Quotes of the Day:

"Nothing is more securely lodged than the ignorance of experts."

- Friedrich August von Hayek

“It will begin with its President taking a simple, firm resolution. The resolution will be: To forego the diversions of politics and to concentrate on the job of ending the Korean war–until that job is honorably done. That job requires a personal trip to Korea. I shall make that trip. Only in that way could I learn how best to serve the American people in the cause of peace. I shall go to Korea.”

- Republican presidential nominee Dwight D. Eisenhower laying out his plan for ending the Korean War, October 25, 1952.

"Every deep thinker is more afraid of being understood than of being misunderstood."

- Friedrich Nietzsche

1.  Army Special Operations Could Be Cut 10% as Military Looks to Conventional Warfare

2. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, May 25, 2023

3. Winning without fighting? Why China is exploring 'cognitive warfare.'

4. Navy Report Details How Problems Mounted at Brutal SEAL Course

5. Praise rolls in for Biden’s Joint Chiefs pick, but confirmation may hit a snag

6. New strategic threat emerging as weapons seek to target brain function, inflict neurological damage

7. Biden, McCarthy looking to close US debt ceiling deal for two years

8. China's military has become an untouchable nationalist symbol. Artists and comedians are finding out the hard way

9. Is the Biden Administration Going Soft on China?

10. Pressure Mounts for U.S. Response After China’s Micron Ban

11. U.S. warns China could hack infrastructure, including pipelines, rail systems

12. China’s “Blue Dragon” Strategy in the Indo-Pacific Makes America and India Restless

13. Who Won the Cold War? Part I

14. Expert Backgrounder: Title I of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act vs. Section 702

15. The end of dollar supremacy

16. US Army receives mixed signals from industry on ‘radio as a service’

17. The Art of Supply Chain Interdiction: To Win Without Fighting

18. A Nuclear Collision Course in South Asia

19. Sad Reality: The Ukraine War Is Now Going Russia's Way

20. Army reorganizing program offices for network and cyber ops, UAVs may be next: Officials

21. What a debt default would mean for national security

22. The Kremlin Has a Security Problem

1. Army Special Operations Could Be Cut 10% as Military Looks to Conventional Warfare

I fear there will be calls to do more with less.  

Some think we can accept risk in preparing for and conducting irregular warfare because you can prepare for war and conduct the "lesser" irregular war but you cannot prepare for irregular war and be effective in conventional war. However, it should be understood that LSCO does not take place in irregular warfare but IW does take place within LSCO as well as on the margins and adjacent to the combat theater and in other theaters around the world. The fact is we have to prepare for all three forms of warfare: ncuelar, conventional (LSCO) and irregular warfare but we should keep in mind that irregular warfare is the dominant form of warfare while nuclear deterrence is a no fail mission and we must maintain the highest level of proficiency in conventional war in order to deter state on state war and peer conflict while conducting irregular warfare around the world. This is the challenge. But salami slice cuts are going to harm the military across the board and in some capabilities worse than others.

Cutting SOF too much may create the condition stated by General Milley in the Joint Concept for Competing (outlining how forces must compete with adversaries on a daily basis below the threshold of war) - we may lose without fighting.

Army Special Operations Could Be Cut 10% as Military Looks to Conventional Warfare

military.com · by Steve Beynon,Rebecca Kheel · May 24, 2023

The Army is mulling cuts to its special operations programs in the coming years, potentially trimming the forces amid a general U.S. military shift in attention to more conventional capabilities and wars.

A planning process known as Total Army Analysis, which the service is using to plan its budget requests to Congress in fiscal years 2025 to 2029, projects a cut of about 10% to Special Forces, a congressional aide confirmed to Military.com.

Army special operations has become synonymous with unconventional warfare. Its Green Berets and other commando units were the cornerstone of the Global War on Terror in the years after 9/11. But as the service pivots its focus toward China, those unconventional units could see cuts in favor of building up the rank and file.

The size of U.S. special operations across all branches doubled after 2001, as the counterinsurgency battlefield called for swift nighttime raids and training of militias in the Middle East and across Africa. The Pentagon is now investing in other capabilities, such as long-range missile strikes and cyberwarfare.

"There will be some changes which [special operations forces] will be part of. With SOF, it has grown continuously while the rest of the Army has come down," Mark Cancian, a senior adviser for the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, told Military.com.

"SOF is going to have to reorient itself and could take significant cuts along with a number of other Army communities,” he said.

The potential cuts, which were first reported by Defense One, would come from enablers, including in logistics and intelligence, but could also include changes to the structure of some Special Forces units that would represent an overall reduction in those forces, the aide said.

The plan, which is still awaiting approval from Army Secretary Christine Wormuth, is being considered as part of a sweeping look at force structure as the Army faces a slump in recruiting and possible reductions in its overall end strength, the aide said. It's unclear whether the cuts would come entirely in 2025 or be spread out from 2025 to 2029.

"The Army has not yet made decisions on its future force structure. Army leaders are looking at how best to ensure our Army is manned, organized and equipped to deter enemies and win future fights," Lt. Col. Ruth Castro, a service spokesperson, told Military.com in a statement. "The Army has shifted from focusing on counterterrorism operations to large-scale combat operations, and our force structure will need to shift as well."

Congress has not been formally briefed on the plan, but "mid- and senior-level officials" in both the Army and special operations community have spoken to congressional offices about the proposal, the aide said.

The potential for cuts to Army special operations has alarmed lawmakers, particularly Republicans, who have argued at recent hearings that it would be a mistake to think those forces will be less necessary in a conflict with China.

"As threats increase, ongoing discussions in the department about cutting SOF budgets and force structure is out of step with the threats and SOF's growing requirements," Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, the ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee's emerging threats subpanel, said at a hearing last week on the role of special operations in the era of great power competition.

"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," Ernst added. "So, we really do have to push back against that."

At that same hearing, Sen. Ted Budd, R-N.C., asked the expert witnesses what a 10% cut to Army special operations would mean for its ability to provide forces to respond to counterterrorism, war or conflict with another global power, or any other crisis.

"I think they'll be crippling," retired Lt. Gen. Ken Tovo, former commanding general of Army Special Operations Command from 2015 to 2018, told Budd during the congressional testimony. "We're a force that is very much driven by our intelligence community. And if the cuts are taken in there, and that's one of the places I believe the service wants to take the cuts, that will be devastating."

Tovo also said he's heard the cuts could be as high as 20%, though the congressional aide told Military.com they have not heard it would be that high.

-- Steve Beynon can be reached at Steve.Beynon@military.com. Follow him on Twitter @StevenBeynon

-- Rebecca Kheel can be reached at rebecca.kheel@military.com. Follow her on Twitter @reporterkheel.

military.com · by Steve Beynon,Rebecca Kheel · May 24, 2023

2. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, May 25, 2023

Maps/graphics/citations: https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-may-25-2023

Key Takeaways

• Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin announced on May 25 that the Wagner Group began handing over its positions in Bakhmut to the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) and claimed Wagner will entirely withdraw from the city on June 1. It remains unclear if Wagner will be able to withdraw the entirety of its contingent by June 1 and if Russian MoD troops will execute a successful relief in place.
• Russia and Belarus signed agreements formally advancing preparations to deploy Russian tactical nuclear weapons to Belarus as part of a longstanding effort to cement Russia’s de facto military control over Belarus, though Russia has not yet deployed nuclear weapons to Belarus and their possible deployment is highly unlikely to presage any Russian escalation.
• Russian President Vladimir Putin met with the leaders of the Eurasian Economic Union member states and several other post-Soviet heads of state at the Supreme Eurasian Economic Council in Moscow on May 25, likely to expand sanctions evasion opportunities.
• Belgorod Oblast Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov announced that Russian officials have created seven territorial defense battalions in Belgorod Oblast as of May 24, likely in order to posture his engagement in the defense of Russian border areas following the May 22 all-Russian pro-Ukrainian raid into Belgorod Oblast.
• Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin held a meeting with representatives of Russian oblasts bordering Ukraine to discuss fortifying border areas on May 24.
• Wagner and Russian forces have notably engaged in previous efforts to fortify border areas, and the recent Belgorod Oblast raid exposed major shortcomings in these efforts.
• Russian political strategist Konstantin Dolgov claimed on May 25 that he was fired as a result of his May 23 interview with Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin.
• Russia conducted another massive Shahed-131/136 drone strike across Ukraine on the night of May 24 to 25.
• Russian President Vladimir Putin continued attempts to portray Russia as an effective international mediator by mediating negotiations between Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev.
• Russian forces continued limited ground attacks northeast of Kupyansk and south of Kreminna.
• Russian forces continued limited ground attacks around Bakhmut as Wagner Group forces reportedly began their withdrawal from frontline areas the city.
• Russian forces continued ground attacks along the Avdiivka-Donetsk City line.
• Russian sources claimed that Russian forces shot down six drones over Crimea.
• Russian forces are reportedly continuing to recruit personnel with various diseases.
• Russian occupation officials continue to announce partnerships with various local Russian officials to improve the standard of living in occupied territories.

RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, MAY 25, 2023

May 25, 2023 - Press ISW

Download the PDF

Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, May 25, 2023

Karolina Hird, Riley Bailey, Nicole Wolkov, Layne Philipson, and Mason Clark

May 25, 2023, 5pm 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 12pm ET on May 25. ISW will cover subsequent reports in the May 26 Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment.

Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin announced on May 25 that the Wagner Group began handing over its positions in Bakhmut to the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) and claimed Wagner will entirely withdraw from the city on June 1. Footage posted on May 25 shows Prigozhin speaking with Wagner fighters in Bakhmut and announcing that Wagner began handing over their positions to the Russian MoD and withdrawing to rear areas of the city.[1] Prigozhin reminded some of the fighters that Wagner will withdraw from the city entirely and reconstitute, rest, and train following June 1.[2] Prigozhin also claimed that Wagner plans to leave behind ammunition and provisions for regular Russian troops if necessary and sardonically showed two Wagner fighters who he claimed he will leave behind for the Russian MoD.[3] ISW has previously reported that Prigozhin announced that Wagner would hand over its positions to the MoD starting on May 25 and withdraw from Bakhmut by June 1, but it remains unclear if Wagner will be able to withdraw the entirety of its contingent by June 1 and if Russian MoD troops will execute a successful relief in place.[4]

Russia and Belarus signed agreements formally advancing preparations to deploy Russian tactical nuclear weapons to Belarus as part of a longstanding effort to cement Russia’s de facto military control over Belarus, though Russia has not yet deployed nuclear weapons to Belarus and their possible deployment is highly unlikely to presage any Russian escalation. Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Belarusian Defense Minister Viktor Khrenin signed documents on the deployment of Russian non-strategic (tactical) nuclear weapons to Belarusian territory during a meeting of defense ministers of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) in Minsk, Belarus on May 25.[5] Shoigu emphasized that Russia would retain control of the tactical nuclear weapons in the event of their deployment to Belarus and claimed that Belarusian aircraft are now capable of carrying nuclear weapons.[6] Russian President Vladimir Putin previously announced on March 25 that Russia would deploy tactical nuclear weapons to Belarus by July 1, likely to renew tired information operations about the potential for nuclear escalation over the war in Ukraine.[7] Russia has long fielded nuclear weapons that are able to strike any target that tactical nuclear weapons launched from Belarus could also hit, and ISW continues to assess that Putin is extraordinarily unlikely to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine or elsewhere.[8] Shoigu also announced that Russian forces will deploy additional military contingents to Belarus to develop military infrastructure, expand joint combat training, and conduct reconnaissance activities near the borders of the Union State.[9] The deployment of tactical nuclear weapons to Belarus requires both significant military infrastructure and Russian command and control over elements of the Belarusian Armed Forces. The Kremlin likely intends to use these requirements to further subordinate the Belarusian security sphere under Russia.

Russian President Vladimir Putin met with the leaders of the Eurasian Economic Union member states and several other post-Soviet heads of state at the Supreme Eurasian Economic Council in Moscow on May 25, likely to expand sanctions evasion opportunities. Armenian President Nikol Pashinyan, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, and Kyrgyz President Sadyr Japarov attended the meeting alongside leaders of non-Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) member states, including Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoyev, and Tajik President Emomali Rahmon.[10] Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) Executive Secretary Sergei Lebedev and Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) Secretary General Zhang Min also attended the meeting.[11] Putin, Pashinyan, and Tokayev all called on further development of the EAEU’s relationship with third-party countries, including the negotiation of free trade agreements with the United Arab Emirates, India, Egypt, Indonesia, Israel, and Iran.[12] Tokayev highlighted efforts to create new international transport routes to China, India, Pakistan, Iran, the Middle East, East Asia, and Southeast Asia.[13] Tokayev also offered to help Russia launch the 2873km Chelyabinsk-Bolshak-Iran high speed freight railway, a project similar to the recent agreement between Russia and Iran to build a segment of the North-South corridor railway project between Rasht and Astara in order to strengthen Russo-Iranian military-economic cooperation.[14] Putin also called for the EAEU to create technological alliances with third-party countries, likely aimed at securing critical components that Russia is struggling to produce or acquire itself.[15]

The Kremlin is likely attempting to convince EAEU member states and other post-Soviet countries to aid in the Kremlin’s ongoing sanctions evasion schemes with China, Iran, and others by facilitating the logistics of those schemes.[16] Putin called for an increase in the number of new joint ventures under the common trademark ”made in the EAEU,” a measure likely aimed at rebranding Russian products as being EAEU products to avoid Western sanctions on exports.[17] Lukashenko and Tokayev both specifically called for the creation of a full-fledged Economic Union with a functioning common market, and Lukashenko claimed that EAEU representatives are discussing the creation of a common market for gas, oil, and petroleum products.[18] Belarus and Kazakhstan are likely both heavily involved in helping Russia evade sanctions, and the Kremlin is likely seeking to expand and formalize those relationships with the wider EAEU.[19] ISW previously assessed that the Kremlin appears to be leveraging its dominance in the CSTO to court member states to procure dual-use technologies that Russia cannot directly purchase due to Western sanctions, and it appears that the Kremlin is attempting to similarly leverage its role in the EAEU.[20]

Belgorod Oblast Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov announced that Russian officials have created seven territorial defense battalions in Belgorod Oblast as of May 24, likely in order to posture his personal engagement in the defense of Russian border areas following the May 22 all-Russian pro-Ukrainian raid into Belgorod Oblast.[21] Gladkov stated that the seven battalions comprise 3,000 people in total, noting that they are already combat-ready units.[22] Gladkov previously announced the creation of several territorial defense battalions in December 2022, and has likely re-upped discussion of them in response to increased anxiety in border areas following the May 22 raid.[23] A prominent Russian milblogger claimed on May 24 that these battalions have a strong presence but are severely hindered by an inadequate weapons supply.[24] The milblogger claimed that United Russia Secretary General Andrey Turchak had urged President Putin to address the legal issues associated with providing weapons to the battalions a month ago.[25] These battalions, if left unfunded and unequipped, are very unlikely to have a substantial positive effect on the security of Russian border areas, however. The publicization of these formations is also likely meant to support ongoing Russian information operations that aim to generate support for a protracted war by portraying Ukraine as existentially threatening Russia.

Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin held a meeting with representatives of Russian oblasts bordering Ukraine to discuss fortifying border areas on May 24. Prigozhin proposed the creation of additional trenches, dugouts, and fire support along the Russia-Ukraine border, arguing that these structures can provide significant protection against possible military threats.[26] Prigozhin also emphasized the need to strengthen the presence of Russian forces along the border, expand the armament of border guards, and retrain them from using machine guns to grenade launchers.[27] Prigozhin stated that the May 22 raid of Belgorod Oblast by all-Russian pro-Ukrainian forces exposes how Russia lacks the rapid reaction forces needed to protect its borders against military threats.[28] Prigozhin stated that a general mobilization of the Russian population is inevitable, emphasizing the fact that Russian leadership can no longer snap its fingers to fix manpower shortcomings.[29] Prigozhin stated that a general mobilization should begin now in order to provide the people with the necessary training, a process that typically takes at least a minimum of four to six months.[30]

Wagner and Russian forces have notably engaged in previous efforts to fortify border areas, and the recent Belgorod Oblast raid exposed major shortcomings in these efforts. Belgorod Oblast Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov reported on March 9 that Russian authorities spent 10 billion rubles (about $132 million) to construct the “Zasechnaya Line” of fortifications along Belgorod Oblast’s border with Ukraine.[31] Prigozhin announced the construction of a set of fortifications called the “Wagner Line” throughout Luhansk, Donetsk, and Belgorod oblasts in October 2022, and directly criticized the Russian bureaucracy for not supporting the construction of the line.[32] New calls to fortify Russian regions along the Russia-Ukraine border will likely have little substantial effect, with Russian and Wagner forces misallocating manpower that would be better suited supporting active offensive operations (or defenses in occupied Ukraine itself) by manning these fortifications. Existing fortifications and defensive preparations did little to thwart the limited May 22 raid into Belgorod. Prigozhin is likely taking advantage of information space anxieties surrounding this reality following the raid to build out his own domestic influence.

Russian political strategist Konstantin Dolgov claimed on May 25 that he was fired as a result of his May 23 interview with Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin. Dolgov published a post to his Telegram channel alleging that he was fired from his position with Russian propaganda platform Telega Online “because of an interview with Prigozhin” and refuted claims that he had previous plans to leave.[33] Prigozhin used his interview with Dolgov to highlight the massive scale of losses suffered by the Wagner Group during the Battle of Bakhmut, mount scathing critiques against Defense Minister Shoigu and Chief of the Russian General Staff Army General Valery Gerasimov, attack the families of Russian elites, and vaguely threaten violence against the broader Russian military establishment.[34] Dolgov complained that he is being personally punished for Prigozhin’s replies because Russian authorities cannot do anything about Prigozhin himself and suggested that Russian President Vladimir Putin would disagree with his firing.[35] Dolgov’s firing may be part of a larger informational campaign pushed by Russian authorities that is aimed at quietly disenfranchising Prigozhin in an attempt to counterbalance Prigozhin’s ever-growing platform, which continues to deprive Russian military officials of informational oxygen.

Russia conducted another massive Shahed-131/136 drone strike across Ukraine on the night of May 24 to 25. Ukrainian military sources reported that Russian forces launched 36 Shahed-131/136 drones at Ukraine from the northern and southern directions and that Ukraine shot down all 36 of the drones.[36] Russian milbloggers claimed that some of the drones reached their intended targets through rear areas of Ukraine, including Kyiv Oblast.[37] Ukraine’s Southern Operational Command noted on May 25 that Ukraine has destroyed 357 Shahed-type drones since Russia began using them in 2022.[38] The White House reported on May 15 that Russia has purchased over 400 drones (primarily Shaheds) from Iran since August 2022.[39] The suggestion that Ukraine has shot down 357 Shahed drones since August 2022 is likely inflated—Ukrainian officials may sometimes count drone crashes due to user error or technical malfunction as official shoot downs, so the actual number is likely to be somewhat lower.

Russian President Vladimir Putin continued attempts to portray Russia as an effective international mediator by mediating negotiations between Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev. Kremlin newswire RIA Novosti reported on May 25 that Pashinyan stated that Armenia and Azerbaijan have agreed on a mutual recognition of territorial integrity.[40] Aliyev noted that Armenia and Azerbaijan could reach a peace agreement now that Armenia recognizes Nagorno-Karabakh as part of Azerbaijan. Kremlin newswire TASS reported that Pashinyan qualified that statement on May 22 and emphasized that Armenia would recognize Nagorno-Karabakh as a part of Azerbaijan on the condition that Azerbaijan ensures the security of Nagorno-Karabakh’s Armenian residents.[41] Russian media reported that Putin noted the importance of the agreement and facilitated bilateral talks with Pashinyan and Aliyev before holding a trilateral meeting.[42] European Council President Charles Michel has also held talks to normalize Armenian-Azerbaijani relations, and Putin is likely seeking to act as a diplomatic counter-balance to the European involvement in Eurasian affairs.[43]

Key Takeaways

• Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin announced on May 25 that the Wagner Group began handing over its positions in Bakhmut to the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) and claimed Wagner will entirely withdraw from the city on June 1. It remains unclear if Wagner will be able to withdraw the entirety of its contingent by June 1 and if Russian MoD troops will execute a successful relief in place.
• Russia and Belarus signed agreements formally advancing preparations to deploy Russian tactical nuclear weapons to Belarus as part of a longstanding effort to cement Russia’s de facto military control over Belarus, though Russia has not yet deployed nuclear weapons to Belarus and their possible deployment is highly unlikely to presage any Russian escalation.
• Russian President Vladimir Putin met with the leaders of the Eurasian Economic Union member states and several other post-Soviet heads of state at the Supreme Eurasian Economic Council in Moscow on May 25, likely to expand sanctions evasion opportunities.
• Belgorod Oblast Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov announced that Russian officials have created seven territorial defense battalions in Belgorod Oblast as of May 24, likely in order to posture his engagement in the defense of Russian border areas following the May 22 all-Russian pro-Ukrainian raid into Belgorod Oblast.
• Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin held a meeting with representatives of Russian oblasts bordering Ukraine to discuss fortifying border areas on May 24.
• Wagner and Russian forces have notably engaged in previous efforts to fortify border areas, and the recent Belgorod Oblast raid exposed major shortcomings in these efforts.
• Russian political strategist Konstantin Dolgov claimed on May 25 that he was fired as a result of his May 23 interview with Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin.
• Russia conducted another massive Shahed-131/136 drone strike across Ukraine on the night of May 24 to 25.
• Russian President Vladimir Putin continued attempts to portray Russia as an effective international mediator by mediating negotiations between Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev.
• Russian forces continued limited ground attacks northeast of Kupyansk and south of Kreminna.
• Russian forces continued limited ground attacks around Bakhmut as Wagner Group forces reportedly began their withdrawal from frontline areas the city.
• Russian forces continued ground attacks along the Avdiivka-Donetsk City line.
• Russian sources claimed that Russian forces shot down six drones over Crimea.
• Russian forces are reportedly continuing to recruit personnel with various diseases.
• Russian occupation officials continue to announce partnerships with various local Russian officials to improve the standard of living 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 northeast of Kupyansk and south of Kreminna on May 25. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces conducted unsuccessful offensive operations near Masyutivka, Kharkiv Oblast (13km northeast of Kupyansk) and Bilohorivka, Luhansk Oblast (12km south of Kreminna).[44] Geolocated footage published on May 24 shows Ukrainian forces recapturing positions on the eastern outskirts of Spirne (25km south of Kreminna) on an unspecified date.[45] A Russian milblogger claimed that positional battles continued near Bilohorivka and Spirne and that Russian forces did not conduct offensive operations in the Kreminna area on May 24.[46]

Russian Subordinate Main Effort #2 – Donetsk Oblast (Russian Objective: Capture the entirety of Donetsk Oblast, the claimed territory of Russia’s proxies in Donbas)

Click here to read ISW’s new retrospective analysis on the Battle for Bakhmut.

Russian forces continued limited ground attacks around Bakhmut as Wagner Group forces reportedly began their withdrawal from frontline areas the city on May 25. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian troops conducted unsuccessful offensive operations in the direction of Bakhmut and Ivanivske (3km southwest of Bakhmut).[47] Footage posted on May 25 shows Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin speaking with Wagner fighters in Bakhmut and discussing how they have begun to withdraw to the rear of Bakhmut and will entirely withdraw from the city on June 1.[48] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces have shifted their focus to the T0504 Chasiv Yar-Bakhmut and O0506 Khromove-Bakhmut highways and remarked that heavy fighting continues on the flanks of Bakhmut.[49] The milblogger claimed that Russian forces are now trying to capture Ivanivske and Khromove (3km due west of Bakhmut).[50] Several Russian sources indicated that forces of the Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) are increasingly arriving in Bakhmut and supplanting Wagner fighters within the city.[51]

Russian forces continued ground attacks along the Avdiivka-Donetsk City line on May 25. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian troops conducted unsuccessful offensive operations north of Donetsk City near Avdiivka and Novokalynove; on the northwestern outskirts of Donetsk City near Krasnohorivka; and on the southwestern outskirts of Donetsk City near Marinka.[52] Geolocated footage posted on May 22 shows that Russian forces have made a marginal advance towards Polihrafichna Street in western Marinka.[53] Additional geolocated footage posted on May 23 shows that Ukrainian troops may hold positions south of Avdiivka near Opytne.[54] Russian milbloggers claimed that positional battles continued in the Avdiivka area near Novobakhmutivka and Novokalynove.[55]

Russian forces did not conduct any confirmed or claimed ground attacks in western Donetsk Oblast on May 25.[56]

Russian Supporting Effort – Southern Axis (Russian objective: Maintain frontline positions and secure rear areas against Ukrainian strikes)

Russian sources claim that Ukrainian forces struck a Russian Su-25 attack aircraft over Zaporizhia Oblast on May 25. A Russian milblogger published footage purportedly showing the aftermath of a Ukrainian anti-aircraft missile defenses striking a Russian Su-25 in an unspecified location in Zaporizhia Oblast.[57] Other milbloggers amplified reports of smoke near Melitopol and claimed that Ukrainian forces downed the Su-25.[58]

Russian forces continued to target Ukrainian positions in southern Ukraine with FAB-500 aerial bombs on May 25. Ukraine’s Southern Operational Command reported that Russian forces conducted two KAB (a FAB-500 variant) strikes near Beryslav in Kherson Oblast.[59] Milbloggers published footage purportedly showing Russian aerial bomb strikes near Beryslav on May 24 and 25.[60]

Russian sources claimed that Russian forces shot down six drones over Crimea on May 25. Crimean occupation administration head Sergei Aksyonov and Sevastopol occupation governor Mikhail Razvozhaev claimed that Russian air defenses and elements of the Black Sea Fleet shot down six drones over Sevastopol and other areas of Crimea on the night of May 24 to 25.[61] A Russian milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces launched seven drones, which Russian forces downed near Dzhankoi, Sterehushche, Maslove, and Zavetne.[62]

Russian Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts (Russian objective: Expand combat power without conducting general mobilization)

Russian forces are reportedly continuing to recruit personnel with various diseases as part of an ongoing crypto-mobilization campaign. BBC’s Russian service reported on May 5 that the Russian MoD refused to expand the list of diseases that would exempt an individual from mobilization.[63] Russian independent news outlet Verstka reported that Russian forces recruit personnel who are HIV positive, have tuberculosis, and hepatitis.[64] Verstka reported that a minimum of hundreds of Russian military personnel, including contract soldiers, mobilized personnel, and volunteers, have HIV. ISW has previously reported on Russian forces and the Wagner Group recruiting personnel with various diseases.[65]

The Russian defense industrial base (DIB) continues to face production challenges due to personnel shortages. Russian First Deputy Minister of Industry and Trade Vasily Osmakov reportedly stated that the main challenge facing Russian industry is a lack of personnel, not sanctions.[66] Director for Special Assignments of Concern at Uralvagonzavod (Russia’s sole tank factory) Kirill Fedorov reportedly claimed that one of Uralvagonzavod’s manufacturers ChTZ-Uraltrak increased the number of its employees by 30 percent in order to increase production for the war, however.[67] ISW has previously reported on Russian defense firms struggling with personnel and specialist shortages.[68]

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 officials continue to announce partnerships with various local Russian officials to improve the standard of living in occupied territories. Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) head Denis Pushilin stated on May 25 that he met with Kemerovo Oblast Governor Sergey Tsivilev to discuss restoring roads, schools, hospitals, and other civilian infrastructure in occupied Horlivka, to which Kemerovo Oblast is a patron.[69] Tsivilev announced that Kemerovo Oblast has organized a “summer vacation” for 500 children of occupied Donetsk Oblast.[70] Kherson Oblast occupation head Vladimir Saldo stated on May 25 that a group of Russian federal officials visited occupied Kherson Oblast for a two-day working trip to discuss opportunities to improve socio-economic conditions in the region, including developing schools and regulating the price and supply of medicine.[71] Crimean occupation head Sergey Aksyonov thanked Russian President Putin on May 25 for authorizing the provision of 6.7 rubles (about $83.7 million) for road repair.[72]

Russian occupation authorities continue efforts to consolidate economic control of occupied territories. Kherson Oblast occupation head Vladimir Saldo stated on May 24 that his administration has officially introduced a decree aimed at regulating retail prices during the ongoing period of martial law.[73] Saldo stated that the occupied Kherson Oblast Department of Retail and Trade created a list of goods that are regulated against maximum prices, to which individual entrepreneurs, occupation authorities, and legal entities must adhere. Saldo stated that those who violate the order will first receive a warning and, for additional offenses, face fines ranging from 20,000 rubles (about $250) to 100,000 (about $1,250).[74]

Russian occupation authorities continue to advertise the successful provision of housing certificates and lump-sum social support payments to residents of occupied territories. Kherson Oblast occupation Ministry of Labor and Social Policy claimed on May 25 that every applicant who applied for housing certificates and one-time payments between January 2023 and June 2023 will receive housing certificates and a one-time, lump-sum payment.[75]

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.

See topline text.

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.

3. Winning without fighting? Why China is exploring 'cognitive warfare.'

Excerpts:

Just how important AI has become for China’s national security and military ambitions was highlighted by President Xi Jinping during a rare Communist Party congress last October, where he emphasized Beijing’s commitment to the development of AI and other cutting-edge technologies. Not only does China plan to become the world’s leading AI power by 2030, Beijing has also turned to a military-civil fusion strategy to achieve this.

Both the U.S. and Chinese militaries are working toward integrating AI into three common areas: information processing, unmanned weapons and decision-making. However, Beijing is taking the technology one step further by exploring its use in cognitive warfare, which some Chinese military experts say will likely become the next most important battlefield after the physical and information space.

...

Indeed, Beijing appears to have already resorted to cognitive operations, Takagi said.

“These activities are particularly aggressive and coercive in Taiwan and Hong Kong, which the Chinese government considers its territory,” he said, noting that attempts to use digital means to influence elections were also seen in Taiwan’s 2020 presidential election.

...

Regardless of whether China’s “intelligent warfare” succeeds or not, it is important to pay attention to the cognitive domain in warfare, Takagi said.

“While the idea of directly influencing the human mind is not new, it may become increasingly feasible thanks to the advances in AI technology.”

Winning without fighting? Why China is exploring 'cognitive warfare.'

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2023/05/26/asia-pacific/china-pla-ai-cognitive-warfare/?utm_source=pianoDNU&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=72&tpcc=dnu&pnespid=6uePldUFv.bW4fC1.ga1r_RMvwoI.nR7gBF2TxEsuFWViMCiFHhLe1CD0cX1MmG3jYBPHTc

• BY GABRIEL DOMINGUEZ
• STAFF WRITER
• SHARE

May 26, 2023

With the U.S. and its allies rapidly bolstering military capabilities around Taiwan, a successful Chinese invasion, let alone an occupation, of the self-ruled island is becoming an increasingly difficult proposition.

But with the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) increasingly focused on “intelligent warfare” — a reference to artificial intelligence-enabled military systems and operational concepts — experts warn that Beijing could eventually have a new card up its sleeve: “cognitive warfare.”

The term refers to operations based on techniques and technologies such as AI aimed at influencing the minds of one’s adversaries and shaping their decisions, thereby creating a strategically favorable environment or subduing them without a fight.

“The PLA has not stated how it intends to use AI to control human cognition,” said Koichiro Takagi, an expert in military information technology and fellow at the Washington-based Hudson Institute think tank.

“But there is an active debate in China about cognitive warfare and how its development would have great appeal to Chinese policymakers, particularly in helping bring about victory in Taiwan without using conventional weapons,” he said.

Just how important AI has become for China’s national security and military ambitions was highlighted by President Xi Jinping during a rare Communist Party congress last October, where he emphasized Beijing’s commitment to the development of AI and other cutting-edge technologies. Not only does China plan to become the world’s leading AI power by 2030, Beijing has also turned to a military-civil fusion strategy to achieve this.

Both the U.S. and Chinese militaries are working toward integrating AI into three common areas: information processing, unmanned weapons and decision-making. However, Beijing is taking the technology one step further by exploring its use in cognitive warfare, which some Chinese military experts say will likely become the next most important battlefield after the physical and information space.

A journalist documents a screen displaying a digital sign-language system run by an artificial intelligence system, during a media tour to the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence in Beijing in February last year. | REUTERS

According to an article published last August in the PLA Daily newspaper, cognitive warfare has become “an important tool in the game of great powers” as all parties strive to achieve political goals in a “relatively controlled manner.”

The article goes on to say that it is therefore not only “urgent” but also of “practical significance” for the PLA to gain insight into the characteristics and development of cognitive operations in order to “win future wars.”

This means the PLA is actively looking at cognitive operations as a new warfare domain, alongside land, maritime, air, cyber and spatial.

“This puts AI to a very different use than most American and allied discussions have envisioned,” Takagi said, referring to how China could try and influence the thinking of decision-makers, military commanders and the general public in rival countries.

For instance, Beijing could use social media and other means to spread disinformation, including via deep fakes, and manipulate public opinion in Taiwan. It could also try to discredit U.S. efforts to support Taiwan, Takagi added.

For this to happen, China would not only need to develop the necessary cyber, psychological and social engineering capabilities but also amass a great deal of detailed personal information.

This is precisely what Washington has long accused Beijing of doing.

Takagi, who has studied AI and data mining, says China has already collected a massive amount of data on government officials and ordinary U.S. citizens, ensuring a foundation for influencing people’s perceptions.

One way of doing this has been through cyberattacks.

In 2015, the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, the agency that manages the government’s civilian workforce, discovered that some of its personnel files had been hacked, including millions of forms containing personal information gathered in background checks for people seeking government security clearances, along with records of millions of people’s fingerprints. While no definitive evidence on the origin of the perpetrators was found, the consensus is that the hack was the work of attackers working for the Chinese government.

This was no isolated incident. Five years later, the U.S. Department of Justice announced charges against what it described as four Chinese “military-backed hackers” in connection with a 2017 cyberattack against Equifax, a consumer credit reporting agency. The intrusion led to the largest known theft of personally identifiable information ever carried out by state-sponsored actors.

Takagi fears that such data could be “weaponized in the future.”

Indeed, Beijing appears to have already resorted to cognitive operations, Takagi said.

“These activities are particularly aggressive and coercive in Taiwan and Hong Kong, which the Chinese government considers its territory,” he said, noting that attempts to use digital means to influence elections were also seen in Taiwan’s 2020 presidential election.

China’s People’s Liberation Army is increasingly focused on “intelligent warfare” — a reference to artificial intelligence-enabled military systems and operational concepts — that experts say could eventually help Beijing attain dominance over a new military front: cognitive warfare. | GETTY IMAGES

Meanwhile, the Chinese military seems to also be focusing on using AI to directly influence the state of mind of its own troops, with the PLA Daily also reporting last August that the force is working on wearable technology and a “psychological support system” to better prepare its own soldiers for real combat situations.

Soldiers in a growing number of units are being given smart sensor bracelets that can “continuously record the facial information of officers and soldiers, judge their psychological state in real time through data feedback, and archive them,” the paper reported.

The device is part of a system designed to examine and address a variety of wartime psychological problems officers and soldiers could face in combat.

The PLA regards the mental state of its soldiers as a key element in winning a conflict. “War is not only a material contest, but also a spiritual contest,” the PLA Daily said in a separate article in December.

“People are always the decisive factor in the outcome of a war, and the effective functioning of people depends on the support of a good psychological situation and stable psychological quality,” according to the article.

Nevertheless, the jury is still out on whether these new tools and technologies will ultimately be as effective as PLA experts hope.

Takagi says some of the analyses on the PLA’s use of AI and autonomous systems suggest Chinese theorists have overlooked the inherent vulnerabilities of these technologies — such as algorithmic bias due to poor quality data — and placed too much emphasis on their capabilities.

“The feasibility remains unknown and may have been overestimated out of political necessity,” he said. This may be the result of pressure exerted on the PLA by China’s leaders to come up with new ideas to unify the Chinese mainland with Taiwan, which Beijing regards as a breakaway province.

Nevertheless, Washington doesn’t want to take any chances, which is why it has imposed restrictions on the sale of advanced chips for AI and supercomputing to China

“Given that the focus of China’s military buildup is artificial intelligence, these restrictions will be highly effective, as it will be extremely difficult for China to replicate the high-end semiconductors developed in both the U.S and its partner countries in the short term,” Takagi said.

In the long term, however, China could develop its own technology and supply chains, he added.

Regardless of whether China’s “intelligent warfare” succeeds or not, it is important to pay attention to the cognitive domain in warfare, Takagi said.

“While the idea of directly influencing the human mind is not new, it may become increasingly feasible thanks to the advances in AI technology.”

4. Navy Report Details How Problems Mounted at Brutal SEAL Course

All "qualification courses" across the services run this risk. Unfortunately some instructors feel they have to be "keepers of the Trident" (SEAL) of "keeper of the tab" (e.g., Ranger or Special Forces or Sapper).

Although perhaps counterintuitive (especially to those who have never experienced these courses), I fear sometimes these very complex courses are so well run and so well organized, that we sometimes overlook (or are blinded to the actions of) these "keepers."  

It seems too simplistic to say but these problems require vigilant leadership and without it, as these courses seem to run on a kind of automatic pilot, these problems will return.

The other unfortunate cultural problem is that these qualification courses (and those who become qualified) wear the high attrition rates as a badge of honor. (see our ballad - one hundred men will test today but only three win... - which of course has always been a myth as much more than three graduate). The sad irony is that the courses are so difficult that they do not need any added stress from the "keepers." The other cultural problem is that the mindset among some instructors is to keep the attrition rate high and graduation rate low rather than the other extreme of trying to graduate as many as possible. This becomes a "standards argument "- high attrition means high standards or the standards being maintained while high graduation rates or any increase in graduation rates mean lower standards. And it is the failure/graduate rate that is used to evaluate how well the standards are maintained. So the "keepers" focus on weeding people out rather than having the mindset of providing the best training to get all those who have the aptitude and desire to become qualified.

This is a tough problem that is not limited to the SEALs or even the military - e.g., SWAT teams and any other high stress and[physically demanding qualification course.

But I predict there will be significant improvement (and I am sure there already has been). I would just caution those who see a rise in graduation rates not to jump to the conclusion that the standards are being lowered. Some of the things that "keepers" do have nothing to do with standards, only attempts to weed people out.

Excerpts:

Instructors, who often had little experience or training for the role, began to view their jobs not as teachers building new SEALs, but as enforcers “hunting the back of the pack” to “weed out” the weak, the report said. A gradual elevation of harsh tactics that the report called “intensity creep” allowed instructors to push the demands of the course “to the far end of the acceptable spectrum,” leaving students exhausted, sick and injured.

The course had long employed civilian veterans of the SEAL teams to be mentors, as a way to temper the young instructors. But under the new leadership, these experienced veterans were marginalized. Soon, fewer than 10 percent of students in some classes were making it through the course.

Navy Report Details How Problems Mounted at Brutal SEAL Course

The New York Times · by Dave Philipps · May 25, 2023

Overzealous instructors, unchecked drug use, and inadequate leadership and medical oversight turned a tough selection course into a dangerous ordeal, investigators found.

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Navy SEAL candidates at the Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL course in Coronado, Calif., in a photo commissioned by the Defense Department.Credit...Abe McNatt/Naval Special Warfare Command

By

May 25, 2023, 4:46 p.m. ET

The notoriously grueling Navy SEAL selection course grew so tough in recent years that to attempt it became dangerous, even deadly. With little oversight, instructors pushed their classes to exhaustion. Students began dropping out in large numbers, or turning to illegal drugs to try to keep up.

Unprepared medical personnel often failed to step in when needed. And when the graduation rates plummeted, the commander in charge at the time blamed students, saying that the current generation was too soft.

Those are the findings of a lengthy, highly critical Navy report released on Thursday, detailing how “a near perfect storm” of problems at the Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL course, known as BUD/S, injured large numbers of students, sent some to the hospital and left one dead.

“The investigation revealed a degree of complacency and insufficient attentiveness to a wide range of important inputs meant to keep the students safe,” the report concludes.

The Navy ordered a review of the course in September, days after The New York Times reported that instructors kept students in frigid water for long periods, denied them sleep, hit and kicked them, and refused to allow many injured students to receive medical care unless they first quit the course, which is held on the beach at Naval Base Coronado near San Diego. Students said that medics regularly did not intervene, and sometimes participated in the abuse.

The problems came to a head with the February 2022 death of Seaman Kyle Mullen, a SEAL candidate who had been suffering from pneumonia and other ailments for days during the course’s most grueling section, known as Hell Week, but received no meaningful intervention from instructors or the course medical staff.

When Seaman Mullen took a turn for the worse and was struggling to breath, the medical officer on duty twice advised other students not to call 911, warning them that calling for emergency help could interfere with training, the report found.

Seaman Kyle Mullen joined the Navy after being captain of the Yale football team. His death while trying to qualify for the Navy SEALs prompted an investigation of the selection course.Credit...

Based on the findings in the report, the Navy has made a number of changes in the course, and has reassigned eight sailors and officers for failing to perform their duties, including the commodore of the Navy Special Warfare training center, Capt. Brian Drechsler, and the training command’s chief medical officer, Dr. Erik Ramey. A Navy spokesman said a number of Navy personnel had been referred to Navy legal authorities for possible punishment.

Reached by phone, Regina Mullen, Seaman Mullen’s mother, said she was pleased that the Navy was admitting to shortfalls in the medical system, “however, I am upset that there is still no accountability to date.”

In a statement, the commander of all of Naval Special Warfare including the SEALs, Rear Adm. Keith Davids, said that the SEALs would work to enact the report’s recommendations for making the training safe, adding, “We will honor Seaman Mullen’s memory by ensuring that the legacy of our fallen teammate guides us towards the best training program possible for our future Navy SEALs.”

The Navy SEALs have tried for decades to strike a balance, making the selection course challenging enough to select only elite SEALs, but not so difficult that it leaves good candidates broken. SEAL training is seen by militaries around the world as a gold standard for special forces, so the design of the course has influence far beyond the small community of Navy SEALs.

Historically, an average of about three out of 10 sailors who try the course graduate to complete it. But the graduation rate has varied widely over the years, based in part on the whims of instructors, and the course has at times resembled institutionalized hazing. In all, about 11 students have died, and untold others have been seriously injured.

After a new leadership team took over the course in 2021, graduation rates dropped steeply. When the commander of Navy Special Warfare at the time, Rear Adm. Hugh W. Howard, was warned about the drop, he told subordinates that it was fine if no one graduated and that it was more important that the course remain tough. According to the report, the admiral added, “Zero is an okay number; hold the standard.”

Instructors, who often had little experience or training for the role, began to view their jobs not as teachers building new SEALs, but as enforcers “hunting the back of the pack” to “weed out” the weak, the report said. A gradual elevation of harsh tactics that the report called “intensity creep” allowed instructors to push the demands of the course “to the far end of the acceptable spectrum,” leaving students exhausted, sick and injured.

The course had long employed civilian veterans of the SEAL teams to be mentors, as a way to temper the young instructors. But under the new leadership, these experienced veterans were marginalized. Soon, fewer than 10 percent of students in some classes were making it through the course.

The course’s medical staff was ill-prepared to respond to the wave of injuries created by the harsh new dynamic, the report said, and “repeated exposure to these conditions caused both instructors and medical personnel to underreact to their seriousness.”

On top of that, the report said, the medical staff was “poorly organized, poorly integrated and poorly led, and put candidates at significant risk.”

Frequent plunges in the frigid Pacific Ocean are one of the most punishing aspects of training in the SEAL selection course. Credit...Abe McNatt/Naval Special Warfare Command

In the case of Seaman Mullen, medics who saw him struggling to breathe during training failed to communicate what they saw to others who assessed him later. Medical officers in charge left the ailing sailor with very young SEAL candidates who had no medical training.

The commander in charge of the course at the time, Capt. Bradley Geary, was warned by civilian staff members and SEAL veterans about the potentially dangerous rise in the number of students dropping out of the course. The report said that Captain Geary “believed the primary reason for attrition issue was the current generation had less mental toughness,” and that he did not take action to address many of the problems.

“Allowing continued execution of the curriculum in this manner while accompanied by historic, rapid and significant changes to attrition demonstrated insufficient oversight” by Captain Geary, the report said.

When Seaman Mullen died, Navy personnel found performance-enhancing drugs, including testosterone and human growth hormone, in his car. An investigation then revealed wider drug use among SEAL candidates, and several students were expelled from the course.

The report reveals that performance-enhancing drugs have been a recurring problem for more than 10 years at the course, but the Navy has never set up a testing system to detect the drugs, and it lacks effective testing even now.

“Without a rigorous testing program producing timely results,” the report warns, the Navy “will be unable to effectively deter use.”

In the year since Seaman Mullen’s death, new leaders have made a number of changes at the course, including increased oversight of instructors, better communication among the medical staff and closer medical monitoring of students who finish Hell Week. Graduation rates have risen back to around the 30-percent level that the SEALs see as normal.

The report makes no mention of the scores of qualified candidates who may have been unfairly driven from the course by abusive instructors and poor medical oversight. Many such candidates serve the remainder of their enlistments in menial, low-level Navy jobs, scraping rust and sweeping decks.

Asked about the issue, a Navy spokesman said there were no current plans to make amends to sailors who were forced out of the course.

Dave Philipps is a national correspondent covering the military and has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize twice, most recently in 2022. His latest book is “Alpha, Eddie Gallagher and the War for the Soul of the Navy SEALs.”

The New York Times · by Dave Philipps · May 25, 2023

5. Praise rolls in for Biden’s Joint Chiefs pick, but confirmation may hit a snag

The snag is really insulting to the US military. The senator is doing damage to our military and national security. 

Praise rolls in for Biden’s Joint Chiefs pick, but confirmation may hit a snag

BY ELLEN MITCHELL - 05/25/23 9:31 PM ET

The Hill · · May 26, 2023

Praise rolled in on Thursday for President Biden’s next intended Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman pick, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., but the four-star general may still face a somewhat complicated confirmation process later this year.

Biden earlier in the day announced Brown as the nominee in the White House Rose Garden, calling him an “unflappable and highly effective leader.”

“He knows what it means to be in the thick of battle and how to keep your cool when things get hard,” Biden said.

What followed were several high-profile endorsements from the likes of Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin whom Brown served under while Austin was head of U.S. Central Command and Brown was commander of Air Forces Central – as well as several top ranking lawmakers and industry officials.

Austin called Brown an “outstanding joint warfighter and a thoughtful, strategic leader” who has also been “a model of strategic clarity and a powerful force for progress.”

“Gen. Brown is an inspiring and effective leader and a man of deep integrity and compassion. Throughout his career, he has insisted on doing right by his teammates and their families,” Austin added.

House Armed Services Committee ranking member Adam Smith (D-Wash.), praised the nominee as “imminently qualified” and “well-suited” to serve as the nation’s highest ranking military officer.

Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Jack Reed (D-R.I.), meanwhile, in a statement called Brown a “trailblazer” and “a remarkable leader and an exceptional choice” given his “experience, ethos, talent, and skill this job demands.”

And Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), the vice chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee and ranking member of the Appropriations Defense subcommittee, said she has “valued General Brown’s extensive experience, focus, and thoughtfulness, all qualities he would bring to the role of Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,” and looks forward to the Senate “swiftly considering his nomination.”

Defense industry leaders also offered their support, with Eric Fanning, the president and CEO of major defense lobbying organization the Aerospace Industries Association, calling Brown “an excellent choice” for Joint Chiefs chairman that will bring a “wealth of experience, particularly in the Indo-Pacific region, and has the right temperament and strategic approach to help lead our military as we face some of the most complex challenges of our lives.”

If confirmed, Brown would replace the current chair Army Gen. Mark Milley, who on Thursday gave his own ringing endorsement of the Air Force leader, describing him as “absolutely superb.” Milley’s term expires at the start of October.

If approved by the Senate, Brown, 60, would be only the second Black man to become Joint Chiefs chairman after Colin Powell.

But even with all the praise lavished upon Biden’s pick, Brown’s confirmation process may prove tricky.

More than 200 senior military appointments are currently being held up in the Senate due to Sen. Tommy Tuberville’s (R-Ala.) block on the confirmations. Tuberville objects to the Pentagon’s policy on abortion that allocates travel funds and support for troops and their dependents who are based in states that do not permit abortions but seek to terminate pregnancies elsewhere due to rape, incest or danger to the life and health of the mother.

When reached for comment, Tuberville’s office said he “has a great deal of respect for General Brown and looks forward to voting on his nomination.”

Asked further whether he foresees his current holdout to be resolved by the time the Senate must vote on Brown’s nomination, Tuberville’s office did not reply.

Brown also is likely to face pointed questions from Republican Senators at a time when the GOP has decried “woke” policies within the Pentagon.

Indignation exists among some Republican lawmakers over Defense Department efforts to find and remove extremist ideology within the ranks, an objective begun under the Biden administration that the GOP sees as only serving to politicize the military.

Administration officials and most Democratic lawmakers, however, say programs and training to recognize hateful rhetoric and ideology among military personnel or potential recruits are necessary to keep out those who would taint the ranks.

In June 2020, Brown waded headfirst into the issue when, just a week from being confirmed by the Senate to serve as Air Force chief of staff, released a video to the service addressing the Minneapolis police officers’ murder of George Floyd.

Brown spoke on camera of his experiences of “living in two worlds” as a Black man and as a military officer, noting that his own experiences “didn’t always sing of liberty and equality.”

McCarthy faces GOP skepticism on debt talks, defense spending Newt Gingrich ‘moderately optimistic’ on where debt limit talks sit: ‘But it’s not done yet’

Arnold Punaro, a retired two-star Marine Corps general and a former Senate Armed Services Committee staff director, predicted that Brown will not face any major snags based on his past comments, though he will get questioned on those topics.

“What tends to happen in areas like this is the senator with the issue/question makes a rather lengthy statement and then the nominee has time for a much shorter answer,” Punaro told The Hill. But the topic will be one of many, including military recruiting and retention, sexual harassment in the ranks, suicide, munitions stocks, defense budget levels in Ukraine, Russia, North Korea, Iran and China.

“You have to put the social issues in this perspective. One might argue all are big issues,” he said.

The Hill ·  · May 26, 2023

6. New strategic threat emerging as weapons seek to target brain function, inflict neurological damage

New strategic threat emerging as weapons seek to target brain function, inflict neurological damage

washingtontimes.com · by Bill Gertz

By - The Washington Times - Wednesday, May 24, 2023

NEWS AND ANALYSIS:

U.S. military forces are facing new dangers of nonkinetic warfare weapons in future conflicts including “neuro-strike” weapons designed to disrupt brain functions of key leaders, according to a military expert.

Robert McCreight, a retired national security specialist and former Army special operations officer, stated in an Army blog post that nonkinetic threats include silent, largely undetectable technologies capable of inflicting damaging, debilitating and degrading physical and neural effects on unwitting targets.

These new weapons can inflict strategic damage on military forces, he said.

“This covert threat is best understood as something to be invoked via rapid surprise attack, or as a stealthy forerunner to a massive kinetic follow-on attack,” Mr. McCreight said on the Army Training and Doctrine Command’s Mad Scientist blog.

“As such, it can gradually weaken, or soften up, targeted leaders, defensive systems and key infrastructure,” he wrote.

The weapons’ effect also can be magnified by causing damage to the brain functions of multiple people or groups.

Traditional kinetic warfare weapons are used to kill, destroy, maim and obliterate enemies, while nonkinetic warfare arms involve the use of lasers, cyber, directed energy and related technologies.

Mr. McCreight said that nonkinetic weapons can produce three kinds of strategic effects: A lightning decapitation strike against leaders; covert, undetected surprise attack to disable leadership; and insidious ongoing attacks that degrade leadership analysis, defensive systems and strategic warning.

“These reflect the infamous Sun Tzu quote, ‘the acme of skill is to win a war without firing a shot,’” Mr. McCreight wrote.

Military leaders are not doing enough to prepare for these kinds of attacks that represent a sixth war-fighting domain after air, land, sea, space and cyber.

The weapons will be used to target human neurobiological and biophysical vulnerabilities.

Mr. McCreight warned that the Army may be overconfident that its future soldiers can be protected by new forms of defenses such as exoskeletons, cyborg add-ons, special biophysical tools, artificial intelligence tools and other technology.

“However, a determined and skillful enemy can unleash an entire spectrum of technologies designed expressly to penetrate, weaken, offset, or overcome those enhancements,” he wrote.

Nonkinetic warfare tools can nullify future war-fighter protections rendering troops defenseless, Mr. McCreight warned.

In particular, neuro-strike weapons are game-changing arms that target the central nervous system, neuromechanics, and inner ear and balance systems. The result is covert, silent, undetected damage to cognitive functions, perception, brain functions, reasoning, judgment and decision-making.

“It is effective and debilitating, leaving its victims unable to perform normal brain functions for many years,” Mr. McCreight wrote.

“If future neuro-strike technology expansion in scope and effect exceeds individual attacks to impair dozens or hundreds of victims neurologically, the enemy has a concrete strategic edge,” he added.

A likely concept of employment in war would be to launch nonkinetic attacks prior to the start of kinetic hostilities, or for use in long-term efforts to degrade leaders’ brain function.

“If U.S. leadership ignores its strategic effect on future warfare, we find a fatal error,” according to Mr. McCreight.

The blog post made no mention of so-called Havana syndrome incidents that have caused neurological damage to U.S. officials overseas.

The U.S. intelligence community has sought to dismiss concerns that incidents involving severe brain injuries suffered by U.S. intelligence and diplomatic personnel overseas may be linked to hostile foreign powers.

The incidents are said to be continuing and have been reported in China, Cuba, Russia, Poland, Georgia, Serbia, Vietnam, India, Colombia, France, Switzerland and Taiwan.

A U.S. intelligence community analysis produced in March concluded that “most” spy services believe it is unlikely a foreign adversary is conducting brain attacks.

The conclusion is based on varying levels of confidence. Two agencies have moderate to high confidence, and three others have moderate confidence. Two others judged the incidents were “unlikely” caused by an adversary, with “low confidence” due to intelligence collection shortcomings.

China is working on brain weapons and the Commerce Department recently imposed sanctions on Chinese technology companies over concerns about their cognitive warfare development.

As Inside the Ring reported in 2021, a Chinese military report on brain weapons stated that advances in science and technology are producing new methods of subduing enemies. “War has started to shift from the pursuit of destroying bodies to paralyzing and controlling the opponent,” the report said.

“The focus is to attack the enemy’s will to resist, not physical destruction,” stated the report, titled “The Future of the Concept of Military Supremacy.”

7. Biden, McCarthy looking to close US debt ceiling deal for two years

I hope these reports do not jinx a deal.

But the idea that military and veterans funding will increase while other areas are cut may have long term consequences for public support of the military and veterans. While my bias is toward proper increases in military spending to ensure our national security, I have to recognize that such views are tone deaf in regards to how many Americans view military spending today. If Congress is going to agree to increases in military (and veterans) spending the military is going to have to make the case to the public as to why such increases are necessary. All the public sees is that DOD cannot pass an audit, that defense procurement is fraught with waste, that defense programs are enacted to benefit the districts of powerful congressmen, abuses of military personnel by other military personnel, etc, etc. Additionally, it is very difficult to quantify and "prove" deterrence and therefore justify the defense expenditures it requires. What seems obvious to military personnel and even some in Congress is not so obvious to the American people and they deserve proper and thorough explanations. Increases in military spending in the face of all these issues undermines public trust and confidence in the military.  

Excerpt:

The deal under consideration would increase funding for discretionary spending on military and veterans while essentially holding non-defense discretionary spending at current year levels, the official said, who requested anonymity because they are not authorized to speak about internal discussions.

Biden, McCarthy looking to close US debt ceiling deal for two years

Reuters · by Richard Cowan

WASHINGTON, May 26 (Reuters) - The White House and congressional Republicans on Friday are putting the final touches on a deal that will raise the U.S. government's $31.4 trillion debt ceiling for two years while capping spending on everything but military and veterans, according to a U.S. official.

Negotiators for Democratic President Joe Biden and House of Representatives Speaker Kevin McCarthy appeared to be nearing a deal on Thursday as the two sides reached agreement on key issues, such as spending caps and funding for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the military.

However, items including work requirements for recipients of federal aid were still holding up the deal, the official said.

The deal under consideration would increase funding for discretionary spending on military and veterans while essentially holding non-defense discretionary spending at current year levels, the official said, who requested anonymity because they are not authorized to speak about internal discussions.

The White House is considering scaling back its plan to boost funding at the IRS to hire more auditors and target wealthy Americans, the official said.

The defense and veteran affairs funding matches Biden's budget released earlier this year, a second U.S. official said.

The agreement would leave many details to be sorted out in the weeks and months ahead.

Each will have to persuade enough members of their party in the narrowly divided Congress to vote for any eventual deal, no small feat with far-right Republicans saying they wouldn't back any deal without sweeping spending cuts and progressive Democrats resisting new work requirements on anti-poverty programs.

"The only way to move forward is with a bipartisan agreement. And I believe we will come to an agreement that allows us to move forward and that protects the hardworking Americans of this country," Biden said on Thursday.

One of the Republican negotiators, Representative Patrick McHenry, said the two sides have aired their concerns and they are very well understood.

"That's why we're still here at the 11th hour fighting about serious things of serious consequence," he told reporters late Thursday.

One thing that has added to the complexity is that it is unclear how long lawmakers have to act. The Treasury Department was warned that it could be unable to cover all its obligations as soon as June 1, but on Thursday said it would sell $119 billion worth of debt that will come due on that date, suggesting to some market watchers that it was not an iron-clad deadline.

Most lawmakers have left Washington for the Memorial Day holiday, but their leaders have warned them to be ready to return for votes when a deal is struck.

Fast-growing health and retirement programs would not be affected, even though they are projected to push U.S. debt levels higher in coming years.

Republicans have rejected Biden's proposed tax increases on corporations and wealthy people, while Biden has resisted Republican proposals to stiffen work requirements in some antipoverty programs and loosen oil and gas drilling rules.

Republican negotiator Representative Garret Graves said late Thursday that the White House is "refusing to negotiate on work requirements," which he called "crazy." He said disagreements over funding social security and Medicare versus work requirements continues to be an issue between the two sides.

House leaders have said lawmakers will get three days to ponder the deal before a vote, and any single lawmaker in the Senate has the power to tie up action for days. At least one, Republican Mike Lee, has threatened to do so.

The standoff has unnerved investors, pushing the government's borrowing costs up by $80 million so far, according to Deputy Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo.

Several credit-rating agencies have said they have put the United States on review for a possible downgrade, which would push up borrowing costs even further.

Reporting by Richard Cowan, Jarrett Renshaw, Nandita Bose, David Morgan, Moira Warburton and Gram Slattery, writing by Andy Sullivan; Editing by Scott Malone, Mary Milliken, Diane Craft and Lincoln Feast.

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Andy Sullivan

Thomson Reuters

Andy covers politics and policy in Washington. His work has been cited in Supreme Court briefs, political attack ads and at least one Saturday Night Live skit.

Reuters · by Richard Cowan

8. China's military has become an untouchable nationalist symbol. Artists and comedians are finding out the hard way

Excerpts:

“Once these concerns become the premise of their creative process, their artistic expression will naturally be impacted,” he said.

As for the future of stand-up comedy in China, some have not entirely lost hope.

The US-based scholar who studies Chinese popular culture is “cautiously optimistic” about the industry, because its existence has important values for the government, they said.

On the one hand, it provides a channel for the authoritarian regime to keep a finger on the pulse of society and better understand public sentiments. Meanwhile, comedy shows also offer a way for the public to let off steam.

“It acts as a safety valve for the public to air discontent about various social issues,” they said.

China's military has become an untouchable nationalist symbol. Artists and comedians are finding out the hard way | CNN

CNN · by Nectar Gan · May 26, 2023

Hong Kong CNN —

For two decades, Yue Minjun’s grinning self-portraits have been celebrated as one of the most recognizable icons of Chinese contemporary art.

His pink-skinned caricatures, frozen in hysterical laughter in various settings and posing as people from all walks of life, including military personnel, have smashed auction records and been shown at galleries and exhibitions around the world.

In recent days, however, the Beijing-based artist has come under fire online in China, where nationalist influencers have denounced him as a “cultural traitor” and demanded his investigation and punishment.

Yue’s alleged transgression: “uglifying” and “insulting” China’s military, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).

The military-themed paintings (one of which is pictured top) are the latest target of a sweeping attack on artistic and cultural freedoms unleashed by the kind of belligerent, hardline nationalism critics say has been promoted under Xi Jinping, China’s most authoritarian leader in decades.

The attacks, which have focused predominately on creators perceived as not aligned with official ideology and values, have drawn comparisons to the Cultural Revolution, a decade of political and social turmoil started in 1966 that saw arts and culture become a tool of the Communist Party.

And in the chest-thumping nationalism that has dominated the country’s tightly controlled official and public discourses, the Chinese military occupies a sacred, central place – and any perceived slight can lead to serious consequences.

A costly lesson

The attack on Yue came just days after an even fiercer backlash against Li Haoshi, a Chinese stand-up comedian who goes by the stage name House.

The 31-year-old has been placed under police investigation over a quip at a Beijing live show, where he used a slogan Xi had coined for the PLA to describe two stray dogs chasing a squirrel.

The eight character propaganda – “Fine style of work, capable of winning battles” – is likely one of the world’s most expensive punchlines, costing Li’s employer more than $2 million in fines.

It also cost Li’s job and future career – and potentially his freedom. Under Xi, China passed a law in 2018 to ban the slander of national “heroes and martyrs,” a crime punishable by up to three years in prison.

The harsh punishment against Li shocked some stand-up comedy fans, who did not find Li’s words particularly offensive or harmful. Li’s joke drew a round of laughter at the show, according to an audio clip of the performance.

China issues $2 million dollar fine for joke about army

02:12 - Source: CNN

Stand-up comedy has gained huge popularity in China in recent years, thanks partly to online shows like “Rock and Roast,” which many watched from their homes under the country’s zero-Covid lockdown.

Like other forms of entertainment, to survive in China, the stand-up comedy industry practices rigorous self-censorship and steers clear of political satire. Instead, it wins its audience – mostly young, professional urbanites – with biting jokes on everyday issues, from gender inequality to excessive work culture.

“The government may tolerate jokes and complaints on some social issues and private life, but if one touches on state institutions, leaders or the military, authorities would have to take action – especially in the face of a fierce online outcry,” said a US-based scholar who studies Chinese popular culture, who requested anonymity due to the sensitivity of the issue.

Historic symbolism

The official censure of Li arrived swiftly and forcefully on the heels of an online nationalist backlash. Even the PLA chimed in, with its Western Theater Command lashing out in a social media post that Li’s apology was far from enough to quell its anger.

To outsiders, it may appear puzzling that China’s military, the largest and one of the most powerful in the world, would be so easily offended by a seemingly tame joke.

But veteran observers of Chinese politics say the fierce official reaction is tied to the PLA’s crucial place in Communist Party history – and in Xi’s muscular nationalism.

Founded as the Red Army in 1927, the PLA played a central role in shaping the trajectory of the party’s rise and the founding of Communist China, said Professor Rana Mitter, an expert on the emergence of nationalism in modern China at the University of Oxford.

“The history of the Chinese Communist revolution is inseparable from the history of what we now think of as the PLA,” he said.

And first and foremost, the PLA is the Communist Party’s army, Mitter said.

“Therefore there’s an extent to which insulting the army is actually an insult to the party,” he said. “The political atmosphere in the last five years – perhaps even longer – has moved heavily towards (the direction) that anything perceived as insulting is essentially regarded as political unacceptable.”

"The Battle of Lake Changjin," released in 2021, is a patriotic blockbuster in China.

Noel Celis/AFP/Getty Images/File

High status

Beyond the PLA’s highly symbolic status, Mitter also pointed to a greater militarization in public life under Xi, with street posters, state media and social media stressing the role of the armed forces in everyday life.

“Some of that has to do with the tensions with Taiwan, but more broadly than that, I think it’s a way of increasing the sense that China remains, in some sense, under siege from the wider world – especially the United States and its US allies – and that the party’s army then becomes a defense against that,” Mitter said.

That acute feeling of besiegement gives the PLA a higher status in China than militaries in most other major economies around the world, and makes any perceived slights particularly sensitive, he said.

Last year, a former investigative journalist was sentenced to seven months in prison after he questioned China’s role in the Korean War as depicted in the blockbuster movie “The Battle at Lake Changjin” – one of the many patriotic war films to hit China’s box office in recent years.

In 2021, social media posts doubting the death toll of Chinese soldiers in a border clash with Indian troops landed a popular blogger eight months in jail.

And experts say the sensitivity will only heighten in Xi’s third term, which he obtained last year by breaking the party’s decades-long power transition norms and scrapping presidential term limits from the constitution.

“Xi has made it very clear that national security is his No.1 priority in his third term, which means the PLA is extremely important,” said Alfred Wu, an associate professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore.

“The focus on security creates a nationalistic narrative that only Xi can save China in a war-like state, so he deserves not only a third term, but possibly beyond,” he said.

Xi has staked his legitimacy on returning China to its former greatness, and a strong and powerful military plays a key role in driving that nationalist agenda. Since coming to power, he has jailed corrupt political foes in the military, overhauled the armed forces and expanded its advanced weaponry. He has also ramped up China’s military posturing, sending fighter jets and warships to the Taiwan Strait and around the disputed islands with Japan.

“The PLA is crucial in realizing his security ambitions, and anything possibly targeting the military could get a very strong response from the government.”

Chinese leader Xi Jinping inspects PLA troops during a parade to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the founding of Communist China on October 1, 2019.

Kevin Frayer/Getty Images AsiaPac/Getty Images

Shrinking space

So far, Chinese authorities have not publicly reacted to the nationalist anger against Yue, the leading contemporary artist, though some of Yue’s paintings have been blocked from Weibo, China’s heavily censored version of Twitter. CNN has reached out to Yue for comment.

Previously, Yue described his work as illustrative of his “deep feelings” about an uncertain future.

“One might be very happy now but always unsure of what’s going to happen next,” he said during an interview with CNN in 2007.

Many social media users have since come to the artist’s defense, saying the political witch-hunt has gone too far.

“You’re too sensitive,” said the top reply to a viral Weibo post that accused Yue’s paintings of “insulting” the military.

By Friday, the original Weibo post, which had attracted thousands of comments and more than 100,000 up-votes, had been deleted.

Hu Jiamin, a Chinese artist who now lives in France, said there will never be a shortage of targets for attack by China’s nationalist influencers and ordinary users, who are competing for clicks online.

“They might not necessarily have very strong values, and it’s often a performative act. Now, the mainstream view is that as long as you show patriotism, you can get attention,” said the artist, who left for France in 2016, frustrated by the social and political direction taken by China.

Compared with established figures like Yue, who have already made their names in the arts and cultural scenes, young creators are likely to be more affected by the attacks by nationalist trolls, Hu said.

“Once these concerns become the premise of their creative process, their artistic expression will naturally be impacted,” he said.

As for the future of stand-up comedy in China, some have not entirely lost hope.

The US-based scholar who studies Chinese popular culture is “cautiously optimistic” about the industry, because its existence has important values for the government, they said.

On the one hand, it provides a channel for the authoritarian regime to keep a finger on the pulse of society and better understand public sentiments. Meanwhile, comedy shows also offer a way for the public to let off steam.

“It acts as a safety valve for the public to air discontent about various social issues,” they said.

Top image caption: A man looks at a painting by Chinese painter Yue Minjun entitled ” Hats Series, Armed Forces” during a Sotheby’s auction preview in Hong Kong, Thursday, April. 2, 2009.

CNN · by Nectar Gan · May 26, 2023

9. Is the Biden Administration Going Soft on China?

We need a bipartisan approach to China. We must know that a part of China's strategy (and Russia's for that matter) is to exploit political divisions in the US.

As evidence of this reset, look to the Biden administration’s recent rhetorical shift away from using the Trump-era buzzword of “decoupling” the U.S. economy from China to instead focusing on “de-risking” U.S. supply chains; growing pressure on the Pentagon to keep its views on the China threat to itself; and the campaign to paint as extreme the U.S. House of Representatives’ new Select Committee on Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party (and even, I hear, for Democrats to depart the committee as a statement).

It’s not entirely clear whether Xi is interested in Biden’s (or Sullivan’s) proffered hand. Hopes had been high at the White House that, having consolidated his unprecedented third term as Communist Party General Secretary and moved past the ravages of the COVID-19 pandemic, Xi would be ready for a plateau moment—a pause in its escalations against the United States and others. And the axing of China’s lead “wolf warrior,” former Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian, appeared to confirm Washington’s optimism. Alas, however, recent signals from China’s new foreign minister, Wang Yi, suggest that Beijing is less eager for a reset than Washington.

Instead, Beijing appears to be all too ready to exploit divisions inside Washington and between Europe and the United States. Bickering among senior Biden administration officials has boiled down to allowing China to choose whom it would most like to entertain on a visit to Beijing. Meanwhile, on a recent European tour, Wang warned that “If this ‘new Cold War’ is fought, not only the interests of China will be harmed, but Europe’s interests will also be sacrificed.”

Still, Biden’s senior national security team is intent on trying for the desired reset. And the U.S. president himself, ever confident in his foreign policy chops, likely estimates that he can succeed where Trump faltered: in splitting China from its dangerous new alliance with Russia, deterring China from its promised absorption of Taiwan, and ramping up trade with China while fostering national champions in semiconductors and other critical sectors. Perhaps he will fail, but he will have done so satisfying critics within his party and his base that, at the very least, he stood up to warmongering Republicans. Could work.

Is the Biden Administration Going Soft on China?

A policy shift toward economic engagement with Beijing seems to be underway in the White House.

By Danielle Pletka, a distinguished senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

Foreign Policy · by Danielle Pletka · May 25, 2023

The need to counter China has been a welcome area of bipartisan consensus in a Washington riven over everything from nuclear modernization to chicken nuggets. But the bipartisan concordat on China is ending, foundering over politics, ideology, and economic expediency. And the biggest beneficiary? The People’s Republic of China.

The need to counter China has been a welcome area of bipartisan consensus in a Washington riven over everything from nuclear modernization to chicken nuggets. But the bipartisan concordat on China is ending, foundering over politics, ideology, and economic expediency. And the biggest beneficiary? The People’s Republic of China.

The break has been coming for some months, a product of myriad, disparate fears among Democrats—a progressive backlash to the alleged “drumbeat to war”; claims that standing up to China is fostering anti-Asian sentiment in the public at large; a desire to draw a contrast with increasing Republican bellicosity; and an appeal to younger generations more skeptical of the need to confront rising powers. And if that’s not enough, don’t forget the possible recession headed America’s way—not the ideal moment for economic conflict—as well as ever-present business lobbying insisting that national security not interfere with corporate profits.

Then there’s the fretting of the liberal commentariat: Jon Bateman argued in a December Politico piece that “The Fevered Anti-China Attitude in Washington Is Going to Backfire.” The New York Times’s Tom Friedman warned, “If it is not the goal of U.S. foreign policy to topple the Communist regime in China, the United States needs to make that crystal clear.” In the pages of the Washington Post, Fareed Zakaria cautioned that “Washington has succumbed to dangerous groupthink on China.” And éminence grise Graham Allison has returned repeatedly to his Thucydides trap warning of 2015, reupping it in 2022 to liken then-U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s trip to Taiwan to Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s visit to Sarajevo (a visit that nominally sparked World War I).

Needless to say, the musings of Washington’s chattering classes are not always dispositive indicators of a policy shift. But I have been told by several insiders that the White House is keenly attuned to these criticisms from Biden stalwarts in the press. And thus, a shift.

U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan all but announced the new policy in a recent speech, explaining: “We are for de-risking and diversifying, not decoupling. We’ll keep investing in our own capacities, and in secure, resilient supply chains. We’ll keep pushing for a level playing field for our workers and companies and defending against abuses.” In other words, for the Biden administration, at least nominally, attention is going to shift first and foremost to cultivating the economic relationship with Beijing, with a little industrial policy thrown in for good measure.

Read More

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An illustration shows George Kennan, the father of Cold War containment strategy.

Is Cold War Inevitable?

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Truth be told, the first two years of Democratic-Republican harmony on China were unexpected, particularly as the end of the era of Kissingerian accommodation to Beijing was very much a Trump administration signature.

The magnitude of the policy transformation that took place under former U.S. President Donald Trump is difficult to overstate. Certainly, there was a growing international awareness of seismic changes in Beijing. Chinese President Xi Jinping accelerated China’s transformation from a rising power focused on a “harmonious” integration into the international system—replete with massive trade surpluses, growing domestic prosperity, and a firm place in a globalizing world—to a predatory power bent on dominating the South China Sea, reintegrating Taiwan into the mainland, repatriating capital and business, stealing intellectual property, curbing any and all forms of dissent, and generally throwing its weight around in international affairs. But in the early years of the 21st century, the global response to those troubling changes in Beijing was a collective shrug.

Political greybeards insisted that China could continue to be a “responsible stakeholder” in global affairs even as it militarized its foreign policy and began testing the limits of its welcome in Western capitals. Simply, the calculus was that the economic benefits of China, Inc. outweighed the costs of growing Chinese Communist Party-led predations, both internal and external. Thus the mild Obama administration response to China’s theft of millions of U.S. government personnel files and its eagerness to downplay growing Chinese human rights violations.

But Trump’s election marked a rebalancing of China engagers versus skeptics. It wasn’t simply that Trump fancied himself the champion of the economically dispossessed—America’s “forgotten men” who had not benefited from globalization and freer trade. For the first time in decades, national security hawks who had long doubted rising China’s purportedly benign intentions notched more influence than the Wall Street traders who had become accustomed to setting the tone for U.S.-China relations.

Strangely, perhaps, Xi appeared to relish his new “Dr. Evil” status, and he set about confirming some of the world’s worst fears. In 2018, an Australian think tank documented a wholesale ethnic cleansing campaign directed at China’s Muslim Uyghur minority. In 2019 and 2020, Hong Kong saw its most widespread pro-democracy demonstrations, which were met with massive police brutality and sweeping arrests. And while the protests died down as COVID-19 took hold, Beijing took the opportunity to bypass the island’s legislature and impose a strict new security law in June 2020. All of this, coupled with the rise of Beijing’s aggressive new “wolf warrior diplomacy,” signaled a new stage in the Chinese Communist Party’s hundred-year campaign to “lead the world.”

Even the Europeans seemed to be coming around to Trump’s more jaundiced China policy after more than a few rocky moments—and the threat of U.S. sanctions. Early efforts to persuade, for example, the United Kingdom of the unwisdom of allowing China telecom giant Huawei to provide critical 5G equipment made little headway. But the Brits, and now even the Germans, appear to have changed their minds. London now complains that it, along with the European Union, has now rebalanced its China policy far more than Washington has—and, indeed, U.K. and European exports to China have cratered while America’s have risen year on year, Trump and U.S. President Joe Biden notwithstanding.

Now, however, the Biden team is retooling, “looking to move beyond” the spy balloon fiasco and stop the “spiral” of tensions with Beijing. I am told there are ongoing arguments within the administration about the need for—and the nature of—the reset with China. Some argue that Biden cannot back down on either security or economic battles with Beijing and that any rapprochement with Xi risks allowing the Republican Party to outflank the administration. Others insist that, with the CHIPS and Science Act and a decision to “harden” Taiwan against an invasion, the economic and security imperatives are well in hand.

But few dispute that a real reset is actually happening, underpinned by a pointed effort to romance Chinese officials at the highest levels. On Thursday, for instance, U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo will meet with Chinese Commerce Minister Wang Wentao for what will be the first Cabinet-level meeting between the two countries in Washington during the Biden administration.

As evidence of this reset, look to the Biden administration’s recent rhetorical shift away from using the Trump-era buzzword of “decoupling” the U.S. economy from China to instead focusing on “de-risking” U.S. supply chains; growing pressure on the Pentagon to keep its views on the China threat to itself; and the campaign to paint as extreme the U.S. House of Representatives’ new Select Committee on Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party (and even, I hear, for Democrats to depart the committee as a statement).

It’s not entirely clear whether Xi is interested in Biden’s (or Sullivan’s) proffered hand. Hopes had been high at the White House that, having consolidated his unprecedented third term as Communist Party General Secretary and moved past the ravages of the COVID-19 pandemic, Xi would be ready for a plateau moment—a pause in its escalations against the United States and others. And the axing of China’s lead “wolf warrior,” former Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian, appeared to confirm Washington’s optimism. Alas, however, recent signals from China’s new foreign minister, Wang Yi, suggest that Beijing is less eager for a reset than Washington.

Instead, Beijing appears to be all too ready to exploit divisions inside Washington and between Europe and the United States. Bickering among senior Biden administration officials has boiled down to allowing China to choose whom it would most like to entertain on a visit to Beijing. Meanwhile, on a recent European tour, Wang warned that “If this ‘new Cold War’ is fought, not only the interests of China will be harmed, but Europe’s interests will also be sacrificed.”

Still, Biden’s senior national security team is intent on trying for the desired reset. And the U.S. president himself, ever confident in his foreign policy chops, likely estimates that he can succeed where Trump faltered: in splitting China from its dangerous new alliance with Russia, deterring China from its promised absorption of Taiwan, and ramping up trade with China while fostering national champions in semiconductors and other critical sectors. Perhaps he will fail, but he will have done so satisfying critics within his party and his base that, at the very least, he stood up to warmongering Republicans. Could work.

Foreign Policy · by Danielle Pletka · May 25, 2023

10. Pressure Mounts for U.S. Response After China’s Micron Ban

Excerpts:

So far, Beijing has given little indication that it is willing to walk back the Micron ban. 

The Cyberspace Administration of China said Sunday its review of Micron products found significant risks that would affect national security and warned operators of key Chinese information infrastructure—such as telecommunications companies and state-owned banks—against purchasing the company’s goods.

The Chinese ban came less than two months after Beijing said it was investigating imports from Micron, in what seemed to be a political gesture aimed at hitting back at a ban Washington put in place late last year on selling advanced chip-making technology to China. 

Chinese officials say they believe certain U.S. companies lobbied the Biden administration to institute the ban. The Micron probe suggested that Beijing zeroed in on Micron as a particular target.

Some analysts say Beijing potentially could narrow the scope of the Micron ban because the term “operators of key infrastructure” is vaguely defined by Chinese authorities. So far, there are few signs of that happening.

Instead, U.S. business representatives in China fear the impact of the ban could be broader as it sends a political signal to other Chinese customers to stop purchasing Micron products

Pressure Mounts for U.S. Response After China’s Micron Ban

High-level talks are held to repairs ties between the two countries

By Lingling WeiFollow and Charles HutzlerFollow

Updated May 25, 2023 10:14 pm ET

https://www.wsj.com/articles/pressure-is-on-u-s-to-hit-back-at-chinas-ban-on-micron-as-meeting-nears-78a51df1?mod=world_lead_pos3

Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and her Chinese counterpart held a pivotal meeting on U.S.-China ties as pressure was building on the Biden administration to respond to Beijing’s blacklisting of the U.S. semiconductor maker Micron Technology.

Any retaliation by the U.S. over Micron carries the risk of setting back a fragile rapprochement after months of bruising acrimony. Raimondo’s dinnertime meeting Thursday with Chinese Commerce Minister Wang Wentao was the latest in a series of high-level talks intended to restart dialogue and the first one to take place in Washington.

A brief Commerce Department statement said the discussions included the “overall environment in both countries for trade and investment” and added that Raimondo raised concerns about the recent spate of actions taken against U.S. companies operating in China.

“The Chinese side expressed major concerns about the U.S.’s economic and trade policy towards China,” the Chinese Commerce Ministry said in its brief account. It singled out Washington’s intensified restrictions on the sale of advanced semiconductor and other technologies to China and a planned executive order that would limit American investments in China.

Both sides described the meeting in positive terms and noted the importance of keeping communication channels open.

The Micron ban and a series of recent moves by Beijing against U.S. businesses in China—including raids, detentions and investigations—were at the top of Raimondo’s agenda, according to people who have consulted with the Commerce Department.

Beijing cited national-security risks Sunday in its move to bar major Chinese companies from buying products from Micron, the largest U.S. memory-chip maker. Biden administration officials have said the restrictions have no basis in fact.

Beijing’s move to block Chinese companies from buying Micron products is a key area of concern for the U.S. PHOTO: KAI PFAFFENBACH/REUTERS

The action against Micron is fueling already-hawkish sentiment in Congress toward China, with prominent lawmakers demanding that the administration take Beijing to task.

House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul (R., Texas) issued a statement Wednesday saying China’s action against Micron demonstrates leader Xi Jinping’s plan to use the Chinese market as “ a weapon to attack others.” McCaul urged the administration to hold Beijing accountable.

Meanwhile, according to U.S. business executives, attention on the Micron issue is likely to get a boost from Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.). Micron announced late last year plans to spend as much as $100 billion over the next two decades to build a computer-chip factory complex in upstate New York.

The commitment by Micron was made possible by the Chips and Science Act of 2022, passed in August, which provides grants and subsidies for companies to build and expand chip-production facilities in the country. Schumer has championed the legislation and his state as a site for semiconductor investment.

Micron’s and Schumer’s offices didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Technology is a prime battlefront in ties between the U.S. and China that have been on a downward spiral for years, with both engaging in tit-for-tat retaliation as they compete for global influence. Last summer, for example, after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi defied China’s objections and traveled to Taiwan, Beijing cut off most high-level dialogue with Washington.

Moves on both sides have particularly homed in on semiconductors, which power everything from cars to weapons. Xi has set plans for China to dominate the field, though it is far from achieving that goal, while the Biden administration has restricted exports of advanced semiconductors and production equipment to China and persuaded allies to follow suit.

Meanwhile, as part of a broader effort to retaliate against intensified U.S. sanctions against Chinese companies, Beijing has held back its green light for mergers that involve American companies such as Intel’s $5.2 billion takeover of Israel-based Tower Semiconductor. 

At a summit last weekend in Japan, the U.S. and other members of the Group of Seven advanced democracies took aim at Beijing’s ambitions, collectively pledging to protect vital technologies and work together to fend off Beijing’s economic pressure on foreign companies and governments.

On the heels of those statements, Beijing announced the purchase ban on Micron. 

“So how do they respond to criticism over economic coercion? With economic coercion,” White House national-security spokesman John Kirby said Wednesday.

Still, Mr. Kirby said disputes like that over Micron underscore why Washington and Beijing should talk.

“The discussions and the lines of communication that we’re trying to keep open remain open,” Kirby told reporters Wednesday. “That doesn’t mean we’re going to sit idly by when we see [China] act inappropriately,” he said.

One retaliation option the Biden administration has been considering involves closing loopholes in its restrictions on the Chinese information-technology conglomerate Inspur Group, according to people familiar with the matter. The loopholes have enabled U.S. companies such as Intel and International Business Machines to continue selling to entities affiliated with Inspur.

The Commerce Department added Inspur to an export blacklist earlier this year but didn’t specify all of its affiliates, which are engaged in businesses such as cloud computing, data centers and artificial intelligence. That means U.S. companies can keep selling to those entities without having to seek government permission.

The debate within the Biden administration over Inspur centers on whether its American suppliers can manage the fallout of a potential plunge in sales to a big Chinese customer that could result from closing the loopholes, the people said.

So far, Beijing has given little indication that it is willing to walk back the Micron ban. 

The Cyberspace Administration of China said Sunday its review of Micron products found significant risks that would affect national security and warned operators of key Chinese information infrastructure—such as telecommunications companies and state-owned banks—against purchasing the company’s goods.

The Chinese ban came less than two months after Beijing said it was investigating imports from Micron, in what seemed to be a political gesture aimed at hitting back at a ban Washington put in place late last year on selling advanced chip-making technology to China. 

Chinese officials say they believe certain U.S. companies lobbied the Biden administration to institute the ban. The Micron probe suggested that Beijing zeroed in on Micron as a particular target.

Some analysts say Beijing potentially could narrow the scope of the Micron ban because the term “operators of key infrastructure” is vaguely defined by Chinese authorities. So far, there are few signs of that happening.

Instead, U.S. business representatives in China fear the impact of the ban could be broader as it sends a political signal to other Chinese customers to stop purchasing Micron products.

Write to Lingling Wei at Lingling.Wei@wsj.com and Charles Hutzler at charles.hutzler@wsj.com

11. U.S. warns China could hack infrastructure, including pipelines, rail systems

Are these recent events China conducting "cyber reconnaissance" to prepare for future attacks?

U.S. warns China could hack infrastructure, including pipelines, rail systems

Reuters · by Raphael Satter

May 25 (Reuters) - The U.S. State Department warned on Thursday that China was capable of launching cyber attacks against critical infrastructure, including oil and gas pipelines and rail systems, after researchers discovered a Chinese hacking group had been spying on such networks.

A multi-nation alert issued Wednesday revealed the Chinese cyber-espionage campaign had been aimed at military and government targets in the United States.

The Chinese government has rejected assertions that its spies are going after Western targets, calling the warning issued by the United States and its allies a "collective disinformation campaign."

U.S. officials said they were still in the process of getting their arms around the threat.

"We’ve had at least one location that we didn’t know about since the hunt guide was released come forward with data and information," Rob Joyce, the U.S. National Security Agency's (NSA) cybersecurity director, told Reuters. The agency disclosed technical details earlier to help critical service providers detect the spying.

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) separately said it was working to understand "the breadth of potential intrusions and associated impacts."

That would help it "provide assistance where needed, and more effectively understand the tactics undertaken by this adversary," CISA's executive assistant director, Eric Goldstein, told Reuters.

Part of the challenge in defending against this espionage work is that it's more covert than regular spy operations, according to researchers and officials.

"In these cases the adversary is often using legitimate credentials and legitimate network administration tools to gain access to execute their objectives on a target network," Goldstein said. "Many traditional methods of detection, such as antivirus, will not find these intrusions."

[1/2] U.S. and Chinese flags are seen in this illustration taken, January 30, 2023. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration

Microsoft analysts who identified the campaign, which they dubbed Volt Typhoon, said it "could disrupt critical communications infrastructure between the United States and Asia region during future crises" - a nod to escalating U.S.-China tensions over Taiwan and other issues.

"The U.S. intelligence community assesses that China almost certainly is capable of launching cyberattacks that could disrupt critical infrastructure services within the United States, including against oil and gas pipelines and rail systems," State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said in a press briefing.

"It's vital for government and network defenders in the public to stay vigilant."

U.S. agencies have been pushing for improved cybersecurity practices in its majority-privately held critical infrastructure industry, after the 2021 hack of the key Colonial Pipeline disrupted nearly half of the U.S. East Coast’s fuel supply.

Intelligence agencies in the United States, Britain and their close allies issued an alert Wednesday to warn about Volt Typhoon. Microsoft said the group had targeted critical infrastructure organizations in the U.S. Pacific territory of Guam, and it was using the security firm Fortinet's (FTNT.O) FortiGuard devices to break into target's networks.

Researcher Marc Burnard, whose organisation Secureworks has dealt with several intrusions tied to Volt Typhoon, said Secureworks had seen no evidence of destructive activity by Volt Typhoon, but that its hackers were focused on stealing information that would "shed light on U.S. military activities."

NSA's Joyce said there was no doubt Volt Typhoon was putting itself in position to carry out disruptive attacks.

"It’s clear that some of the entities on here are of no intelligence value," he told Reuters of the critical infrastructure sites identified by the government.

Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Mao Ning told reporters that the alerts issued by the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand were intended to promote their intelligence alliance - known as the Five Eyes - and it was Washington that was guilty of hacking.

"The United States is the empire of hacking," Mao said.

Additional reporting by Christopher Bing and Daphne Psaledakis; editing by William Maclean, Mark Heinrich, Chizu Nomiyama and Leslie Adler

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Raphael Satter

Thomson Reuters

Reporter covering cybersecurity, surveillance, and disinformation for Reuters. Work has included investigations into state-sponsored espionage, deepfake-driven propaganda, and mercenary hacking.

James Pearson

Thomson Reuters

Reports on hacks, leaks and digital espionage in Europe. Ten years at Reuters with previous postings in Hanoi as Bureau Chief and Seoul as Korea Correspondent. Author of 'North Korea Confidential', a book about daily life in North Korea. Contact: 447927347451

Reuters · by Raphael Satter

12. China’s “Blue Dragon” Strategy in the Indo-Pacific Makes America and India Restless

Excerpts:

As Tellis argues, the strategic but asymmetrical partnership between India and the United States—along with other American allies and democratic friends in the Indo-Pacific—may deepen to counteract a more assertive China. Meanwhile, the Russian and Indian defense and energy linkages might continue but will weaken over time.

However, Indian investment in the Quad and its military exercises—combined with the four foundational agreements on defense procurements, intelligence sharing, and cyber security—would help New Delhi to preserve its strategic autonomy in its neighborhood and against its two neighboring nuclear powers: China and Pakistan, the latter of which is China’s “all-weather” friend.

Additionally, India must recognize the medium- and long-term calculus of China’s grand-yet-veiled vision of national rejuvenation in the Indo-Pacific. It encompasses Beijing’s Blue Dragon strategy that has already put necessary footprints in the continental and maritime region of South Asia to encircle India in both security and economic domains. The subtle encirclement starts with Taiwan in the Western Pacific Ocean and extends to Sri Lanka in the heart of the Indian Ocean.

All this points to a deterministic grand vision articulated by Beijing that is historically deeper and more geographically expansive than the United States’ conception of “strategic competition” or India’s strategic autonomy. Modern China has adhered to the advice of Sun Tzu, who long ago asserted that “the supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.” Following his counsel, Beijing has succeeded in building militarized artificial islands in the South China Sea while the United States and its regional allies did not intervene because it would lead to an open confrontation with China. Likewise, if nothing changes, the Indian Ocean could eventually become China’s “Western Ocean” as described in ancient Chinese literature.

G20 leaders plan to meet in New Delhi in September of this year. Until then, Modi and Jaishankar certainly have time to reconsider their views on China’s intentions and capabilities. What New Delhi must ask itself is which would it rather see occur: China achieving national rejuvenation and global hegemony based upon military and economic strength, or an Indo-Pacific region that remains safe for democracy by fully aligning India with the United States and its allies?

China’s “Blue Dragon” Strategy in the Indo-Pacific Makes America and India Restless

As China expands upon the seas, India may find its traditional middle-path foreign policy is a luxury it can no longer afford.

The National Interest · by Patrick Mendis · May 25, 2023

In his recent critical Foreign Affairs essay, “America’s Bad Bet on India,” Ashley J. Tellis argued that the Biden administration’s India policy is “misplaced.” He accused Washington of overlooking “India’s democratic erosion” because the United States needs a reliable partner in South Asia to challenge the rise of China. The article’s perceptive analysis of the U.S.-India security partnership notes that the relationship is hardly based on mutually assured democratic trust. He notes, for example, that India is breaking with the West in the context of the Russo-Ukrainian War and instead “goes it alone.”

Tellis’ conclusion is that “India’s security partnership with the United States will remain fundamentally asymmetrical for a long time to come.” While New Delhi would want Washington to prevail in a major conflict with Beijing in the East China Sea or the South China Sea, it is “unlikely to embroil itself in the fight.” This assessment is predicated largely on India’s nominal “strategic autonomy” in its foreign policy. India has evolved with a history of Soviet and Russian military ties as well as a lingering record of border conflicts with China.

However, China’s unprecedented military and economic capabilities have increasingly challenged New Delhi’s strategic autonomy. A matured India may not have a strategic alternative to sustain the past; it must thus work harmoniously and collaboratively with Washington for its national interest and civilizational heritage.

The “Return to History”

For the civilizational states of China and India, the past is often prologue. In his book, The India Way: Strategies for an Uncertain World, Indian external affairs minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar wrote that New Delhi believes it faces an inevitable “return to history,” rather than the Fukuyaman “end of history,” in the emerging international governance of multipolarity.

To the east, China—which holds a similar worldview regarding multipolarity and the perception of American decline—has begun to prepare itself for the coming era. To that end, it has devised an incremental “Blue Dragon” strategy for the Indo-Pacific region. This approach encompasses the country’s expansion and influences in nearby major bodies of water, supported by economic and military projects. Starting with the East China Sea, Beijing has already aimed at expanding its reach to the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean to encircle India.

To this end, China has wasted no time sitting idle over the past few years. Instead, Beijing set its eyes on the two island nations of Sri Lanka in the heart of the Indian Ocean and Taiwan in the Western Pacific to advance its’ best “core” national interests and fulfill its longstanding geopolitical ambitions. For Beijing, Taiwan has been a “breakaway province” of mainland China; Sri Lanka has maintained religious, diplomatic, and trade links to China for millennia.

Concurrently, these two strategically located island nations have become increasingly vital to American foreign policy objectives—including the freedom of navigation in the Indo-Pacific region, the promotion of democratic governance, and the maintenance of peace and prosperity in the region. These two island nations have also long been characterized as “unsinkable aircraft carriers.” The phrase, originally attributed to General Douglas MacArthur, was used to describe Taiwan and to highlight its historical and strategic importance to China as well as to the United States.

China’s approach towards these two “unsinkable aircraft carriers” is composed of two different strategies—a carrot and a stick—aimed at China’s rejuvenation. Guided by the Blue Dragon strategy, Beijing has basically encircled the expanding vicinity of the East China Sea and Taiwan, the South China Sea and the artificial islands in the Paracel archipelagos, and the Indian Ocean. Sri Lanka, located at the southern tip of India and in a perfect strategic position, has historically been important to Beijing.

Against this backdrop, are India and the United States able to jointly and harmoniously work together to make the Indo-Pacific region safe for democracy?

The Indian Conundrum

It is against this background that one must consider Tellis and other discerning observers’ questioning of India’s position as the United States’ most important and dependable democratic partner and friend. These doubts arise from the civilization dogma of “return to history,” which can be traced back to India’s millennia-old Hindu and Buddhist traditions. Such influences are nothing new; after achieving independence in 1947, India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, advocated a “middle-path” non-aligned foreign policy during the Cold War period.

In his India Way, Jaishankar attempts to reconcile and transcend right-wing tendencies and left-wing aspirations by defining Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s political vision, his economic agenda, and India’s security and geopolitical challenges. The Modi administration’s worldview seems to fit well with the emerging approach of “multipolarity” towards global governance, in which New Delhi could play an interlocutor role between and among China, Russia, and the United States. In his video message to the recent G20 Meeting of the Foreign Ministers in Srinagar, for example, Modi said: “As you meet in the land of Gandhi and the Buddha, I pray that you will draw inspiration from India’s civilizational ethos—to focus not on what divides us, but on what unites us.”

Despite all this, the Russo-Ukrainian War emerged as a test for India of Gandhian morality and Buddhist ethics in international affairs. New Delhi—a longtime military partner of Moscow—called for an end of hostilities but failed to criticize the Russian invasion and declined to support UN resolutions against Russia. The United States and other Western leaders have been notably disappointed but accepted India’s neutrality and its reluctance to “condemn” Russia’s unjustified aggression. Moreover, these leaders—particularly those in Europe—understand India’s long history of reliance on Russian weapons and energy sources.

In the prevailing gamut of complexities and changing national security interests, Jaishankar summarized that “this is a time for us to engage America, manage China, cultivate Europe, reassure Russia.” For India, this approach is in keeping with the “vivid expression of [Indian] beliefs and traditions” of the middle path of Buddhism and the foreign policy of Nehruvian Panchsheel.

For the United States, however, the current situation presents an interesting conundrum. This evolving foreign policy—from the non-alignment to strategic autonomy—has prevented New Delhi from fully aligning with Washington.

There are some signs for optimism. In recent years, successive U.S. administrations have engaged with India as a reliable partner in trade and investment, science and technology, as well as security and education. Similarly, the share of weapon procurements from the Soviet vintage has gradually been declining as India has begun to buy defense weaponry from the United States and two other Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad) countries: Australia and Japan. In the past, Russian defense materiel was vital for Indian defense in light of sectarian conflicts with Pakistan as well as the lingering border disputes with China. Even before the Russo-Ukrainian War, defense relations between India and Russia apparently started to drift apart and continue to “steadily drift away” after the strategic Sino-Russian “no-limit” agreement was signed at the Beijing Winter Olympics in February 2022—mere weeks before President Vladimir Putin launched the “special military operation” in Ukraine.

With Russia entangled as a junior partner to assertive China’s strategic and tactical gamesmanship, it is increasingly challenging for New Delhi to preserve its historic partnership with Moscow. The strategic “no-limit” pact between China and Russia hardly mentions Ukraine but has purposefully included Taiwan. Nonetheless, China now realizes that the United States and its democratic allies link their indirect efforts to weaken Russia in Ukraine to confront China elsewhere. Of course, the Ukraine war and the Taiwan issue cannot be easily compared, but the strategic resemblance of the two seems to illustrate both Russian and Chinese endgames.

Which Way, India?

As Jaishankar highlighted, New Delhi must “engage America, manage China, cultivate Europe, reassure Russia.” However, both India’s future and democratic legacy increasingly seem to depend more on being associated with the United States. In fact, this process began with the U.S.-India Civil Nuclear Agreement in 2005—followed by the four foundational U.S.-India Defense and Security Agreements and the Quad.

As Tellis argues, the strategic but asymmetrical partnership between India and the United States—along with other American allies and democratic friends in the Indo-Pacific—may deepen to counteract a more assertive China. Meanwhile, the Russian and Indian defense and energy linkages might continue but will weaken over time.

However, Indian investment in the Quad and its military exercises—combined with the four foundational agreements on defense procurements, intelligence sharing, and cyber security—would help New Delhi to preserve its strategic autonomy in its neighborhood and against its two neighboring nuclear powers: China and Pakistan, the latter of which is China’s “all-weather” friend.

Additionally, India must recognize the medium- and long-term calculus of China’s grand-yet-veiled vision of national rejuvenation in the Indo-Pacific. It encompasses Beijing’s Blue Dragon strategy that has already put necessary footprints in the continental and maritime region of South Asia to encircle India in both security and economic domains. The subtle encirclement starts with Taiwan in the Western Pacific Ocean and extends to Sri Lanka in the heart of the Indian Ocean.

All this points to a deterministic grand vision articulated by Beijing that is historically deeper and more geographically expansive than the United States’ conception of “strategic competition” or India’s strategic autonomy. Modern China has adhered to the advice of Sun Tzu, who long ago asserted that “the supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.” Following his counsel, Beijing has succeeded in building militarized artificial islands in the South China Sea while the United States and its regional allies did not intervene because it would lead to an open confrontation with China. Likewise, if nothing changes, the Indian Ocean could eventually become China’s “Western Ocean” as described in ancient Chinese literature.

G20 leaders plan to meet in New Delhi in September of this year. Until then, Modi and Jaishankar certainly have time to reconsider their views on China’s intentions and capabilities. What New Delhi must ask itself is which would it rather see occur: China achieving national rejuvenation and global hegemony based upon military and economic strength, or an Indo-Pacific region that remains safe for democracy by fully aligning India with the United States and its allies?

Dr. Patrick Mendis, a former American diplomat and a military professor in the NATO and the Indo-Pacific Commands of the Pentagon, is currently serving as a distinguished visiting professor of transatlantic relations at the University of Warsaw in Poland.

Image: Shutterstock.

The National Interest · by Patrick Mendis · May 25, 2023

13. Who Won the Cold War? Part I

Graphics at the link: https://www.aei.org/foreign-and-defense-policy/who-won-the-cold-war-part-i/

Who Won the Cold War? Part I

By Nicholas Eberstadt

AEIdeas

May 19, 2023

The years since the end of the Cold War have been an extraordinary—and extraordinarily aberrant—time. We live in an era when a single state—the USA—possesses vastly more power and wealth than any before has ever enjoyed. Neither the Roman Empire, nor the Golden Horde, nor any of history’s other runners-up came close to the global reach America now commands.

Yet during this moment of geopolitical “unipolarity” and unparalleled prosperity, things quietly started going wrong for a great many Americans—badly wrong for more than a few. The unease so many in our country feel today reflects that contradiction.

Curiously, the most indispensable of the many victors in the Cold War—the American people—are now suffering from a “failure to thrive.” Their social wellbeing has been faltering for some time. Ironically, many of these new problems date back to around the time when the Berlin Wall fell.

Below we highlight a single, albeit highly significant, aspect of this more general failure to thrive: America’s strangely limited progress in wealth promotion—spreading wealth among its citizens. (We’ll look at other symptoms in upcoming postings.)

Overall, post–Cold War America has been fantastically successful in wealth creation. By the reckoning of the Federal Reserve, the net worth of American households amounted to nearly $140 trillion at the end of 2022[1]: an average of over $400,000 per person and over a million dollars per household (for a 2.5 person home). Since the fourth quarter of 1989—when the Wall came down in Berlin—the average real net worth for US households has grown at almost 3 percent a year—implying a doubling time of about 25–26 years, a pretty respectable long-term tempo. But the fortunes of a great many Americans are not described by that aggregate trend. Consider Figure 1, which shows the real mean net worth of homes in the bottom half of the wealth spectrum since 1989.

For almost two decades—from 1989 to 2007—mean net worth for this bottom half of households was basically flat (a little over $30,000 in 4Q2022 dollars). And in 2019, on the eve of the COVID-19 pandemic, real mean net worth for these same households was just 4 percent higher than it had been in late 1989, three decades earlier. The implied doubling time for net worth, given those endpoints, would have been a little over 500 years.

Since 2019 net worth for America’s bottom half has surged. In 2022 it averaged nearly $63,000—close to twice as much as in 2019. If the 1989/2022 tempo of growth could be maintained, net worth for the bottom half of US households would be doubling every 36 years. But most of this sudden leap appears to have been due to special emergency transfers of borrowed public funds during the coronavirus pandemic. That was a one-off, with no obvious prospect for repeat performances.

America’s struggle for mass prosperity can also be placed in international perspective, thanks to the path-breaking research for the Credit Suisse Global Wealth Databook. Those estimates are still a work in progress for poorer societies, but they look fairly reliable for most affluent Western democracies. The Global Wealth Databook offers estimates for “median wealth per adult” in current US dollars for the years 2000–2021 for 170 countries and places. Those statistics are not directly comparable to the figures in Figure 1—among other things, they are not inflation adjusted. But they do give a sense of comparative performance over time in wealth building for people in the middle of society in question—“median” being the dividing point between the richest and the poorest halves.

Figures 2 and 3 show US estimated median wealth per adult for 2000–2021 in relation to America’s Cold War treaty allies in Europe and Asia. These charts are “busy”[2]—but the underlying pattern is clear enough.

By 2021, estimated US median wealth per adult was lower than in most of our Western European NATO allies, including growth-challenged Italy and Spain; also lower than in any of our Asian treaty allies save for Thailand, which is not yet a high-income country. Further, US performance in wealth-building over these decades has been decidedly weaker than for most Cold War allies in both Asia and Europe.

Surveying these three charts, we may ask: Was there a Post-Cold War “peace dividend”? If so, for whom?

[1] Partly due to exchange rate fluctuations for a USD-denominated series.

[2] These are “balance sheet” estimates of net worth—tangible assets minus liabilities. They do not include future Social Security payments, which economists would also regard as “wealth.” But that “change in your pocket” metric tracks pretty well with how most people regard their own net worth.

14. Expert Backgrounder: Title I of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act vs. Section 702

Excerpts:

Unfortunately, too many journalists – and editors and producers – have fallen prey to these misunderstandings in their own reporting and commentary or have allowed such statements by officials to be published without explaining to readers the logical flaw in making these connections.

The purpose of this short explainer is not to do a deep dive into the minutiae of Section 702 or the legal issues raised by the program, but rather to offer a general, broad-brush view of national security electronic surveillance, and how to differentiate the issues raised by surveillance of U.S. persons (USPERs, a useful acronym adopted by the government) in cases like Crossfire Hurricane from the issues raised by Section 702.

Expert Backgrounder: Title I of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act vs. Section 702

A Quick-Reference Guide to Understanding the Legal Debate About Electronic National Security Surveillance (and How to Spot Imposters Trying to Muddy the Waters)

justsecurity.org · by Asha Rangappa · May 25, 2023

May 25, 2023

An issue that has surfaced in reaction to Special Counsel John Durham’s report on the FBI’s handling of Crossfire Hurricane is the reauthorization of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, set to expire in December of this year. But that connection – drawn from the report to the surveillance program – reflects a confusion and conflation. The two events – the content of the Durham report and the 702 surveillance program – have little, or nothing, to do with each other. This widespread misunderstanding, and the deeper confusion it reflects, threatens to pollute the needed democratic debate and sober consideration of whether to reauthorize or reform one of the most important but controversial tools in the U.S. national security arsenal.

To be sure, Durham’s report reminded us of the many errors highlighted by the Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz in 2019 regarding the evidence used to obtain a FISA order on Carter Page, a former foreign policy advisor on the Trump campaign. And that’s also where some of the confusion starts. According to Politico, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) has used Durham’s report to argue that Section 702 “cannot be reauthorized as is,” and Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) has stated that Durham’s report will “absolutely” play a role in the reauthorization debate. Rep. Kelly Armstrong (R-ND), called Durham’s report an “indictment” of Section 702.

The conflation of the reauthorization of Section 702 with Crossfire Hurricane suggests that these members of Congress are, at best, unaware of the details of the program or, at worst, deliberately muddying the waters in an effort that will have the unintended consequence of substantially benefiting our foreign adversaries. It therefore is worthwhile to understand what the Section 702 debate is about, and what it is not about.

Unfortunately, too many journalists – and editors and producers – have fallen prey to these misunderstandings in their own reporting and commentary or have allowed such statements by officials to be published without explaining to readers the logical flaw in making these connections.

The purpose of this short explainer is not to do a deep dive into the minutiae of Section 702 or the legal issues raised by the program, but rather to offer a general, broad-brush view of national security electronic surveillance, and how to differentiate the issues raised by surveillance of U.S. persons (USPERs, a useful acronym adopted by the government) in cases like Crossfire Hurricane from the issues raised by Section 702.

The Carter Page Surveillance Was Conducted Under Title I of FISA, Not Section 702

Let’s begin with a quick primer on FISA. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was passed in 1978 in response to the abuses in the intelligence community revealed by the Church and Pike oversight committees following Watergate. The framework was created as part of a compromise between the legislative and executive branches on the legal parameters of electronic surveillance conducted for national security (as opposed to criminal) investigative purposes. In accordance with a 1972 Supreme Court case which acknowledged that surveillance conducted for the purpose of obtaining intelligence on foreign powers need not be as onerous as the standard for domestic security surveillance to be reasonable under the Fourth Amendment, FISA creates for foreign intelligence an analogous process to Title III of the Omnibus Safe Streets Act of 1968, which governs the procedure to obtain “wiretaps” for criminal investigations.

Specifically, FISA established a secret court – the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court – comprised of 11 (originally 7) Article III judges selected by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, who sit in rotation. Unlike requests for Title III criminal wiretaps, which must demonstrate to a neutral magistrate probable cause that electronic surveillance will yield evidence of a crime, applications to the Court under Title I of FISA must demonstrate probable cause that the surveillance target is a foreign power, or an agent of a foreign power, and that a significant purpose of the surveillance is to obtain foreign intelligence information. FISA applications targeted at USPERs acting as an agent of a foreign power have a more stringent probable case standard and narrower time limits than for nonUSPERs and foreign powers (such as foreign terrorist organizations) and agents of a foreign power (such as foreign diplomats). If approved by the FISA Court, the government obtains an order (technically not a “warrant”) to be given to the target’s communication provider to commence surveillance on the target.

The big takeaway here is that applications to directly surveil USPERs are conducted under Title I of FISA, and they are done on an individualized basis – that is, for each person the government intends to surveil, it must submit a separate application to the FISA Court outlining the probable cause that the individual is an agent of a foreign power.

Title I of FISA is the exclusive statutory means through which the government can directly surveil any USPERs within the United States. It is also the exclusive statutory means by which nonUSPERs may be targeted when they are located within the geographical boundaries of the United States. Other provisions of FISA (sections 703 and 704) allow for targeting USPERs when they travel abroad under the same probable cause standard.

Section 702 is Programmatic Surveillance

The evolution of Section 702 of FISA is much more recent than the broader FISA framework, including Title I orders. Section 702 has its roots in the George W. Bush administration, which, following 9/11, engaged in non-court-ordered surveillance of communications where one end of the communication was inside of the United States, and one end was abroad (known as Operation STELLAR WIND). The government carried out this operation despite its being in part, if not wholly, illegal under FISA (though the Bush administration construed it as permissible under its Article II authority). After the New York Times exposed the Bush administration’s program, Congress moved to codify a version of it to bring it under the FISA legislative framework. This was first done temporarily through the Protect America Act in 2007 and then as Section 702 of the FISA Amendment Act in 2008. Since then, Section 702 has been periodically reauthorized, including most recently in 2018.

Section 702 permits the executive branch to conduct electronic surveillance of nonUSPERS who are reasonably believed to be located abroad. Like Title I the aim here is not criminal law enforcement but to obtain foreign intelligence information. Importantly, however, Section 702 does not provide a judicial process to review targeting of persons on an individual basis. Rather, it allows the FISC to “certify” a surveillance program presented to it by the Justice Department and for the FISC to continue to review the overall practice of the program on a periodic basis.

In order to be certified, the Justice Department must detail the following three components of the surveillance program:

• Targeting (whose communications will be obtained and how)
• Minimization (the steps the Justice Department takes to avoid the acquisition, retention, and dissemination of communications of people not intended to be captured)
• Querying procedures (how recipient agencies will search the captured communications)

Once the FISC is satisfied that the procedures comport with the Fourth Amendment and the statute, the program is certified. A key difference here from Title I surveillance is that the FISC is not approving surveillance on any particular individual, but rather, a set of procedures which authorizes the NSA to collect certain communications under the approved procedures, subject to periodic reporting to the FISC. As with Title I, Section 702 surveillance permits the Justice Department to require communications service providers to collect communications under the certified targeting procedures.

So who gets targeted? Section 702 surveillance is not based on particular individuals, but rather “selectors” – email addresses or cell phone numbers – which are associated with nonUSPERs reasonably believed to be located abroad and whose communications are likely to return foreign intelligence information. It is possible that some of the intelligence about Russia’s military movements leaked by Jack Texeira, for example, could have been obtained through 702 surveillance. Of course, communications between members of foreign terrorist organizations located abroad would also be fair game. (See, for example, White House Deputy Homeland Security Advisor Joshua Geltzer’s recent statement, in a Just Security’s podcast interview: “locating the world’s most wanted terrorist last year, I mean Ayman al-Zawahiri, the global leader of al Qaeda, involved 702 collection and of course that enabled us to remove from him the battlefield.”).

So if Section 702 targets nonUSPERs outside of the United States, why is this program so controversial? The main issue concerning USPERs when it comes to Section 702 is not direct surveillance, but rather what is known as “incidental collection.” This means that if, in the course of collecting communications from a nonUSPER reasonably believed to be located abroad (using a selector associated with that person), that person is in contact with a USPER, the USPER’s side of the communication will be captured, even though they were not the intended target. In short, some fraction of the hundreds of millions of communications collected by Section 702 will, by necessity, include a not insignificant number of “incidental” USPER communications.

The main debate in the Section 702 reauthorization is how intelligence agencies – and most importantly, an agency like the FBI with both national security and criminal law enforcement functions – utilize these “incidental” communications. As former NSA litigation counsel George Croner has written, all of the communications collected through Section 702 comprise essentially a database consisting of an undifferentiated, “primordial stew” of information. In order to glean anything of value from it, intelligence agencies must conduct a “query” – that is, seeking inside the database for a particular piece of information. Critics of Section 702 argue that using queries to search this “stew” for information related to USPERs – which has been dubbed “backdoor searches” – particularly for the purposes of criminal investigations, raises Fourth Amendment and policy concerns.

As noted previously, it is beyond the scope of this quick reference guide to explore the merits of this contention. The two-part Just Security series on foreign intelligence surveillance reform offers a detailed summary of the arguments for and against reauthorizing Section 702 as is, or whether there should be additional requirements imposed on the FBI, or the intelligence community more broadly, before the 702 database can be queried for information relating to USPERs. It should be noted that, beginning with the reauthorization in 2018, additional requirements have already been added to FBI queries of the 702 database. Some compliance issues have arisen as a result of those additional requirements, which form the central basis of the current reauthorization debate.

For now, the important point to underscore is that any deficiencies in the Carter Page FISA – highlighted either by the Justice Department Inspector General or John Durham – were not a result of Section 702: It is clear that Page’s surveillance was conducted under Title I of FISA. It may very well be that the flaws highlighted by these reports suggest needed reforms to Title I – such as tightening up the probable cause standard for individual FISAs for USPERs. (Notably, Durham wrote that he was largely satisfied with the DOJ and FBI reforms adopted since the Inspector General revealed the problems with the Carter Page and other Title I applications.) Regardless, such policy recommendations involve a discussion wholly unrelated to the technicalities up for debate with the reauthorization of Section 702.

I should note, in conclusion, that while Jordan and others are using the Durham report to conflate Title I and Section 702 of FISA, this obfuscation is not limited to Republicans. In 2018, when 702 was last up for reauthorization, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) invoked the warrantless surveillance on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (on the occasion of his national holiday) to oppose Section 702. Of course, as outlined above, the entire FISA framework was implemented precisely to avoid abuses like those against Dr. King and even if he were alive and being targeted today, Section 702 would not apply to him. Such disingenuous or otherwise mistaken objections to Section 702 reauthorization, regardless of which side of the political aisle they come from, do little to advance a meaningful understanding and discussion of how to balance the need to protect the United States from foreign threats with civil liberties concerns in an evolving technological landscape.

About the Author(s)

Asha Rangappa

Senior Lecturer at Yale’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs. She served as an FBI counterintelligence agent from 2002 to 2005. Member of the editorial board of Just Security. Follow her on Twitter @AshaRangappa_.

15. The end of dollar supremacy

There are many conflicting analyses on the dollar. I want to be optimistic. But this conclusion is sobering.

Excerpt:

The fate of the West hangs in the balance, and it must stop drawing the wrong lessons from Roman history, not the least of which is a stubborn refusal to accept a diminished role in its world. After all, the Roman Empire might have survived had it not weakened itself with wars of choice on its ascendant Persian rival. By finding a way to coexist peacefully with its own rival China, however uncomfortable that may be, the US could do itself and the world a favour.

The end of dollar supremacy

The West's imperial lifecycle is drawing to a close

BY JOHN RAPLEY

unherd.com · by John Rapley · May 25, 2023

In January 1999, in a Washington of bustling bars and soaring stock markets, Bill Clinton rose to deliver his State of the Union address. America was so untroubled by threat or misfortune that it had spent the previous year debating the precise significance of fellatio. But Clinton, who had survived the scandal, exuded unshakeable personal and civilisational self-confidence. Declaring “a new dawn for America” and a future of “limitless possibility”, he called on Congress to decide how to spend all the record surpluses the government was soon going to enjoy. America’s only inconvenience, it seemed, was too much money. Today, as America struggles to support a crumbling dollar, marshal allies against Russia, ward off a rising China, it’s easy to forget that barely two decades ago it strode the planet like a colossus.

But pride before a fall has an ancient lineage, and only the arrogance of the historical present could treat American imperial decline as a novel phenomenon, let alone mere metaphor. Some 16 centuries before Clinton, in an uncannily similar setting of domes and colonnades, a Roman orator stood before the imperial Senate to deliver an equally triumphal speech. It was 1 January 399, inauguration day for the latest in a millennium-old line of consuls, the most prestigious Roman office. This year’s candidate was Flavius Mallius Theodorus. After rising to praise his audience — “here I see gathered all the brilliance of the world” — he went on to proclaim the dawn of a new Golden Age, celebrating the unparalleled prosperity of the Empire.

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Rome’s rapid comeuppance is now a historical parable that America can learn from in real-time. Because the rhetoric of Clinton and his ancient predecessor was spoken from atop the crest of the same wave: an identical process of rise and decline which Peter Heather and I, in our new book, call “the imperial lifecycle”. Empires grow rich and powerful and attain supremacy through the economic exploitation of their colonial periphery. But in the process, they inadvertently spur the economic development of that same periphery until it can roll back and ultimately displace its overlord.

America has never thought of itself as an empire, mainly because with the exception of the few islands in the Pacific and Caribbean, it has never accumulated a large network of overseas territories. But this modern European model, in which colonies were (and in a few cases, still are) administered by governors who answered directly to the imperial capital, was but one of many. The late Roman Empire, for instance, functioned as an “inside-out” empire — effectively run from the provinces, with Rome serving more as a spiritual than administrative capital. What held it all together was the shared culture of the provincial nobility that ran it, most of whom has provincial origins but had been socialised into what Peter Heather has called the imperial culture of “Latin, towns and togas”.

The American Empire — or more accurately the American-led Western empire — mirrors this confederal model, with an updated cultural-political glue that we might call “neoliberalism, Nato and denim”. Under this regime, the nation-state was primary, borders were inviolable, relatively open trade and capital movement prevailed, governing elites were committed to liberal principles, and bureaucracy was based on increasingly standardised education systems (with economics training assuming an increasingly central role as the century progressed). But since its establishment in 1944 at the Bretton Woods conference, its fundamental economic model has been in the timeless imperial mould: exploitation of the periphery to the benefit of the imperial core.

The great wave of decolonisation that followed the war was meant to end that. But the Bretton Woods system, which created a trading regime that favoured industrial over primary producers and enshrined the dollar as the global reserve currency, ensured that the net flow of financial resources continued to move from developing countries to developed ones. Even when the economies of the newly-independent states grew, those of the G7 economies and their partners grew more. And while the treaty arrangements that cemented this system were periodically updated at international summits, even then the US and its main trading partners would typically draft a deal for sign-off by everyone else. As a result, the gap between rich and poor countries grew bigger than ever.

Clinton was speaking at the all-time peak of this American imperial order. Two years earlier, a financial crisis that had begun in Asia had ricocheted across the developing world. And when protesters filled streets and governments across the Global South collapsed, the rich in developing countries panicked and sent their money into the safe haven of US Treasury paper. That influx of cash sent the late Nineties US economy into overdrive, creating the abundance that Clinton took to be endless.

In fact, as he was speaking, the overall flow of global capital had already begun moving the other way. By this time, quietly but steadily, developing countries like China and India had shaken off the torpor of earlier decades and were starting to grow in leaps and bounds. The brief recessions induced in developing countries by the Asian Crisis and the consequent boom in the West obscured the fact that the really dynamic economies of the world were now in what was called the Third World. Once the protests died down and normal business resumed there, investors in the developing world — followed by fund-managers in Western countries — sent their money back to the growing economies of the global periphery.

In the Roman Empire, peripheral states developed the political and military capacity to end Roman domination by force. In the modern case, the conflict was fought through diplomatic, economic and political channels. The year of Clinton’s panegyric now looks pivotal — not only for the changing capital winds, but because of what happened at that year’s World Trade Organization summit in Seattle. After decades in which they’d more or less signed off on done-and-dusted deals, delegations from some of the big developing countries got together, refused to go along and brought the negotiations to a halt. As their diplomatic and political capacity rose to match their economic heft, developing countries were now demanding, and getting, better deals.

The Third World was rising, and it quickly showed in the economic data. On the eve of the millennium, the cusp of its supremacy — a supremacy no other empire in history had come remotely close to matching — the West accounted for four-fifths of the global economy. Today, that’s down to three-fifths, and falling. The fastest-growing economies in the world are now all in the old periphery; the worst-performing economies are disproportionately in the West. These are the economic trends that have created our present landscape of superpower conflict — most saliently between America and China. A once-mighty empire is now challenged and feels embattled. Taken aback by the refusal of so many developing countries to join in isolating Russia, the West is now waking up to the reality of the emerging, polycentric and fluid global order.

These trends are only set to continue. But this is where America and Rome diverge. The Roman Empire existed at a time where there was one fixed factor of production: land. The economy was therefore necessarily steady-state and overwhelmingly agricultural. For the periphery to rise, the core had to fall, as the barbarian invaders seized physical Roman real estate. But in the modern world, where continued technological progress means economies can keep moving forward, if more slowly, decline may only need to be relative. The West can continue to grow, and to play a pre-eminent role in global governance.

But meek acceptance isn’t what builds empires in the first place. The danger is that, obsessed with past glories and tempted by a desire to turn back the clock, Western countries attempt to restore their greatness. Since its own imperial marginalisation, Britain has been possessed by a manic and counter-productive declinism, most recently responding to the 2008 crash with a programme of austerity that has sunk its economy into what may become a permanent decay. America’s interminable annual wranglings over debt ceilings could, if they continue, diminish the attractiveness of the dollar, at a time when developing countries are looking for alternatives.

The fate of the West hangs in the balance, and it must stop drawing the wrong lessons from Roman history, not the least of which is a stubborn refusal to accept a diminished role in its world. After all, the Roman Empire might have survived had it not weakened itself with wars of choice on its ascendant Persian rival. By finding a way to coexist peacefully with its own rival China, however uncomfortable that may be, the US could do itself and the world a favour.

John Rapley is a political economist at Cambridge University, and the author of Twilight of the Money Gods. His next book, co-authored with Peter Heather, is Why Empires Fall: Rome, America and the Future of the West, published on 25 May

jarapley

unherd.com · by John Rapley · May 25, 2023

16. US Army receives mixed signals from industry on ‘radio as a service’

Just issue everyone iPhones and use Protonmail and Signal and Whatsapp with the handsets connected directly to satellites for world wide communication. (note sarcasm)

US Army receives mixed signals from industry on ‘radio as a service’

c4isrnet.com · by Colin Demarest · May 25, 2023

PHILADELPHIA — U.S. Army officials are considering what’s next for an initiative known as radio as a service, after receiving feedback from industry that swung from enthusiasm to skepticism.

The Army published a request for information regarding the as-a-service tack, a potential pivot away from the traditional means of buying and maintaining radios, and received 15 responses by March.

Input ranged from “folks wanting to be the the manager of the process, all the way to folks providing us everything that a lower tactical network needs,” Col. Shermoan Daiyaan, the project manager for tactical radios at the Program Executive Office for Command, Control and Communications-Tactical, or PEO C3T, said May 24 at an industry conference in Philadelphia.

At the same time, other vendors came “back and said, ‘Nope, we’re not going to play,’” Daiyaan said. “That was a response, and that’s data. We’ll appreciate that and take that to heart.”

The Army has hundreds of thousands of radios — too many to quickly and cost-effectively modernize given security deadlines and constant competition with China and Russia, which have sophisticated signals intelligence that can cue onto communications. Service leaders have said the as-a-service method, while experimental, could drive down costs and boost adaptability.

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As initially teased in December by Army Under Secretary Gabe Camarillo, radio as a service would be more akin to a subscription offered by some makers of consumer products. It could mirror other deals in which companies furnish goods and services on a rolling basis, keep them up to date and handle quality control.

“We left that RFI very open, very generic. We approached it from: We don’t want to shape your response,” Daiyaan said. “It’s such a novel idea that we didn’t want to take things off the table.”

The colonel expects to speak with senior leaders about the effort in the coming weeks. PEO C3T is tasked with overhauling the Army’s battlefield connectivity tools.

“What we’re trying to figure out is if there’s something in there to explore,” Daiyaan said. “I believe there’s something there to explore.”

About Colin Demarest

Colin Demarest is a reporter at C4ISRNET, where he covers military networks, cyber and IT. Colin previously covered the Department of Energy and its National Nuclear Security Administration — namely Cold War cleanup and nuclear weapons development — for a daily newspaper in South Carolina. Colin is also an award-winning photographer.

17. The Art of Supply Chain Interdiction: To Win Without Fighting

Excerpts:

Supply chain risk identification and mitigation create an insatiable demand for supply chain management graduates in the private sector. Based on the realized and potential implications for national security, the U.S. government also needs to be on hiring binges for these specialties. The disruption in drone supply chains mentioned in earlier examples makes it clear: Supply chains are a tactical front far from the actual geographic locations of war, and supply chain experts are the sentries acting as the first line of defense.

A diversified and global economy presents unique attack vectors of relatively low risk and exposes vulnerabilities of offshore supply chains. Nation-states possess resources and budgets capable of affecting entire industries that can inflict severe consequences on their adversaries. Supply chain interdiction in the open market can achieve desired outcomes without kinetic action or politically fraught sanctions. Using shell companies and proxies obfuscates intent and makes assigning attribution dubious. These actions in the gray zone will make them appealing, and their lower risk likely reduces the threshold for deployment. Considering that at least two successful examples of supply interdiction have already occurred in war zones, U.S. military planners would be wise to take notice and look for opportunities for deployment. At the same time, care must be taken to ensure our defense industries are not equally vulnerable to such an attack. To do so, planners and the government should recruit personnel versed in supply chain management and harness the growing number of graduates in this increasingly important field.

The Art of Supply Chain Interdiction: To Win Without Fighting - War on the Rocks

warontherocks.com · by Trevor Phillips-Levine · May 26, 2023

The U.S. Army looked on with apprehension as small and cheap drone weapons proliferated within the ranks of insurgents in the Middle East. In response to drone proliferation and growing risks posed to U.S. ground forces, the U.S. Army tasked the Asymmetric Warfare Group, and later the Threat Systems Management Office, to procure similar drones to those used overseas for counter-drone training. At the time, militant groups purchased remote-controlled airplane kits and commercial drones from online marketplaces like China-based Alibaba through front companies and proxies. After purchase, the components or drones were shipped to intermediaries before being delivered into the hands of militants. The seemingly innocuous toys and parts were modified to carry explosives with a fusing device once within the conflict zone, challenging traditional concepts of air superiority. The red team needed to grow quickly and went on a massive buying spree, utilizing shell companies and contractors. But something very interesting happened afterward.

The Army’s voracious appetite for drones and associated parts upended the supply chain, changing how insurgents constructed drones. With online marketplaces sold out of common airframe components, militant groups could not procure significant quantities. A former contractor on the project revealed that weaponized drone production dropped precipitously when combined with the U.S. military’s counter-drone campaign in the theater. The U.S. Army’s effort to equip a red team for the drone threat it faced in the Middle East unwittingly interdicted militant weapon components. The U.S. Army successfully skewed the market to interdict the supply chain without firing a shot.

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This unwitting victory was short-lived as insurgent groups adapted and fabricated their own drones or found substitutes for hard-to-procure parts. Still, using the open market demonstrated a unique way to disrupt ongoing insurgent operations. In 2015, the Transportation Journal published an article titled “Supply Chain Interdiction as a Competitive Weapon.” The article recognizes that “vigorous competition” downstream is inevitable if an adversary can deploy its resources at will and scale. The article suggests an entity can avoid this competition by effectively manipulating the adversary supply chain, termed “supply chain interdiction.”

The Department of Defense should view supply chain interdiction within the open marketplace as an effective weapon of war. Operational planners need to study adversarial supply chains in detail to determine where deployment opportunities exist and to hedge against a similar attack. To accomplish this task, the services should recruit supply chain professionals and place them within their ranks alongside other servicemember specialties. With real fears of critical supply chain compromise, supply chain professionals must be considered important tools in the tactical and operational levels of warfare and not just for risk mitigation in the commercial industry.

Supply Chain Interdiction

Harassing and destroying supply lines through a direct attack is as old as warfare. Hannibal had to divert resources from the intended sack of Rome to protect Carthage’s power base after a brilliant Roman ploy, delaying and eventually halting his advance. Nazi leader Adolf Hitler attempted to use submarines to sink Allied shipping during the Battle of the Atlantic to starve Britain into submission. Ukraine used rocket systems, drones, and sabotage to hit ammunition dumps, railyards, and bridges to erode Russian military power.

But what if a country could erode combat effectiveness simply by buying the entire supply of a critical component in the open market? In The Art of War, interpretations of Sun Tzu’s text place bloodless victories as the cornerstone of his warfare philosophy — to win without fighting. Supply chains are acute pressure points that can quickly paralyze a war machine, and their manipulation to subdue an adversary appears to align with Sun Tzu’s overarching tenet. Strategists have both salivated over and fretted about upstream supply chain attacks. The CHIPS Act is meant as a way for the United States and its allies to ensure access to critical semiconductors used in almost every modern gadget and weapons system during a war or in times of instability. But the CHIPS Act is also a way to shore up the integrity of the supply chain to guard against real or imagined fears of an upstream supply chain attack from suppliers in China. The fear is rooted in the belief that China could use domestically manufactured electronics to compromise critical systems or choke supply during a crisis.

Designing a Supply Chain Interdiction Campaign

The purpose of interdiction is to “prevent a rival from acquiring, moving, or converting critical resources” to gain a military advantage by preventing “a competitor from using resources at the time of their choosing.” There are four strategies for supply chain interdiction: to delay, divert, disrupt, or destroy the ability of a rival to deploy its resources.

Delay and disruption strategies share similar definitions. A delay forces a selection of an alternate that imparts a delay of tactical or operational significance. Meanwhile, a diversion strategy is to “cause the consumption of resources or capabilities that are critical to a competitor’s operations.” It is useful to explain with a hypothetical scenario. Say a country signs a lucrative deal with a major overseas oil producer and locks in priority shipments over a competitor. Unable to fully satisfy domestic consumption, the competitor begins drawing down its strategic oil reserves, eroding its self-sustainment capability in times of crisis.

Disruption strategies remove predictability from a process and force a reaction. They prevent the deployment of resources in the manner the adversary desires it, other than time — for example, the deployment of smaller quantities of equipment or in a location that is other than preferred. Destruction strategies seek to destroy a portion of the supply chain to “completely prevent a competitor’s ability to supply itself with critical inputs.” Destroying an enemy’s ability to deploy its resources using supply chain interdiction is possible, but it depends on the timeframe. It is only a matter of time before a counter is discovered and implemented on the adversary’s side.

A sudden increase in demand outside normal variation is a demand shock in which a supplier cannot react quickly enough to satisfy all demand. When a supplier analyzes the new demand signal and adjusts production to meet it, the destruction of an adversary’s supply chain is realized. However, the adversary supply chain is restored as alternative sources are located, and supplier surge production replenishes stocks. In the case of insurgents in Syria and Iraq and the U.S. Army’s red team, the inability to resource critical components “destroyed” insurgent drone manufacturing for a short period. However, as time passed and substitutes or workarounds were discovered, the impacts shifted from the destruction of insurgent drone manufacturing to delays and disruption.

Identifying Deployment Vectors

For supply chain interdiction to disrupt an adversary’s operations, the component or material requires a narrow supplier base controlled by independent third parties. In other words, a supplier will not withhold an order from one party to benefit another because they operate in the free market. In many cases, the United States has used sanctions to try and shape this market by imposing penalties for certain kinds of trade. The goal is to disincentivize free market behavior. Sanctions also require broad acceptance to be effective. Curtailing markets have negative repercussions on suppliers. For example, the U.S. satellite industry lost significant market share to European competitors after International Trafficking in Arms Regulations restricted the sale of U.S.-made satellite components. In contrast, supply chain interdiction works within the bounds of a free market. This makes supply chain interdiction quicker to deploy, less disruptive to suppliers, and therefore less likely to raise objections from industry and governments outside the targeted entity.

Ideally, components or materials targeted for supply chain interdiction are highly manufactured. Highly manufactured components or materials likely require proprietary knowledge or advanced manufacturing processes. Such traits present high barriers to entry for substitute manufacturers as they must acquire the requisite knowledge and expensive infrastructure. Due to their complexity and resource requirements, such components cannot be easily replaced or swapped out with an alternative supplier, which slows market response to demand shocks. A good example of this is the maritime industry. In the abstract, suppose company “A” makes a specialized marine engine used in warships where customer orders average about five monthly. Another company, “B,” produces three engines monthly. To account for demand variation, company “A” manufactures six engines monthly and represents the factory’s maximum output without substantial and time-consuming investment. The unsold engines are placed in inventory.

The maritime industry produces nine marine engines monthly and will sell engines to any customer that can pay for new or inventoried production. Now, suppose two countries are experiencing rising hostilities over the sovereignty of an island, and one utilizes the specialized marine engines from both fictional companies for naval warship propulsion. Both countries recognize that naval power will be paramount to resolving the issue. One country already possesses a sizeable navy, but the other is conducting a naval buildup. To prevent its rival from matching its naval force, the country with the larger navy purchases the entire supply of engines, locking up the supply of engines for months. The goal is to delay the growing power’s ability to deploy forces in the numbers and timeframe desired to combat the other. In the timeframes of a crisis, such delays could prove decisive.

The above vignette focused on the maritime industry, which contains highly manufactured specialty parts like marine engines, propellers, and propeller shafts. Despite China possessing one of the largest shipbuilding capacities in the world, it is still heavily reliant on imports of marine engines and propellers. Many of these components come from Europe. Data from 2021 showed that Germany was the largest exporter of marine engines. By comparison, China was the world’s largest importer of marine engines. Some of China’s Luyang III guided missile destroyers were even found to contain German engines.

The U.S. Navy possesses its own foundry for making specialty submarine propellers. However, American shipyards mostly import propellers, like competitor shipyards in China. Coincidentally, Germany was also the top exporter of marine propellers. Such dependencies show a potential attack vector and vulnerability for China and the United States. Germany represents a concentrated supplier base with a sizeable market share of a highly manufactured critical component.

The drone industry presents other opportunities for interdiction. Many commercial and hobbyist drone components, consisting of controllers, optics, motors, and airframes, are manufactured in China. These components can be found on online marketplaces like Alibaba, which is similar to Amazon. When the U.S. Army made massive purchases of drone components to start its counter-drone programs, it spiked demand beyond normal variation and depleted stocks faster than they could be replaced. Ukraine pulled off a similar disruption against Russia years later.

Supply Chain Interdiction During Large-Scale Combat Operations

During the early days of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the exploits of anti-tank missiles like the Javelin were well known. As the war progressed, images of drone strikes came to the forefront, first from Turkey’s TB2 drones, then from civilian drones like the DJI Mavic. With Ukraine’s airspace contested and proving deadly for Ukrainian and Russian air forces, both sides leaned heavily on small drones. Portions of these drone fleets are comprised of first-person-view drones. Originally developed for racing, these drones are cheap and can be built from kits or plans online. Ukraine mated these drones to munitions like rocket-propelled grenades and used the first-person view to manually fly the drones into targets as suicide munitions.

In preparation for its upcoming offensive, Ukraine went on a buying spree, scooping up first-person-view drone components from global suppliers. Some estimates place the total Ukrainian buy between 50,000 and 100,000 units. Russian Telegram channels indicate extreme worry about an impending swarm attack and a race to procure a similar capability to deploy against Ukraine. Russia has used first-person-view drones to attack Ukrainian positions in the past. Chief among Russia’s concerns is the apparent ineffectiveness of its current air defense systems against small drones, especially when launched in large numbers and outside the range of jamming systems.

The predominance of first-person-view drone components comes from China. Considering that some Russian assessments assert that nearly the entire world supply of first-person-view drone components was recently purchased by Ukraine, Russia cannot deploy a similar capability in the near term. Thus, Ukraine may be the first country to successfully pull off a supply chain interdiction of an adversary engaged in large-scale combat operations. The effect leaves Russia mostly with defensive options and without potent counterattack weaponry.

Ukraine’s interdiction represents the ideal scenario where the procured materials can be redeployed directly against an adversary; however, materials do not necessarily need to be redeployed. The simple act of denying the material from being deployed with an enemy force achieves the desired outcome. In this example, Ukraine succeeded in destroying and delaying Russia’s near-term ability to deploy a similar capability, diverting precious resources from its war effort to counter-drone defenses, and disrupting its war plans.

Inverse Vulnerabilities

The sensitivity of military programs and government regulations require defense companies to maintain visibility at least six to seven layers deep. This includes the manufacturer of a component, the manufacturers of each subcomponent that makes up the larger component, subcomponent suppliers, and their suppliers. Sometimes that is not enough, as evidenced by a magnet containing an alloy manufactured by a Chinese company being found in the F-35’s engine supply chain. While assessed as not a threat to the F-35, the episode demonstrated the difficulty in finding domestic or approved suppliers of critical defense raw materials. Such sobering realizations are the impetus for America’s attempt to revive domestic rare earth production. Even if a country can fulfill its appetite for highly manufactured components domestically, there is still a risk of supply chain interdiction with raw materials.

Supply chain risk identification and mitigation create an insatiable demand for supply chain management graduates in the private sector. Based on the realized and potential implications for national security, the U.S. government also needs to be on hiring binges for these specialties. The disruption in drone supply chains mentioned in earlier examples makes it clear: Supply chains are a tactical front far from the actual geographic locations of war, and supply chain experts are the sentries acting as the first line of defense.

A diversified and global economy presents unique attack vectors of relatively low risk and exposes vulnerabilities of offshore supply chains. Nation-states possess resources and budgets capable of affecting entire industries that can inflict severe consequences on their adversaries. Supply chain interdiction in the open market can achieve desired outcomes without kinetic action or politically fraught sanctions. Using shell companies and proxies obfuscates intent and makes assigning attribution dubious. These actions in the gray zone will make them appealing, and their lower risk likely reduces the threshold for deployment. Considering that at least two successful examples of supply interdiction have already occurred in war zones, U.S. military planners would be wise to take notice and look for opportunities for deployment. At the same time, care must be taken to ensure our defense industries are not equally vulnerable to such an attack. To do so, planners and the government should recruit personnel versed in supply chain management and harness the growing number of graduates in this increasingly important field.

Become a Member

Trevor Phillips-Levine is a naval aviator and close air support instructor at the Naval Aviation Warfighting Development Center. He holds a master of business administration degree in aerospace and defense from the University of Tennessee. He also serves as an advisor for weaponized small drone development in a cooperative research and development agreement.

The author would like to thank Dr. John E. Bell and Dr. Ben Skipper at the University of Tennessee’s Haslam College of Business Supply Chain Department for their assistance in writing this article. Additionally, Taylor Abington, CEO of Abington Aviation Consulting, provided insight into insurgent drone activity.

Commentary

warontherocks.com · by Trevor Phillips-Levine · May 26, 2023

18. A Nuclear Collision Course in South Asia

Conclusion:

Tellis hints at a tantalizing solution to India’s problems. The United States could provide India with a reliable thermonuclear weapon design. The trilateral security pact among Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States that is known as AUKUS, which will assist Australia in acquiring nuclear-powered submarines, could be expanded to include India. Might the Americans also share their nuclear reactor designs with New Delhi? But for this to happen, India, which has kept the United States at arm’s length practically since its birth, would have to finally and firmly close ranks with the leading Indo-Pacific democracies and formally forsake the nonaligned strategic autonomy it has long enshrined at the heart of its foreign policy.

A Nuclear Collision Course in South Asia

The Budding Arms Race Among China, India, and Pakistan

By Andrew F. Krepinevich Jr.

May 26, 2023

Foreign Affairs · by Andrew F. Krepinevich Jr. · May 26, 2023

In the summer of 2021, the world learned that China was dramatically expanding its nuclear arsenal. Satellite imagery showed Beijing building as many as 300 new ballistic missile silos. The Pentagon now projects that China’s stockpile of nuclear weapons, which had for years rested in the low hundreds, could spike to 1,500 warheads by 2035, confirming suspicions that Beijing has decided to join Russia and the United States in the front rank of nuclear powers.

Security experts are only beginning to sort through the implications of China’s nuclear breakout. They would do well to consider Ashley Tellis’s new book, Striking Asymmetries, which assesses the implications of Beijing’s actions from the vantage point of the rivalries between South Asia’s three nuclear powers: China, India, and Pakistan. In a work that should be required reading for senior political and military leaders, Tellis presents a compelling case why this tripolar nuclear system, which has for decades remained remarkably stable, may be on the verge of becoming far more dangerous.

Tellis draws upon decades of experience in South Asian security affairs, unique access to senior policymakers and military leaders in the three rivals’ defense establishments, and a remarkable ability to make seemingly abstract technical concepts readily understood by those with even a passing interest in the subject matter. The result is the most comprehensive, informed, and accessible assessment to date of this nuclear rivalry—and one that cannot be ignored.

THE RACE IS ON

China and Pakistan have a long and close relationship, in part built around their mutual view of India as a rival. India finds itself sandwiched between these two often hostile powers. Yet despite a history of wars and persistent low-grade conflict between India and its two rivals, a general war has been averted since India and Pakistan became nuclear powers a quarter century ago. Moreover, the three countries have not found themselves caught up in a nuclear arms race. Until recently, they viewed their nuclear weapons primarily as political instruments, not as tools for actual warfighting. All three adopted a “minimum deterrent” nuclear posture, maintaining the lowest number of nuclear weapons necessary to inflict unacceptable damage to their adversaries’ key cities even after suffering a nuclear attack.

In keeping with this strategy, the three Asian rivals avoided maintaining a significant portion of their arsenals on high alert. Instead, they stored their weapons in caves, in deep underground facilities, or in other concealed locations. Rejecting American and Russian notions that “retaliation delayed is retaliation denied,” the three countries, especially China and India, forswore the need for a swift response to a nuclear attack. To be sure, they would respond eventually—in days, weeks, or even months—but they did not accept the imperative of immediacy. As a result, these countries have avoided making heavy investments in early warning systems while retaining centralized control over their arsenals.

But the prospects for sustaining this era of minimum deterrence appear increasingly shaky. The tripolar rivalry has not been locked in amber: Tellis describes strongly held beliefs among top security officials in China, India, and Pakistan that their nuclear postures are inadequate. Led by China and Pakistan, with India following in their wake, the three rivals are now on a course that will result in a dramatic expansion of their nuclear arsenals, even if Russia and the United States pursue substantial cuts to theirs.

TWO AGAINST ONE

At the core of Tellis’s assessment are the differences—“asymmetries”— driving the tripolar rivalry. One fundamental difference is that China and Pakistan are revisionist powers seeking to alter the existing order, while India remains content with the status quo. China possesses the most formidable nuclear arsenal of the three, followed by Pakistan, with India trailing.

There is also an asymmetry in the three powers’ strategic focus. Pakistani security officials are obsessed with India, while India’s focus is overwhelmingly on China. China’s sights, however, have shifted beyond regional to global rivalries, principally with the United States. It is this competition with Washington that is driving Beijing’s nuclear breakout. For China, India’s deterrent is rapidly assuming a peripheral role, similar to that played by China in American nuclear planning during the Cold War.

Beijing’s support for Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program, which includes providing Islamabad with blueprints for a bomb and fissile material, has further complicated India’s position. Pakistan’s leaders are looking to abandon minimum deterrence in favor of “full-spectrum deterrence,” where their nuclear forces cover multiple contingencies in the event of war with India. There are three central factors spurring Pakistani officials to adopt this more aggressive posture. First, Islamabad is aware that its conventional forces are weaker than India’s and believes it has no alternative but to employ, if need be, its nuclear forces to offset this asymmetry. Second, given that India is far larger than Pakistan, Islamabad believes it must be able to inflict greater destruction on India in a retaliatory strike than India will inflict on it. This requires Pakistan to maintain a larger nuclear arsenal to target India’s population and economic hubs in the event of war. Third, Pakistan also hopes that its nuclear forces prevent India from undertaking large-scale military action against it in response to Islamabad’s ongoing support for militant groups in the disputed region of Kashmir.

Tellis shows that accomplishing full-spectrum deterrence will require Pakistan to expand its arsenal substantially. For instance, he notes that stopping a major advance of Indian conventional forces into Pakistani territory would require scores of so-called tactical nuclear weapons, weapons that Islamabad currently lacks.

A FRAGILE PEACE

Although Tellis argues that Beijing’s and Islamabad’s nuclear provocations do not automatically portend growing instability in the region, the evidence he presents suggests otherwise. He finds that Beijing’s growing arsenal will not necessarily place India’s security at greater risk—but describes a set of highly plausible Chinese actions that, in combination with a superpower-sized arsenal, risk undermining India’s confidence in its own nuclear deterrent.

To begin with, Beijing is seeking the capability to launch nuclear reprisals far more quickly than ever before. This requires China to maintain a portion of its force on heightened alert, which may not have posed a threat to India when China possessed a few hundred weapons. But if Beijing placed a significant percentage of its expanded arsenal of 1,000 or more warheads on high alert, the strategic ground would shift considerably. India would now face a neighbor capable of launching a large-scale attack with little or no warning.

India’s ability to withstand a nuclear strike and retain the capacity to inflict catastrophic destruction in response is closely tied to the security of its underground nuclear storage sites. China currently lacks the ability to destroy them—even assuming it knows their locations. That could change, however, once China’s arsenal has more than 1,000 warheads, especially if China improves the accuracy of its weapons. Such a development, combined with Beijing’s adoption of increased alert levels for its nuclear forces, would set alarm bells ringing in New Delhi; Indian officials could conclude that China has the capacity to disarm India’s nuclear weapons arsenal.

China may also enhance its air and missile defenses, making matters even more precarious for India. These defenses would minimize the threat posed by any “broken-back” Indian nuclear retaliation—in other words, an attack that uses whatever weapons survive a disarming Chinese strike. But New Delhi would surely know that employing the remnants of its arsenal to retaliate against China would leave it vulnerable to Pakistani nuclear blackmail. Put simply, India would risk being left with no credible nuclear deterrent to resist coercion by Islamabad.

Tellis is correct to note that China’s development of these capabilities is not assured. Yet during Beijing’s decades-old conventional military buildup, it has sought to match every significant U.S. capability, including stealth fighters, military satellite constellations, aircraft carriers, and cyberweaponry. Tellis recognizes that even if China creates such a set of capabilities, it must still know the location of India’s storage sites in order to target them—and have high confidence that its intelligence is accurate and comprehensive. This uncertainty could restrain Beijing. But at the same time, New Delhi may not feel comfortable simply trusting that its nuclear sites have not yet been unearthed by Chinese intelligence or presuming that Chinese leaders are wary of taking big risks.

NEW DELHI’S DILEMMA

How might India respond to China’s and Pakistan’s nuclear provocations? Tellis points out that India is not without options—but that each path has its pitfalls.

First, he shows that if India wanted to, it could easily match China weapon for weapon. Yet he believes New Delhi would prefer to maintain its minimum deterrent strategy, emphasizing its ability to inflict severe damage on its adversaries’ cities. This stems in no small part from the expense India would incur by following Beijing in its quest to match America’s nuclear arsenal. Still, Tellis acknowledges that India’s arsenal will have to expand its nuclear holdings to possess the warheads needed to inflict unacceptable damage on both China and Pakistan. And as India increases its arsenal, Pakistan is sure to do the same—completing the regional chain reaction triggered by China’s nuclear expansion.

Tellis rejects the “more of the same” option of expanding India’s underground storage facilities, showing persuasively that it would prove costlier to accomplish than it would for China to simply expand the number of weapons needed to destroy them. Rather, he argues, India’s solution is to be found in stealth and mobility. This could be achieved by creating a nuclear ballistic missile submarine force and by shifting more of India’s arsenal to mobile road and rail missile launchers.

As for China’s air and missile defenses, Tellis points out that India might address the problem by deploying penetration aid decoys on its missiles. These decoys are designed to present themselves as actual warheads to missile defense radars, thereby inducing the defender to expend precious interceptor missiles engaging false targets. This would offset, if only partially, New Delhi’s need to expand its nuclear arsenal.

The United States could provide India with a reliable thermonuclear weapon design.

Yet even if India were to pursue these actions, it would still face significant challenges. The threat of a Chinese preemptive strike may compel India to develop an effective early warning system to enable it to reduce its arsenal’s vulnerability by sending its weapons out to sea and flushing its land-based missiles from their silos. New Delhi would also have to establish a new command-and-control system to direct the actions of its nuclear submarines. Yet while India is in the process of constructing nuclear-powered ballistic submarines, it still has a long way to go in building a significant force and overcoming the technological hurdles necessary to create a credible seaborne nuclear deterrent. Tellis notes that among these challenges, New Delhi is experiencing problems with its naval nuclear reactor designs.

Then there are India’s nuclear weapons. New Delhi has only conducted a handful of nuclear tests—not enough to validate its thermonuclear designs to offer high confidence that these weapons will perform as designed. Its most reliable weapon has a yield of 12 kilotons, whereas China’s weapons have yields as much as 100 times greater. Addressing these shortfalls may require India to resume testing—and risk incurring sanctions from the United States and other nations.

Tellis hints at a tantalizing solution to India’s problems. The United States could provide India with a reliable thermonuclear weapon design. The trilateral security pact among Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States that is known as AUKUS, which will assist Australia in acquiring nuclear-powered submarines, could be expanded to include India. Might the Americans also share their nuclear reactor designs with New Delhi? But for this to happen, India, which has kept the United States at arm’s length practically since its birth, would have to finally and firmly close ranks with the leading Indo-Pacific democracies and formally forsake the nonaligned strategic autonomy it has long enshrined at the heart of its foreign policy.

• ANDREW F. KREPINEVICH, JR., is a Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute and an Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Center for a New American Security.

Foreign Affairs · by Andrew F. Krepinevich Jr. · May 26, 2023

19. Sad Reality: The Ukraine War Is Now Going Russia's Way

I hope this report is inaccurate.

Sad Reality: The Ukraine War Is Now Going Russia's Way

Recent evidence indicates the Russian side has made tactical and operational improvements that are having an impact on the ground in Ukraine.

19fortyfive.com · by Daniel Davis · May 25, 2023

From almost the opening days of the Russia-Ukraine War, a running theme among Western analysts has been that the Russian military has badly underperformed and the Ukrainian Armed Forces constantly exceeded expectations.

Few seem to have noticed, however, that the pendulum on the battlefield has shifted.

Shift for Russia in Ukraine

Recent evidence indicates the Russian side has made tactical and operational improvements that are having an impact on the ground in Ukraine.

Washington policymakers need to update their understanding of the current trajectory of the war to ensure the U.S. is not caught off guard by battlefield events – and that our interests don’t suffer as a result.

There has been no shortage of legitimate evidence to support the contention that throughout 2022 the Russian side performed much worse than most expected and that Ukraine performed better than anticipated. Russia’s initial battle plan was flawed at the strategic, operational, and tactical levels.

Moscow allocated an invasion force that was too small for the task, dispersed across four axes of advance (ensuring that none would be strong enough to succeed on its own), and was not equipped with supplies to sustain a long war.

Ukraine was more prepared for an invasion than many originally believed and took impressive action quickly to stem the Russian advance, blunting each axis, and imposing serious casualties on the invaders.

In contrast to Russian blunders, Zelensky’s troops initially performed well at the strategic, operational, and tactical levels such that Russia was forced into a major withdrawal of the bulk of its armored forces from Kyiv and Kharkiv barely a month into the war.

Russian Deployments

It was a logical and rational strategic decision for Russia to redeploy its forces to strengthen the Donbas front in April 2022. But even then, ample evidence began to pile up that tactically, there were still grave weaknesses in the Russian forces, such as the infamous May 2022 crossing of the Seversky-Donetsk river, which saw an entire battalion wiped out. All the news wasn’t bad for Russia, however, as through the month of July Putin’s forces captured a number of key cities.

After repositioning its forces, Russia Captured Mariupol, Lyman, Popasna, Severodonetsk, and Lysychansk. But exposing Russia’s ongoing operational weaknesses, Ukrainian forces launched two offensives, one of which caught Russia completely by surprise, resulting in the recapture of Lyman. The first was in the Kherson province, which started off badly for Ukraine. But while all Moscow’s attention was on Kherson, Ukraine unleashed a major drive north near Kharkiv.

Back and Forth Continues

Russian leaders had been asleep at the wheel, focusing all of their attention on Kherson and literally ignoring Kharkiv, trying to secure their northern flank with a paltry number of minimally trained national guardsmen. Ukraine exploited this mistake and drove Russian troops back over 100km to the Svatavo-Kremenna line. While still reeling from this blow, Russia faced a dilemma in Kherson city: fight a bloody defensive battle in the city or surrender it without a fight.

Russia chose the latter. By October, Russian leaders were being ridiculed in the West as having been seriously wounded by Ukraine’s twin offensives, and talk of a Ukrainian victory picked up steam, with former U.S. Army general Ben Hodges claiming Ukraine could win the war “by the end of the year” 2022.

As of November 2022, it was fair to say the Russian general staff had been outperformed by the Ukrainian general staff. Many pundits in the West concluded that Russian troops and leaders were deeply flawed and incapable of improving, believing that Russia would remain incapable tactically for the duration of the war.

What many of these analysts failed to recognize, however, is that Russia has vastly more capacity to make war, both in terms of material and personnel, and therefore has the capacity to absorb enormous losses and still remain viable. Further, Russian history is replete with examples of starting out poorly in wars, suffering large casualties, and then recovering to turn the tide. Ukraine, on the other hand, has significantly fewer resources or troops and therefore has less room for error.

Timeframe

Over the now 15 months of war, Ukraine has fought and lost four major urban battles against Russia, suffering progressively worse levels of casualties in each: Severodonetsk, Lysychansk, Soledar, and most recently Bakhmut.

When Russia was faced with city battles – Kyiv, Kharkiv City, and Kherson City – they chose to abandon each while establishing more defensible defensive positions elsewhere. Ukraine, on the other hand, chose to fight for their major cities. The results are telling.

By withdrawing from Kyiv and Kharkiv in the first month of war and from Kherson City last fall, Russia was able to relocate its force into more defensible positions, preserving its personnel from the crucible of a grueling defensive fight in urban terrain. Ukraine, on the other hand, chose to contest major cities and has now lost staggering numbers of troops – but they also lost the city itself in the end. The decision of the Ukrainian general staff to defend Bakhmut until the end may have grave implications for the rest of the war.

As far back as December, it was clear that Ukraine would not be able to keep Bakhmut. Once Russian troops advanced around the flanks of the city and took all the roads supporting the garrison under fire control, the chances of holding the city fell to almost zero. What Ukraine could and should have done is follow the Russian example at Kherson and withdraw to the next prepared defensive position in the vicinity of Kramatorsk or Slavyansk.

From those locations, the Ukrainians would again have had all the advantages: they would have had elaborately dug fighting positions, unrestricted fields of fire to attack oncoming Russian troops, and unhindered resupply routes to the rear. It would have been far more expensive for Russia to try and take those positions than it was to fight from point-blank range against the Ukrainians in Bakhmut, especially when the Russians could and did inflict severe blows on a daily basis to resupply the defenders.

As a result, Ukraine has lost literally tens of thousands of killed and wounded, along with enormous quantities of equipment and ammunition, in those four city fights. Based on a likely fire superiority of 10-to-1 on the Russian side, Ukraine no doubt suffered considerably more casualties in those fights than the Russians. But even if the cost were equal, Russia has millions more men from whom to draw more fighters and a major domestic industrial capacity to produce all the ammunition they may require.

Put simply, Ukraine doesn’t have the personnel or industrial capacity to replace their lost men and equipment in comparison to the Russians. Moreover, Russia has been learning from its many tactical mistakes and evidence suggests they are improving tactically while simultaneously expanding their industrial capacity. Even bigger than the dearth of ammunition and equipment for Ukraine, however, is the number of trained and experienced personnel they’ve lost. Many of those skilled troops and leaders simply cannot be replaced in the span of mere months.

Ukraine is now faced with a world-class dilemma: should they use their last offensive capacity in a last gasp of hoping they inflict a grave wound on the Russians defending in the occupied territories or preserve them in case Russia launches a summer offensive of their own? There are serious risks with either course of action. I assess there is currently no likely path for Ukraine to achieve a military victory. Continuing to fight in that hope may perversely result in them losing even more territory.

Supporting Ukraine

The United States must take these realities into consideration in the coming weeks and months. Washington has already provided Ukraine the lion’s share of all military and financial aide including many of our most sophisticated armor, artillery, rockets, and missiles. Biden has even authorized the release of F-16 jets. The United States cannot – nor should it – commit to sending an equal amount of support for the next year of war, should it continue that long. Europe must be willing to make greater contributions to any future deliveries to Ukraine.

Only Kyiv can decide whether to keep fighting or seek the best-negotiated deal it can get. But the United States is obligated to ensure the security of our country and people above the desires of Kyiv.

In addition to burden-shifting physical support primarily to European states, means the U.S. must avoid the trap of agreeing to any type of security guarantee for Ukraine. History is too filled with examples of hasty agreements to end fighting that unwittingly lay the foundation for future conflicts. America must not put its own future safety at risk by agreeing to any form of security guarantee.

The trend of war is shifting toward Moscow, regardless of how upset that may make many in the West. It is the observable reality. What Washington must do is avoid the temptation to “double-down” on supporting a losing proposition and do whatever we need to bring this conflict to a rapid conclusion, preserving our future security to the maximum extent. Ignoring these realities could set up Ukraine for even greater losses – and could put our own security at unacceptable future risk.

A 19FortyFive Contributing Editor, Daniel L. Davis is a Senior Fellow for Defense Priorities and a former Lt. Col. in the U.S. Army who deployed into combat zones four times. He is the author of “The Eleventh Hour in 2020 America.” Follow him @DanielLDavis.

19fortyfive.com · by Daniel Davis · May 25, 2023

20. Army reorganizing program offices for network and cyber ops, UAVs may be next: Officials

Army reorganizing program offices for network and cyber ops, UAVs may be next: Officials - Breaking Defense

The way the historic PEO organizations were initially set up was “for a reason,” but now the Army is modernizing, and the shift is needed to support its unified network, Young Bang said.

breakingdefense.com · by Jaspreet Gill · May 25, 2023

The 1st Battalion, 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment try out an early version of the Army’s Integrated Tactical Network (ITN) in wargames. Source: U.S. Army photo by Justin Eimers, PEO C3T Public Affairs

PHILADELPHIA — In a move to further its digital transformation strategy, the Army at the start of the next fiscal year will formally realign three of its program executive offices to support its cyber operations and better pursue its unified network vision, and more offices could follow in the future.

Though the PEOs had been organized the way they were “for a reason,” Young Bang, principal deputy assistant secretary of the Army for acquisition, logistics & technology (ASA(ALT)) said at an industry technical exchange meeting, but now the Army is modernizing and needs to rethink its organizational stance.

“And we had a lot of discussions across the ASA(ALT) community and the PEOs and we talked about those types of things,” Bang said on Wednesday. “So this notion of PEO optimization, this may be the first of maybe more changes to come. But what we’re looking at is, ‘How do we really accelerate the modernization of the network?'”

The discussions were prompted by the complexity of the current set-up, in which different components of the Army’s network were in different organizations.

So starting Oct. 1, several organizations will be split between the program executive offices of intelligence, electronic warfare and sensors (PEO IEW&S), command, control communications-tactical (PEO C3T) and enterprise information systems (PEO EIS).

PEO IEW&S will take over all cyber operations from the three PEOs, and all network elements — both tactical and enterprise — will move under PEO C3T. Ross Guckert, who runs the PEO EIS portfolio, emphasized that the reorganization will not affect contracts or jobs.

Mark Kitz, who runs PEO IEW&S, said the reorganization aligns with how Congress wants the military to move forward with its cyber operations.

“However, I do want to highlight that in the last two [National Defense Authorization Acts], with Cyber Command there has been a focus on integrating the Joint Cyber Warfighting architecture and establishing that Cyber Command acquisition authority around the integration of cyber and functional components,” he said. “And as many of you know, the Army is a significant contributor on the offensive side to that Joint Cyber Warfighting architecture.”

Speaking with reporters today, Bang said more reorganizations could follow.

“There’s always been… things that were in different areas,” he said. “For example, like [unmanned aerial vehicles], we kind of have them kind of a little bit all over. And so we have pockets of some of those in [PEO] aviation…in [PEO] soldier.

“So I do think that we need to get a little bit better… I do think UAVs, for example, we probably need to have some more deliberate thought and planning around that,” he continued. “And that may necessitate some shifts of other things… But what we want to do is figure out what makes the most sense for what we’re trying to do now and then be flexible and look at that.”

breakingdefense.com · by Jaspreet Gill · May 25, 2023

21. What a debt default would mean for national security

What a debt default would mean for national security

BY RICHARD FONTAINE, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR 05/22/23 02:00 PM ET

thehill-com.cdn.ampproject.org

Over the past several years, American political leaders have rightly focused on augmenting national power. Faced with China’s geopolitical challenge, Washington has boosted its defense budget, stimulated domestic innovation, built new international partnerships, and moved to protect its technological lead. These steps have won broad support in both parties and across very different presidential administrations, and for good reason: A more powerful United States, working ever more closely with likeminded partners, is best placed to engage in long-term competition with Beijing.

In this context, the possibility of a default on U.S. debt — which Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warns could occur as soon as June 1 — seems utterly mystifying. Defaulting on the nation’s debt threatens catastrophic economic consequences and would seriously harm national security. It’s hard to think of a single American action that would more effectively reduce its global standing, influence and power — and boost those of its chief competitor.

The economic consequences of a default are real and well-rehearsed. An inability to pay federal bills would roil financial markets and likely tip the United States into recession. It would increase interest rates and borrowing costs. It would harm American credibility, encourage diversification away from U.S. bonds, and threaten the dollar’s role as the world’s preeminent reserve currency. Military strength and geopolitical influence rise and fall with a country’s economic power, and a debt default would strike a major blow against them all.

It would also degrade America’s ability to effectively employ its foreign policy tools. The dollar’s extensive use to settle accounts gives Washington extensive powers to impose financial sanctions. By undermining confidence in the dollar, a default would likely encourage countries to denominate trade and financial transactions in other currencies, and to hold non-dollar official reserves as well. Already, Beijing has encouraged its trade partners to invoice in renminbi and is developing an alternative to the dollar-dominated SWIFT financial messaging network. Such moves would erode Washington’s ability to impose the kind of economic sanctions it applied after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

A default could have negative effects on military power as well. Defense represents the largest category of federal discretionary spending, and a disruption in the government’s ability to pay bills would harm readiness and investment. Pentagon leaders have begun warning about their potential inability to pay troops on time, and the uncertainty could delay the production of key weapons systems. The House has already postponed its consideration of this year’s defense authorization bill while debt ceiling negotiations proceed.

The near-term diplomatic costs are starting to pile up as well. President Biden, tied down in debt negotiations in Washington, cancelled his scheduled visit to Papua New Guinea and his attendance at the Quad meeting in Australia. A decade ago, President Obama missed the APEC leader’s meeting and the East Asian Summit in order to deal with a government shutdown at home; allies fretted at America’s absence while Beijing crowed. Today the stakes are higher, and allies already worry about American presence and leadership.

That points to perhaps the gravest national security consequence of a debt default. In the contest with China, Washington asks allies to cast their economic and security lots with the United States. For those would-be partners, the choice amounts to a bet on the future of American power and competence.

Washington has, however, provided ample fodder for hesitation in recent years: political polarization, the January 6 Capitol attacks and Washington’s crisis-prone decision-making invites questions about America’s ability to generate national solutions. The messy end to wars in Afghanistan and Iraq suggest strategic incompetence and a reluctance to match national security means to our stated ends. The enduring trend toward protectionism and America First-style economic policy is spawning questions among allies about where exactly their interests fit in U.S. decision-making.

Such doubts are naturally catnip to China, America’s chief competitor. Beijing portrays the West as in terminal decline, led by an increasingly divided United States unable to deliver the world — or even its own people — the unity and effectiveness they desire. America continues to coast, Chinese leaders suggest, on the privileges it accrued during a unipolar moment, including dollar dominance, the ability to impose sanctions, disproportionate influence in international institutions, and untrammeled military power. This dynamic, they say, is an artifact of yesterday’s world, and no longer reflective of a rising China and dysfunctional America. It reflects, instead, the antiquated disarray of Western democracies, in contrast to efficient and effective autocracy. A debt default would provide enormous ammunition to those pushing the narrative of American decline.

Given the massive downsides, an actual default is very unlikely. Both Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy and President Biden insist that defaulting on the nation’s debt is “not an option.” But unlikely is not impossible. In 2011, the Budget Control Act established a penalty — massive, indiscriminate spending cuts — designed to be so severe that Republicans and Democrats would have no choice but to agree on a deal that would avoid them. A nice concept, but one that failed utterly: “sequestration” spending caps harmed America’s defense for years. Today’s game of chicken is far more dangerous. The recognition of a default’s costs is no guarantee that we will avoid one.

The Abraham Accords may not be the best path toward Arab-Israeli normalization One war, one speech, and one aggressive, rising China

If American leaders are even remotely serious when they point to long-term competition from revisionist China, when they proclaim this the decisive decade to shape global order, and when they insist that the United States, working in concert with its allies, must augment its power in order to prevail in a generational contest of systems — if they are serious about any of that — they cannot possibly entertain a default on the debt.

Yet the deadline looms.

Richard Fontaine is the chief executive officer of the Center for a New American Security.

thehill-com.cdn.ampproject.org

22. The Kremlin Has a Security Problem

I am reminded of the clip from Animal House and the parade - "Remain calm. All is well" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWBiLeVy45k

The Kremlin Has a Security Problem

Drone attacks in Moscow, incursions over the border—Russians are starting to wonder whether Putin really does have, as he promised, “everything under control.”

By Anna Nemtsova

The Atlantic · by Anna Nemtsova · May 25, 2023

President Vladimir Putin sustains his power on the promise to Russians that he has, as he put it in 2010, “everything under control.” This week’s attack on the southern Belgorod region, launched from Ukraine, would have been alarming under any circumstances, but Putin’s posture as the man in command makes it particularly hard to explain away.

A string of bad news that began earlier this month suggests to Russians that their security system is crumbling. First came the drone attack on the roof of Putin’s residence in the Kremlin on May 4. Now comes an incursion into Belgorod, demonstrating that a year and a half into the war, the Federal Security Service, or FSB, which is in charge of the borders, does not have the manpower to protect against small units attacking from Ukraine. Russia was not even able to secure a nearby storage site for nuclear-weapons components, known as Belgorod-22—instead it reportedly moved the materiel away.

Russians in the border regions are beginning to realize that the war that has destroyed dozens of towns and villages in Ukraine is coming to their own land. Nobody seemed to be defending Belgorod, so on Tuesday, locals demanded answers from their governor, Vyacheslav Gladkov, in a live chat on Vkontakte, a social-networking site.

Governor Gladkov read the questions aloud: “They said that everything was under control, that fortifications have been built, some pyramids and so on, but the enemy is coming to our regional center by tanks. Why is the border full of holes?” he read from one message. “And we are not mentioning the constant artillery and mortar fire, wounded residents—how come?”

Eliot A. Cohen: It’s not enough for Ukraine to win. Russia has to lose.

The complaint seemed valid enough. And the more information that emerged, the more the episode risked turning the entire nationalist rationale behind Russia’s war in Ukraine back on the Kremlin: The invaders were Russian nationalists serving in the Ukrainian armed forces who claimed that they were liberating Russia from Putin’s regime.

Somebody had to be honest with locals, and Governor Gladkov, surprisingly, was. “I agree with you,” he said, looking tired and grim. “I have many more questions for the Defense Ministry than you.” He called on his listeners to draw their own conclusions “from the mistakes that have been made.”

Russians have been drawing conclusions rather quickly this week. Thousands jumped into their vehicles and left their villages in the Belgorod region, without waiting for further explanation or assistance from the security services. One video shows local residents trying to break into an old Soviet bomb shelter, screaming at the top of their lungs.

Ilya Ponomarev is a former member of Russia’s Parliament now in exile. He acts as a spokesperson for the Freedom of Russia Legion, the anti-Kremlin group that crossed into the Belgorod region. Ponomarev told me that the legion’s soldiers were “just four kilometers away” from the Belgorod-22 nuclear-storage site, and that the group’s goal was to demonstrate to Russians that their border was unprotected.

The attack seems to have struck its psychological target. Tsargrad, a nationalist television channel in Russia, headlined a program with the question of whether, after a year of “bombs raining on … Russian regions,” the “special military operation” in Ukraine was coming to resemble the second Chechen war. The comparison jabbed at dark memories of fighting that killed thousands of civilians in the Northern Caucasus and created streams of internal migrants.

Now again, Russians have been internally displaced. “This is just a shock; there is no safe place in the south,” 72-year-old Nina Mikhailova, a pensioner from Russia’s Krasnodar region, south of Belgorod, told me by phone on Tuesday. “There is no end to this war, to killings, and nobody tells us when or how it will end. The jokes and threats about nuclear mushrooms are not funny. If the only solution is to nuke America, we are all in real trouble.”

Boris Vishnevsky, a city-council member in St. Petersburg, is one of the very few opposition figures left in government in Russia. I spoke with him by phone yesterday. Russia’s generals, he observed, can “promise us to destroy everything alive coming our way”—but then they will come up against the problem that “the FSB, who are actually responsible for protecting the borders, are busy hunting down and imprisoning Russians for their posts on social media.”

This week, some of my Russian friends said they caught themselves walking around with their mouths open in absolute shock. “The border is supposed to be protected by the FSB, but it is not; they just look more and more like some dumb thugs,” a former Russian member of parliament, Gennady Gudkov, himself a veteran of the KGB, told me on Tuesday. Like many of his friends and colleagues in Moscow, he gasped at the news of tanks and armored vehicles rolling from Ukraine to Russia, unstopped. Nothing was under control.

Putin pretends to love history. While his security services were in Belgorod chasing armed invaders from Ukraine, he was staring at a French map, allegedly dated from the mid-17th century, with the word Ukraine on it, but still insisting that Ukraine did not exist before the Soviet times.

Read: Russia’s rogue commander is playing with fire

Meanwhile, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the founder of the Wagner mercenary group, is building political capital from every failure of the Russian military. When the attack began from Ukraine, and the legion took over village after village, Prigozhin took aim at the armed forces on his Telegram channel: “Instead of providing security for the state, some of them are dividing cash and the others make fools of themselves. There is no leadership, no desire and no personalities ready to defend their country.”

Ukraine, however, is only getting stronger, according to Prigozhin: “Ukraine had 500 tanks in the beginning of our special operation and now they have 5,000. If before, 20,000 of their men knew how to fight, now 400,000 men know how to fight. So it turns out we militarized them in a big way.”

Prigozhin has predicted an apocalyptic ending for Putin’s regime as a result of the attack on Belgorod. “People will come out with pitchforks to the streets,” he told Russian media. When that day arrives, he warns, he will be the one taking the situation under control: “And then we come.”

The Atlantic · by Anna Nemtsova · May 25, 2023

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Foundation for Defense of Democracies

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com