Quotes of the Day:
“The responsibility of great states is to serve and not to dominate the world.”
-Harry S. Truman, Message to Congress, April 16, 1945
"If you find your opponent in a strong position costly to force, you should leave him a line of retreat as the quickest way of loosening his resistance. It should, equally, be a principle of policy, especially in war, to provide your opponent with a ladder by which he can climb down."
-Sir Basil H. Liddel-Hart (Strategy, 1954)
“A trained and disciplined guerrilla is much more than a patriotic peasant, workman, or student armed with an antiquated fowling-piece and home-made bomb. His endoctrination begins even before he is taught to shoot accurately, and it is unceasing. The end product is an intensely loyal and politically alert fighting man.”
-Brig Gen S.B. Griffith in the Introduction to Mao’s On Guerrilla Warfare, 1961.
1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, MAY 19 (PUTIN'S WAR)
2. The Russians Are Throwing Everything They’ve Got At One Ukrainian Garrison
3. Biden in Asia: New friends, old tensions, storms at home
4. Red Cross registers hundreds of Ukrainian POWs from Mariupol
5. Milley speaks with top Russian general days after post-Ukraine invasion call between Austin and Russian defense minister
6. Opinion | Biden seeks a new opening in a rattled Asia
7. Pentagon spokesman John Kirby moving to the White House
8. 5 Asian military hotspots and how they play into Biden's visit
9. 155 mm Howitzers on The Ukraine Battlefield | SOF News
10. Disinformation board's ex-leader faced wave of online abuse
11. Department of Defense continues to downplay Taliban and Al Qaeda threat in Afghanistan
12. Afghanistan Rising: It’s Time to Let the Taliban Fall
13. Pro-war Russians are increasingly critical of the Ukraine conflict
14. US intel skeptical Putin will be swayed by Russian public opinion over war in Ukraine
15. New Evidence Shows How Russian Soldiers Executed Men in Bucha
16. After delay, U.S. Senate overwhelmingly approves $40 billion in Ukraine aid
17. Opinion | We Should Say It. Russia Is Fascist.
18. Three Signs That Putin Might Be Reassessing His Plans
19. Hybrid power could keep the Little Bird helo flying
20. Why a ‘Buy Allied’ approach matters
21. A Fight Over Taiwan Could Go Nuclear
22. Here are the high-end weapons Zelenskyy hopes the new Ukraine aid bill will provide
23. The Corps should drop manslaughter charges against MARSOC Marines, corpsman
24. How Strong Is al-Qaeda? A Debate
25. Nuclear vs. Conventional Spending? We Don’t Have that Luxury
26. ‘Our Commander Is Leaving With Us’: Putin’s Troops Openly Plot to Ditch ‘Stupid’ War
1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, MAY 19 (PUTIN'S WAR)
RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, MAY 19
Kateryna Stepanenko, Karolina Hird, and Frederick W. Kagan
May 19, 5:30 pm ET
Ukrainian military officials reported that some Russian troops withdrawn from the Kharkiv City axis have redeployed to western Donetsk Oblast on May 19. The Ukrainian General Staff said that 260 servicemen withdrawn from the Kharkiv City axis arrived to replace the significant combat losses that the 107th Motorized Rifle Battalion has taken approximately 20 km southwest of Donetsk City.[1] The Ukrainian Military Directorate (GUR) intercepted a Russian serviceman’s call suggesting that some of the 400 servicemen from the Kharkiv City axis who had arrived elsewhere in Donbas were shocked by the intensity of the fighting there compared with what they had experienced in Kharkiv Oblast.[2]
Russian forces are continuing to suffer shortages of reserve manpower, causing the Russian military command to consolidate depleted battalion tactical groups (BTGs). An unnamed US defense official reported that Russian forces still have 106 BTGs operating in Ukraine but had to disband and combine some to compensate for losses.[3] Ukrainian General Staff Main Operations Deputy Chief Oleksiy Gromov reported that Russian forces are combining units of the Pacific and Northern Fleets at the permanent locations of the 40th Separate Marine Brigade and the 200th Separate Motorized Rifle Brigade, respectively.[4] Gromov added that Russian forces are training servicemen in Krasnodar Krai to replenish units of the 49th Combined Arms Army and are trying to restore combat power of Russian units withdrawn from the battlefront in occupied Crimea.
Unknown Russian perpetrators conducted a series of Molotov cocktail attacks on Russian military commissariats throughout the country in May, likely in protest of covert mobilization. Russian media and local Telegram channels reported deliberate acts of arson against military commissariats in three Moscow Oblast settlements—Omsk, Volgograd, Ryazan Oblast, and Khanty-Mansi Autonomous District—between May 4 and May 18.[5] Ukrainian General Staff Main Operations Deputy Chief Oleksiy Gromov said that there were at least 12 cases of deliberate arson against military commissariats in total and five last week.[6] Russian officials caught two 16-year-olds in the act in one Moscow Oblast settlement, which suggests that Russian citizens are likely responsible for the attacks on military commissariats.[7]
Key Takeaways
- Russian forces are intensifying operations to advance north and west of Popasna in preparation for an offensive toward Severodonetsk.
- Russian and proxy authorities in Mariupol are struggling to establish coherent administrative control of the city.
- Russian forces reportedly attempted to regain control of the settlements they lost during the Ukrainian counteroffensive north of Kharkiv City.
- Russian forces are bolstering their naval presence around Snake Island to fortify their grouping on the island.
We do not report in detail on Russian war crimes because those activities are well-covered in Western media and do not directly affect the military operations we are assessing and forecasting. We will continue to evaluate and report on the effects of these criminal activities on the Ukrainian military and population and specifically on combat in Ukrainian urban areas. We utterly condemn these Russian violations of the laws of armed conflict, Geneva Conventions, and humanity even though we do not describe them in these reports.
ISW has updated its assessment of the four primary efforts Russian forces are engaged in at this time. We have stopped coverage of supporting effort 4, “Sumy and northeastern Ukraine,” because it is no longer an active effort.
- Main effort—Eastern Ukraine (comprised of one subordinate and three supporting efforts);
- Subordinate main effort- Encirclement of Ukrainian troops in the cauldron between Izyum and Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts
- Supporting effort 1—Mariupol;
- Supporting effort 2—Kharkiv City;
- Supporting effort 3—Southern axis.
Main Effort—Eastern Ukraine
Subordinate Main Effort—Southern Kharkiv, Donetsk, Luhansk Oblasts (Russian objective: Encircle Ukrainian forces in Eastern Ukraine and capture the entirety of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, the claimed territory of Russia’s proxies in Donbas)
Russian forces unsuccessfully attempted to resume offensive operations southwest of Izyum and did not advance in the Slovyansk or Lyman directions on May 19.[8] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces suffered significant losses and retreated after a failed assault on Velyka Komyshuvakha approximately 23 km southwest of Izyum.[9] Ukrainian General Staff Main Operations Deputy Chief Oleksiy Gromov said that Russian forces are resuming the Slovyansk offensive despite the loss of offensive capabilities.[10] Ukrainian artillery struck Russian electronic warfare (EW) equipment 7 km from Izyum on May 18.[11]
Russian forces intensified efforts to advance north and west of Popasna in preparation for the Battle of Severodonetsk. Ukrainian officials reported that Russian forces conducted several unsuccessful assaults in settlements leading to the Lysychansk and Bahmut highways near Popasna.[12] The Luhansk People’s Republic (LNR) claimed to have encircled Ukrainian troops in Zolote and Hirske, approximately 12 and 14 km northeast of Popasna, respectively.[13] ISW cannot independently confirm this LNR claim. Russian forces also attempted to break Ukrainian defenses west and east of Avdiivka without any success and maintained heavy shelling in the area.[14]
Russian troops have begun operating at a company scale rather than at the level of a BTG to focus on seizing specific villages in Donbas, according to US officials.[15] An unnamed US defense official also noted that Russian forces are still facing challenges in coordinating communication between commanders and synchronizing artillery fire in supporting ground assaults.[16] ISW previously reported that some Russian military bloggers criticized the Russian reconnaissance-strike complex due to its excessively centralized approval system for artillery fire.[17] A pro-Russian military Telegram channel criticized the current Russian strategy, claiming that Russian forces are hitting a “strategic dead end” and are suffering significant losses trying to slowly capture small villages in different directions.[18]
Supporting Effort #1—Mariupol (Russian objective: Capture Mariupol and reduce the Ukrainian defenders)
Russian and proxy occupation authorities in Mariupol reportedly struggled to establish coherent administrative control of the city on May 19. Advisor to the Mayor of Mariupol Petro Andyrushchenko claimed that authorities in Mariupol who are collaborating with Russian occupiers do not report to the leadership of the Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) and instead are being guided by the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB). [19] Andryushchenko additionally stated that the Luhansk People’s Republic (LNR) will become the only “independent” political organ of Russia due to the way DNR officials are imposing their occupational agendas on Mariupol.[20] Andryushchenko noted that Head of the DNR Denis Pushilin has commanded elements of the police corps currently stationed in Mariupol to move to other areas in Donetsk to respond to riots caused by “an internal struggle of political clans.”[21] While ISW cannot independently confirm Andryushchenko’s claims, they are consistent with the overall lack of coherency in the implementation of occupation agendas by Russian and DNR authorities alike.
Factional infighting between proxy authorities in Mariupol is likely being exacerbated by the ongoing evacuation of Ukrainian defenders from the Azovstal Steel Plant. Pro-Russian Telegram channels complained that Russian forces are removing wounded Russian servicemen from hospitals in the DNR to treat wounded Ukrainian soldiers who were recently evacuated from Azovstal.[22] If confirmed, these reports indicate a continued lack of consistency in the way Russian and proxy authorities are handling the evacuation of Ukrainian forces from Azovstal and the overall capture of Mariupol.
Supporting Effort #2—Kharkiv City (Russian objective: Withdraw forces to the north and defend ground lines of communication (GLOCs) to Izyum)
Russian forces focused on maintaining their positions north of Kharkiv City to prevent further Ukrainian advances on May 19.[23] The Ukrainian General Staff noted that Russian troops conducted unspecified and unsuccessful counterattacks in an attempt to restore lost positions around Kharkiv City.[24] Deputy Chief of the Main Operations Department of the Ukrainian General Staff Brigadier General Oleksiy Gromov reported that the Ukrainian counteroffensive in northern Kharkiv Oblast has liberated 23 settlements since May 5, but did not name the settlements.[25] Russian troops continued to conduct artillery attacks on Ukrainian positions and suburban settlements around Kharkiv City.[26]
Supporting Effort #3—Southern Axis (Objective: Defend Kherson against Ukrainian counterattacks)
Russian forces did not make any confirmed advances on the southern axis and shelled along the frontline on May 19.[27] Russian forces conducted artillery attacks against Kherson, Zaporizhia, Dnipropetrovsk, and Mykolaiv Oblasts.[28] Unidentified partisans reportedly blew up a Russian armored train in Melitopol and damaged two railway tracks and a locomotive with ten fuel tanks.[29] Russian forces are continuing to fortify their grouping on Snake Island with two warship detachments and cruise missiles.[30] The situation in Transnistria remains unchanged.
Immediate items to watch
- Russian forces will likely complete their withdrawal from the vicinity of Kharkiv City but attempt to hold a line west of Vovchansk to defend their GLOCs from Belgorod to Izyum. It is unclear if they will succeed.
- The Russians will continue efforts to encircle Severodonetsk and Lysychansk at least from the south, possibly by focusing on cutting off the last highway connecting Severodonetsk-Lysychansk with the rest of Ukraine.
[4] https://www dot pravda.com.ua/news/2022/05/19/7347223/
[6] https://armyinform dot com.ua/2022/05/19/u-rosiyi-za-ostannij-tyzhden-stalosya-5-pidpaliv-vijskkomativ/
[10] https://armyinform dot com.ua/2022/05/19/protyvnyk-ne-zalyshaye-sprob-vidnovlennya-nastupu-v-napryamku-slovyanska-genshtab/
[25] https://armyinform dot com.ua/2022/05/19/na-harkivskomu-napryamku-z-5-travnya-zvilneno-23-naselenyh-punkty/
2. The Russians Are Throwing Everything They’ve Got At One Ukrainian Garrison
Excerpts:
If the Russians fail to cut the road, they could end up expending their last reserves of combat strength trying to starve a small portion of the Ukrainian army in one small city.
The Russian offensive already is partially compromised. The original plan apparently was to attack from the north and south. But to do that, Russian battalions needed to erect pontoon bridges across the Seversky Donets River, northwest of Severodonetsk.
Ukrainian artillery earlier this month caught a whole brigade on the riverbanks and wiped it out, destroying the better part of two BTGs and killing as many as 400 Russians. If the Russian army completes its encirclement, it’ll have to be from the south.
The situation is fluid. As recently as Wednesday, the Ukrainian armed forces’ general staff noted Russian attacks from Popasna but insisted the Russians “had no success.” But the main assault apparently began on Thursday.
The Russians Are Throwing Everything They’ve Got At One Ukrainian Garrison
Forbes · by David Axe · May 19, 2022
Russian paratroopers in Popasna.
Social media capture
With a thunderous artillery barrage, the Russian army on Thursday launched its latest offensive in Ukraine.
Much of what’s left of the Russian army—106 or so under-strength battalion tactical groups, down from 125 full-strength BTGs at the start of the war in late February—attacked north and west from Popasna in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region.
The ultimate target is obvious. “Russian troops are attempting to siege and destroy Severodonetsk,” the Ukrainian armed forces tweeted on Thursday.
Popasna is the locus of Russian forces on the southern side of the Severodonetsk pocket, an area under Ukrainian control that extends west from the city—pre-war population, 100,000—and is surrounded on the north, east and south by areas under Russian and separatist control.
The three or so Ukrainian brigades in and around Severodonetsk include 5,000 or more troops. They’ve dug in and blown bridges leading into the city. Still, they’re vulnerable.
Just one main road threads through the town of Bakhmut across the pocket to Severodonetsk. It’s along this route that the main Ukrainian army pushes supplies to the city’s garrison.
The westward Russian thrust from Popasna might be aiming for Bakhmut, 13 miles away. The northern thrust could be attempting to complete the encirclement of Severodonetsk, 17 miles away.
It’s fair to say the Kremlin has concentrated its best remaining forces along the Popasna axis for this offensive. Airborne units, possibly reinforced by Chechen troops and mercenaries from the Wagner Group, are fighting alongside armored units with the latest T-90 tanks and BMP-T fighting vehicles.
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Inasmuch as the Russian army has suffered extensive casualties after attempting to roll across Ukraine along three fronts—northern, eastern and southern—and ultimately abandoning the northern front, the Battle of Severodonetsk might represent Moscow’s best opportunity for a near-term win.
A win that could allow Russian president Vladimir Putin to declare a sort of victory in Ukraine. Even if that victory is modest compared to the Kremlin’s original goal of capturing Kyiv, destroying the Ukrainian armed forces and cutting off Ukraine from the sea.
What happens over the next few days could be critical—and should set the conditions for the next few weeks of fighting. If the Russians cut the road through Bakhmut and encircle Severodonetsk, the ensuing urban fighting could be brutal for the Ukrainian garrison.
They eventually would run out of food, fuel and ammunition. Barring a breakthrough by Ukrainian forces outside the pocket, Severodonetsk’s fall might be only a matter of time under those circumstances. Kyiv could lose several thousand troops and a key strongpoint in Donbas.
If the Russians fail to cut the road, they could end up expending their last reserves of combat strength trying to starve a small portion of the Ukrainian army in one small city.
The Russian offensive already is partially compromised. The original plan apparently was to attack from the north and south. But to do that, Russian battalions needed to erect pontoon bridges across the Seversky Donets River, northwest of Severodonetsk.
Ukrainian artillery earlier this month caught a whole brigade on the riverbanks and wiped it out, destroying the better part of two BTGs and killing as many as 400 Russians. If the Russian army completes its encirclement, it’ll have to be from the south.
The situation is fluid. As recently as Wednesday, the Ukrainian armed forces’ general staff noted Russian attacks from Popasna but insisted the Russians “had no success.” But the main assault apparently began on Thursday.
Forbes · by David Axe · May 19, 2022
3. Biden in Asia: New friends, old tensions, storms at home
A good overview of a number of issues and challenges.
Excerpts:
The U.S. and other wealthy democracies — including Japan and South Korea — banded together to help Ukraine and punish Russia, but not all countries were ready to side with the alliance. China, India and others have aimed to stay cordial with Russia without crossing the sanctions.
The uncertainty leaves Biden determined to show that America’s ultimate power rests with its ability to make friends and influence people rather than the raw capacity of its military and economy. A look at some of the key issues and themes on the table for Biden’s visit:
EASING TENSIONS WITH NEW LEADERS
NORTH KOREAN PRESSURE COOKER
STORMS AT HOME
THE QUAD
THE CHINA CONUNDRUM
A NEW ACRONYM: IPEF ( the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework)
MORE CHIPS, PLEASE
Biden in Asia: New friends, old tensions, storms at home
AP · by JOSH BOAK, AAMER MADHANI and MARI YAMAGUCHI · May 20, 2022
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — President Joe Biden hopes to use his visit to Asia to confirm his belief that long-standing friendships can afford to become even friendlier — and pay dividends. He opened the trip in South Korea on Friday and will end in Japan next week at a time when world events are resetting the foundations of the global order.
The coronavirus pandemic disrupted supply chains and exposed the fragilities of a trade system focused primarily on low prices for consumers and high profits for corporations. Then Russia’s invasion of Ukraine ushered in a return to Cold War-era intrigues.
The U.S. and other wealthy democracies — including Japan and South Korea — banded together to help Ukraine and punish Russia, but not all countries were ready to side with the alliance. China, India and others have aimed to stay cordial with Russia without crossing the sanctions.
The uncertainty leaves Biden determined to show that America’s ultimate power rests with its ability to make friends and influence people rather than the raw capacity of its military and economy. A look at some of the key issues and themes on the table for Biden’s visit:
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EASING TENSIONS WITH NEW LEADERS
Relations between Japan and South Korea have been at their worst in decades because of disputes over wartime history and trade. These are rifts that the countries’ two new leaders appear willing to heal, with Biden as a possible interlocutor who could help bring them closer together.
South Korea’s Yoon Suk Yeol assumed the presidency a week ago on the expectation of better ties with Japan. Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, who took office in October, spoke with Yoon by phone the day after Yoon’s March election victory, saying “sound relations” are crucial for regional and international peace and stability.
As Kishida sees it, the rules-based order is threatened by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Japan fears the war that began in February could embolden China to seize territories in the Pacific, a big reason why better relations with South Korea are desired. Still, Kishida skipped Yoon’s May 10 inauguration, sending his foreign minister instead. Because the U.S. has relations with both countries, one likely bridge toward improving ties is focusing on their shared interests.
NORTH KOREAN PRESSURE COOKER
Biden’s visit comes as the allies face a growing threat from North Korea’s nuclear weapons and missile program. The country’s authoritarian leader Kim Jong Un is trying to force the United States to accept the idea of the North as a nuclear power and he’s out to negotiate security and economic concessions from a position of strength.
Kim has conducted 16 rounds of missile tests so far this year, including the country’s first flight of an intercontinental ballistic missile in nearly five years in March. He’s attempting to exploit a favorable environment to push forward his weapons program as the U.N. Security Council remains divided over Russia’s war on Ukraine.
The challenges posed by a decaying economy and an escalating COVID-19 outbreak across an unvaccinated population of 26 million are unlikely to slow his pressure campaign. White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan says U.S. intelligence shows there’s a “genuine possibility” that North Korea will conduct another ballistic missile test or nuclear test during or around Biden’s visit.
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Nuclear negotiations between Washington and Pyongyang have stalled for more than three years about disagreements over how to relax crippling U.S.-led sanctions in exchange for disarmament steps by the North.
STORMS AT HOME
Even half a world away from home, Biden can’t escape the turbulence rippling through the U.S.
The stock market is tanking over fears about the economy. The baby formula shortage is frustrating families, even amid efforts to bring in imports and boost domestic supplies. The pain of the Buffalo, New York, mass shooting and the racist motives underlying the attack are still fresh. Add to that rising gasoline prices and the persistent challenge of inflation at a nearly 40-year high.
The president may want to train the public’s attention on his efforts abroad, but he’ll likely face tough questions about what’s happening at home.
THE QUAD
It meets Tuesday, but what is it? The Quad is a partnership composed of the U.S., Australia, India and Japan with the expressed goal of a “free and open” Indo-Pacific region. The joint statement coming out of their 2021 meeting didn’t mention China, yet many of the stances adopted by the Quad are interpreted as a check on China’s ambitions to be the dominant power in Asia.
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This time, the drama might be more internal and deal with the complex nature of democracy itself. That’s because Australia is holding elections Saturday. If the incumbent party wins, Prime Minister Scott Morrison would already be set to attend Tuesday’s meeting in Tokyo. But if his party loses, Morrison would have to quickly resign so that opposition leader Anthony Albanese could be sworn in before the Tokyo meeting. Then there’s the possibility that neither party captures a majority or the results are uncertain. If that happens, Albanese might be able to attend as an observer.
THE CHINA CONUNDRUM
China is carefully watching Biden’s visit. The U.S. and its allies rely on China as a trade partner, yet rivalry persists as the shared economic interests have often revealed conflicting values systems. U.S. officials increasingly frame the relationship with China as one of competition.
Shortly before Russia invaded Ukraine in February, Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin met at the Beijing Winter Olympics and told the world that the countries had a friendship of “no limits.” Since the invasion, China has been critical of the sanctions imposed on Russia while appearing hesitant to cross the bans imposed by the U.S. and its allies.
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Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian alluded to China as “a third party” who should not be disadvantaged by agreements between the U.S. and Japan.
“The development of bilateral relations between the U.S. and Japan should not target a third party or harm the interests of third parties,” Zhao said at a Thursday briefing.
A NEW ACRONYM: IPEF
Former U.S. President Donald Trump torched years of trade negotiations by pulling the U.S. out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership in 2017. While Biden has portrayed himself as the anti-Trump, he’s shown no enthusiasm for returning to the deal as written.
This leaves the U.S. coming to Asia to promote an alternative trade pact: the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework. Or, IPEF.
The framework is about regional cooperation on trade, technology, supply chains, clean energy, worker standards, taxes and anti-corruption programs. None of that is necessarily controversial. But a possible hurdle is the administration signaling that the framework won’t involve the usual financial sweeteners of lower tariffs and easier access to American customers, a possible nod to a U.S. voter backlash against past trade deals.
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Australia, India and Japan — the three other members of the Quad — are likely members of the framework. South Korea and some Southeast Asian countries are also seen candidates. But the framework is still in its early stages. It was announced Tuesday that the U.S. Commerce Department is bringing in Sharon Yuan from The Asia Group, a business advisory firm, to be its chief negotiator for the agreement.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said Friday that any regional cooperation framework should feature “peace and development, enhance mutual trust and cooperation between regional countries, should not target any third parties or undermine their interests, and should not be selective or exclusive.”
MORE CHIPS, PLEASE
It’s the engine of the digital age: Almost everything needs a computer chip. But the world simply lacks a reliable supply in the wake of the pandemic. U.S. government officials expect the shortages to ease toward the end of this year, but it might not be until 2023 that enough semiconductors are on the market to meet industry needs.
No one denies the need for more cooperation, but there’s an open debate about how to increase production to withstand disease, war, extreme weather and other calamities. Biden wants to see more chips made in the U.S. South Korea and Taiwan want to increase the resiliency of their own production as a fix to this crisis, according to a briefing by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. And Japan’s prime minister is making chips a cornerstone of his “new capitalism” policy, looking to make chips for robotic technology, artificial intelligence and quantum computing.
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Madhani reported from Washington. Yamaguchi reported from Tokyo. AP writer Kim Tong-hyung contributed to this report from Seoul.
AP · by JOSH BOAK, AAMER MADHANI and MARI YAMAGUCHI · May 20, 2022
4. Red Cross registers hundreds of Ukrainian POWs from Mariupol
Will this be sufficient to provide them protection? I fear that will not be the case.
Red Cross registers hundreds of Ukrainian POWs from Mariupol
AP · by OLEKSANDR STASHEVSKYI and CIARAN McQUILLAN · May 19, 2022
KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — The Russian military said Thursday that more Ukrainian fighters who were making a last stand in Mariupol have surrendered, bringing the total who have left their stronghold to 1,730, while the Red Cross said it had registered hundreds of them as prisoners of war.
The International Committee of the Red Cross said that the registrations of Ukrainian prisoners of war, which included wounded fighters, began Tuesday under an agreement between Russia and Ukraine.
The Geneva-based humanitarian agency, which has experience in dealing with prisoners of war and prisoner exchanges, said however that its team did not transport the fighters to “the places where they are held” — which was not specified.
Ukrainian fighters who emerged from the ruined Azovstal steelworks after being ordered by their military to abandon the last stronghold of resistance in the now-flattened port city face an uncertain fate. Some were taken by the Russians to a former penal colony in territory controlled by Moscow-backed separatists.
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While Ukraine said it hopes to get the soldiers back in a prisoner swap, Russia threatened to put some of them on trial for war crimes.
The Red Cross cited rules under the Geneva Conventions that should allow the organization to interview prisoners of war “without witnesses” and that visits with them should not be “unduly restricted.”
The organization did not specify how many prisoners of war were involved.
It’s also not clear how many fighters are left at the plant. Russia previously estimated that it had been battling some 2,000 troops in the waterside plant.
Denis Pushilin, a senior Russia-backed separatist official in a region that includes Mariupol, said that those Ukrainian soldiers who needed medical assistance were hospitalized while others were put in a detention facility. He also claimed that Red Cross representatives were allowed to inspect the detention facility, but that could not be immediately verified.
Amnesty International said earlier that the Red Cross should be given immediate access to the Mariupol fighters who surrendered. Denis Krivosheev, Amnesty’s deputy director for the region, cited lawless executions allegedly carried out by Russian forces in Ukraine and said the Azovstal defenders “must not meet the same fate.”
Despite the setback in Mariupol, Ukraine’s confidence has been growing after fighting the Russian offensive to an effective standstill and forcing Moscow to withdrawal from around Kyiv and narrow its military goals.
Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy who was involved in several rounds of talks with Russia, said Thursday in a tweet that at this stage “do not offer us a ceasefire — this is impossible without total Russian troops withdrawal.”
“Until Russia is ready to fully liberate occupied territories, our negotiating team is weapons, sanctions and money,” he tweeted.
Ukraine’s military said in its morning briefing Thursday that Russian forces were still pressing their offensive on various sections of the front in the east, but were being successfully repelled.
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Ukraine’s military made no mention of Mariupol in its early morning briefing Thursday, saying only that Russian forces were still pressing their offensive on various sections of the front in the east, but were being successfully repelled.
In the eastern Donbas region, which has been the center of recent fighting as Russian forces on the offensive have clashed with staunch Ukrainian resistance, four civilians were killed in the town of Sievierodonetsk in a Russian bombardment, Luhansk Gov. Serhiy Haidai said. Three other civilians were wounded in the attack Wednesday, and the shelling continued into early Thursday, Haidai said.
On the Russian side of the border, the governor of Kursk province said a truck driver was killed and several other civilians wounded by shelling from Ukraine. Separatist authorities in the Donetsk region in eastern Ukraine said two civilians were killed and five wounded also in Ukrainian shelling over the last 24 hours.
Meanwhile, in the first war-crimes trial held by Ukraine, a captured Russian soldier pleaded guilty on Wednesday of killing a civilian and faces a possible life in prison.
The plant was the only thing standing in the way of Russia declaring the full capture of Mariupol. Its fall would make Mariupol the biggest Ukrainian city to be taken by Moscow’s forces, giving a boost to Putin in a war where many of his plans have gone awry.
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Military analysts, though, said the city’s capture at this point would hold more symbolic importance than anything else, since Mariupol is already effectively under Moscow’s control and most of the Russian forces that were tied down by the drawn-out fighting have already left.
Video showed the Ukrainian fighters carrying out their wounded on stretchers and undergoing pat-down searches before being taken away on buses escorted by military vehicles bearing the pro-Kremlin “Z” sign.
The U.S. has gathered intelligence that shows some Russian officials have become concerned that Kremlin forces in Mariupol are carrying out abuses, including beating city officials, subjecting them to electric shocks and robbing homes, according to a U.S official familiar with the findings.
The Russian officials are concerned that the abuses will further inspire residents to resist the occupation and that the treatment runs counter to Russia’s claims that its military has liberated Russian speakers, according to the official, who was not authorized to comment.
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In the war-crimes case in Kyiv, Russian Sgt. Vadim Shishimarin, a 21-year-old member of a tank unit, pleaded guilty to shooting an unarmed 62-year-old Ukrainian man in the head through a car window in the opening days of the war. Ukraine’s top prosecutor has said some 40 more war-crimes cases are being readied.
On the diplomatic front, Finland and Sweden could become members of NATO in a matter of months, though objections from Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan threaten to disrupt things. Turkey accuses the two countries of harboring Kurdish militants and others it considers a threat to its security.
Ibrahim Kalin, a foreign policy adviser and spokesman for Erdogan, said there will be “no progress” on the membership applications unless Turkey’s concerns are met. Each of NATO’s 30 countries has an effective veto over new members.
Mariupol’s defenders grimly clung to the steel mill for months and against the odds, preventing Russia from completing its occupation of the city and its port.
Mariupol was a target of the Russians from the outset as Moscow sought to open a land corridor from its territory to the Crimean Peninsula, which it seized from Ukraine in 2014.
The city — its prewar population of about 430,000 now reduced by about three-quarters — has largely been reduced to rubble by relentless bombardment, and Ukraine says over 20,000 civilians have been killed there.
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For Ukraine, the order to the fighters to surrender could leave President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s government open to allegations it abandoned the troops he described as heroes.
“Zelenskyy may face unpleasant questions,” said Volodymyr Fesenko, who heads the independent Penta think tank in Kyiv. “There have been voices of discontent and accusations of betraying Ukrainian soldiers.”
A hoped-for prisoner swap could also fall through, he cautioned.
Russia’s main federal investigative body said it intends to interrogate the surrendering troops to “identify the nationalists” and determine whether they were involved in crimes against civilians.
The Russian parliament was scheduled to consider a resolution to ban the exchange of any Azov Regiment fighters but didn’t take up the issue Wednesday.
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McQuillan and Yuras Karmanau reported from Lviv, Ukraine. Mstyslav Chernov and Andrea Rosa in Kharkiv, Elena Becatoros in Odesa, Lorne Cook in Brussels, Aamer Madhani in Washington and other AP staffers around the world contributed.
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AP · by OLEKSANDR STASHEVSKYI and CIARAN McQUILLAN · May 19, 2022
5. Milley speaks with top Russian general days after post-Ukraine invasion call between Austin and Russian defense minister
Milley speaks with top Russian general days after post-Ukraine invasion call between Austin and Russian defense minister
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, right, and Army Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, left, meet with leaders from across the world to discuss the ongoing crisis in Ukraine during the Ukraine Defense Consultative Group at Ramstein Air Base, Germany, April 26, 2022. (Staff Sgt. Megan Beatty/U.S. Air Force)
WASHINGTON — The top officers of the U.S. and Russian militaries spoke by phone Thursday, less than a week after Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and the Russian defense minister talked for the first time since Russia launched its war on Ukraine in February.
Army Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Gen. Valery Gerasimov, chief of the Russian General Staff, held a conversation that the Pentagon declined to further detail beyond acknowledging it had happened.
“The military leaders discussed several security-related issues of concern and agreed to keep the lines of communication open,” the Pentagon said in a statement announcing the call. “In accordance with past practice, the specific details of their conversation will be kept private.”
Though few senior-level U.S. and Russian officials acknowledge having direct contact since the war started, the two countries established a communication line in March to reduce the risk of deadly misunderstandings, according to the Pentagon.
"The United States retains a number of channels to discuss critical security issues with the Russians during a contingency or emergency," a senior U.S. defense official had said.
The call came days after Austin on Friday spoke to Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu for the first time since Russian forces invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, according to the Pentagon.
“Secretary Austin urged an immediate cease-fire in Ukraine and emphasized the importance of maintaining lines of communication,” chief Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said at the time.
That call was initiated by the U.S. and occurred after Austin had “consistently” requested one for weeks to no avail, a senior U.S. defense official told reporters at the Pentagon last week.
“What motivated them to change their mind and to be open to it, I don't think we know for sure,” the official said.
The Pentagon did not disclose whether Milley reiterated Austin’s call for a cease-fire or which country initiated the Milley-Gerasimov conversation Thursday.
6. Opinion | Biden seeks a new opening in a rattled Asia
"Rattled Asia?" China on its back foot?
Excerpt:
A sign of Beijing’s disorientation in this moment of upheaval: When the White House warned Beijing this week about the possible North Korean test and proposed a common effort to help deal with the covid outbreak there, sources say the Chinese didn’t respond. They were, so to speak, on the back foot.
Opinion | Biden seeks a new opening in a rattled Asia
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May 19, 2022 at 7:50 p.m. EDT
President Biden is traveling this week to Asia to project U.S. diplomatic and economic power in a region that has been rattled by the blunders of America’s two most powerful rivals, Russia and China.
Outrage about Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine is a global phenomenon, Biden administration officials believe. The unprovoked attack by President Vladimir Putin rocked Europe, but it also sent shock waves through Asian countries such as South Korea and Japan, which have rushed to aid Kyiv. China, deeply embarrassed by Russia’s assault, has seen its influence diminish in Europe and Asia.
China is having its own internal troubles at the same moment that its chief ally is caught in a war of attrition in Ukraine. President Xi Jinping’s campaign to create “common prosperity” has backfired, administration officials believe. Chinese growth is slowing, capital is fleeing the country and internal dissent is increasing — even as a new wave of the pandemic has Shanghai and other major cities in lockdown.
“This is an opportunity for the United States to get off the back foot,” says Stephen Hadley, who served as national security adviser for President George W. Bush. “Putin has delivered a strategic blow to Russia by his failed effort to absorb Ukraine, and Xi by his policies has derailed the Chinese juggernaut.”
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Biden’s trip to Asia will offer a powerful tableau of the United States’ greatest global strength, which is its network of partnerships with strong democracies. Biden is scheduled to visit with South Korea’s new president and then with the leaders of India, Japan and Australia, who are America’s partners in the so-called Quad.
Because Ukraine will be on everyone’s mind, the usual gaps between transatlantic and Asia-Pacific policies might be dissolved by common opposition to aggression. “These may be two theaters, but there’s one operating system strategically,” argues Kurt Campbell, who coordinates Asia policy for the National Security Council.
Biden’s Asia trip will launch a two-month roadshow of diplomacy in which Biden will take his case for global partnerships to leaders from Asia, Latin America, Europe and the Middle East. Because it’s a moment when both Beijing and Moscow are suffering from severe, self-inflicted problems, administration officials feel that they have the wind at their backs for a change.
China’s recent economic difficulties form an unexpected backdrop for the trip. Reversals in the property, technology and financial sectors, plus new covid-19 lockdowns, led International Monetary Fund economists to lower their growth forecast for China this year to 4.4 percent. Some analysts think growth will actually be much slower, and that at current rates, the Chinese economy might not surpass that of the United States by the end of this decade, as many had expected — or perhaps not ever.
Kevin Rudd, a China scholar and former Australian prime minister, summarized Beijing’s difficulties in a speech this month to the Asia Society, which he heads. Xi tried to dictate “common prosperity,” by cracking down on highflying tycoons. The resulting economic turmoil was so great that in recent months, the economic buzzword for newly centrist Chinese officials has become “stability,” Rudd wrote in his prepared remarks.
Investors were already fleeing Chinese stocks and bonds when the pandemic struck again this year, shattering Xi’s zero-covid policy. For a country that touts the managerial competence of its authoritarian system, it’s not a pretty picture. `
Biden plans to announce a new Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, which will seek to establish common digital standards, supply-chain cooperation and other shared norms. It’s not a “trade agreement” like the Trans-Pacific Partnership that Democrats abandoned in 2016, ceding the field to China, which quickly created its own multilateral group. But the IPEF, as the administration has dubbed it, provides what one official calls “an affirmative, positive economic vision for the most strategically consequential region of the world.”
Administration officials expect that at least 10 Asian countries will agree to join the IPEF negotiations. That will include India, a regional powerhouse, as well as other major Asian economies. The IPEF isn’t as broad as the TPP was, but one former trade official notes that it’s “a mechanism for getting the U.S. back to the table, to engage, to show leadership on issues that matter.” That’s a step forward from the trade phobia that has rattled the administration.
A shadow over the Asia trip will be North Korea. U.S. officials fear that President Kim Jong Un might be planning a missile launch, or even a nuclear test, during Biden’s visit to the region. A nuclear test would provoke a full-blown crisis with Pyongyang, even as Kim struggles to contain a covid outbreak that one official said is “tearing through the country.”
A sign of Beijing’s disorientation in this moment of upheaval: When the White House warned Beijing this week about the possible North Korean test and proposed a common effort to help deal with the covid outbreak there, sources say the Chinese didn’t respond. They were, so to speak, on the back foot.
7. Pentagon spokesman John Kirby moving to the White House
Personnel is policy. I wonder if he is going to get involved in a national level message coordination effort - strategic influence through information advantage? He is a strategic communicator.
Pentagon spokesman John Kirby moving to the White House
CNN · by Kaitlan Collins, CNN
(CNN)Pentagon spokesman John Kirby is soon moving to the White House, a source familiar with the matter tells CNN.
While the details are still being finalized, Kirby is expected to take on a senior foreign policy communications role with the National Security Council. The Pentagon's chief spokesman has become a prominent face of the administration amid Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
Kirby was seen at the White House last week getting a tour of the West Wing. He told people that, despite his years in government service, it was his first time in there. A source said that Kirby met with President Joe Biden to discuss the role in recent days.
Read More
CNN · by Kaitlan Collins, CNN
8. 5 Asian military hotspots and how they play into Biden's visit
The hotspots. Interesting that the Kuril Islands makes the list. That is an area most people do not have on their radar screen.
Taiwan
North Korea
The Kuril Islands
The South China Sea
India-China
5 Asian military hotspots and how they play into Biden's visit
CNN · by Analysis by Brad Lendon, CNN
Seoul, South Korea (CNN)United States President Joe Biden arrives in Asia this week, visiting South Korea and Japan, with the region facing its most volatile security environment in decades.
Hot spots including Taiwan, North Korea, the South China Sea, the India-China border and the Kuril Islands have all seen a Ukraine effect, as Russia's war accelerates regional security concerns -- while providing lessons that major players in Asia are evaluating daily.
Here's a look at those key spots and the military landscape Biden faces in each.
Taiwan
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That has left other Pacific powers, especially Japan, wary.
Japanese officials have pointed out that 90% of their country's energy needs are imported via the water around Taiwan, tying Japan's economic stability to Taiwan's autonomy.
On GPS: Is Taiwan next? 08:47
The United States is also committed to providing for Taiwan's self-defense, although not to defending it with US troops.
That's where lessons from Ukraine come in, both for the US and its allies -- and for China.
"Simply put, it will be enormously difficult for US leaders to convince China they are willing to risk a war over Taiwan that might turn nuclear," Peter Harris, an associate professor of political science at Colorado State University, wrote this week in a paper for the Defense Priorities think tank.
"This is especially true in light of President Biden's unambiguous refusal to commit US troops to Ukraine because of the looming threat of nuclear war with Russia," Harris wrote.
But, Harris argues, NATO allies and much of the rest of the world have stood with Ukraine, via sanctions on Russia and arms for Ukraine.
That could make China wary of any move on Taiwan for fear of what actions nations around the region could take against Beijing, he says.
"China must be left in no doubt that Japan, Australia, South Korea, the Philippines, and others would be forced to rethink their national security strategies in the shadow of an enlarged and aggressive Chinese state," Harris wrote.
And that will be part of Biden's mission over the next week -- to unify the region around Taiwan as a deterrent to any Chinese belligerence.
North Korea
The Kim Jong Un regime has staged a record number of missile tests this year, and there are indications it could be getting ready to test a nuclear weapon for the first time since 2017.
The missile testing comes after negotiations between North Korea and the US over Pyongyang's nuclear program stalled following failed summits between Kim and former US President Donald Trump.
What North Korea is learning from Russia's war in Ukraine 02:35
"Some observers suggest that North Korea ratchets up tests to get Washington's attention and restart dialogue. There is more evidence that Pyongyang is focused on improving military capabilities to deter, threaten and extort other countries," says Leif-Eric Easley, a professor at Ewha University in Seoul.
That was a page in the Russian playbook before it eventually invaded Ukraine, and provides a lesson for the Korean Peninsula, Easley says.
"Russia's aggression shows that the cost of war is almost always greater than the price of peace, not only because of the lives shattered and resources expended, but also because leaders tend to overestimate their ability to achieve military and political objectives while underestimating long-term unintended consequences," he says.
According to Easley, Biden can reduce the threat from North Korea by playing to the strength of America's partnerships in the Pacific.
"Effective and plausible options for Seoul and Washington to strengthen deterrence include restoring combined field exercises, better coordinating defense procurement, and regularizing trilateral security cooperation with Tokyo," he says.
The Kuril Islands
The Kuril Islands, referred to as the Southern Kurils by Russia and the Northern Territories by Japan, were captured by Soviet forces following Japan's surrender to the Allies in 1945.
The resulting disagreement over who has rightful ownership of the islands has soured relations between the two countries, contributing to their continued failure to sign a World War II peace treaty.
China refusing to condemn Russia's actions in Ukraine 02:54
But the Russian invasion of Ukraine has raised tensions between Tokyo and Moscow to some of their highest levels since World War II. That's because Japan has been full-throated in its condemnation of the invasion -- largely following the Western line against Russia, including expelling Russian diplomats, imposing sanctions on Moscow and even donating supplies to the Ukrainian military.
This comes after Russia has upped its military profile in the Western Pacific, including testing missiles in the waters between Japan and Russia and joining with the Chinese navy for an exercise circumnavigating much of Japan.
"Given all this, Japan's threat perception on its northern flank has changed substantially," says Robert Ward, Japan chair at the International Institute for Security Studies.
And the rising tensions in the north have created what Ward calls "an arc of risk" for Japan to its west, from the Kurils in the north, south to the North Korean missile threat and further south to China, around Taiwan and around the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands, claimed by both Beijing and Tokyo as sovereign territory.
This is a concern for Biden because, through a mutual defense treaty, the US is committed to defend any part of Japanese sovereign territory. Wavering in the slightest in these areas concerning its No. 1 ally would raise concerns about US commitments elsewhere in the world, including to NATO allies still worried what Russia's next move in Europe might be.
The aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, front, and other warships sail in formation during a US-Japan bilateral exercise at the Sea of Japan.
The South China Sea
China's claim to almost all of the 1.3-million-square-mile South China Sea has been a continuous source of strain between Washington and Beijing in recent years.
But the war in Ukraine, along with increasing tensions around Taiwan, North Korea and the Kuril Islands, has turned the thermostat down a bit in the South China Sea.
Collin Koh, research fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore, notes that in 2022, the US Navy seems to have curtailed its freedom of navigation operations (FONOPS), in which US warships sail close to Chinese-occupied contested islands -- with only one such operation in January.
Why it matters who owns the seas 03:48
"It appears that the Biden administration might have elected to switch from the previous militarized focus on (the South China Sea) approach to one that's more based on geoeconomics," Koh said.
He notes a recent White House meeting with leaders of the Association of Southest Asian Nations (ASEAN) yielded economic, development and health care commitments, rather than military ones.
In fact, the closest to a security initiative was committing a US Coast Guard cutter and training team to the region, Koh said.
But Russia's military struggles in Ukraine have lessons for China, too, Koh said.
"The line of communication -- air and sea -- from the coastal hubs along China's southern mainland and these outposts would be too long, and vulnerable to interdiction unless they're able to secure air and naval dominance," he said.
"Even if the Chinese might gain the initial upper hand by seizing some features in (the South China Sea), holding them securely in the long run becomes uncertain," Koh said.
India-China
The decades-long standoff along the Line of Actual Control (LAC), the ill-defined border between India and China in the Himalayas, might be the most complex of the military issues facing Biden on his trip to Asia.
A bloody clash between Indian and Chinese troops on the LAC in 2020 has pushed India, which has long had Russia as its major weapons supplier, closer to the United States.
India has also aligned itself with the US, Japan and Australia in the Quad, an informal group of countries that many see as an effort to push back against China's influence in the Indo-Pacific region.
Fareed's Take: Don't cast the war in Ukraine as a showdown with autocracy 05:29
But New Delhi's historically close ties with Moscow, and the need to keep oil and gas imports from Russia intact -- as well as military supply chains -- have seen India stopping short of sanctions against Russia, something the other Quad members have been at the forefront of.
Harsh V. Pant, professor at Kings College London and director at Observer Research Foundation in New Delhi, notes two factors from Ukraine that are likely to keep India tilting toward the United States.
One, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance provided by Washington and its allies have helped Ukraine stop and now push back Russia on the battlefield.
India has had a similar understanding with the US in monitoring and understanding Chinese military capabilities and what's happened in Ukraine will push that effort forward, Pant says.
And two, Russia's role as a supplier of around half of India's military weaponry comes into question.
"India will have to look very carefully at the sourcing of its hardware," Pant says.
"If Russia is so embroiled in its own wars, where are the maintenance and spare parts (for India) going to come from?"
Washington and its allies are the more likely provider both of the weapons themselves, but also aiding in technology transfer for India to manufacture its own modern armaments, Pant says.
And that would be a likely avenue for an agreement to come out of the meeting of Quad leaders in Tokyo next week.
CNN · by Analysis by Brad Lendon, CNN
9. 155 mm Howitzers on The Ukraine Battlefield | SOF News
155 mm Howitzers on The Ukraine Battlefield | SOF News
The defense of Kyiv has resulted in a Ukrainian victory over the invading Russian forces in northern Ukraine. Russian units have pulled out of most of northern Ukraine and have repositioned into eastern Ukraine in the Donbas region. Both Ukraine and Russia are massing their units for a protracted battle in this area of Ukraine and artillery is playing a key role on the battlefield.
Russian tactics have always had artillery and rocket fire as a key ingredient in both offense and defense. The Ukrainians need to match their adversary’s artillery capabilities. Numerous shipments of M777 155 mm howitzers (Wikipedia) by the United States and other countries are helping Ukraine respond to the firepower of Russia’s artillery and rocket systems.
On May 19, 2022, the Pentagon announced (DoD) that another shipment of 18 155 mm howitzers are heading to Ukraine. In addition, 18 tactical vehicles to tow those howitzers are part of the shipment. Other field equipment and three AN/TPQ-36 counter-artillery radars are also going as part of the weapons shipment. This is equipment is part of yet another tranche of presidential drawdown support for Ukraine. The 18 artillery tubes are basically the equivalent of a U.S. artillery battalion.
Photo: Marines fire a M777 howitzer at Twentynine Palms, California. Marine Corps Sgt. Jose E. Guillen.
The howitzers have left several different locations within the United States. They are usually transported by Air Force C-17 Globemaster IIIs to Europe. Members of the Ukrainian military have received training on the artillery tubes in Germany and a few other locations in Europe. The training is about a week long. The transition to the M777s should not be difficult by the Ukrainians. Their standard artillery weapons are the D-30 122 mm howitzer and 152 mm Msta-B howitzer. By the end of April over over 50 of the howitzers had arrived in Ukraine along with 155 mm rounds. With this latest shipment of 18 howitzers and the 90 already shipped or enroute, the total M777 howitzers delivered to Ukraine will be 108 or the equivalent of six U.S. artillery battalions. The U.S. is also providing the tactical vehicles to tow the howitzers.
The artillery is a critical element for the Ukrainians in the Donbas region where the opposing forces are heavily reliant on long-range fires and artillery and have massed many motorized infantry and armor units. Many of the 155 mm howitzers are already on the frontlines and being used effectively by the Ukrainians.
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Photo: Marine Corps 155 mm M777 towed howitzers are staged on the flight line prior to loading them into an Air Force C-17 Globemaster III aircraft on March Air Reserve Base, Calif., April 23, 2022. The howitzers are included in U.S. and allied efforts to identify and provide Ukraine with additional capabilities. Photo by Marine Corps Staff Sgt. Royce H. Dorman.
10. Disinformation board's ex-leader faced wave of online abuse
This will be an important case study. It is unfortunate that Ms. Jankowicz was victimized in this way. It is ironic that the failed rollout of an organization to study disinformation is itself the victim of a very well coordinated disinformation campaign - a campaign the organization was designed to study.
But the lesson is that if we are going to focus on disinformation we need to be extremely transparent with that organization and we should have a comprehensive strategic influence campaign prepared prior to the rollout to have any chance at countering the disinformation campaign that will inevitably occur from those who put politics above security. On the other hand those who criticize the effort and who embarked on the disinformation campaign to ensure failure of this organization are concerned that this organization would focus on politics and not on security and that their speech would be threatened for political purposes. Oh the irony.
Disinformation board's ex-leader faced wave of online abuse
AP · by AMANDA SEITZ · May 20, 2022
WASHINGTON (AP) — Nina Jankowicz, like so many millennials, was excited to share a social media post announcing her new job on Twitter late last month when she was named executive director for a new disinformation board established by the Department of Homeland Security.
But instead of well-wishes, Jankowicz’s tweet set off a torrent of sexist profanities across social media and menacing emails filled with rape or death threats that continue to follow her even after she resigned from that new job on Wednesday morning following the disastrous rollout of the program.
It’s a familiar scenario.
A crush of online harassment, stalking and abuse has driven dozens of women around the globe from powerful positions. The speed and unchecked virulence of the attacks show another way that social media can serve as an accelerant to sowing discord.
“This type of silencing and terrorizing are global, sadly, and unsurprising,” said Danielle Citron, a law professor at the University of Virginia who studies online privacy and hate crimes. “It is a playbook. And it’s downright scary.”
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In 2018, after winning an election that made her the first female, Black legislator in Vermont, Kiah Morris said she was quitting the job because of racist threats, including from one Twitter user who threatened to stalk her at rallies.
Former Ohio health director Amy Acton, one of several female health officials across the U.S. who was subjected to threats online after recommending COVID-19 masking and stay-at-home orders, resigned weeks after protesters showed up at her house armed with sexist, antisemitic signs.
Heidi Allen, a member of British Parliament, stepped down in 2019, saying she was “exhausted” by “vile” online hatred she received, which included one man who posted aerial images of her home with specific threats. He was eventually jailed for his posts.
A United Nations report released earlier this year that studied Finland confirmed what many of those women already suspected: Female politicians, regardless of political affiliation, are subjected to 10 times more abusive messages on Twitter, including hate speech that sometimes suggested the women kill themselves. The online abuse, the U.N. concluded in its report, prevents democracies from being equally representative.
For her part, Jankowicz said Wednesday she won’t be “silenced” by the online harassment and it was not the final provocation that led to her resignation.
But it had a similar effect.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas decided Tuesday to pause the work of the Disinformation Governance Board after such a negative reception and growing concerns that it was becoming a distraction for the department’s other work on disinformation, according to two department officials who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. The board’s pause led Jankowicz to quit Wednesday morning.
To be sure, the board’s bungled launch and the agency’s ensuing struggle to directly answer questions about its purpose, funding or work made the new initiative contentious from the start. Critics and Republican lawmakers raised serious questions about how the board might infringe on Americans’ free speech and privacy rights. Others expressed concerns about Jankowicz’s previous statements around the provenance of a laptop said to belong to Hunter Biden, the president’s eldest son.
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“I was trying to do important work to protect Americans from a real threat,” Jankowicz said. But, instead, she was spending time reporting a steady wave of threats about herself.
“It was horrible. It was constant (direct messages), emails, threats on Twitter, threats on other places that I wasn’t looking at. That’s obviously really scary and really unpleasant.”
AP · by AMANDA SEITZ · May 20, 2022
11. Department of Defense continues to downplay Taliban and Al Qaeda threat in Afghanistan
Department of Defense continues to downplay Taliban and Al Qaeda threat in Afghanistan | FDD's Long War Journal
The U.S. military continues to underestimate Al Qaeda’s strength in Afghanistan and overestimate the threat posed by the Islamic State’s Khorasan Province.
The newly released Department of Defense Inspector General report on Operation Freedom’s Sentinel (OFS, the now-defunct mission in Afghanistan) and Operation Enduring Sentinel (OES, the current mission to address threats emanating from Afghanistan) puts the number of Al Qaeda operatives in the low hundreds.
Additionally, the report somehow elevated the Islamic State’s Khorasan Province as the primary threat in Afghanistan, over the Taliban, which controls the country and shelters numerous regional and global terror groups, including Al Qaeda.
Stale U.S. military estimates of Al Qaeda’s strength
The Defense Intelligence Agency, or DIA, “reported no significant change from its assessment last quarter that al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent probably has about 200 members and al-Qaeda core has far fewer. During this quarter,” according to the report.
“During this quarter, the U.S. Government did not take any actions to disrupt or degrade al-Qaeda’s activities in Afghanistan, including its media operations, which have increased since August 2021, according to USCENTCOM.”
The U.S. military and intelligence services have a more than decade-long history of underestimating Al Qaeda’s manpower in Afghanistan, and recycling the old estimates year after year. FDD’s Long War Journal reported on these flawed estimates since the military and intelligence services released them.
Between July 2010 and late 2015, the U.S. military and CIA consistently claimed that Al Qaeda had only 50 to 100 operatives in Afghanistan. The 50 to 100 estimate remained static for over five yearS, despite reporting, including from the U.S. military’s own press releases, showed that scores of Al Qaeda fighters were being killed in dozens of provinces in Afghanistan yearly.
The 50 to 100 Al Qaeda in Afghanistan estimate was blown out of the water in the fall of Oct. 2015, when U.S. and Afghan forces raided two Al Qaeda camps in the Shorabak district in Kandahar province. One of the two camps was situated over 30 square miles and was described as the largest Al Qaeda camp in Afghanistan since the U.S. invasion in late 2001.
Only after the Shorabak raids did the U.S. military revise its estimate from 50 to 100 Al Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan – this time from to 100 to 300. That revised estimate, given seven years ago, is essentially the same as the estimate provided today.
Today, the DIA is claiming there are 200-plus Al Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan. This is clearly an unrevised estimate from years ago. In 2018, the Department of Defense estimated Al Qaeda’s manpower in Afghanistan at 200 members.
U.S. military estimate of the strength Al Qaeda and other groups in Afghanistan, from 2018.
How can the Defense Intelligence Agency estimate Al Qaeda’s strength?
The U.S. military’s poor performance on estimating Al Qaeda’s manpower in Afghanistan is well-documented here at LWJ. But if we suspend disbelief and accept the Defense Intelligence Agency’s stale estimate as accurate, how exactly does the DIA make this estimate?
The report provided no details on the methods and means. But the report is clear about one thing: the U.S. military and intelligence services have near-zero visibility on the situation in Afghanistan. The report noted that there are no on-the-ground intelligence assets, and the ability to fly intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance missions are severely limited due to the long flight-time from drone bases in Doha and limit loiter time.
Keep in mind, the U.S. military had difficulty tracking Al Qaeda in Afghanistan while it had a presence there. The U.S. military missed the fact that Al Qaeda was running two camps at Shorabak while in country; it only found out about their location by capitalizing on intelligence from a raid of a different Al Qaeda base far from Kandahar.
Given the lack of intelligence and inability to monitor the situation on the ground, and the history of these failed estimates, it is highly likely that the DIA recycled a tired estimate of Al Qaeda’s manpower.
The Taliban-Al Qaeda alliance is the real threat
The U.S. military continued to display a lack of awareness of the true threat that emanates from Afghanistan. According to the report, “ISIS-K Remains Top Terrorist Threat in Afghanistan.” ISIS-K is the Islamic State’s Khorasan Province, or ISKP.
According to the DIA, ISKP has 2,000 fighters in country (again, how the DIA knows this nearly nine months after leaving the country is unclear). The report noteD that ISKP controls no territory, and is only able to carry out limited terror attacks within the country. The Taliban and its allies are enemies of the Islamic State, and the Taliban routinely hunts ISKP operatives.
Meanwhile, the Taliban controls all 34 of Afghanistan’s provinces and all levers of government, took possession of $7.1 billion of U.S. military hardware, maintains support from Pakistan and to a lesser extent Iran, and shelters a host of global and regional terror groups, including Al Qaeda, the Movement of the Taliban in Pakistan, the Turkistan Islamic Party, Jamait Ansarullah, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, Lashkar-e-Taiba, and others.
These terror groups now have safe haven, with the ability to regroup, train its fighters, shelter its leaders, and plot and execute attacks against Western interests. The terror groups, at the behest of the Taliban, are limiting their external operations at the moment to give the Taliban time to consolidate its grip on Afghanistan.
But even the U.S. military concedes that it is only a matter of time before the restraints are loosened.
The U.S. military prioritized the ISKP threat after it emerged in Afghanistan in 2015, and focused an inordinate amount of energy to hunt down and destroy the group, often while cooperating with the Taliban. The U.S. military began to view the Taliban as a partner in peace, and backed State Department negotiations with the Taliban, and even claimed it could be an effective counterterrorism partner.
All with dissasterous consequences.
The U.S. military has continually grossly misjudged the threat in Afghanistan before the withdrawal, and to the surprise of no one, that did not change today.
Bill Roggio is a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the Editor of FDD's Long War Journal.
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12. Afghanistan Rising: It’s Time to Let the Taliban Fall
Excerpts:
The Taliban’s losses so early in the spring show the competence of the National Resistance Front. Without outside assistance and against an enemy armed to the teeth, Massoud’s forces show victory to be possible. In effect, Afghanistan today is like Ukraine two months ago. Ukraine’s victories discredited intelligence assessments about Russia’s potency that, in retrospect, seem silly. So too does the narrative that Taliban are unchallenged in Afghanistan and that they have consolidated control.
President Joe Biden and Congress are right to fund Ukraine. It would be unconscionable for any official in Washington or the West would suggest funding Russian occupation zones in the name of alleviating the suffering that the Russians themselves caused. It is no less crazy, however, to pump tens of millions of dollars to the Taliban regime in the name of humanitarian relief. Donor motives might be pure, but that money does not achieve its goals. The Taliban steals and diverts it. At the very least, it helps the Taliban solidify control.
The United States need not actively fund Massoud and the Afghan resistance, but it should recognize the Afghan Zelenskyy when it sees it and stand out of his way. Massoud’s success is apparent to anyone who looks. It is time to let the Taliban fail.
Afghanistan Rising: It’s Time to Let the Taliban Fall
What’s the difference between Afghanistan and Ukraine? Not as much as you might expect.
What’s the difference between Afghanistan and Ukraine? Not as much as you might expect.
Ukraine and its resistance have captured the Western imagination in a way Afghanistan never did. European leaders and Congressional delegations head to Kyiv to have their photographs taken with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy with an urgency few did with former Afghanistan president Ashraf Ghani: Western politicians know they gain more from being seen with Zelenskyy than vice versa.
It is likely that the Biden administration wishes to forget that it initially counseled Zelenskyy’s surrender. The Ukrainian leader rose to the moment and showed himself to be more Winston Churchill than Neville Chamberlain. He inspired his countrymen to fight for a cause in which they believed and against an enemy against whom they could unite. The ramifications for the liberal order would be disastrous had Zelenskyy chosen differently.
Ghani was no Zelenskyy. For years prior to Kabul’s fall, first Donald Trump and then Joe Biden counseled compromise. Ghani resisted at first—the privileges of power were vast, and he never believed the United States would follow through with its threats to leave the country—but, when push came to shove, he fled his palace in the middle of the night, handing the capital city to the Taliban. The Taliban, in victory, quickly dashed any hope that they were different from the radical, repressive force that dominated the country in the years immediately prior to the September 11, 2001, terror attacks.
While Biden may wish to put Afghanistan behind him, deflect blame, and tarnish all Afghans with the actions of their former president, the reality is many Afghans never gave up the fight. Freed from Washington’s efforts to micromanage the Afghan politics, true leaders have arisen who refuse to accept the subjugation of their people.
Consider the case of Ahmad Massoud, the son of the late “Lion of the Panjshir” Ahmad Shah Massoud. The U.S. Embassy in Kabul might have spent millions of dollars in polling to tell them how Afghans felt outside the embassy compound’s walls, but those polls were always snake oil: A far better way would simply be to drive around the city and into the countryside. In my years visiting Kabul and its environs, portraits of Massoud became more numerous and prominent than Afghanistan’s top elected leaders in shops, homes, and on billboards.
Even if Biden does not believe his withdrawal was an error, its timing surely was. He ordered the U.S. evacuation in the summer at the height of Afghanistan’s fighting season when the Taliban was most mobile. Had the United States waited until winter, it might have given Afghans a chance to entrench and prepare to the battle the Pakistan-backed group. After the winter snows froze the Taliban’s gains in place, Western politicians erred again when they confused silence with acquiescence.
No longer. In recent weeks, Massoud’s National Resistance Front launched its spring offensive. It was able quickly to take most of three districts in Panjshir, a district in Takhar, and several villages in Andarab. The Taliban lost considerable local credibility when its spokesman denied fighting in the north while media disseminated photographs of dead fighters and coffins transported to Helmand and Kandahar. Massoud’s forces then ambushed Taliban reinforcements, inflicting casualties on the Taliban force in southern Panjshir and in the Abdullah Khel district. Compounding the Taliban’s problems are is the fact that reinforcements from southern Afghanistan are like fish out of water in Panjshir and the surrounding valleys.
The Taliban also lost fighters and vehicles in Qasan village in Andarab. There have been similar ambushes of Taliban forces in northern Kabul, Parwan, Kapisa, Takhar, Baghlan, and Badakhshan. The Taliban, therefore, now face resistance across hundreds of miles.
Importantly, the Taliban have not been able to take any National Resistance Front bases in a counterattack. In effect, what Massoud’s force now is doing in the Panjshir Valley and elsewhere in Afghanistan is reminiscent of the initial Ukrainian resistance against the Russian onslaught. And, just like Russia did in the face of resistance, Taliban forces are taking civilian hostages and conducting summary executions around Andarab, perhaps believing that retaliating against relatives of resistance fighters will demoralize them. To the contrary, however, it appears to solidify and motivate the resistance. Taliban brutality has also led many non-Pashtun to defect to the National Resistance Front. The most senior defector so far was Commander Malik, who served as the intelligence director for the Taliban police in Panjshir.
Momentum matters in Afghanistan. I learned this the hard way while visiting Mazar-e-Sharif in 1997. I went to sleep in an area controlled by non-Taliban forces, with the front-line dozens of miles away. When I woke up, the Taliban were marching on the city after convincing a neighboring warlord to defect. (The Indian Embassy in Uzbekistan helped evacuate me to Termez, just across the Afghanistan border).
The Taliban consolidated power and by 1998, controlled perhaps 90 percent of the country. As Afghans living under them told me when I visited the Taliban’s emirate in March 2000, they were a house of cards. It was not surprising to see the rapidity of their collapse in October 2001 in the face of overwhelming U.S. and NATO firepower. Only when Washington began to signal exhaustion did the Taliban really rebound. Now, however, it is the Taliban’s turn to face a crisis of momentum.
The Taliban’s losses so early in the spring show the competence of the National Resistance Front. Without outside assistance and against an enemy armed to the teeth, Massoud’s forces show victory to be possible. In effect, Afghanistan today is like Ukraine two months ago. Ukraine’s victories discredited intelligence assessments about Russia’s potency that, in retrospect, seem silly. So too does the narrative that Taliban are unchallenged in Afghanistan and that they have consolidated control.
President Joe Biden and Congress are right to fund Ukraine. It would be unconscionable for any official in Washington or the West would suggest funding Russian occupation zones in the name of alleviating the suffering that the Russians themselves caused. It is no less crazy, however, to pump tens of millions of dollars to the Taliban regime in the name of humanitarian relief. Donor motives might be pure, but that money does not achieve its goals. The Taliban steals and diverts it. At the very least, it helps the Taliban solidify control.
The United States need not actively fund Massoud and the Afghan resistance, but it should recognize the Afghan Zelenskyy when it sees it and stand out of his way. Massoud’s success is apparent to anyone who looks. It is time to let the Taliban fail.
Michael Rubin is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
Image: Reuters.
13. Pro-war Russians are increasingly critical of the Ukraine conflict
Excerpts:
Thousands of Russians have been detained or harassed because they oppose President Vladimir Putin’s decision to go to war. The pro-war critics are different — they support the war but are frustrated with the pace of progress and in many instances want Putin to get tougher.
“Dear Vladimir Vladimirovich, please decide, are we fighting a war or are we jacking off?” Alexander Arutyunov, a military veteran who blogs under the name Razvedos, asked on his Telegram account. “If we are fighting we need to fight! And we need to hit everything. There is no other way to win in a war.”
Others bluntly question whether Russia can win the war without radical adjustments to its tactics or the mass mobilization of Russian reservists. A British intelligence report earlier this week estimated that Russia has lost up to a third of the 190,000-strong force originally deployed. Russia has also steadily been sending reinforcements, including regular contract forces alongside reservists, conscripts and mercenaries, for a current total of around 167,000, according to a Ukrainian estimate on Wednesday.
“There must be mobilization or we will lose the war. It needs 600,000-800,000 men to defeat Ukraine,” wrote Vladlen Tatarsky, a former fighter with the separatist Donbas militia who comments on his Telegram account to over 270,000 followers.
Pro-war Russians are increasingly critical of the Ukraine conflict
Far from opposing the war, the criticisms call for tougher measures to subdue Ukraine
May 19, 2022 at 9:52 a.m. EDT
RIGA, Latvia — Battlefield setbacks in Ukraine are prompting mounting criticisms of the Russian military among Russians who support the war but are increasingly frustrated with the way it is being fought.
Military analysts, veterans, mercenaries and journalists are among those who have begun speaking out on social media and state-run television against the blunders and shortcomings that continue to plague Russia’s efforts in Ukraine, even after the Russian military narrowed its goals to the capture of territory in the eastern Donbas region.
Thousands of Russians have been detained or harassed because they oppose President Vladimir Putin’s decision to go to war. The pro-war critics are different — they support the war but are frustrated with the pace of progress and in many instances want Putin to get tougher.
“Dear Vladimir Vladimirovich, please decide, are we fighting a war or are we jacking off?” Alexander Arutyunov, a military veteran who blogs under the name Razvedos, asked on his Telegram account. “If we are fighting we need to fight! And we need to hit everything. There is no other way to win in a war.”
Others bluntly question whether Russia can win the war without radical adjustments to its tactics or the mass mobilization of Russian reservists. A British intelligence report earlier this week estimated that Russia has lost up to a third of the 190,000-strong force originally deployed. Russia has also steadily been sending reinforcements, including regular contract forces alongside reservists, conscripts and mercenaries, for a current total of around 167,000, according to a Ukrainian estimate on Wednesday.
“There must be mobilization or we will lose the war. It needs 600,000-800,000 men to defeat Ukraine,” wrote Vladlen Tatarsky, a former fighter with the separatist Donbas militia who comments on his Telegram account to over 270,000 followers.
The criticisms mirror those of U.S. officials and Western military experts who have expressed astonishment at the dismal performance of the Russian military, assumed on the eve of the war to be the second-most powerful in the world. Poor planning, tactical mistakes, substandard equipment and weaponry, as well as tough resistance by Ukrainian armed forces, thwarted Russia’s original plan to seize Kyiv and are now blunting its efforts to capture Donbas.
Russian troops are making gains, but at a slower pace than envisaged by Russian military planners, U.S. officials say. Meanwhile, Russia continues to suffer heavy losses of men and equipment, prompting Western military experts to question how much longer the Russians will be able to sustain offensive operations.
The Russian critics are asking the same question. A retired colonel and prominent military analyst stunned television audiences on Monday with a candid assessment of the challenges facing Russia. With the United States and its allies rushing large quantities of sophisticated weaponry to Ukrainian forces, the situation for Russian troops “will frankly get worse,” Mikhail Khodaryonok told the “60 Minutes” talk show on the state-run Rossiya-1 channel. “We are in total geopolitical isolation and the whole world is against us, even if we don’t want to admit it.”
In an appearance earlier this month, he suggested that even mass mobilization wouldn’t help Russia given the superiority of the NATO weapons being supplied to Ukraine. Calling up more untrained men isn’t a solution, he said, “because we don’t have modern weapons and equipment in our reserves.”
“Sending people armed with weapons of yesteryear into a 21st-century war to fight against world-class NATO weapons would not be the right thing to do,” he added, proposing a radical restructuring of Russia’s military industrial complex as a solution.
Harsh condemnations are also being circulated on Telegram, the social media channel that has emerged as the dominant forum for news and discussion of the war, among Russians and Ukrainians alike.
Russia’s battle for Donbas will only be won with “courage and political will … not with chatter and half-measures, but decisive, lightning-fast actions,” wrote Yury Kotyonok, a journalist and military analyst with over 290,000 followers on his Telegram account. He added that both appear to be lacking.
Meanwhile, he noted, “the West speaks and acts, pumping up Ukraine for war [with weapons]. Russia is waiting for this fetid pile to be blown by the wind in our direction.”
A failed attempt by Russian forces last week to cross the Siversky Donets river that stands in the way of their westward advance drew ridicule. Commentators expressed contempt for the tactical and leadership failings that contributed to what may have been the single biggest Russian setback in the ground war so far.
As many as 485 soldiers died and 80 armored vehicles were lost when Russian troops with the 74th Motorized Rifle Brigade of the 41st Combined Arms Army raised a pontoon bridge across the river, only to be obliterated by Ukrainian artillery, according to Ukrainian reports quoted by the Institute for the Study of War and a forensic study by the Atlantic Council.
The Russians then attempted at least one other identical maneuver at the exact same point, only for that force to be destroyed, too, the ISW said. According to the head of the Luhansk administration, Serhiy Haidai, the Russians made a total of five failed attempts at the same point in the river.
“How much of an idiot could you be? German Kulikovsky, a Russian journalist, asked on his Telegram account. “Maybe it is not idiocy but sabotage?”
“Honestly, it is much easier to explain this situation by sabotage,” he added sarcastically.
Tatarsky, the former Donbas fighter, called for the “military genius” who ordered the operation to be publicly named and held accountable. The Donbas offensive has slowed in part because of the actions of such commanders, he said.
The criticisms reflect a wider dissatisfaction with the way the war is going within the Russian military and security services, Russian journalists and analysts say. And greater leeway to speak out is given to pro-war Russians who have demonstrated unquestionably patriotic credentials, said a Russian journalist who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he opposes the war and fears the consequences of being publicly quoted.
Many in the military establishment believe that limiting the war’s initial goals, downsized after the Russian failure to seize Kyiv, was a mistake, wrote Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan, prominent Russian investigative journalists and nonresident fellows at the Center for European Policy Analysis.
“They now argue that Russia is not fighting Ukraine, but NATO. Senior officers have therefore concluded that the Western alliance is fighting all out (through the supply of increasingly sophisticated weaponry) while its own forces operate under peacetime constraints like a bar on airstrikes against some key areas of Ukraine’s infrastructure,” Soldatov and Borogan wrote. “In short, the military now demands all-out war, including mobilization.”
Whether the criticisms are reaching Putin and his inner circle is in question. Putin has boasted in the past that he doesn’t have time for social media and the Kremlin has said that he doesn’t own a cellphone.
14. US intel skeptical Putin will be swayed by Russian public opinion over war in Ukraine
Key points: A large shift in Russian public opinion is unlikely to influence Putin or lead to his ouster.
The US IC is conducting analytic work to assess a post-Putin era. (Learn, adapt, anticipate)
Excerpts:
Multiple US officials and outside experts said that the only opinion Putin is forced to be truly responsive to is the opinion of Russia's security and business elite, who help keep him in power and whom he has made rich.
Still, the intelligence community has begun doing "serious exploratory analysis" in an effort to predict what the end of the Putin era might look like -- eventually.
"There's just a lot of ways that it looks super messy," this person said.
US intel skeptical Putin will be swayed by Russian public opinion over war in Ukraine
Updated 7:30 AM ET, Fri May 20, 2022
CNN · by Katie Bo Lillis, Zachary Cohen and Jeremy Herb, CNN
Washington (CNN)US intelligence officials are skeptical that any change in Russian public opinion against the Kremlin's war in Ukraine -- even a dramatic one -- would have an effect in persuading Russian President Vladimir Putin to end the conflict, according to multiple sources familiar with the latest intelligence.
Officials also doubt that the war, which many strategists believe has been an unmitigated disaster for Russia's military, is likely to lead to the removal of Putin from power, at least in the short term.
That assessment reflects the extent to which officials believe Putin has cemented his control over Russia during his more than two decades in power. Although intelligence officials believe Putin is keenly sensitive to small shifts in public opinion, his ability to crack down on protests and control the media still helps insulate him against any significant popular uprising -- leaving him free to prosecute the war on his own terms.
Putin is intimately involved in the day-to-day management of the conflict, according to three sources familiar with US and western intelligence, who told CNN that Putin directly participates in decision-making that in most Western armies would be reserved for lower-ranking officers. One source familiar with Western intelligence said that Putin often makes decisions on minutiae like the location of attack lines and day-to-day operational goals.
"He clearly is his own decision maker. He doesn't seem to rely even on experts within the government or the cabinet very much," said a senior NATO official. "So it's a bit hard to imagine that popular opinion sways him all that much."
Read More
That raises questions about the effectiveness of Western sanctions designed in part to make the war unpopular inside Russia by inflicting broad economic pain. Efforts to target Russian oligarchs have led to the seizure of millions of dollars in assets, including yachts and luxury properties around the world. But within Russia, analysts say Putin has succeeded in staving off the more immediate economic repercussions, at least for now.
And while there has been some grumbling among Russia's elites who are getting squeezed by sanctions, sources say it's nothing that would lead the intelligence community to believe that Putin will be forced to change course -- and certainly not enough to remove him from power.
"Wide range of opinions," said one of the sources briefed on US intelligence. "In my view, we are a long way from him being in any danger of being removed."
A popular war in Russia
Russian public opinion over the war remains high despite the heavy losses Russian forces have suffered, according to outside analysts and sources familiar with US intelligence. Officials are quick to note that most Russians don't fully grasp the reality of the war, thanks to the deeply repressive media environment inside Russia. Putin has tightened free speech laws surrounding the conflict and effectively shuttered the few remaining independent outlets.
A man rides a motorbike past a destroyed Russian tank on a road in the Kyiv region on April 16.
Public dissent has also been quickly crushed. Widespread protests in the early days of the war were met with mass arrests. Even if disapproval is simmering beneath the surface of rosy public polls, fear of reprisal could keep that disapproval buried and ineffectual.
"Everybody will be against (the war) but they will be afraid of doing anything," said Dr. Natalia Savelyeva, a sociologist with the Center for European Policy Analysis who specializes in the conflict in Ukraine. "Kind of like a long-lasting, stable and horrible situation."
US intelligence officials are intensely tracking public views of the conflict inside Russia, in part because they do believe Putin's perception of public opinion might offer clues to his thinking and future decision-making, according to one source familiar with the latest reporting.
But sources say it has become increasingly difficult to measure public opinion from the outside. The US doesn't trust the available polling and Putin's crackdown on dissent has left American intelligence agencies without a confident picture of Russian attitudes -- and even poorer predictions of how those attitudes might shift as western sanctions begin to impact ordinary life or if Putin orders a mass mobilization amid mounting Russian casualties.
The US "has very little accurate insight post-invasion," said one source briefed on US intelligence. "The assumption right now is Putin has effectively isolated his people from information and repercussions regarding the conflict. How long he can do that is unknown."
Putin's lie to justify invasion draws outrage 02:41
For now, Putin appears to have been successful in pushing his alternate reality through state media, which has continued to report that Russia is fighting Nazis in Ukraine and that the West is to blame for the conflict. Even as unprecedented Western sanctions are expected to shrink Russia's GDP by at least 10% over the next year, both outside experts and officials familiar with US and western intelligence believe Putin and his war are broadly popular -- and are likely to remain so, in large part because of how effectively Putin has controlled the media narrative.
It is extremely unlikely that there will be a large enough shift in domestic attitudes to forge a popular uprising, according to one source familiar with the latest intelligence, and only slightly more likely that cracks in popular support for Putin and his war embolden Russian elites to stage a coup.
But even if public support were to tank, many officials familiar with the intelligence are doubtful that it would do much to alter Putin's commitment or ability to wage the war. Putin could simply move to repress any bubbling opposition, those sources and outside analysts say. Time is also on Putin's side: the Russian president doesn't face reelection until 2024.
"It would take a long time for that shift to happen anyway, given the way the information security culture works there," said one source familiar with western intelligence. "And that's not to assume he won't go full communist -- already you have people reporting on their neighbors.
"A culture of fear can live for a long time, even if you're not so popular," this person added. "And he is popular."
Percolating discontent
Despite the grim outlook, the Biden administration has in place a number of policy measures designed at least in part to turn Russians against the war. The CIA earlier this month published on social media instructions for how Russians concerned about the war can securely contact the agency. The State Department has started a Russian-language channel on Telegram, one of the few open social media platforms that remains available to Russians.
Police officers detain a man during a protest against Russian military action in Ukraine, in Manezhnaya Square in central Moscow on March 13, 2022.
There have been some signs of percolating discontent inside Russia at different points since the beginning of the conflict, and there appears to be a growing awareness at least in Russia's urban centers and among younger Russians that the conflict isn't going very well. On Monday, a former senior Russian officer warned on state television that the situation will get worse, in a rare instance of public criticism of the conduct of Russia's military operations in Ukraine -- although, days later, he appeared to soften his criticism.
But inside the intelligence community, there is little optimism that Russian views of the war are changing.
"What we see is that the majority of the Russian people continue to support the special military operation," Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines told lawmakers earlier this month when asked directly about the impact of sanctions on popular resistance. "I think it's just very hard, frankly, for information to get into Russia to the Russian people. They have a very particular perspective that they're being fed by the government during this period."
Public opinion is still of "incredible interest" to the intelligence community, according to another source familiar with the latest reporting, because officials believe that Putin himself is closely watching for any cracks in his popular support. Watching public opinion may allow the intelligence community to predict Putin's next moves, this person said.
'We need a way out': Former Russian colonel criticizes war efforts in Ukraine 01:33
The Russian president -- long fearful of so-called democratic "color revolutions" -- is likely to be sensitive to marginal shifts in his popularity because his ability to command overwhelming support is one of the keys to maintaining his grip on power.
Popular sentiment may influence Putin's decision-making on ordering a mass mobilization, for example, even if it is unlikely to convince him to back away from the war, analysts say.
CIA Director William Burns said last week that the Russian leader is determined to fulfill a sense of personal destiny in seizing control of Ukraine through armed conflict, but as his forces continue to perform below expectations, he will likely be inclined to adjust his strategic thinking without quitting entirely.
Gaming out a post-Putin Russia
A mass mobilization order -- which senior US intelligence officials have said publicly that Putin would need to implement to achieve many of his war aims -- would also likely have an immediate impact on public perceptions of the war, analysts note.
"We can only guess," said Savelyeva of the Center for European Policy Analysis. "(But) that's a very different thing when you just observe the war on TV and support it, and when your child or yourself have to go and fight."
Some Russians will likely also blame the US and the west for the bite of sanctions, Savelyeva and other analysts note. Putin has primed the nation by insisting the west would have imposed sanctions against Russia no matter what action it took in Ukraine.
Multiple US officials and outside experts said that the only opinion Putin is forced to be truly responsive to is the opinion of Russia's security and business elite, who help keep him in power and whom he has made rich.
Still, the intelligence community has begun doing "serious exploratory analysis" in an effort to predict what the end of the Putin era might look like -- eventually.
"There's just a lot of ways that it looks super messy," this person said.
For now, the Biden administration has taken a wait-and-see approach.
CNN · by Katie Bo Lillis, Zachary Cohen and Jeremy Herb, CNN
15. New Evidence Shows How Russian Soldiers Executed Men in Bucha
New Evidence Shows How Russian Soldiers Executed Men in Bucha
May 19, 2022
visual investigations
Witness testimony and videos obtained by The New York Times show how Russian paratroopers executed at least eight Ukrainian men in a Kyiv suburb on March 4, a potential war crime.
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CCTV camera footage, obtained by The Times, showed Russian soldiers leading a group of Ukrainian captives toward the courtyard where they would be executed moments later on March 4.
May 19, 2022, 4:46 p.m. ET
This article contains images of graphic violence.
BUCHA, Ukraine — It is the last time the men would be seen alive: In two videos, Russian paratroopers march them at gunpoint along a street in Bucha, a suburb of Kyiv. Some of the Ukrainian captives are hunched over, holding the belts of those in front of them. Others have their hands over their heads. “Walk to the right, bitch,” one of the soldiers orders them.
The videos, filmed on March 4 by a security camera and a witness in a nearby house and obtained by The New York Times, are the clearest evidence yet that the men were in the custody of Russian troops minutes before being executed.
“Hostages are lying there, against the fence,” the person filming the video says. He counts: “One, two, three, for sure, four, five, six …” In total, nine people are being held.
The men are forced to the ground, including one wearing a distinctive bright blue hooded sweatshirt.
A video obtained by The Times showed a group of Ukrainian men being led to the makeshift Russian base.
The video ends. But eight witnesses recounted to The Times what happened next. Soldiers took the men behind a nearby office building that the Russians had taken over and turned into a makeshift base. There were gunshots. The captives didn’t return.
A drone video filmed a day later on March 5, also obtained exclusively by The Times, is the first visual evidence that confirms the eyewitness accounts. It showed the dead bodies lying on the ground by the side of the office building at 144 Yablunska Street as two Russian soldiers stood guard beside them. Among the bodies, a flash of bright blue was visible — the captive in the blue sweatshirt.
Drone footage filmed for the Ukrainian military, and obtained by The Times, showed Russian soldiers standing next to the men’s bodies a day after the execution.
A photograph of the executed men’s bodies lying in a courtyard, some with their hands bound, was among a range of images that received global attention in early April after Russian forces withdrew from Bucha. Russian leaders at the highest levels have repeatedly denied wrongdoing in Bucha and described the images as a “provocation and fake.”
But a weekslong investigation by The Times provides new evidence — including the three videos — that Russian paratroopers rounded up and intentionally executed the men photographed in the courtyard, directly implicating these forces in a likely war crime. Russia’s foreign affairs and defense ministries did not respond to requests for comment on The Times’s findings.
A photograph taken on April 3 showed the scene where Russian forces executed eight men at 144 Yablunska Street.Credit...Vadim Ghirda/Associated Press
To uncover what happened to these men, The Times spent weeks in Bucha interviewing a survivor, witnesses, coroners, and police and military officials. Reporters collected previously unpublished videos from the day of the execution — some of the only evidence thus far to trace the victims’ final movements. The Times scoured social media for missing persons reports, spoke to the victims’ family members and, for the first time, identified all of the executed men and why most of them were targeted.
They were husbands and fathers, grocery store and factory workers who lived ordinary civilian lives before the war. But with restrictions on men leaving the country, coupled with a resolve to protect their communities, most of the men joined various defense forces in the days before they were killed. Nearly all of them lived within walking distance of the courtyard in which their bodies would later lie.
Still images from a surveillance camera opposite 144 Yablunska Street showed Russian paratroopers occupying Bucha around the same time the group of men were executed.
Return to Bucha
Russian soldiers first entered Bucha in late February, days after the war began, as they advanced toward Kyiv. Ukrainian forces were ready for them. They devastated Russian paratroopers at the front of the column in an ambush. Death notices and interviews with Russian prisoners posted by a Ukrainian YouTuber indicate that at least two paratrooper units — the 104th and 234th Airborne Assault Regiments — suffered losses.
The Russians withdrew and regrouped before returning on March 3, making their way to Yablunska Street, a long thoroughfare running through the city. Security camera footage obtained by The Times shows that the soldiers, like those who were ambushed in late February, were paratroopers. The video shows them driving vehicles — such as the BMD-2, BMD-3 and BMD-4 designs — that are used almost exclusively by the Russian Airborne Forces, according to experts from the International Institute for Strategic Studies and the Royal United Services Institute.
Security camera footage obtained by The Times showed Russian troops re-entering Bucha near 144 Yablunska Street on March 3 and 4.
The paratroopers patrolled the area, conducting house-to-house searches and operating in and out of 144 Yablunska Street, a four-story office building that the Russians turned into a base and field hospital.
About 300 yards from that base, at 31 Yablunska Street, Ivan Skyba, a 43-year-old builder, and five other fighters had been manning a makeshift checkpoint when the Russians returned. They had a grenade, bulletproof vests and a rifle between them, Mr. Skyba told The Times.
Vitaliy Karpenko, 28, a fighter in a paramilitary unit in Bucha who was executed by Russian soldiers, standing at a checkpoint at 31 Yablunska Street.Credit...Facebook
Ivan Skyba, a 43-year-old builder who volunteered to take shifts at the 31 Yablunska Street checkpoint, was taken captive by Russian soldiers in Bucha.Credit...The New York Times
Warned via radio that Russians were back in Bucha and moving in their direction, they hid in the house beside the checkpoint, along with the homeowner, Valera Kotenko, 53, who had been bringing the fighters tea and coffee, Mr. Skyba said.
They were joined later by two more fighters, Andriy Dvornikov and Denys Rudenko, the man wearing the blue sweatshirt in the video. As the nine men hid, they texted and called loved ones. Mr. Rudenko messaged his best friend saying they were trapped. “Don’t call. I will dial later,” he wrote.
The men sheltered there overnight. By the morning of March 4, they realized that an escape was impossible. “We are surrounded,” Mr. Rudenko wrote to his friend. “For now we are hiding. They are shooting from armored vehicles and heavy caliber.”
Translated text messages between Denys Rudenko and his friend, Ivan Andriychuk, show the last communication they had before he was killed. Mr. Rudenko never responded to Mr. Andriychuk’s last question.
Mr. Dvornikov, a delivery driver, called his wife, Yulia Truba, at 10:20 a.m., she told The Times. “We can’t get out. I will call when I call,” he said, before telling her to delete all of their messages and to prepare to evacuate. “I love you,” he said.
Around an hour later, Russian soldiers conducting searches found the men and forced all nine of them, including the homeowner, out of the house at gunpoint, Mr. Skyba said. The soldiers searched the men for tattoos that could indicate military affiliation and made some of them remove their winter jackets and shoes. Then they walked them to the Russian base at 144 Yablunska Street.
What happened next was described to Times reporters by Mr. Skyba and seven civilian witnesses whom Russian forces also rounded up from neighboring houses and held in a separate group yards from the captive fighters.
Photos shared with The Times, and taken from social media, show the eight men who were executed. Top row, from left: Anatoliy Prykhidko, Andriy Matviychuk, Andriy Verbovyi and Denys Rudenko. Bottom row, from left: Andriy Dvornikov, Svyatoslav Turovskyi, Valera Kotenko and Vitaliy Karpenko.
The witnesses said they saw the group of captives in the parking lot in front of the Russian base with shirts pulled over their heads. Yura Razhik, 57, who lives in front of the office building, said some had their hands tied. The Russian soldiers made them kneel down and then shot one of the men, Vitaliy Karpenko, 28, almost immediately, Mr. Skyba said. Mr. Razhik said he also witnessed the shooting.
Mr. Skyba and another captive, Andriy Verbovyi, were then taken inside the building, he said, where they were questioned and beaten before Mr. Verbovyi was shot and killed. The soldiers took Mr. Skyba back to the parking lot, where the other checkpoint guards were still being held.
At one point, one of the checkpoint guards confessed to the Russians that they were fighters, Mr. Skyba said, and he was eventually let go. He is now under investigation by Ukrainian authorities, according to a local military commander and investigators; a government document seen by The Times specifies it is for “high treason.”
The soldiers debated what to do with the remaining men. “Get rid of them, but not here, so their bodies aren’t laid around,” one said, according to Mr. Skyba.
Satellite image by Maxar By Taylor Johnston
A courtyard execution
Two Russian soldiers took Mr. Skyba and the remaining captives to a courtyard on the side of the building, where the body of another dead man was already lying, Mr. Skyba said. The Times has identified that man as Andriy Matviychuk, 37, another volunteer fighter who went missing a day earlier. He was shot in the head, according to his death certificate.
Mr. Razhik and other witnesses being held outside the office building saw the soldiers lead the captives out of sight, they said. Then gunshots rang out.
Russia-Ukraine War: Key Developments
Card 1 of 4
U.S. aid. The Senate overwhelmingly approved a $40 billion aid package for Ukraine, bringing the total American investment in the war to $54 billion in just over two months. The measure is the latest proof of the bipartisan support on Capitol Hill for helping Ukraine fight Russia.
In Mariupol. Hundreds more Ukrainian fighters that had been in a steel plant in Mariupol surrendered to Russia. Ukrainian officials have said the fighters will be exchanged for Russian prisoners of war, but they have provided no details about the agreement.
“I was shot and I fell down. The bullet went into my side,” Mr. Skyba said. Photos he shared of his injuries show an entry and exit wound in the left side of his abdomen. A doctor in Bucha who treated his injury and a medical report reviewed by The Times confirmed the injury.
Credit...Yousur Al-Hlou/The New York Times
“I fell down and I pretended to be dead,” he said. “I didn’t move and didn’t breathe. It was cold outside and you could see people’s breath.”
Mr. Skyba lay there as the soldiers fired another volley at injured men who were still moving. He waited for about 15 minutes until he could no longer hear the soldiers’ voices. Then he ran.
Tetyana Chmut, whose garden borders the courtyard at 144 Yablunska Street, was among the residents held and later released by the Russians, along with her family. As Ms. Chmut dashed from her house to shelter in a neighbor’s basement later on March 4, she saw the bodies lying in the courtyard. A neighbor of Ms. Chmut’s, Marina Chorna, saw the bodies two days later when she emerged from her basement after the Russian troops occupying her house left.
The bodies of the men killed in the parking lot and inside the building were brought to the courtyard and, together with the six other victims, would lie there for nearly a month.
Evidence of a war crime
Four weeks later, after Russian forces had withdrawn from Bucha, Times reporters visited the scene of the executions. The wall and steps of the building were pockmarked by bullet holes. On the other side of the courtyard, scattered a few feet from where the bodies lay, were spent 7.62x54R cartridge casings, used in the Soviet-designed PK-series machine guns and Dragunov sniper rifles commonly used by Russian troops. The Times also found an unfired 7.62x54R round inside the building.
Credit...Benjamin Foley for The New York Times
Other evidence left behind by the Russians points to two specific paratrooper units that may have occupied the building. Packing slips for crates of weapons and ammunition listed Units 32515 and 74268, corresponding respectively to the 104th and 234th Airborne Assault Regiments. Both units suffered heavy losses during the first Russian attempt to enter Bucha in February.
Packing slips on crates of ammunition, left behind by Russian forces, identified two paratrooper units — the 104th and the 234th Air Assault Regiments — who may have occupied the building.Credit...Security Service of Ukraine
Investigators with the Security Service of Ukraine, or S.B.U., also provided The Times with an image of a patch recovered from inside the building bearing the emblem of the 104th Regiment and a roster of Russian soldiers recovered from the building. By searching Russian social media websites and other databases for each soldier’s name, The Times found that at least five of the named soldiers had apparent links to the 104th Regiment. Others posted images of themselves holding paratrooper flags or wearing paratrooper uniforms. Some listed their location as Pskov, the city that is the headquarters for both the 104th and 234th regiments.
The execution of the captured fighters and the homeowner in Bucha “is the kind of incident that could become a strong case for war crimes prosecution,” said Stephen Rapp, former United States ambassador-at-large for war crimes issues. The captives, having been disarmed and taken into custody by the Russians, were “outside of combat,” under the laws of war, Mr. Rapp said. According to the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross, such laws mean that prisoners must be treated humanely and protected from mistreatment in all circumstances.
In addition to the soldiers who shot the men, their commanders could be charged if they knew about the killings and failed to act to prevent or punish the conduct, Mr. Rapp said.
A desperate search
On March 4, after the men stopped answering calls and replying to text messages, their brothers, wives, mothers and friends began an agonizing search for them. Russian forces patrolled the streets of Bucha, so the relatives went online, pleading for information on social media.
A note photographed next to an unidentified body, and circulated on Telegram, provided details about the person for anyone who may be looking for him. The man was later identified as Valera Kotenko. The note reads: “Bucha city, 144 Yablunska Street. Is wearing a black T-shirt and blue joggers with three white stripes.”Credit...Kyiv Regional Police
“My nephew Denys (wearing a cap and glasses) stopped responding three days ago,” Valentina Butenko, Mr. Rudenko’s aunt, wrote on Facebook. “Does anyone know anything about him?”
“Help find this man,” Elena Shyhan wrote with a photo of her husband, Vitaliy. “His family is very worried, but we are not losing hope.”
Meanwhile, the men’s bodies remained in the courtyard. Once the Russians fled nearly a month later, the graphic image of the scene caught the world’s attention — and that of the families scrambling to find clues.
Liudmyla Nakonechnaya, the mother of Mr. Dvornikov, saw the photo on Facebook. Her comment read: “Oh my god! Oh my god! My dear son!”
Ms. Shyhan also saw the image. She edited her post from weeks earlier with a single line: “Stop searching. We have found him.”
Benjamin Foley, Aleksandra Koroleva, and John Ismay contributed reporting. Dmitriy Khavin and Emily Sternlicht contributed video production, and Oksana Nesterenko contributed research.
16. After delay, U.S. Senate overwhelmingly approves $40 billion in Ukraine aid
After delay, U.S. Senate overwhelmingly approves $40 billion in Ukraine aid
WASHINGTON, May 19 (Reuters) - The U.S. Senate overwhelmingly approved nearly $40 billion in new aid for Ukraine on Thursday sending the bill to the White House for President Joe Biden to sign into law as Washington races to keep military assistance flowing nearly three months after Russia's invasion.
The Senate voted 86-11 in favor of the emergency package of military, economic and humanitarian assistance, by far the largest U.S. aid package for Ukraine to date. All 11 no votes were from Republicans.
The strong bipartisan support underscored the desire from lawmakers - most Republicans as well as Biden's fellow Democrats - to support Ukraine's war effort, without sending U.S. troops.
"This is a large package, and it will meet the large needs of the Ukrainian people as they fight for their survival," Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said, urging support for the emergency supplemental spending bill before the vote.
Biden said the spending bill's passage ensured there will be no lapse in U.S. funding for Ukraine.
"I applaud the Congress for sending a clear bipartisan message to the world that the people of the United States stand together with the brave people of Ukraine as they defend their democracy and freedom," Biden said in a statement, noting that he would announce another package of security assistance on Thursday. read more
A top aide to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy thanked the Senate and said the money would help ensure the defeat of Russia. "We are moving towards victory confidently and strategically," Zelenskiy's chief of staff Andriy Yermak said in an online post minutes after the vote.
SPENDING DEADLINE HAD LOOMED
The House of Representatives passed the spending bill on May 10, also with every "no" vote from Republicans. It stalled in the Senate after Republican Senator Rand Paul refused to allow a quick vote. Biden's fellow Democrats narrowly control both the House and Senate, but Senate rules require unanimous consent to move quickly to a final vote on most legislation. read more
Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin had urged lawmakers to work quickly, telling congressional leaders in a letter that the military had enough funds to send weapons to Kyiv only until Thursday, May 19, so the bill passed just before that deadline.
When Biden signs the supplemental spending bill into law, it will bring the total amount of U.S. aid approved for Ukraine to well over $50 billion since the Russian invasion began on Feb. 24.
The package includes $6 billion for security assistance, including training, equipment, weapons and support; $8.7 billion to replenish stocks of U.S. equipment sent to Ukraine, and $3.9 billion for European Command operations.
In addition, it authorizes a further $11 billion in Presidential Drawdown Authority, which allows Biden to authorize the transfer of articles and services from U.S. stocks without congressional approval in response to an emergency.
And it includes $5 billion to address food insecurity globally due to the conflict and nearly $9 billion for an economic support fund for Ukraine.
The war has killed thousands of civilians, forced millions of Ukrainians from their homes and reduced cities to rubble. Moscow has little to show for it beyond a strip of territory in the south and marginal gains in the east.
Reporting by Patricia Zengerle, additional reporting by David Ljunggren and Steve Holland; Editing by Daniel Wallis
17. Opinion | We Should Say It. Russia Is Fascist.
Should this be a part of a strategic influence campaign?
Excerpts:
We understand more about fascism than we did in the 1930s. We now know where it led. We should recognize fascism, because then we know what we are dealing with. But to recognize it is not to undo it. Fascism is not a debating position, but a cult of will that emanates fiction. It is about the mystique of a man who heals the world with violence, and it will be sustained by propaganda right to the end. It can be undone only by demonstrations of the leader’s weakness. The fascist leader has to be defeated, which means that those who oppose fascism have to do what is necessary to defeat him. Only then do the myths come crashing down.
As in the 1930s, democracy is in retreat around the world and fascists have moved to make war on their neighbors. If Russia wins in Ukraine, it won’t be just the destruction of a democracy by force, though that is bad enough. It will be a demoralization for democracies everywhere. Even before the war, Russia’s friends — Marine Le Pen, Viktor Orban, Tucker Carlson — were the enemies of democracy. Fascist battlefield victories would confirm that might makes right, that reason is for the losers, that democracies must fail.
Had Ukraine not resisted, this would have been a dark spring for democrats around the world. If Ukraine does not win, we can expect decades of darkness.
Opinion | We Should Say It. Russia Is Fascist.
Guest Essay
We Should Say It. Russia Is Fascist.
May 19, 2022, 1:00 a.m. ET
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Dr. Snyder is a professor of history at Yale University and the author of many books on fascism, totalitarianism and European history.
Fascism was never defeated as an idea.
As a cult of irrationality and violence, it could not be vanquished as an argument: So long as Nazi Germany seemed strong, Europeans and others were tempted. It was only on the battlefields of World War II that fascism was defeated. Now it’s back — and this time, the country fighting a fascist war of destruction is Russia. Should Russia win, fascists around the world will be comforted.
We err in limiting our fears of fascism to a certain image of Hitler and the Holocaust. Fascism was Italian in origin, popular in Romania — where fascists were Orthodox Christians who dreamed of cleansing violence — and had adherents throughout Europe (and America). In all its varieties, it was about the triumph of will over reason.
Because of that, it’s impossible to define satisfactorily. People disagree, often vehemently, over what constitutes fascism. But today’s Russia meets most of the criteria that scholars tend to apply. It has a cult around a single leader, Vladimir Putin. It has a cult of the dead, organized around World War II. It has a myth of a past golden age of imperial greatness, to be restored by a war of healing violence — the murderous war on Ukraine.
It’s not the first time Ukraine has been the object of fascist war. The conquest of the country was Hitler’s main war aim in 1941. Hitler thought that the Soviet Union, which then ruled Ukraine, was a Jewish state: He planned to replace Soviet rule with his own and claim Ukraine’s fertile agricultural soil. The Soviet Union would be starved, and Germany would become an empire. He imagined that this would be easy because the Soviet Union, to his mind, was an artificial creation and the Ukrainians a colonial people.
The similarities to Mr. Putin’s war are striking. The Kremlin defines Ukraine as an artificial state, whose Jewish president proves it cannot be real. After the elimination of a small elite, the thinking goes, the inchoate masses would happily accept Russian dominion. Today it is Russia that is denying Ukrainian food to the world, threatening famine in the global south.
Many hesitate to see today’s Russia as fascist because Stalin’s Soviet Union defined itself as antifascist. But that usage did not help to define what fascism is — and is worse than confusing today. With the help of American, British and other allies, the Soviet Union defeated Nazi Germany and its allies in 1945. Its opposition to fascism, however, was inconsistent.
Before Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, the Soviets treated fascists as just one more form of capitalist enemy. Communist parties in Europe were to treat all other parties as the enemy. This policy actually contributed to Hitler’s ascent: Though they outnumbered the Nazis, German communists and socialists could not cooperate. After that fiasco, Stalin adjusted his policy, demanding that European communist parties form coalitions to block fascists.
That didn’t last long. In 1939, the Soviet Union joined Nazi Germany as a de facto ally, and the two powers invaded Poland together. Nazi speeches were reprinted in the Soviet press and Nazi officers admired Soviet efficiency in mass deportations. But Russians today do not speak of this fact, since memory laws make it a crime to do so. World War II is an element of Mr. Putin’s historical myth of Russian innocence and lost greatness — Russia must enjoy a monopoly on victimhood and on victory. The basic fact that Stalin enabled World War II by allying with Hitler must be unsayable and unthinkable.
Stalin’s flexibility about fascism is the key to understanding Russia today. Under Stalin, fascism was first indifferent, then it was bad, then it was fine until — when Hitler betrayed Stalin and Germany invaded the Soviet Union — it was bad again. But no one ever defined what it meant. It was a box into which anything could be put. Communists were purged as fascists in show trials. During the Cold War, the Americans and the British became the fascists. And “anti-fascism” did not prevent Stalin from targeting Jews in his last purge, nor his successors from conflating Israel with Nazi Germany.
Soviet anti-fascism, in other words, was a politics of us and them. That is no answer to fascism. After all, fascist politics begins, as the Nazi thinker Carl Schmitt said, from the definition of an enemy. Because Soviet anti-fascism just meant defining an enemy, it offered fascism a backdoor through which to return to Russia.
In the Russia of the 21st century, “anti-fascism” simply became the right of a Russian leader to define national enemies. Actual Russian fascists, such as Aleksandr Dugin and Aleksandr Prokhanov, were given time in mass media. And Mr. Putin himself has drawn on the work of the interwar Russian fascist Ivan Ilyin. For the president, a “fascist” or a “Nazi” is simply someone who opposes him or his plan to destroy Ukraine. Ukrainians are “Nazis” because they do not accept that they are Russians and resist.
A time traveler from the 1930s would have no difficulty identifying the Putin regime as fascist. The symbol Z, the rallies, the propaganda, the war as a cleansing act of violence and the death pits around Ukrainian towns make it all very plain. The war against Ukraine is not only a return to the traditional fascist battleground, but also a return to traditional fascist language and practice. Other people are there to be colonized. Russia is innocent because of its ancient past. The existence of Ukraine is an international conspiracy. War is the answer.
Because Mr. Putin speaks of fascists as the enemy, we might find it hard to grasp that he could in fact be fascist. But in Russia’s war on Ukraine, “Nazi” just means “subhuman enemy”— someone Russians can kill. Hate speech directed at Ukrainians makes it easier to murder them, as we see in Bucha, Mariupol and every part of Ukraine that has been under Russian occupation. Mass graves are not some accident of war, but an expected consequence of a fascist war of destruction.
Fascists calling other people “fascists” is fascism taken to its illogical extreme as a cult of unreason. It is a final point where hate speech inverts reality and propaganda is pure insistence. It is the apogee of will over thought. Calling others fascists while being a fascist is the essential Putinist practice. Jason Stanley, an American philosopher, calls it “undermining propaganda.” I have called it “schizofascism.” The Ukrainians have the most elegant formulation. They call it “ruscism.”
We understand more about fascism than we did in the 1930s. We now know where it led. We should recognize fascism, because then we know what we are dealing with. But to recognize it is not to undo it. Fascism is not a debating position, but a cult of will that emanates fiction. It is about the mystique of a man who heals the world with violence, and it will be sustained by propaganda right to the end. It can be undone only by demonstrations of the leader’s weakness. The fascist leader has to be defeated, which means that those who oppose fascism have to do what is necessary to defeat him. Only then do the myths come crashing down.
As in the 1930s, democracy is in retreat around the world and fascists have moved to make war on their neighbors. If Russia wins in Ukraine, it won’t be just the destruction of a democracy by force, though that is bad enough. It will be a demoralization for democracies everywhere. Even before the war, Russia’s friends — Marine Le Pen, Viktor Orban, Tucker Carlson — were the enemies of democracy. Fascist battlefield victories would confirm that might makes right, that reason is for the losers, that democracies must fail.
Had Ukraine not resisted, this would have been a dark spring for democrats around the world. If Ukraine does not win, we can expect decades of darkness.
Timothy Snyder (@TimothyDSnyder) is a professor of history at Yale University and a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. He is the author of numerous books, among them “Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin” and “On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From the Twentieth Century.”
18. Three Signs That Putin Might Be Reassessing His Plans
Yes, surely the Russian Colonel was on TV because he was allowed to be there for a purpose. Tom Nichols speculates on what might be the purpose.
Excerpts:
So why are the Russians letting him go on TV? When I first mentioned this on Twitter, responses were filled with predictable jokes about poison tea and falls from windows, but this is the wrong way to think about Russian television. No one goes on a program like Russia’s 60 Minutes and surprises the hosts; the producers and everyone in that studio knew what Khodaryonok was going to say. He is not some fringe figure and his views were widely known before that moment.
If he was on Russian television, it’s because someone allowed him to be there.
But who, and why? I don’t know. Again, it could be a head fake: Khodaryonok isn’t kidding around, but maybe the regime allowed him to be on television as an example of Soviet-style “managed dissent,” where a critic of the war blows off some steam and makes people in Russia feel like they’ve been heard. (Note, by the way, that Khodaryonok doesn’t criticize Putin, just the whole idea of a quick defeat of Ukraine.)
Or it could be that there are people among the Russian elite who want to lower the public’s expectations after three months of extremist and unhinged cheerleading from leading Russian media figures. It could be someone sending a message to Putin.
I hate to leave you with such imprecision, but until there’s more data, it could be any of these things, or something else.
Three Signs That Putin Might Be Reassessing His Plans
The war in Ukraine drags on, but there are signs of change.
By Tom Nichols
MAY 19, 2022
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More alone than ever? (Contributor/Getty)
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We are now three months into the biggest European war since the defeat of Hitler, and a country of 40 million Ukrainians, attacked along multiple axes of advance by a numerically superior Russia, is holding its own.
That’s the good news, and perhaps the only good news. (Well, along with the fact that this conflict has not blossomed into a general European or even global war.) The armies sent to Ukraine by Russian President Vladmir Putin continue to murder, rape, pillage, and destroy, all in the name of … well, no one but Putin is quite sure. But there are signs that some kind of Russian reassessment might be underway.
I don’t want to raise any false hopes here. Be assured that Putin is going to go on hammering away at Ukrainian cities and infrastructure with artillery and missiles. But his plan of capturing Ukraine whole has failed, and his forces have now lost the battles of Kyiv and Kharkiv. They’ve won—if “winning” means anything at the moment—the battle of Mariupol, by reducing that besieged city to rubble. The onslaught is not going to end anytime soon.
Nonetheless, three things have made me wonder what’s going on in the Kremlin. I am connecting these pieces of data by pure speculation at this point, but taken together they seem to be a pattern. One is Putin’s Victory Day speech, another is the phone call between U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and his Russian counterpart, Sergei Shoigu, and the last is a striking Russian television appearance by an incisive critic of the war, retired Russian Colonel Mikhail Khodaryonok.
Let’s look at each of them.
First, the worst did not happen on Victory Day, which is (so far) a relief. I was pretty worried, based on some concerns floating around British and U.S. intelligence circles, that Putin could declare war on Ukraine and NATO and anyone else that he thinks has frustrated his hare-brained scheming in Ukraine. Instead, we got something of a damp squib of a Victory Day speech, in which Putin whined that he had no choice but to act against an imminent Ukrainian-Western-NATO threat.
No one believes this laugh-out-loud explanation in Russia or anywhere else. Putin himself probably doesn’t believe it, but what else could he say at this point?
Second, after months of American efforts to reach the Russian high command, a senior Russian defense official has finally answered the phone. Washington and Moscow have managed to keep communications open at lower levels, but neither Putin nor his top defense officials have been responding to requests for a discussion. Apparently, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan has from time to time been in touch with his Russian opposite number, Nikolai Patrushev. There is a “deconfliction” line open so that U.S. and Russian forces don’t accidentally trip over each other (but the Russians aren’t answering that one often either). Putin clearly issued orders months ago that any other calls would go right to voicemail.
Last week, however, Secretary Austin got through to Minister Shoigu. This is interesting for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is that a rumor went around in the British tabloids that Shoigu was supposedly sidelined with a serious heart attack. (Russia denied the story.) But for whatever reason, there have been no senior Russian–American defense contacts until now.
(And until this week, I wondering about the Chief of the Russian General Staff, General Valery Gerasimov. Rumors abound that he was fired, and then not fired but injured. None of this is confirmed, although we now know he went to the front lines to try to unscrew some of the Russian military’s problems. But now he and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Mark Milley, have spoken as well. This is why rumors aren’t very useful. I’m not going to discuss the “Putin is dying” rumors, either. He might be very sick, but sick Russian leaders can hang in there for a long time.)
The Austin–Shoigu call was perfunctory, at least from the Pentagon readout. Austin said hello, that it’s good to talk, and that there should be a cease-fire.
By the way, Austin’s call for a cease-fire should undermine the idea that the Biden administration wants to keep the war going to weaken Russia. On this, Biden can’t win with critics of his conduct of the war: If the administration keeps the arms flowing, it’s protracting the war, but calls for a cease-fire make a lot of people angry because they see it as appeasing Putin. But this is a discussion for another day.
Anyway, the important fact is that the call happened at all. Did Putin relent and allow Shoigu to pick up the phone? Did Shoigu do it of his own accord and just not bother to ask? Are Putin and Shoigu together playing some sort of game of “good cop, bad cop” so that they can settle in with their current territorial gains?
I don’t know. But I know that it’s better, and safer, if the secretary of defense and the defense minister (and their two top military chiefs) have an open line of communication, and those calls are a good start.
Finally, there was Khodaryonok’s appearance on Russian television a few days ago. This is not his first time in public; Khodaryonok is a well-known security commentator and he was on Russian TV a few weeks ago. He is a sober and stoic critic of the war who stated, in very matter-of-fact terms, why Russia is losing. Even before the war, he laid out why Putin’s plan was likely to fail in an article he published in Russia, and now he’s being proven right in spades.
On the Russian television show 60 Minutes, Khodaryonok pulled no punches. He told the panel, including the reliably pro-Putin host Olga Skabeyeva, that Ukraine had better morale, better weapons, and a better reason to fight. (Skabeyeva tried to offer some token arguments, but she and the other participants mostly just listened in sullen silence.)
“The main deficiency of our military-political position,” Khodaryonok said, “is that we are in full geopolitical isolation, and however much we would hate to admit this, virtually the entire world is against us.” Russians should not comfort themselves with false “informational sedatives” about the state of the Ukrainian military, which he described as a nation in arms that wasn’t going to give up. He waved away Russia’s nuclear threats against Finland and Sweden as mere saber-rattling.
“The situation for us,” he warned, “is clearly going to get worse.”
So why are the Russians letting him go on TV? When I first mentioned this on Twitter, responses were filled with predictable jokes about poison tea and falls from windows, but this is the wrong way to think about Russian television. No one goes on a program like Russia’s 60 Minutes and surprises the hosts; the producers and everyone in that studio knew what Khodaryonok was going to say. He is not some fringe figure and his views were widely known before that moment.
If he was on Russian television, it’s because someone allowed him to be there.
But who, and why? I don’t know. Again, it could be a head fake: Khodaryonok isn’t kidding around, but maybe the regime allowed him to be on television as an example of Soviet-style “managed dissent,” where a critic of the war blows off some steam and makes people in Russia feel like they’ve been heard. (Note, by the way, that Khodaryonok doesn’t criticize Putin, just the whole idea of a quick defeat of Ukraine.)
Or it could be that there are people among the Russian elite who want to lower the public’s expectations after three months of extremist and unhinged cheerleading from leading Russian media figures. It could be someone sending a message to Putin.
I hate to leave you with such imprecision, but until there’s more data, it could be any of these things, or something else.
But taken together, this is still a striking change. All the confident and screechy bloviation we heard a few months ago from the Kremlin about a single Russian people and the great holy work of uniting Ukraine and Russia against the decadent Russian traitors in league with Ukrainian Nazis is gone. The Russians, including Khodaryonok, now admit that they’re up against a dedicated and unified Ukrainian society and army, and that the Ukrainians have better training and better weapons than their Russian opponents.
The Russians, of course, are trying to explain their failures by saying that they’re fighting NATO. They have to say this, because they know they’re fighting Ukrainians—and losing, and this is far more humiliating than losing to the United States and NATO. This, combined with sanctions, means the war fever Putin whipped up three months ago is cooling—and getting colder by the moment.
Does this new realism mean that Putin is going to lay off the wild-eyed rhetoric and escalatory threats? Maybe. Finland and Sweden applied to join NATO, and the Kremlin shrugged. Everyone in Moscow knows this is a diplomatic defeat of the first order; even in the darkest days of the Cold War, the Finns and Swedes cautiously remained culturally and politically pro-West but militarily nonaligned. Putin has done something no Soviet leader ever managed to achieve: the nearly complete unification of Europe against Russia.
But it’s one thing to wave away the long timetable of Finland and Sweden joining NATO. Is there any hope that the Russians will begin to wind down this war?
So far, there’s no evidence for that. I’ll be watching for more diplomatic openings and high-level contacts, along with any possible preparation of the Russian public for an outcome that isn’t the total victory they were promised. What I will not expect is that Russia will scale back the violence; Putin isn’t a big believer in cease-fires or humanitarian corridors. He won’t want to stop killing Ukrainians for their defiance. I’m not going to use the term off-ramp because he doesn’t believe in those, either.
But Putin may have to settle for turning this war of conquest into yet another frozen conflict, where he feeds Russian boys into the meat grinder while pondering his next idiotic move. How long Russians—and the Russian military—will put up with that is anyone’s guess.
This post has been corrected to note that Putin’s forces have lost the battles of Kyiv and Kharkiv, not Kyiv and Kherson, and updated to note that Generals Gerasimov and Milley have spoken recently.
19. Hybrid power could keep the Little Bird helo flying
Hybrid power could keep the Little Bird helo flying
TAMPA, Fla. — A small, yet nimble and heavily used light-attack helicopter that carries small teams of special operators into battle has a problem.
The A/MH-6 Little Bird is becoming too slow to keep up with its counterparts in the fleet, and it’s already too slow to run and gun with new aircraft that the U.S. Army is developing under its Future Vertical Lift program.
While far from official, a new technology could keep the Little Bird — or something very much like it — in the fleet over the coming decades: a hybrid-powered version.
A hybrid helicopter might give developers a means to increase the 80 knots at which the Little Bird currently flies. That existing speed is fast when you’re dangling out of the side of a small airframe, as many Oakley-sporting operators have done for decades. But its far from fast enough for the base requirements of new helos coming online, which must hit 180 knots and are likely to be flying closer to 200 knots or more, said Geoff Downer, program executive officer for the special operations forces’ rotary-wing portfolio.
“My big concern is we’re modernizing our fleet to fly at 200-plus knots and I’ve got an aircraft that flies at 80 knots,” Downer said Wednesday at the Special Operations Forces Industry Conference, hosted in Tampa, Florida, by the National Defense Industrial Association.
U.S. Special Operations Command and its rotary-wing experts are waiting to see how the Army moves forward with its two future vertical lift projects: the future long-range assault aircraft and the future attack reconnaissance aircraft, which are to replace the venerable UH-60 Black Hawk and CH-47 Chinook, respectively.
Neither the FARA nor the FLRAA fit the peculiar role of the only commercial rotary aircraft in U.S. Special Operations Command’s inventory, but Little Bird does.
Defense News reported as early as 2016 that the Army and SOCOM were looking at the strain and capabilities that Little Bird could endure.
Part of it is a funding issue. The Army doesn’t use the Little Bird, so when big-ticket upgrades come to the Chinook, which has flown since the 1960s, or the Black Hawk, SOCOM benefits from those moves.
“If it’s Army common, it’s paid for under Army dollars,” Maj. Gen. Clayton Hutmacher, the deputy commander of U.S. Army special operations, said at the 2016 Army Aviation Association of America’s Mission Solutions Summit.
The commander said at the time that the service would need to look for a new aircraft after the Block 3 portion concluded.
Downer’s presentation on Wednesday showed that date hitting by 2034.
Special operators have upgraded the Little Bird several times and continue to do so. They’ve shifted the helo from four- to five- to six-blade rotors, reduced the weight, and strengthened the airframe. This year, they’re adding a next-generation tactical radio system. Next year, they’re upgrading its sensor package.
They’re also delivering crash-worthy seats and fuel tanks. In the next block of upgrades, slated to start in fiscal 2024, they will install a new machine airframe made by Boeing for all the Little Birds.
Meanwhile, a new performance kit composite rotor is expected to increase blade diameter to add lift. And they’re also adding a new AMS cockpit that gives pilots the ability to use motion controls in that same block, Downer said.
Those solutions will help the Little Bird fly its heart out, but only for so long. In a little more than a decade, when the future vertical lift aircraft begin coming online, the Little Bird may be unable to keep up with the rest of the fleet.
Downer doesn’t expect to have a 100% fleet replacement with the FARA, instead anticipating a mix for the SOCOM mission set. “So we need this street fighter, we need this aircraft to be rapidly deployed, so we’re going to have some mixed fleet going forward.”
Downer told Military Times there are opportunities with a hybrid Little Bird because it will reduce rotor speed, which can increase the aircraft’s speed by offloading some of the drag.
Todd South has written about crime, courts, government and the military for multiple publications since 2004 and was named a 2014 Pulitzer finalist for a co-written project on witness intimidation. Todd is a Marine veteran of the Iraq War.
20. Why a ‘Buy Allied’ approach matters
I hope we can make ""Buy Allied" this work. I think it is smart.
Excerpts:
The current administration is right in its policies to encourage onshoring of key technologies and production capabilities. The hundreds of billions of dollars in infrastructure and pandemic-relief funs need to be smartly used to invest in those areas that America needs in order to keep the economy strong and modern.
However, adopting policies that discourage or penalize American companies from procuring key products and resources as well as partnering with allies and friendly countries not only hurts the American economy but will weaken America’s ability to provide for a strong national defense.
Why a ‘Buy Allied’ approach matters
During the past five years, Americans have heard a lot from two presidential administrations and Congress about the need to onshore manufacturing. In accordance with the slogans “Buy American” and “Made in America,” the noble concept seeks to bring production and jobs back to the U.S. and to reduce our economy’s dependence on foreign suppliers and supply chains.
Clearly two years of the COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on global trade has reaffirmed what Presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden have argued: America no longer is able to produce many products and items that companies and consumers desperately want and need. But the idea that America must completely onshore the manufacturing of items such as microchips, vaccines, televisions, and critical technologies misses the point. Having and maintaining robust foreign suppliers through a “Buy Allied” approach is essential for the American economy to remain strong and will help reduce dependencies on Chinese sources.
Take, for example, the aerospace and defense industry. This industry is already one of the strongest domestic manufacturing sectors because of existing Buy America laws and the need to keep sensitive technologies on U.S. soil. However, to only have domestic sources in American defense items both flies in the face of how military goods are manufactured and is self-defeating when U.S. forces need to operate and fight with allies and partners.
There are at least four essential reasons why making the U.S. aerospace and defense industry exclusively “Made in America” is neither feasible nor desirable:
- Both the Trump and Biden administrations recognized that the American defense-industrial base has become too dependent on single-source suppliers. The Trump administration’s supply chain vulnerability report, released nearly four years ago in accordance with executive order 13806, starkly noted that there are only one or two suppliers in the world who can provide critical materials or components necessary to manufacture military systems. The Biden administration’s executive order 14017 on defense supply chains recognized similar vulnerabilities, particularly in lower ends of the supply chain (e.g., rare earth elements and microelectronics). Both efforts recognized the importance of engaging with allies and partners to build U.S. industrial resilience.
- Defense Department acquisition officials are always seeking the best technology and solution for their systems; and sometimes that technology does not originate in the United States. In two recent competitions, for example, the Navy selected the Italian shipbuilder Fincantieri Marine Group to build its next class of frigates, and the Air Force selected Saab as the prime for the T-X trainer. In both cases, these companies partnered with U.S. companies on their bids, and they are now building these systems in the United States.
- Programs are designed from the outset with foreign partners in mind to help lower costs of research and development as well as and production. They’re also designed to ensure interoperability between the U.S. and its allies. The best known example is the F-35. From its design, the F-35 was meant to be a multinational fighter not just because many nations would fly it but because many nations would be involved from its earliest days in investing in its capabilities and design. By doing so, the U.S. taxpayer did not have to shoulder as much of the financial burden, and the allies would bring the best of their own technologies to the table to build this common platform.
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A Buy America-only approach is counterproductive to U.S. economic and security cooperation priorities. Most countries around the world do not have an advanced defense-industrial sector that can produce at scale for their nation’s military. Therefore, most nations buy American, French, British, Israeli or other nations’ defense items. It is challenging, however, for U.S. defense officials to argue for the security cooperation benefits of purchasing U.S. defense systems when the administration has published a final rule increasing Buy America requirements on U.S. systems from 55% to 75% by 2029.
As has been noted by numerous think tanks and congressional panels, America’s defense-industrial base has weakened over the past decade or so. Congressional budgeting and appropriations issues — such as sequestration and continuing resolutions, unhelpful DoD acquisition policies, outsourcing to countries where labor is cheap, and intellectual property theft by China and other countries, among other issues — have introduced such elements of risk and unpredictability to many small and medium-sized companies, such that they have decided to exit the market and the greater DoD ecosystem.
This is bad for American competitiveness and innovation.
The current administration is right in its policies to encourage onshoring of key technologies and production capabilities. The hundreds of billions of dollars in infrastructure and pandemic-relief funs need to be smartly used to invest in those areas that America needs in order to keep the economy strong and modern.
However, adopting policies that discourage or penalize American companies from procuring key products and resources as well as partnering with allies and friendly countries not only hurts the American economy but will weaken America’s ability to provide for a strong national defense.
Daniel Fata is a nonresident senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. He previously served as the U.S. deputy assistant secretary of defense for Europe and NATO policy during President George W. Bush’s administration. Jerry McGinn is executive director of the Center for Government Contracting at George Mason University’s School of Business. He is a former senior acquisition official for the U.S. Defense Department.
21. A Fight Over Taiwan Could Go Nuclear
Excerpts:
The clear lesson from the war game is that the United States needs to strengthen its conventional capabilities in the Indo-Pacific to ensure that China never views an invasion of Taiwan as a prudent tactical move. To do so, the United States will need to commit to maintaining its conventional military superiority by expanding its stockpiles of long-range munitions and investing in undersea capabilities. Washington must also be able to conduct offensive operations inside the first and second island chains even while under attack. This will require access to new bases to distribute U.S. forces, enhance their survivability, and ensure that they can effectively defend Taiwan in the face of China’s attacks.
Moreover, the United States needs to develop an integrated network of partners willing to contribute to Taiwan’s defense. Allies are an asymmetric advantage: the United States has them, and China does not. The United States should deepen strategic and operational planning with key partners to send a strong signal of resolve to China. As part of these planning efforts, the United States and its allies will need to develop war-winning military strategies that do not cross Chinese red-lines. The game highlighted just how difficult this task may be; what it did not highlight is the complexity of developing military strategies that integrate the strategic objectives and military capacities of multiple nations.
Moving forward, military planners in the United States and in Washington’s allies and partners must grapple with the fact that, in a conflict over Taiwan, China would consider all conventional and nuclear options to be on the table. And the United States is running out of time to strengthen deterrence and keep China from believing an invasion of Taiwan could be successful. The biggest risk is that Washington and its friends choose not to seize the moment and act: a year or two from now, it might already be too late.
A Fight Over Taiwan Could Go Nuclear
Wargaming Reveals How a U.S.-Chinese Conflict Might Escalate
May 20, 2022
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has raised the specter of nuclear war, as Russian President Vladimir Putin has placed his nuclear forces at an elevated state of alert and has warned that any effort by outside parties to interfere in the war would result in “consequences you have never seen.” Such saber-rattling has understandably made headlines and drawn notice in Washington. But if China attempted to forcibly invade Taiwan and the United States came to Taipei’s aid, the threat of escalation could outstrip even the current nerve-wracking situation in Europe.
A recent war game, conducted by the Center for a New American Security in conjunction with the NBC program “Meet the Press,” demonstrated just how quickly such a conflict could escalate. The game posited a fictional crisis set in 2027, with the aim of examining how the United States and China might act under a certain set of conditions. The game demonstrated that China’s military modernization and expansion of its nuclear arsenal—not to mention the importance Beijing places on unification with Taiwan—mean that, in the real world, a fight between China and the United States could very well go nuclear.
Beijing views Taiwan as a breakaway republic. If the Chinese Communist Party decides to invade the island, its leaders may not be able to accept failure without seriously harming the regime’s legitimacy. Thus, the CCP might be willing to take significant risks to ensure that the conflict ends on terms that it finds acceptable. That would mean convincing the United States and its allies that the costs of defending Taiwan are so high that it is not worth contesting the invasion. While China has several ways to achieve that goal, from Beijing’s perspective, using nuclear weapons may be the most effective means to keep the United States out of the conflict.
Gearing For Battle
China is several decades into transforming its People’s Liberation Army (PLA) into what the Chinese President Xi Jinping has called a “world-class military” that could defeat any third party that comes to Taiwan’s defense. China’s warfighting strategy, known as “anti-access/area denial,” rests on being able to project conventional military power out several thousand miles in order to prevent the American military, in particular, from effectively countering a Chinese attack on Taiwan. Meanwhile, a growing nuclear arsenal provides Beijing with coercive leverage as well as potentially new warfighting capabilities, which could increase the risks of war and escalation.
China has historically possessed only a few hundred ground-based nuclear weapons. But last year, nuclear scholars at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies and the Federation of American Scientists identified three missile silo fields under construction in the Xinjiang region. The Financial Times reported that China might have carried out tests of hypersonic gliders as a part of an orbital bombardment system that could evade missile defenses and deliver nuclear weapons to targets in the continental United States. The U.S. Department of Defense projects that by 2030, China will have around 1,000 deliverable warheads--more than triple the number it currently possesses. Based on these projections, Chinese leaders may believe that as early as five years from now the PLA will have made enough conventional and nuclear gains that it could fight and win a war to unify with Taiwan.
A fight between China and the United States could very well go nuclear.
Our recent war game—in which members of Congress, former government officials, and subject matter experts assumed the roles of senior national security decision makers in China and the United States—illustrated that a U.S.-China war could escalate quickly. For one thing, it showed that both countries would face operational incentives to strike military forces on the other’s territory. In the game, such strikes were intended to be calibrated to avoid escalation; both sides tried to walk a fine line by attacking only military targets. But such attacks crossed red lines for both countries, and produced a tit-for-tat cycle of attacks that broadened the scope and intensity of the conflict.
For instance, in the simulation, China launched a preemptive attack against key U.S. bases in the Indo-Pacific region. The attacks targeted Guam, in particular, because it is a forward operating base critical to U.S. military operations in Asia, and because since it is a territory, and not a U.S. state, the Chinese team viewed striking it as less escalatory than attacking other possible targets. In response, the United States targeted Chinese military ships in ports and surrounding facilities, but refrained from other attacks on the Chinese mainland. Nevertheless, both sides perceived these strikes as attacks on their home territory, crossing an important threshold. Instead of mirror-imaging their own concerns about attacks on their territory, each side justified the initial blows as military necessities that were limited in nature and would be seen by the other as such. Responses to the initial strikes only escalated things further as the U.S. team responded to China’s moves by hitting targets in mainland China, and the Chinese team responded to Washington’s strikes by attacking sites in Hawaii.
A New Era
One particularly alarming finding from the war game is that China found it necessary to threaten to go nuclear from the start in order to ward off outside support for Taiwan. This threat was repeated throughout the game, particularly after mainland China had been attacked. At times, efforts to erode Washington’s will so that it would back down from the fight received greater attention by the China team than the invasion of Taiwan itself. But China had difficulty convincing the United States that its nuclear threats were credible. In real life, China’s significant and recent changes to its nuclear posture and readiness may impact other nations’ views, as its nuclear threats may not be viewed as credible given its stated doctrine of no first use, its smaller but burgeoning nuclear arsenal, and lack of experience making nuclear threats. This may push China to preemptively detonate a nuclear weapon to reinforce the credibility of its warning.
China might also resort to a demonstration of its nuclear might because of constraints on its long-range conventional strike capabilities. Five years from now, the PLA still will have a very limited ability to launch conventional attacks beyond locations in the “second island chain” in the Pacific; namely, Guam and Palau. Unable to strike the U.S. homeland with conventional weapons, China would struggle to impose costs on the American people. Up until a certain point in the game, the U.S. team felt its larger nuclear arsenal was sufficient to deter escalation and did not fully appreciate the seriousness of China’s threats. As a result, China felt it needed to escalate significantly to send a message that the U.S. homeland could be at risk if Washington did not back down. Despite China’s stated “no-first use” nuclear policy, the war game resulted in Beijing detonating a nuclear weapon off the coast of Hawaii as a demonstration. The attack caused relatively little destruction, as the electromagnetic pulse only damaged the electronics of ships in the immediate vicinity but did not directly impact the U.S. state. The war game ended before the U.S. team could respond, but it is likely that the first use of a nuclear weapon since World War II would have provoked a response.
The most likely paths to nuclear escalation in a fight between the United States and China are different from those that were most likely during the Cold War. The Soviet Union and the United States feared a massive, blot-from-the-blue nuclear attack, which would precipitate a full-scale strategic exchange. In a confrontation over Taiwan, however, Beijing could employ nuclear weapons in a more limited way to signal resolve or to improve its chances of winning on the battlefield. It is unclear how a war would proceed after that kind of limited nuclear use and whether the United States could de-escalate the situation while still achieving its objectives.
An Ounce of Prevention
The clear lesson from the war game is that the United States needs to strengthen its conventional capabilities in the Indo-Pacific to ensure that China never views an invasion of Taiwan as a prudent tactical move. To do so, the United States will need to commit to maintaining its conventional military superiority by expanding its stockpiles of long-range munitions and investing in undersea capabilities. Washington must also be able to conduct offensive operations inside the first and second island chains even while under attack. This will require access to new bases to distribute U.S. forces, enhance their survivability, and ensure that they can effectively defend Taiwan in the face of China’s attacks.
Moreover, the United States needs to develop an integrated network of partners willing to contribute to Taiwan’s defense. Allies are an asymmetric advantage: the United States has them, and China does not. The United States should deepen strategic and operational planning with key partners to send a strong signal of resolve to China. As part of these planning efforts, the United States and its allies will need to develop war-winning military strategies that do not cross Chinese red-lines. The game highlighted just how difficult this task may be; what it did not highlight is the complexity of developing military strategies that integrate the strategic objectives and military capacities of multiple nations.
Moving forward, military planners in the United States and in Washington’s allies and partners must grapple with the fact that, in a conflict over Taiwan, China would consider all conventional and nuclear options to be on the table. And the United States is running out of time to strengthen deterrence and keep China from believing an invasion of Taiwan could be successful. The biggest risk is that Washington and its friends choose not to seize the moment and act: a year or two from now, it might already be too late.
- STACIE L. PETTYJOHN is a senior fellow and director of the defense program at the Center for a New American Security.
- BECCA WASSER is a fellow in the defense program and co-lead of The Gaming Lab at the Center for a New American Security.
22. Here are the high-end weapons Zelenskyy hopes the new Ukraine aid bill will provide
Excerpt:
The supplemental aid package contains $11 billion in funding to allow President Biden to transfer big-ticket military equipment to Ukraine via presidential drawdown authority — his preferred means so far to quickly provide assistance to the Ukrainian military. The massive supplemental also includes $8.7 billion to backfill stocks of items like Javelin anti-tank and Stinger anti-aircraft missiles that have already been sent to Ukraine under drawdown authority.
Here are the high-end weapons Zelenskyy hopes the new Ukraine aid bill will provide
WASHINGTON — The Senate on Thursday passed 86-11 a $40 billion aid package for Ukraine that will enable the Biden administration to transfer more advanced, high-end weapons systems to counter Russia.
The bulk of the funding in the pipeline — $34.7 billion — is allocated toward Ukrainian military aid and marks the largest tranche yet from Congress. Much of that money is likely to go toward providing Kyiv with major weapons systems Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has sought to more effectively counter Russia as the conflict transitions into a war of attrition in Ukraine’s south and east.
“We are looking at additional high-end systems that would provide new capabilities,” Jessica Lewis, the assistant secretary of state for political-military affairs, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last week. “Some of those of course require training, and we need to make sure there’s time to do that as well.”
Lewis declined to identify specific systems the Biden administration intends to transfer with the funds, but Zelenskyy has relayed specific requests to the flurry of U.S. lawmakers who have visited Ukraine in recent weeks.
Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., and Rep. Jason Crow, D-Colo., both met with Zelenskyy on separate trips and subsequently told Defense News he now seeks long-range rocket artillery, more sophisticated drones and anti-ship systems.
Barrasso and three other Republican senators led by Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., met with Zelenskyy in Ukraine last week while Crow joined a separate delegation last month led by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.
“We have to evolve the Ukrainian military into the future fight, which is going to look different in the south and the east,” said Crow.
The supplemental aid package contains $11 billion in funding to allow President Biden to transfer big-ticket military equipment to Ukraine via presidential drawdown authority — his preferred means so far to quickly provide assistance to the Ukrainian military. The massive supplemental also includes $8.7 billion to backfill stocks of items like Javelin anti-tank and Stinger anti-aircraft missiles that have already been sent to Ukraine under drawdown authority.
Pelosi and Crow relayed Zelenskyy’s weapon requests to Biden and Defense Department officials during a meeting at the White House last week.
Crow said multiple launch rocket systems would help defend major Ukrainian metropolitan centers from Russian advances while bolstering offensive operations in Donbas and Luhansk.
He also noted Zelenskyy has asked for “more sophisticated intelligence and surveillance drones as well as attack drones that can be reused multiple times instead of the Kamikaze drones we’ve given them.”
The U.S. so far has provided Ukraine with small Switchblade drones, which are piloted by operators up to several miles away and can loiter in the air before attacking their targets. Ukraine is now seeking longer-range drones with precision-strike munitions that can be rearmed multiple times.
Ukraine also wants Harpoon anti-ship missiles, which Crow said would help keep the Russian Navy at bay and prevent them from attacking the shoreline.”
Barrasso said anti-ship missiles would allow the Ukrainians to remove the naval mines they’ve placed that are blocking off the key port of Odessa.
“Because it’s mined, you can’t get all the grain out,” Barrasso told Defense News. “Zelenskyy and others have pointed out that if they have the anti-ship weaponry they can take mines out of the harbor so the boats and the ships can get out.”
The package Congress passed includes $100 million in demining funds, which the Ukrainians can use in Odessa and elsewhere.
The Defense Department’s Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative is also set to get a $6 billion boost to provide equipment, supplies and logistical support to the Ukrainian military after Biden quickly exhausted the $300 million Congress provided for the fund in March.
The legislation gives Ukraine and NATO’s eastern flank countries access to $4 billion in Foreign Military Financing — grants that help countries purchase equipment from U.S. defense manufacturers.
Another $3.9 billion will fund U.S. forces stationed in Europe, including the deployment of a Patriot missile battery. And the legislation will set aside $500 million to replenish the U.S. critical munitions stockpile and $600 million to expedite missile production and expand domestic access to critical minerals via the Defense Production Act.
Finally, the bill requires the inspectors general for the Pentagon and State Department to oversee the Ukraine aid funds.
Bryant Harris is the Congress reporter for Defense News. He has covered the intersection of U.S. foreign policy and national security in Washington since 2014. He previously wrote for Foreign Policy, Al-Monitor, Al Jazeera English and IPS News.
23. The Corps should drop manslaughter charges against MARSOC Marines, corpsman
The Corps should drop manslaughter charges against MARSOC Marines, corpsman
Loyalty. Duty. Country. These values matter to me.
As a bomb disposal expert in Afghanistan, I was the tip of the spear: It was my job to find and dispose of improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, and clear the path ahead so that the rest of my platoon could safely do their jobs.
The last IED I found, I discovered with my feet. When the bomb went off, I lost two legs and a finger.
During my lengthy recovery and rehabilitation at Walter Reed Medical Center in Maryland, I knew one thing for certain: I was not going to let my last best days of service to my country be behind me. The same values that guided me on the battlefield compelled me to continue to serve. Now, as the representative for Florida’s 18th District, I’m committed to using my role in Congress to continue to clear the path so my brothers and sisters in arms can do their jobs.
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The court found that a top Marine lawyer made "threatening" statements that sabotaged any chance for a fair trial.
Maj. Gen. James F. Glynn needs to put this unfortunate incident behind MARSOC. He has a chance to right the wrong of his predecessor, Maj. Gen. Daniel Yoo, who seriously damaged the capability and credibility of the command by ignoring the evidence and overzealously ordering the harshest charges and the harshest form of court-martial for the three heroes involved ― a general court-martial.
I’m concerned that these actions were politically motivated, and that the three Marine Raiders ― Marine Gunnery Sgt. Daniel Draher, Marine Gunnery Sgt. Joshua Negron and Navy Hospital Corpsman Chief Petty Officer Eric Gilmet ― have been wrongly scapegoated by Yoo.
Let’s look at the facts.
I’ve personally reviewed multiple surveillance videos that captured the entire event. Here’s what I saw:
In the early morning hours of New Year’s Day 2019, in a civilian pub across the street from the U.S. consulate in Irbil, Kurdistan, a U.S. contractor was repeatedly aggressive toward Gilmet. Several Kurdish bouncers kicked the visibly intoxicated and aggressive contractor out of the bar, but he remained outside near the on-street parking area, seemingly to seek and provoke a violent confrontation.
Draher attempted to de-escalate the situation. He approached the contractor and his eight or nine buddies. He kept his hands at his side, careful to use nonconfrontational body language. The contractor then attacked Draher, landing numerous punches to his face. As the attack continued, Negron stepped in to defend his friend and threw a single punch that rendered the contractor unconscious. Immediately, the hospital corpsman, Gilmet, began providing medical care.
After that, I know that the contractor’s buddies dispersed, so the trio brought him back to the base where all four lived. Gilmet was concerned about his heavily intoxicated state, so he posted watch overnight. In the morning, Gilmet asked the contractor’s friend to keep watch over him. Later, when left alone, the contractor choked on his own vomit and stopped breathing. The friend called for Gilmet, who responded and provided urgent medical care, then helped transport the contractor to the base hospital. Tragically, he died some days later at Landstuhl, Germany.
Immediately after the incident, Draher informed his chain of command of the situation. Then, nearly 10 months later and seemingly out of the blue, Yoo charged Draher, Gilmet and Negron with involuntary manslaughter, negligent homicide, obstruction of justice, dereliction of duty and violation of orders. If convicted, all three would face 22 years in the brig.
There are two questions that must be answered: (1) What motivated Yoo to ignore the overwhelming evidence that his men acted in self-defense; and, (2) What created a judicial environment where unlawful command influence would be perpetrated?
Answering the first question requires some context.
The summer after the episode, the top Navy SEAL sent out a letter stating his command has a problem with discipline “that must be addressed immediately.”
Three days prior, the Navy Times had revealed an internal report exposing cocaine abuse and lax drug testing inside SEAL Team 10. The week before, a platoon from SEAL Team 7 was brought home early from Iraq because of misconduct. This was followed shortly thereafter by a comprehensive culture and ethics review, citing these incidents among others. As a result, commanders sought to publicly restore discipline by holding violators of the laws of armed conflict accountable.
It appears to me that this unfortunate episode got wrapped up in other cases of alleged misconduct within the U.S. Special Operations Command. I believe that Yoo saw an opportunity for damage control and a chance to score political points at the expense of these three heroes. Further, his eagerness suggested to those in his command that no length was too far to travel in pursuit of that goal.
Which brings me to the second question about unlawful command influence within MARSOC.
In February of this year, military judge Navy Cmdr. Hayes C. Larsen dismissed all charges against Gilmet with prejudice ― meaning the charges cannot be refiled ― because Gilmet’s JAG was threatened by a senior JAG.
In his decision, Larsen wrote, “a senior judge advocate who occupied a position of authority over the futures of young judge advocates made threatening comments to a young judge advocate about his career” and that “[h]is actions constitute actual and apparent UCI.”
I am troubled that the government is now appealing this decision. What’s more, the shockingly unlawful judicial culture with the Marine Corps has forced Draher and Negron to release their highly competent Marine JAGs and turn to the Army and Coast Guard for new defense counsel.
Three years on, Glynn must correct these festering wrongs. He has been described by the Commandant of the Marine Corps Gen. David Berger as a “listening and learning leader.”
I believe that Glynn shares my values of loyalty duty, and country. I am confident that he will serve country and Corps by making a swift and just determination in this case by dropping the charges and ensuring these men are honorably treated.
Congressman Brian Mast, R-Florida, is serving his third term representing the 18th Congressional District of Florida. He served in the U.S. Army for more than 12 years as a bomb disposal expert under the Joint Special Operations Command.
The last IED that he found resulted in catastrophic injuries, including the loss of both his legs. He earned a Bronze Star, the Army Commendation Medal for Valor, the Purple Heart Medal and the Defense Meritorious Service Medal.
24. How Strong Is al-Qaeda? A Debate
Excerpts:
Although we end up with different threat assessments, we agree on many aspects of the danger. We share the view that American counterterrorism is a leading constraint on al-Qaeda’s ability to attack the United States. We also believe that al-Qaeda does not have to be a strong organization to undertake or promote lethal attacks. Capable groups can often behave strategically and conduct careful, limited attacks, while weak groups can carry out bloody ones, especially in the United States, where there is easy access to assault weapons. Although we disagree on the degree of operational freedom the group enjoys in its Iranian haven and on the risk of terrorism emanating from the Taliban’s Afghanistan, we concur that these are important sanctuaries for al-Qaeda and a significant challenge for U.S. counterterrorism.
Yet our disagreements have significant policy implications. Byman’s assessment suggests that the tempo and scope of counterterrorism pressure can be reduced, though much of the low-cost, day-to-day efforts like intelligence cooperation and military training should continue. Forever wars can end or, at least, be diminished. More broadly, even though other Salafi-jihadi threats like ISIL endure, a more limited threat by al-Qaeda implies the importance of counterterrorism in the hierarchy of U.S. foreign policy priorities can fall. Any death of an innocent is too many, but if the group is less able to launch major international terrorist attacks on the United States and its key allies, then other policy concerns should come to the fore.
Mir’s reading suggests that counterterrorism needs to remain among America’s major-national security priorities to manage al-Qaeda and similar threats. America is vulnerable to the second-order effects of al-Qaeda’s terrorist activity, such as heightened polarization, divisiveness, and anti-immigrant sentiment. The U.S. government, by itself as well as in conjunction with regional allies, should also maintain strong monitoring and targeting capabilities across Afghanistan, Yemen, the Sahel, Somalia, and Syria. Finally, dramatically scaling back the U.S. government’s own counterterrorism resources, as implied by the Biden administration’s National Defense Strategy, and reducing investments in bilateral and multilateral counterterrorism efforts due to strategic competition with China and Russia would be a mistake: They are essential to preventing terrorist provocations and remaining focused on strategic competition in the long-run.
How Strong Is al-Qaeda? A Debate - War on the Rocks
Sept. 11, 2001, was “The Day the World Changed.” The 2,977 deaths at the hands of al-Qaeda terrorists led to massive policy changes and dominated U.S. politics for years afterward. The United States went to war in Afghanistan to topple the Taliban, and the attacks contributed to the U.S. decision to invade Iraq in 2003. America began an array of aggressive counterterrorism programs, including the use of armed drones to kill suspected terrorists, indefinite detention at the naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and even torture. At home, the U.S. government detained many American Muslims on flimsy pretexts and implemented controversial programs related to surveillance.
Over 20 years later, the effectiveness of these measures, and the threat al-Qaeda poses, remain hotly debated. Leading terrorism experts like Bruce Hoffman have warned that al-Qaeda remains strong, patiently waiting for opportunities to strike while strengthening its global reach. Other leading analysts are skeptical. Barak Mendelsohn and Colin Clarke contend that “al-Qaeda the organization has failed.” In her 2022 threat testimony, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines struck a middle ground, warning that al-Qaeda still aspires “to conduct attacks in the United States” while also noting that its external attack capabilities are “degraded.” With the al-Qaeda threat perhaps in the rearview mirror, President Biden withdrew troops from Afghanistan in 2021 to end the so-called “forever wars” that sprang up in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.
This article presents a debate on the al-Qaeda threat today, drawing on a longer article we wrote for Studies in Conflict & Terrorism. However, rather than a typical debate where each author makes a case for one side of the argument in separate essays, this article offers a back-and-forth on key arguments in the same essay in order to better engage the arguments. Asfandyar Mir argues that al-Qaeda remains a significant threat, while Daniel Byman is more skeptical. We each present our arguments and then highlight where we agree and disagree. We conclude by detailing the policy implications of our arguments.
Why Al-Qaeda Is a Significant and Enduring Problem: Asfandyar Mir
Al-Qaeda today is led by long-time jihadist Ayman al-Zawahiri, who took the helm after U.S. special operations forces killed Usama bin Laden in 2011. The core itself, mostly based in remote parts of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border regions and Iran, probably has several hundred core members. Far more reside in its affiliate organizations, such as al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, al-Shabaab in Somalia, and al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, among others. The group also has ties to a range of other jihadist organizations and has sought to inspire unaffiliated Muslims around the world to strike the United States and otherwise carry out the group’s objectives.
Despite being the most hunted organization in the world, al-Qaeda is able to threaten the U.S. homeland, its broader security interests, and regional stability in Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. To understand this threat requires careful attention to the group’s political trajectory in light of the constraints facing it.
Al-Qaeda remains committed in its political ambition of fighting the United States while simultaneously embedding itself in key regional contexts. The enduring focus on America, in particular of the core group led by Ayman al-Zawahiri, is a vital indicator of the threat, as al-Qaeda has faced intense pressure to change direction. Dropping the focus against the United States and rebranding to focus squarely on state-building in select regions or against new geopolitical powers, like China, could have blunted the wide-ranging international consensus against al-Qaeda and eased U.S. counterterrorism pressures. Yet al-Qaeda stuck with the costly choice of maintaining an anti-American platform while calibrating the local, regional, and transnational focus of different parts of the overall network. With such adjustments, the group minimized targeting pressures while retaining its historic anti-American raison d’etre.
Al-Qaeda has also managed to stay remarkably cohesive despite poaching pressure from the rival Islamic State group, the absence of regular direction from core leaders, competing regional realities of affiliates, and multinational efforts to divide the group. With the rise of ISIL and the defection of Jabhat al Nusra in Syria in 2016, it was widely assumed that Zawahiri and his top lieutenants had lost control of the global network due to slow communications, and that the al-Qaeda brand was unattractive for some, and even radioactive for other jihadi constituencies. Yet Zawahiri, despite his sclerotic style, managed to retain the loyalty of key top elites based in Iran and the Afghanistan-Pakistan region. He also succeeded in preventing affiliates from breaking away from al-Qaeda’s orbit — even after numerous attempts by the Islamic State to woo some of them. Significantly, over the last five years, several affiliates consolidated politically while also growing funds, recruiting more fighters, and developing permissive safe havens.
One such major affiliate is al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS) in South Asia. This affiliate has kept Zawahiri — who reportedly remains in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region, and has a $25 million bounty on his head — alive. Critically, it helped the Afghan Taliban’s insurgency against the U.S. military and the deposed Afghan government. Now, AQIS is supporting the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan’s expanding campaign of violence in Pakistan while developing its own campaign against India — actively supported by Zawahiri’s provocations.
In Somalia, al-Qaeda affiliate al-Shabaab is more politically cohesive and focused on striking U.S. interests in the region and beyond than it was a decade ago. It controls substantial territory and is al-Qaeda’s richest and most lethal affiliate. In a sign of al-Shabaab’s growing danger, the Biden administration is redeploying troops to fight it. In the Sahel, Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin has embedded itself in local communities through coalition-building and popular support — threatening the stability of Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, and littoral West Africa. Despite the civil war and loss of territory in Yemen, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula remains a consistent threat as it continues to prepare operations targeting the West. In Syria, after a series of setbacks, al-Qaeda retains an important (even if constrained) presence in the form of Hurras-ud-Din. Other affiliates, like al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and Nigeria-based Jamaat Ansar al Muslimeen fi Bilad al Sudan, also reaffirm their allegiance to al-Qaeda.
Some analysts and policymakers, including my co-author, recognize the dangerous trajectory of al-Qaeda’s affiliates but assume that their growing capabilities are a local problem where the affiliates are based — and therefore the U.S. government can remain indifferent to them. In the past, however, the local capabilities of al-Qaeda and its allies in Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen have expanded into regional and transnational threats: When al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, for example, was formed in January 2009, it was considered a local threat. But it plotted attacks against the United States in late 2009 and 2010. The distinction between which capabilities threaten U.S. interests and which ones don’t is not always clear or, equally important, predictable.
In addition to affiliates, al-Qaeda’s core has key relationships with Iran and the Taliban in Afghanistan, which position it to evade international counterterrorism efforts and generate capability. For example, al-Qaeda is able to leverage Iranian territory to protect its central leadership, who manage the affiliate network while funneling resources to different nodes of the group. Despite immense pressure to do so, the Taliban haven’t broken from al-Qaeda. Instead, members of al-Qaeda’s core and al-Qaeda’s Indian subcontinent affiliate remain in Afghanistan, well positioned to pursue a steady buildup for deniable operations. Additionally, Iranian support can synergize al-Qaeda’s Afghanistan presence and boost its overall capability, despite the limits placed on the group by both the Taliban and Tehran.
Al-Qaeda has major opportunities in the years ahead. It is able to boast a “win” from the removal of a U.S.-allied regime and the U.S. military’s defeat in Afghanistan as well as growing influence in East and West Africa, all of which position it to build local and transnational operations capabilities in multiple theaters. American counterterrorism — the factor that has most constrained al-Qaeda — is weakening in the regions where both the core and affiliates are present due to diminishing resources, which are being redirected to respond to intensifying strategic competition with China and Russia. Al-Qaeda is also attentive to America’s domestic political polarization — and can mount attacks to exploit divisions.
Al-Qaeda Is Less Dangerous Than in the Past: Daniel Byman
The low number of attacks on the United States and its key allies is one reason to be skeptical of the al-Qaeda threat. The core did not carry out a single successful attack on the United States or Europe in the 2010s — and the last major plot in the United States by the core was Najibullah Zazi’s disrupted plan to bomb the New York subway. Although al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula conducted the 2019 shooting attack at Naval Air Station Pensacola, the majority of al-Qaeda affiliates have not attacked the U.S. homeland or Europe. Indeed, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula itself has been weakened in the last five years through drone strikes, U.A.E. military intervention, and the growing civil war in Yemen.
Another is that al-Qaeda has not succeeded by some of its own metrics. Al-Qaeda has failed to change the regimes of Muslim-majority countries closely allied with the United States. One of al-Qaeda’s ambitions — and one that Zawahiri himself long pursued with single-minded devotion before taking the helm of al-Qaeda — is to overthrow supposedly apostate regimes in Muslim-majority countries and establish Islamic governments in their places. The group sees itself as a vanguard supporting Muslim insurgencies through training, funding, and inspiring other groups. Yet in Saudi Arabia, bin Laden’s home, the al-Saud dynasty remains entrenched, and the regime led by Mohammad bin Salman is implementing reforms to make the country more secular. In Egypt, where Zawahiri formed his first jihadist cell as a teenager, the Hosni Mubarak dictatorship was replaced by the dictatorship of Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, an even more secular dictator. Indeed, in 2011, when the Arab world exploded with democratic energy, al-Qaeda affiliates were notably absent as major players initially.
My co-author is correct that al-Qaeda’s allies have grown stronger in Yemen, parts of sub-Saharan Africa, and other areas. Historically, however, these are areas of limited interest to the United States. Counterterrorism assistance and military training are still appropriate, but these do not need to be policy priorities.
Another al-Qaeda goal is the removal of the United States and other so-called infidel military forces from Muslim-majority countries. In recent years, the United States has deployed roughly 40,000-60,000 troops to the greater Middle East, with a presence not only in pre-9/11 allies like Jordan and Saudi Arabia but also in additional countries like Iraq and Syria. This number is up from just under 30,000 before the 9/11 attacks.
Without direction from the top, affiliates have increasingly focused on local and regional concerns, changing the nature of the threat they pose to U.S. interests. Al-Qaeda is not prioritizing the United States in practice, despite the rhetoric of figures like Zawahiri. For affiliates and allies, the day-to-day vicissitudes of living and fighting in civil war zones, and the constant pressure from rival groups and the government, lead to choices in favor of the local battlefield over the needs of external operations, about which few local audiences care.
In addition, they are less able to plot elaborate high-casualty attacks on the West. An operation like 9/11, which involved years of planning, operatives working in multiple countries, a haven in Afghanistan in which to plan, train, and recruit, and other advantages — and depended upon the attackers receiving little scrutiny when they arrived in the United States — is much harder to execute today.
Indeed, al-Qaeda’s ability to stop infighting in Iraq and Syria and control the jihadist movement there proved the biggest public blow to al-Qaeda and almost led to the core group’s undoing by creating its biggest rival: ISIL. Tens of thousands of foreign fighters from at least 110 countries flocked to join ISIL, not al-Qaeda, in Iraq and Syria. And in the United States and Europe, it was usually ISIL that exerted a pull on potential foreign fighters and inspired attackers. ISIL also produced rival affiliates and rejected important parts of al-Qaeda’s ideology. The propaganda war between the two is bitter and diminishes them both. Both compete for recruits and fundraising, and they and their affiliates often fight.
Al-Qaeda today lacks a haven comparable to what it enjoyed in the Taliban’s Afghanistan before 9/11. In the 1990s, al-Qaeda was able to train thousands of fighters in Afghanistan, elevating their skill levels, giving them a common cause, and directing them when they returned to their home countries. Although al-Qaeda has a presence in many countries, it cannot run the industrial-scale training camps it ran in the past.
As my co-author points out, there are two possible exceptions to this: Afghanistan and Iran. In Afghanistan, the Taliban — and its on-and-off Pakistani ally — have incentives to prevent the group from launching major international terrorist attacks against the United States, Europe, and many key allies, although further limited attacks in South Asia are more likely. In addition, the United States has some remaining (even if reduced) counterterrorism capacity in the region that will still hinder al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.
The relationship between Iran and al-Qaeda is troubled. There is considerable distrust, and al-Qaeda members have complained they are “captive … in the enemy state of Iran.” Counterterrorism operations are still carried out in Iran, such as the 2020 killing of Abu Muhammad al-Masri, a top al-Qaeda official living in Iran, reportedly by Israeli assets operating at the behest of the United States. Furthermore, ties to Iran — a Shiite power loathed by many religious Sunnis — are unpopular and taint al-Qaeda by association.
In addition to having been diminished by effective counterterrorism, jihadists have also struggled to establish a foothold in Muslim communities. Risa Brooks has found that the American Muslim community self-polices, rooting out radicals in its midst, and cooperates regularly with the FBI. Compounding this problem, many of the would-be terrorists in the Western world are not the brightest bulbs in the chandelier. The list of their mistakes is long and at times comical.
How Policy Should Reflect the Threat
Counterterrorism and the struggle against al-Qaeda is no longer the number one policy priority it was in the years after 9/11. Nevertheless, a succession of presidents have maintained high levels of spending and continued many of the homeland security, intelligence, and military programs that sprang up in the wake of the attacks.
Although we end up with different threat assessments, we agree on many aspects of the danger. We share the view that American counterterrorism is a leading constraint on al-Qaeda’s ability to attack the United States. We also believe that al-Qaeda does not have to be a strong organization to undertake or promote lethal attacks. Capable groups can often behave strategically and conduct careful, limited attacks, while weak groups can carry out bloody ones, especially in the United States, where there is easy access to assault weapons. Although we disagree on the degree of operational freedom the group enjoys in its Iranian haven and on the risk of terrorism emanating from the Taliban’s Afghanistan, we concur that these are important sanctuaries for al-Qaeda and a significant challenge for U.S. counterterrorism.
Yet our disagreements have significant policy implications. Byman’s assessment suggests that the tempo and scope of counterterrorism pressure can be reduced, though much of the low-cost, day-to-day efforts like intelligence cooperation and military training should continue. Forever wars can end or, at least, be diminished. More broadly, even though other Salafi-jihadi threats like ISIL endure, a more limited threat by al-Qaeda implies the importance of counterterrorism in the hierarchy of U.S. foreign policy priorities can fall. Any death of an innocent is too many, but if the group is less able to launch major international terrorist attacks on the United States and its key allies, then other policy concerns should come to the fore.
Mir’s reading suggests that counterterrorism needs to remain among America’s major-national security priorities to manage al-Qaeda and similar threats. America is vulnerable to the second-order effects of al-Qaeda’s terrorist activity, such as heightened polarization, divisiveness, and anti-immigrant sentiment. The U.S. government, by itself as well as in conjunction with regional allies, should also maintain strong monitoring and targeting capabilities across Afghanistan, Yemen, the Sahel, Somalia, and Syria. Finally, dramatically scaling back the U.S. government’s own counterterrorism resources, as implied by the Biden administration’s National Defense Strategy, and reducing investments in bilateral and multilateral counterterrorism efforts due to strategic competition with China and Russia would be a mistake: They are essential to preventing terrorist provocations and remaining focused on strategic competition in the long-run.
Daniel Byman is a professor at Georgetown University and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Asfandyar Mir is a senior expert at the U.S. Institute of Peace.
Image: Al Kataib via the Belfer Center
25. Nuclear vs. Conventional Spending? We Don’t Have that Luxury
Conclusion:
Now more than ever we should be clear that our nuclear deterrent plays many roles, and in the first instance deterring a major non-nuclear strategic attack is vital.
Nuclear vs. Conventional Spending? We Don’t Have that Luxury
The call to boost one at the expense of the other is wrong.
Voltaire reportedly once remarked “Lord, protect me from my friends; I can take care of my enemies.” This thought immediately came to mind as we read a recent commentary in Defense One recommending dramatic increases to America’s military stocks for the next five years, and the cost of its nuclear weapons.
In “Four Lessons Should Upend Pentagon’s Five-Year Strategy,” John Ferrari, now a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, raises concerns about a deficit in War Reserve Munitions. His thinking about a possible war in this decade and the effects of inflation on the defense budget are spot-on. We would be the first to agree that that Defense Department topline needs something like 5 percent real annual growth to keep pace with the unprecedented national security challenges facing the nation.
But the call to increase defense spending for conventional capabilities at the expense of modernizing our nuclear forces could not be more wrong. Spending increases for both are necessary.
Ferrari falls into the familiar trap, carefully prepared by the progressive anti-U.S. nuclear forces movement, by quoting a notional “nearly trillion-dollar” cost to modernize the nuclear triad. That frequently cited figure involves notorious double counting of dual-use systems and ignores that fact that the cost of nuclear modernization will be amortized over a 30-year life cycle. Moreover, at a time when Congress has appropriated nearly $6 trillion in two years for domestic needs in the wake of the COVID pandemic, spending $1 trillion over three decades on a national security insurance policy that has served the nation well for 75 years seems like a bargain at twice the price.
Second, three ongoing threats should serve to remind all of us that nuclear weapons continue to play a crucial role in world affairs: Russia’s brandishing of its nuclear weapons and explicit threats about possible nuclear weapons use in the Ukrainian war; Kim Jong-un’s similar tactics of missile tests and nuclear scare-mongering; and China’s continued expansion of its nuclear forces, which U.S. Strategic Commander Adm. Charles Richard called “breathtaking.” Failing to modernize our triad of nuclear delivery systems, which are already suffering from a two-decade procurement holiday, would be tantamount to condemning those systems to retirement without replacement.
If you think the world is dangerous now, try envisioning it without a credible, safe and reliable nuclear deterrent.
Third, general arm-waving about cutting nuclear modernization costs begs the following questions: what is it specifically that opponents propose cutting? Should we abandon the new Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile in favor of keeping the 70-year-old Minuteman III? Do we buy fewer B-21 stealth bombers, which also have a conventional mission, just as they begin to enter full-scale production? Should we halt the assembly line that is building replacement SSBNs even as the existing Ohio-class boats will be forced to retire in the years ahead on safety grounds? Any of these would delay critical replacements for aging platforms in the field today as well as drive up overall program costs as procurement is stretched out and delayed.
Fourth, the notion that the White House’s Office of Management and Budget will provide separate line-items to fund triad modernization outside the defense budget is risible. Whether such special funds should exist, as they do in the UK to support Britain’s continuous at sea deterrent is an interesting philosophical question but not one that will help us negotiate the immediate challenges facing the United States’ defense establishment today.
Fifth, a clear-eyed look at the true cost of nuclear modernization will reveal that it constitutes between 2.5 and 3.0 percent of the defense budget. The operation and sustainment of the existing force accounts for another 3.5 to 4.0 percent. Simple arithmetic makes clear, therefore, that the percentage of the Defense Department budget not devoted to nuclear systems is about 93 percent. Looking to save money on the nation’s nuclear forces remains the “hunt for small potatoes” as David Mosher, the former director of the national security division of the Congressional Budget Office, described it some 20 years ago. It is no doubt for that reason that former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said that the cost of nuclear modernization is a small price to pay to deter an existential threat.
Finally, Ferrari’s thesis ignores the fundamental truth that an effective nuclear force deters not only nuclear attack but also conventional aggression against our treaty allies in NATO and the Pacific. Would Putin have attacked Ukraine if Kyiv had retained a nuclear arsenal? Would he be striking NATO if our nuclear umbrella, aged as it is, was not in place? Would we and other NATO members be able to resupply Ukraine without a strong nuclear deterrent? These questions answer themselves.
Now more than ever we should be clear that our nuclear deterrent plays many roles, and in the first instance deterring a major non-nuclear strategic attack is vital.
Eric S. Edelman is counselor at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. He served as defense undersecretary for policy from 2005 to 2009. Franklin Miller is a principal of the Scowcroft Group and chairman of the board of directors of the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory. Both have held senior positions in national security affairs over administrations of both parties.
26. ‘Our Commander Is Leaving With Us’: Putin’s Troops Openly Plot to Ditch ‘Stupid’ War
Excerpts:
“It’s not desertion, because we shouldn’t be on this territory… We crossed the border as 200s,” he says, using a Russian military term for those killed in battle. “We’re not actually here. So if they say I’m a deserter, fuck off, I’m not here. Prove otherwise.”
Other Russian soldiers are said to have taken equally drastic measures to get themselves out of the war. Ukrainian intelligence has released several recordings in recent days that purportedly show Russian soldiers resorting to injuring themselves in an effort to get pulled from the war.
On Thursday, Ukraine’s Security Service released another recording said to reveal that trend. In the purportedly intercepted call between two Russian soldiers, one of the men tells his friend that fighting is getting more and more intense by the day, and despite daily fatalities, the military leadership is not providing backup.
“Take someone else’s weapon, a Ukrainian one, and shoot yourself in the legs,” his friend advises.
‘Our Commander Is Leaving With Us’: Putin’s Troops Openly Plot to Ditch ‘Stupid’ War
‘SHOOT YOURSELF IN THE LEGS’
“It’s not desertion, because we shouldn’t be on this territory.”
Updated May. 19, 2022 2:56PM ET / Published May. 19, 2022 10:21AM ET
Reuters
Russian soldiers are apparently so sick of Vladimir Putin’s “stupid” war in Ukraine that they are now openly plotting with their own commanders to go AWOL.
The Ukrainian Defense Ministry’s Main Intelligence Directorate released a recording on Thursday that is said to show precisely that happening, with a soldier heard in a purportedly intercepted phone call detailing the plan.
The soldier, identified by Ukrainian intelligence as one of many men “mobilized” by authorities in occupied Donetsk, complains that he and others in his battalion are so under-equipped that even the Chechen forces fighting alongside them mock them as “meat.”
“Everyone who is here … I’m telling you … everyone is planning to take off on the 26th,” the purported soldier says.
“Isn’t that stupid?” says the other man, apparently a relative back home.
“Isn’t it stupid that we’re here?” the unnamed soldier shoots back.
He goes on to explain that the troops have decided to abscond “on the basis of the fact that they put us on the front with absolutely nothing.”
“I want to tell you even more,” he says, adding that a “battalion commander is leaving with us and even a staff colonel.”
“They don’t provide us with any [equipment],” he says, adding that the rifles given to snipers are “from 1945.”
Other units “look at them and go, ‘Holy shit, what would you need those for?’ They laugh at us. You know what they call us? Blessed. We ask, ‘Why blessed?’ They say because we are walking around with no equipment, no helmets, without anything. … The Chechens call us meat.”
“It’s not desertion, because we shouldn’t be on this territory… We crossed the border as 200s,” he says, using a Russian military term for those killed in battle. “We’re not actually here. So if they say I’m a deserter, fuck off, I’m not here. Prove otherwise.”
Other Russian soldiers are said to have taken equally drastic measures to get themselves out of the war. Ukrainian intelligence has released several recordings in recent days that purportedly show Russian soldiers resorting to injuring themselves in an effort to get pulled from the war.
On Thursday, Ukraine’s Security Service released another recording said to reveal that trend. In the purportedly intercepted call between two Russian soldiers, one of the men tells his friend that fighting is getting more and more intense by the day, and despite daily fatalities, the military leadership is not providing backup.
“Take someone else’s weapon, a Ukrainian one, and shoot yourself in the legs,” his friend advises.
V/R
David Maxwell
Senior Fellow
Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Phone: 202-573-8647
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
