqi tanks and reconnaissance troops with the initiative. To be sure, the greater sophistication of the US tanks compared to those of their Iraqi adversaries also contributed, but having more advanced tanks alone is not enough—as Russian losses in Ukraine make clear. Rather, it was the method of employment that contributed to the incredibly lopsided outcome of the battle: half of the 300–400 Iraqi tanks destroyed without a single US tank lost. By increasing the prevalence of the R&S forces in tank formations and incorporating concepts like hunter-killer, tank formations can develop layers of warning against the rising drone threat that will help reduce the tank’s vulnerability during transit to the direct-fire zone.

Familiar Concepts, Renewed

While R&S troops and security concepts like that of hunter-killer can help tanks adapt to the prevalence of drones in modern warfare, they cannot rely on the same tools and equipment. Instead, these concepts must incorporate new technology and forms of maneuver to detect and evade armed reconnaissance drones.

For example, militaries should modernize their R&S and armored formations with antidrone technology. The technology could include systems such as L3Harris’s VAMPIRE (Vehicle Agnostic Modular Palletized ISR Rocket Equipment). VAMPIRE is a rocket launcher designed to locate, track, and destroy armed reconnaissance drones. Its system is small and can fit in the truck bed of a light, wheeled military vehicle, such as a Humvee. Additional tools should include modern light, wheeled vehicles and shoulder-fired systems, such as the M1297 Ground Mobility Vehicle and DroneShield—a shoulder fired antidrone weapon. These systems will help R&S troops remain undetectable while maintaining their proficiency in counterreconnaissance missions.

Tank units will also need a technological boost to improve survivability. R&S operations cannot repel all enemy reconnaissance assets; thus, militaries must equip their tanks with technology that provides local security during penetration. Prudent updates could include installing self-defense equipment, like the Iron Fist Light Active Protection System from General Dynamics and Rafael’s Trophy. Similar to how the C-RAM (counter–rocket, artillery, and mortar) protected US troops during contingencies in Afghanistan and Iraq, these systems provide local counterbattery fire to drone and ATGM attacks and help mitigate blind spot vulnerability.

The war in Ukraine has affirmed the assumption that unsupported armored warfare will struggle in combat due to blind spot vulnerabilities. However, the war also challenges the assumption that simply attaching infantry will solve these issues, as it has done in past conflicts. The proliferation of surveillance and attack drones makes both the tank and infantry vulnerable to aerial attack and ambush. As a result, these formations will need layers of early warning and security to achieve their objectives. Armored warfare at lower echelons will need to rely less on infantry troops and more on R&S forces. R&S troops provide the reconnaissance and counterreconnaissance capabilities necessary to thwart the advantages armed reconnaissance drones offer. By nesting R&S troops within an armored formation’s scheme of maneuver, and updating the technology and weapons used in counterreconnaissance and local defense, tank formations can retain their ability to influence battlefield conditions and remain effective in modern warfare.

Michael P. Losacco is a graduate student studying US national security policy at Georgetown University. Between 2015 and 2019, he served as an active duty armor officer in the US Army and deployed to Afghanistan in 2017.

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: Mvs.gov.ua, via Wikimedia Commons

mwi.usma.edu · by Michael P. Losacco · May 2, 2023

15. U.S. Security Cooperation Deserves a Fair Evaluation

Assessments are key. This is why area study and area assessments are foundational tools for Special Forces operations.

Excerpts:

There are ways to reduce the chances of things going awry in security cooperation. Before the United States decides to strengthen a partner’s capabilities, it should conduct a serious analysis of its risk profile to determine whether the security cooperation investment will generate acceptable returns. This should happen prior to promising the partner anything or supplying it with any equipment — which is contrary to what Washington typically does with most of its partners.

In accordance with Defense Department directive, conducting initial assessments of the partner is mandatory, but based on my experience as a senior advisor on security cooperation in the department in 2018–2019, more can be done. That’s because the Defense Department does not have the expertise to conduct comprehensive analysis of the partner. Studying any country’s social, political, cultural, economic, and security systems is the job of various parts of the executive branch, including the intelligence community (hence the need to integrate the input of the latter into initial partner assessments, which is not happening).

The Defense Department oftentimes is good at measuring the partner’s absorptive capacity, but is unable to effectively assess the latter’s political stability or financial condition (this is where the State Department’s analytic capabilities are most needed and should be integrated into assessment, monitoring, and evaluation of security cooperation). Neither does the Department of Defense really know how to assess the partner’s will to fight. These are the responsibilities of diplomats, spies, and subject-matter experts.

In conclusion, helping a partner to attain a higher level of military development and achieving broader strategic objectives of security cooperation requires various parts of the U.S. interagency process to step in and step up. Sometimes security cooperation underperforms because of mistakes committed by the United States, the partner, or both. But sometimes it actually does work, as several cases throughout history have shown. Let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater by using the wrong metrics and drawing the wrong conclusions about security cooperation.

U.S. Security Cooperation Deserves a Fair Evaluation - War on the Rocks

warontherocks.com · by Bilal Y. Saab · May 2, 2023

Security cooperation has been a critical pillar of U.S. statecraft for decades. However, the enterprise has gotten a bad reputation since the beginning of the 21st century because of the costly misadventures in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and elsewhere. But perhaps the problem is that we are not evaluating it the right way.

Much of Washington’s frustration with security cooperation is warranted, but some of it also is misplaced. Any sound assessment of security cooperation’s return on investment should start with a clear understanding of the intended objectives of the security cooperation program, and whether those, and only those, are effectively being met. Underscoring the difference between the process of security cooperation and the strategic/policy outcomes of security cooperation is also crucial for evaluators. Each deserves its own distinct evaluation. The United States has sometimes succeeded with the former only to struggle with the latter due to various external factors that have little or nothing to do with security cooperation itself.

Become a Member

Correctly evaluating security cooperation — a responsibility that ultimately belongs to the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy — matters a great deal because the stakes are currently so high. In a period of strategic competition with China, America’s global network of allies and partners is a unique advantage that should be leveraged and sustained through a better understanding of, and a larger role for, security cooperation. Better assessment would help to ensure that Washington does not abandon or reduce its reliance on this crucial tool when it’s needed most. Better assessment could also help U.S. policymakers to think more strategically about the political pitfalls that undermine security cooperation, so they better pre-empt them and deploy this tool when and where it will be most effective.

Assessment, Monitoring, and Evaluation

Security cooperation has evolved over the years, in accordance with changes in the strategic environment and U.S. priorities in the world. The United States still uses security cooperation to manage political relationships with friends, forge new partnerships, and acquire access to the partner’s territory. But since 9/11, America has elevated the more challenging and ambitious objective of helping to develop the military capabilities of weaker state and non-state partners to address shared security concerns.

The National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2017 issued historic security cooperation reforms that called for integrating institutional capacity building into military capability development with partners. Another key element of the reforms is the requirement for the Defense Department to maintain a program of assessment, monitoring, and evaluation in support of these efforts. Today, to sustain a certain security cooperation program with a partner, the department must know, and be able to demonstrate to Congress, that the program is hitting the mark. The challenge, however, is that there is no consensus in the U.S. bureaucracy on what that mark is, oftentimes leading to inaccurate, unfair, or irrelevant security cooperation evaluations.

The Defense Department’s definition of security cooperation — “all activities undertaken by the Department of Defense to encourage and enable international partners to work with the United States to achieve strategic objectives” — doesn’t help the evaluators much because it is too broad. That said, some aspects of security cooperation are easier to evaluate than others because the desired outcomes are binary. For example, if a partner grants Washington access, basing, and overflight, that is considered a success, and vice versa.

Yet, assessing security cooperation’s contributions to the military development of a partner, as well as its willingness to contribute to collective security interests, is anything but straightforward. Not only are there multiple (and sometimes interdependent) variables to examine — such as capability and the will to fight — but these have to be assessed in the short and long run both for the United States and for the partner. This can result in at least seven different outcomes, each with unique implications that do not fit into a simple success/failure dichotomy.

The partner succeeds in boosting its combat effectiveness and institutional capacities, and the process itself leads to positive strategic/policy outcomes. This is clearly the best outcome. Yet the record shows that it is the least likely and most difficult to achieve.

A couple of cases fall into this most precious category, including Colombia and, to a large extent, Indonesia. Through security cooperation and foreign aid from Washington, Colombia was able to upgrade and redesign its armed forces throughout the 2000s. This process, which escalated in early 2008, has sought to enable the Colombian defense and security sector to more effectively address evolving threats in the 21st century beyond narco-terrorism through a set of reforms in defense management including capability-based force planning, budget planning, and human resource management. Defense transformation in Bogotá led to serious inroads in the war against narco-terrorism, pushing the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, after suffering significant military losses, to reach a historic agreement with the government in 2016 through which the former promised to declare all its assets and hand them over to the Colombian authorities.

In Indonesia, security cooperation efforts from 2013 to 2018, which included work on strategic planning and defense reorganization, enhanced bilateral relations with the United States. The process of security cooperation itself was less successful than the Colombian one: More institutional capacity reforms were and still are needed in the Indonesian defense sector. But the process still incentivized and enabled the Indonesian authorities to contribute to shared maritime security aims.

The partner succeeds in boosting its combat effectiveness temporarily, but struggles to sustain its tactical effectiveness over the long run due to institutional capacity deficits. This is an all-too-familiar scenario in the American universe of security cooperation with developing partners. The main goal here is to help the partner conduct a specific military activity at a specific moment to support operations against a particular threat. In this case, all that security cooperation evaluators should look for to determine success or failure is whether that partner was effectively able to pursue that activity on a short-term basis. Examples of such activities include the United Arab Emirates staging an effective amphibious landing in Yemen in 2016, the Iraqi counterterrorism service clearing towns and villages of Sunni militants, the Bahraini coast guard interdicting smuggling by nefarious actors, and the Saudi military shooting down drones and missiles from Yemen.

However, if Washington wishes that the partner capably pursues such activities, possibly among others, on a consistent basis and with little or no U.S. help, then institutional capacity building — the jewel of the 2017 security cooperation reforms — becomes paramount. In that context, security cooperation evaluation would have to include demonstrable improvements in the partner’s combat and institutional capabilities including strategy, doctrine, acquisition, logistics, human resource management, and defense resource management. The argument here is not that one goal is more important than the other. Rather, it is that correct evaluation requires clearly defined objectives.

The partner manages to improve its defense readiness and military capabilities in peacetime, but is incapable of displaying combat effectiveness during wartime. This scenario underscores the huge difference between military capability and military effectiveness. The partner could be doing everything, or most things, right in steady-state operations to better prepare itself for various military contingencies and conflict situations. It could develop sound defense and military strategies, come up with doctrine that reflects its strategic culture and processes, invest in all the necessary institutional enablers, train hard, acquire the right weapons, conduct effective defense budgeting, and promote the best personnel (and fire or sideline the under-achievers).

But when the time comes to fight, the partner, for many reasons (some of which are beyond its control), is incapable of performing effectively and meeting its objectives — and the enemy obviously gets a vote, too. Centuries of human warfare have taught us that it’s one thing for an army to possess tools and skills and show high levels of readiness, but it’s another altogether to leverage all these assets and enablers and proficiently execute on the battlefield.

For example, when the United States withdrew its combat troops from Iraq at the end of 2011, Iraqi security forces were more or less ready to assume their duties of protecting the country from terrorist groups. By that time, Iraq had more than 700,000 well-equipped and Western-trained military and security personnel. But then, the debacle of 2014 happened. Hundreds of very modestly equipped Islamic State fighters managed to overrun tens of thousands of Iraqi soldiers who abandoned their gear and fled the battlefield. Many attributed this outcome to the lack of Iraqi will to fight. While that may be true, had the Iraqi army been capable of initially resisting the Islamic State’s assault, it wouldn’t have elected to leave Mosul while it was under attack.

The armed forces of the partner attain a higher level of military development, but the government is unwilling to take actions that support some or all U.S. policy objectives. This scenario results from an honest disagreement about priorities between Washington and the partner. In this case, there is nothing malicious or ill-intentioned about the partner’s cost-benefit calculation. Through security cooperation (and other means), the United States takes all the necessary steps to enhance the partner’s military capabilities and institutional capacities, but the latter assesses that the potential costs of addressing a particular shared threat and the risks of escalation are too high — politically, militarily, or both.

The U.S.-led military campaign against the Islamic State is one example. The United States had helped several regional partners enhance some of their military capabilities in years preceding the start of Operation Inherent Resolve in 2014. But when the call to support U.S. operations came, few of those partners answered it effectively. The United States was forced to carry out most of the airstrikes and, with the exception of Iraqi and Syrian Kurdish security forces, none of the partners significantly contributed to the fight on the ground.

The armed forces of the partner attain a higher level of military development, but the government is politically weak and divided, thus rendering it unable to take actions that support some or all U.S. policy objectives. This scenario is similar to the previous one, but is sufficiently different because of its emphasis on the inability of the partner to reach a consensus on a specific threat or U.S. policy objective due to political division and incompetence. One example of that is the security cooperation program with the Lebanese Armed Forces. U.S. military assistance to Lebanon turned the country’s armed forces from a weak and badly run army into one of the most competent and well-managed forces in the region. In 2017, the Lebanese Armed Forces waged a highly effective battle against hundreds of Islamic State fighters in the north and evicted them from the country. By most standards, security cooperation in Lebanon was incredibly effective.

However, the success of security cooperation with the Lebanese Armed Forces, unsurprisingly, could not overcome the acute disunity, corruption, and ineptitude of the Lebanese government. Beirut has consistently failed to reach a political consensus on, among other national priorities, how to tackle the problem of Hizballah’s arms, the security of the borders, and the enforcement of U.N. Security Council resolutions relevant to Lebanon. Critics of U.S. assistance to the Lebanese Armed Forces have pointed to these negative outcomes to argue for reducing or cutting security cooperation in the country. But the fact that the Lebanon has not been able to achieve these objectives is not proof of the failure of U.S. assistance to the country’s armed forces. Rather, it demonstrates the bankruptcy of the entire Lebanese political system, which itself has hamstrung U.S. policy. Evaluation of security cooperation in Lebanon is a classic case of wrong metrics leading to faulty conclusions.

The partner enhances its military capabilities over the short or long run, but pursues goals that are antithetical to those of Washington. This scenario has materialized to some extent in Yemen and Libya in recent years. Over the past decade, the United States has helped to enhance the military capabilities of the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia through various security cooperation means, a process that has contributed to shared security objectives. But in some situations, Riyadh and Abu Dhabi used these very capabilities to advance policy goals that challenged U.S. policy and preferences. For example, with fighter jets purchased from Washington, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates committed human rights violations in Yemen (as did their antagonists, the Iran-backed Houthis) by conducting airstrikes that killed thousands of innocent civilians. In Libya, the United Arab Emirates deployed warplanes bought from the United States in violation of a U.N. arms embargo to support the forces of Gen. Khalifa Haftar, a Libyan rebel leader whose army was fighting the U.S.- and U.N.-backed government in the country’s capital, Tripoli.

In Burkina Faso, in February 2022, the military toppled the democratically-elected government of President Roch Marc Christian Kaboré. This was the same military that the United States had supported since 2009 because they shared the goal of combating terrorism. Elsewhere in Africa, U.S.-trained local officers led seven coups and coup attempts in 2021 and 2022. Similar stories have been reported in Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America, where U.S. military assistance has been notorious for perpetuating militarism in the form of military coups and strong-man military regimes that violated human rights and worked against democracy.

But do these consequences prove the failure of security cooperation in these countries? Not necessarily. Preventing coups and attacks on democracy, upholding international law, incentivizing recipients of U.S. assistance to pursue policies that serve American interests, and attaining country-specific or regional stability are very worthy U.S. foreign policy objectives, but they are not the prerogative of security cooperation. How Washington leverages security cooperation and incorporates it into the integrated country strategy to safeguard collective security interests is the responsibility of the U.S. government as a whole, with the American ambassador stationed in that country playing a coordinating role.

The United States manages to improve the combat effectiveness and perhaps even the institutional capacities of the partner, but ultimately leaves, significantly cuts its presence, or pursues new policies that undermine its success. Assuming that the partner commits to credible military development and defense reform, the United States could hamper if not terminate the security cooperation process by withdrawing or significantly reducing its presence and/or assistance for political or strategic reasons.

This is, to some extent, what happened with the security cooperation program in Afghanistan. Make no mistake about it: The Afghan military was to blame for many sins it committed, including corruption, lack of discipline, division, and disorganization (though some units in the Afghan Air Force did a lot better than others by better leveraging U.S. assistance). But when the United States removed all its troops and even contractors in 2021, paving the way for the Taliban to regain control of the government, the Afghan military disintegrated and all security cooperation progress that was made immediately vanished.

In such a strategic environment, a U.S. policy decision directly contributed to the failure of the security cooperation effort. Perhaps the entire security cooperation enterprise in Afghanistan was doomed to fail. Like many others, it was heavy on military equipment and light on long-term sustainment and defense reform. But there’s no question that when Washington elected to end its military and advisory presence in the country after nearly 20 years, there was no hope for the security cooperation program.

Process versus Outcomes

The Defense Department deserves credit for committing to the assessment, monitoring, and evaluation of key parts of its military assistance. Congress also should be commended for coming up with legislation that for the first time ever formally instructs the department to conduct this assessment. But the practice still suffers from a basic problem: It’s unclear what is being assessed, monitored, and evaluated, who’s performing those tasks, and what the standards and metrics of success are.

On paper, there are ready answers to these issues. But what matters most is how things are in practice, and that’s where the confusion and subpar performance are noticeable. Defense Department policy suggests that assessment, monitoring, and evaluation should report on “outcomes and sustainability of security cooperation and track, understand, and improve returns on Defense Department security cooperation investments.” But it’s unclear what the department means by outcomes. Is it referring to tactical outcomes pertaining to the development of the partner’s military capabilities, or to strategic/policy outcomes that address the partner’s tangible contributions to collective security interests?

There are methodological implications for the distinction between process and outcomes when it comes to assessing, monitoring, and evaluating a partner’s military development. A quantitative analysis, including proper coding and measurement of variables, might be more suitable to assessment, monitoring, and evaluation than a qualitative one (in some cases, a combination of the two is needed). The former, however, requires lots of reliable data, which will not be easy to gather, especially when it comes to authoritarian partners.

The United States has some control over how it advises, trains, and equips the partner, but the moment that strategic/policy outcomes are inserted into the equation, much that is simply outside the control of Washington can go wrong. Security cooperation evaluators should account for that basic reality — yet, more often than not, they don’t.

There are ways to reduce the chances of things going awry in security cooperation. Before the United States decides to strengthen a partner’s capabilities, it should conduct a serious analysis of its risk profile to determine whether the security cooperation investment will generate acceptable returns. This should happen prior to promising the partner anything or supplying it with any equipment — which is contrary to what Washington typically does with most of its partners.

In accordance with Defense Department directive, conducting initial assessments of the partner is mandatory, but based on my experience as a senior advisor on security cooperation in the department in 2018–2019, more can be done. That’s because the Defense Department does not have the expertise to conduct comprehensive analysis of the partner. Studying any country’s social, political, cultural, economic, and security systems is the job of various parts of the executive branch, including the intelligence community (hence the need to integrate the input of the latter into initial partner assessments, which is not happening).

The Defense Department oftentimes is good at measuring the partner’s absorptive capacity, but is unable to effectively assess the latter’s political stability or financial condition (this is where the State Department’s analytic capabilities are most needed and should be integrated into assessment, monitoring, and evaluation of security cooperation). Neither does the Department of Defense really know how to assess the partner’s will to fight. These are the responsibilities of diplomats, spies, and subject-matter experts.

In conclusion, helping a partner to attain a higher level of military development and achieving broader strategic objectives of security cooperation requires various parts of the U.S. interagency process to step in and step up. Sometimes security cooperation underperforms because of mistakes committed by the United States, the partner, or both. But sometimes it actually does work, as several cases throughout history have shown. Let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater by using the wrong metrics and drawing the wrong conclusions about security cooperation.

Become a Member

Bilal Y. Saab is a senior fellow and the director of the Defense and Security Program at the Middle East Institute. He is an adjunct professor at Georgetown University’s Security Studies Program and a former senior advisor for security cooperation in the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy.

Commentary

warontherocks.com · by Bilal Y. Saab · May 2, 2023

16. An Unerring Sense of Locality: Ukraine and the Future of Armored Warfare

Conclusion:

The war in Ukraine has affirmed the assumption that unsupported armored warfare will struggle in combat due to blind spot vulnerabilities. However, the war also challenges the assumption that simply attaching infantry will solve these issues, as it has done in past conflicts. The proliferation of surveillance and attack drones makes both the tank and infantry vulnerable to aerial attack and ambush. As a result, these formations will need layers of early warning and security to achieve their objectives. Armored warfare at lower echelons will need to rely less on infantry troops and more on R&S forces. R&S troops provide the reconnaissance and counterreconnaissance capabilities necessary to thwart the advantages armed reconnaissance drones offer. By nesting R&S troops within an armored formation’s scheme of maneuver, and updating the technology and weapons used in counterreconnaissance and local defense, tank formations can retain their ability to influence battlefield conditions and remain effective in modern warfare.

An Unerring Sense of Locality: Ukraine and the Future of Armored Warfare - Modern War Institute

mwi.usma.edu · by Michael P. Losacco · May 2, 2023

Russian tanks are having a bad time of it in Ukraine, suffering high casualties as Ukrainian troops, equipped with antitank guided missiles and armed drones, frequently ambush Russian armored formations unaware of their surroundings and lacking dismounted ground support. Observers in search of lessons are watching the war play out, interpreting the incredible attrition rate imposed on Russia’s tanks as validation of the widely held assumption that armored formations cannot successfully operate alone—an assumption that was similarly solidified fifty years ago, when Egyptian and Syrian forces destroyed Israeli tanks en masse during the 1973 Yom Kippur War.

A conclusion drawn from the destruction suffered by Israeli tanks during that war was that attaching infantry solves the tank’s woes. But the character of warfare has changed since then, and both analysts and decision makers should be cautious that simply adding infantry will solve tanks’ vulnerabilities on the modern battlefield. Evidence from Ukraine suggests that the ubiquity of drones on the battlefield renders the combined infantry-armor formation less effective than in the past. Drones are hard to detect, making it difficult for infantry-armor formations to find and destroy them. This advantage allows an adversary to ambush an infantry-tank formation before it can defend itself. Thus, successful tank operations in the future will involve not only linking infantry to tanks, but ensuring the attachment of reconnaissance and security (R&S) troops. R&S troops can provide early warning and counterreconnaissance capabilities needed to mitigate the drone’s advantage. Together, infantry-tank formations and R&S troops will maintain the tank’s lethality at lower echelons and help armored combat power adapt to the changing characteristics of modern warfare.

Lessons from the Yom Kippur War

A tank’s hardened armor and high-explosive weaponry allow it to destroy enemy positions with speed, mobility, and certainty. These characteristics help the tank penetrate reinforced battle positions, producing a psychological shock in the adversary’s mind.

But, where the tank excels in survivability and firepower, it struggles to keep its crew situationally aware. For example, the US M1A2 Abrams is heavily armored and requires its commander to view and designate targets with an optic. Like a submarine periscope, this optic leaves the tank commander vulnerable to blind spots. This vulnerability worsens in combat when tank commanders retreat from their hatches because of the risk of death or injury and cannot verify their blind spots. These circumstances allow an adversary to exploit the tank’s vulnerability by hiding in the commander’s blind spot and attacking the tank with an antitank guided missile (ATGM) or armed drone.

The 1973 Yom Kippur War provides historical context. Following the success of Israeli armored formations in the Six-Day War, six years prior, Israel Defense Forces leaders assumed the tank could win ground battles alone. This belief led Israeli generals in 1973 to spearhead counterattacks in the Sinai and Golan Heights with unsupported armored formations. The result was devastating—Egyptian and Syrian dismounted troops, armed with Sagger ATGMs, decimated Israeli armor formations as their lumbering profiles moved across the desert. Effective up to two miles, the Sagger allowed Egyptian and Syrian antitank teams to hide within the terrain and exploit the Israeli tank crews’ blind spots. As a result, Israeli tanks ventured blindly into Syrian and Egyptian kill zones without early warning and suffered high casualty rates.

Altogether, Israeli armor units lost over three hundred tanks, and in the Golan Heights, an Israeli tank unit attempting to seize terrain lost twenty-six of its twenty-eight tanks to enemy ATGM teams. These events, coupled with the inherent characteristics of armored platforms, illustrate the difficulty tanks have in locating unobtrusive targets without additional eyes and ears on the battlefield.

Back to the Future

Russian tank operations in Ukraine have reinforced the lesson of 1973—that tanks operating by themselves in combat will be unsuccessful. The opening stages of the war in Ukraine saw large, unsupported Russian tank convoys speeding toward Kyiv. Subsequently, the Russian tank crews fell victim to roving bands of hidden Ukrainian light infantry armed with Javelin and NLAW ATGMs, as well as armed drones. Like the destruction waged by Egyptian and Syrian Sagger teams, these ambushes resulted in the widespread destruction of Russian tanks and contributed to Russia’s operational abandonment of its northern axis of advance. As a result, between February 2022 and March 2023, Russia lost 1,917 of what the International Institute for Strategic Estimate estimated to be a prewar total of 3,417 tanks in active service—an astronomical figure that has led Russia to take drastic measures, such as reactivating its derelict stockpile of Cold War–era T-54 tanks.

Since the first images of destroyed Russian tanks in Ukraine appeared in the media, analysts in the defense and national security community have debated whether Russian tank losses are a sign of the tank becoming obsolete. Supporters of the use of tanks point to the absence of infantry attached to Russian armored formations. “A well-trained NATO armored column would have been accompanied by infantry to stop an ambush,” said retired British Army Brigadier Ben Barry, a senior land warfare fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. Similarly, a recent security blog heading indicated, “The best tank armor is a well-trained infantry.” These claims suggest that if the Russian military paired tanks with infantry units, they would have greater success in repelling Ukrainian antitank ambushes.

Without a doubt, the tank’s characteristics constrain the crew’s situational awareness, providing adversarial ATGM and drone teams a weakness to exploit. Both Israeli tank losses during the 1973 Yom Kippur War and the more recent Russian tank losses in the war in Ukraine support this assumption and affirm the tank’s need for light ground support to reduce vulnerability. US tank operations in a series of battles—from Aachen, Germany in 1945 to Fallujah, Iraq in 2004—illustrate the success of pairing tank formations with infantry units. In each of these two cases, infantry helped tank formations clear and hold urban terrain.

In this regard, the assumption that unsupported armored formations will struggle in combat remains true, and infantry support only furthers the likelihood of battlefield success. However, the war in Ukraine suggests the proliferation and success of drones will challenge the notion of infantry support as the sine qua non for armored warfare.

Closing the Distance

Consider Aerorozvidka, a Ukrainian group that straddles the line between nongovernmental organization and military unit and has been described as a “war startup.” It is known for destroying Russian infantry and tank formations in Ukraine with commercially purchased drones, such as the R18 quadcopter, which carry thermal imaging cameras and up to three RKG-1600 antitank bombs. They are cost-effective, allowing Aerorozvidka to field them in large numbers and provide Ukrainian troops with reliable long-range surveillance and attack capability.

Aerorozvidka’s drones and tactics pose a new challenge for armored warfare. Traditionally, tank formations became threatened in the direct-fire zone. In this area, the tank and its adversary are within range of each other and can utilize their weapons systems against one another. Before entering this zone, the tank was relatively safe and unencumbered. However, the increased prevalence of armed reconnaissance drones, like those utilized by Aerorozvidka, indicates this is no longer true. Drones now extend the direct-fire zone, closing the distance that tanks can operate without being threatened. These factors, combined with the tank’s maintenance and fuel requirements that prevent it from conducting long-distance operations, will create a more persistent threat and leave the tank more vulnerable.

Armor formations will need to ensure their concepts of maneuver include layers of early warning to succeed in future contingencies. While infantry may help, drone attacks like those of Aerorozvidka have been particularly successful against dug-in Russian infantry. These outcomes suggest dismounted infantry, which are also vulnerable against drones, will fare no better as the tank’s primary support. Instead, armored warfare must ensure it includes a force capable of providing warning and counterreconnaissance options to be successful—a tactical task best accomplished by R&S troops.

An Unerring Sense of Locality

In his seminal book On War, Carl von Clausewitz emphasized the importance of terrain and enemy analysis in combat operations. “With a quick, unerring sense locality,” he writes, “[a commander’s] dispositions will be more rapid and assured; he will run less risk of a certain awkwardness in his concepts and be less dependent on others.” In modern warfare, this “unerring sense of locality” is provided by R&S troops.

A commander’s eyes and ears of the battlefield, R&S troops are conventional forces whose mission is to detect enemy positions and provide early warning, rather than seizing and holding terrain. They accomplish this by operating forward and to the flanks of a tank unit, monitoring enemy activity. Smaller in numbers and burdened by less equipment, R&S forces are less vulnerable than infantry units because they operate in dispersed formations and avoid becoming decisively engaged. These characteristics make it harder for drones to detect their presence. In doing so, these troops develop a picture of the local environment into which the main fighting element (in this case, a tank unit) is about to enter. This information includes the trafficability of roads, the composition and disposition of enemy ATGM teams, and potential obstacles, like rough terrain—all of which helps the tank commander gain the situational awareness needed to create an effective scheme of maneuver and avoid an ambush.

Additionally, R&S units are responsible for security operations. Security missions focus on preventing an adversary from observing the main fighting element and establishing hidden forward positions to detect enemy reconnaissance assets. They search for armed reconnaissance drones, enemy observation posts, and the adversary’s R&S troops. They provide early warning and help preserve the armor formation by acting as a control measure for the tank’s vulnerabilities.

Historically, R&S teams have helped armored formations achieve their objectives. During the 1991 Persian Gulf War’s Battle of 73 Easting, American tank formations led by scout platoons operated in a hunter-killer construct. Under this construct, nimble scout platoons would operate ahead and to the flanks of tank formations, serving as the hunters of Iraqi reconnaissance assets and tanks. The scouts’ discreet and agile characteristics allowed a smaller American force to observe Iraqi reconnaissance assets and tanks and report their disposition to the US armored formation in the rear, all while undetected. This enabled the tank formation to assume the killer role and pull forward to destroy Iraqi tanks and reconnaissance troops with the initiative. To be sure, the greater sophistication of the US tanks compared to those of their Iraqi adversaries also contributed, but having more advanced tanks alone is not enough—as Russian losses in Ukraine make clear. Rather, it was the method of employment that contributed to the incredibly lopsided outcome of the battle: half of the 300–400 Iraqi tanks destroyed without a single US tank lost. By increasing the prevalence of the R&S forces in tank formations and incorporating concepts like hunter-killer, tank formations can develop layers of warning against the rising drone threat that will help reduce the tank’s vulnerability during transit to the direct-fire zone.

Familiar Concepts, Renewed

While R&S troops and security concepts like that of hunter-killer can help tanks adapt to the prevalence of drones in modern warfare, they cannot rely on the same tools and equipment. Instead, these concepts must incorporate new technology and forms of maneuver to detect and evade armed reconnaissance drones.

For example, militaries should modernize their R&S and armored formations with antidrone technology. The technology could include systems such as L3Harris’s VAMPIRE (Vehicle Agnostic Modular Palletized ISR Rocket Equipment). VAMPIRE is a rocket launcher designed to locate, track, and destroy armed reconnaissance drones. Its system is small and can fit in the truck bed of a light, wheeled military vehicle, such as a Humvee. Additional tools should include modern light, wheeled vehicles and shoulder-fired systems, such as the M1297 Ground Mobility Vehicle and DroneShield—a shoulder fired antidrone weapon. These systems will help R&S troops remain undetectable while maintaining their proficiency in counterreconnaissance missions.

Tank units will also need a technological boost to improve survivability. R&S operations cannot repel all enemy reconnaissance assets; thus, militaries must equip their tanks with technology that provides local security during penetration. Prudent updates could include installing self-defense equipment, like the Iron Fist Light Active Protection System from General Dynamics and Rafael’s Trophy. Similar to how the C-RAM (counter–rocket, artillery, and mortar) protected US troops during contingencies in Afghanistan and Iraq, these systems provide local counterbattery fire to drone and ATGM attacks and help mitigate blind spot vulnerability.

The war in Ukraine has affirmed the assumption that unsupported armored warfare will struggle in combat due to blind spot vulnerabilities. However, the war also challenges the assumption that simply attaching infantry will solve these issues, as it has done in past conflicts. The proliferation of surveillance and attack drones makes both the tank and infantry vulnerable to aerial attack and ambush. As a result, these formations will need layers of early warning and security to achieve their objectives. Armored warfare at lower echelons will need to rely less on infantry troops and more on R&S forces. R&S troops provide the reconnaissance and counterreconnaissance capabilities necessary to thwart the advantages armed reconnaissance drones offer. By nesting R&S troops within an armored formation’s scheme of maneuver, and updating the technology and weapons used in counterreconnaissance and local defense, tank formations can retain their ability to influence battlefield conditions and remain effective in modern warfare.

Michael P. Losacco is a graduate student studying US national security policy at Georgetown University. Between 2015 and 2019, he served as an active duty armor officer in the US Army and deployed to Afghanistan in 2017.

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: Mvs.gov.ua, via Wikimedia Commons

mwi.usma.edu · by Michael P. Losacco · May 2, 2023

17. Are We Asking Too Much of Cyber?

Excerpts:

There are also major lessons here for U.S. strategy. The appeal of cheap(er) coercive tools is apparent in U.S. strategic documents. The 2023 National Cybersecurity Strategy — the first one authored by the new Office of the National Cyber Director — calls on the United States to conduct “disruption campaigns” on an ongoing basis. A core pillar of the 2022 National Defense Strategy is the concept of “integrated deterrence,” which sees offensive cyber operations as one of many options for shaping how adversaries — especially China, which the strategy defines as the “pacing challenge” — view the expected benefits of aggression.

Looking ahead, U.S. cyber strategies should be more explicit about articulating not only the strategic benefits cyberspace offers but also its limitations. One useful example from which policymakers could draw is the United Kingdom’s recently released National Cyber Force white paper, which offers strategic guidance for offensive cyber operations. The document directly tackles some of the challenges of employing cyber power — such as the limited evidence that cyber operations can be a “primary contributor to deterrence,” the constraints associated with developing and employing exquisite offensive cyber capabilities, and the difficulties of measuring outcomes. The strategic guidance engages these issues while still offering a robust vision for the role of cyber offense. Moreover, it is worth noting that whenever leaders use cyber for coercion, they are potentially burning exploits that could have been leveraged for intelligence. This is less relevant for capabilities like conventional munitions where intelligence and military capabilities are not as intertwined.

More realism about cyberspace may help leaders truly integrate cyber capabilities. In most cases, integrating cyber effectively will mean leveraging the insights gleaned from this domain to tailor other, non-digital forms of deterrence and coercion. In the rare cases where leaders believe cyber coercion can work, it is likely to be as part of a broader package involving other policy levers. Figuring out what the right cocktail is will be hard but is a worthy undertaking.

Are We Asking Too Much of Cyber? - War on the Rocks

warontherocks.com · by Erica Lonergan · May 2, 2023

The U.S. Intelligence Community’s 2023 Annual Threat Assessment contains some alarming estimates, especially as it relates to the cyber capabilities of the People’s Republic of China. It states that Beijing would “almost certainly consider undertaking aggressive cyber operations against U.S. homeland critical infrastructure and military assets worldwide” if they thought war was “imminent.” These operations “would be designed to deter U.S. military action by impeding U.S. decisionmaking, inducing societal panic, and interfering with the deployment of U.S. forces.” Such warnings are particularly concerning considering we may be in the midst of what some experts call “the decade of maximum danger.”

There were similar warnings prior to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine early last year. Cyber security expert Jason Healey hypothesized that if a SolarWinds-style hack in the midst of the Ukraine crisis actually wiped data on all machines that downloaded the malware — as opposed to stealing data from a subset of them — “The psychological shock to the public and to decision-makers might successfully coerce the United States into backing down.” Others warned of the potential for Russia to use cyber tools to cow Ukraine into submission. One article held that “a potentially destructive cyber onslaught … could pressure Kyiv into concessions and its friends abroad into meeting Russia’s demands.” Another posited that Putin “would likely employ massive cyber and electronic warfare tools … to create ‘shock and awe,’ causing Ukraine’s defenses or will to fight to collapse.”

But not everyone is so sanguine about cyber’s promise and potential. When it comes to cyber coercion, these scholars and analysts are skeptical about cyber’s capacity to coerce or shape conflict in any meaningful way. They point to a number of factors that hamper cyber operations’ potential for coercion, such as their limitations in generating costly effects; their unpredictable nature, which can confound attempts to cause a desired effect against a specific target at the right time; and the fact that brandishing cyber capabilities for the purposes of signaling can undermine their effectiveness.

Become a Member

Too often, conversations about cyber coercion take place in a vacuum, disconnected from broader debates about coercion and its efficacy. Coercion theory focuses on the threat or application of force or punishment of some kind to shape the behavior of an adversary — either as a form of deterrence to prevent or dissuade them from taking an undesirable action or as a form of compellence to induce changes in behavior. Despite its appeal, there are countless studies which indicate that coercion — regardless of the tool being used — routinely fails. Even still, leaders often rely on these imperfect tools not because they expect them to work but because they lack better options.

The upshot is that both cyber enthusiasts and skeptics may be asking too much of cyber. When enthusiasts speak of cyber’s enormous coercive potential, they are essentially expecting it to be more potent than conventional tools that commonly fail. By placing disproportionate faith in a fragile and ephemeral capability, they overlook the fact that coercion of all kinds often fails. For their part, cyber skeptics are discounting the reality that many of the non-digital tools states use to shape one another’s behavior also have a poor track record. Moreover, by dismissing cyber coercion’s potential, often for good reasons, skeptics may find it challenging to engage policymakers who are likely to find it appealing — not necessarily because they expect it to succeed but because options are limited. They may also underestimate the frequency with which adversaries may attempt cyber coercion for the same reason. And even if those attempts ultimately fail, the damage done in the process demands that we anticipate them and take them seriously.

Simply put, coercion is hard. Cyber is especially problematic, but it is not uniquely limited. The sooner we come to terms with this, the sooner we can prioritize what cyber capabilities are best at.

Why Coercion is Hard

States often turn to coercion to influence other leaders short of war. Leaders can implement coercive strategies through denial approaches, thereby making it more difficult for adversaries to carry out their military strategy. Alternatively, they can turn to punishment by imposing significant costs on an adversary’s civilian population and economy — or at least threatening to.

Despite its appeal, successful coercion is notoriously elusive. Several factors all have to align for it to work. Coercing states must clearly communicate to adversaries the desired behavior and the consequences of defiance. The threat must also be credible, which means states need both the capability and political will to carry it out. The potential costs also have to outweigh any benefit the target perceives in taking an action. Finally, and perhaps most difficult, the coercing state has to reassure the target it will not carry out its threat if it complies. There are many points where things can go awry.

Unsurprisingly, examples of failed coercion abound. The United States could not deter Syria from using chemical weapons despite President Obama’s August 2012 warning that it would be a “red line” that would “change [his] calculus” and cause “enormous consequences.” The U.S. threat to Muammar Qaddafi in March 2011 to “step down from power and leave,” coupled with the warning that the United States was exploring a range of military responses if he refused, is another example of failed coercion. And the Trump administration’s coercive diplomacy campaign, applying “maximum pressure” with blustery threats of military force like the infamous “fire and fury” quip in 2017, did not result in concessions by North Korea around its nuclear weapons program.

A Deeper Dive Into The Limits of Coercive Tools

The most popular tool the United States employs to coerce external actors is economic sanctions. However, targets often find ways of circumventing them, especially earlier efforts that were less “smart” and tailored. And once sanctions are applied, it becomes more difficult to repeal them, undermining the reassurance aspect of coercion. Individual cases illustrate the point. The United States and its allies have imposed punishing sanctions on North Korea for years with little to show for it. The same could be said for sanctions against Iraq throughout the 1990s.

Where sanctions appear to have had an effect, it was often a large-scale, multilateral effort that took years to bear fruit. Iran is a good example. Many experts identify a desire for sanctions relief as important for getting Iran to the negotiating table in 2015 to sign the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. But to make sanctions bite, a collective effort of lots of countries was necessary. After Trump ended U.S. participation in the agreement, the effectiveness of sanctions — many of which were temporarily lifted as part of the deal — on Iran’s enrichment progress has been minimal.

The limits of aerial bombing is also instructive. Despite advancements in precision, lethality, and range, air power is often of marginal coercive utility, especially when used independently and as a form of punishment. Germany’s strategic bombing campaign against London in World War II was a failure. The United States dropped millions of tons of ordnance during the Vietnam War and still lost.

When it comes to cyberspace, there are endemic features of the domain that undermine its usefulness as a tool of coercion. Reasons include the difficulty of attribution, the inability to telegraph attacks beforehand without compromising access, and the relatively low impact and reversibility of most operations. Even if states could credibly communicate that they would impose costs and those threats were believed, adversaries still may not care. Despite all this, states continue to find cyber coercion enticing.

The takeaway is not that policymakers should refrain from being skeptical of cyber’s coercive capacity. Rather, the point is that many tools of statecraft are ineffective when it comes to coercion, whether kinetic, economic, or digital. And when they do work, it is often because of large-scale, joint efforts or a host of other factors that contribute to success.

A Lack of Good Options

If coercion is so hard, it may seem odd that states try it so often. In reality, it is less puzzling than it seems. Leaders are not purely motivated by effectiveness when deciding which tools of statecraft to use. They frequently pursue policies they anticipate will not be wildly successful owing to a lack of better options. In the case of the United States, this is often due to perceived limitations of political will, especially when it comes to using military force where troops are deployed overtly.

Interestingly, then, asking whether cyber coercion is effective or ineffective is often beside the point. In many instances, leaders turn to this capability — just as they do others, such as remotely piloted aircraft — because they can avoid significant escalation while still demonstrating they are doing something. If it succeeds, all the better. But effectiveness regularly competes with a reluctance to expend significant blood and treasure or incur major political costs.

Another wrinkle is that when leaders turn to imperfect tools of coercion because the alternatives are too costly, this further undermines the very resolve needed for successful coercion. If targets are aware of the constraints leaders are operating under, or can infer as much from the actions they take, it diminishes the chances of capitulation. With respect to cyber specifically, if adversaries believe policymakers are using these capabilities because they want to shield themselves from more significant costs, it is little wonder their coercive potential is limited.

Getting Cyber Right in an Era of Competition

This discussion has big implications for assessing the threat that China poses in cyberspace, particularly in a crisis or in wartime. As mentioned at the outset, U.S. policymakers clearly believe China is attracted to the prospect of cyber coercion. According to a recent Politico article, China may “unleash a volley of digital strikes against the United States” in the context of potential military action against Taiwan. Policymakers like Rep. Mike Gallagher warn that in a Taiwan invasion scenario, China would likely conduct cyber attacks against America’s “electrical grid, water systems and communications infrastructure — especially near military installations.”

The million-dollar question is whether this would work. Theory and evidence suggest it may not. Coercion, for reasons outlined above, is hard. Cyber enthusiasts have yet to articulate why things would be different this time around. Even if the operations succeed on technical grounds, there is no guarantee of coercive success. Coercive attempts by China are just as likely to rally the American public as they are to divide it. To be sure, China may recognize as much and still try it anyway — something skeptics have not fully grappled with. China may see few alternatives for targeting the U.S. homeland directly. As such, the potential for widespread disruption demands that policymakers continue to invest in defense and resilience even if coercion ultimately fails.

There are also major lessons here for U.S. strategy. The appeal of cheap(er) coercive tools is apparent in U.S. strategic documents. The 2023 National Cybersecurity Strategy — the first one authored by the new Office of the National Cyber Director — calls on the United States to conduct “disruption campaigns” on an ongoing basis. A core pillar of the 2022 National Defense Strategy is the concept of “integrated deterrence,” which sees offensive cyber operations as one of many options for shaping how adversaries — especially China, which the strategy defines as the “pacing challenge” — view the expected benefits of aggression.

Looking ahead, U.S. cyber strategies should be more explicit about articulating not only the strategic benefits cyberspace offers but also its limitations. One useful example from which policymakers could draw is the United Kingdom’s recently released National Cyber Force white paper, which offers strategic guidance for offensive cyber operations. The document directly tackles some of the challenges of employing cyber power — such as the limited evidence that cyber operations can be a “primary contributor to deterrence,” the constraints associated with developing and employing exquisite offensive cyber capabilities, and the difficulties of measuring outcomes. The strategic guidance engages these issues while still offering a robust vision for the role of cyber offense. Moreover, it is worth noting that whenever leaders use cyber for coercion, they are potentially burning exploits that could have been leveraged for intelligence. This is less relevant for capabilities like conventional munitions where intelligence and military capabilities are not as intertwined.

More realism about cyberspace may help leaders truly integrate cyber capabilities. In most cases, integrating cyber effectively will mean leveraging the insights gleaned from this domain to tailor other, non-digital forms of deterrence and coercion. In the rare cases where leaders believe cyber coercion can work, it is likely to be as part of a broader package involving other policy levers. Figuring out what the right cocktail is will be hard but is a worthy undertaking.

Become a Member

Erica Lonergan is an Assistant Professor in the Army Cyber Institute at West Point and a Research Scholar at the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University. She is the co-author, with Shawn W. Lonergan, of “Escalation Dynamics in Cyberspace” (Oxford University Press, 2023).

Michael Poznansky is an Associate Professor in the Strategic and Operational Research Department and a core faculty member in the Cyber & Innovation Policy Institute at the U.S. Naval War College. He is the author of “In the Shadow of International Law: Secrecy and Regime Change in the Postwar World” (Oxford University Press, 2020).

The views expressed here are the authors’ alone and do not reflect the policy or position of any U.S. government organization or entity with which they may be affiliated.

Image: U.S. Cyber Command

Commentary

warontherocks.com · by Erica Lonergan · May 2, 2023

18. Joint Statement of the Leaders of the United States and the Philippines

Joint Statement of the Leaders of the United States and the Philippines - The White House

whitehouse.gov · by The White House · May 1, 2023

President Joseph R. Biden, Jr. is honored to welcome Philippine President Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr. to Washington, DC. The leaders recognize the remarkable ties of friendship, community, and shared sacrifice that serve as the foundation of the U.S.-Philippines alliance.

President Biden and President Marcos welcome the historic momentum in U.S.-Philippine relations, and resolve to continue expanding engagement and cooperation on all issues of common concern. In efforts to promote inclusive and broad-based prosperity, invest in the clean energy transition and the fight against climate change, uphold international peace and stability, and ensure respect for human rights and the rule of law, the United States and the Philippines will remain the closest of allies, working together to deliver a better future for our citizens and tackle the emerging challenges of the twenty-first century.

Partnering for Peace and Security: Strengthening our Alliance, Upholding International Law, and Expanding Regional Collaboration

President Biden reaffirms the United States’ ironclad alliance commitments to the Philippines, underscoring that an armed attack on Philippine armed forces, public vessels, or aircraft in the Pacific, including in the South China Sea, would invoke U.S. mutual defense commitments under Article IV of the 1951 U.S.-Philippines Mutual Defense Treaty.

The leaders welcome the identification of new sites pursuant to the U.S.-Philippines Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement, which will strengthen Philippine security and support the Armed Forces of the Philippines’ modernization goals, while driving U.S. investment to local communities across the Philippines and improving our shared ability to rapidly deliver humanitarian assistance and disaster relief.

The leaders underscore their unwavering commitment to freedom of navigation and overflight in the South China Sea, and the importance of respecting the sovereign rights of states within their exclusive economic zones consistent with international law. The leaders support the right and ability of Filipino fisherfolk to pursue their traditional livelihoods. The leaders note the ruling of the 2016 arbitral tribunal, constituted pursuant to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). They affirm the importance of maintaining peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait as an indispensable element of global security and prosperity. The leaders convey support for Ukraine’s sovereignty, independence, and territorial integrity within its internationally recognized borders, noting that the conflict has adversely affected food and energy security in the Indo-Pacific.

The leaders welcome cooperation with partners that share the United States’ and the Philippines’ commitment to international law and mutual respect, and in that spirit, they reaffirm their strong support for ASEAN centrality and the ASEAN Outlook on the Indo-Pacific. They look forward to establishing trilateral modes of cooperation among the Philippines, Japan, and the United States, as well as the Philippines, Australia, and the United States. Furthermore, they welcome the Quad’s commitment to support a peaceful and stable, rules-based region with ASEAN at the center, through its efforts to advance a free and open Indo-Pacific.

Delivering Prosperity and Resilience: Driving Broad-Based Economic Growth, Accelerating the Clean Energy Transition, and Promoting the Well-Being of Our Citizens

President Biden and President Marcos resolve to draw on the strength of their partnership to promote enduring economic growth and prosperity in the United States, the Philippines, and the broader Indo-Pacific region. To that end, President Biden will dispatch a Presidential Trade and Investment Mission to the Philippines on his behalf, to enhance U.S. companies’ investment in the Philippines’ innovation economy, its clean energy transition and critical minerals sector, and the food security of its people. Furthermore, the leaders announce that the United States and the Philippines will co-host the 2024 Indo-Pacific Business Forum – the United States’ marquee commercial event in the region – in Manila, which will further establish the Philippines as a key hub for regional supply chains and high-quality investment. Additionally, the two countries will pursue engagements with stakeholders, including in the business and social sectors, regarding opportunities to enhance bilateral economic engagement in a manner that is worker-centered, sustainability-driven, fair, and transparent, focusing on sectors in which it is critical to develop resilient supply chains and in which significant and meaningful economic value-added and employment can be generated in the United States and the Philippines.

The leaders welcome their countries’ plans to prioritize bilateral economic cooperation through the U.S.-Philippines Trade and Investment Framework Agreement (TIFA). The leaders also applaud progress in developing the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, which will deliver concrete benefits to our workers, families, and businesses by promoting trade, supply chain resilience, clean economy development, and anti-corruption throughout the region. The two leaders look forward to seeing one another again in San Francisco this November for the APEC Economic Leaders’ Week, to advance sustainable and inclusive economic growth in the region.

Recognizing that the climate crisis poses an existential threat to the world, and the Philippines’ particular vulnerability to the effects of climate change, the leaders reaffirm they will undertake urgent action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. They resolve to expand collaboration on renewable energy production to accelerate the clean energy transition while bringing down energy costs and expanding energy access for families. The leaders hail progress in negotiating a U.S.-Philippines civil nuclear cooperation agreement (“123 agreement”). The United States and the Philippines will also pursue an ambitious program of cooperation on wind, solar, and geothermal energy, while enhancing cooperation on reducing greenhouse gas emissions from the waste, road, and shipping sectors.

The leaders further resolve to expand cooperation on environmental protections, including enhanced domain awareness, marine conservation, and protecting coastal areas from environmental degradation. Acknowledging the paramount significance of science and technology in propelling our countries forward, the leaders pledge to promote increased cooperation and knowledge sharing between the United States and the Philippines through the Science and Technology Agreement (STA), and they welcome U.S. plans to establish an Open-RAN Interoperability Lab in Manila. Recognizing the importance of enhancing and sustaining joint efforts in outer space activities, the leaders also welcome their countries’ plan to prioritize and strengthen bilateral space cooperation, including by convening their first bilateral Civil Space Dialogue this year.

The leaders underscore the importance of strong democratic institutions, rule of law, and respect for human rights, including freedom of expression, press, and association, and they note the importance of countering any form of violence in our societies, such as that against civil society, women, children, and marginalized groups. The leaders welcome the establishment of a bilateral Labor Working Group as part of the U.S.-Philippines TIFA, which will provide an important opportunity for the United States and the Philippines to work together on implementation of internationally recognized labor rights, and to facilitate exchange and dialogue among U.S. and Philippine governments and labor unions, as well as employer organizations.

The leaders recognize that the people-to-people ties between the two countries are an indispensable pillar of our partnership, manifested in their immense contributions to both the United States and the Philippines. The leaders note the service and sacrifice of Filipinos in World War II, and more recently, the significant contributions of Filipino Americans on the frontlines of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Looking to the future, President Biden and President Marcos express the utmost confidence that the special ties between their nations and their people will only grow stronger with time, as the United States and the Philippines continue to realize their shared vision of partnership, peace, and prosperity.

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whitehouse.gov · by The White House · May 1, 2023

19. Washington Must Focus on Asia When Targeting Tehran’s Drone Technology Procurement

I recommend Dr. Bruce Bechtol's book on North Korea Military Proliferation in the Middle East and Africa – Enabling Violence and Instability to examine the relationship between north Korea and Iran.  Specifically chapter 4 is very enlightening: "North Korea and Military Proliferation to Iran: Pyongyang's Most Important Customer."

Washington Must Focus on Asia When Targeting Tehran’s Drone Technology Procurement

Asia has long served as a critical hub for military and missile technology to the Islamic Republic.

The National Interest · by Behnam Ben Taleblu · April 30, 2023

The U.S. Treasury Department recently sanctioned a multi-jurisdiction procurement ring supporting the Islamic Republic of Iran’s drone and military programs. Concurrent with Iran’s continued proliferation of drones to Russia for use in Ukraine, both the Biden administration and Congress have sought to stem the flow of American components found in downed Iranian unmanned aerial systems.

Yet while preventing transfers of such Western equipment to Iran is both necessary and understandable, Asia has long served as a critical hub for military and missile technology to the Islamic Republic. An increase in the pace and scope of penalties targeting Tehran’s networks and fronts in Asia will be essential to disrupting Iran’s drone program.

The latest U.S. penalties center around an Iranian electronics firm known by an English transliteration of its acronym, PASNA. First sanctioned in 2018 for seeking technology with military applications from China and for reportedly providing material support to the sanctioned Iran’s Electronics Components Industries—a subsidiary of the sanctioned Iran Electronics Industries, which is, in turn, a subsidiary of Iran’s sanctioned Ministry of Defense and Armed Forces Logistics (MODAFL)—PASNA continued its activities after exposure in 2018 through fronts, aliases, and affiliates, both in Iran and Malaysia.

Beyond exposing these fronts, the Treasury Department also sanctioned the managing director of PASNA, Mehdi Khoshghadam, as well as four suppliers of electronic goods and microelectromechanical systems to PASNA operating in both Hong Kong and the People’s Republic of China. These penalties build on recent efforts by the Treasury Department to disrupt other Iranian drone technology procurement rings in Asia. Last month, the department targeted five firms operating in China and Hong Kong that sold aerospace components and light-aircraft engines to Iran Aircraft Manufacturing Industries, which is a subsidiary of the Iran Aviation Industries Organization, itself another MODAFL subsidiary.

Iran’s ability to erect, sustain, and even recreate front companies across jurisdictions despite Washington’s increased willingness to crack down on drone procurement, production, and proliferation networks should come as a surprise to no one. Oil shippers and shadowy fronts across Asia have long helped the Islamic Republic generate illicit revenues through the sale or storage of crude oil and petrochemicals, including at the height of U.S. sanctions.

For Tehran, which has a robust domestic defense industrial base, continued illicit procurement of drone components is a sign of the growing importance these low-flying unmanned aerial systems play in bolstering the revolutionary regime’s status and security.

Iran’s transfer of drones to Russia marked a historic first in Tehran’s relationship with Moscow, and one that the Islamic Republic is reportedly already cashing in on. Over the past three decades, it was Iran who served as a junior partner to Russia, purchasing Russian weapons like surface-to-air missile systems, fighter jets, and even diesel-electric submarines. Now it is Iranian weapons that are helping preserve Russian long-range strike platforms like cruise and ballistic missiles and helping sustain Russia in its war against Ukraine.

Regionally, variants of Iranian drones have become a regular feature of low-intensity conflict in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen where they bolster the capabilities of Iran’s “Axis of Resistance” and strike U.S. persons, interests, and partners. On the home front, while drones were once seen as the purview of the elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, these weapons are being increasingly diffused through Iran’s Armed Forces and branches of Iran’s Artesh, or national military.

Additionally, over the past few years, Iran has taken to directly launching drones from its own territory, striking at adversaries while operating beneath their threshold for the overt use of force. Of particular importance here have been loitering munitions or suicide drones. Such weapons have been launched by Iran in a combined arms operation with land-attack cruise missiles against Saudi Arabian oil facilities in 2019, as well as against moving targets like an Israeli-owned oil tanker in 2021.

All of this is to suggest that sporadic or graduated sanctions against Iranian procurement or proliferation networks will not handicap Iran’s drone program overnight nor will it deter future drone use by Iran. For example, there is no reason why Washington waited half a decade to sanction the head of an entity that was already subject to sanctions and still engaging in sanctionable activity, as was the case with PASNA and its managing director.

Conversely, sustained pressure against managers, boards, companies, and networks alike—especially when levied in large tranches rather than meted out over time—does stand a chance at both exposing and impeding the supply chains that feed Iran’s drone program. This is especially the case when focused on jurisdictions across Asia where illicit Iranian activity continues. Washington must therefore allocate more time, resources, and political capital to keep pace with this threat.

Behnam Ben Taleblu is a senior fellow focusing on Iranian political and security issues at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), where he contributes to its Iran Program, Center on Military and Political Power (CMPP), and Center on Economic and Financial Power (CEFP).

Image: Shutterstock.

The National Interest · by Behnam Ben Taleblu · April 30, 2023

20. The United States and Saudi Arabia: A Possible Path Forward

Download the entire memo here: https://www.fdd.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/fdd-memo-the-united-states-and-saudi-arabia-possible-path-forward.pdf

April 28, 2023 | Memo

The United States and Saudi Arabia: A Possible Path Forward

https://www.fdd.org/analysis/2023/04/28/the-united-states-and-saudi-arabia/

Bradley Bowman

CMPP Senior Director

Orde Kittrie

Senior Fellow

Ryan Brobst

Research Analyst

The United States and Saudi Arabia are at a crossroads. The decades-long arrangement in which the United States essentially guaranteed Saudi security in return for the reliable export of oil may be on the ropes. Much of Washington is eager to downsize its commitments in the Middle East to focus on the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the Indo-Pacific. Meanwhile, Riyadh, for its part, is contending with a deteriorating regional security environment and declining trust in American security assurances. Saudi Arabia now reportedly seeks security guarantees from the United States, reliable and expeditious access to American weapons, and U.S. cooperation with a civilian nuclear program, including Saudi enrichment of uranium.1

The Biden administration will likely be unable to agree to Riyadh’s requests without congressional acquiescence, which seems unlikely owing to anti-Saudi sentiment among some members of Congress. Riyadh is therefore increasingly sidling up to Beijing.2 It is not clear whether Riyadh realizes that this strategy risks sending already-strained U.S.-Saudi relations into a freefall. Americans of both parties increasingly believe that countries that “side” with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) are not America’s friends (or partners).

So, what comes next? Should the two countries go their separate ways, accepting a strategic divorce? Or is there a path forward to put the relationship on a firmer footing and perhaps move toward a strategic partnership agreement that would be consistent with American interests and address key Saudi concerns? What could such an agreement look like?

Attempting to answer or at least explore those questions is the purpose of this memo, which is organized into three sections. The first section describes the strategic context for the bilateral relationship by detailing what appear to be the key priorities and concerns in both capitals, summarizing the essential problems in the relationship, and highlighting the role of the People’s Republic of China — the elephant (or dragon) in the room. Despite the differences and disagreements between the United States and Saudi Arabia, the second section attempts to identify common objectives that the two governments share or around which they could at least build bilateral consensus. The final section analyzes seven areas that could perhaps constitute a U.S.-Saudi Arabia strategic partnership agreement that would serve American interests, address key Saudi objectives, and garner support in both capitals. Those areas include: security assurances and cooperation; preventing a nuclear-armed Iran; arms transfers; oil, gas, and petrochemicals; nuclear energy; terrorism; and human rights.

21. Iran Denies Schoolgirls Were Poisoned Despite Overwhelming Evidence

Iran Denies Schoolgirls Were Poisoned Despite Overwhelming Evidence

fdd.org ·  · May 1, 2023

Latest Developments

Following an investigation, Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence announced on April 28 that no poisoning of schoolgirls has occurred in the country. Instead, the statement blamed unidentified foreign “enemies” for engineering allegations of poisoning in an effort to discredit the Islamic Republic. The statement denies overwhelming evidence that gas poisonings have taken place, effectively dismissing the experiences of thousands of student victims in some 460 attacks in approximately 140 cities since November. Over the weekend, a gas poisoning of a girls’ school in the Iranian city of Andimeshk sent some 50 students to the hospital.

Expert Analysis

“As these attacks continue, the regime has gone back to its favorite method of denial and blaming everyone besides itself. The regime’s claim that schoolgirls are faking the symptoms is particularly outrageous. The least that Western governments can do is to impose sanctions on regime officials and initiate an investigation into what is going on in Iran.” — Saeed Ghasseminejad, FDD Senior Iran and Financial Economics Advisor

“As expected, the Islamic Republic is once again pointing a finger of blame abroad for crises created by itself at home. The Islamist regime and its security apparatus are the only ones with the both the intention and capability to carry out such far-reaching chemical attacks on their own youth, and, in particular, schoolgirls. The dismissal of evidence and the reliance on a tried-and-true playbook of denial and deflection rub salt in the wounds of the almost 500 cases of poisonings against young students in Iran.” — Behnam Ben Taleblu, FDD Senior Fellow

The Attacks

The first poisonings reportedly occurred in late November 2022 among 18 schoolgirls and staff at the Nour Technical School in the religious center of Qom, approximately 80 miles southwest of Tehran. The girls went to the hospital with symptoms that included headaches, heart palpitations, respiratory problems, nausea, dizziness, lethargy, and inability to move, according to media reports. The same school experienced another round of poisonings on December 13. Still, it was only in March 2023 that the poisonings came to dominate Iranian political debates as the number of attacks increased and their geographical distribution spread.

Regime Deflects Blame

The Islamic Republic likely perpetrated the attacks in response to the revolutionary protests that have consumed the country since September 2022, when government agents killed 22-year-old Mahsa Amini for allegedly wearing her headscarf improperly. In a country like Iran, where the government has tight control over society, it is unlikely that anti-regime groups could have engaged in such operations. In addition, dissident groups have to target schoolgirls in the middle of a revolution promoting women’s rights.

Iran’s denial that the poisonings took place marks its most glaring attempt to deflect responsibility for the attacks. In the past, the regime had at least recognized there had been poisonings. When 104 chemical attacks occurred on March 6 alone, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, acknowledged the problem, saying the “poisonings are a grave and unforgivable crime” that warrant “the most severe of punishments.”

Related Analysis

“Chemical Attacks on Iranian Students,” by Saeed Ghasseminejad and Mark Dubowitz

“Who Is Poisoning Iranian Schoolgirls?” by Reuel Marc Gerecht and Ray Takeyh

“New Chemical Attacks in Iran Hospitalize Schoolgirls,” FDD Flash Brief

fdd.org ·  · May 1, 2023

22. Shrinking U.S. Military Capacity Now for Capabilities Later Is A Mistake

Excerpts:

Promises hold no sway. Only good old fashioned “consistent upward and adequately funded demand signals” will help better balance capacity and capability to compete and deter now, as well as win the war later. Pentagon leaders have repeatedly shown their bias to pass the problem to the next administration. Congress must now act to bridge the yawning military capability gaps.

Shrinking U.S. Military Capacity Now for Capabilities Later Is A Mistake

Enemies are not scared of ghost fleets and expanding bone yards. What does send a message is multiple cranking production lines across the services — everything from ships and drones to munitions and aircraft. 

19fortyfive.com · by Mackenzie Eaglen · May 1, 2023

Year after year and bill after bill, Congress keeps telling the Pentagon to reduce near-term risk by maintaining capacity and to meet global combatant commander requirements. Yet one administration after the next continues to shrink and age the U.S. military. The result is now clear: The U.S. is left with fewer options to manage global events and keep simmering crises from bursting into full-blown conflicts.

Marines stuck on-base in Japan for lack of available ships were forced to skip a recent training exercise. After February’s devastating earthquake in Turkey, the commandant of the Marine Corps said he could not send help to a key NATO ally. Gen. David Berger had the Marines, the equipment, and the proper training for units. What the Marines didn’t have in the region was a ship, specifically an amphibious vehicle, for crisis response. The result, according to the commandant, is that combatant commanders “start to accept risk. Where they can’t get to something, they can’t deter something.”

Yet the gospel of “divest to invest” reigns supreme at the Pentagon.

Conflict and Competition

This year, the president’s defense budget seeks to let go of eight ships, including three amphibs, before the end of their service lives. Congress should reject this waste outright.

It is wasteful because not everything is utilized for war alone. Plenty of so-called legacy systems are needed for competition and deterrence on a daily basis. For example, so-called traditional intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) aircraft such as the RC-135 were of limited utility after Russia invaded Ukraine. But just prior, those and other planes were “in constant use in the lead-up to the invasion” collecting critical intelligence, according to Defense Intelligence Agency director Lt. Gen. Scott Berrier.

Traditional ISR, it turns out, still provides the bulk of our intel collection. These systems “can collect on the periphery and actually analyze and process that information,” according to the general. Berrier concluded by reminding Congress of the obvious: there is a “balance between ISR in competition and ISR in conflict.”

Ya don’t say?

But the U.S. military is now so small that it is foreclosing options that are cheaper — namely, prevention — for outcomes that are avoidable, ugly, and costlier.

There are challenges to maintaining capacity wherever possible. But sacrificing credible combat capability for the promise of some replacement leaves us perennially waiting for a future that always seems another two years away. Indeed, leaders are scrambling to prevent a two-year schedule slip on the new Minuteman missile replacement right now.

Earlier this year, the Air Force’s long-overdue trainer replacement timeline slipped again, from 2024 to 2027. This lack of available new planes leads to an ever-elongating pipeline to train new Air Force pilots. The dearth of trainer aircraft is creating an 18-to-24-month wait just to begin pilot training, contributing to a pilot shortage crisis.

Meanwhile across the Air Force, the service now operates eight separate fleets over a half-century old, and one — the KC-135 tanker — that exceeds 60 years of life.

Time to Act Now

Enemies are not scared of ghost fleets and expanding bone yards. What does send a message is multiple cranking production lines across the services — everything from ships and drones to munitions and aircraft.

These hot production lines “by themselves, are a deterrent, and we need to put much more focus on that across the board,” Undersecretary of Defense William LaPlante told Congress last month.

But this Pentagon leadership team has proposed the permanent shuttering of too many production lines — from the LPD-17 amphib and the HH-60W rescue helicopter, to the CH-47 Chinook helicopter and the V-22 Osprey.

Recent history shows repeatedly that closed lines have workforces that do not easily return years later. Nor do converted facilities get recertified for regulatory and environmental reviews quickly. There is essentially no such thing as a “warm” line, where people and products wait around for the possibility of future orders.

Promises hold no sway. Only good old fashioned “consistent upward and adequately funded demand signals” will help better balance capacity and capability to compete and deter now, as well as win the war later. Pentagon leaders have repeatedly shown their bias to pass the problem to the next administration. Congress must now act to bridge the yawning military capability gaps.

Now a 19FortyFive Contributing Editor, Mackenzie Eaglen is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where she works on defense strategy, defense budgets, and military readiness. She is also a regular guest lecturer at universities, a member of the board of advisers of the Alexander Hamilton Society, and a member of the steering committee of the Leadership Council for Women in National Security.

19fortyfive.com · by Mackenzie Eaglen · May 1, 2023

23. How to Avoid a Great-Power War

Listen to the podcast at this link:https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/how-to-avoid-great-power-war-mark-milley

How to Avoid a Great-Power War

A Conversation With General Mark Milley

May 2, 2023

Foreign Affairs · May 2, 2023

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

General Mark Milley has his work cut out for him. As chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he’s helping to guide U.S. strategy in Ukraine.

At the same time, he’s trying to figure out how the United States should navigate in a very different world—one where it is no longer the sole superpower; where tension with both Russia and China is growing; and where for the first time in decades, it is all too easy to imagine a great-power war.

General Milley, thanks for doing this.

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GENERAL MARK MILLEY

Hey, thanks Dan, appreciate it.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

So let’s jump right into the subject that has no doubt dominated most of your last year, and we’ll dominate your next five months on this job. What do you expect a likely Ukrainian offensive in the coming weeks to achieve, and what would the path be from a successful offensive to a negotiated outcome to this war?

GENERAL MARK MILLEY

I don’t want to speculate on a specific offensive or not. What I will say is that over the last several months, the Ukrainians have asked us for assistance, military assistance, to help them, to train, to man, to equip their forces. Specifically about nine brigades worth of combined arms, armor, and mech infantry type forces. Also, there’s some light infantry, ranger type units, that we helped train. And I say we—I mean NATO, all of the European partners, and we did that.

So I would tell you that the Ukrainians right now have the capability to attack, they can conduct offensive operations, and they also have the capability to defend, significantly enhanced from what they were just a year ago for conventional operations. So, I think their capability has significantly increased. So they can either do attack or defense. So I don’t want to suggest that they may or may not conduct an offensive operation in the coming weeks. That’ll be up to them. They’ve got a significant amount of planning and coordination and all of that to do, if they were to do an offensive operation. But they’re prepared to do offense or defense.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

And the path from there to a negotiated outcome? You’ve stressed again and again the need for this war to end in a negotiation, as has President Biden, President Zelensky, and many others. How do we get there given the assessments from senior U.S. government officials that Putin is not exactly in a mood to negotiate at this point?

GENERAL MARK MILLEY

I would say a couple things. First, all wars do end, sooner or later, and how they end really is the question. And in this case, you know, what is war about to begin with? War is about imposing your political will on your opponent by the use of organized violence. And wars happen when diplomacy fails.

So when the Russians decided to invade, they had strategic objectives. One of their strategic objectives was to collapse the Zelensky government; capture the capital of Kyiv, to do that relatively quickly; advance from the Russian border all the way to Dnipro River, do that in a short amount of time, four to six weeks, perhaps; and then also to cut off Ukraine’s access to the sea, to the Sea of Azov, by securing Kherson and Odessa. Very short order—the invasion started on the 24th of February—in very short order, Russia fell short of their strategic objectives, really within about a month or so. And the Russians could not militarily achieve what they set out to do.

And then what happens is, at the end of March, maybe beginning of April, in that timeframe of last year, Putin readjusts and resets his strategic objectives. And then he says, I’m just going to limit my objectives to the southern border, the southern oblasts—provinces—of Ukraine, and to consolidate power in Donbas, secure the Crimea, and so on. So he takes his entire military, shifts them further to the south and to the east. And then he launches a second set of what I would call operational objectives—and he failed there as well.

So he has not yet completely secured the Donbas. He has not yet achieved his operational objectives, down in that region. And yet you’ve got, I don’t know, maybe 200 plus thousand—maybe 250,000, a large number—of Russian casualties, killed and wounded. And he has replaced them with his first tranche of mobilized reservists, about 300,000 of those guys, two to 300,000. So there’s still around 200,000 Russian troops—poorly led, not well trained, poorly equipped, not well sustained—in Russian-occupied Ukraine. But they’re there.

For the Ukrainian side, in about August timeframe the Ukrainians launched two sequential offensives. One offensive—counteroffensive—was up in the Kharkiv region, and then it’s advanced across the river, and it’s now really the frontline traces in and around Crimea; and they were very successful in doing that. And then they launched an offensive, a counteroffensive, down in the Kherson region; and they were very successful in doing that. So they have two very successful counteroffensives where they compelled the Russians to withdraw, and closed their lines and reestablished their defense. And then things set in for the winter. And for the winter, even though there’s been a lot of fighting, almost World War I style fighting, there’s been very little change of hands of significant pieces of territory with the possible exception of Bakhmut.

So you’ve got essentially a situation along a frontline that extends, I don’t know, probably Washington, D.C. to Atlanta, something like that. It’s quite a ways. And that front line hasn’t changed hands. It’s essentially been stalemated. And then the Ukrainians asked us for help to build up their force so that they had the capability, anyway, of conducting offensive operations with combined arms maneuver with heavy forces, mechanized armor and infantry. We’ve done that, and we have not yet seen what that’s going to result in—you know, this planning. But I’m not going to discuss that in this form, so we’ll see.

Then the question becomes, how does it end? Let’s just say for the sake of argument that there is an offensive. And now you’re dealing in probabilities and speculation, which is always a dangerous thing to do. But I think that it’s fair to say, if there were an offensive, that there’s a possibility of a variety of outcomes. Clearly one of those outcomes could achieve significant success and collapse the Russian frontline across the board. And that’s happened before in previous wars—World War I, for example. So there’s a possibility of that. Then there’s a possibility of partial success. There’s a possibility of limited success. There’s a possibility of no success. So all of these are ranges of outcome if there were an offensive operation. Then the opposite is true—maybe the Ukrainians are going to do a defensive operation, and the Russians would have a great challenge mounting an offensive operation. So we’re going to see what the future holds.

I do think, though, that the probability of either side achieving their political objectives—war is about politics through the sole use of military means—I think that’s going to be very difficult, very challenging. And frankly, I don’t think the probability of that is likely in this year. But I do think the Russians have suffered a tremendous amount. They’ve lost a lot of casualties. Their economy has been hurt significantly. Their ground forces, at least, have suffered enormously.

And I think that rational folks, as part of the Russian decision-making process, will conclude—I believe, over either months or a year or two—they’re going to conclude that the cost exceeds the benefit, and it’ll be time to do something, at least from a negotiating standpoint. That time may not be now—I can’t read minds. I don’t know when Putin will be ready to do that—but at a certain point, if he’s rational, he needs to do that. He could do it tonight; he could end the war tonight. Of course, he has political constraints internal to Russian politics. But they’re going to have to figure that out because they’re not going to win.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

If we look back a year ago, it striking to me that we were all thinking a lot about escalation risks, including nuclear escalation risks. That’s not front of mind for most of us—maybe we’re deluding ourselves, but how have you thought about managing escalation risks in this context, and how has that shaped our assistance, our advice to the Ukrainians or approach to the conflict in general?

GENERAL MARK MILLEY

Well, I think that it’s in everyone’s interests not to escalate. Russia does not want a war with NATO or the United States, and NATO and the United States don’t want a war with Russia. So it’s in everyone’s interests in that regard, and Ukraine certainly doesn’t want that scale of war in its territory. So it’s in everyone’s interests not to escalate. Having said that, the possibility of escalation is very real. Wars are highly emotional; there’s a tremendous amount of fear, there’s pride, there’s interest, as Thucydides would tell us. And all of that is at play all at the same time, in varying degrees of inputs. So the possibility of escalation is always there.

Every single day, we are always—any action we take, or any action we see the Russians taking, we are always calculating the possibility of escalation. Why? Because the consequences of escalation are so severe, and the consequences of armed conflict between the United States and Russia, or any of NATO and Russia, would be devastating for both sides. So it’s in everyone’s interest not to have it. We always calculate it and we’re always conscious of any move and the possibility of escalation, and we manage that as closely as we can.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

If we were talking about great-power war 18 months ago, we’d be focused on China. One thing that has been striking about the last year or so is the growing closeness of Russia and China. I’m curious how you see that relationship, what your assessment of that relationship is, especially in the context of the war in Ukraine, looking at what Xi Jinping wants to achieve vis-à-vis the war. And then is there anything you see the U.S. able to do to prevent that from becoming an enduring feature of the international security landscape?

GENERAL MARK MILLEY

Unlike the Cold War, now, you’ve got three great powers in the world: the United States, China, and Russia. All have significant inherent power potential in their populations, their economy, and of course their military. And all three have substantial nuclear arsenals. So the United States is the most powerful by any measure. But having said that, Russia and China are quite powerful as well. So it is not in the U.S. interest to see Russia and China form a strategic military alliance, and we should do what we can to make sure that that doesn’t happen.

But three is going to be more complicated than two, where the Cold War relationship was between the Soviet Union and the United States, you know, and there were other powers that hovered around each of those two countries. But it was really a struggle between the Soviet Union and the United States. So it was a bipolar world, even though I acknowledge that there were other powers. Today we’re in a tripolar world, so three is more complicated than two—and that relationship is very difficult to manage.

So what we have to be conscious of, and careful of, is not to drive China and Russia close together in a military sense. There’s going to be relations between countries, so competition’s not the issue here. The issue is conflict and war. So we want to make sure that Russia and China don’t form some sort of geostrategic, political, military alliance against the United States. There are some indicators out there of China and Russia becoming closer together. I would say that, they bear watching very, very closely, although—

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

But it’s not yet that geostrategic military alliance that we feel.

GENERAL MARK MILLEY

I wouldn’t say that it is—yet. It may yet develop into that. But we’ve seen some economic assistance; not strong in terms of the military piece of this. Whatever exercises they do are small, relatively inconsequential. I mean, they’re not without consequence, but they’re not huge military exercises together. In terms of military support and lethal support to Russia, nothing really significant yet. The Russians have asked, for sure; they’re asking a lot of countries for ammunition and so on. But there is a relationship, military relationship, with Iran and Russia, for example—that’s not good.

But with China it’s been very, very modest. And President Xi, I would argue that he—very, very tough guy, hard guy, consummate realist. Very ruthless, Chinese Communist Party, very ruthless; but they’re very realist in the sense that they are keenly aware of cost, benefit, and risk, and they too do not want outright armed conflict with the United States. They recognize—the Chinese do—how powerful the United States is. Despite what people may say out there, the Chinese are fully aware of how powerful the United States is. And so they’re not looking for that kind of armed conflict either. They want to achieve their national objectives, but they want to actually do it without armed conflict.

So we’ll see where that goes, but we’re not seeing yet a full-fledged, really cemented, long-lasting, resilient geopolitical alliance between China and Russia. Could that happen in the future? It could, and we need to be wary of that, and we need to do what we can to make sure that doesn’t happen.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

When you look at the risk of armed conflict in Asia, you tend to talk a lot about the need to do more to deter China. As you look at the war in Ukraine and the lessons of that, what are you bringing to the Pacific theater, to concerns about deterring China, and where do you think we need to be doing work when it comes to that deterrence challenge given changing technology and everything else?

GENERAL MARK MILLEY

The first thing to remember is no two wars are alike. An invasion of Taiwan by China is not going to look like an invasion, necessarily, of Ukraine by Russia. The fundamentals are different, in the sense that—just the terrain and the weather, it’s obvious. You’ve got a landlocked country of Ukraine, with a land border with Russia. And Russia was able to mobilize and place into assembly areas and attack positions for an invasion, you know, 140,000, 150,000 troops just in the lead echelons, with another a hundred thousand behind them, on multiple axes of advance across a land border. So then they have ground lines of communication, et cetera.

The Chinese problem is fundamentally different. In order to attack Taiwan, they would have to mount an amphibious invasion combined with paratroopers and air assault, rotary wing helicopters, missiles, all the prep fires that would go into that; they’d have to isolate beachheads and then have to have the amphibious lift in order to do that; and cross basically a hundred miles of water, which is challenging in and of itself. Then they’d have to ensure that the subsurface of the water was secure, as well, from submarine attack. They’d have to clear mines, clear beaches, they’d have to go in and essentially attack and seize an urban area that’s about three and a half million people, in a country that’s very mountainous and lends itself to the defense.

So I would tell you that, you know, be careful about drawing straight-line lessons or conclusions. I think one lesson, though, that the Chinese are probably witting of is that real war is quite a bit different than war on paper. And when real people are dying, and real tanks and infantry fighting vehicles are being blown up, and real friction is occurring, sometimes things don’t go exactly the way you may think they go.

So, the Chinese have not, at least to our knowledge, we have not seen the level of training and exercises that would be warranted to conduct that size, scale, scope of an invasion. Think about Normandy. At Normandy, the United States and Britain put about 120,000 troops ashore—plus they dropped in three airborne divisions the night before, and they put about 120,000 troops on the beach, I think before noon or by the afternoon; and then there were follow-on troops in the days afterward.

Now, the Taiwanese military is not, you know, the Wehrmacht of 1944, but it’s not zero either, the Taiwanese military does have capabilities. That military that landed at Normandy had already done the invasions of North Africa, had done the invasion of Sicily, had done the amphibious operations in Italy, and they had the benefit of the lessons learned of, I don’t know, probably a hundred or so amphibious operations in the Pacific during World War II. And they were led by experienced, seasoned leaders that were hitting the beach, et cetera.

So that military, even as good as it was at the time in 1944—don’t forget that Eisenhower wrote a letter of resignation in the event of failure the night prior. And that was over the English channel, which is, whatever it is, 30 miles, something like that. And now you’re looking at a hundred miles with a military that has never done anything like that at all. And to do that and pull it off successfully—even against the Taiwan military, which is not the Wehrmacht, granted—but the terrain is much tougher, much more complex terrain in Taiwan than it was at Normandy. I think it’s a real heavy lift, and I think the Chinese know that.

So what do we do? We need to deter armed conflict. And how do you deter? We know through history that the way to deter is to have a very, very strong, capable, multi-domain military, and ensure that your opponent knows that you have that capability, that that capability is overwhelming, knows that you have the will to use it, and you’ve communicated that to them. So what we need to do is make sure the United States military is not only just a little bit better, but a lot better, it’s overwhelmingly better than the Chinese military—to make sure that they know it and that we have the will to use it in the event of a crisis.

The other thing that has to happen, I think, is Taiwan needs to significantly and rapidly improve their defensive capability. And this includes essentially what you saw the Ukrainians do, which is a nation in arms—the Russians aren’t just fighting the Ukrainian army, they’re fighting the Ukrainian people. And you need to kind of review your defensive doctrine and develop your military into a capability that—many strategists have used the term porcupine strategy, which tells the Chinese that if you attack, you may achieve some limited success, but the cost is going to exceed the benefit, and the cost of attacking to seize Taiwan would be extremely high. And my guess is we have a relatively limited amount of time to ensure President Xi calculates like that, and that’s what deterrence is about.

[AD BREAK]

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

It strikes me that you seem much more assured in having this conversation than the general environment in Washington. There’s a line of argument that we in the American policy debate have gotten a bit hysterical about the threat from China. Do you have concerns that we are overreacting, creating self-fulfilling prophecies? Where do you think we are on assessing the challenge from China, and how do you see the debate here?

GENERAL MARK MILLEY

I kind of fall back to, you know, the old saying from Teddy Roosevelt’s time, right, Which is, you know, speak softly, carry a big stick, that sort of thing. And that’s where I think we should be. I think we should develop our military to such a—modernize our military to such a degree that it is overwhelmingly obvious to the Chinese that they cannot defeat it. So that’s one thing. And to make sure that we do all the right moves, diplomatically, economically, et cetera, to assure our friends and allies in the region that we’re going to be there, and we’re going to help deter, prevent, Chinese military aggression.

But we’re in a period, we’re in a pivot point—I think we’re in a pivot point, anyway—in terms of what I’ve referred to in the past as the character of war. And what I mean by that is, you’ve got the nature of war and you’ve got the character of war. The nature of war, arguably, is immutable. War is politics. That war involves fear and friction, uncertainty, chance—that’s the realm of the nature of war. And as long as humans are involved in war, then I would say those fundamentals about the nature of war—probably true. So the nature of war arguably doesn’t change.

But the character of war changes frequently. So the character of war refers to the tactics, the techniques, the procedures, the organization, the weapons, et cetera. And the character of war changes often; every time you get a software upgrade, technically the character of war has changed somehow. But the character of war only changes fundamentally once in a while. Think the development of the wheel, and then all of a sudden you’ve got chariots. Think of putting a bit in a horse’s mouth, and now you have the development of cavalry. Think about putting lands and grooves inside a metal tube and you go from a musket to a rifle. The biggest fundamental change that is commonly cited historically is between World War I and War War II, where you get the introduction of three technologies—the airplane; mechanization, the wheeled and tracked vehicles; and then those are linked together through wireless communications, through radio.

So I would argue that in today’s world, we are undergoing the most fundamental change in the character of war ever in recorded history, and it’s primarily being driven by technology. So what are some of those technologies? Well, first of all, you’ve got precision munitions and you’ve got ubiquitous sensors. So we can conduct long-range precision fires with greater accuracy, at greater range, than at any time in human history, period. And it’s not only us, but the Russians and the Chinese and other countries can do the same. And now we’re seeing the advent—in addition to long-range and precision, you’ve got the advent of speed hypersonics, so you’re introducing weapons that can travel at speeds that essentially, with today’s defensive technologies, are not defensible against yet. So you’ve got some fundamental changes in the ability to shoot.

You’ve also got fundamental change happening in the ability to see. So anyone who wears a Fitbit or GPS watch or runs around an iPhone—that’s a sensor. You know, it’s a means of communication for most people, and some track your health, I guess. But for other people it might be a sensor, a tracker. So we have an ability to sense and see the environment, and to pick up signals because there’s so much electronic signals in the environment. We have the ability—not just we, Russians, Chinese, et cetera—have the ability to see and sense that environment like never before. You can go on Google Earth today and get mapped data and see satellite imagery that was only available to the world’s most advanced militaries as late as, like, five years ago, 10 years ago. So our ability to sense the environment is incredible.

So the ability to see, and the ability to shoot, and shoot at range with accuracy, never before like it is today—just those two fundamentals in and of themselves augur a change in the fundamental character of war. But throw on top of that the rapidly developing technology of robotics—we already use robotics, UAVs, unmanned aerial vehicles, for example. We are now experimenting and developing unmanned maritime vehicles, both surface and subsurface. We’re conducting experiments with modern fighter aircraft or bomber aircraft that will be essentially unmanned. You’ll see in the future trucks and tanks and ground forces—you’ll see a very large percentage of those will be unmanned, So robotics is coming very, very rapidly into all militaries, much faster than people may think.

Throw on top of that some other things, the most significant of which is the ability to make decisions rapidly with great accuracy. So you could potentially—potentially—see artificial intelligence and quantum computing combined with robotics, become a dominant factor in the conduct of war. Combine that with the domains of cyber and space. There’s a lot of things happening undersea, and there’s about 20 other technologies that I won’t go over. But you’ve got this convergence of technologies that is driving, fundamentally driving, significant change in civil society, in human relationship to work, for example, our relationship to each other.

And there’s zero doubt in my mind that that’s going to have a huge impact on the conduct of military operations in the future. And just like in the past, the country that optimizes those technologies for the conduct of warfare—that country is going to have a decisive advantage, at least at the beginning and the opening shots of the next war. I want that country to be the United States.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

And what needs to change about the way we do strategy, the way the U.S. military operates, in order to prevent the Chinese from gaining that advantage?

GENERAL MARK MILLEY

Well, there’s several things we’ve got to do. One of the things we are doing is, you have to have a concept of war fighting. But at the same time, you’ve got to then also develop the war fighting organizations that would execute that concept. Once you figure that out, you’ve got to also figure out the technologies, the weapon systems, that these organizations would employ in order to successfully execute the concept. Then you’ve got to figure out the human piece. What is the type of people, the talent management, the training, the skills, the knowledge, the attributes, that are going to be required to be successful in that operating environment? So for example, I would argue that the future operating environment will be extraordinarily more lethal than that which we’ve seen in the past. Why? Because you can see better. Sense the environment better. You can hit it with precision better. You can probably hit at speed with, for example, a hypersonic weapon.

I think it’s also highly probable that decision in future war will more often than not occur in highly dense urban areas. And why do I say that? We know that by midcentury, we’re going to have something around the tune of about maybe 8 billion people in the world. We know there’s something like 10 or 15 megacities today defined as over 10 million people in the city. We know that midcentury, at least the projections that I’ve seen, show that we’ll probably have something like 50 megacities. And megacity—think about Seoul, for example, as a megacity, where you’ve got 27 to 30 million people, basically from the militarized zone all the way down to Ulsan.

So you’ve got these massive urban belts—think of Northern New Jersey and New York City, think of Rio de Janeiro. These are megacities, so, these are where people are going to live. And war will probably shift to be conducted more in highly dense urban areas than not. So for, I don’t know, hundreds of years, maybe thousands of years, the conduct of warfare has occurred—and armies and militaries have been optimized to fight wars—in rural areas, in deserts, in the rolling hills of northern Europe, that sort of thing. I would argue that decision in war in the future will probably fundamentally be decided in highly dense urban areas. We’ve seen some movie trailers, so to speak, or some previews of that, in recent wars. The war against ISIS was decided in Raqqa and Mosul, as an example.

So in any given war, you’re seeing the indicators, the leading indicators of the likely technologies, the tactics, the techniques, the procedures—you see them before that war starts. So, as we move into the next decade and decades that follow, I would submit that the outcomes of war will be decided fundamentally in urban areas. And the side that optimizes their military to fight in urban areas, that optimizes the technologies that are coming at us very quickly, and the the side that basically gets there firstest with the mostest, so to speak, and has the largest, most capable force that that optimizes those two things, I think will be successful.

And the last thing is, in order to be successful, you have to survive. And because it’s going to be a highly lethal environment, you’re going to be able to be seen. What are some of the attributes of a future force? It is entirely conceivable to me that a future force will need to be lots of small entities, small organizations that are in constant states of movement in order to survive on a highly lethal battlefield. And you’ll have to be invisible, either through technology or through basic cover and concealment sort of thing. But speed, size, and being nearly invisible will be fundamental to survival on a future battlefield.

And we will have to transform our military. We’re not going to throw the baby out with the bathwater here—70 percent of our navy is going to be still with us 10 years from now, 70 percent of the air force, 70 percent of the army. But about a third of that force we will need to fundamentally transform in order to continue to outpace anything that Russia or China can throw at us.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Let me close by stepping back even further—in historical perspective, you’re a student of history, you know that it’s pretty rare to go through a period of many decades without a great-power war. We’ve defied the odds already; with every passing year it seems like the odds of that go up in ways that must scare someone in your position.

GENERAL MARK MILLEY

I think that’s true. The World War II generation, the last group of people that fought a true great-power war, they’re passing very quickly. I went to Normandy a few years ago, when I was Chief of Staff of the Army, and I saw this guy who was a paratrooper from the 82nd Airborne Division. He’s in a wheelchair, he’s an older guy. And I leaned over to him and talked to him, and I said, so, tell me, Sergeant, what was your lesson that you want to tell the Chief of Staff of the Army, what’s your lesson from World War II? And I thought he was going to tell me something about tactics or, you know, three second rushes, or how to shoot a weapon or whatever. And his eyes filled with tears, and he looked at me and he said, General, never let it happen again. Never let it happen again.

And my father was very much like that as well. There were 7,000 Marines who died in 19 days on Iwo Jima, where my dad landed at Blue Beach. 34,000 wounded in 19 days at the Meuse-Argonne from October to November in 1918, 26,000 Americans killed in action from the beaches of Normandy to the deliberation of Paris. 26,000 Americans killed in a short period of time—not even counting the 40 million Soviet citizens, the Russian citizens who were killed in World War II, the 30 million Chinese, the 20 million Japanese, 20 million—I mean, it’s horrific. It’s unbelievable.

So that memory’s gone from our day-to-day existence. There’s no one in uniform in any military in the world who experienced a great-power war. There are no politicians currently in office that I’m aware of that have firsthand experience. And it’s worthwhile to remember how horrific it is, and that all of us should recommit ourselves to preventing such a horrific catastrophe, and try to resolve differences in means other than the use of the levels of violence that come with great-power war. And we need to again remember the methods that have worked in the past—deterrence, powerful militaries, capable militaries, strong militaries, transmitting your will to your opponent. These are things that have worked in the past and they’re likely to work in the future regardless of the weapon system, the modernization.

But we, the United States, if we do not meet that challenge, then it’s going to be a bad day and things are going to get really rough in the not-too-distant future. I think we’re up to that challenge. I think our country’s up to it. I know our military is; we’re very, very capable and strong and ready right now. But we do have to make some fundamental changes as we move forward.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Well, that is a good note to end on. General Milley, thank you so much for doing this.

GENERAL MARK MILLEY

Thanks, Dan. Appreciate it.

Foreign Affairs · May 2, 2023

24. Harvard Professor Writes Fawning Piece About the CCP

Excerpts:

China is not the flourishing private economy imagined by Kelman, but an economy and a society where the state and the party are everywhere and control everything. In his book The Perfect Dictatorship: China in the 21st Century, Norwegian political scientist Stein Ringen notes that the CCP is not, as Kelman implies, “single-mindedly dedicated to economic growth, but rather is “single-mindedly dedicated to its own preservation.” The CCP, Ringen writes, is “present in every government agency, central and local, in every unit of the military, in every town and village and neighborhood, in every school, in every university department and every student residence, in every business, and in every registered social organization.”

China expert Stein Ringen calls the CCP the “perfect dictatorship.” China expert Steven Mosher calls the CCP the “bully of Asia.” But useful idiot Steve Kelman concludes that the CCP “isn’t half bad.”

Harvard Professor Writes Fawning Piece About the CCP - The American Spectator | USA News and PoliticsThe American Spectator | USA News and Politics

spectator.org · by Francis P. Sempa · April 29, 2023

Harvard Professor Writes Fawning Piece About the CCP

The CCP under Xi, Kelman writes, is a significant improvement on China’s previous “parasitic emperors.”

April 28, 2023, 10:04 PM

China President Xi Jinping defends zero-COVID policy at party congress, Oct. 15, 2022 (CCTV via APTN/Bloomberg Markets and Finance/YouTube)

Where to begin? Communist regimes in their struggles with the West have benefited at various times from Western intellectuals that Lenin called “useful idiots.” Paul Hollander cataloged their naive political statements and harmful (to the West) activities in his book Political Pilgrims: Western Intellectuals in Search of the Good Society. Steve Kelman, a professor of public management at Harvard University’s Kennedy School, has entered their ranks with a fawning piece about the Chinese Communist Party in the Hill.

Kelman writes that “the current Chinese government is probably the least bad they have had in memory,” and he credits Deng Xiaoping with leading the CCP to break “with their Communist ideological past” and “essentially dismantling Maoism and allowing for the flourishing of a private economy.” China, in other words, is no longer communist, according to Kelman. “[M]ost Chinese can pursue their lives more or less as they choose,” Kelman explains, even if, as he admits, they face long prison sentences for publicly criticizing the government. And while Kelman shrinks from calling public debate in China “unconstrained,” he praises the CCP for allowing a “moderately wide range of opinions on current issues” to be voiced. The Chinese people, he claims, are not “terrified by a totalitarian state.”

Kelman acknowledges that “the political environment has become more restrictive under Xi Jinping,” but praises Xi for “the successful campaign against the kind of pervasive and daily corruption that characterized China in the decade or so before Xi.” Never mind that Xi’s anti-corruption campaigns, like Mao’s in the past, are designed to crush potential political rivals and quell any political opposition.

According to a global survey, Kelman writes, the Chinese people trust their government more than Americans trust theirs. It is not clear what Kelman is implying by citing that survey. Does China have a more trustworthy government than the United States or are Chinese citizens more reluctant than Americans to criticize their own government? To anyone other than a “useful idiot,” the answer is obviously the latter.

Kelman even excuses the CCP’s genocide (he uses the term “suppression”) of the Muslim Uyghurs in Xinjiang Province by placing it in the context of “terrorist actions … by separatists in the region whose ideology bares a strong resemblance to that of ISIS.” What is important to Kelman is “China’s achievement in lifting nearly 800 million people from poverty.” The CCP under Xi, Kelman writes, is a significant improvement on China’s previous “parasitic emperors,” the “corrupt kleptocracy of Chiang Kai-shek,” and “brutal communist revolutionaries led by Mao Zedong.”

Most China experts, however, believe that Xi has accumulated more power than any Chinese ruler since Mao. And noticeably absent from Kelman’s article are any references to China’s massive military build-up, its aggressive actions in the South China Sea and toward Taiwan, the CCP’s construction and expansion of a “surveillance state” that rivals anything Orwell or Huxley described in their novels, and the CCP’s expressed goal of replacing the United States as the world’s leading power.

Nor does Kelman mention Xi’s expressed commitment to “struggle for communism our entire lives” and his prediction of the inevitable triumph of socialism over capitalism. Perhaps he should read the revealing article by Matt Pottinger, David Feith, and Matthew Johnson in Foreign Affairs that uses Xi’s own words to show his and the CCP’s commitment to the victory of communism.

China is not the flourishing private economy imagined by Kelman, but an economy and a society where the state and the party are everywhere and control everything. In his book The Perfect Dictatorship: China in the 21st Century, Norwegian political scientist Stein Ringen notes that the CCP is not, as Kelman implies, “single-mindedly dedicated to economic growth, but rather is “single-mindedly dedicated to its own preservation.” The CCP, Ringen writes, is “present in every government agency, central and local, in every unit of the military, in every town and village and neighborhood, in every school, in every university department and every student residence, in every business, and in every registered social organization.”

China expert Stein Ringen calls the CCP the “perfect dictatorship.” China expert Steven Mosher calls the CCP the “bully of Asia.” But useful idiot Steve Kelman concludes that the CCP “isn’t half bad.”

25. Is America postured for a fight in the Indo-Pacific?

Is America postured for a fight in the Indo-Pacific?

Defense News · by Dustin Walker · May 1, 2023

The Biden administration promised 2023 would be “the most transformative year” for U.S. force posture in the Indo-Pacific region in a generation. With a trio of major political announcements and a proposed budget boost, 2023 is off to a strong start. But there is no time for a scenic overlook of recent accomplishments. To achieve the transformative effect needed to bolster deterrence against China, the Biden administration needs to keep its foot on the gas.

In January, the United States and Japan agreed to keep the U.S. 3rd Marine Division in Okinawa (instead of Guam) and to replace it with the new 12th Marine Littoral Regiment in 2025. The two countries also agreed to share ammunition storage at Kadena Air Base.

In February, the United States and the Philippines agreed to designate four new sites as part of the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement, or EDCA, which provides access for U.S. forces.

In March, the United States agreed as part of the AUKUS security partnership to increased U.S. submarine port visits to Australia and to rotate up to four Virginia-class submarines by as early as 2027.

Also in March, the Pentagon’s budget request included $2.3 billion for military construction west of the international date line — a $400 million increase from the prior year.

So far so good. But overcoming a decade-long “say-do” gap on Indo-Pacific posture and keeping pace with a rapidly evolving Chinese military threat will require sustained urgency matched by robust investment.

Building on recent political momentum is critical. With Japan, we need ambitious defense diplomacy to secure new access for U.S. forces and to make shared use of bases, ports, airfields and other facilities the rule, not the exception. And after years of legal and political challenges, the U.S. and the Philippines need to make up for lost time and maximize the potential of EDCA sites through accelerated investment and expanded combined training and operations.

Seaman Semajia Marshal heaves a mooring line on the Ticonderoga-class guided-missile cruiser Antietam near the Philippines. (MC2 William McCann/U.S. Navy)

More posture dollars should be focused directly on achieving a more distributed and resilient posture. Most investment in the Indo-Pacific is dedicated to maintaining existing facilities or executing legacy posture initiatives, some of questionable relevance to the current or future threat. That investment is also geographically concentrated. West of the international date line, the Pentagon plans to spend 75% of fiscal 2024 military construction funds in Japan and Guam — up from 66% the previous year. Going forward, more investment is needed in the second island chain, Oceania and Southeast Asia.

Beyond politics and budgets, achieving a “transformative” effect on Indo-Pacific posture requires actually moving forces. The Obama administration’s “pivot to Asia” was matched with two additional destroyers and fifth-generation fighters in Japan; an additional submarine and Terminal High Altitude Area Defense battery in Guam; and rotational littoral combat ships in Singapore, among other moves. The Biden administration needs to demonstrate similar follow-through, and there’s plenty of options to do so.

The Air Force has operated fifth-generation aircraft for nearly two decades, but it has no plan to permanently station its most advanced fighters in the Indo-Pacific. The Air Force has promised to maintain a continuous fighter presence at Kadena Air Base in Japan, including fifth-generation aircraft, as it withdraws and retires F-15C/D aircraft. Beyond that, it has offered no specifics. Basing F-35As at Misawa Air Base in Japan would be a strong next step.

The Multi-Domain Task Force is central to the Army’s contribution toward joint operations in the Indo-Pacific. But while it has based MDTFs in Washington state and Hawaii, the Army does not yet plan to station an MDTF west of the international date line. The Army chief of staff recently hinted this may change. The Biden administration should ensure it does, including by prioritizing access for an MDTF in defense diplomacy with Japan.

The Navy has long pledged to send its most advanced ships and aircraft to the Indo-Pacific. However, of the Navy’s 20 commissioned Virginia-class submarines — critical to the U.S. military’s advantage over China — the Navy has sent 14 to Atlantic ports and just six to Pacific ports. And none of the Navy’s most advanced attack boats are homeported west of the international date line. While keeping pace with Russia’s submarine threat is critical, the Biden administration should rebalance that laydown by stationing Virginia-class submarines in Guam and San Diego, California.

The Biden administration should also accelerate investment in the logistics network that is essential for credible deterrence and effective warfighting. Fuel storage and distribution is critical, especially with the planned closure of Red Hill Bulk Fuel Storage Facility. But the Pentagon is kicking the fuel can down the road. The Defense Logistics Agency plans to spend at least $360 million over the five-year Future Years Defense Program in projects for fuel facilities and storage west of the international date line. But it has requested no funding for those projects in next two fiscal years, and punted most projects to FY27 and FY28. Working with Congress, the Biden administration should accelerate these projects as able.

The weaknesses of U.S. force posture in the Indo-Pacific have contributed to the erosion of credible deterrence. But with sustained diplomatic urgency, robust investment and more advanced capabilities, a transformation of U.S. force posture can help restore and preserve credible deterrence in the Indo-Pacific.

Dustin Walker is a nonresident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute think tank. He was previously a professional staff member on the Senate Armed Services Committee and an adviser to Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.

26. Netflix: A Splashy Drama About the Diplomacy of Marriage

I downloaded all 8 episodes on my iPad and binge watched them on my flight to Seoul last week. It was a fun show and I appreciated all the parallels to current events. I wonder how all the power couples of State (e.g., husband and wife diplomats/ambassadors) compare? (Note sarcasm).

Excerpt:

With regard to politics, The Diplomat tends toward lightness, with occasional flashes of insight. There are abundant references to real-world crises, and a sight gag about an employee barely out of college who’s a Russia expert at the embassy because everyone who’s anyone has been sent to Ukraine. There’s a “bad guy” with his own private militia who’s seemingly modeled after the founder of the Wagner Group, and the American president seems like an unholy fusion of presidents 45 and 46: older than he’d like to be, crass, essentially eager to help. David Gyasi is engagingly hamstrung as the British foreign secretary, who’s caught between his scheming, unscrupulous boss and Kate, with whom he has a meaningful connection. And Stuart’s relationship with Kate is combative at first but eventually vital as they earn each other’s trust. The series is thoughtful about power, and why the people who crave it most are the least suited to wield it. But it’s most gratifying when it’s exposing the nuances of our most crucial commitments: how we know whom to trust, and what we do when things turn toxic.

A Splashy Drama About the Diplomacy of Marriage

On Netflix’s The Diplomat, relationships and geopolitics are similarly hard to wrangle.

By Sophie Gilbert

The Atlantic · by Sophie Gilbert · April 26, 2023

The pleasure of The Diplomat, Netflix’s zippy new geopolitical drama, is how enticingly it ties together tropes and tricks from shows gone by, a TV bouquet that’s undeniably familiar and yet still seems fresh. The premise—an American diplomat is reluctantly conscripted during a crisis into the role of ambassador to the United Kingdom—borrows equally from fish-out-of-water comedies and intense political thrillers. Kate Wyler, played by Keri Russell, is a sharp, diligent, charmingly slobby Foreign Service officer whose career has long come second to that of her charismatic husband, Hal (Rufus Sewell). When a British aircraft carrier is bombed off the coast of Iran and the White House reaches out about a vacant strategic position, she initially assumes it’s Hal they’re after. Kate, who thinks she’s on her way to filling a diplomatic position in Afghanistan, is an unlikely show pony. But Hal senses possibility. “You need to lean into the Cinderella thing,” he tells her as she balks at a photo shoot with British Vogue commemorating her new job. “I’m here for 30 funerals,” Kate replies. “The only tea-length garment I packed is a burka.”

For a show about geopolitical catastrophe, The Diplomat is surprisingly fun; it’s snappily structured to careen its way through kidnappings and catastrophic photo ops and refrigerator raids with bizarrely high stakes. Its creator, Debora Cahn, has worked on Homeland and The West Wing, but also on Grey’s Anatomy, whose DNA seems to inform The Diplomat’s tone—self-aware, smarter than it often seems, sometimes sillier than is strictly necessary. (To be fair, Homeland could be silly too.) When a young woman in a bad wig bundles Hal into a car at the end of the first episode and sticks a hypodermic needle in his neck, the moment is a shock for viewers, but not for Kate, who reels off a list of people who have targeted Hal in the past, including disgruntled Islamic State commanders, Hezbollah generals. Even the secretary of state has it in for him—clearly the man has a history.

But for all its insouciance with regard to plot, The Diplomat is also astute when it comes to relationships: the special ones, the damaging ones, and the ones that manage to be both. In the second half of the show’s eight episodes, the action swerves its way toward an explosive cliff-hanger. I found the momentum less interesting, though, than the thesis the show quietly espouses early on: that maintaining a marriage is more like diplomacy than many of us realize.

Read: The exquisite pain of monogamous life

Kate’s relationship with Hal, we can see immediately, is complicated, but in a deeply sympathetic way. Russell—who in her career has played a Mouseketeer, a curly-haired, college ingenue, a Russian assassin role-playing a housewife, and a nurse trying to protect kids from a cocaine-addled bear—is in godlike form. Kate is grumpy (I lost count after the seventh muttered “Jesus Christ”), stubborn, and exacting, yet Russell makes her lovable, too. She also offsets some of the character’s more clichéd personality traits—messiness, a lack of personal graces—by emphasizing her competence, a quality that’s always somehow in short order among TV’s most high-strung heroes. Kate has spent the bulk of her career supporting Hal, a peacocking, intensely ambitious networker whose charm is rivaled only by his egocentrism. Her reluctance to take the job she’s offered, we soon understand, has to do with Hal—not only how he’ll respond to being shoehorned into the role of a diplomatic spouse, but also what kind of trouble he’ll kick up, left to his own devices in London.

Read: The Americans’ marriage faces its greatest test yet

The couple’s chemistry, though, is undeniable. Sewell smolders unknowably as Hal; he says over and over again how happy he is to be supporting Kate, while constantly undercutting her, by instinct if not by intention. The revelations of the first episode include that Kate is—without her knowledge—being assessed to potentially replace the vice president, and that she and Hal are likely headed for divorce. The two paths can’t coexist, which leaves Kate in a pickle. (Also, the bull-like, chaotic, Johnsonian British prime minister, Nicol Trowbridge—played genially by Rory Kinnear—keeps pushing the U.S. president to declare war, which Kate would prefer to avert.)

The micro and the macro, enemies foreign and oh so domestic. Watching The Diplomat, you might start to think about how so many of the terms used to describe international relations are intimate in nature: Countries get in bed with each other, they sever ties, they seek rapprochement, they issue ultimatums. Diplomacy is about trying to forge meaningful bonds that help each party thrive, which is also a neat description of marriage. And the thing about Hal is that he’s an invaluable asset until he’s not: No one knows Kate better; no one can enable her success quite so efficiently, or blow it up with such aplomb. “She hates cameras, and microphones,” he tells her anxious chief of staff, Stuart Hayford (Ato Essandoh), adding as an afterthought, “and people.” His intimacy with Kate is the kind built on years of precedent: knowing when she’s hungry; understanding when her shoes are hurting her; sensing when she needs to, as he euphemistically puts it, “scratch an itch.”

With regard to politics, The Diplomat tends toward lightness, with occasional flashes of insight. There are abundant references to real-world crises, and a sight gag about an employee barely out of college who’s a Russia expert at the embassy because everyone who’s anyone has been sent to Ukraine. There’s a “bad guy” with his own private militia who’s seemingly modeled after the founder of the Wagner Group, and the American president seems like an unholy fusion of presidents 45 and 46: older than he’d like to be, crass, essentially eager to help. David Gyasi is engagingly hamstrung as the British foreign secretary, who’s caught between his scheming, unscrupulous boss and Kate, with whom he has a meaningful connection. And Stuart’s relationship with Kate is combative at first but eventually vital as they earn each other’s trust. The series is thoughtful about power, and why the people who crave it most are the least suited to wield it. But it’s most gratifying when it’s exposing the nuances of our most crucial commitments: how we know whom to trust, and what we do when things turn toxic.

The Atlantic · by Sophie Gilbert · April 26, 2023

27. A “Post-Like-Share” Revolution: Strategic Messaging and Social Media as a Tool of Irregular Warfare

Excerpts:

From leveraging different digital platforms to analyzing successful social media trends from around the world, the DoD must establish a baseline for strategic messaging that can be used as part of an irregular warfare campaign. The baseline should include at minimum: target audience identification; measurements for outcomes; and plans for potential counter-messaging. The DoD should establish a strategic messaging office that would work across all services and with local entities to establish the baselines, coordinate messages and effective targeting plans. This office would be responsible for planning and supporting strategic messaging campaigns and establish baselines and analysis that could be leveraged for irregular warfare campaigns.

In the two months since NXTanimal posted the video, it has been viewed more than 60 million times and shared in almost 100 countries. Its message has reached the halls of the French National Assembly, where the video was subtitled in French and submitted as part of testimony during an event titled “Freedom for the Iranian People” on February 3, 2023. And its reach is still expanding. In the new era of a connective world, those who control the narrative have the ability to control the people. Messaging matters, but so does the message.

A “Post-Like-Share” Revolution: Strategic Messaging and Social Media as a Tool of Irregular Warfare – Irregular Warfare Center

irregularwarfarecenter.org

May 1, 2023

A “Post-Like-Share” Revolution: Strategic Messaging and Social Media as a Tool of Irregular Warfare

Mohamad Mirghahari

Download a PDF of this publication by clicking the icon to the left.

As daylight broke on January 24, 2023, more than 123 million Iranians reached for their smartphones and scrolled through their social media platforms. Checking Instagram, they began watching a video posted that morning by NXTanimal, a social media creative agency.

The video, narrated by Arian Moayed,–best known for his role of Stewie Hussieni on the HBO hit show Succession–quickly gained traction across the country. In the first 24 hours, it was viewed more than a million times on Instagram, millions more on platforms such as Twitter, Telegram, WhatsApp, Facebook, and others.

The caption accompanying the video was short but powerful: “They may have robbed our country of its riches but they can never steal our spirit and determination to taste freedom #IRGCterrorists.” This two-minute video conveyed a powerful truth to the Iranian people. It told the story of average Iranians having to make hard decisions to feed their families and make ends meet to survive.

The video shows Iranians trading sneakers for a piece of meat, bartering goods to heat their homes, and selling their schoolbooks for grains of rice. The video then highlighted the value of Iran’s oil output, $35 billion in 2022, and showcased how the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) squandered billions of dollars of this revenue on its proxy forces in Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, and elsewhere across the Middle East—at the cost of the continued implosion of the Iranian economy.

While the Islamic Republic spends on its proxy wars, food costs for the Iranian people soared nearly 70 percent. Meanwhile, the IRGC’s nuclear program and adventurist foreign policy in the region, including its support for terrorist groups, resulted in the regime being slapped with sanctions—which only further exacerbate the daily living conditions of the Iranian people, depriving them of access to medicine, modern medical equipment, and other resources.

NXTanimal’s video ricocheted across the internet. Farsi language television platforms outside of Iran also broadcasted the video. People reacted and shared, amplifying the protest movements and calls for change in Iran. Their actions fit neatly into what we call irregular warfare (IW).

The NXTanimal video was one of many developed by other social media organizations outside of Iran, such as Middle East Matters and Legomahi, to support anti-government protests following the death of a young Iranian woman named Mahsa Amini. The regime arrested Amini for not wearing her headscarf properly, and the 22-year-old Amini suffered severe head trauma while in custody, dying on September 16, 2022. Iranians were enraged and took to the streets in protest against the regime.

The video was an excellent example of the impact of non-linear strategic messaging and amplification—both valuable tools of irregular warfare. The Department of Defense (DoD) defines irregular warfare as “a violent struggle among state and nonstate actors for legitimacy and influence over the relevant populations.” Messaging is one of the most important aspects and tools of IW. Messaging can build or erode legitimacy, constrain government options, and fundamentally change the balance of strategic power, especially as authoritarian governments seek to control the message that their populations receive. The spread of this video exemplifies the power of a message that resonates with the people and the efficiency of social media in disseminating that message, showcasing the utility and impact of social media as a tool of irregular warfare.

The 2009 Strategic Communication Joint Integrating Concept study defines strategic communication as: “focused United States Government efforts to understand and engage key audiences to create, strengthen, or preserve conditions favorable for the advancement of United States Government interests, policies, and objectives through the use of coordinated programs, plans, themes, messages, and products synchronized with the actions of all instruments of national power.” The NXTanimal video would certainly fit that definition of strategic communication.

For years, the IRGC has attempted to control social media and internet access, seeking to limit the amount of information the Iranian people have about its meddling in the Middle East. The IRGC has spent more than $16 billion on wars and conflicts outside of Iran. For years, average citizens took almost no notice. Quite naturally, they focused their attention on more immediate concerns, like the rising prices of food, gas, and other day-to-day goods, some of which soared more than 500 percent. That gave the IRGC a free hand to effectively control internal messaging. Using anti-Western rhetoric and blaming the sanctions levied by the United States and the rest of the Western world, the IRGC could keep most of its population in the dark and distract them from their extravagant spending to finance external conflicts instead of addressing the needs of its own people.

Then came NXTanimal. From its professional editing quality, to how it used prominent Iranians as narrators and distributed the video via known Iranian influencers. NXTanimal represented a new frontier in strategic messaging against the Iranian regime, and landed with the Iranian people in a never-before-seen manner. NXTanimal produced a whole series of videos exposing the Islamic Republic and their regime, titled “Diaries of A Revolution” that tell the stories of Iranians who sent in anonymous reports and accounts of daily life during the protests. NXTanimal also produced another video titled “No Due Process” shortly after the executions of two Iranians, Mohammad Mahdi Karami and Mohammad Hosseini, who were both found guilty of corruption in a rushed trial, a charge which the regime has slapped upon protestors. The video portrays Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi and other senior officials of the Iranian government as criminals with their mugshots, messaging the Islamic Republic must be accountable for the death of these two Iranian citizens.

These videos had a wide reach among both Iranians and the Iranian diaspora. The Iranian people saw NXTanimal as an outlet to share their stories without fearing retaliation, arrest, imprisonment, or even death.

Although the popularity of social media has ushered in an era of messaging, information in and of itself is not enough. The presentation of the information, not just the message itself, is paramount to success. The NXTanimal video demonstrated the necessary components for a great message to be effective and spread. Native speakers and cultural experts were necessary to develop the message while making sure it felt organic to the targeted audience. From an irregular warfare standpoint, the ability to understand what grievances and unifying ideas at a local level enable better targeting for exploitation of an audience is just as important as the language used. NXTanimal was able to leverage the outrage of everyday issues that affect the Iranian people, and tapped into daily grievances that all Iranians could agree upon.

In the wake of the protests, the regime began arresting citizens for posting messages of support on social media. The arrests did not quell the protestors, forcing the regime to begin limiting internet access across the country in order to restrict access to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Tik Tok, where these messages were metastasizing. That, too, failed to stop the protests. In response, groups from across the world started to fill the void, amplifying the voices and videos of the protesters. Groups outside of Iran distributed protest times and dates through channels not blocked by the government. Additionally, these “outsiders” highlighted messages showing how family members of the Iranian regime’s officials were living lavishly in Europe and not according to the rules of the Islamic Republic, all while the average Iranian was struggling to afford the basic necessities of daily life. Eventually, a nearly seamless transition occurred from the people in Iran to the people outside of Iran, who were free to coordinate protests and disseminate anti-regime messaging within the country.

And therein lies a foundational lesson for irregular warfare and information operations: even with limited internet access, amplification of voices and messages that resonate to a target audience can still happen despite any governments or state’s restrictions. The local populace of a country will know how to bypass censorship, but more importantly, they know how and with whom to share a message so that it resonates and its reach grows organically.

The DoD and other U.S. government agencies use strategic messaging and information operations to control and shape the battlefield, to limited success. Strategic messaging will take on greater import, in this era of irregular warfare. As such, there are a few key lessons that Washington should learn from viewing the success of NXTanimal.

Data analytics will form a key plank of effective amplification strategies. Developing influence mapping algorithms and, more broadly, using science-based methodology to amplify messages of freedom will further enhance the influence of social media-based messaging. Organizations can identify or insert the source of a message and its path using advanced data analytics thus predicting how effective messaging will be against a target audience. From there, organizations can measure success on several different factors: effectiveness, reach, and impact. By aligning planned messages with specific discussions and audiences, DoD planners can improve the likelihood of engagement. Data analysis can also help identify which topics of interest are effective and receive measured engagement which can guide decision making.

The effectiveness of strategic messaging on social media, as a tool of irregular warfare, should not be underestimated. Strategic messaging, social media, and a dispersed international network provide invaluable resources. A well-crafted message that resonates with the target audience will find a way to spread and can have significant influence over the people. With the reach of social media, messaging apps, and the internet, the United States and other U.S. allies can effectively influence and shape a population in support of their mission. In addition, the cost of this type of strategic messaging is nominal compared to other resources. The DoD and other agencies need to leverage and keep up with trending digital changes, new methodologies, and advances in data analysis and analytics to ensure they are prepared to implement messaging as necessary.

From leveraging different digital platforms to analyzing successful social media trends from around the world, the DoD must establish a baseline for strategic messaging that can be used as part of an irregular warfare campaign. The baseline should include at minimum: target audience identification; measurements for outcomes; and plans for potential counter-messaging. The DoD should establish a strategic messaging office that would work across all services and with local entities to establish the baselines, coordinate messages and effective targeting plans. This office would be responsible for planning and supporting strategic messaging campaigns and establish baselines and analysis that could be leveraged for irregular warfare campaigns.

In the two months since NXTanimal posted the video, it has been viewed more than 60 million times and shared in almost 100 countries. Its message has reached the halls of the French National Assembly, where the video was subtitled in French and submitted as part of testimony during an event titled “Freedom for the Iranian People” on February 3, 2023. And its reach is still expanding. In the new era of a connective world, those who control the narrative have the ability to control the people. Messaging matters, but so does the message.

Mohamad Mirghahari is the National Security Fellow at Seton Hall University’s School of Diplomacy and International Relations. Mirghahari previously served in the Department of Defense in key leadership positions, in support of counterterrorism and Special Operations initiatives that have significantly impacted mission-critical outcomes across the globe.

irregularwarfarecenter.org

28. Italy signed up to China's Belt and Road Initiative. Now it's having second thoughts

Our canary in the coal mine?

Italy signed up to China's Belt and Road Initiative. Now it's having second thoughts

CNBC · by Silvia Amaro · May 1, 2023

KEY POINTS

• Italy has previously been described as a “middle-power” bridge used by Beijing and Moscow.
• In 2019, Rome sent shockwaves throughout the Western world when it signed up for China’s Belt and Road initiative.
• When former European Central Bank governor Mario Draghi took power in Rome in 2021, he froze the agreement.

Giorgia Meloni, Italy's prime minister, has a tough choice to make

Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Italy's rather surprising decision to join China's Belt and Road Initiative a few years back is being thrust back into the fore, with a deadline to potentially end it fast approaching under Rome's new leadership.

Italy has previously been described as a "middle-power" bridge used by Beijing and Moscow to strike deals with a country that's a member of NATO, the European Union, and the G-7 group of advanced economies.

In 2019, Rome sent shockwaves throughout the Western world when it signed up to the BRI — China's massive infrastructure and investment plan aimed at boosting its influence across the world. At the time, analysts said that by joining the project, Italy was undermining Europe's ability to stand up to Beijing.

When former European Central Bank governor Mario Draghi took power in Rome in 2021, he froze the agreement and led a critical screening of Chinese investments in the country — having vetoed at least three Chinese takeovers during that year.

Two years down the line and with a new government in place, Rome is now having another think about its ties with China.

"It is a very controversial issue for the Italian government," Silvia Menegazzi, professor of international relations and Chinese studies at Luiss University, said over the phone, adding that this is due to one key reason: Taiwan.

China sees Taiwan as a breakaway province, while Taiwan sees itself as separate from China, having ruled itself since splitting from the mainland in 1949 following a protracted civil war. Tensions between the two have risen over the years, and high-level U.S. politicians' visits to Taiwan have drawn Beijing's ire.

New Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said via Twitter prior to her election in September — and standing next to a representative from Taiwan — that she stands alongside those who believe in democracy.

If Italy chooses closer ties to Taiwan, that will surely jeopardize its relations with China. At the same time, deepening investment links with Beijing might go against what Meloni promised pre-election.

A delegation of Italian politicians was due to travel to Taiwan in April. But the trip was postponed to an unspecified date, according to media reports.

"I believe they might not decide anything," Menegazzi said, suggesting the Italian government will continue its Belt and Road participation for now.

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Under the agreement the two parties can end the deal after five years, otherwise the partnership gets extended for another five-year term. Italy has until the end of the 2023 to inform China on whether it wants to end the deal.

Back in 2022 and prior to being elected, Meloni said that joining the BRI was a "big mistake."

"Since becoming PM, she's chosen to present herself as aligned with the U.S. on the Chinese front. Yet she's under pressure from her coalition partners, [Lega's Matteo] Salvini and [Forza Italia's Silvio] Berlusconi, whose respective constituencies are softer on China being interested in closer economic ties through the Belt and Road initiative," Alberto Alemanno, professor of EU law at the H.E.C. business school, said via email.

The office for the prime minister was not immediately available for comment when contacted by CNBC Wednesday. Meloni leads a coalition with two other right-wing parties: Lega and Forza Italia.

Future for EU-China relations

The upcoming decision for Rome comes at a time when the wider European Union is framing a new relationship with China. The bloc is finding it increasingly hard to strike a united front toward Beijing, with some nations favoring economic links and others pushing for a more critical approach.

In 2022, China was the largest source of EU imports and the third largest buyer of EU goods, highlighting the economic importance that Beijing has for Europe. This is particularly relevant when economic growth in the EU is vulnerable to the ongoing war in Ukraine.

This economic argument is also supported by those who think a close relationship with Beijing is needed to accomplish advancements in climate policy.

But for many European governments, China could and should do more to support Ukraine in the wake of Russia's invasion. China has failed to condemn Russia's onslaught of its neighbor and in a visit to Moscow in March, China's leader Xi Jinping referred to his Russian counterpart as a dear friend.

On top of that, Beijing has proposed a 12-point peace plan for the Ukraine war. The plan fails to specify whether Russia needs to leave Ukrainian territory for a deal to be completed. Ukraine has made it clear it will not agree to any peace deal that does not involve regaining full control of its territory.

Furthermore, the United States has added pressure on EU nations to be more critical of China in line with national security concerns. Countries in Europe that are keen on a healthy transatlantic relationship will not have a problem following that path.

CNBC · by Silvia Amaro · May 1, 2023

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Foundation for Defense of Democracies

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com