|
Quotes of the Day:
"I have never in my life envied a human being who led an easy life; I have envied a great many people who led difficult lives and led them well."
- Theodore Roosevelt, 1910
"What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." "In 1984", Huxley added, "people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure."
In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us."
~Neil Postman
"First, have a definite, clear practical ideal; a goal, an objective. Second, have the necessary means to achieve your ends; wisdom, money, materials, and methods. Third, adjust all your means to that end."
- Aristotle
1. Army Mulls 10-20% Cut to Special Operations Forces
2. F-16s Would Make No ‘Fundamental Change’ in Ukraine’s War Effort, USAF Secretary Says
3. UN watchdog: Ukrainian nuclear plant briefly loses power supply again, is 'extremely vulnerable'
4. What it would mean for the global economy if the US defaults on its debt
5. Russia alleges border incursion by Ukrainian saboteurs; Kyiv claims they are disgruntled Russians
6. Anti-Putin militia claims to have overrun Russian border village
7. Women’s secret war: the inside story of how the US military sent female soldiers on covert combat missions to Afghanistan
8. FMS 2023: Retooling Foreign Military Sales for An Age of Strategic Competition
9. 'Exhaust them': Why Ukraine has fought Russia for every inch of Bakhmut, despite high cost
10. China Makes Clear Its Military Isn’t Funny Anymore
11. Russia Offensive Campaign Assessment, May 22, 2023
12. The Strategic Downside To Drone Attacks – Analysis
13. The west’s tightening of Russian sanctions is a sign of failure
14. Bestselling military memoir banned from Hudsonville Public Schools
15. A Note of Caution: How Sanctions Can Undermine U.S. Interests
16. Did the Unipolar Moment Ever End?
17. The cyber gulag: How Russia tracks, censors and controls its citizens
18. FACT FOCUS: Fake image of Pentagon explosion briefly sends jitters through stock market
19. Death by Drones: Does the Pentagon Always Know Who it is Killing?
20. The 1880s Political Novel That Could Have Been Written Today
21. Rand survey finds level of extremism among veterans same as public
1. Army Mulls 10-20% Cut to Special Operations Forces
Note that the correct term is PSYOP not psyops.
But where to begin?
The rumors I have heard is that USSOCOM already has been reduced by some 742 personnel and as I understand it the headquarters has absorbed those cuts so that the operational units would not be directly affected.
Now I understand the Army wants to 'take back" some 3000 "enabling forces" - intelligence, logistics, and communications. This will be devastating to the operational units and the ability of SOF to field irregular warfare proficient campaign headquarters.
Increasing demands for special operations employment aside, the Army could be cutting off its nose to spite its face or shooting itself in the foot. These "enablers" gain tremendous experience conducting support operations over long distances in austere environments without large theater logistics, communications, and intelligence organizations to plug into nearby or even in theater. When the Army gets these forces back from their rotations with SOF units they are very skilled and highly trained. They are especially well suited for operations in INDOPACOM.
The Army should consider viewing these enablers through the lens of the Abrams Charter when the CSA established the Ranger Battalions in the 1970s. The purpose was to build an elite highly trained and skilled infantry force - the finest light infantry in the world - whose members would rotate between the Ranger Battalions and the regular infantry bringing new skills and capabilities and esprit de corps to the rest of the Army. The SOF enablers have in effect been doing this for years. I have watched intelligence, logistics, and communications professionals do amazing work based on their SOF experiences.
I cannot imagine how anyone could think reducing PSYOP would be a smart thing to do now. But I guess I should not be surprised as I think too often we would rather contract with fly by night "influence organizations" rather than develop and properly employ the PSYOP professionals that already exists - of course we have saddled our PSYOP community with so many restrictions because of our risk averseness regarding anything to do with information and influence. It is no wonder we would rather contract out activities to those who do not have to fall under the draconian approvals process for real PSYOP.
Lastly, regarding Special Forces. We already cut Special Forces significantly back in 2012-0214. For those who have forgotten, the 2006 QDR directed the growth in SF of a fourth battalion in each of the five Special Forces Groups. This meant an increase from 270 Special Forces Operational Detachments (SFODAS) that were authorized (but not fully manned) at 9-11 and the beginning of GWOT to 360 SFODAs by 2013. However, we were not able to recruit and train a sufficient number of personnel to become SF qualified. Therefore about 2013 the decision was made to reorganize the authorized fourth battalion to a new smaller organization that would be able to focus on unconventional warfare preparation of the environment in support of theater commanders and chiefs of mission requirements and to provide the operational preparation to facilitate operations by the other three battalions in the SF Group. This reorganization was very prescient and actually foreshadowed the SF requirements and capabilities necessary for successful operations in strategic competition in the gray zone. To cut SF any further now will be cutting deep into the bones of SF because the fat has long been removed.
I hope that Congress will take a hard look at this and not allow the Army or any of the services (as well as Congress itself) to undermine the nation's special operations capability when it is needed most. Remember that if left to the services we would have little to know special operations capabilities. We have SOCOM and the SOF capability we value today only because of Congress who legislated the capabilities over objections by the services.
Army Mulls 10-20% Cut to Special Operations Forces
Lawmakers and Army officials have discussed cuts through decade’s end, including to Green Berets, psyops, and enablers.
defenseone.com · by Caitlin M. Kenney
The U.S. Army is considering cutting 10 to 20 percent of their special operation forces, according to Capitol Hill officials and a former top commander of the service’s elite forces.
Kenneth Tovo, a retired Army lieutenant general who led U.S. Army Special Operations Command, was asked by Sen. Ted Budd, R-N.C., at a Senate hearing on Wednesday about “the administration's plans to cut 10 percent of U.S. Army Special Operations Forces” and their likely effect on the service’s ability “to provide combatant commanders with options for great power competition, counterterrorism and crisis response.”
“I think it'll be crippling,” said Tovo, who was speaking before the Armed Services subcommittee on emerging threats and capabilities. “10 percent of the force is going to be a significant—…the higher end is even 20 percent.”
Later, a congressional aide went into more detail.
“I’m told by both mid- and senior-level officials in the Army and special operations that cuts to [special operations forces] are coming. Cuts of at least 10 percent. I say again: at least 10 percent are currently reflected in TAA 25-29. TAA is Total Army Analysis 25-29, which is the Army’s process by which they determine future force structure and inform the budget process,” said the aide, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the cuts.
"I’m told that the cuts will be most acute on SOF enablers like logistics and intelligence, but that some changes to force structure are also likely for Special Forces, civil affairs, psychological operations," the aide said.
A second congressional aide confirmed that Army officials were talking with lawmakers and staffers about such cuts but did not say just how deep they might be.
An Army spokesperson, asked about the potential cuts, referred questions to U.S. Special Operations Command.
Kenneth McGraw, a spokesman for U.S. SOCOM, said, “It would be inappropriate for us to speculate on what future decisions might be made about special operations force structure.”
Last week, Gen. Bryan Fenton, commanding general of U.S. Special Operations Command argued in a op-ed in Defense One that the nation’s elite forces that proved to be so valuable for recent counterterrorism wars would be just as necessary for future conflicts and deterrence, saying the United States must “strengthen our ability to contribute to the United States’ contest with great-power adversaries.”
The first aide argued Army proposals to cut end strength are understandable.
“There are very real constraints being placed on the Army, and we understand that, both budgetary and due to the recruiting crisis,” he said. “And changes to force structure are needed both to address those impacts to the overall end strength of the Army and to ensure that the Army can compete with China and Russia, and fight and win America’s wars. But I think we would all prefer that our adversaries are deterred rather than resorting to armed conflict. And competition is happening every day in the grey zone, and that work is primarily being done by special operators who are enabled by both cyber and space capabilities.”
Both staffers said that the Army has not officially told Congress about their end-strength proposals.
“The bottom line is that SOF requirements are increasing, so any loss of capability or capacities for our special operations forces is going to be met with extreme skepticism by members of Congress on both sides of the aisle,” the first aide said.
Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, said at the hearing, “You cannot mass-produce [special operations forces] in a crisis. And we can't get to a point where we're faced with a crisis and we do not have the operators that are able to step forward. So, we really do have to push back against that.”
Tovo said cuts in intelligence enablers would be “devastating.”
“We're a force that is very much driven by our intelligence community,” he said. “And if the cuts are taken there—and that's one of the places that the service I believe wants to take the cuts—that will be devastating. Without the intelligence capability, our operational capability is hobbled at best.”
He also said cuts are likely to affect troops in the Green Berets, psychological operations, and civil affairs, which are “areas where we really can't afford—they are the prime forces for competition.”
“They are the persistent present forces out in the crisis spots of the world who are working with partners and have the ability to do all the things that our last two [National Defense Strategies] have said we want to be able to do to leverage partners and allies,” he said. “And if we take cuts in those, we'll certainly have less capability.”
Once cuts are made, the time it would take to rebuild those forces again is “hard to say, but it'll be measured in years,” Tovo told the senators.
Demand for operators is not waning, and if anything, people in specific specialties are more in demand than what the military currently has. Jonathan Schroden, the research program director for Countering Threats and Challenges at the Center for Naval Analyses, led a recent congressionally mandated force structure assessment that looked into what combatant commanders and the services were requesting for SOF compared to the current force structure.
“We ran a bunch of different calculations, scenarios, etc. One of the common themes in terms of force structure requirements that emerged from those is in almost every scenario we looked at, there was a higher demand for PSYOP forces, for civil affairs forces, for undersea warfare and maritime capabilities, than what the force has today,” Schroden said.
Budd sought to overturn presidential election results in 2020.
defenseone.com · by Caitlin M. Kenney
2. F-16s Would Make No ‘Fundamental Change’ in Ukraine’s War Effort, USAF Secretary Says
F-16s Would Make No ‘Fundamental Change’ in Ukraine’s War Effort, USAF Secretary Says
Biden’s decision to start training Ukrainian pilots on the jet is more about setting up Kyiv’s long-term capabilities, Kendall said.
defenseone.com · by Audrey Decker
Sending F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine would make no “fundamental change” to the war, the U.S. Air Force secretary said.
“It will give Ukrainians an increment of capability that they don't have right now, but it's not going to be a dramatic game-changer, as far as I'm concerned, for their total military capabilities,” Frank Kendall told reporters Monday during a Defense Writers Group event.
President Biden announced on Friday that the U.S. will help train Ukrainian pilots on F-16s and other modern jets, a move that could enable Kyiv to use the jets if any are donated.
Kendall did not rule out eventually sending U.S. F-16s to Ukraine, but said he “didn’t know” and that “there are a number of possibilities, but we haven’t sorted all that out yet.”
While manned and unmanned aircraft are flying above Ukraine every day, Kendall said airpower has not been a decisive factor since Russia’s invasion because neither side has been able to gain control of the skies.
“Both sides have most generally used aircraft for fairly limited operations. And part of that has been the efficacy of ground-based air defenses, on both sides, so with small numbers of aircraft and with not a full suite of capabilities, more modern capabilities, it's hard to overcome those systems. And that's one of the fundamental limitations here,” he said.
Asked whether F-16s should have been provided already, Kendall said the U.S. has been focused on providing weapons and gear that will make the most difference on the battlefield and “that’s what we’ve done.”
Also, sending fighter jets would be seen “by some as an escalatory act on our part,” Kendall added.
Even if Ukraine’s supporters decided today to donate fighter jets, it would take months to deliver them, Kendall said.
“We will not under any circumstances get F-16s or another Western fighter in significant numbers into the hands of the Ukrainian Air Force in something less than at least several months, so there was always a long-lead-time kind of a thing,” he said.
Kendall thinks the decision, in part, to train pilots to fly fighters now has to do with Ukraine’s long-term posture in the war.
“Ukraine is going to remain an independent nation. It's going to need a full suite of military capabilities for its requirements and so it's time to start thinking longer-term about what that military might look like and what it might include,” he said.
While Ukrainian pilots are largely used to flying Soviet-era aircraft, Kendall said it will take “months, not years” to train Ukrainians on modern aircraft.
“Everything we've done with the Ukrainians, they've shown a capacity to learn. And certainly, I don't think I've ever seen more motivated individuals in terms of wanting to get into the fight and make a difference,” Kendall said.
defenseone.com · by Audrey Decker
3. UN watchdog: Ukrainian nuclear plant briefly loses power supply again, is 'extremely vulnerable'
We better think hard about all the potential conflict zones that contain nuclear power plants.
UN watchdog: Ukrainian nuclear plant briefly loses power supply again, is 'extremely vulnerable'
AP · by SUSIE BLANN · May 22, 2023
KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, Europe’s largest atomic power station, spent hours operating on emergency diesel generators Monday after losing its external power supply for the seventh time since Russia’s full-scale invasion of its neighbor, the head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog said.
“The nuclear safety situation at the plant (is) extremely vulnerable,” Rafael Grossi, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said in a tweet.
Hours later, national energy company Ukrenergo said on Telegram that it had restored the power line that feeds the plant.
But for Grossi, it was another reminder of what’s at stake at the Russian-occupied plant which has seen shelling close by.
“We must agree to protect (the) plant now; this situation cannot continue,” Grossi said, in his latest appeal for the area to be spared from the fighting between Ukrainian and Russian forces. IAEA staff are deployed at the plant, which is occupied by Russian troops.
The plant’s six nuclear reactors are protected by a reinforced shelter able to withstand an errant shell or rocket. But a disruption in the electrical supply could disable cooling systems essential for the reactors’ safety. Emergency diesel generators, which officials say can keep the plant operational for 10 days, can be unreliable.
Fighting, especially artillery fire, around the plant has fueled fears of a disaster like the one at Chernobyl in 1986. Then, a reactor exploded and spewed deadly radiation, contaminating a vast area in the world’s worst nuclear catastrophe.
Energoatom, Ukraine’s state nuclear company, blamed Russian shelling for the loss of the last high-voltage transmission line to the plant in Russian-occupied southern Ukraine, about 500 kilometers (300 miles) from Kyiv. It was not possible to independently verify that claim.
The facility is “on the verge of a nuclear and radiation accident,” Energoatom warned.
Grossi said it was the seventh time the plant had lost its outside power supply since Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022.
The Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant is one of the 10 biggest atomic power stations in the world.
Russian officials have begun training for a planned evacuation from the plant of 3,100 staff and their families, a representative of Energoatom said last week. The plant employed around 11,000 staff before the war, some 6,000 of whom remain at the site and in the surrounding town of Enerhodar.
More Russian military units have been arriving at the site and are mining it, the representative told The Associated Press, speaking on condition of anonymity due to security concerns.
Ukraine’s presidential office said Monday morning that at least three Ukrainian civilians were killed and 16 others were injured over the previous 24 hours.
The Ukrainian Air Force reported that four out of 16 Russian missiles and all 20 drones launched against Ukrainian targets were shot down.
Military targets and public infrastructure in Dnipro, Ukraine’s fourth-largest city in the center of the country, were singled out for Russian attacks, which injured eight people, officials said. The Dnipro fire department was affected, and 12 houses, shops, and a kindergarten were damaged, according to Governor Serhii Lysak.
___
Follow AP’s coverage of the war in Ukraine at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine
AP · by SUSIE BLANN · May 22, 2023
4. What it would mean for the global economy if the US defaults on its debt
I just don't see how leaders of the US can play with fire like this.
What it would mean for the global economy if the US defaults on its debt
AP · by PAUL WISEMAN · May 22, 2023
WASHINGTON (AP) — If the debt crisis roiling Washington were eventually to send the United States crashing into recession, America’s economy would hardly sink alone.
The repercussions of a first-ever default on the federal debt would quickly reverberate around the world. Orders for Chinese factories that sell electronics to the United States could dry up. Swiss investors who own U.S. Treasurys would suffer losses. Sri Lankan companies could no longer deploy dollars as an alternative to their own dodgy currency.
“No corner of the global economy will be spared” if the U.S. government defaulted and the crisis weren’t resolved quickly, said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics.
Zandi and two colleagues at Moody’s have concluded that even if the debt limit were breached for no more than week, the U.S. economy would weaken so much, so fast, as to wipe out roughly1.5 million jobs.
And if a government default were to last much longer — well into the summer — the consequences would be far more dire, Zandi and his colleagues found in their analysis: U.S. economic growth would sink, 7.8 million American jobs would vanish, borrowing rates would jump, the unemployment rate would soar from the current 3.4% to 8% and a stock-market plunge would erase $10 trillion in household wealth.
Of course, it might not come to that. The White House and House Republicans, seeking a breakthrough, concluded a round of debt-limit negotiations Sunday, with plans to resume talks Monday. The Republicans have threatened to let the government default on its debts by refusing to raise the statutory limit on what it can borrow unless President Joe Biden and the Democrats accept sharp spending cuts and other concessions.
US DEBT, LONG VIEWED AS ULTRA-SAFE
Feeding the anxiety is the fact that so much financial activity hinges on confidence that America will always pay its financial obligations. Its debt, long viewed as an ultra-safe asset, is a foundation of global commerce, built on decades of trust in the United States. A default could shatter the $24 trillion market for Treasury debt, cause financial markets to freeze up and ignite an international crisis.
“A debt default would be a cataclysmic event, with an unpredictable but probably dramatic fallout on U.S. and global financial markets,” said Eswar Prasad, professor of trade policy at Cornell University and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.
The threat has emerged just as the world economy is contending with a panoply of threats — from surging inflation and interest rates to the ongoing repercussions of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to the tightening grip of authoritarian regimes. On top of all that, many countries have grown skeptical of America’s outsize role in global finance.
In the past, American political leaders generally managed to step away from the brink and raise the debt limit before it was too late. Congress has raised, revised or extended the borrowing cap 78 times since 1960, most recently in 2021.
Yet the problem has worsened. Partisan divisions in Congress have widened while the debt has grown after years of rising spending and deep tax cuts. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has warned that the government could default as soon as June 1 if lawmakers don’t raise or suspend the ceiling.
‘SHOCKWAVES THROUGH THE SYSTEM’
“If the trustworthiness of (Treasurys) would become impaired for any reason, it would send shockwaves through the system ... and have immense consequences for global growth,” said Maurice Obstfeld, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund.
Treasurys are widely used as collateral for loans, as a buffer against bank losses, as a haven in times of high uncertainty and as a place for central banks to park foreign exchange reserves.
Given their perceived safety, the U.S. government’s debts — Treasury bills, bonds and notes — carry a risk weighting of zero in international bank regulations. Foreign governments and private investors hold nearly $7.6 trillion of the debt — roughly 31% of the Treasurys in financial markets.
Because the dollar’s dominance has made it the de facto global currency since World War II, it’s relatively easy for the United States to borrow and finance an ever-growing pile of government debt.
But high demand for dollars also tends to make them more valuable than other currencies, and that imposes a cost: A strong dollar makes American goods pricier relative to their foreign rivals, leaving U.S. exporters at a competitive disadvantage. That’s one reason why the United States has run trade deficits every year since 1975.
CENTRAL BANKS’ STOCKPILES OF DOLLARS
Of all the foreign exchange reserves held by the world’s central banks, U.S. dollars account for 58%. No. 2 is the euro: 20%. China’s yuan makes up under 3%, according to the IMF.
Researchers at the Federal Reserve have calculated that from 1999 to 2019, 96% of trade in the Americas was invoiced in U.S. dollars. So was 74% of trade in Asia. Elsewhere outside of Europe, where the euro dominates, dollars accounted for 79% of trade.
So reliable is America’s currency that merchants in some unstable economies demand payment in dollars, instead of their own country’s currency. Consider Sri Lanka, battered by inflation and a dizzying drop in the local currency. Earlier this year, shippers refused to release 1,000 containers of urgently needed food unless they were paid in dollars. The shipments piled up at the docks in Colombo because the importers weren’t able to obtain dollars to pay the suppliers.
“Without (dollars), we can’t do any transaction,” said Nihal Seneviratne, a spokesman for Essential Food Importers and Traders Association. “When we import, we have to use hard currency — mostly the U.S. dollars.”
Likewise, many shops and restaurants in Lebanon, where inflation has raged and the currency has plunged, are demanding payment in dollars. In 2000, Ecuador responded to an economic crisis by replacing its own currency, the sucre, with dollars — a process called “dollarization” — and has stuck with it.
THE GO-TO HAVEN FOR INVESTORS
Even when a crisis originates in the United States, the dollar is invariably the go-to haven for investors. That’s what happened in late 2008, when the collapse of the U.S. real estate market toppled hundreds of banks and financial firms, including once-mighty Lehman Brothers: The dollar’s value shot up.
“Even though we were the problem — we, the United States — there was still a flight to quality,” said Clay Lowery, who oversees research at the Institute of International Finance, a banking trade group. “The dollar is king.’’
If the United States were to pierce the debt limit without resolving the dispute and the Treasury defaulted on its payments, Zandi suggests that the dollar would once again rise, at least initially, “because of the uncertainty and the fear. Global investors just wouldn’t know where to go except to where they always go when there’s a crisis and that’s to the United States.”
But the Treasury market would likely be paralyzed. Investors might shift money instead into U.S. money market funds or the bonds of top-flight U.S. corporations. Eventually, Zandi says, growing doubts would shrink the dollar’s value and keep it down.
GOVERNMENT’S STRATEGY IF DEBT CAP IS BREACHED
In a debt-ceiling crisis, Lowery, who was an assistant Treasury secretary during the 2008 crisis, imagines that the United States would continue to make interest payments to bondholders. And it would try to pay its other obligations — to contractors and retirees, for example — in the order that those bills became due and as money became available.
For bills that were due on June 3, for example, the government might pay on June 5. A bit of relief would come around June 15. That’s when government revenue would pour in in as many taxpayers make estimated tax payments for the second quarter.
The government would likely be sued by those who weren’t getting paid — “anybody who lives off veterans’ benefits or Social Security,” Lowery said. And ratings agencies would likely downgrade U.S. debt, even if the Treasury continued to pay interest to bondholders.
The dollar, though it remains dominant globally, has lost some ground in recent years as more banks, businesses and investors have turned to the euro and, to a lesser extent, China’s yuan. Other countries tend to resent how swings in the dollar’s value can hurt their own currencies and economies.
A rising dollar can trigger crises abroad by drawing investment out of other countries and raising their cost of repaying dollar-denominated loans. The United States’ eagerness to use the dollar’s clout to impose financial sanctions against rivals and adversaries is also viewed uneasily by some other countries.
So far, though, no clear alternatives have emerged. The euro lags far behind the dollar. Even more so does China’s yuan; it’s hamstrung by Beijing’s refusal to let its currency trade freely in global markets.
But the debt ceiling drama is sure to heighten questions about the enormous financial power of the United States and the dollar.
“The global economy is in a pretty fragile place right now,” Obstfeld said. “So throwing into that mix a crisis over the creditworthiness of U.S. obligations is incredibly irresponsible.’’
______
AP Writer Bharatha Mallawarachi in Colombo, Sri Lanka, contributed to this report.
AP · by PAUL WISEMAN · May 22, 2023
5. Russia alleges border incursion by Ukrainian saboteurs; Kyiv claims they are disgruntled Russians
A lot of unpack here. This is why unconventional warfare is so difficult. Are these disgruntled Russians acting on their own? Are they disgruntled Russians who have been provided with support to con=duct these operations? What are the psychological warfare implications here? UW is very messy.
Russia alleges border incursion by Ukrainian saboteurs; Kyiv claims they are disgruntled Russians
The Seattle Times · by SUSIE BLANN · May 22, 2023
KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Russian officials claimed that Ukrainian military saboteurs launched an attack across the border Monday, wounding eight people in a small town. Kyiv officials denied any link with the group and blamed the fighting on a revolt by disgruntled Russians against the Kremlin.
Neither version of events could be independently verified in an area that has witnessed sporadic spillover from the almost 15-month war in Ukraine.
The governor of Russia’s Belgorod region, which borders Ukraine, said that a Ukrainian Armed Forces saboteur group entered the town of Graivoron, about five kilometers (three miles) from the border. The town also came under Ukrainian artillery fire, he said.
Gov. Vyacheslav Gladkov said eight people were wounded and most residents had left the area, but the situation remained “tense.”
In nearby Zamostye village, a projectile hit a kindergarten and caused a fire. One woman was wounded in her hand, Gladkov said. He also reported that Russian anti-aircraft systems shot down an unmanned aerial vehicle over Belgorod region.
Advertising
Gladkov said a counterterrorist operation was underway and that authorities were imposing special controls, including personal document checks and stopping the work of companies that use “explosives, radioactive, chemically and biologically hazardous substances.”
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Russian President Vladimir Putin was informed about the alleged saboteur incursion. An effort to “push them out from the Russian territory and liquidate them” was underway, he said.
Peskov described the action as an attempt by Ukraine to divert attention from the eastern city of Bakhmut, which Moscow claimed to have captured after months of battle but where Kyiv says it is still fighting.
But Ukrainian military intelligence officials didn’t confirm that Kyiv had deployed saboteurs. Instead, they claimed that Russian citizens seeking regime change in Moscow were behind the Graivoron incursion.
Ukraine intelligence representative Andrii Cherniak said Russian citizens belonging to murky groups calling themselves the Russian Volunteer Corps and the “Freedom of Russia” Legion were behind the assault.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s advisor, Mykhailo Podolyak, said on Twitter that Ukraine “has nothing to do with it.” He suggested an “armed guerrilla movement” was behind the attack.
Advertising
The Russian Volunteer Corps claimed in a Telegram post it had crossed the border into Russia again, after claiming to have breached the border in early March.
The Russian Volunteer Corps describes itself as “a volunteer formation fighting on Ukraine’s side.” Little is known about the group, and it is not clear if it has any ties with the Ukrainian military. The same is true for the “Freedom of Russia” Legion..
The RVC was founded last August and reportedly consists mostly of anti-Putin far-right Russian extremists who have links with Ukrainian far-right groups.
Earlier Monday, Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, Europe’s largest atomic power station, spent hours operating on emergency diesel generators after losing its external power supply for the seventh time since Russia’s full-scale invasion of its neighbor, the head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog said.
“The nuclear safety situation at the plant (is) extremely vulnerable,” Rafael Grossi, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said in a tweet.
Hours later, national energy company Ukrenergo said on Telegram that it had restored the power line that feeds the plant.
Advertising
But for Grossi, it was another reminder of what’s at stake at the Russian-occupied plant which has seen shelling close by.
“We must agree to protect (the) plant now; this situation cannot continue,” Grossi said, in his latest appeal for the area to be spared from the fighting between Ukrainian and Russian forces. IAEA staff are deployed at the plant, which is occupied by Russian troops.
The plant’s six nuclear reactors, which are protected by a reinforced shelter able to withstand an errant shell or rocket, have been shut down. But a disruption in the electrical supply could disable cooling systems that are essential for the reactors’ safety even when they are shut down. Emergency diesel generators, which officials say can keep the plant operational for 10 days, can be unreliable.
Grossi said it was the seventh time the plant had lost its outside power supply since Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022.
The Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant is one of the 10 biggest atomic power stations in the world.
Ukraine’s presidential office said Monday morning that at least three Ukrainian civilians were killed and 16 others were injured in Russian assaults over the previous 24 hours.
Sponsored
The Ukrainian Air Force reported that four out of 16 Russian missiles and all 20 drones launched against Ukrainian targets were shot down.
Military targets and public infrastructure in Dnipro, Ukraine’s fourth-largest city in the center of the country, were singled out for Russian attacks, which injured eight people, officials said. The Dnipro fire department was affected, and 12 houses, shops, and a kindergarten were damaged, according to Governor Serhii Lysak.
___
Follow AP’s coverage of the war in Ukraine at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine
SUSIE BLANN
The Seattle Times · by SUSIE BLANN · May 22, 2023
6. Anti-Putin militia claims to have overrun Russian border village
What is the resistance potential within Russia? Is there a significant anti-Putin faction that can take action?
Anti-Putin militia claims to have overrun Russian border village
Self-described partisans the Freedom of Russia Legion say they launched cross-border raid from Ukraine
The Guardian · by Andrew Roth · May 22, 2023
Fighting has broken out along the Russian border with Ukraine after self-described Russian partisan forces launched a cross-border raid and claimed to have overrun a border village for the first time in the war.
The Freedom of Russia Legion, which describes itself as an anti-Kremlin militia seeking to liberate Russia from Vladimir Putin, claimed to have crossed the border and overrun the settlement of Kozinka, while sending units into the town of Grayvoron in Russia’s Belgorod region.
Any capture of territory has not been independently confirmed by journalists on the ground. The militia has existed mostly on social media and it is not known to have participated in any major battles during the war.
Both Russia and Ukrainian officials have confirmed fighting at the border and social media video has shown armoured vehicles appearing to overrun a Russian border post near Grayvoron.
“We are the same Russians as you,” said a statement put out by the group on social media. “We are distinguished only by the fact that we no longer wanted to justify the actions of criminals in power and took up arms to defend our and your freedom. But today it’s time for everyone to take responsibility for their future. It’s time to put an end to the Kremlin’s dictatorship.”
Other video posted to social media showed a Russian Mi-8 helicopter trailing flares over Kozinka and videos of smoke rising from the settlement with the sounds of emergency sirens clearly audible.
The governor of the Belgorod region confirmed an attack on Monday, writing that “sabotage and reconnaissance group of the armed forces of Ukraine have entered the territory of the Grayvoron district. The armed forces of the Russian Federation, together with the border service, Rosgvardiya and the FSB, are taking the necessary measures to eliminate the enemy.”
Ukraine has disavowed connection to the Russian partisan fighters, saying that they act independently and are not subject to military control.
“Yes, today the Russian Volunteer Corps and the Freedom of Russia Legion, which consist of citizens of the Russian Federation, have launched an operation to liberate these territories of the Belgorod region from the so-called Putin regime and push back the enemy in order to create a certain security zone to protect the Ukrainian civilian population,” Andriy Yusov, a spokesperson for Ukraine’s military intelligence, told Ukrainian media.
The US and other western powers have supplied weapons to Ukraine with the caveat that they not be used to strike targets inside Russia. Ukraine has denied any connection to past attacks on Russian territory, including strikes that have hit Russian airfields, energy infrastructure, and even the drone attack on the Kremlin earlier this month.
It is not clear whether the raid is part of a sustained military strategy or meant as a diversionary strike, as expectations remain that Ukraine is preparing to launch a summer counteroffensive to retake territory occupied by Russia.
But clashes are increasing along the border in the Belgorod and Bryansk regions. Earlier this month, four Russian military aircraft, including two jets and two helicopters, were shot down in one of the worst single-day losses of the war.
In March, the Moscow-born far-right militia leader Denis Nikitin claimed to have led a raid into a town in Bryansk, where his fighters posed with flags before quickly returning to Ukraine.
The Guardian · by Andrew Roth · May 22, 2023
7. Women’s secret war: the inside story of how the US military sent female soldiers on covert combat missions to Afghanistan
These were not covert operations. They were not secret. This is not a scope.
Women’s secret war: the inside story of how the US military sent female soldiers on covert combat missions to Afghanistan
theconversation.com · by Jennifer Greenburg
A US Army handbook from 2011 opens one of its chapters with a line from Rudyard Kipling’s poem The Young British Soldier. Written in 1890 upon Kipling’s return to England from India, an experienced imperial soldier gives advice to the incoming cohort:
When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains, And the women come out to cut up what remains …
The handbook, distributed in 2011 at the height of the US’s counterinsurgency in Afghanistan, invoked Kipling and other imperial voices to warn its soldiers that:
Neither the Soviets in the early 1980s nor the west in the past decade have progressed much beyond Kipling’s early 20th-century warning when it comes to understanding Afghan women. In that oversight, we have ignored women as a key demographic in counterinsurgency.
Around this time, a growing number of US military units were – against official military policy – training and posting all-women counterinsurgency teams alongside their male soldiers.
Women were still banned from direct assignment to ground combat units. However, these female soldiers were deployed to access Afghan women and their households in the so-called “battle for hearts and minds” during the Afghanistan war, which began on October 7 2001 when the US and British militaries carried out an air assault, followed by a ground invasion, in response to the September 11 attacks.
And these women also played critical roles in gathering intelligence. Their sexuality – ironically, the basis of the excuse the US military had long given for avoiding integrating women into combat units – was now seen as an intelligence asset, as the army handbook made clear:
Like all adolescent males, young Afghan males have a natural desire to impress females. Using this desire to interact with and impress females can be advantageous to US military forces when done respectfully to both the female soldier and the adolescent Afghan males. Female soldiers can often obtain different and even more in-depth information from Afghan males than can male soldiers.
Whether collecting intelligence or calming victims of a US special forces raid, female soldiers – often despite a lack of proper training – played a central yet largely invisible role in the Afghanistan war. Their recollections of what they experienced on these tours call into question official narratives both of women breaking through the “brass ceiling” of the US military, and the war having been fought in the name of Afghan women’s rights and freedom.
Since the US’s final withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021, the Taliban’s rollback of women’s rights has concluded a brutal chapter in a story of competing feminisms over the past two decades of war.
Members of a US marine female engagement team in combat training before a tour, October 2011. Cpl. Meghan Gonzales/DVIDS
Female counterinsurgency teams in Afghanistan
Between 2010 and 2017, while conducting research at six US military bases and several US war colleges, I met a number of women who spoke of having served on special forces teams and in combat in Afghanistan and Iraq. This was surprising as women were then still technically banned from many combat roles – US military regulations only changed in 2013 such that, by 2016, all military jobs were open to women.
Fascinated by their experiences, I later interviewed 22 women who had served on these all-female counterinsurgency teams. The interviews, alongside other observations of development contractors on US military bases and the ongoing legacies of US imperial wars, inform my new book At War with Women: Military Humanitarianism and Imperial Feminism in an Era of Permanent War.
By 2017, enough time had lapsed that the women could speak openly about their deployments. Many had left the military – in some cases disenchanted by the sexism they confronted, or with the idea of returning to an official job in logistics having served on more prestigious special forces teams.
This article is part of Conversation Insights
The Insights team generates long-form journalism derived from interdisciplinary research. The team is working with academics from different backgrounds who have been engaged in projects aimed at tackling societal and scientific challenges.
In 2013, Ronda* supported a mission deployed to Kandahar, Afghanistan’s second-largest city. She was one of only two women living on a remote base with the Operational Detachment Alpha – the primary fighting force for the Green Berets (part of the US Army’s special forces).
For Ronda, one of the most rewarding aspects of this deployment was the image she carried of herself as a feminist example for Afghan women. She recalled:
Just letting the girls see there’s more out there [in the wider world] than what you have here, that was very empowering. I think they really appreciated it. In full kit I look like a dude, [but] that first instance when you take off your helmet and they see your hair and see you are female … A lot of times they have never seen a female before who didn’t just take care of the garden and take care of the kids. That was very empowering.
In 2012, the US military presented its female counterinsurgency teams as feminist emblems while keeping their combat roles hidden. Cpl. Meghan Gonzales/DVIDS
Amanda, who had been on a similar mission to Uruzgan province in southern Afghanistan a year earlier, also described inspiring local women – in her case, via stories she shared through her interpreter of life in New York City, and what it was like to be a female soldier. Amanda lived alongside the male soldiers in an adobe hut with a thatched roof, and was unable to shower for the full 47 days of the mission. But she recalled going out into the village with pride:
You see the light, especially in the females’ eyes, when they see other females from a different country – [it] kind of gives them perspective that there is more to the world than Afghanistan.
Publicly, the US military presented its female counterinsurgency teams as feminist emblems, while keeping their combat roles and close attachment to special forces hidden. A 2012 army news article quoted a member of one female engagement team (FET) describing the “positive responses from the Afghan population” she believed they had received:
I think seeing our FET out there gives Afghan women hope that change is coming … They definitely want the freedom American women enjoy.
However, the US military’s mistreatment of its female workforce undermines this notion of freedom – as do the warped understandings of Afghan culture, history and language that both male and female soldiers brought with them on their deployments. Such complexity calls into question US military claims of providing feminist opportunities for US women, and as acting in Afghan women’s best interests.
As a logistics officer, Beth had been trained to manage the movement of supplies and people. She said she was ill-prepared for the reality she confronted when visiting Afghan villages with one of the cultural support teams (CSTs), as they were also known, in 2009.
Beth’s pre-deployment training had included “lessons learned” from the likes of Kipling and Lawrence of Arabia. It did not prepare her to understand why she encountered such poverty when visiting Afghan villages. She recalled:
Imagine huts – and tons of women, men and children in these huts … We had to tell these women: ‘The reason your children are getting sick is because you’re not boiling your water.’ I mean, that’s insane. Look at when the bible was written. Even then, people knew how to boil their water – they talked about clean and unclean, kosher, and that they know what’s going to rot. How did Jesus get the memo and you didn’t?
An Afghan role-player with soldiers during female engagement training at a US Army base. Jennifer Greenburg, Author provided
‘Ambassadors of western feminism’
By observing lessons in military classrooms, I learned how young US soldiers (men and women) went through pre-deployment training that still leaned on the perspectives of British colonial officers such as T.E. Lawrence and C.E. Callwell. There was a tendency to portray Afghan people as unsophisticated children who needed parental oversight to usher them into modernity.
US military representations of Afghan women as homogeneous and helpless, contrasting with western women as models of liberation, also ignored Afghan and Islamic feminist frameworks that have long advocated for women’s rights. The notion of US female soldiers modelling women’s rights was often linked with representations of Afghan people as backward and needing models from elsewhere.
To skirt the military policy that in the mid-2000s still banned women from direct assignment to ground combat units, female soldiers were “temporarily attached” to all-male units and encouraged not to speak openly about the work they were doing, which typically entailed searching local women at checkpoints and in home raids.
Rochelle wrote in her journal about her experiences of visiting Afghan villages: “Out the gate I went, [with] headscarf and pistol …” Like Beth’s use of a biblical reference to explain the Afghan villages she confronted, Rochelle placed Afghanistan far backward in time. In one diary entry about a village meeting, she reflected:
For years, I have always wondered what it would be like to live in the Stone Age – and now I know. I see it every day all around me. People walking around in clothes that haven’t been washed, ones they have worn for years. Children with hair white from days of dust build-up. Six-year-old girls carrying around their baby brothers. Eyes that tell a story of years of hardship. Houses made of mud and wooden poles, squares cut out for windows. Dirty misshapen feet.
‘Cultural considerations’ training material. USAID, Author provided
When Rochelle was not accompanying the male patrols, she was visiting girls’ schools and holding meetings with Afghan women about how her unit could help support income-generating opportunities for women, such as embroidery or selling food. Her logic, that this would reduce Taliban support and recruitment, echoed USAID programmes that still today claim targeted economic opportunity can “counter violent extremism”.
Amelia, a female soldier attached to a special forces mission, spoke of how she was an asset because:
We were not threatening, we were just there. For Afghan men, we were fascinating because we were these independent women in a different role than they see for most women there. And we were non-threatening to them, so they could talk to us openly.
Strikingly, Amelia admitted that she and other female soldiers played a similar role for their American counterparts too:
For the [male] marines, just having us there helped kind of calm things down. We would do things to try to give back to them – like we baked for them frequently. That was not our role and I don’t want anyone to think that we were a “baking team”, but we would do things like that and it really helped. Like a motherly touch or whatever. We would bake cookies and cinnamon buns. It really helped bring the team together and have more of a family feeling.
Amelia’s clear apprehension at her unit being seen as the “baking team” speaks to how they were incorporated into combat through reinforcement of certain gender stereotypes. These women used “emotional labour” – the work of managing, producing and suppressing feelings as part of one’s paid labour – both to counsel the male soldiers with whom they were stationed, and to calm Afghan civilians after their doors had been broken down in the middle of the night.
But the women I met also revealed a culture of sexist abuse that had been exacerbated by the unofficial nature of their combat roles in Afghanistan and Iraq. Soldiers who did not want women in their midst would joke, for example, that CST actually stood for “casual sex team”. Such treatment undermines the US military’s representations of military women as models of feminist liberation for Afghan women.
A provincial reconstruction team deploying to Afghanistan patrols a mock Afghan village on a US military base. Jennifer Greenburg, Author provided
‘It was the best and the worst deployment’
Beth’s first deployment to Afghanistan in 2009 was to accompany a small group of Green Berets into an Afghan village and interact with the women and children who lived there. One of her strongest memories was figuring out how to shower once a week by crouching under a wood palate and balancing water bottles between its slats.
Beth’s role was to gather information about which villages were more likely to join the US military-supported internal defence forces – a cold war counterinsurgency strategy with a history of brutalising countries’ own citizens. To elicit feelings of security and comfort in those she encountered when entering an Afghan home or searching a vehicle, she described adjusting her voice tone, removing her body armour, and sometimes placing her hands on the bodies of Afghan women and children.
But this “kinder and gentler” aspect of her work was inseparable from the home raids she also participated in, during which marines would kick down the doors of family homes in the middle of the night, ripping people from their sleep for questioning, or worse.
Women like Beth were exposed to – and in a few cases, killed by – the same threats as the special forces units to which they were unofficially attached. But the teams’ hidden nature meant these women often had no official documentation of what they did.
If they returned home injured from their deployment, their records did not reflect their attachment to combat units. This meant they were unable to prove the crucial link between injury and service that determined access to healthcare. And the women’s lack of official recognition has since posed a major barrier to being promoted in their careers, as well as accessing military and veteran healthcare.
Lack of official recognition posed a barrier to some women being promoted in their military careers. Bumble Dee/Shutterstock
While Beth said she was “lucky” to have come home with her mental health and limbs intact, many of her peers described being unable to sleep and suffering from anxiety, depression and other symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as a result of their continued exposure to stressful combat situations such as night raids.
Six months into her deployment, Beth’s female partner was riding in a large armoured vehicle when it ran over an explosive device. “Luckily”, as Beth put it, the bomb exploded downwards, blowing off four of the vehicle’s wheels and sending a blast through the layer of rubber foam on which her partner’s feet rested. She was medevacked out of the combat zone with fractured heels, along with six other men.
Technically, Beth was always supposed to have a female partner when working for a cultural support team, but no replacement came. Her mission changed and she became the only woman assigned to support a group of marines stationed on a remote base. There were only a handful of other women on the base, and Beth lived alone in a repurposed shipping container sandwiched between housing for 80 men.
Beth said the marines spread false rumours about her. Other women I spoke with indicated that there was a widespread culture of degrading women like Beth in the US military at this time – just as its leaders were publicly disavowing the military’s epidemic of sexual assault and rape.
As Beth described her treatment on the second part of her deployment in Afghanistan, her eyes widened. She struggled to find the words that eventually came out:
It was the best and the worst deployment. On some level, I did things that I will never do again – I met some great people, had amazing experiences. But also, professionally, as a captain in the Marine Corps, I have never been treated so poorly in my life – by other officers! I had no voice. Nobody had my back. [The marines] didn’t want us there. These guys did not want to be bringing women along.
Beth described how one of the male soldiers lied to her battalion commander, accusing her of saying something she didn’t say – leading to her being removed from action and being placed under a form of custody:
I got pulled back and sat in the hot-seat for months. It was bad. That was a very low point for me.
‘Women as a third gender’
A narrow, western version of feminism – focused on women’s legal and economic rights while uncritical of the US’s history of military interventions and imperialistic financial and legal actions – helped build popular support for the Afghanistan invasion in 2001. On an individual level, women like Beth made meaning of their deployments by understanding themselves as modern, liberated inspirations for the Afghan women they encountered.
A female engagement team member treats a child during a medical aid mission, October 2010. Staff Sgt. Whitney Hughes/DVIDS
But in reality, the US military did not deploy women like Beth with the intention of improving Afghan women’s lives. Rather, special forces recognised Afghan women as a key piece of the puzzle to convince Afghan men to join the internal defence forces. While male soldiers could not easily enter an Afghan home without being seen as disrespecting women who lived there, the handbook for female engagement teams advised that:
Afghan men often see western women as a “third gender” and will approach coalition forces’ women with different issues than are discussed with men.
And a 2011 Marine Corps Gazette article underlined that:
Female service members are perceived as a “third gender” and as being “there to help versus there to fight”. This perception allows us access to the entire population, which is crucial in population-centric operations.
The use of “third gender” here is surprising because the term more often refers to gender identity outside of conventional male-female binaries. In contrast, military uses of such language reinforced traditional gender expectations of women as caregivers versus men as combatants, emphasising how women entered what were technically jobs for men by maintaining these gender roles.
The female counterinsurgency teams were intended to search Afghan women and gather intelligence that was inaccessible to their male counterparts. Beth had volunteered for these secretive missions, saying she was excited to go “outside the wire” of the military base, to interact with Afghan women and children, and to work with US special operations.
Initially, she was enthusiastic about the tour, describing her gender as an “invaluable tool” that allowed her to collect information which her male counterparts could not. She went on home raids with the marines and would search women and question villagers.
Technically, the US military has strict rules about who is allowed to collect formal intelligence, limiting this role to those trained in intelligence. As a result, Beth explained:
Just like any other team going out to collect information, we always steer clear of saying “collect” [intelligence]. But essentially that’s exactly what we were doing … I won’t call them a source because that is a no-no. But I had individuals who would frequent me when we were in particular areas … [providing] information we were able to elicit in a casual setting instead of running a source and being overt.
‘A completely different energy’
Female engagement team recruitment poster, 2011. US Army
Cindy deployed with a US Army Ranger regiment to Afghanistan in 2012. Having recently graduated from one of the military academies, an advertisement caught her eye: “Become a part of history. Join the US Army Special Operations Command Female Engagement Team Program.”
She was drawn in by the high physical bar and intellectual challenge of jobs in special operations from which the military technically excluded her. Describing the process of being selected for the female unit as a “week from hell”, Cindy said she was proud of “being where it’s hardest” and “the sense of duty, obligation”.
While she was completing her training, Cindy’s friend from airborne school was killed by an explosion in October 2011, while accompanying an Army Ranger team on a night raid of a Taliban weapons maker’s compound in Kandahar. This was Ashley White-Stumpf, subject of the bestselling book Ashley’s War, which is now being adapted into a film starring Reese Witherspoon. She was the first cultural support team member to be killed in action, and her funeral brought this secret programme into a very public light.
Her death cast a shadow on the excitement Cindy had initially felt. To confuse matters, the dangers that White-Stumpf (and now Cindy) faced were publicly invisible, given that women were banned from being officially attached to special forces combat units. When female soldiers did appear in public relations photographs, it was often handing out soccer balls or visiting orphanages.
Soldiers unveil a memorial to 1st Lt. Ashley White-Stumpf, September 2013. Staff Sgt. Kelly Lecompte/DVIDS via Wikimedia
Yet once deployed, Cindy was attached to a “direct action” unit – the special forces portrayed in action movies kicking down doors, seizing documents and capturing people. This meant that while special forces carried out their mission, her job was:
To interact with women and children. To get information, or [find out] if there were nefarious items that were hidden under burkas and things of that nature.
She explained how “you have different tools as a woman that you can use that I don’t think a man would be successful in” – offering the example of a little boy in a village who her team thought knew something. A ranger was questioning the little boy, who was terrified of how, in her words, this male soldier “looked like a stormtrooper, wearing his helmet and carrying a rifle”. In contrast, Cindy explained:
For me to kneel next to the little kid and take off my helmet and maybe put my hand on his shoulder and say: “There, there” – I can do that with my voice, [whereas] this guy probably could not or would not. And that kid was crying, and we couldn’t get anything out of him. But you can turn the tables with a completely different energy.
Cindy told me proudly how it took her just 15 minutes to identify the correct location of the Taliban activity, when her unit had been in the wrong location. She, like many of the women I spoke to, painted a picture of using emotional labour to evoke empathy and sensitivity amid violent – and often traumatic – special operations work.
‘I’ve had so much BS in my career’
The women I interviewed were operating in the same permissive climate of sexual harassment and abuse that later saw the high-profile murders of the servicewoman Vanessa Guillén at Fort Hood military base in Texas in 2020, and the combat engineer Ana Fernanda Basaldua Ruiz in March 2023.
Before their deaths, both Latinx women had been repeatedly sexually harassed by other male soldiers and had reported incidents to their supervisors, who failed to report them further up the chain of command. Such cases overshadowed any excitement about the recent ten-year anniversary of women formally serving in ground combat roles in the US military.
Protesters march in support of the murdered US soldier Vanessa Guillén, July 2020. Jewjewbeed/Shutterstock
Mollie deployed to Afghanistan as part of a female engagement team in 2009. Her career up to then had been chequered with discriminatory experiences. In some cases, there were subtle, judgmental looks. But she also described overt instances, such as the officer who, when told of her impending arrival on his unit, had responded bluntly: “I don’t want a female to work for me.”
Mollie said she saw the FET as a way to showcase women’s skill and value within a masculinist military institution. She felt tremendous pride for the “20 other strong women” she worked with, whose adaptability she was particularly impressed with:
During the FET, I saw such great women. It frustrates me that they have to put up with this [sexism] … I’ve had so much BS like that throughout my career. Seeing how amazing these women were in high-stress situations – I want to stay in and continue to fight for that, so junior marines don’t have to put up with the same sorts of sexist misogynist comments that I did.
Mollie said the experience on the FET changed her, describing herself emerging as an “unapologetic feminist” responsible for more junior servicewomen. This encouraged her to re-enlist year after year. But for other women, deploying in capacities from which they were normally excluded, only to then return to gender-restricted roles, was a good reason to quit after their contract was up. As was, for many, the continued background of resistance and abuse from male colleagues.
A 2014 study of the US military found that “ambient sexual harassment against service women and men is strongly associated with risk of sexual assault”, with women’s sexual assault risk increasing by more than a factor of 1.5 and men’s by 1.8 when their workplace had an above-average rate of ambient sexual harassment. In 2022, the US military admitted that the epidemic of sexual assault within military ranks had worsened in recent years, and that existing strategies were not working.
A US marine checks an Afghan woman at the Evacuation Control Center at Kabul airport, August 2021. Staff Sgt. Victor Mancilla/American Photo Archive/Alamy
‘Magnitude of regrets’
Amid the chaotic withdrawal of US and international forces from Afghanistan in August 2021, marines threw together another female engagement team to search Afghan women and children. Two of its members, maintenance technician Nicole Gee and supply chief Johanny Rosario Pichardo, died in a suicide bomb attack during the evacuation that killed 13 soldiers and at least 170 Afghans.
Sergeant Nicole Gee photographed at Kabul airport, August 2021. CNP/Abaca Press/Alamy
Media coverage remembered Gee cradling an Afghan infant as she evacuated refugees in the days leading up to the attack, underscoring how female soldiers like her did high-risk jobs that came into being through gender expectations of women as caregivers.
Writing to me in 2023, ten years after her deployment to Afghanistan, Rochelle reflected that the departure of US soldiers could be “a whirlwind of emotions if you let it”. She added: “My anger lies with the exit of our own [US forces]. The magnitude of regrets, I hope, lay heavy on someone’s conscience.”
The experiences of Rochelle and other female soldiers in Afghanistan complicate any simplistic representations of them as trailblazers for equal rights in the US military. Their untreated injuries, unrecognised duties, and abusive working conditions make for a much more ambivalent blend of subjugation and pathbreaking.
And even as their position helped formalise the role of US women in combat, this happened through the reinforcement of gender stereotypes and racist representations of Afghan people. In fact, Afghan women had long been mobilising on their own terms – largely unintelligible to the US military – and continue to do so, with extraordinary bravery, now that the Taliban is back in control of their country.
It is devastating, but not surprising, that the military occupation of Afghanistan did not ultimately improve women’s rights. The current situation summons feminist perspectives that challenge war as a solution to foreign policy problems and work against the forms of racism that make people into enemies.
Following the withdrawal from Afghanistan, US Army female engagement teams have been reassembled and deployed to train foreign militaries from Jordan to Romania. As we enter the third decade of the post-9/11 wars, we should revisit how these wars were justified in the name of women’s rights, and how little these justifications have actually accomplished for women – whether in the marine corps barracks of Quantico, Virginia, or on the streets of Kabul, Afghanistan.
*All names and some details have been changed to protect the identities of the interviewees.
For you: more from our Insights series:
To hear about new Insights articles, join the hundreds of thousands of people who value The Conversation’s evidence-based news. Subscribe to our newsletter.
theconversation.com · by Jennifer Greenburg
8. FMS 2023: Retooling Foreign Military Sales for An Age of Strategic Competition
"Where possible?" Why would we prioritize FMS that is not iAW the NSS/NDS? I am sure that is not the intent of this paragraph but it almost sounds like we would set priorities that may not be IAw with the NSS/NDS, etc.
Excerpt:
Prioritizing cases for FMS based on National Security Strategy goals. Where possible, we can prioritize and provide expedited planning assistance to partners identified as priorities in the National Security Strategy, National Defense Strategy, and DoD’s regional Combatant Command Theater Campaign Plans.
FMS 2023: Retooling Foreign Military Sales for An Age of Strategic Competition
FACT SHEET
OFFICE OF THE SPOKESPERSON
MAY 18, 2023
https://www.state.gov/fms-2023-retooling-foreign-military-sales-for-an-age-of-strategic-competition/?utm_source=pocket_saves
Foreign Military Sales (FMS) are a key U.S. arms transfer mechanism and an important tool of U.S. foreign policy. Overseen by the U.S. Department of State and implemented through the U.S. Department of Defense, FMS is one of many ways the United States promotes interoperability and strengthens our unmatched network of alliances and security partnerships worldwide.
On average, Allies and partners purchase approximately $45 billion annually in U.S. arms, equipment, and training via FMS, and from 2021 to 2022, implemented FMS purchases grew by 49 percent. But amid shifting global security conditions, from Russia’s war in Ukraine, to managing competition in the Indo-Pacific, as well as industrial capacity challenges and global supply change disruptions, the time has come to reassess and adapt security cooperation to meet new and emerging challenges.
Building on the National Security Strategy and the U.S. Conventional Arms Transfer Policy, the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs has undertaken a comprehensive review of the Department’s oversight of FMS. This review complemented DoD’s parallel review of its own FMS implementation mechanisms. The result is FMS 2023: a new 10-point plan of action to re-tool the Department of State’s oversight of FMS for an age of heightened strategic competition.
While 95 percent of FMS cases are evaluated and approved by the Department of State within 48 hours, FMS 2023 examined how the Department’s review process can be improved for the remaining 5 percent of cases, which may entail complex policy issues and extensive interagency coordination. Together with DoD, we will support U.S. industry as it scales up to meet growing global demand among Allies and partners in the years ahead.
FMS 2023 Initiatives are focused on improving the efficiency and competitiveness of Foreign Military Sales at all phases: from strategic planning to case adjudication, to administering implementation of current and future FMS cases.
A NEW APPROACH TO FMS STRATEGIC PLANNING
-
Developing A Regional Approach to Arms Transfers. When adjudicating proposed FMS cases for one country, we can save time on the policy approval process and further improve interoperability between U.S. and foreign partners by anticipating comparable demands for its neighbors and making anticipatory policy decisions for these countries’ potential future FMS purchases as well.
-
Prioritizing cases for FMS based on National Security Strategy goals. Where possible, we can prioritize and provide expedited planning assistance to partners identified as priorities in the National Security Strategy, National Defense Strategy, and DoD’s regional Combatant Command Theater Campaign Plans.
-
Promoting proactive, forward-looking uses of the Special Defense Acquisition Fund (SDAF). SDAF allows for the rapid delivery of selected defense articles and services in advance of normal procurement lead-times. By identifying key capabilities in demand by multiple partners we can reduce long-lead time articles by months, or even years and accelerate delivery timelines.
IMPROVING FMS ADJUDICATION
-
Refining implementation of the Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) Export Policy. UAS can provide Allies and partners important capabilities for a range of operational requirements. Refining internal Department processes for adjudicating potential UAS transfers will expedite arms transfer policy decisions.
-
Improving Security Cooperation Officer (SCO) Training. At U.S. embassies overseas, the SCO is a key player in working with Allies and partners to develop arms transfer cases and security cooperation partnerships. Improving SCO training and curriculum will improve their ability to develop proposed FMS cases.
-
Working with Congress to Improve Consultation through the Tiered Review (TR) process. Congress provides extremely important input for FMS cases that require Congressional notification. We are committed to exploring process improvements with our committees of jurisdiction to improve the quality of our consultations and demonstrate to partners and industry why the United States remains their security partner of choice.
-
Modernizing the Congressional Notification Process. Eliminating duplicative reporting to Congress and prioritizing consultations on critical potential arms transfers, all while maintaining transparency on Congressionally notified FMS cases.
FORWARD-LOOKING SUPPORT TO FMS IMPLEMENTATION and FUTURE CASES
-
Limiting Special Security Arrangements (SSAs). Standard FMS measures can provide sufficient safeguards to technology and end-use under most circumstances. We can reduce delivery times to select partners by up to two years by reducing the overuse of SSAs while maintaining appropriate technology security measures.
-
Streamlining Internal Processes to Avoid delivery delays and Manage Expectations Where They Occur. Reassure Allies and partners in the viability of FMS by optimizing internal coordination to maintain awareness of changes in case status and work with the Chiefs of Mission to convey these delays to our partners.
-
Advancing the Conventional Arms Transfer (CAT) Policy Working Group (WG) initiatives. As part of the new CAT Policy, the Department is working with DoD to improve FMS processes and provide enhanced options to Allies and partners by: 1) addressing long standing challenges facing innovative and flexible financing mechanisms, 2) improving the process for procuring Non-Program of Record platforms, 3) building exportability into the development process, and 4) improving technology security and releasability processes.
For further information, please contact the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, Office of Congressional and Public Affairs at PM-CPA@state.gov, and follow the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs on Twitter, @StateDeptPM.
9. 'Exhaust them': Why Ukraine has fought Russia for every inch of Bakhmut, despite high cost
A war of exhaustion is not just about exhausting military forces.
Two of the more frequently used military strategies are attrition and exhaustion. Attrition means reducing an adversary’s physical capacity to fight; exhaustion entails wearing down the opponent’s willingness to do so. Both strategies can mean long wars, imposing heavy burdens on a nation’s population and economy, meaning they are not always culturally acceptable or economically practical. The Allies’ strategy in the Second World War is a modern example of attrition. A strategy of exhaustion can take several forms: blockades, sieges, guerrilla warfare, and “scorched earth” policies that destroy the physical ground an attacker might use. Physical and political geographies in the region will affect the implementation of either strategy. -
- Antulio J. Echevarria. Military Strategy: A Very Short Introduction, https://academic.oup.com/book/584/chapter-abstract/135310598?redirectedFrom=fulltext
'Exhaust them': Why Ukraine has fought Russia for every inch of Bakhmut, despite high cost
AP · by SAMYA KULLAB · May 21, 2023
KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — The nine-month battle for Bakhmut has destroyed the 400-year-old city in eastern Ukraine and killed tens of thousands of people in a mutually devastating demonstration of Ukraine’s strategy of exhausting the Russian military.
The fog of war made it impossible to confirm the situation on the ground Sunday in the invasion’s longest battle: Russia’s defense ministry reported that the Wagner private army backed by Russian troops had seized the city. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, meanwhile, said Bakhmut was not being fully occupied by Russian forces.
Regardless, the small city has long had more symbolic than strategic value for both sides. The more meaningful gauge of success for Ukrainian forces has been their ability to keep the Russians bogged down. The Ukrainian military has aimed to deplete the resources and morale of Russian troops in the tiny but tactical patch of the 1,500-kilometer (932-mile) front line as Ukraine gears up for a major counteroffensive in the 15-month-old war.
“Despite the fact that we now control a small part of Bakhmut, the importance of its defense does not lose its relevance,” said Col.-Gen. Oleksandr Syrskyi, the Commander of Ground Forces for the Ukrainian Armed Forces. “This gives us the opportunity to enter the city in case of a change in the situation. And it will definitely happen.”
About 55 kilometers (34 miles) north of the Russian-held regional capital of Donetsk, Bakhmut was an important industrial center, surrounded by salt and gypsum mines and home to about 80,000 people before the war, in a country of more than 43 million.
The city, named Artyomovsk after a Bolshevik revolutionary when Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union, was known for its sparkling wine produced in underground caves. It was popular among tourists for its broad tree-lined avenues, lush parks and stately downtown with imposing late 19th century mansions. All are now reduced to a smoldering wasteland.
Fought over so fiercely by Russia and Ukraine in recent months has been the urban center itself, where Ukrainian commanders have conceded that Moscow controlled more than 90%. But even now, Ukrainian forces are making significant advances near strategic roads through the countryside just outside, chipping away at Russia’s northern and southern flanks by the meter (yard) with the aim of encircling Wagner fighters inside the city.
“The enemy failed to surround Bakhmut. They lost part of the heights around the city. The continuing advance of our troops in the suburbs greatly complicates the enemy’s presence,” said Hanna Maliar, Ukraine’s deputy defense minister. “Our troops have taken the city in a semi-encirclement, which gives us the opportunity to destroy the enemy.”
Ukrainian military leaders say their months-long resistance has been worth it because it limited Russia’s capabilities elsewhere and allowed for Ukrainian advances.
“The main idea is to exhaust them, then to attack,” Ukrainian Col. Yevhen Mezhevikin, commander of a specialized group fighting in Bakhmut, said Thursday.
Russia has deployed reinforcements to Bakhmut to replenish lost northern and southern flanks and prevent more Ukrainian breakthroughs, according to Ukrainian officials and other outside observers. Russian President Vladimir Putin badly needs to claim victory in Bakhmut city, where Russian forces have focused their efforts, analysts say, especially after a winter offensive by his forces failed to capture other cities and towns along the front.
Some analysts said that even Ukraine’s tactical gains in the rural area outside urban Bakhmut could be more significant than they seem.
“It was almost like the Ukrainians just took advantage of the fact that, actually, the Russian lines were weak,” said Phillips O’Brien, a professor of strategic studies at the University of St. Andrews. “The Russian army has suffered such high losses and is so worn out around Bakhmut that ... it cannot go forward anymore.”
Ukrainian forces in the outskirts of Bakhmut and in the city bore relentless artillery attacks until a month ago. Then, Ukrainian forces positioned south of the city spotted their chance for a breakthrough after reconnaissance drones showed the southern Russian flank had gone on the defensive, Col. Mezhevikin said.
After fierce fighting for weeks, Ukrainian units had made their first advance in the vicinity of Bakhmut since it was invaded nine months ago.
In all, nearly 20 square kilometers (eight square miles) of territory were recaptured, Maliar said in an interview last week. Hundreds of meters (yards) more have been regained almost every day since, according to Serhii Cherevatyi, spokesman for Ukraine’s Operational Command East.
“Previously we were only holding the lines and didn’t let Russians advance further into our territory. What has happened now is our first advance (since the battle started),” Maliar said.
Victory in Bakhmut does not necessarily bring Russia any closer to capturing the Donetsk region — Putin’s stated aim of the war. Rather, it opens the door to more grinding battles in the direction of Sloviansk or Kostiantynivka, 20 kilometers (12 miles) away, said Kateryna Stepanenko, a Russia analyst at the U.S.-based think tank Institute for the Study of War.
Satellite imagery released this week shows infrastructure, apartment blocks and iconic buildings reduced to rubble.
In the last week, days before Russia announced that the city had fallen into their control, Ukrainian forces retained only a handful of buildings amid constant Russian bombardment. Outnumbered and outgunned, they described nightmarish days.
Russia’s artillery dominance is so overwhelming, accompanied by continuous human waves of mercenaries, that defensive positions could not be held for long.
“The importance of our mission of staying in Bakhmut lies in distracting a significant enemy force,” said Taras Deiak, a commander of a special unit of a volunteer battalion. “We are paying a high price for this.”
The northern and southern flanks regained by Ukraine are located near two highways that lead to Chasiv Yar, a town 10 kilometers (6 miles) from Bakhmut that serves as a key logistics supply route, one dubbed the “road of life.”
Ukrainian forces passing this road often came under fire from Russians positioned along nearby strategic heights. Armored vehicles and pickup trucks driving toward the city to replenish Ukrainian troops were frequently destroyed.
With the high plains now under Ukrainian control, its forces have more breathing room.
“This will help us design new logistic chains to deliver ammunition in and evacuate the injured or killed boys,” said Deiak, speaking from inside the city on Thursday, two days before Russia claimed it controlled the city. “Now it is easier to deliver supplies, rotate troops, (carry out) evacuations.”
___
Danica Kirka in London contributed to this report.
AP · by SAMYA KULLAB · May 21, 2023
10. China Makes Clear Its Military Isn’t Funny Anymore
Who says the PLA can't take a joke? I guess the party and the people say so.
Excerpt:
That post triggered a wave of nationalist anger online, as well as condemnation of Li by the PLA and state media. Li was fired and faces a police investigation. At least two other production companies canceled coming comedy shows, and authorities detained a woman who asked on social media what was wrong with comparing soldiers to dogs. Police also blamed the Li incident while shutting down a weekend music festival in Beijing.
...
Communist Party leaders, alarmed by a global rise in anti-China sentiment since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, have intensified a campaign to sell the virtues of Chinese culture and civilization abroad. Top political adviser Wang Huning hammered home that desire at a meeting in Beijing on Tuesday, saying the country needed to find ways to improve the appeal and reach of Chinese stories, “and present a China that is credible, appealing and respectable.”
Fallout from Li’s joke shows how that soft-power project is imperiled by a constant expansion of political taboos under Xi that is suffocating its most effective storytellers, media and culture experts say.
China Makes Clear Its Military Isn’t Funny Anymore
Fallout from propaganda joke continues to spread; ‘everyone will retreat to safety’
By Wenxin FanFollow
Updated May 22, 2023 12:57 am ET
https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinese-speech-fears-skyrocket-after-military-attack-on-comedian-b70359d3?utm_source=pocket_saves
HONG KONG—The furious reaction in China to a comedian’s riff on a military slogan is raising fears around speech to new levels in the heavily censored country, threatening a broader chill on Chinese arts and culture.
On Wednesday, Chinese authorities fined the country’s most popular comedy show operator, Shanghai Xiaoguo Culture Media, the equivalent of $2 million and suspended the company’s future shows in Beijing after a routine by one of its performers enraged China’s military, the People’s Liberation Army.
At a stand-up event in Beijing on May 13, comedian Li Haoshi described two stray dogs he had adopted launching themselves after a squirrel like artillery shells. “Normally you see dogs and you think how cute they are,” he continued. “When I see these two dogs, my mind immediately thinks of the words: ‘Able to win battles with first-rate style.’”
The slogan, ubiquitous in military propaganda, was coined by Chinese leader Xi Jinping a decade ago as he embarked on a campaign to remake the PLA into a top-flight fighting force. The joke produced a ripple of laughter, according to an audio clip of the performance, but at least one member of the audience was offended and slammed the joke in a social-media post afterward.
That post triggered a wave of nationalist anger online, as well as condemnation of Li by the PLA and state media. Li was fired and faces a police investigation. At least two other production companies canceled coming comedy shows, and authorities detained a woman who asked on social media what was wrong with comparing soldiers to dogs. Police also blamed the Li incident while shutting down a weekend music festival in Beijing.
Comedian Li Haoshi, who was fired after his recent riff on a military slogan, in happier times. PHOTO: SHANGHAI XIAOGUO CULTURE MEDIA
Li, whose social-media accounts have been taken down, couldn’t be reached for comment. The State Information Office, which handles media inquiries for the central government, didn’t respond to requests for comment. The Ministry of Defense couldn’t be reached.
Communist Party leaders, alarmed by a global rise in anti-China sentiment since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, have intensified a campaign to sell the virtues of Chinese culture and civilization abroad. Top political adviser Wang Huning hammered home that desire at a meeting in Beijing on Tuesday, saying the country needed to find ways to improve the appeal and reach of Chinese stories, “and present a China that is credible, appealing and respectable.”
Fallout from Li’s joke shows how that soft-power project is imperiled by a constant expansion of political taboos under Xi that is suffocating its most effective storytellers, media and culture experts say.
In the past, China was able to amass soft power by giving space to filmmakers, writers, musicians and other artists that it didn’t fully control. Censorship existed, but the no-go areas were more clearly delineated. Entertainers who knew how to dance along those political red lines could and did win international acclaim, and generated interest in China in the process.
Wang Huning, China’s top political adviser. PHOTO: MARK SCHIEFELBEIN/ASSOCIATED PRESS
The rise under Xi of a culture of extreme, hypervigilant seriousness means red lines can be impossible to see clearly in China, according to David Bandurski, director of the China Media Project, a U.S.-based independent research project.
“An incident like this will strike fear into a lot of people, and usher in a period of intense self-censorship,” Bandurski said. “Everyone will retreat to safety.”
Comedy shows have exploded in popularity in China, powered in part by the growth of live-streaming platforms. For commercial performances like Li’s May 13 show, scripts are scrutinized by government censors word by word, according to industry insiders.
Li, who goes by the stage name “House,” apologized on Monday for using an “inappropriate metaphor,” and Xiaoguo said he had been indefinitely suspended. A subsequent statement issued by Beijing’s cultural authorities said that the comedian diverged from the script in two shows on Saturday, a finding Xiaoguo confirmed.
On the popular Weibo social-media platform, an official account of the PLA’s flagship newspaper appeared to respond to the apology by posting excerpts of Xi’s speeches on culture along with a message decrying “vulgar humor.” The PLA’s Western Theater Command was more direct, saying in a Weibo post that Li’s apology wasn’t enough to “quell the anger” of the army.
Some sought to defend Li online, pointing out how common it is in China for people to casually appropriate propaganda slogans. Several insisted he had been “made to wear a hat,” a reference to victims of the Cultural Revolution who were falsely accused of political crimes and forced to wear conical hats marking them as counter-revolutionaries.
One comedian affiliated with Xiaoguo who goes by the stage name Kid quietly changed his Weibo handle from “Kidnofear” to “Kidknowfear,” before switching it back after the public took notice.
On Tuesday, a woman in the northeastern city of Dalian posted a message questioning why Li had been punished, asking, “Are our soldiers not dogs?” Local police issued a notice the next day saying she had been taken into administrative detention. “Blaspheming the dignity of the soldiers will not be tolerated,” the notice said.
As the weekend neared, reports circulated of venues in major Chinese cities altering and canceling cultural events, including an outdoor acoustic music festival in Beijing scheduled for Saturday that organizers said was called off “due to unforeseen circumstances.” Police came to break up the festival before it started, citing the Li incident, according to a person who was present.
The fallout from a comedian’s riff on a military slogan coined by Chinese leader Xi Jinping a decade ago highlights growing political taboos in the country. PHOTO: ANDY WONG/ASSOCIATED PRESS
In recent years, Chinese authorities have used a new law requiring the defense of military heroes and martyrs to punish people who criticize the PLA, part of Xi’s effort to bolster the military and defend its reputation as he hardens the country for a potential confrontation with the U.S. One man was sentenced to seven months in prison after he ridiculed a popular Chinese movie about the Korean War and questioned China’s decision to participate in the conflict.
Hao Qun, an exiled Chinese writer who publishes under the pen name Murong Xuecun, said the response to Li’s routine demonstrated that efforts to safeguard the military’s dignity had risen to absurd heights.
“That a harmless joke could lead to such dire consequences is a much bigger shock,” he said.
One of China’s most popular fiction writers, Murong fled China in 2021 to escape censorship. Before that, he said, he and his friends were so afraid of government eavesdropping they never referred to Xi out loud in conversation but instead raised their thumbs over their heads to indicate they were speaking about the Chinese leader.
“It was chilling,” he said.
Murong Xuecun, who fled China in 2021 to escape censorship, speaking in New York in 2015. PHOTO: FRANK FRANKLIN II/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Comedy has long been a fraught genre of entertainment in China. After all but disappearing in the Mao era, it made a gradual comeback in the decades following Mao’s death in 1976, to the point that one Shanghai comedian famously got away with mimicking top Communist Party leaders on stage in the 2000s. After years of tiptoeing along the edge of political correctness, the industry has lately found itself scrambling for safer ground.
Last year, a comedian was fined $7,000 for making fun of the zero-Covid policy on stage. In December, stand-up comedy operations in 13 Chinese cities signed a pledge to eliminate content at odds with socialist core values. People who want to hear a comedy bit in Mandarin that takes on anything overtly political now have to travel to cities like New York.
Searching for stand-up routines following the Li Haoshi dog incident, Chinese comedy enthusiasts uncovered year-old footage of a performance, promoted by the Shanghai suburb of Jiading as a form of “political theory stand up,” that aimed to promote Xi’s political philosophy. During the 10 minutes of the clip, which is punctuated by dabs of syrupy piano music, the audience barely laughed.
After one punchline failed to land, editors inserted a computer-generated “Wow.”
Corrections & Amplifications
The China Media Project’s director is David Bandurski. An earlier version of this article misspelled his surname as Bandurksi on second reference.
Write to Wenxin Fan at wenxin.fan@wsj.com
11. Russia Offensive Campaign Assessment, May 22, 2023
Maps/graphics/citations: https://understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-may-22-2023
Key Takeaways
- Elements of the all-Russian pro-Ukrainian Russian Volunteer Corps (RDK) and Freedom of Russian Legion (LSR) conducted a raid into Belgorod Oblast on May 22.
- Ukrainian officials noted that they are aware of the attack but denied any direct involvement by the Ukrainian Armed Forces. The raid prompted a slate of responses from local and federal Russian officials.
- The Russian information space responded with a similar degree of panic, factionalism, and incoherency as it tends to display when it experiences significant informational shocks.
- Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin claimed that Wagner forces will withdraw from the entire frontline in Ukraine after June 1 in order to reconstitute and train for about two months.
- Ukrainian officials stated that limited fighting continued in and around Bakhmut on May 22.
- The Russian informational response to the capture of Bakhmut has thus far focused on competing for responsibility for the victory rather than discussing the resulting military situation. The hyperfocus on claiming victory in Bakhmut distracts from the precarious Russian military situation in and around Bakhmut, underscoring the weight of Prigozhin’s influence in the information space.
- Russian forces launched another large-scale drone and missile strike against Ukrainian infrastructure on the night of May 21-22.
- Russian forces continued limited ground attacks in the Kupyansk direction.
- Russian forces made marginal gains in the Avdiivka area and did not conduct any confirmed or claimed ground attacks in western Donetsk Oblast.
- The Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant reportedly lost power for the seventh time since the beginning of the war.
- The Russian military is reportedly lowering the length of training for convicts in order to compensate for heavy losses.
- Russian occupation authorities announced that preliminary voting for the ruling United Russia Party has commenced in occupied territories.
RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, MAY 22, 2023
May 22, 2023 - Press ISW
Download the PDF
Russia Offensive Campaign Assessment, May 22, 2023
Karolina Hird, Grace Mappes, Nicole Wolkov, Layne Philipson, and Frederick W. Kagan
May 22, 2023, 8:30pm ET
Click here to see ISW’s interactive map of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This map is updated daily alongside the static maps present in this report.
Click here to access ISW’s archive of interactive time-lapse maps of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. These maps complement the static control-of-terrain map that ISW produces daily by showing a dynamic frontline. ISW will update this time-lapse map archive monthly.
Note: The data cutoff for this product was 4pm ET on May 22. ISW will cover subsequent reports in the May 23 Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment.
Elements of the all-Russian pro-Ukrainian Russian Volunteer Corps (RDK) and Freedom of Russia Legion (LSR) conducted a raid into Belgorod Oblast on May 22. Russian sources began reporting on the morning of May 22 that a detachment of the RDK and LSR consisting of two tanks, an armored personnel carrier, and nine other armored vehicles crossed the international border and captured Kozinka, a settlement in the Grayvoron region of Belgorod Oblast within 600 meters of the border with Sumy Oblast.[1] Several Russian sources claimed that the grouping then captured the settlements of Glotovo and Gora Podol (3km and 5km from the border, respectively), although some milbloggers disputed claims that the attack completely captured Glotovo or Gora Podol, instead reporting that RDK forces only got to the Glotovo House of Culture.[2] ISW has not yet observed geolocated confirmation that the RDK or LSR reached Glotovo or Gora Podol. Geolocated footage posted on May 22 does confirm that the RDK struck a border post near Kozinka before crossing the border with at least one tank.[3] The RDK also posted footage reportedly showing the body of a Russian border guard in a border station, likely from the border crossing near Kozinka.[4] Russian milbloggers later claimed that Russian troops retook control of all three settlements.[5] Some Russian sources additionally reported that Russian forces repelled pro-Ukrainian sabotage groups near Dronovka, about 22km northwest of Kozinka.[6] The RDK additionally posted footage reportedly outside two settlements near the border area in Bryansk Oblast, but the nature of this incursion is unclear and ISW has not observed additional evidence or discourse surrounding actions in Bryansk Oblast on May 22.[7]
Ukrainian officials noted that they are aware of the attack but denied any direct involvement by the Ukrainian Armed Forces. Ukrainian Main Intelligence Directorate (GUR) Spokesperson Andriy Yusov noted that the RDK and LSR are comprised exclusively of Russian citizens and reported that the groups launched an operation in Belgorod Oblast to “liberate these territories...from the so-called Putin regime” and create a “security zone” by the border to protect Ukrainian civilians from further Russian shelling.[8] Advisor to the Head of the Ukrainian President’s Office Mykhailo Podolyak stated that Ukraine is observing and studying the situation but “has no direct relation to it,” noting that armed anti-regime Russian partisan movements are inevitable against the backdrop of the war.[9]
The raid prompted a slate of responses from local and federal Russian officials. Belgorod Oblast Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov announced on May 22 the start of a counterterrorism operation regime in order to “ensure the safety of citizens in Belgorod Oblast.”[10] While some social media users posted footage claiming to show an official evacuation from the Grayvoron region, the Belgorod Oblast Ministry of Emergency Situations reported that it never announced an evacuation and suggested that some individuals may be leaving of their own accord.[11] Kremlin Spokesperson Dmitry Peskov stated that the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD), Federal Security Service (FSB), and Border Service reported to Russian President Vladimir Putin on an “attempt by Ukrainian saboteurs to break into Belgorod Oblast.”[12] Peskov also accused Ukraine of staging the incident in order to distract from the situation in Bakhmut.[13] A Russian milblogger additionally claimed that the Russian military leadership decided to deploy the 74th Motorized Rifle Brigade (41st Combined Arms Army, Central Military District) to the Belgorod Oblast border area in order to counter the attack.[14]
The Russian information space responded with a similar degree of panic, factionalism, and incoherency as it tends to display when it experiences significant informational shocks. Some milbloggers fixated on the fact that the RDK and LSR are comprised of mostly Russians and labeled them traitors to Russia, baselessly accusing them of working under the GUR.[15] Several milbloggers additionally speculated that the attack was a purposeful information operation intended to distract from the recent Russian capture of Bakhmut and to instill panic in the Russian information space in advance of a potential Ukrainian counteroffensive.[16] Former Russian officer and ardent nationalist milblogger Igor Girkin remarked that he has long warned that such cross-border raids may be part of a wider Ukrainian counteroffensive strategy.[17] Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin took advantage of the incident to accuse the Russian government and its bureaucratic inertia of contributing to the attack and criticized the Russian MoD for being unable to strengthen Russian borders and defend Russia.[18] The first observed line of Russian defensive fortifications notably runs 2km in front of Gora Podol, and the suggestion that RDK forces managed to penetrate the defensive line emphasizes the weakness of such fortifications at least when not fully manned by well-prepared and well-equipped soldiers. While the majority of milbloggers responded with relatively varied concern, anxiety, and anger, the information space did not coalesce around one coherent response, which indicates first and foremost that the attack took Russian commentators by surprise.
Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin claimed that Wagner forces will withdraw from the entire frontline in Ukraine after June 1 in order to reconstitute and train for about two months. Prigozhin claimed on May 21 – one day after he declared victory in Bakhmut City – that Wagner forces will give Russian conventional forces control of Bakhmut on May 25 and completely withdraw from the entire frontline by June 1 to rest and reconstitute over a two-month period.[19] Prigozhin also claimed that any reports of Wagner assault operations during that two-month period are fake unless he says otherwise. ISW previously assessed that Wagner forces are unlikely to continue fighting beyond Bakhmut due to severe depletion and the culmination of their offensive capabilities.[20] The two-month reconstitution period Prigozhin has announced could have Wagner forces sitting out key parts of the Ukrainian counter-offensive depending on when and how it begins.
Ukrainian officials stated that limited fighting continued in and around Bakhmut on May 22. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that fighting continues in Bakhmut and that Russian forces conducted unsuccessful ground attacks near Hryhorivka (8km northwest of Bakhmut) and south of Ivanivske (immediately west of Bakhmut).[21] Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Malyar reiterated that Ukrainian forces maintain positions in a fortified area in western Bakhmut and that fighting for heights north and south of Bakhmut continues.[22] Geolocated footage published on May 21 shows that Wagner forces advanced towards the T0504 entrance to southwestern Bakhmut.[23] A prominent Russian milblogger claimed that fighting is ongoing just west of Bakhmut near Khromove as of May 21.[24] Another milblogger claimed on May 22 that Russian forces attempted a limited ground attack south of Bakhmut near Bila Hora.[25] Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) Head Denis Pushilin, Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin, and other Russian sources claimed that Russian forces began clearing and demining operations on the western outskirts of Bakhmut.[26]
The Russian informational response to the capture of Bakhmut has thus far focused on competing for responsibility for the victory rather than discussing the resulting military situation. Prominent Russian milbloggers amplified a document allegedly from the Russian MoD that would grant state awards for the capture of Bakhmut to Russian Deputy Chief of the General Staff Colonel General Alexey Kim, MoD deputies Tatyana Shevtsova and Ruslan Tsalikov, and Ksenia Shoigu, the daughter of Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu – notably omitting Wagner Group personnel and its affiliates, such as Prigozhin and Army General Sergey Surovikin.[27] Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin claimed that DNR Head Pushilin announced the creation of a specific award commemorating the Battle of Bakhmut but complained that Russia should not hand out the medal to those who did not actually fight in Bakhmut.[28] Prigozhin complained that Russia has not issued state awards to dead Wagner fighters for the Bakhmut effort, and that the MoD had never even awarded Wagner fighters medals commemorating the capture of Palmyra, Syria.[29] Russian milbloggers amplified footage showing a Wagner commander awarding personnel with Wagner’s own internal award commemorating Bakhmut, likely attempting to beat the Russian MoD in solidifying its claims in the capture of Bakhmut.[30] A Russian milblogger affiliated with the nationalist, pro-war Angry Patriots Club criticized Prigozhin for claiming sole responsibility for the capture of Bakhmut, claiming that conventional Russian forces defended Bakhmut’s flanks and that the 137th Airborne (VDV) Regiment (106th Guards Airborne Division, Western Military District) has supported Wagner forces since the early part of the Bakhmut effort.[31]
The hyperfocus on claiming victory in Bakhmut distracts from the precarious Russian military situation in and around Bakhmut, underscoring the weight of Prigozhin’s influence in the information space. The Russian military situation in Bakhmut is particularly vulnerable as the Russian offensive effort in the area has likely culminated, granting Ukrainian forces the opportunity to launch further counterattacks on Bakhmut’s already-weakened flanks.[32] Wagner’s withdrawal in contact will also likely result in the Russian MoD manning defensive lines with poorly trained and provisioned conventional units similar to those that retreated from their positions while defending against Ukrainian counterattacks earlier in May.[33] The Russian information space is largely ignoring these vulnerabilities, however. Girkin complained that the Russian focus on capturing Bakhmut was a “strategic failure” that resulted in an “unnecessary and Pyrrhic” victory.[34] Girkin criticized Prigozhin, Shoigu, and Chief of the General Staff Army General Valery Gerasimov for prolonging the effort to take Bakhmut and distracting from preparations to defend against a coming Ukrainian counteroffensive.[35]
Russian forces launched another large-scale drone and missile strike against Ukrainian infrastructure on the night of May 21-22. The Ukrainian General Staff reported on May 22 that Russian forces launched 21 Shahed drones at Ukraine and 21 missiles at Dnipro and Zaporizhzhia cities and Kharkiv Oblast, including four Kh-101/555 air-launched cruise missiles, five Kh-22 cruise missiles, two Iskander-M ballistic missiles, five S-300 missiles, and four other unspecified missiles.[36] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces shot down all of the Kh-101/555 missiles and Shahed drones. Ukrainian Air Force Spokesperson Yuriy Ihnat stated that Russian forces may have lost the desire to strike Chernihiv and Sumy oblasts from the northern direction with guided aerial bombs due to the downing of two Russian Mi-8 helicopters, one Su-34 aircraft, and one Su-35 aircraft in Bryansk Oblast on May 13.[37]
Key Takeaways
- Elements of the all-Russian pro-Ukrainian Russian Volunteer Corps (RDK) and Freedom of Russian Legion (LSR) conducted a raid into Belgorod Oblast on May 22.
- Ukrainian officials noted that they are aware of the attack but denied any direct involvement by the Ukrainian Armed Forces. The raid prompted a slate of responses from local and federal Russian officials.
- The Russian information space responded with a similar degree of panic, factionalism, and incoherency as it tends to display when it experiences significant informational shocks.
- Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin claimed that Wagner forces will withdraw from the entire frontline in Ukraine after June 1 in order to reconstitute and train for about two months.
- Ukrainian officials stated that limited fighting continued in and around Bakhmut on May 22.
- The Russian informational response to the capture of Bakhmut has thus far focused on competing for responsibility for the victory rather than discussing the resulting military situation. The hyperfocus on claiming victory in Bakhmut distracts from the precarious Russian military situation in and around Bakhmut, underscoring the weight of Prigozhin’s influence in the information space.
- Russian forces launched another large-scale drone and missile strike against Ukrainian infrastructure on the night of May 21-22.
- Russian forces continued limited ground attacks in the Kupyansk direction.
- Russian forces made marginal gains in the Avdiivka area and did not conduct any confirmed or claimed ground attacks in western Donetsk Oblast.
- The Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant reportedly lost power for the seventh time since the beginning of the war.
- The Russian military is reportedly lowering the length of training for convicts in order to compensate for heavy losses.
- Russian occupation authorities announced that preliminary voting for the ruling United Russia Party has commenced in occupied territories.
We do not report in detail on Russian war crimes because these activities are well-covered in Western media and do not directly affect the military operations we are assessing and forecasting. We will continue to evaluate and report on the effects of these criminal activities on the Ukrainian military and the Ukrainian population and specifically on combat in Ukrainian urban areas. We utterly condemn these Russian violations of the laws of armed conflict, Geneva Conventions, and humanity even though we do not describe them in these reports.
- Russian Main Effort – Eastern Ukraine (comprised of two subordinate main efforts)
- Russian Subordinate Main Effort #1 – Capture the remainder of Luhansk Oblast and push westward into eastern Kharkiv Oblast and encircle northern Donetsk Oblast
- Russian Subordinate Main Effort #2 – Capture the entirety of Donetsk Oblast
- Russian Supporting Effort – Southern Axis
- Russian Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts
- Activities in Russian-occupied areas
Russian Main Effort – Eastern Ukraine
Russian Subordinate Main Effort #1 – Luhansk Oblast (Russian objective: Capture the remainder of Luhansk Oblast and push westward into eastern Kharkiv Oblast and northern Donetsk Oblast)
Russian forces continued limited ground attacks in the Kupyansk direction on May 22. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces conducted unsuccessful offensive actions towards Masyutivka (13km northeast of Kupyansk).[38] The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) claimed that units of the Western Group of Forces stopped three Ukrainian sabotage and reconnaissance groups about 20km southeast of Kupyansk near Tymivka, Kyslivka, and Ivanivka.[39] A Russian milblogger warned that Ukrainian forces may be preparing to attack positions of the Western Military District (WMD)’s 1st Guards Tank Army and 6th Combined Arms Army on this sector of the front.[40]
Russian forces continued ground attacks and have made incremental advances south of Kreminna as of May 22. Geolocated footage posted on May 22 indicates that Russian troops have advanced near the filtration station on the southeastern outskirts of Bilohorivka (about 13km south of Kreminna).[41] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces also conducted unsuccessful offensive operations near Ivano-Darivka (23km south of Kreminna).[42]
Russian Subordinate Main Effort #2 – Donetsk Oblast (Russian Objective: Capture the entirety of Donetsk Oblast, the claimed territory of Russia’s proxies in Donbas)
See topline text on Bakhmut.
Russian forces made marginal gains in the Avdiivka area as of May 22. Geolocated footage published on May 21 shows that Russian forces made marginal territorial gains southwest of Pervomaiske (11km southwest of Avdiivka).[43] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces conducted unsuccessful offensive operations near Avdiivka, Pervomaiske, Novokalynove (7km north of Avdiivka), Vodyane (6km southweset of Avdiivka), and Marinka (18km west of Donetsk City).[44] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces also attacked near Sieverne (7km west of Avdiivka) and Novomykhailivka (10km southwest of Donetsk City).[45] Ukrainian Donetsk Oblast Head Pavlo Kyrylenko reported that Russian forces shelled Avdiivka with cluster munitions.[46] One Russian milblogger expressed concern that Ukrainian forces are concentrating armor for an offensive effort from Avdiivka against Donetsk City, but another milblogger claimed that the alleged armor buildup is insufficient for such an effort.[47]
Russian forces did not conduct any confirmed or claimed ground attacks in western Donetsk Oblast on May 22.
Russian Supporting Effort – Southern Axis (Russian objective: Maintain frontline positions and secure rear areas against Ukrainian strikes)
Russian sources continued to express concern about Ukrainian positions on the Dnipro River islands ahead of an anticipated Ukrainian counteroffensive. The Kherson Oblast occupation administration amplified footage on May 22 purportedly showing Russian forces striking Ukrainian positions on unspecified islands in the Dnipro River delta with high-precision projectiles.[48] The Kherson Oblast occupation administration claimed that rumors about Ukrainian forces potentially crossing the Dnipro River and the coming counteroffensive are only propaganda promoting fear and uncertainty. A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces maintain control over the islands in the Dnipro River delta and that Russian forces drive Ukrainian forces off the islands with aerial bombs.[49]
The Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP) lost power for the seventh time since the beginning of the war. International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director Rafel Grossi stated on May 22 that the ZNPP was completely disconnected from the national electric grid for several hours, forcing the plant to rely on external diesel generators for power.[50] Grossi reiterated calls for increased efforts to restore backup powerlines and for the IAEA monitoring contingent to receive access to the Zaporizhzhia Thermal Power Plant (ZTPP) switchyard to provide backup power to the ZNPP. Ukrainian nuclear energy operator Energoatom reported that Russian shelling cut the only operational power line to the ZNPP.[51] Zaporizhia Oblast occupation official Vladimir Rogov claimed that Ukrainian forces struck the ZNPP, however.[52] ISW has previously reported on Russian militarization of the ZNPP.[53]
Russian Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts (Russian objective: Expand combat power without conducting general mobilization)
The Russian military is reportedly reducing the length of training for convicts in order to compensate for heavy losses. The Ukrainian General Staff reported on May 22 that the Russian military leadership has reduced the training period for convicts at a training camp in Starobilsk Raion in Russian occupied Luhansk Oblast from four weeks to 10 days.[54] ISW previously assessed that the Russian forces are diluting their combat effectiveness with poorly trained personnel in an attempt to make up for high casualties.[55]
Activities in Russian-occupied areas (Russian objective: Consolidate administrative control of annexed areas; forcibly integrate Ukrainian civilians into Russian sociocultural, economic, military, and governance systems)
Russian occupation authorities announced that preliminary voting for the ruling United Russia Party has commenced in occupied territories. Russian occupation authorities in occupied Donetsk, Luhansk, and Zaporizhia oblasts announced on May 22 that residents may vote for their preferred candidates online from May 22 to 28, or in-person from May 26-28.[56] Russian occupation authorities in occupied Kherson Oblast did not comment on preliminary voting, though Ukrainian Kherson Oblast Administration Advisor Serhiy Khlan stated that Kherson Oblast occupation authorities are preparing for the autumn regional elections.[57]
Significant activity in Belarus (ISW assesses that a Russian or Belarusian attack into northern Ukraine in early 2023 is extraordinarily unlikely and has thus restructured this section of the update. It will no longer include counter-indicators for such an offensive.)
ISW will continue to report daily observed Russian and Belarusian military activity in Belarus, but these are not indicators that Russian and Belarusian forces are preparing for an imminent attack on Ukraine from Belarus. ISW will revise this text and its assessment if it observes any unambiguous indicators that Russia or Belarus is preparing to attack northern Ukraine.
Ukrainian Joint Forces Commander Lieutenant General Serhiy Nayev stated on May 22 that there continues to be no evidence that Russian forces have formed ground strike groups in Belarus or Russia though Russian forces maintain a military presence in Belarus.[58] Nayev stated that Russian forces continue to maintain two State Border Protection groups totaling 18,000 personnel in southern Belarus and Kursk, Bryansk, and Belgorod oblasts.[59] Nayev stated that the main contingent of Russian forces that had been in Belarus has moved to Rostov Oblast, Russia and then deployed to Donetsk Oblast after training at Belarusian training grounds.[60] Nayev stated that Russian forces maintain 13 Russian fixed-wing aircraft on Belarusian territory, including eight Su-34s, three Su-30SMs, two Su-24MRs, and 12 Mi-8, Mi-24, and Mi-28N helicopters.[61]
Note: ISW does not receive any classified material from any source, uses only publicly available information, and draws extensively on Russian, Ukrainian, and Western reporting and social media as well as commercially available satellite imagery and other geospatial data as the basis for these reports. References to all sources used are provided in the endnotes of each update.
12. The Strategic Downside To Drone Attacks – Analysis
Excerpts:
Drones play to America’s strength – technology – and put no Americans at risk, but the strategic downside is never priced in. The response to U.S. drones will be more drones, but deployed by the opposition who, if they can’t attack U.S. troops, will settle for soft targets like American embassies, or U.S. allies. And drones’ low cost means civil conflicts – where U.S. troops may be deployed as peacekeepers – will get even deadlier as armed gangs, many styled as “militias,” can now field an air arm for surveillance or attack.
In the case of Lotfi Hassan Misto, the drone attack may be helping to achieve something thought well-nigh impossible: the rehabilitation of Bashar al-Assad. As thanks, perhaps Assad can send the Pentagon a tasteful gift, maybe a silver picture frame with a signed picture of he and the Missus.
And America’s drone attacks will prompt asymmetric responses that will be called “terrorism,” justifying even more drone strikes, and more responses, ad nauseum.
The resulting Pentagon bureaucratic to-and-fro will result in an even more detailed pre-strike checklist, but the cat is out of the bag and, aside from its evaporating moral authority, the U.S. no longer has the luxury of air superiority, ironically due to the drone technology it has advanced.
The Strategic Downside To Drone Attacks – Analysis
https://www.eurasiareview.com/22052023-the-strategic-downside-to-drone-attacks-analysis/
May 22, 2023 James Durso 0 Comments
By James Durso
In the United States, giving aid and comfort to the enemy is a serious offense, but America’s armed drone program, while it kills a lot of bad guys, also helps generate new recruits to replace them.
In early May 2023, the Pentagon announced a drone attack killed a “senior al-Qaeda leader” in Syria. On 18 May, the same day Syria president Bashar al-Assad arrived at the Arab League meeting in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, the Pentagon was forced to admit it may have killed the wrong guy. The “wrong guy” was Lotfi Hassan Misto, a 51-year-old sheep herder and father of ten who was tending his flock.
But the Pentagon wasn’t giving up so easy as it insisted: “Though we believe the strike did not kill the original target, we believe the person to be al-Qaeda.”
After a mistake like this, al-Assad may be excused for thinking he is on a divinely-ordained mission. He didn’t even need to wax eloquent at the Arab League meeting about American perfidy and brutality; all he had to do was read the news as it came off the wire.
Days before al-Assad’s triumphant arrival in Jeddah, the Brown University Cost of War Project announced an estimated 4.5 million people died in the post 9-11 wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen, among others. Al-Assad and his host, Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, are responsible for many of those deaths but America’s precision, high-tech drones command more attention, especially when, as is often the case, they kill the wrong guy.
A bad man in a movie said, “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it’s enemy action.” Many of the helpless people in the countries where America went to war after 9-11 agree with the bad man.
The killing of Lotfi Hassan Misto will bring to mind the America’s shambolic retreat from Afghanistan, capped by the drone killing of ten members of a family, including seven children, when the U.S. forces attacked who they thought was an Islamic State facilitator, a rushed revenge attack justified as a “righteous strike” by Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley.
The truth came out because there were journalists in the capital city of Kabul, unlike many other errant strikes in isolated places in Afghanistan or Pakistan, and the Pentagon’s story unraveled when The New York Times reported the deaths of the Ahmadi family, headed by a man who worked for a U.S.-based aid organization, who hoped to emigrate to the U.S. Tragedy became farce when the military later admitted it couldn’t find the safe house where the mythical Islamic State facilitator was based, despite tracking Mr. Ahmadi all day as he drove around Kabul.
The stock U.S. reply to the accidental killing of civilians in drone attacks is that it will conduct a thorough investigation with the implication that punishment will be meted out, but that never happens. When you just lost a family member due to an inattentive or inexperienced watch stander in Indian Springs, that fact that his next promotion may be delayed six months doesn’t seem like justice. But if Russia or Iran screw up, and they did when they shot down flights MH17and PS752, the U.S. demands a trial at The Hague and imposes new rounds of sanctions.
The military’s stock explanation after every accidental killing is “mistakes were made, but no one did anything wrong.” “Regrettably” will be sprinkled throughout the press release about the findings of the official investigation (which will never see the light of day), a word salad that will leave the victims’ survivors likely thinking the U.S. is using its laws to avoid justice.
The investigation will be referred to the operational commanders who will require some extra training for some lower ranks, then cite the Privacy Act so the offenders will be forever anonymous. In the hands of a decent lawyer, the “mistakes were made” investigation will bind the hands of any commander who thinks real accountability is justified.
So, once again, America’s intelligence apparatus – all-seeing, but unknowing – misidentified as a terrorist leader an innocent family man minding his own business. Several drones, and layers of analysts and reviewers – dozens of people – from Syria to Nevada, were involved and they blew it. The drone operators may be feeling stress but, after this many mistakes, does anyone care?
After an accidental killing, the military’s priority is to shield its members from civil lawsuits in the U.S., or prosecution in a foreign court that would result in an Interpol Red Notice when the offending troops fail to appear. The U.S. wants to avoid a repeat of the trial in Italy of 22 CIA officers and a U.S. Air Force colonel for the 2003 kidnapping of the convicted terrorist, Abu Omar. All 23 were found guilty in absentia and one of the CIA officers was arrested when she later traveled to Europe.
These errors are a labor-saving device for America’s enemies, who can make the case that the U.S. is careless when foreign lives are at stake. If drones turn out to be a recruiting sergeant for groups like the Islamic State, we may have to admit that while they are tactically effective, they are an expensive strategic liability that create more enemies than they kill.
For example, the U.S. tried five times to kill Qari Hussain, a deputy commander of the Pakistani Taliban, before getting lucky the sixth time on 15 October 2010, but in the process killing 128 unlucky people, 13 of them children.
Former CIA officer John Kiriakou admitted, “Well the truth of the matter is that the drone program is probably the most potent recruiting tool that foreign terrorist groups have…there are people in countries all over the region – not just the Middle East but South Asia and the Horn of Africa – that otherwise would never have had reason to take up arms against us and did so solely because of the drone program.”
Drones play to America’s strength – technology – and put no Americans at risk, but the strategic downside is never priced in. The response to U.S. drones will be more drones, but deployed by the opposition who, if they can’t attack U.S. troops, will settle for soft targets like American embassies, or U.S. allies. And drones’ low cost means civil conflicts – where U.S. troops may be deployed as peacekeepers – will get even deadlier as armed gangs, many styled as “militias,” can now field an air arm for surveillance or attack.
In the case of Lotfi Hassan Misto, the drone attack may be helping to achieve something thought well-nigh impossible: the rehabilitation of Bashar al-Assad. As thanks, perhaps Assad can send the Pentagon a tasteful gift, maybe a silver picture frame with a signed picture of he and the Missus.
And America’s drone attacks will prompt asymmetric responses that will be called “terrorism,” justifying even more drone strikes, and more responses, ad nauseum.
The resulting Pentagon bureaucratic to-and-fro will result in an even more detailed pre-strike checklist, but the cat is out of the bag and, aside from its evaporating moral authority, the U.S. no longer has the luxury of air superiority, ironically due to the drone technology it has advanced.
This article was published by Defense.Info
James Durso
James Durso (@james_durso) is a regular commentator on foreign policy and national security matters. Mr. Durso served in the U.S. Navy for 20 years and has worked in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Central Asia.
13. The west’s tightening of Russian sanctions is a sign of failure
Excerpt:
None of which is to say that Russia will win. Putin has been guilty of his own questionable assumptions: that the war would be short and that the west would provide only token support for Kiev. But the new sanctions and the pledge to back Ukraine for “as long as it takes” is recognition that Russia is putting up stiffer economic resistance than the G7 anticipated.
The west’s tightening of Russian sanctions is a sign of failure | Larry Elliot
The Kremlin is putting up stiffer economic resistance than the G7 anticipated
The Guardian · by Larry Elliott · May 21, 2023
The tightening of sanctions against Russia announced by the G7 summit in Hiroshima is evidence that the west remains solidly behind Ukraine in its battle against aggression. It is also a sign of failure.
Despite talk of quick victory there has been no knockout blow in the economic war, let alone signs that freezing assets, targeting oligarchs, seeking alternative energy sources and depriving Russia of vital components has brought about a change of heart in the Kremlin.
The lack of instant success should not come as too much of a surprise. The earliest example of the use of sanctions dates back to ancient Greece and their record has been mixed since then. For the most part, turning the economic screw has had only a modest impact. Furthermore, it takes time – decades often – for the measures to work.
No doubt, Russia is feeling the impact of sanctions, but so is the west. Indeed, one reason for the over-egging of claims that the Russian economy is close to collapse is that western policymakers know their own voters are suffering from the collateral damage: dearer energy, rising food prices and falling living standards.
Despite all that, public support for Ukraine in G7 countries remains solid. But the past 15 months have exposed the difficulties in laying economic siege to a country as well-endowed with natural resources and technical nous as Russia. The new measures are designed to disrupt the Kremlin’s ability to source materials for its military, close loopholes, further reduce international reliance on Russian energy, and limit Moscow’s access to the global financial system.
Early forecasts from the International Monetary Fund that the Russian economy would contract by 8.5% in 2022 have since been revised to a 2.5% fall. The IMF is expecting growth of 0.7% this year. Inflation is running at a three-year low of 2.3% – lower than in the US, the UK or the eurozone.
So what is happening? One possible explanation is that things are worse than they appear on the surface. There are reports of a brain drain of skilled workers and of shortages of spare parts. Neither would lead the economy to fold immediately, but longer term they would be factors – if left unaddressed – that would slow the economy.
Interestingly, some Russians admit the war has had an impact. Last September, the Institute of National Economic Forecasting of the Russian Academy of Sciences released an assessment in which it admitted the shock from sanctions had affected almost every part of the economy. It said difficulties in obtaining raw materials and components were among the most acute problems.
The RAS report said: “Despite the extreme severity of the problems, the authorities managed to stop the inflationary surge in the economy fairly quickly, prevent a bank panic, ensure the smooth operating of the payments system, and return the ruble to the previous exchange rate with a margin.”
Three questionable assumptions underpinned the west’s belief that the economic war would be swiftly over. The first is that Russia would run out of money and so be unable to finance its military action.
In reality, the energy embargoes and the freezing of Russian reserves held by western central banks have proved to be less effective than envisaged. While the volume of Russian oil and gas exports has fallen, higher prices have meant the value of exports has not been affected.
Russia has also offered to supply oil and gas at a discount and found plenty of ready buyers: China and India most notably. So far, Moscow has not needed to dip into its reserves, although that might change if global energy prices continue to soften.
The second assumption was that the entire global community would be united in opposition to Russian aggression. This has proved optimistic. Many countries in Africa and Asia refused to condemn Russia in a UN vote at the start of the war and abstained instead.
Sign up to Business Today
Free daily newsletter
Get set for the working day – we'll point you to all the business news and analysis you need every morning
Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
after newsletter promotion
This lack of universal support for Ukraine has made it possible for Russia to circumvent sanctions. A report by the German newspaper Bild showed that exports of German cars to Kazakhstan rose by 507% between 2021 and 2022. Exports of chemical products to Armenia rose by 110%, and sales of electrical and computer products to the same country increased by 343%.
Now, it is possible that Kazakhstan and Armenia are in the throes of economic booms that necessitate massive increases in imports. It seems much more likely that the cars, chemicals and electrical goods are finding their way into Russia by a circuitous route.
The final assumption is that the Russia of 2023 is no different to the Soviet Union of the 1980s; a basket case that will wilt under pressure from the west’s superior economic model. Yet, as the US economist James Galbraith pointed out in a recent paper, Russia has an excellent education system, plenty of technical knowhow, and industrial plants that have been built by western multinationals since the end of the cold war. Sanctions provide an incentive for the Russians to substitute home-grown products for western imports.
“Though some techniques remain to be mastered, Russia is not short of any underlying ingredients – food, fuel, materials, scientific and engineering talent,” said Galbraith. “Whether its economic leadership is of a calibre to use these resources effectively is an open question, but so far, the contrary evidence is not compelling.”
None of which is to say that Russia will win. Putin has been guilty of his own questionable assumptions: that the war would be short and that the west would provide only token support for Kiev. But the new sanctions and the pledge to back Ukraine for “as long as it takes” is recognition that Russia is putting up stiffer economic resistance than the G7 anticipated.
The Guardian · by Larry Elliott · May 21, 2023
14. Bestselling military memoir banned from Hudsonville Public Schools
How far is this "book banning disease" going to progress in the US?
“Any book worth banning is a book worth reading.” -Isaac Asimov
"Censorship reflects a society's lack of confidence in itself." ― Potter Stewart
“There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.” ― Joseph Brodsky
“Don't join the book burners. Don't think you're going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don't be afraid to go in your library and read every book...” ― Dwight D. Eisenhower
Bestselling military memoir banned from Hudsonville Public Schools
wzzm13.com
HUDSONVILLE, Mich. — A school district in Ottawa County has voted to remove a bestselling memoir about one marine's time in the Persian Gulf War.
The Hudsonville Public Schools (HPS) board narrowly decided to remove "Jarhead" from its school libraries by a vote of 4-3 last Monday.
The decision came after two hours of public comment and discussion by the board.
"We're here to fight against darkness," One community member said during public comment. "Jarhead has an extremely violent, vulgar, pornographic diatribe, and tonight, we will learn if HPS has any intention of taking any measures to protect our students from any flagrantly obscene content."
Community opinions were split on removing the book from the school libraries.
"We are allowing recruiters into schools where kids can sign on the dotted line, but they can't read about actual service members and soldiers experiences," another person said in opposition to the ban.
The book first appeared in the school's library in 2004 and the board noted that the book had been checked out a total of 21 times since 2010.
The book was first brought to the boards attention due to complaints from parents who said the book disrespected the military and portrayed graphic scenes of violence and sex.
You can watch the public comment about Jarhead from the meeting here:
Jarhead is written by Anthony Swofford about his time with the Surveillance and Target Acquisition Platoon of the 2nd Battalion, 7th Marines during the Persian Gulf War.
The book was the basis for the R rated movie "Jarhead" in 2005. It has been said to be one of the most accurate war movies ever made and yet has also been criticized by military personnel as well.
15. A Note of Caution: How Sanctions Can Undermine U.S. Interests
Excerpts:
The outlook for global sanctions policy is different today than when Demarais was writing her book. The Biden administration has shown more willingness than its predecessor to consider sanctions’ associated harms. As Demarais has written recently, Washington’s partners are more enthusiastic about joint sanctions campaigns than they were a few years ago. Europeans, who were once fed up with Washington’s sanctions approach, are now protagonists in the economic war against Russia in the context of the Ukraine invasion.
But Demarais’ compelling book is still relevant and will continue to be. As the United States and its allies ramp up their sanctions use, it is clear that sanctions are powerful measures that can bear consequences. They may be an appropriate tool in a range of circumstances, as they were in response to Russia’s flagrant violation of international norms in its invasion of Ukraine, but policymakers should use them carefully, keeping a close eye on their adverse effects and remaining nimble in addressing them. The Biden administration has supported some important reforms to this end, but considering the number of sanctions imposed in his presidency so far— including on Russia — sanctions are more ingrained than ever as a tool of U.S. statecraft. Against this backdrop, attention to their downsides has never been more important. The United States would be wise to heed the warnings in Demarais’ book so that its sanctions policies do not backfire.
A Note of Caution: How Sanctions Can Undermine U.S. Interests - War on the Rocks
warontherocks.com · by Delaney Simon · May 23, 2023
In the dead of night on January 29, 2018, the Department of the Treasury published a list of senior political figures and oligarchs in Russia on a U.S. government website. With just 11 minutes to spare before a congressional deadline, American financial regulators had satisfied one of the requirements of Congress’ Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act. It was a slapdash effort; names on the list appeared to have been copy-and-pasted from the Forbes billionaires report and from public directories of Russian government staff. But the list nonetheless informed a Treasury sanctions package released three months later targeting prominent Russians for their linkages to Moscow’s “malign” activities.
While the Kremlin mocked the so-called Forbes list, firms had to take it seriously. When it became clear that the sanctions would affect major international companies owned by several of the Russians on the list, a cascade of unintended consequences followed that paralyzed global supply chains, roiled commodity markets, and threatened entire industries in the United States and Europe. Under serious pressure from the business community and the European Union, Washington was forced to change course, at the expense of its own credibility but not necessarily to the fortunes of the sanctions targets.
Become a Member
This misadventure offers a cautionary tale about how a flawed approach to the application of U.S. sanctions — in particular, the failure to do a full accounting of their potential collateral effects — can undermine U.S. policy goals and interests.
Washington Sneezes, the World Catches a Cold
In her important new book, Backfire: How Sanctions Reshape the World Against U.S. Interests, Agathe Demarais offers a host of such examples, including the case of Oleg Deripaska, one of the oligarchs that Treasury sanctioned in 2018. Deripaska, a Kremlin insider and billionaire, was sanctioned along with his holding company, EN+. Deripaska is mostly known in the United States for his alleged entanglements with former President Donald Trump’s campaign in 2016 and the subsequent scrutiny of his actions by U.S. investigators. But it was his far-flung business interests and close ties to the Kremlin that brought him and his businesses into focus for the U.S. Department of the Treasury.
As Demarais recounts, Russia-based Rusal, the largest maker of aluminum outside of China, fell under the umbrella of EN+, Deripaska’s holding company. Responsible for 10 percent of the world’s aluminum, Rusal’s operations spanned multiple countries, but the sanctions — which included secondary sanctions that penalized non-U.S. actors for engaging with the firm — forced companies worldwide to sever ties with Rusal. The London Metals Exchange declared it wouldn’t trade aluminum unless it could be guaranteed Rusal hadn’t produced it. Manufacturers scrambled to adjust, raising prices and grappling with supply disruptions. Rusal’s stock value plummeted, and banks ceased processing its payments. As the aluminum market reeled, prices surged by 30 percent, sparking panic buying and sending a ripple effect throughout the industry.
Demarais describes how Rusal’s European operations teetered on the brink, with the largest alumina refinery on the continent facing shutdown and electricity suppliers refusing to serve the company’s Swedish smelter. Other metals companies, shipping giants like Maersk and MSC, and even European car manufacturers felt the tremors, with 800,000 German jobs suddenly at stake. The unexpected side effects, notably on global metals markets and the myriad businesses that produce goods made from aluminum, implicated the jobs of tens of thousands of people in Russia and around the world, threatening their livelihoods. The United States’ European partners were furious: Washington had not consulted them before imposing the Rusal sanctions, despite the firm’s importance to the European economy.
As aluminum prices soared to record highs, consumers faced steeper prices while Chinese metal producers filled the void, profiting handsomely. Eventually, the United States issued a license that temporarily waived the sanctions on Rusal, and after lengthy negotiations Deripaska relinquished some of his holdings, allowing sanctions against Rusal to be lifted while penalties on Deripaska remained. The sanctioned Russian bank VTB acquired part of Rusal’s parent company, ultimately directing profits into Russian state coffers, perhaps to fund — as Demarais points out — the very activities that prompted the United States to impose sanctions on Rusal in the first place. Despite the tumult, the unintended beneficiaries of this high-stakes geopolitical drama likely ended up being the Kremlin and Vladimir Putin himself.
Sanctions on Russia Since the Ukraine War
As the world marked the anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine recently, another milestone came to pass: Washington’s massive sanctions package targeting Moscow had been in effect for a year. The economic front has not received as much attention as the battlefields, but in reality, the largely Western effort to address Russia’s illegal war in Ukraine has focused as much on banks and commodities as on the trenches. With sanctions becoming such a dominant feature of U.S. foreign policy, it is more pressing than ever to understand their effects.
That is what makes Backfire so important. In brisk and readable prose, Demarais — a former French Treasury official who served in Lebanon and Russia and current global forecasting director at the Economist Intelligence Unit — reviews the sharp upward trajectory of U.S. sanctions since September 2001. While sanctions began to emerge as a pressure tool toward the end of the Cold War, they really took off after the attacks on Sept. 11, with the mushrooming of measures designed to deny resources to al-Qaeda affiliates and other terrorist groups. U.S. sanctions have now exploded into a set of economic measures against more than 10,000 people and entities in more than 150 states. Washington maintains sanctions programs in more than 30 countries, with some affecting entire economies, such as in Iran, North Korea, and Syria. As sanctions have multiplied, so have concerns in Washington’s policymaking circles (and among scholars and other expert communities) that the United States is overusing them. But when confronted with a crisis, policymakers still reflexively reach for this tool, tending to see it as a relatively low-cost, low-risk way to signal U.S. engagement and deter undesirable conduct.
Demarais persuasively outlines the pitfalls of this approach in her book. Backed by a string of recent and deeply researched examples — such as the Rusal story recounted here —she points out the ways Washington’s sanctions sometimes jeopardize its own priorities, including those that the sanctions were meant to address. Her book gives readers a crash course in modern U.S. sanctions policy. It also serves as a warning to the United States that sanctions, implemented without rigorous analysis of and preparation for their consequences, can come at a significant cost.
Reforms in Washington, but Only to an Extent
The Rusal affair occurred during Donald Trump’s presidency. He made “maximum pressure” a cornerstone of his foreign policy and slapped sanctions on adversaries with little apparent thought to their potential harms. Demarais’ book was published in November 2022, less than a year into Joe Biden’s presidency, and so it does not capture the most recent efforts by the U.S. government to reform sanctions policy. President Biden came into office with a view to undoing some of the sanctions-related damage caused by his predecessor. As a start, in his first months in office, he removed Yemen’s Houthi rebels from the Foreign Terrorist Organization list, a listing that aid groups warned would spark a famine. In December 2022, his administration championed an effort in the United Nations Security Council to prevent sanctions from hindering humanitarian aid and released an unprecedented series of Treasury licenses that did the same.
When it came to ramping up sanctions on Russia in response to Putin’s all-out invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the Biden administration was cognizant of the potential for global ripple effects. It had observed the fallout from the Rusal case described above and others like it, and coalesced around the idea — long espoused by sanctions experts like Demarais — that unilateral sanctions are less likely to be effective and more likely to prompt the ire of allies. Senior officials had started to echo a refrain, rarely voiced publicly before, that U.S. sanctions had the potential to have unintended economic, political, and humanitarian impacts. And so Washington avoided sanctioning commodities that sustain livelihoods in the global south such as food and fertilizer, and those that played a major role in the global economy, including that of Europe (and, to a lesser extent, the United States), notably oil and gas. Washington issued sanctions in lockstep with European and other allies following months of joint planning.
This is not to say that the sanctions did not have collateral ramifications, however. Russia, through its invasion and actions in Ukraine, bears primary responsibility for the war’s consequences. Yet sanctions were widely seen as having played a role in a cascade of global shocks — notably spikes in food and fuel prices— that followed the invasion. Putin also instrumentalized the sanctions to serve his propaganda campaigns by blaming them for global food shortages. As Western sanctions expanded, going far beyond what most planners imagined to be conceivable in February 2022 (such as banning some Russian banks from the SWIFT international payment system), U.S. policymakers scrambled to control the outcomes of their sweeping economic measures. It took time for the Biden administration to put mechanisms in place to mitigate the harms that had become apparent and to confront Russia’s unhelpful propaganda. Even carefully considered sanctions can prompt unintended consequences.
It is too early to judge whether the economic means employed against Russia have been well matched to their desired ends. The United States had a strong rationale for sanctioning Russia as it did — namely, to clip Russia’s capacity to wage war and to make good on a threat made to deter the invasion in the first place. But while sanctions on Russia are biting, Putin shows no indication of slowing his war effort, and the Russian economy has proven strikingly resilient. Only a full accounting of sanctions’ effectiveness and costs can start to answer these questions, and that will likely have to wait at least until the war is over. Still, Washington shows no sign of pulling its finger from the sanctions trigger, and it remains — as a 2021 Treasury review of sanctions policy called it — “a tool of first resort.”
More Sanctions, More Evasion
A central argument of Backfire is that Washington’s ability to inflict pain through sanctions — particularly if imposed unilaterally, which current sanctions on Russia are not — is drawing to a close because America’s adversaries have learned to insulate themselves against such measures. Demarais has compared the phenomenon to antibiotic resistance: the more Washington uses sanctions, the more immune its targets become to their harms. She details examples of sanctions evasion that are remarkable in their scope. They include laundering sanctioned assets through the U.S. art market; the extensive use of front companies; reorienting exports from the West to China and other countries; expanded trade ties between previously unconnected sanctioned countries such as Venezuela and Iran; direct currency trades settled in currencies other than the U.S. dollar; and the expanded use of digital currencies. Collectively, she says, such innovations have given countries alternative mechanisms for transactions that are effectively “sanctions-proof.”
An associated effect, she warns (as others long have), will be the decline of the dollar as a reserve currency. She says that over time, this may diminish the United States’ place at the center of the global financial system. Other commentators dispute this point, noting that the dollar is still preeminent. But even if other countries have not come close to matching Washington’s financial dominance (China’s attempts to build a competing system to SWIFT or to promote the renminbi as an international currency have fallen short), the trend toward circumventing America’s coercive measures is on the upswing.
Despite these warnings, however, Demarais is not making a case against sanctions in her book. She recognizes their “many selling points,” noting cases where they have prompted behavior change and demonstrated Washington’s resolve. She acknowledges that sanctions have the benefit of not inflicting the same immediate human or political costs as military intervention. Rather, the overarching case she is making is that if the United States wants its sanctions to be effective, it has to better understand their undesired effects and how those impact America’s allies and enemies alike.
A New Era
The outlook for global sanctions policy is different today than when Demarais was writing her book. The Biden administration has shown more willingness than its predecessor to consider sanctions’ associated harms. As Demarais has written recently, Washington’s partners are more enthusiastic about joint sanctions campaigns than they were a few years ago. Europeans, who were once fed up with Washington’s sanctions approach, are now protagonists in the economic war against Russia in the context of the Ukraine invasion.
But Demarais’ compelling book is still relevant and will continue to be. As the United States and its allies ramp up their sanctions use, it is clear that sanctions are powerful measures that can bear consequences. They may be an appropriate tool in a range of circumstances, as they were in response to Russia’s flagrant violation of international norms in its invasion of Ukraine, but policymakers should use them carefully, keeping a close eye on their adverse effects and remaining nimble in addressing them. The Biden administration has supported some important reforms to this end, but considering the number of sanctions imposed in his presidency so far— including on Russia — sanctions are more ingrained than ever as a tool of U.S. statecraft. Against this backdrop, attention to their downsides has never been more important. The United States would be wise to heed the warnings in Demarais’ book so that its sanctions policies do not backfire.
Become a Member
Delaney Simon is a senior analyst with the U.S. program at the International Crisis Group. Before joining Crisis Group, Delaney worked for the United Nations in Afghanistan, Lebanon, and Yemen.
Image: United States Treasury
Book Reviews
warontherocks.com · by Delaney Simon · May 23, 2023
16. Did the Unipolar Moment Ever End?
At the link you can see how the foreign policy blob thinks about the debate statement below. You can view the results graphically and then read each member's explanation for their views.
One observation: the blob is not a monolith.
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/ask-the-experts/did-unipolar-moment-ever-end
Did the Unipolar Moment Ever End?
Foreign Affairs Asks the Experts
May 23, 2023
Foreign Affairs has recently published a number of articles on the global balance of power, the future of U.S. hegemony, and how great-power competition is playing out in the developing world. To complement these essays, we asked a broad pool of experts for their take. As with previous surveys, we approached dozens of authorities with expertise relevant to the question at hand, along with leading generalists in the field. Participants were asked to state whether they agreed or disagreed with a proposition and to rate their confidence level in their opinion. Their answers are below.
DEBATE STATEMENT
The global distribution of power today is closer to being unipolar than it is to being bipolar or multipolar.
17. The cyber gulag: How Russia tracks, censors and controls its citizens
Excerpts:
At the time, many experts dismissed these efforts as futile, and some still seem ineffective. Russia’s measures might amount to a picket fence compared to China’s Great Firewall, but the Kremlin online crackdown has gained momentum.
After Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, online censorship and prosecutions for social media posts and comments spiked so much that it broke all existing records.
According to Net Freedoms, a prominent internet rights group, more than 610,000 web pages were blocked or removed by authorities in 2022 -– the highest annual total in 15 years — and 779 people faced criminal charges over online comments and posts, also a record.
A major factor was a law, adopted a week after the invasion, that effectively criminalizes antiwar sentiment, said Net Freedoms head Damir Gainutdinov. It outlaws “spreading false information” about or “discrediting” the army, using it against those publicly opposing the war.
The cyber gulag: How Russia tracks, censors and controls its citizens
AP · by DASHA LITVINOVA · May 23, 2023
TALLINN, Estonia (AP) — When Yekaterina Maksimova can’t afford to be late, the journalist and activist avoids taking the Moscow subway, even though it’s probably the most efficient route.
That’s because she’s been detained five times in the past year, thanks to the system’s pervasive security cameras with facial recognition. She says police would tell her the cameras “reacted” to her — although they often seemed not to understand why, and would let her go after a few hours.
“It seems like I’m in some kind of a database,” says Maksimova, who was previously arrested twice: in 2019 after taking part in a demonstration in Moscow and in 2020 over her environmental activism.
For many Russians like her, it has become increasingly hard to evade the scrutiny of the authorities, with the government actively monitoring social media accounts and using surveillance cameras against activists.
Even an online platform once praised by users for easily navigating bureaucratic tasks is being used as a tool of control: Authorities plan to use it to serve military summonses, thus thwarting a popular tactic by draft evaders of avoiding being handed the military recruitment paperwork in person.
Rights advocates say that Russia under President Vladimir Putin has harnessed digital technology to track, censor and control the population, building what some call a “cyber gulag” — a dark reference to the labor camps that held political prisoners in Soviet times.
It’s new territory, even for a nation with a long history of spying on its citizens.
“The Kremlin has indeed become the beneficiary of digitalization and is using all opportunities for state propaganda, for surveilling people, for de-anonymizing internet users,” said Sarkis Darbinyan, head of legal practice at Roskomsvoboda, a Russian internet freedom group the Kremlin deems a “foreign agent.”
RISING ONLINE CENSORSHIP AND PROSECUTIONS
The Kremlin’s seeming indifference about digital monitoring appeared to change after 2011-12 mass protests were coordinated online, prompting authorities to tighten internet controls.
Some regulations allowed them to block websites; others mandated that cellphone operators and internet providers store call records and messages, sharing the information with security services if needed. Authorities pressured companies like Google, Apple and Facebook to store user data on Russian servers, to no avail, and announced plans to build a “sovereign internet” that, if needed, could be cut off from the rest of the world.
At the time, many experts dismissed these efforts as futile, and some still seem ineffective. Russia’s measures might amount to a picket fence compared to China’s Great Firewall, but the Kremlin online crackdown has gained momentum.
After Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, online censorship and prosecutions for social media posts and comments spiked so much that it broke all existing records.
According to Net Freedoms, a prominent internet rights group, more than 610,000 web pages were blocked or removed by authorities in 2022 -– the highest annual total in 15 years — and 779 people faced criminal charges over online comments and posts, also a record.
A major factor was a law, adopted a week after the invasion, that effectively criminalizes antiwar sentiment, said Net Freedoms head Damir Gainutdinov. It outlaws “spreading false information” about or “discrediting” the army, using it against those publicly opposing the war.
Human Rights Watch cited another 2022 law allowing authorities “to extrajudicially close mass media outlets and block online content for disseminating ‘false information’ about the conduct of Russian Armed Forces or other state bodies abroad or for disseminating calls for sanctions on Russia.”
SOCIAL MEDIA USERS ‘SHOULDN’T FEEL SAFE’
Harsher anti-extremism laws adopted in 2014 targeted social media users and online speech, leading to hundreds of criminal cases over posts, likes and shares. Most involved users of the popular Russian social media platform VKontakte, which reportedly cooperates with authorities.
As the crackdown widened, authorities also targeted Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Telegram. About a week after the invasion, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter were blocked in Russia, but users of the platforms were still prosecuted.
Marina Novikova, 65, was convicted this month in the Siberian city of Seversk of “spreading false information” about the army for antiwar Telegram posts, fining her the equivalent of over $12,400. A Moscow court last week sentenced opposition activist Mikhail Kriger to seven years in prison for Facebook comments in which he expressed a desire “to hang” Putin. Famous blogger Nika Belotserkovskaya, who lives in France, received a nine-year prison term in absentia for Instagram posts about the war that the authorities claimed spread “fakes” about the army.
“Users of any social media platform shouldn’t feel safe,” Gainutdinov said.
Rights advocates worry that online censorship is about to expand drastically via artificial intelligence systems to monitor social media and websites for content deemed illicit.
In February, the government’s media regulator Roskomnadzor said it was launching Oculus — an AI system that looks for banned content in online photos and videos, and can analyze more than 200,000 images a day, compared with about 200 a day by humans.
Two other AI systems in the works will search text materials.
In February, the newspaper Vedomosti quoted an unidentified Roskomnadzor official as lamenting the “unprecedented amounts and speed of spreading of fakes” about the war. The official also cited extremist remarks, calls for protests and “LGBT propaganda” to be among banned content the new systems will identify.
Activists say it’s hard to know if the new systems are operating and how effective they are. Darbinyan, of the internet freedom group, describes it as “horrible stuff,” leading to “more censorship,” amid a total lack of transparency as to how the systems would work and be regulated.
Authorities could also be working on a system of bots that collect information from social media pages, messenger apps and closed online communities, according to the Belarusian hacktivist group Cyberpartisans, which obtained documents of a subsidiary of Roskomnadzor.
Cyberpartisans coordinator Yuliana Shametavets told AP the state-created bots are expected to infiltrate Russian-language social media groups for surveillance and propaganda.
“Now it’s common to laugh at the Russians, to say that they have old weapons and don’t know how to fight, but the Kremlin is great at disinformation campaigns and there are high-class IT experts who create extremely effective and very dangerous products,” she said.
Government regulator Roskomnadzor did not respond to a request for comment.
EYES ON — AND UNDER — THE STREETS
In 2017-18, Moscow authorities rolled out a system of street cameras enabled by facial recognition technology.
During the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, authorities were able to trace and fine those leaving their homes in violation of lockdowns.
That same year, Russian media reported schools would get cameras, too. Vedomosti reported they will be linked to a facial recognition system dubbed “Orwell,” for the British writer of the dystopian novel “1984,” with his all-seeing character, “Big Brother.”
When protests over the imprisonment of opposition leader Alexei Navalny broke out in 2021, the system was used to track down and detain those attending demonstrations, sometimes weeks afterward. After Putin announced a partial mobilization for men to fight in Ukraine in September 2022, it apparently helped officials round up draft evaders.
A man who was stopped on the Moscow subway after failing to comply with a mobilization summons said police told him the facial recognition system alerted them to his presence, according to his wife, who spoke to AP on condition of anonymity because she feared retaliation.
In 2022, “Russian authorities expanded their control over people’s biometric data, including by collecting such data from banks, and using facial recognition technology to surveil and persecute activists,” Human Rights Watch reported this year.
Maksimova, the activist who repeatedly gets stopped on the subway, filed a lawsuit contesting the detentions, but lost. Authorities argued that because she had prior arrests, police had the right to detain her for a “cautionary conversation” — in which officers explain a citizen’s “moral and legal responsibilities.”
Maksimova says officials refused to explain why she was in their surveillance databases, calling it a state secret. She and her lawyer are filing an appeal of the court ruling.
There are 250,000 surveillance cameras in Moscow enabled by the software — at entrances to residential buildings, in public transportation and on the streets, Darbinyan said. Similar systems are in St. Petersburg and other large cities, like Novosibirsk and Kazan, he said.
He believed the authorities want to build “a web of cameras around the entire country. It sounds like a daunting task, but there are possibilities and funds there to do it.”
‘TOTAL DIGITAL SURVEILLANCE’
In November, Putin ordered the government to create an online register of those eligible for military service after efforts to mobilize 300,000 men to fight in Ukraine revealed that enlistment records were in serious disarray.
The register, promised to be ready by fall, will collect all kinds of data, “from outpatient clinics to courts to tax offices and election commissions,” political analyst Tatyana Stanovaya said in a recent commentary for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
That will let authorities serve draft summonses electronically via a government website used to apply for official documents, like passports or deeds. Once a summons appears online, recipients cannot leave Russia. Other restrictions -– like suspension of a driver’s license or a ban on buying and selling property -– are imposed if they don’t comply with the summons within 20 days, whether they saw it or not.
Stanovaya believes these restrictions could spread to other aspects of Russian life, with the government “building a state system of total digital surveillance, coercion and punishment.” For instance, a December law mandates that taxi companies share their databases with the successor agency of the Soviet KGB, giving it access to travelers’ dates, routes of trips and payment.
“The cyber gulag, which was actively talked about during the pandemic, is now taking its real shape,” Stanovaya wrote.
___
Associated Press writer Yuras Karmanau in Tallinn, Estonia, contributed.
AP · by DASHA LITVINOVA · May 23, 2023
18. FACT FOCUS: Fake image of Pentagon explosion briefly sends jitters through stock market
A wakeup call?
FACT FOCUS: Fake image of Pentagon explosion briefly sends jitters through stock market
AP · by PHILIP MARCELO · May 22, 2023
An image of black smoke billowing next to a bureaucratic-looking building spread across social media Monday morning, with the claim that it showed an explosion near the Pentagon.
The posts sent a brief shiver through the stock market and were quickly picked up by news outlets outside the U.S., before officials jumped in to clarify that no blast actually took place and the photo was a fake.
Experts say the viral image had telltale signs of an AI-generated forgery, and its popularity underscores the everyday chaos these now increasingly sophisticated and easy-to-access programs can inflict.
Here’s a closer look at the facts.
CLAIM: An image shows an explosion near the Pentagon.
THE FACTS: Police and fire officials in Arlington, Virginia, say the image is not real and there was no incident at the U.S. Department of Defense headquarters across the Potomac from the nation’s capital.
Despite this, the image and claim was spread by outlets including RT, a Russian government-backed media company formerly known as Russia Today. It was also widely shared in investment circles, including an account bearing Twitter’s signature blue verification check mark that falsely suggested it was associated with Bloomberg News.
“Reports of an explosion near the Pentagon in Washington DC,” the Russian state news agency wrote in a since-deleted tweet to its more than three million followers.
The timing of the fake image, which appeared to spread widely just after the U.S. stock market opened for trading at 9:30 a.m., was enough to send a ripple through the investment world.
The S&P 500 briefly dropped a modest 0.3% as social media accounts and investment websites popular with day traders repeated the false claims.
Other investments also moved in ways that typically occur when fear enters the market. Prices for U.S. Treasury bonds and gold, for example, briefly began to climb, suggesting investors were looking for someplace safer to park their money.
The image’s rapid spread prompted the Arlington County Fire Department to take to social media to knock down the rumors.
“@PFPAOfficial and the ACFD are aware of a social media report circulating online about an explosion near the Pentagon,” the agency wrote, referring to the acronym for the Pentagon Force Protection Agency that polices the Pentagon. “There is NO explosion or incident taking place at or near the Pentagon reservation, and there is no immediate danger or hazards to the public.”
Capt. Nate Hiner, a spokesperson for the fire department, confirmed the agency’s tweet was authentic but declined to comment further, deferring to the Pentagon police force, which didn’t respond to email and phone messages.
Misinformation experts say the fake image was likely created using generative artificial intelligence programs, which have allowed increasingly realistic, but oftentimes flawed, visuals to flood the internet recently.
Inconsistencies in the building, fence and surrounding area are imperfections typically found in AI-generated images, noted Hany Farid, a computer science professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who specializes in digital forensics, misinformation and image analysis.
“Specifically, the grass and concrete fade into each other, the fence is irregular, there is a strange black pole that is protruding out of the front of the sidewalk but is also part of the fence,” he wrote in an email. “The windows in the building are inconsistent with photos of the Pentagon that you can find online.”
Chirag Shah, co-director of the Center for Responsibility in AI Systems & Experiences at the University of Washington in Seattle, cautioned that spotting fakes won’t always be as obvious.
Society will need to lean more on “crowdsourcing and community vigilance to weed out bad information and arrive at the truth” as AI technology improves, he argued.
“Simply relying on detection tools or social media posts are not going to be enough,” Shah wrote in an email.
Before the explosion hoax, the biggest Beltway intrigue on Wall Street’s mind Monday morning was whether the U.S. government will avoid a disastrous default on its debt.
But as the market is becoming increasingly reactive to headline-grabbing news, misinformation can be especially damaging when it’s shared by outlets even vaguely deemed as credible, said Adam Kobeissi, editor-in-chief at The Kobeissi Letter, an industry publication.
“A lot of these moves are happening because of high frequency trading, algorithmic trading, which is basically taking headlines, synthesizing them and then breaking them down into a trade on a millisecond basis,” he explained by phone, noting that much of the market is now automated. “It’s basically like you’re pulling a trigger every time a headline comes out.”
__
Associated Press business reporters Stan Choe and Wyatte Grantham-Philips in New York contributed to this story.
___
This is part of AP’s effort to address widely shared misinformation, including work with outside companies and organizations to add factual context to misleading content that is circulating online. Learn more about fact-checking at AP.
AP · by PHILIP MARCELO · May 22, 2023
19. Death by Drones: Does the Pentagon Always Know Who it is Killing?
Just remember (as my PSYOP friends lament), it is easier to get permission to put a hellfire missile on the forehead of a terrorist than it is to get permission to put an idea between his ears. A kinetic mistake can be catastrophic. But an information mistake will be over in one or two 24 hour news cycles. But it is not either/or. We need both effective kinetic operations and effective influence operations.
AAR questions.
Excerpt:
As U.S. officials grapple with the fallout from the latest drone strike, Congress and senior administration officials should demand answers to the following questions...
Death by Drones: Does the Pentagon Always Know Who it is Killing?
justsecurity.org · by Brianna Rosen · May 22, 2023
May 22, 2023
In the latest example of problems with the U.S. drone and targeted killing program, the Pentagon is investigating whether it mistakenly killed a civilian in a recent strike in northwest Syria. U.S. officials are now walking back their previous assertion that the May 3 strike killed a senior al-Qaeda militant, following investigative reporting suggesting the target, Lotfi Hassan Misto, was a farmer with no ties to terrorism in an area hostile to any al-Qaeda presence.
This is not the first time U.S. drones or other airstrikes have missed the mark. It is the continuation of policies that have resulted in decades of civilian harm, as meticulously documented by a series of award-winning New York Times reports. The strike that killed ten civilians, including seven children, during the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021 is one prominent example, but there are countless other strikes that have claimed innocent lives that never make the headlines.
These incidents are tragic, but they are not merely “tragic mistakes.” Civilian harm resulting from U.S. strikes is the result of systemic problems that have plagued the program for decades, a continuous failure to learn from the past, and a growing military culture of impunity.
What is concerning about this latest incident is how the Department of Defense (DOD) did not seem to know much about who it killed with a drone in a highly important strike trumpeted by the Pentagon and despite a series of proposed reforms within the Department to address civilian harm and stricter policy guidance from the White House. U.S. military officials speaking on condition of anonymity to the Washington Post offered mixed assessments of the latest strike, with one official acknowledging the Pentagon was “no longer confident” it had killed a senior al-Qaeda member and another official stating that “though we believe the strike did not kill the original target, we believe the person to be al-Qaeda.”
The evidence for the belief that Misto was a member of al-Qaeda is classified, making it impossible to verify claims of what the DOD knew or thought it knew at the time. But al-Qaeda has not claimed any of its members were recently martyred, as is typical after such strikes. Counterterrorism experts also say it would be highly unusual for al-Qaeda to operate in the area where the strike occurred, which is controlled by rival group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham. Video footage from the civil defense “White Helmets” immediately following the strike also corroborates that the U.S. missile killed the 56-year-old farmer.
What is more, the U.S. military has a history of misidentifying targets due to confirmation bias and relying on outdated or unsubstantiated intelligence reporting. DOD previously has also misclassified civilians as combatants based on flimsy evidence, including a combination of factors such as gender, the presence of weapons, and physical proximity to fighting or known terrorist locations.
Congress, for its part, should ensure that there is an independent investigation into this incident and accountability for any wrongful harm. In the wake of the strike, Congresswoman Sara Jacobs (D-CA) urged the Pentagon to “conduct a full investigation into what happened, make potential plans for amends, and report to Congress.” Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) similarly called for DOD to find out the “truth of what happened, provide the compensation that Congress has repeatedly authorized, and allow independent investigations.”
As U.S. officials grapple with the fallout from the latest drone strike, Congress and senior administration officials should demand answers to the following questions:
- Who was the original target of the strike? On what basis was the target selected and how was it approved?
- Why do some U.S. officials reportedly believe that even though Misto was not the original target, he was nevertheless an al-Qaeda member?
- What evidence was there linking Misto to al-Qaeda pre-strike and post-strike? Does DOD assess that individuals are members of al-Qaeda based on their physical proximity to known terrorist locations, or other signatures associated with terrorist activity? What factors alone suffice to make such a determination both pre-strike and post-strike?
- What were the assessments of other agencies pre- and post-strike of the intended target and resulting casualty? At what level of confidence were any such determinations made?
- How have targeting procedures within DOD changed since the implementation of the Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Action Plan? Were such safeguards adequate in this case and, if not, why not?
- Why did it take DOD nearly a month to review its initial assertion that it had killed a senior member of al-Qaeda? What triggered this review?
- How is DOD investigating claims that Misto was a civilian? When will the post-strike review be completed and is DOD considering information from external sources, such as media and civil society organizations, in its review?
- Does DOD include the same methods of verification as the outside experts referenced in the Washington Post report?
- If the review concludes Misto was a civilian, what steps will DOD take in terms of reparations? Will reparations include a formal apology and condolence payments, and what is the timeline for such actions?
- What will DOD do differently next time? What lessons have been learned from this incident that will inform future operations? What lessons have been learned that might bring into question the accuracy of past U.S. airstrikes in which external reporting may not have been available?
Image: Military unmanned aerial vehicle at sunset (via GettyImages).
justsecurity.org · by Brianna Rosen · May 22, 2023
20. The 1880s Political Novel That Could Have Been Written Today
Excerpts:
In this way, the Prince comes off as a surprisingly contemporary character—the way he warps everything he encounters makes him conspicuously like the culture warriors who denounce “wokeism” but cannot define it. Not all who support the aristocracy are made fun of by the novel: An old woman named Madame Grandoni lives with the Princess and disagrees with her growing involvement with the revolution, saying throughout that there is a point at which she will no longer be able to stay with the Princess and implicitly sanction her behavior. By the end, Madame Grandoni has left; her clear-eyed understanding of the politics around her and the material role she plays is never treated with anything but dignity.
There is a lesson here too: Rather than degrading oneself like the Prince, skulking around the world looking for clues that your worst nightmares have come true, you should instead be like Madame Grandoni. When you find yourself in a situation that you dislike, or that you think you are inadvertently enabling, simply make your disapproval quietly clear, then leave.
Casamassima shows us how rhetoric makes politics ridiculous and toothless—how ideologies, when rigidly defined by the slogans and catchwords we think we’re supposed to believe in, lose all meaning. This is what makes Hyacinth’s fate by the end of the novel so tragic. Hyacinth got caught up in language, gave a stirring stump speech about his willingness to do more than speak, and was condemned to action he didn’t believe in because the language he had learned to mimic made unsubtle claims that he would fully understand only when it was too late. Too often people today fall into the same trap. They parrot rhetoric without understanding that their words should be based on their actions, not the other way around. In a world of yard signs and bluster, we would do well to learn from Hyacinth’s mistake.
The 1880s Political Novel That Could Have Been Written Today
The Princess Casamassima, published more than 100 years ago, carries a warning for America today.
By Charlie Ericson
A Mostly Forgotten Henry James Novel Is Startlingly Modern
The Atlantic · by Charlie Ericson · May 22, 2023
In correspondence with other writers over the years, Joseph Conrad often referred to Henry James as “The Master.” He would not be the only writer to do so. James was a writer’s writer, the kind who attracted the adulation of his peers. Conrad once described James’s writerly talent as a “magic spring” flowing “without languor or violence in its force, never running back upon itself, opening new visions at every turn of its course.”
James died more than a century ago, in 1916, but his reputation has come through the 20th century nearly unscathed. Between the taut psychology of The Portrait of a Lady, the dizzying world of What Maisie Knew, and the nuance of The Ambassadors, James has retained both his status as one of America’s greatest writers and his perennial place on college syllabi. But even James has had some of his stories lost to time. The Princess Casamassima is largely forgotten; it isn’t one of the books that scholars use to prove James’s genius. Yet it remains startlingly modern, and offers a lesson for our politically chaotic times.
The Princess Casamassima, first published in The Atlantic in 1885, is a strange novel that follows an oddly named bookbinder, Hyacinth Robinson, through encounters with both aristocratic and revolutionary circles in late-19th-century London. The highest drama in the book comes from characters turning up unexpectedly in one another’s parlors, speaking in dense, portentous turns of phrase. The same could be said of any of James’s novels: The action takes place mostly in social subtleties that have largely lost their meaning to 21st-century readers. In most Henry James novels, such as The Awkward Age and The Golden Bowl, the threat to the lives of the characters is some kind of domestic disturbance: adultery, elopement, lechery. In Casamassima, the threat looms over civic life rather than domestic life, and that makes its characters’ super-subtle phrases and actions even more difficult to parse. Yet there is real wisdom to be gleaned for the modern reader.
The Princess Casamassima
By Henry James
Casamassima is James’s only “political” novel, and the easiest criticism it faces is that it is not political enough. Americans have seen, especially in the past few years, how easily people can dismiss books and TV shows that fail to endorse or validate their own political worldviews. All too often, people read Ayn Rand or Tracy K. Smith and joke that the other is not worth reading. As polarization worsens, it also becomes more visible throughout culture and daily life to the point of absurdity: Consider, for example, the ubiquity of yard signs that begin with in this house, we believe followed by a string of rhetorically charged slogans. These signs are sometimes the weapons of lawn-ornament wars that reduce political discourse among those who disagree with each other to dueling Blue Lives Matter and Black Lives Matter flags. It’s hard to imagine that the politically disengaged work of Henry James would have much to offer this situation—but the novel is politically disengaged only if we limit our understanding of politics to rhetoric. We can learn something from James about our own politics: how to let go of our political identities in service of political actions.
Read: The dangerous rise of ‘front-yard politics’
The names and dates of hot-button political fights in James’s day may have been different, but the polarization is all too familiar. On one side of English politics in the 1880s, the Liberal Party claimed to protect the poor and disadvantaged, but was mistrusted by the people as made up of bureaucrats and performers who cared only about lining their own pockets. On the other, a Conservative Party preached national values tied to nostalgia for a mythologized past, and its members did everything in their power to protect the hyper-wealthy elite who kept them in office. Then a new party emerged. In 1881, the Social Democratic Federation was established. Its early leaders included the writer and visual artist William Morris, Eleanor Marx (daughter of Karl), and James Connolly, who would later be executed for his role as commander in chief of Ireland’s Easter Rising. This political backdrop offered a loose model for James in developing Hyacinth’s revolutionaries. It was a time of extraordinary political turmoil and unrest. Soon after Casamassima appeared in this magazine, police in London violently quashed a Socialist-led protest in an event that came to be known as Bloody Sunday—one of many instances of police violence to go by that name.
Casamassima is less a debate between two sides than a portrait of the tense political scene playing out in London at the time it was published—the novel is a portrait, too, of the dangers of thinking that either side can offer a realistic model for understanding an individual’s relationship to civic society. Hyacinth’s ingratiation with revolutionary circles starts out the way these things typically do: a vague politics supported by occasional attendance at barroom meetings where one performs much shouting before returning home. He is introduced to these meetings by Poupin, an older man from his workplace who seems to speak only in political slogans. It would go no further, except that he meets the Princess Casamassima, an aristocrat who wants nothing more than to devote herself to the Cause so long as there is a real Cause to be devoted to. So Hyacinth gets more involved with socialism in direct proportion to his growing involvement with the Princess, a contradiction that propels the story along. He encounters the beautiful world that wealth makes possible and at the same time pledges himself to someday commit violence for the Cause. The last third of the novel is given up to Hyacinth’s fluctuations of feeling as the possibility of that violence looms and the Princess becomes more and more invested in the Cause herself, giving up the ornate furnishings and artworks she previously surrounded herself with. Finally, Hyacinth is called on to commit an assassination, and the novel ends with the crisis of him deciding whether or not he can bring himself to do it.
James’s novels are concerned almost exclusively with the mind, but in Casamassima every character whose politics are based on ideas is mocked. By the end of the novel Poupin is described in hideous terms: His “ardent eyes, fixed, unwinking, always expressive of the greatness of the occasion, whatever the occasion was, had never seemed to him to protrude so far from his head.” Poupin is no villain in the novel, and in fact the novel has no discernibly malicious character. He does, though, keep repeating the slogans he seems to feel he is supposed to say, rather than taking political action like Hyacinth does, and grows grotesque and insectlike along the way. The upper-middle-class liberals whose politics remain within the bounds of their lawn ornaments might find something to relate to in Poupin. In both cases, there is little expectation that they will act on their political slogans, because they are clearly disinterested in following through on their incessant talk. Opposite Poupin we see Paul Muniment, Hyacinth’s political idol. Soon after he is introduced in the novel, Paul says of Hyacinth, “Look at the way he has picked up all the silly bits of catchwords!” The only people Paul actually respects in the novel are those who visit his bedridden sister, regardless of their stated politics. Paul Muniment has an attitude toward political life that we could use more of today: a politically involved person who doesn’t care about what you say so much as what you do.
Read: The political novel gets very, very specific
The novel has as many defenders of the aristocracy as it does of the revolution. Hyacinth’s foster mother, Pinnie, worships the idea of the aristocracy in much the same way that Silicon Valley fanboys reflexively defend Elon Musk: with an almost endearing lack of information, rehearsed disdain for their detractors, and a mysterious, unimpeachable regard for status. The Prince, the estranged husband of the novel’s title character, is treated even more comically than Pinnie for his contempt toward anyone without a title.
In this way, the Prince comes off as a surprisingly contemporary character—the way he warps everything he encounters makes him conspicuously like the culture warriors who denounce “wokeism” but cannot define it. Not all who support the aristocracy are made fun of by the novel: An old woman named Madame Grandoni lives with the Princess and disagrees with her growing involvement with the revolution, saying throughout that there is a point at which she will no longer be able to stay with the Princess and implicitly sanction her behavior. By the end, Madame Grandoni has left; her clear-eyed understanding of the politics around her and the material role she plays is never treated with anything but dignity.
There is a lesson here too: Rather than degrading oneself like the Prince, skulking around the world looking for clues that your worst nightmares have come true, you should instead be like Madame Grandoni. When you find yourself in a situation that you dislike, or that you think you are inadvertently enabling, simply make your disapproval quietly clear, then leave.
Casamassima shows us how rhetoric makes politics ridiculous and toothless—how ideologies, when rigidly defined by the slogans and catchwords we think we’re supposed to believe in, lose all meaning. This is what makes Hyacinth’s fate by the end of the novel so tragic. Hyacinth got caught up in language, gave a stirring stump speech about his willingness to do more than speak, and was condemned to action he didn’t believe in because the language he had learned to mimic made unsubtle claims that he would fully understand only when it was too late. Too often people today fall into the same trap. They parrot rhetoric without understanding that their words should be based on their actions, not the other way around. In a world of yard signs and bluster, we would do well to learn from Hyacinth’s mistake.
When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.
The Atlantic · by Charlie Ericson · May 22, 2023
21. Rand survey finds level of extremism among veterans same as public
As they say, the military (veterans) is a microcosm of society.
Rand survey finds level of extremism among veterans same as public
militarytimes.com · by Nikki Wentling · May 23, 2023
A new survey of about 1,000 veterans found no evidence that the population harbors more extreme beliefs than the rest of the American public — though its authors acknowledged that the results are limited by how many people were willing to be honest about their extremist stances. And it did show that about a third of veterans surveyed believe in the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory – that people of color are being allowed to enter the U.S. to upend the white majority.
Still, the findings released Tuesday by Rand Corporation are being seized on by some Republican lawmakers as a reason to end Pentagon funding to fight military extremism in active duty ranks.
“We’ve had this narrative the last couple of years that the military has this growing and dire problem of white supremacy and extremism within it,” Rep. Mike Waltz, R-Fla., told the Military Times. “I’ve repeatedly said that we have very little data to back that up,” he said. He said he hoped this report would end Congress’ discussion on the need for more focus on extremism in the ranks.
The survey by the nonpartisan think tank asked whether respondents supported the following: white supremacy, black nationalism, the neo-Nazi Proud Boys, or Antifa, a far-left, anti-fascist group. While just 1% of participants said they supported white supremacists, Antifa saw the most support, at 5.5%. Rand compared the results to a Morning Consult survey of 2,000 registered voters that found 7% support white supremacy, while 10% support Antifa.
“We did not find evidence of veterans having a higher prevalence rate for extremism,” said Todd Helmus, a senior behavioral scientist at RAND and the lead author of a report detailing the survey results. “In fact… they at least appear to have lower risk, particularly support for groups like Antifa and Proud Boys and the KKK, as well as QAnon views.” He made no comment on the “Great Replacement” theory results.
Veterans’ beliefs in the far-right conspiracy theory QAnon were also less than the general population, at 13.5%. About 17% of the overall American public agree with QAnon theories, according to the 2022 “American Values” survey of 2,500 people by the nonprofit Public Religion Research Institute.
Veterans’ support for political violence and belief in the Great Replacement are roughly on par with the rest of the country, with 19% supporting political violence and 29% believing in the Great Replacement, a conspiracy theory about lenient immigration policies being designed to replace the power and culture of white people in the United States. RAND included the Great Replacement theory as a separate question from the one asked about veterans’ beliefs in white supremacy. To gauge the latter, they asked veterans if they supported the KKK, Patriot Front or Ayran Brotherhood.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of Calif., with other Democratic leaders, speaks during a news conference about a resolution condemning "great replacement theory" on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, June 8, 2022. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)
The study didn’t try to determine how many veterans have joined extremist groups or the potentially outsized influence they could bring to those organizations because of their combat training, logistical knowledge and leadership capabilities — topics that Helmus and the report’s other authors believe are cause for further research.
Helmus and his co-authors, Ryan Brown and Rajeev Ramchand, were prompted to conduct the survey after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, when some supporters of former President Donald Trump attempted to stop Congress from certifying the 2020 election results. About one in six people charged in the riot had connections to the military, according to data from the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, known as START.
The attack drove the Defense Department to hold an extremism “stand-down,” a military-wide training on the potential signs and dangers of extremist ideology.
The topic of extremism in the military has since been a source of contentious political debate. Republicans have decried the stand-down as an effort to politicize the military and tarnish the public image of the armed forces. Democratic lawmakers — and senior military officials — say teaching troops to identify and eschew extremism is necessary to prevent the few troops with radical views from poisoning the wider force with their hateful ideology.
“If we had to hypothesize at the start, it may have been that veterans are at increased risk, just because of all the chatter among the elite class about that risk,” Helmus said. “But we didn’t find that to be the case… Veterans are not as scary as some may have made them out to be. And they have more resilience than maybe some have given them credit for.”
The GOP’s opposition to investigating extremism in the armed forces effectively shut down those efforts already, CNN reported Friday. Senior military officials reportedly folded under political pressure from Republicans and didn’t follow through on recommendations to counter extremism made in 2021 by the DOD’s Countering Extremism Working Group. The Pentagon didn’t immediately respond to request for comment about the CNN report.
Like Waltz, Rep. Mike Bost, R-Ill., the chairman of the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, said the report showed the need for Congress to shift its focus away from the issue of extremism in the armed forces.
“For years, my friends on the other side of the aisle alleged that the veteran community is full of extremists,” Bost said in a statement. “Today’s Rand report proves what Republicans have been saying all along. There is no evidence that veterans are more extreme than non-veterans.”
Rep. Mike Waltz, R-Fla., gestures during a news conference with Republicans on Wednesday, Jan. 4, 2023, on Capitol Hill in Washington. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
But Rep. Andy Kim, D-N.J. and ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee’s personnel panel, said he doesn’t think the survey findings eliminate the need for the military to focus on the problem of extremism in the ranks.
“It’s encouraging that we’re not seeing any sort of higher levels of extremism in our military compared to general society. But it doesn’t mean that we don’t stay vigilant,” Kim said, especially as the training doesn’t take that much time out of troops’ schedules.
Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., agreed, arguing that any threat to military security should be addressed.
“These findings make it clear that we need more research into the root causes that have pushed a small group of folks toward violence or extremism,” Tester said in a statement.
Rep. Mark Takano, D-Calif., the ranking Democrat on the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, said the report highlighted the need for lawmakers to do more to discredit extremist ideas among veterans and the general population. The level of support for the Great Replacement theory among the American public is particularly concerning, he said.
“I would like to work with my colleagues in the majority to find out why a small group of veterans have been drawn to violent extremism and then work with VA and DOD to figure out a concrete plan to address growing extremism among the military and VA communities,” Takano said in a statement.
Brown, another behavioral scientist at RAND who co-wrote the report, agreed that attention to the issue is still warranted, but conversations about the prevalence of extremism should be focused on the entire U.S. population, rather than exclusively on veterans and service members, he said.
“The risk is everywhere. We don’t need to unduly focus on veterans, and we certainly don’t need to stigmatize or write these narratives of expectation in our minds that are actually harmful,” Brown said.
RAND’s report could unwittingly give lawmakers reason to ignore extremism in the military, warned Allison Jaslow, CEO of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. Jaslow also argued the results were unreliable because the survey relied on people to identify themselves as extremist thinkers.
“I’m skeptical of this research because I don’t know that it can be expected of individuals to self-report that they agree with extremist views or are a member of an extremist organization,” Jaslow said. “It’s much more realistic to ask people if they see problems with other peoples’ views, versus themselves.” IAVA conducted its own survey last year with the help of Syracuse University. The university asked about 5,000 veterans whether they had witnessed incidents of extremism in the military, and 32% said they had.
Leaders of We The Veterans, a pro-democracy, non-partisan nonprofit, said they hoped the report would drive the political parties together to work on the issue, particularly because the survey asked about both far-right and far-left organizations. The group works to bolster resiliency against disinformation among military communities and advocates for more civic education and media literacy in the American school system.
“Depending on what kind of media silo you’re in, you could think that the military has gone way too far to the left or think of the population as way too far to the right,” said Ellen Gustafson, a co-founder of the group. “It’s wonderful to see the validation in this report that most military veterans are not so far down the rabbit hole of either side of the sort of extremist organizations that are very much trying to target them.”
This story was produced in partnership with Military Veterans in Journalism.
About Leo Shane III
Leo covers Congress, Veterans Affairs and the White House for Military Times. He has covered Washington, D.C. since 2004, focusing on military personnel and veterans policies. His work has earned numerous honors, including a 2009 Polk award, a 2010 National Headliner Award, the IAVA Leadership in Journalism award and the VFW News Media award.
22.
De Oppresso Liber,
David Maxwell
Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy
Senior Fellow, Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation
Editor, Small Wars Journal
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
Phone: 202-573-8647
email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com
| 
