Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

“Mankind is at its best when it is most free. This will be clear if we grasp the principle of liberty. We must recall that the basic principle is freedom of choice, which saying many have on their lips, but few in their minds.”

- Dante.

“Always recognize that human individuals are ends, and do not use them as means to your end.”

- Immanuel Kant

"Freedom makes a huge requirement of every human being. With freedom comes responsibility."

- Eleanor Roosevelt

1. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, May 27, 2023

2. 'Massive' Russian Drone Attack Kills One in Kyiv

3. US nuclear umbrella for Taiwan: solid cross-strait shield or wishful thinking?

4. AUKUS moving from nuke subs to AI drone swarms

5. Senators urge Pentagon to investigate price gouging by military contractors after 60 Minutes report

6. Russia Launches Largest Drone Attack on Kyiv Since Start of War

7. No names added to USASOC memorial wall for first time since 9/11

8. Is cybersecurity an unsolvable problem?

9. Opinion | Beyond the ‘Matrix’ Theory of the Human Mind

10. The US’s multiple Indo-Pacific strategies, explained

11. Joe Biden’s advisers say he doesn’t want to drag Pacific allies into ‘headlong clash’ between US and China

12. Ukraine has squeezed out of the US-Patriot missile system a capability that the Pentagon did not think possible, military analyst says

13. OPINION: The Brilliance of Belgorod

14. Consider The 'Porcupine': Western Officials Struggle To Find A New Security Model For Ukraine

15. The National Counterterrorism Center Must Expand to Better Fight Domestic Terrorists

16. Learning the Ukrainian Way of War

17. Ukrainians fighting outside Bakhmut see Russian mercenaries withdrawing

18. Ukraine’s coming counteroffensive has a good chance of succeeding

19. The Evil Empire Isn’t Russia: It’s Fossil Fuel-Based Capitalism, Waging Apocalyptic War On Planet – OpEd

1. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, May 27, 2023

Maps/graphics/citations: https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-may-27-2023

Key Takeaways

Wagner Group mercenaries appear to be withdrawing from Bakhmut city to reconstitute and regroup in the rear as Russian offensive operations decrease in and around the city.
The Russian military command may be transferring Donetsk People’s Republic’s (DNR) forces to relieve Wagner Group forces in Bakhmut city.
The Russian transfer of DNR elements to Bakhmut may decrease the tempo of Russian offensive operations on the Avdiivka-Donetsk City line.
The Russian military command appears to be reinforcing Bakhmut’s flanks with regular formations, however.
Former Russian officer and ardent nationalist Igor Girkin accused Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin of planning a coup against the current Russian leadership.
Ukrainian officials denied Western reporting that suggested that a Chinese diplomat expressed interest in a negotiated ceasefire in Ukraine amidst the likely renewal of Russia’s information campaign surrounding negotiations.
Russian forces continued limited offensive operations northeast of Kupyansk and south of Kreminna.
Russian forces continued to launch unsuccessful offensive operations on the Avdiivka-Donetsk City line.
Ukrainian forces continued to strike rear logistics nodes in southern Zaporizhia oblast.
The Ukrainian Main Military Intelligence Directorate (GUR) warned on May 26 that Russian forces are preparing to conduct large scale provocations to create radiological danger at the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP).
The Russian Ministry of Justice registered the civil society group “Council of Mothers of Wives” as a foreign agent on May 26, likely to curb resistance to ongoing and future Russian force generation efforts.
Russian authorities are escalating efforts to portray Russia as a safe guardian of Ukrainian children.

RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, MAY 27, 2023

May 27, 2023 - Press ISW

Download the PDF

Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, May 27, 2023

Kateryna Stepanenko, Riley Bailey, Grace Mappes, and Fredrick W. Kagan

May 27, 2023, 6:30pm ET

Click here to see ISW’s interactive map of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This map is updated daily alongside the static maps present in this report.

Click here to access ISW’s archive of interactive time-lapse maps of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. These maps complement the static control-of-terrain map that ISW produces daily by showing a dynamic frontline. ISW will update this time-lapse map archive monthly.

Note: The data cutoff for this product was 1pm ET on May 27. ISW will cover subsequent reports in the May 28 Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment.

Wagner Group mercenaries appear to be withdrawing from Bakhmut city to reconstitute and regroup in the rear as Russian offensive operations decrease in and around the city. Ukrainian military officials reported that Russian offensive operations had dramatically decreased to two skirmishes in the Bakhmut direction, and Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Malyar attributed this decrease to the Russian relief-in-place and regrouping of forces in the area.[1] The Ukrainian General Staff reported on May 27 that Russian forces conducted unsuccessful offensive operations west of Khromove (immediately west of Bakhmut) and in the direction of Predtechyne (15km southwest of Bakhmut).[2] Malyar stated that Ukrainian forces hold dominant elevated positions north and south of Bakhmut and that Ukrainian forces stopped combat operations on May 26 and 27 to fulfill other unspecified tasks.[3] Malyar also stated that Ukrainian forces continue to control positions in the southwestern outskirts of Bakhmut City.[4] A prominent Russian milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces are not conducting active operations aimed at regaining positions in Bakhmut City itself despite the possible continuation of localized Ukrainian counterattacks northwest and southwest of the city.[5]

Ukrainian National Security and Defense Council Secretary Oleksiy Danilov stated that Wagner mercenaries are withdrawing from the city of Bakhmut and are “regrouping to another three locations.”[6] Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin reiterated that Wagner forces continued to withdraw from Bakhmut city on May 27.[7] Prigozhin’s statements are likely true given the decrease in Russian offensive capabilities around Bakhmut and Ukrainian statements regarding the situation in Bakhmut.

The Russian military command may be transferring Donetsk People’s Republic’s (DNR) forces to relieve Wagner Group forces in Bakhmut city. The UK Ministry of Defense (MoD) assessed that the Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) forces have likely entered Bakhmut city as of May 24 and begun clearing operations.[8] ISW previously observed elements of the 132nd Separate Guard Motorized Rifle Brigade of the DNR’s 1st Army Corps operating in the Bakhmut direction after previously fighting in the Avdiivka area.[9] It is unclear at this time if elements of the 132nd Brigade are operating inside of the city, but DNR Head Denis Pushilin previously raised the DNR flag in Bakhmut - which likely indicates that the DNR forces are assuming control over Bakhmut.[10] Pushilin also indicated that DNR elements were clearing the city as of May 23.[11]

The Russian transfer of DNR elements to Bakhmut may decrease the tempo of Russian offensive operations on the Avdiivka-Donetsk City line. ISW previously assessed that the Russian military command has heavily committed a variety of DNR elements to the Avdiivka-Donetsk City frontline.[12] Russian attacks around Avdiivka-Donetsk City area appear to have been decreasing in recent days, which may be connected to the transfer of DNR forces to Bakhmut. The Ukrainian General Staff reported on May 27 that Russian forces conducted 13 combat operations in eastern Ukraine, of which seven attacks were in the Marinka area (about 19km west from Donetsk City).[13] The Ukrainian General Staff previously reported that Russian forces attacked 20 times in Marinka alone on the day Wagner forces declared victory over Bakhmut on May 20.[14] The Russian offensives around Avdiivka have been steadily decreasing since at least April 8 after the Russian military command attempted to intensify offensive operations near the settlement in mid-March, and the transfer of DNR units to Bakhmut may further slow Russian efforts on the Avdiivka-Donetsk City frontline.[15] The Russian military command may be transferring DNR units operating in the well-defended Avdiivka-Donetsk City area to avoid making other directions vulnerable or to ensure quick reinforcements for Bakhmut city.

The Russian military command appears to be reinforcing Bakhmut’s flanks with regular formations, however. The UK MoD assessed that elements of the 31st Brigade of the Russian Airborne Forces (VDV) have likely transferred from the Svatove-Kreminna line to reinforce Bakhmut’s flanks in recent weeks.[16] Ukrainian military officials previously reported that Russian forces are transferring unspecified VDV, motorized rifle, and special forces units to the Bakhmut direction after successful Ukrainian counterattacks on Bakhmut‘s flanks.[17] ISW also observed Cossack units operating in Soledar, although these units likely were previously operating in the area.[18]

Former Russian officer and ardent nationalist Igor Girkin accused Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin of planning a coup against the current Russian leadership. Girkin openly accused Prigozhin of planning to conduct a coup amid the upcoming Ukrainian counteroffensive and of continuously violating Russian censorship laws against the discreditation of the Russian army and military command.[19] Girkin warned of “mutiny” if Prigozhin is “allowed” to lead the Wagner Group. Girkin noted that Prigozhin ordered for the Wagner forces to withdraw to the Wagner bases deep inside of Russia on the eve of the Ukrainian counteroffensive. He also claimed that Wagner personnel had never taken oaths promising not to engage in combat against Russia or its military.[20] Prigozhin stated on May 27 that Wagner will decide later on if it will fight in Ukraine or in another country, which indicates that Prigozhin retains the ability to command his own army outside of the formal Russian military command structure.[21] Girkin also recently criticized the Russian military command for failing to address Prigozhin’s open and vulgar conflict with the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD), even warning that Prigozhin will “devour” the Russian military officials who “bet” in his favor as he seeks to increase his political power.[22] A member of Girkin’s Angry Patriots Club claimed that the conflict between Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu and Prigozhin is developing into a conflict between the Russian military and Wagner forces but that Putin is not paying attention.[23] Girkin’s and his associates’ criticisms are largely consistent with Prigozhin’s continued prioritization of his own personal aims over those of the Russian Ministry of Defense and the broader operational situation near Bakhmut.[24] Prigozhin’s decision to withdraw his forces from Bakhmut and, apparently, from active combat on the eve of the Ukrainian counter-offensive is strategically questionable.

Ukrainian officials denied Western reporting that suggested that a Chinese diplomat expressed interest in a negotiated ceasefire in Ukraine amidst the likely renewal of Russia’s information campaign surrounding negotiations. Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba stated on May 27 that he contacted his European counterparts who recently met with Chinese Special Representative for Eurasian Affairs Li Hui and that they denied that Li had expressed interest in a ceasefire that would see Russia retain control of occupied territories, as a May 26 Wall Street Journal report suggested.[25] Li Hui visited Moscow on May 26 reportedly to discuss a negotiated settlement to Russia’s war in Ukraine, a visit that the Kremlin likely used to attempt to renew a recurring information operation falsely claiming that Russia is open to serious negotiations.[26] The Kremlin previously intensified this information operation in December 2022 to attempt to delay the provision of Western tanks and other advanced military equipment to Ukraine in order to set conditions for Russia’s 2023 winter-spring offensive.[27] The Kremlin is likely reintroducing the information operation intending to weaken Western willingness to send critical security assistance to Ukraine ahead of potential Ukrainian counteroffensive operations.

The Kremlin has established a pattern in this information operation in which some Russian officials express feigned interest in negotiations while other Russian officials simultaneously reiterate Putin’s maximalist goals for the war in Ukraine.[28] Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Galuzin stated on May 26 that the conditions for a ”comprehensive, just and lasting peace” in Ukraine include the cessation of hostilities by Ukrainian forces, the end of Western security assistance to Ukraine, the Ukrainian return to a “neutral non-aligned status,” the explicit Ukrainian refusal to join NATO and the EU, and the recognition of Russia’s annexation of occupied territories in Ukraine.[29] Galuzin’s reiteration of Russia’s maximalist objectives coincide with Putin’s alleged expression of Russian interest in negotiations during a phone call with Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula de Silva on May 26.[30]

Key Takeaways

Wagner Group mercenaries appear to be withdrawing from Bakhmut city to reconstitute and regroup in the rear as Russian offensive operations decrease in and around the city.
The Russian military command may be transferring Donetsk People’s Republic’s (DNR) forces to relieve Wagner Group forces in Bakhmut city.
The Russian transfer of DNR elements to Bakhmut may decrease the tempo of Russian offensive operations on the Avdiivka-Donetsk City line.
The Russian military command appears to be reinforcing Bakhmut’s flanks with regular formations, however.
Former Russian officer and ardent nationalist Igor Girkin accused Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin of planning a coup against the current Russian leadership.
Ukrainian officials denied Western reporting that suggested that a Chinese diplomat expressed interest in a negotiated ceasefire in Ukraine amidst the likely renewal of Russia’s information campaign surrounding negotiations.
Russian forces continued limited offensive operations northeast of Kupyansk and south of Kreminna.
Russian forces continued to launch unsuccessful offensive operations on the Avdiivka-Donetsk City line.
Ukrainian forces continued to strike rear logistics nodes in southern Zaporizhia oblast.
The Ukrainian Main Military Intelligence Directorate (GUR) warned on May 26 that Russian forces are preparing to conduct large scale provocations to create radiological danger at the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP).
The Russian Ministry of Justice registered the civil society group “Council of Mothers of Wives” as a foreign agent on May 26, likely to curb resistance to ongoing and future Russian force generation efforts.
Russian authorities are escalating efforts to portray Russia as a safe guardian of Ukrainian children.

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 offensive operations northeast of Kupyansk and south of Kreminna on May 27. Geolocated footage published on May 26 indicates that Russian forces likely advanced northwest of Bilohorivka, Luhansk Oblast (12km south of Kreminna).[31] The Ukrainian General Staff reported on May 27 that Russian forces conducted unsuccessful offensive operations near Bilohorivka and Masyutivka, Kharkiv Oblast (13km northeast of Kupyansk).[32] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces recaptured several recently lost positions southeast of Bilohorivka, although ISW has not observed visual confirmation of this claim.[33] Another Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces advanced up to two kilometers from Masyutivka, although ISW has not seen visual confirmation of these advances nor confirmation that Russian forces control Masyutivka.[34] The milblogger claimed that fighting is ongoing near Dvorichna (16km northeast of Kupyansk) and Synkivka (8km northeast of Kupyansk).[35] Russian Western Grouping of Forces (Western Military District) Spokesperson Sergey Zybinsky claimed that Russian forces also conducted offensive operations near Movchanove (10km northeast of Kupyansk) and destroyed a Ukrainian platoon in the area.[36]

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.

See topline text for Bakhmut.

Russian forces continued to launch unsuccessful offensive operations on the Avdiivka-Donetsk City line on May 27. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian assaults on Pervomaiske and Sieverne within 12km west of Avdiivka, and seven attacks on Marinka (about 20km southwest of Donetsk City).[37] A Kremlin-affiliated milblogger claimed that Russian forces conducted a reconnaissance-in-force in the Novokalynove direction (about 12km north of Avdiivka) from Krasnohorivka (approximately 9km north of Avdiivka).[38] The milblogger also claimed that Russian forces repelled a Ukrainian counterattack across the H20 highway from Novokalynove. Another Kremlin-affiliated milblogger stated that Russian forces are continuing assaults in Marinka and unsuccessfully conducted offensive operations in Krasnohorivka (about 19km west from Donetsk City).[39] The Donetsk People’s Republic claimed that the 10th Separate Tank Battalion of the 1st Army Corps is operating in the Avdiivka direction.[40] Russian sources also indicated that elements of the 110th Separate Guards Motorized Rifle Brigade (formerly the 100th Brigade, 1st Army Corps) are operating in the Nevelske direction (approximately 18km northwest of Donetsk City).[41]

Russian forces did not conduct offensive operations southwest of Donetsk City on May 27 and continued launching artillery and air strikes at Ukrainian positions in the area.[42] A Russian milblogger amplified video footage reportedly showing elements of the Russian 37th Separate Guards Motor Rifle Brigade of the 36th Combined Arms Army (Eastern Military District) shelling Ukrainian positions in the Vuhledar direction.[43] The Ukrainian General Staff retroactively reported that unspecified Russian airborne units participated in an attack on Vuhledar in February 2023 and suffered heavy losses.[44]

Russian sources amplified footage on May 26 purporting to show the aftermath of a Ukrainian strike at the Azovstal Metallurgical Combine in Mariupol with two long-range missiles.[45] Russian sources also claimed that Russian air defenses shot down one of the two missiles.[46]

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

Russian forces continued to target southern Ukraine with artillery, drone, and air strikes on May 27.[47] The Ukrainian Southern Operational Command reported that Russian forces conducted airstrikes against Beryslav Raion, Kherson Oblast, and targeted Mykolaiv Oblast with Shahed drones.[48] Russian sources claimed that Russian forces struck the Obvodna rail station in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast on May 26.[49] The Ukrainian Southern Operational Command reported on May 27 that Russian forces’ primary tactic in southern Ukraine is counterbattery fire.[50]

Ukrainian forces continued to strike rear logistical nodes in Zaporizhia Oblast on May 27. Russian and Ukrainian sources reported that Ukrainian forces struck Polohy and Berdyansk, Zaporizhia Oblast on May 27.[51] Some Russian sources claimed that Russian air defenses intercepted Ukrainian Storm Shadow missiles targeting Berdyansk on May 26, on which ISW has recently reported.[52]

The Ukrainian Main Military Intelligence Directorate (GUR) warned on May 26 that Russian forces are preparing to conduct large scale provocations to create radiological danger at the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP).[53] The GUR published audio intercepts on May 27 in which Russian military personnel claimed that unknown drones dropped chemical weapons in Enerhodar.[54] The GUR stated that Russia intends to falsely blame Ukraine for the attacks and aims to undermine the coming Ukrainian counteroffensive.[55] ISW has no independent confirmation that Russia is preparing to conduct a nuclear or chemical false flag attack in occupied Zaporizhia Oblast, but GUR’s reports are consistent with longstanding debunked Kremlin information operations. ISW has notably reported on prior Kremlin efforts to set conditions for false flag attacks as pretexts for the 2022 full scale invasion of Ukraine and to undermine Western support for Ukraine, and US officials have previously debunked claims that Ukraine was preparing to conduct chemical attacks.[56] The Kremlin has also previously accused Syrian opposition groups of conducting chemical attacks that the Syrian government had actually conducted themselves.[57]

The Russian MoD claimed that the “Ivan Khurs” Yury Ivanov-class intelligence vessel returned to port at Sevastopol on May 26 to resupply following the claimed May 24 attack against the vessel.[58]

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

The Russian Ministry of Justice registered the civil society group “Council of Mothers of Wives” as a foreign agent on May 26, likely to curb resistance to ongoing and future Russian force generation efforts.[59] The “Council of Mothers and Wives” routinely advocated for their relatives serving in the Russian military by reaching out to local officials following the start of partial mobilization in late September 2022.[60] Putin previously tried to dull the informational impact of the group’s public criticism of mobilization in late November 2022 by attending a meeting with hand-picked women in the Russian political sphere who were falsely presented as mothers of mobilized personnel.[61] The added legal pressure on the group is likely meant to allow Russian officials to suppress the group’s activities in the event of renewed heightened public resistance to Russian force generation efforts.

Russian officials reportedly confirmed that Russian conscripts are operating near the Ukrainian border as of May 27. The Yaroslavl Oblast government announced on May 27 that Russian conscripts perform tasks in various military units, including those deployed near the Russian border with Ukraine.[62] ISW assesses that the Kremlin is unlikely to deploy conscripts to Ukraine itself due to the potential for social backlash reminiscent of the domestic response to conscripts’ deployment to Ukraine earlier in the full-scale invasion.[63]

Russian convict recruits reportedly continue to desert their positions in frontline areas of Ukraine. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that 20 convict recruits who recently arrived to strengthen Russian units near Svatove, Luhansk Oblast stole a Russian military vehicle and fled their positions on May 25.[64] Russian sources reported on May 26 that Russian authorities are searching for 39-armed convict recruits who deserted their positions near Lysychansk, Luhansk Oblast.[65]

Russian arms manufacturer Kalashnikov Group is launching a new division for producing drones.[66] Kalashnikov Group President Alan Lushnikov announced on May 26 that the company intends to significantly increase Russia’s production of reconnaissance and combat drones by 2024.[67]

Russian space agency Roscosmos is reportedly recruiting its own employees to form a volunteer battalion. Russian and social media sources amplified an advertisement for the “Uran” volunteer battalion that reportedly appeared on the internal Roscosmos website, which ostensibly only Roscosmos employees can access.[68] The possible recruitment of highly educated and likely limited specialists in the Russian aerospace field suggests that Russian officials may be prioritizing immediate force generation requirements over long-term human capital needs.

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 authorities are escalating efforts to portray Russia as a safe guardian of Ukrainian children. Luhansk People’s Republic (LNR) Head Leonid Pasechnik announced the formation of a Russian State Duma Committee dedicated to prosecuting claimed Ukrainian crimes against children of Donbas, including the “illegal export” of Ukrainian children – whose families are presumably in Russia – to other countries.[69] Ukrainian Minister for the Reintegration of Occupied Territories Iryna Vereshchuk announced on May 26 that Russia returned a child who had been deported from Mariupol following Russian occupation of the city.[70]

The Kherson Oblast administration announced further efforts likely aimed at stymieing Ukrainian partisan activity and concealing Russian military movements. Kherson Oblast occupation administration head Vladimir Saldo announced the establishment of a curfew for all of the occupied Kherson Oblast as of May 25.[71] The curfew is between 23:00pm and 04:00am nightly for areas more than 30 kilometers from the east (right) bank of the Dnipro River and 21:00pm to 06:00am for areas within 30 kilometers of the riverbank.[72]

Significant activity in Belarus (ISW assesses that a Russian or Belarusian attack into northern Ukraine is extraordinarily unlikely and has thus restructured this section of the update. It will no longer include counter-indicators for such an offensive.)

The Belarusian Ministry of Defense (MoD) reported that Belarusian territorial troops are continuing to train to respond to sabotage and reconnaissance groups.[73]

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.

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.

2. 'Massive' Russian Drone Attack Kills One in Kyiv

'Massive' Russian Drone Attack Kills One in Kyiv

Moscow sends anticipated deadly greeting on Ukrainian capital's "Kyiv Day".

https://www.kyivpost.com/post/17605?utm

by AFP | May 28, 2023, 9:13 am | Comments (4)

Photo: illustrative.

One civilian has died in Kyiv after a "massive" drone attack on the Ukrainian capital, the city's mayor Vitali Klitschko said Sunday.

"A 35-year-old woman was hospitalized, a 41-year-old man died," the mayor and former boxer said on Telegram, reporting that drone wreckage had crashed near a petrol station.

He said Kyiv's air defenses had shot down "more than 20 drones" headed for the city, and implored city residents: "Stay in shelters. The attack is massive!"

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A fire also broke out at a company premises in the Holosiivskyi district, he added.Russian forces have targeted Kyiv throughout May.

Kyiv. Photo credit: Local civil and military administration, Telegram.

The head of the local civil and military administration, Serhii Popko, said Friday that there had been 13 attacks during the month.

Over the past few weeks, reports of drone attacks in Russia have also multiplied, usually in regions bordering Ukraine.

On Saturday, shelling in those areas killed two people, regional authorities said.

Moscow has blamed Kyiv -- and its Western supporters -- for the escalating number of attacks and sabotage operations, including on the Kremlin, but Ukraine has denied involvement.

3. US nuclear umbrella for Taiwan: solid cross-strait shield or wishful thinking?

Excerpts:

American political scientist John Mearscheimer, an international affairs professor at the University of Chicago, has also said that a nuclear umbrella would “create a powerful, conventional deterrent in Taiwan”.

It would send a clear message to Beijing that “if they are to attack Taiwan, it will escalate to the nuclear level”, Mearscheimer told the Taipei-based CommonWealth Magazine in an interview in December.

The White House has yet to express its stand on the issue.

Analysts in Taiwan said that since neighbours Japan and South Korea were covered by Washington’s Extended Deterrence Strategy – which included the nuclear umbrella – adding Taipei would create a stronger deterrent effect for Beijing.

Taiwan’s own choice to remain non-nuclear would also help it draw military support, according to Su Tzu-yun, senior analyst at the Institute for National Defence and Security Research, a government think tank in New Taipei.

US nuclear umbrella for Taiwan: solid cross-strait shield or wishful thinking?

Debate swirls after Taiwanese Foreign Minister Joseph Wu suggests self-ruled island is in talks with the United States on the issue
Some analysts point to added security, but others call the matter unrealistic, as it goes against long-held US policy of strategic ambiguity on Taiwan

Lawrence Chung in Taipei

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Published: 6:00am, 28 May, 2023

By Lawrence Chung South China Morning Post7 min

May 27, 2023

View Original

Taiwanese Foreign Minister Joseph Wu has declined to offer details on the island’s “communication with good friends”, but emphasised that the nuclear umbrella issue is “very important”. Photo: EPA-EFE

As Washington and Beijing ramp up their military signalling on Taiwan, the self-ruled island has started to discuss what was once unthinkable – to come under the US nuclear umbrella that has successfully protected Japan, South Korea and Australia for decades.

The debate was set off after Taiwanese Foreign Minister Joseph Wu suggested on Monday that the island had been in talks with the United States on the nuclear umbrella issue.

Some local defence analysts argue that the island would be better off having such a shield, as extra security against any military assault from across the Taiwan Strait.

But others say that seeking any such arrangement would be unrealistic, as it might require the US to adjust its decades-long “strategic ambiguity” on the issue of Taiwan. The island also has higher defence priorities like securing deals for advanced weapons, they say.

Strategic ambiguity is a deliberately vague US stand on defending Taiwan should it face armed conflict with Beijing, which sees the island as a breakaway territory that must be reunified – by force if necessay.

Pressed by a lawmaker on whether Taiwan had indeed sought US protection given Beijing’s growing nuclear arsenal, Wu said: “Regarding the discussion of this issue with the United States, it is not suitable for me to make it public here.”

The “nuclear umbrella” refers to a guarantee by a nuclear-armed state to defend a non-nuclear ally.

While Wu declined to offer details on the US talks, he nonetheless emphasised that the nuclear umbrella issue was “very important”.

As Taiwan maintained a policy of not developing, stockpiling or using nuclear weapons, it would not tolerate any threats of a nuclear strike, he said.

“This is why we have communication with our good friends who have similar concerns about the issue,” Wu said, without identifying the parties involved.

Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, and the Nato countries are covered by the US nuclear umbrella. Taiwan, whose 1980s research programme to secretly develop atomic weapons was stopped at Washington’s behest, has long hoped to be included as well.

On Tuesday, a Taiwanese foreign ministry spokesman also declined to give details of the umbrella issue, including when the discussions began and what the progress had been.

“In the face of growing military threats from [mainland] China, it is our own duty to safeguard Taiwan … strengthen our defence capability and solidify our relations with like-minded countries and security partners … to ensure peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait and Indo-Pacific region,” spokesman Jeff Liu said in Taipei.

03:26

Beijing slams Taiwan visit by British ex-PM Liz Truss as ‘dangerous political show’

Military muscle-flexing by Beijing has spiked as Taiwan’s independence-leaning government led by President Tsai Ing-wen has deepened its relationship with the West, the US in particular. The United States, like most countries, does not see Taiwan as a sovereign state but is opposed to any forcible change to the cross-strait status quo.

The US’ closer ties with Taiwan have also been fostered by Washington’s spiralling rivalry with Beijing, especially over its rapid military expansion in the Indo-Pacific.

Some American lawmakers and think-tank experts have also proposed that Taiwan be placed under US protection.

The 2020 Taiwan Defence Act introduced by Republicans Senator Josh Hawley and Representative Mike Gallagher called for US assessment of the use of nuclear force to help defend the island against any nuclear threats from Beijing.

02:28

‘Preparing for war’: China revises military recruitment rules for the first time since 2001

American political scientist John Mearscheimer, an international affairs professor at the University of Chicago, has also said that a nuclear umbrella would “create a powerful, conventional deterrent in Taiwan”.

It would send a clear message to Beijing that “if they are to attack Taiwan, it will escalate to the nuclear level”, Mearscheimer told the Taipei-based CommonWealth Magazine in an interview in December.

The White House has yet to express its stand on the issue.

Analysts in Taiwan said that since neighbours Japan and South Korea were covered by Washington’s Extended Deterrence Strategy – which included the nuclear umbrella – adding Taipei would create a stronger deterrent effect for Beijing.

Taiwan’s own choice to remain non-nuclear would also help it draw military support, according to Su Tzu-yun, senior analyst at the Institute for National Defence and Security Research, a government think tank in New Taipei.

“Taiwan has maintained a policy of not developing nuclear or other weapons of mass destruction, and therefore, other like-minded countries would be more willing to support Taiwan if it faced nuclear threats,” Su said.

“If Taiwan is included, it would provide Taiwan an extended form of deterrence that would greatly enhance its security.”

Beijing would then be more cautious in planning any attack on the island, nuclear or otherwise, Su added.

Wang Kung-yi, director of the Taiwan International Strategic Study Society, a Taipei think tank, said the West was increasingly concerned about Beijing’s military pressure campaign against Taiwan.

“If Taiwan is not able to come under US nuclear protection, a possible way is for the US to send nuclear submarines through the waters close to the Taiwan Strait as a kind of deterrence,” Wang said.

Taiwan’s high-level exchanges with US officials in particular have triggered unprecedented People’s Liberation Army warplane sorties, extended live-fire drills, as well as simulated precision strikes and blockades around the island in recent months.

Chang Yen-ting, a retired Taiwanese lieutenant general, said Taiwan was the central pivot of the so-called first island chain line of defence off the East Asian continental coast, and strategically important for the US to retain its influence in the western Pacific.

“It would help to undermine the Chinese communists’ efforts to extend their forces to the western Pacific if Taiwan was under the nuclear umbrella,” Chang said.

But Chang also sought to allay nuclear assault concerns, given how close Taiwan sat to mainland China. “It is unlikely for Beijing to use nuclear weapons to attack Taiwan, given the radiation spillover problem and the proximity of Taiwan to the Chinese mainland,” he said.

According to Chang, what Taiwan needs most is to acquire more advanced US military hardware, like F-35 fighter jets, P-8 anti-submarine aircraft and other weapons, to counter Beijing’s latest lines of weapons, like the emerging J-31 fifth-generation stealth fighter.

“Taiwan’s priority should be to get more advanced and effective weapons instead of seeking to be incorporated into the nuclear umbrella,” he said.

Chieh Chung, a security analyst at the National Policy Foundation, a think tank affiliated with Taiwan’s main opposition Kuomintang party, said becoming one of the US’ nuclear umbrella allies might be wishful thinking for Taiwan.

“Taiwan and the US do not have a mutual defence agreement and those under the umbrella are allies Washington has committed to defend in line with their mutual defence treaties,” Cheih said.

Moreover, even with such defence agreements, the US had not totally committed to using nuclear weapons to defend allies from nuclear attacks, he noted.

“Take South Korea, for example,” Chieh said. “The two sides have had a mutual defence treaty for close to 70 years but, until today, the US has not entirely committed to using nuclear weapons to help defend South Korea in the event of a nuclear attack from North Korea.”

While the US was concerned about the risk of a potential cross-strait war, it continued to maintain a policy of strategic ambiguity on the issue, Chieh noted.

“This is because Washington is worried that if it changes its strategic ambiguity policy into strategic clarity, it could offer a blank cheque to [Taiwan’s] pro-independence supporters who could be encouraged to breach Beijing’s red line, resulting in the Chinese communists sending forces to attack Taiwan.”

07:07

Why mainland China is holding military drills in Taiwan Strait following US Speaker Pelosi’s trip

The US policy of strategic ambiguity, which neither commits to nor rules out military action to defend Taiwan, is designed to leave Beijing guessing about the likely American response to any attack on the island.

The policy also keeps the pro-independence camp in Taiwan from pursuing its cause – a move that Beijing has vowed would provoke an attack.

Chieh said if the US had no desire to adjust this policy, it would be less likely to talk to Taiwan about the nuclear umbrella.

Li Da-jung, a professor of international relations and strategic studies at Tamkang University in New Taipei, said the Tsai government must remain prudent in dealing with such a sensitive issue.

“A nuclear umbrella for Taiwan is certain to sharply provoke Beijing which is expected to respond with actions even more violently than after the [Nancy] Pelosi visit, given that it would cross the mainland’s bottom line,” Li said.

The PLA staged a series of unprecedented live-fire drills around the island in August after then-US House speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan in defiance of repeated warnings from Beijing, which saw the trip as a violation of its sovereignty.

Lawrence Chung

Lawrence Chung covers major news in Taiwan, ranging from presidential and parliament elections to killer earthquakes and typhoons. Most of his reports focus on Taiwan’s relations with China, specifically on the impact and possible developments of cross-strait relations under the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party and mainland-friendly Kuomintang governments. Before starting work at the South China Morning Post in 2006, he wrote for Reuters and AFP for more than 12 years.

4. AUKUS moving from nuke subs to AI drone swarms

High tech and equipment is great but we need to move to other areas such as SOF. I would establish an AUKUS SOF working group to examine how to synchronize AUKUS SOF activities to achieve mutual objectives. See "AUKUS Special Operations Forces in Strategic Competition, Integrated Deterrence, and Campaigning: Resistance to Malign Activities" here: https://securityanddefenceplus.plusalliance.org/essays/aukus-special-operations-forces-in-strategic-competition-integrated-deterrence-and-campaigning-resistance-to-malign-activities/

AUKUS moving from nuke subs to AI drone swarms

Australia-UK-US alliance accelerating cooperation across high-tech fields toward aim of defeating China in a potential conflict

asiatimes.com · by Gabriel Honrada · May 27, 2023

From nuclear submarines to hypersonic weapons, AUKUS is now developing AI-powered drone swarms and target identification capabilities that may prove decisive in a Taiwan Strait conflict.

Breaking Defense reported that the UK Ministry of Defense (MOD) announced the first-of-its-kind AI and autonomy trial for aerial and ground vehicles occurred last month, with several claimed “world firsts” at the event showcasing AUKUS Pillar 2’s capabilities.

AUKUS’ advanced technology-sharing follows a two-pillar framework. Pillar 1 is a trilateral effort focused on supporting Australia to build a nuclear attack submarine (SSN) fleet.

In contrast, Pillar 2 focuses on accelerating cooperation in several high-tech fields such as cyber capabilities, artificial intelligence, quantum computing, hypersonics and counter-hypersonics.

Breaking Defense notes that the event was spearheaded by the UK’s Defense Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL), which included “live retraining of models in flight and the interchange of AI models between AUKUS nations.”

The same report mentions that AUKUS teams developed AI models and directed each other’s air and ground systems tasked with target identification.

These assets, the Breaking Defense notes, include UK Blue Bear Ghost and Australian Insitu CT220 drones, UK Challenger 2 tanks, Warrior armored vehicles and Viking uncrewed ground vehicles, alongside an FV433 Abbot self-propelled gun and a BMP OT-90 infantry fighting vehicle.

Intelligent drone swarms may be a game-changing capability in a Taiwan scenario. Asia Times reported in May 2022 that drone swarms linked together by a distributed laser “mesh” data-sharing network were essential in securing a US victory in the Taiwan Strait during 2020 simulations conducted by the RAND think tank.

The drones used line-of-sight lasers to transmit data among each other, sharing targeting and flight data instantaneously between individual drones and effectively making the swarm autonomous.

Such intelligent drone swarms can work with manned stealth aircraft, extending the latter’s sensor range while maintaining electronic silence, thus drastically increasing the latter’s target acquisition capabilities.

Experts say the basic idea of a drone swarm is that its machines are able to make decisions among themselves. Image: Azrobotics.com.

They could also flood enemy radars with multiple targets, forcing the enemy to use limited air defense missiles and ammunition on expendable targets while manned stealth aircraft move in for the kill.

Machine learning and AI also enable drone swarms to look at targets from multiple angles, cross-check various targeting data streams and suggest the best attack.

For example, such capability may allow drone swarms to attack specific points on a warship, such as missile launchers, radars and engine compartments.

In line with the 2020 RAND simulation, Asia Times reported on February 2023 that the US is moving to accelerate the development of autonomous drone swarm technology that has already proved its worth in the Ukraine war and may prove decisive in a Taiwan contingency.

The US Department of Defense (DOD) has launched a low-profile program called “Autonomous Multi-Domain Adaptive Swarms-of-Swarms” (AMASS) to develop drone swarms that can be launched from sea, air and land.

AMASS aims to develop the capability to command autonomous drones working together to destroy enemy air defenses, artillery pieces, missile launchers and command centers.

Although details of the AMASS project are classified, pre-solicitation documents show that it is likely to focus on defeating or deterring a Chinese invasion of Taiwan.

Australia may already be deeply involved in US drone swarm projects. For example, Australia’s 2023 Defense Strategic Review mentions that collaboration with the US on the MQ-28A Ghost Bat should be a priority, with the drone capable of flying autonomously or with manned aircraft while being an expendable asset.

Drone-based target acquisition capabilities may also benefit AUKUS land-based precision fires in the Pacific. Asia Times reported in December 2022 that the US plans to build a “missile wall” in the Pacific, built around US Army and Marine Corps land-based missile launchers.

The US Army is testing its Typhon land-based missile launcher for its mid-range capability (MRC) program to provide long-range precision fires in the Pacific. It is designed to fire the Standard SM-6 or Tomahawk Block V missiles between 500 to 1,800 kilometers.

In the same direction, the US Marine Corps pursues a similar project with its Long-Range Fires program, using the same Tomahawk Block V missiles and other subsystems as the US Army’s Typhon.

Not to be left behind, Australia is also acquiring land-based missile launchers. The Strategist reported in April 2023 that the Australian Defense Force is seeking “land-based maritime strike” capability for a future conflict in coastal areas.

Australia’s HMAS Hobart firing an RIM-66 missile. More such projectiles will be trained on China in the years ahead. Photo: Australian Department of Defense

The Strategist report notes that a leading contender for this project is the Bushmaster troop carrier equipped with a pair of Naval Strike Missiles and advanced anti-ship weapons with a 250-kilometer range, the type of which are in service with the US Navy and US Marine Corps.

Such a level of advanced technology-sharing only happens in the tightest of alliances, with ingrained trust, shared culture and common language. The deep institutionalization of defense ties gives AUKUS an advantage over other Pacific security arrangements where those factors are lacking.

However, the high-tech AUKUS alliance may also have profound pitfalls. In a November 2022 Hudson Institute article, Koichiro Takagi notes that AI may outpace humans in decision-making speed, citing the risk of a flash war wherein opposing AI systems start an uncontrollable chain reaction that starts a conflict or even launches nuclear missiles.

He notes the tendency of humans to trust AI in the heat of battle, even if evidence shows that the AI’s decisions are incorrect. Takagi mentions that throughout history, it has not been superior technology and science that has won wars but the human intelligence that uses those tools.

He notes that future wars may not be determined by who has the better AI but by the innovativeness of the concepts that use it alongside human intelligence and creativity.

asiatimes.com · by Gabriel Honrada · May 27, 2023

5. Senators urge Pentagon to investigate price gouging by military contractors after 60 Minutes report

Video at the link: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/senators-urge-pentagon-investigate-price-gouging-military-contractors-60-minutes-report/

Senators urge Pentagon to investigate price gouging by military contractors after 60 Minutes report

CBS News · by Aliza Chasan

A bipartisan group of U.S. senators asked the Department of Defense to launch an investigation into longstanding price gouging by defense contractors Wednesday.

In a letter to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Chuck Grassley (R-IA), Mike Braun (R-IN) and Ron Wyden (D-OR) said they were prompted by a six-month investigation by 60 Minutes that uncovered extensive price gouging. Experts told 60 Minutes that military contractors overcharge the Pentagon on almost everything the DOD buys each year.

"Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, and TransDigm are among the offenders, dramatically overcharging the Department and U.S. taxpayers while reaping enormous profits, seeing their stock prices soar, and handing out massive executive compensation packages," the senators wrote. "These companies have abused the trust government has placed in them, exploiting their position as sole suppliers for certain items to increase prices far above inflation or any reasonable profit margin."

In March, Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks announced the largest Pentagon budget ever: $842 billion. Almost half will go to defense contractors.

"Dollars that are wasted on overpriced weapons or spare parts cannot be spent to counter adversaries or support service members," the senators wrote.

The five senators' letter, addressed to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, cites that in 2020, the defense department's Office of Inspector General reported that roughly 1 in 5 of its ongoing investigations were related to procurement fraud. The Department of Defense has been on the Government Accountability Office's high-risk list for financial management since the 1990s.

"The DOD can no longer expect Congress or the American taxpayer to underwrite record military spending while simultaneously failing to account for the hundreds of billions it hands out every year to spectacularly profitable private corporations," the senators wrote.

Shay Assad, now retired after rising to become the defense department's most senior and awarded contract negotiator, pointed 60 Minutes to the Patriot weapons system as one example. In 2015, Assad ordered a review and Army negotiators discovered Lockheed Martin and its subcontractor, Boeing, were grossly overcharging the Pentagon and U.S. allies by hundreds of millions of dollars for Patriot PAC-3 missiles.

Lockheed Martin told 60 Minutes it, "constructively and ethically works with the U.S. government to support its national defense, intelligence, and international security cooperation objectives." "We negotiate with the government in good faith on all our programs to meet its mission needs with the best and most effective technologies and systems in compliance with Federal Acquisition Regulations and all other applicable laws."

After the review, the Pentagon negotiated a new follow-on contract and saved the Department of Defense $550 million.

"…[W]e take very seriously our responsibility to support the warfighter and our commitments to the U.S. government and taxpayer," a Boeing spokesperson said.

Retired Air Force Lieutenant General Chris Bogdan, who oversaw the purchase of some of the country's most critical weapons systems, pointed 60 Minutes to another problematic Lockheed Martin contract. He took the reins of the troubled F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program in 2012, when the program was seven years behind schedule and $90 billion over the original estimate. Bogdan said the biggest costs are yet to come. Support and maintenance could end up costing taxpayers $1.3 trillion.

Lockheed is delivering the aircraft the Pentagon paid to design and build, but under the contract, the company and its suppliers retained control of some of proprietary information — the design and repair data — needed to fix and upgrade the plane.

The 60 Minutes report also looked at Raytheon, where Assad was a top executive before going to work at the defense department. Army negotiators said Raytheon made "unacceptable profits" from the Patriot missile defense system by dramatically exaggerating the cost and hours it took to build the radar and ground equipment. Raytheon stated that it is working to "equitably resolve" the matter and the company has informed investors that it has set aside $290 million for probable liability.

TransDigm, a fast-growing company led by CEO Nick Howley, was also part of the 60 Minutes report. TransDigm has taken over companies that make spare parts for the military. Last year, Howley was called before Congress a second time over accusations of price gouging. Assad's review team found the government will pay TransDigm $119 million for parts that should cost $28 million.

TransDigm told 60 Minutes that the company follows the law and charges market prices.

On Thursday, the company told 60 Minutes in an emailed statement: "TransDigm companies manufacture over 500,000 parts for mostly commercial aircraft used all over the world and are also proud to supply the DoD with reliable, high-quality aircraft products. ... TransDigm has engaged directly with the DoD to ensure better exchange of information and will continue to work with the DoD to improve the procurement process as it relates to its business with TransDigm. ..."

The Department of Defense previously responded to 60 Minutes' report from Sunday, writing in part: "The Department is committed to evaluating all DoD contracts for fair and reasonable pricing in order to minimize cost to the taxpayer and maximize the combat capability and services delivered to the Department. Robust competition within the defense industrial base is one of the surest ways to obtain reasonable pricing on DoD contracts. For some defense requirements, however, the Department is reliant on single suppliers, and contracting officers must negotiate sole-source contracts using statutory and regulatory authorities that protect the taxpayers' interests. ..."

Aliza Chasan is a digital producer at 60 Minutes and CBS News.

Twitter

CBS News · by Aliza Chasan

6. Russia Launches Largest Drone Attack on Kyiv Since Start of War

Russia Launches Largest Drone Attack on Kyiv Since Start of War

Defense analysts suggest drone strikes are designed to deplete Ukrainian air defenses

By Matthew LuxmooreFollow

May 28, 2023 7:04 am ET

https://www.wsj.com/articles/russia-launches-largest-drone-attack-on-kyiv-since-start-of-war-a68c2daa?mod=hp_lead_pos11

KYIV—Russia launched a massive wave of suicide drones against targets across Ukraine including the capital on Sunday, in what authorities said was its largest attack using the Iranian-supplied drones since the start of the war in February 2022.

The drone strikes were part of a broader campaign of Russian shelling and artillery attacks against targets in 12 regions across Ukraine on Saturday and early on Sunday morning, authorities said.

Kyiv, which on Sunday celebrates the anniversary of its founding more than 1,500 years ago with muted celebrations and outdoor fairs planned, was especially hard-hit by the attacks.

Air-raid sirens continued for more than five hours in the capital as Mayor Vitali Klitschko urged residents to stay in bomb shelters and warned that “this will be a tough night.”

Ukrainian soldiers head toward the front line near Bakhmut, Ukraine. PHOTO: EFREM LUKATSKY/ASSOCIATED PRESS

The Ukrainian Air Force said Russia had deployed 54 Iranian-supplied Shahed drones against infrastructure and military objects, mainly in central Ukraine and the capital. It said 52 of them had been shot down.

The Kyiv region military administration said 40 of the drones were shot down over the capital, coming in several waves as troops manning air defenses scrambled to bring them down.

Debris from downed drones caused damage in several parts of the capital, Klitschko said. Emergency workers rushed to combat blazes at high-rise apartment blocks struck by falling drones. In a central part of the city, Klitschko said, at least one person died as a result of drone debris.

Oleksiy Danilov, the secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, on Sunday posted to Facebook a doctored image of the Ukrainian capital’s famous Motherland sticking its middle fingers up in the direction of Russia. “The mood of Kyivites hasn’t changed,” read the caption.

Russia has sought to exhaust Ukraine’s air defenses by launching waves of cheap Iranian-supplied drones that are easy to procure but expensive for Ukraine to shoot down using advanced Western air-defense systems supplied by allies in recent months. Defense experts say depleting Ukraine’s air defense stocks may be aimed at raising the effectiveness of future cruise-missile attacks by Russia.

The latest attacks come as Ukrainian troops prepare for the start of a widely anticipated counteroffensive aimed at retaking land captured by Russia since the start of its invasion in February 2022. Kyiv has been pushing its Western allies for extra weapons supplies ahead of the campaign, especially F-16 jet fighters that could go toe-to-toe with Russian planes launching bombs, missiles and rockets from Russian-held parts of eastern Ukraine.

“We’ll make sure the coming week is effective from the perspective of cooperation with our partners,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a video address late on Saturday. “We are not wasting a single week.“

Meanwhile, authorities said the death toll from a Russian rocket attack that hit a medical clinic in the city of Dnipro in southeastern Ukraine on Friday had risen to four. More than 30 people were wounded in what Zelensky at the time called “another crime against humanity.”

Write to Matthew Luxmoore at matthew.luxmoore@wsj.com

7. No names added to USASOC memorial wall for first time since 9/11

Bittersweet news.

Excerpts:

His son, Spc. John Pelham, 22, was assigned to Headquarters & Headquarters Company, 2nd Battalion, 3rd Special Forces Group at the time of his death on Feb. 12, 2014. Spc. Pelham died after sustaining wounds from small arms fire during an insider attack in Kapisa province, Afghanistan.

Pelham said that USASOC promised him and his family their son would never be forgotten.

“9 years later, the special operations community has never let me down,” Pelham said. “They have always stayed true to us and to their word that they would always remember.”

That was apparent to the Pelham family during the ceremony. The family aspect was palpable, whether you were a family member or one of the men or women serving in USASOC. Pelham said the ceremony continues to pay tribute to USASOC’s fallen and keeps their memories alive.

No names added to USASOC memorial wall for first time since 9/11

taskandpurpose.com · by Joshua Skovlund · May 27, 2023

No new service members were added to the US Army Special Operations Command memorial wall during a Gold Star Memorial Ceremony Thursday morning at the Memorial Plaza at USASOC Headquarters on Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

That means, for the first time since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, no one assigned to USASOC has died in combat during the past year.

The memorial wall bares 1,242 names of soldiers who have died in combat since USASOC was first established. Of the names on the wall, 377 have been added since the Global War on Terrorism began.

“We’ve gotten good enough in certain areas of what we do that lives have been protected, and lives have been saved, and another family doesn’t have to get a call at 4:37 on a Friday afternoon, ‘honey, why are there two guys on my front porch in dress blue uniforms,’” said Wendall Pelham, a Gold Star father in attendance for the ceremony. “That call, as you can imagine, literally changed our lives forever. And to know that in the last year, nobody’s family got that call — that is heaven sent.”

His son, Spc. John Pelham, 22, was assigned to Headquarters & Headquarters Company, 2nd Battalion, 3rd Special Forces Group at the time of his death on Feb. 12, 2014. Spc. Pelham died after sustaining wounds from small arms fire during an insider attack in Kapisa province, Afghanistan.

Pelham said that USASOC promised him and his family their son would never be forgotten.

“9 years later, the special operations community has never let me down,” Pelham said. “They have always stayed true to us and to their word that they would always remember.”

That was apparent to the Pelham family during the ceremony. The family aspect was palpable, whether you were a family member or one of the men or women serving in USASOC. Pelham said the ceremony continues to pay tribute to USASOC’s fallen and keeps their memories alive.

With Memorial Day weekend starting, Pelham wants people to understand what this weekend is about. He says all the BBQs, store sales, and well-wishes are fine, but make sure to spend time paying respect to America’s military members that made the ultimate sacrifice.

“Memorial Day is for those who gave their full measure, those who gave their last and final sacrifice to this country,” Pelham said. “Americans need to know that there are people in this country willing to do that.”

Joshua Skovlund

Joshua Skovlund is a contributor for Task & Purpose. He has reported around the world, from Minneapolis to Ukraine, documenting some of the most important world events to happen over the past five years. He served as a forward observer in the US Army, and after leaving the service, he worked for five years in paramedicine before transitioning to a career in multimedia journalism.

Army

Branch

taskandpurpose.com · by Joshua Skovlund · May 27, 2023

8. Is cybersecurity an unsolvable problem?

A fascinating book and an interview with the author.

Powerful and important excerpt here:

But Shapiro also brings some penetrating insight into why the Internet remains so insecure decades after its invention, as well as how and why hackers do what they do. And his conclusion about what can be done about it might prove a bit controversial: there is no permanent solution to the cybersecurity problem. "Cybersecurity is not a primarily technological problem that requires a primarily engineering solution," Shapiro writes. "It is a human problem that requires an understanding of human behavior." That's his mantra throughout the book: "Hacking is about humans." And it portends, for Shapiro, "the death of 'solutionism.'"

Ars spoke with Shapiro to learn more.

Is cybersecurity an unsolvable problem?

Ars Technica · by Jennifer Ouellette · May 27, 2023

Enlarge

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

In November 1988, a graduate student at Cornell University named Robert Morris, Jr. inadvertently sparked a national crisis by unleashing a self-replicating computer worm on a VAX 11/750 computer in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Artificial Intelligence Lab. Morris had no malicious intent; it was merely a scientific experiment to see how many computers he could infect. But he made a grievous error, setting his reinfection rate much too high. The worm spread so rapidly that it brought down the entire computer network at Cornell University, crippled those at several other universities, and even infiltrated the computers at Los Alamos and Livermore National Laboratories.

Making matters worse, his father was a computer scientist and cryptographer who was the chief scientist at the National Security Agency's National Computer Security Center. Even though it was unintentional and witnesses testified that Morris didn't have "a fraudulent or dishonest bone in his body," he was convicted of felonious computer fraud. The judge was merciful during sentencing. Rather than 15–20 years in prison, Morris got three years of probation with community service and had to pay a $10,000 fine. He went on to found Y Combinator with his longtime friend Paul Graham, among other accomplishments.

The "Morris Worm" is just one of five hacking cases that Scott Shapiro highlights in his new book, Fancy Bear Goes Phishing: The Dark History of the Information Age in Five Extraordinary Hacks. Shapiro is a legal philosopher at Yale University, but as a child, his mathematician father—who worked at Bell Labs—sparked an interest in computing by bringing home various components, like microchips, resistors, diodes, LEDs, and breadboards. Their father/son outings included annual attendance at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers convention in New York City. Then, a classmate in Shapiro's high school biology class introduced him to programming on the school's TRS-80, and Shapiro was hooked. He moved on to working on an Apple II and majored in computer science in college but lost interest afterward and went to law school instead.

With his Yale colleague Oona Hathaway, Shapiro co-authored a book called The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World, a sweeping historical analysis of the laws of war that spans from Hugo Grotius, the early 17th century father of international law, all the way to 2014. That experience raised numerous questions about the future of warfare—namely, cyberwar and whether the same "rules" would apply. The topic seemed like a natural choice for his next book, particularly given Shapiro's background in computer science and coding.

Despite that background, "I honestly had no idea what to say about it," Shapiro told Ars. "I just found it all extremely confusing." He was then asked to co-teach a special course, "The Law and Technology of Cyber Conflict," with Hathaway and Yale's computer science department. But the equal mix of law students and computer science students trying to learn about two very different highly technical fields proved to be a challenging combination. "It was the worst class I've ever taught in my career," said Shapiro. "At any given time, half the class was bored and the other half was confused. I learned nothing from it, and nor did any of the students."

That experience goaded Shapiro to spend the next few years trying to crack that particular nut. He brushed up on C, x86 assembly code, and Linux and immersed himself in the history of hacking, achieving his first hack at the age of 52. But he also approached the issue from his field of expertise. "I'm a philosopher, so I like to go to first principles," he said. "But computer science is only a century old, and hacking, or cybersecurity, is maybe a few decades old. It's a very young field, and part of the problem is that people haven't thought it through from first principles." The result was Fancy Bear Goes Phishing.

The book is a lively, engaging read filled with fascinating stories and colorful characters: the infamous Bulgarian hacker known as Dark Avenger, whose identity is still unknown; Cameron LaCroix, a 16-year-old from south Boston notorious for hacking into Paris Hilton's Sidekick II in 2005; Paras Jha, a Rutgers student who designed the "Mirai botnet"—apparently to get out of a calculus exam—and nearly destroyed the Internet in 2016 when he hacked Minecraft; and of course, the titular Fancy Bear hack by Russian military intelligence that was so central to the 2016 presidential election. (Fun fact: Shapiro notes that John von Neumann "built a self-reproducing automaton in 1949, decades before any other hacker... [and] he wrote it without a computer.")

But Shapiro also brings some penetrating insight into why the Internet remains so insecure decades after its invention, as well as how and why hackers do what they do. And his conclusion about what can be done about it might prove a bit controversial: there is no permanent solution to the cybersecurity problem. "Cybersecurity is not a primarily technological problem that requires a primarily engineering solution," Shapiro writes. "It is a human problem that requires an understanding of human behavior." That's his mantra throughout the book: "Hacking is about humans." And it portends, for Shapiro, "the death of 'solutionism.'"

Ars spoke with Shapiro to learn more.

Enlarge / Scott Shaprio is the author of Fancy Bear Goes Phishing.

Ars Technica: Your overarching theme is that hacking is ultimately about humans. The defect is not in the programming, it's in human cognition and human behavior—what you describe as "upcode," as opposed to "downcode" (the programs). Our culture and our biases and our assumptions actually shape the programs.

Scott Shapiro: It's like to understand God, you've got to understand the people who made him. My first draft of this book was just about downcode. And then I read it over, as one does, and I recognized that I was giving two different explanations for vulnerabilities. One is the technical explanation and the other was the political human ones. I'm a legal philosopher. I talk all the time about how law and norms guide conduct. It's amazing that I forgot that. So I rewrote it and then realized that there was a third explanation: the philosophical explanation. So I had to rewrite the book again, but it came into shape by the third time.

Ars Technica: You write about Alan Turing's seminal 1936 paper and the notion of "meta code," which is what hackers target. What is metacode, and why is it so central to these issues?

Scott Shapiro: As a philosopher, I'm most interested in metacode. In 1936, this 24-year-old British computer scientist and mathematician, Alan Turing, decides that he's going to try to show that not every problem can be solved by an algorithm, by a computing device. He has to first come up with a model of computing devices and then show that they can solve solvable problems, but there's going to be an infinite number of problems that you can't solve.

One principle of meta code is the idea that computation, the act of computation, is a physical act of manipulating symbols. That sounds complicated, but it isn't, because when you add two numbers, you're manipulating symbols. We learn how to do that in elementary school. I call that physicality. Physicality ensures that a computing device can be built to solve a solvable problem. But what Turing also showed was that you could build not just a computing device but a general computing device that can solve any solvable problem. Instead of building the programming into the hardware, the decision logic, the way it was done for several decades, it would be piped in through software, through binary strings.

This is the second principle of metacode that Turing discovered. Despite the fact that code and data are so different from one another, they can still be represented by the same symbols, namely numerical symbols. That makes general computing devices possible. Now we have computing devices, but also, we can load software on them using the same sort of symbols that we use for data. I call that duality, the idea that code and data can be represented by the same symbols.

These two basic principles that make our world possible are the very principles that hackers exploit. It allows us to, first of all, group together very different kinds of technical hacks. All these different technical hacks are really motivated by exploiting a philosophical principle of computation of meta code. The second thing is to show why perfect cybersecurity is impossible because the very principles that make hacking possible are the ones that make general computing possible. So you can't get rid of one without the other because you cannot patch metacode.

Ars Technica: Your conclusion is what you call the "death of solutionism." We don't like feeling helpless, and we don't like to feel like we can't solve a problem. But you're saying we cannot solve this problem. The cat-and-mouse game never ends. All you can do is make sure the cat mostly wins.

Scott Shapiro: That's right. In a way, Turing himself showed that perfect cybersecurity is impossible through the proof that he gave. It's easy to extend the proof just to see that among the problems that cannot be solved are finding bugs in computer programs. So in a way, what I'm saying is uncontroversial as a conclusion. In the epilogue, I try to lay out the Turing proof. It's a bit hard to understand. But I think this explanation seems very straightforward. The five hacks I write about in the book are all very different kinds of hacks, but they can be grouped into these two categories. By the end of the book, I hope to convince you that this is the way it's done. Computers are built this way and hacking works this way, so how are you going to fix it? So I think it's an easier way to get the same conclusion.

Ars Technica: I was struck by your description of the different cultures of the scientific and the military communities. When the Internet was being developed, the scientists wanted open sharing and they were willing to sacrifice security for that. The military wanted the exact opposite. So is there a way to "hack the hackers," so to speak, in terms of their culture—by altering their upcode?

Scott Shapiro: It's a great question, and I do believe there is. Education has to change. As professors, as teachers, as cultural figures, we have to present hacking as a very interesting subject but a very dangerous one. It's not fun and games. I mean, it is if it's done safely. So I teach students how to hack, but I teach them how to do it safely and legally. I could tell them, "Hey, the odds of you getting caught are pretty low. Go out, have a good time, you'll get better at it." That would be a bad idea. That would be telling people that this is an OK thing to do. The way in which computer science education has changed, people are starting to realize that this isn't a joke. Hacking is very serious, and it needs to be taught and introduced in a very responsible manner.

I taught at Tel Aviv University in Israel, and I was really surprised by the different culture that Israel has with respect to technology, and also with respect to cybersecurity, compared to the United States. For example, one of the parents said that their 7-year-old child is going to a camp where they learn how to write viruses. I don't think that that's a great idea. Also, the NSO group is an Israeli cyberweapons manufacturer and provider. They're the developers of Pegasus, which is a certain spyware tool being used against human rights activists and journalists. At least in the United States, the response has been that this is a bad thing for NSO to do, for any kind of company to do. There have been sanctions placed on NSO.

This is an important message to the American people that this is not a legitimate way to run your business. On the other hand, when I was in Israel, students would tell me that their parents would be very proud if they worked for NSO because NSO is a big success story in Israel, or at least it was. So Israel and the United States have very different cultures. One is a security state, the other is not. It's a different view about the relationship that people should have toward hacking. And I think leaders and educators are the ones who are responsible for changing cultural attitudes.

Ars Technica: The scientific community in various disciplines has struggled with this in the past. There's an attitude of, "We're just doing the research. It's just a tool. It's morally neutral." Hacking might be a prime example of a subject that you cannot teach outside the broader context of morality.

Scott Shapiro: I couldn't agree more. I'm a philosopher, so my day job is teaching that. But it's a problem throughout all of STEM: this idea that tools are morally neutral and you're just making them and it's up to the end user to use it in the right way. That is a reasonable attitude to have if you live in a culture that is doing the work of explaining why these tools ought to be used in one way rather than another. But when we have a culture that doesn't do that, then it becomes a very morally problematic activity. We're now seeing a lot of hand-wringing about AI. We always see hand-wringing about every single new technology. There's the techno-utopians and there's the techno dystopians, and usually a couple of years later, the cooler heads prevail.

Ars Technica: There are advocates of hiring the hackers. Teaching young kids how to code a virus can be useful if they grow up to be cybersecurity experts and help solve the problem. You do say there is a great need for experts in cybersecurity.

Scott Shapiro: That's exactly right. I'm not sure that a 7- or 8-year-old is ready for that, to be honest with you. But I teach people how to hack. Anybody can learn how to hack. But we're constantly reminding people about their ethical and legal responsibilities. We are not teaching them just to hack. We're teaching them the ideas behind hacking, how the Internet works, how operating systems work, so they can appreciate the powerful technology that we're showing them how to exploit. I hope we do it in a very responsible fashion because it isn't a joke, and it needs to be taken seriously. But I want people to do this because I think it's the only way to learn how to protect yourself. Plus, it's fun. Everyone's talking about it and almost nobody understands it, but it's not that hard.

Ars Technica: You write that for most people, taking some basic precautions means that 90 percent of the time, they're going to be OK.

Scott Shapiro: The book's not trying to make you feel bad, like, "Hey, your password's too short." And I'm not trying say that we're all going to die. The truth is in the middle. For most people, the risks are not big at all. The culture presents to us a picture of hackers which is a sensational caricature: Somebody who is almost completely asocial, maybe has mental illness, maybe is morbidly overweight. There's the 400-pound person sitting in their pajamas in their basement in their parents' house, socially maladapted human beings who are malicious and evil. There have been hackers in the last several decades who've challenged that picture.

Yes, of course, hacking is a real risk. But the vast majority of hacking, of cybercrime, is financially motivated— to make money. They do not want to break into your computer specifically. They want to break into lots of computers easily to create a botnet or to distribute spam or ransomware. They don't really want to spend that much time on you. So for most of us, basic precautions make it just a little bit more expensive to attack you. They're more likely to move on to somebody else because these are basically automated tools that are very low-level type of things.

So most of us are low-value targets. But there are people who are high-value targets: journalists, activists, CFOs, CEOs, celebrities. They are under attack. There's just no question. They can protect themselves, but they probably should seek the help of a professional. So some people really do need to worry about it because there really are people who are after you. But for most of us, it's not true.

Ars Technica: Do you have a favorite hacker among those you write about in your book?

Scott Shapiro: That's tough. What's my favorite child? But I feel a connection to Robert Morris just because we're the same age, our dads worked in the same building, and we're both kind of obsessed with Unix. He was not only the first one to crash the Internet, his case raises a whole set of questions of legal interpretation What downcode did he write? But also, what upcode applies to him? And going forward, how are we going to deal with people like this? When anybody teaches cybersecurity law, United States vs. Morris is the first case you teach because it's so seminal.

Ars Technica · by Jennifer Ouellette · May 27, 2023

9. Opinion | Beyond the ‘Matrix’ Theory of the Human Mind

Ezra Klein: We Blew It With the Internet. Let’s Not Blow It With A.I.

Opinion | Beyond the ‘Matrix’ Theory of the Human Mind

The New York Times · by Ezra Klein · May 28, 2023

Ezra Klein

Beyond the ‘Matrix’ Theory of the Human Mind

May 28, 2023, 6:00 a.m. ET

Credit...Christopher Anderson/Magnum Photos

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Imagine I told you in 1970 that I was going to invent a wondrous tool. This new tool would make it possible for anyone with access — and most of humanity would have access — to quickly communicate and collaborate with anyone else. It would store nearly the sum of human knowledge and thought up to that point, and all of it would be searchable, sortable and portable. Text could be instantly translated from one language to another, news would be immediately available from all over the world, and it would take no longer for a scientist to download a journal paper from 15 years ago than to flip to an entry in the latest issue.

What would you have predicted this leap in information and communication and collaboration would do for humanity? How much faster would our economies grow?

Now imagine I told you that I was going to invent a sinister tool (perhaps, while telling you this, I would cackle). As people used it, their attention spans would degrade, as the tool would constantly shift their focus, weakening their powers of concentration and contemplation. This tool would show people whatever it is they found most difficult to look away from — which would often be what was most threatening about the world, from the worst ideas of their political opponents to the deep injustices of their society. It would fit in their pockets and glow on their night stands and never truly be quiet; there would never be a moment when people could be free of the sense that the pile of messages and warnings and tasks needed to be checked.

What would you have thought this engine of distraction, division and cognitive fracture would do to humanity?

Thinking of the internet in these terms helps solve an economic mystery. The embarrassing truth is that productivity growth — how much more we can make with the same number of people and factories and land — was far faster for much of the 20th century than it is now. We average about half the productivity growth rate today that we saw in the 1950s and ’60s. That means stagnating incomes, sluggish economies and a political culture that’s more about fighting over what we have than distributing the riches and wonders we’ve gained. So what went wrong?

You can think of two ways the internet could have sped up productivity growth. The first way was obvious: by allowing us to do what we were already doing and do it more easily and quickly. And that happened. You can see a bump in productivity growth from roughly 1995 to 2005 as companies digitized their operations. But it’s the second way that was always more important: By connecting humanity to itself and to nearly its entire storehouse of information, the internet could have made us smarter and more capable as a collective.

I don’t think that promise proved false, exactly. Even in working on this article, it was true for me: The speed with which I could find information, sort through research, contact experts — it’s marvelous. Even so, I doubt I wrote this faster than I would have in 1970. Much of my mind was preoccupied by the constant effort needed just to hold a train of thought in a digital environment designed to distract, agitate and entertain me. And I am not alone.

Gloria Mark, a professor of information science at the University of California, Irvine, and the author of “Attention Span,” started researching the way people used computers in 2004. The average time people spent on a single screen was 2.5 minutes. “I was astounded,” she told me. “That was so much worse than I’d thought it would be.” But that was just the beginning. By 2012, Mark and her colleagues found the average time on a single task was 75 seconds. Now it’s down to about 47.

This is an acid bath for human cognition. Multitasking is mostly a myth. We can focus on one thing at a time. “It’s like we have an internal whiteboard in our minds,” Mark said. “If I’m working on one task, I have all the info I need on that mental whiteboard. Then I switch to email. I have to mentally erase that whiteboard and write all the information I need to do email. And just like on a real whiteboard, there can be a residue in our minds. We may still be thinking of something from three tasks ago.”

The cost is in more than just performance. Mark and others in her field have hooked people to blood pressure machines and heart rate monitors and measured chemicals in the blood. The constant switching makes us stressed and irritable. I didn’t exactly need experiments to prove that — I live that, and you probably do, too — but it was depressing to hear it confirmed.

Which brings me to artificial intelligence. Here I’m talking about the systems we are seeing now: large language models like OpenAI’s GPT-4 and Google’s Bard. What these systems do, for the most part, is summarize information they have been shown and create content that resembles it. I recognize that sentence can sound a bit dismissive, but it shouldn’t: That’s a huge amount of what human beings do, too.

Already, we are being told that A.I. is making coders and customer service representatives and writers more productive. At least one chief executive plans to add ChatGPT use in employee performance evaluations. But I’m skeptical of this early hype. It is measuring A.I.’s potential benefits without considering its likely costs — the same mistake we made with the internet.

I worry we’re headed in the wrong direction in at least three ways.

One is that these systems will do more to distract and entertain than to focus. Right now, the large language models tend to hallucinate information: Ask them to answer a complex question, and you will receive a convincing, erudite response in which key facts and citations are often made up. I suspect this will slow their widespread use in important industries much more than is being admitted, akin to the way driverless cars have been tough to roll out because they need to be perfectly reliable rather than just pretty good.

A question to ask about large language models, then, is where does trustworthiness not matter? Those are the areas where adoption will be fastest. An example from media is telling, I think. CNET, the technology website, quietly started using these models to write articles, with humans editing the pieces. But the process failed. Forty-one of the 77 A.I.-generated articles proved to have errors the editors missed, and CNET, embarrassed, paused the program. BuzzFeed, which recently shuttered its news division, is racing ahead with using A.I. to generate quizzes and travel guides. Many of the results have been shoddy, but it doesn’t really matter. A BuzzFeed quiz doesn’t have to be reliable.

A.I. will be great for creating content where reliability isn’t a concern. The personalized video games and children’s shows and music mash-ups and bespoke images will be dazzling. And new domains of delight and distraction are coming: I believe we’re much closer to A.I. friends, lovers and companions becoming a widespread part of our social lives than society is prepared for. But where reliability matters — say, a large language model devoted to answering medical questions or summarizing doctor-patient interactions — deployment will be more troubled, as oversight costs will be immense. The problem is that those are the areas that matter most for economic growth.

Marcela Martin, BuzzFeed’s president, encapsulated my next worry nicely when she told investors, “Instead of generating 10 ideas in a minute, A.I. can generate hundreds of ideas in a second.” She meant that as a good thing, but is it? Imagine that multiplied across the economy. Someone somewhere will have to process all that information. What will this do to productivity?

One lesson of the digital age is that more is not always better. More emails and more reports and more Slacks and more tweets and more videos and more news articles and more slide decks and more Zoom calls have not led, it seems, to more great ideas. “We can produce more information,” Mark said. “But that means there’s more information for us to process. Our processing capability is the bottleneck.”

Email and chat systems like Slack offer useful analogies here. Both are widely used across the economy. Both were initially sold as productivity boosters, allowing more communication to take place faster. And as anyone who uses them knows, the productivity gains — though real — are more than matched by the cost of being buried under vastly more communication, much of it junk and nonsense.

The magic of a large language model is that it can produce a document of almost any length in almost any style, with a minimum of user effort. Few have thought through the costs that will impose on those who are supposed to respond to all this new text. One of my favorite examples of this comes from The Economist, which imagined NIMBYs — but really, pick your interest group — using GPT-4 to rapidly produce a 1,000-page complaint opposing a new development. Someone, of course, will then have to respond to that complaint. Will that really speed up our ability to build housing?

You might counter that A.I. will solve this problem by quickly summarizing complaints for overwhelmed policymakers, much as the increase in spam is (sometimes, somewhat) countered by more advanced spam filters. Jonathan Frankle, the chief scientist at MosaicML and a computer scientist at Harvard, described this to me as the “boring apocalypse” scenario for A.I., in which “we use ChatGPT to generate long emails and documents, and then the person who received it uses ChatGPT to summarize it back down to a few bullet points, and there is tons of information changing hands, but all of it is just fluff. We’re just inflating and compressing content generated by A.I.”

When we spoke, Frankle noted the magic of feeding a 100-page Supreme Court document into a large language model and getting a summary of the key points. But was that, he worried, a good summary? Many of us have had the experience of asking ChatGPT to draft a piece of writing and seeing a fully formed composition appear, as if by magic, in seconds.

My third concern is related to that use of A.I.: Even if those summaries and drafts are pretty good, something is lost in the outsourcing. Part of my job is reading 100-page Supreme Court documents and composing crummy first drafts of columns. It would certainly be faster for me to have A.I. do that work. But the increased efficiency would come at the cost of new ideas and deeper insights.

Our societywide obsession with speed and efficiency has given us a flawed model of human cognition that I’ve come to think of as the Matrix theory of knowledge. Many of us wish we could use the little jack from “The Matrix” to download the knowledge of a book (or, to use the movie’s example, a kung fu master) into our heads, and then we’d have it, instantly. But that misses much of what’s really happening when we spend nine hours reading a biography. It’s the time inside that book spent drawing connections to what we know and having thoughts we would not otherwise have had that matters.

“Nobody likes to write reports or do emails, but we want to stay in touch with information,” Mark said. “We learn when we deeply process information. If we’re removed from that and we’re delegating everything to GPT — having it summarize and write reports for us — we’re not connecting to that information.”

We understand this intuitively when it’s applied to students. No one thinks that reading the SparkNotes summary of a great piece of literature is akin to actually reading the book. And no one thinks that if students have ChatGPT write their essays, they have cleverly boosted their productivity rather than lost the opportunity to learn. The analogy to office work is not perfect — there are many dull tasks worth automating so people can spend their time on more creative pursuits — but the dangers of overautomating cognitive and creative processes are real.

These are old concerns, of course. Socrates questioned the use of writing (recorded, ironically, by Plato), worrying that “if men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves but by means of external marks.” I think the trade-off here was worth it — I am, after all, a writer — but it was a trade-off. Human beings really did lose faculties of memory we once had.

To make good on its promise, artificial intelligence needs to deepen human intelligence. And that means human beings need to build A.I., and build the workflows and office environments around it, in ways that don’t overwhelm and distract and diminish us. We failed that test with the internet. Let’s not fail it with A.I.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.

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Ezra Klein joined Opinion in 2021. Previously, he was the founder, editor in chief and then editor-at-large of Vox; the host of the podcast “The Ezra Klein Show”; and the author of “Why We’re Polarized.” Before that, he was a columnist and editor at The Washington Post, where he founded and led the Wonkblog vertical. @ezraklein

The New York Times · by Ezra Klein · May 28, 2023

10. The US’s multiple Indo-Pacific strategies, explained

Two key points:

There can’t really be just one Indo-Pacific strategy

Cooperation with China is a necessity for most in the region

The US’s multiple Indo-Pacific strategies, explained

A Papua New Guinea pact reveals the complexity of creating partnerships in the region.

By Ellen Ioanes May 27, 2023, 4:17pm ED

Vox · by Ellen Ioanes · May 27, 2023

Andrew Kutan/AFP via Getty Images

Ellen Ioanes covers breaking and general assignment news as the weekend reporter at Vox. She previously worked at Business Insider covering the military and global conflicts.

The US has accelerated its security and cooperation agreements in the Indo-Pacific region in recent months, renewing strong ties to the Philippines, enhancing cooperation with Australia, and negotiating wide-ranging defense and cooperation agreements with Papua New Guinea. But even as the US courts the region, Asian and Pacific countries must weigh the costs and benefits of their alignments in a complex security, economic, and environmental interests.

While there are no official details about the agreements, they include targeted economic support, efforts to fight climate change, disaster relief assistance, as well as an expanded US military presence over the next 10 years and support in policing illicit activity like illegal fishing in the country’s immediate vicinity. Papua New Guinea, like many countries in the broader region, has a strong trade relationship with China but values its non-aligned status and commitment to its own domestic priorities above “great power” competition.

Papua New Guinea President James Marape insists that the defense agreement is just an update of a previous defense pact and that his country will not be used as a US base in a conflict between the US and China. “We have a healthy relationship with the Chinese government and they are an important trading partner,” Marape said during a joint press conference with Secretary of State Antony Blinken in the capital, Port Moresby, last week.

The leaders of 14 Pacific Island nations were in Port Moresby last week as part of a regional partnership with the US, aimed at deepening economic and security ties to help fend off what President Joe Biden called China’s “economic coercion” in the region at a White House summit last year.

Efforts to court nations in the Pacific Islands also comes on the heels of renewed defense cooperation with the Philippines. That partnership withered under former Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte, but the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (ECDA), has been reinstated under President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. and allows the US to base troops at specific military installations in the Philippines.

Japan and South Korea have also agreed to invest more in their militaries, and cooperation between the two nations has increased under new leadership and with increased threats both from China and North Korea. And the Quad — the defense, economic, and policy cooperation group made up of the US, Australia, Japan, and India — is at its strongest yet.

Though US efforts to cooperate with Asian and Pacific countries have recently produced good results, many countries in the region don’t see cooperation with the US as being in their interest. And any positive movement in those relationships may have as much to do with Beijing’s aggression or mismanagement of relationships as it does with what the US has to offer.

There can’t really be just one Indo-Pacific strategy

The US has many challenges to its relationships in the Asia-Pacific region; horrific wars, outright colonialism, environmental destruction, and covert meddling in politics are just a few of the reasons Asian and Pacific nations have to distrust or reject a relationship with the US.

Japan and South Korea do have long-standing defense relationships with the US, both of which emerged from conflict. The US has had military bases in Japan since the end of World War II because it occupied Japan during that time; in exchange for a constitutionally pacifist Japan, the US agreed to defend the country so long as it could place troops and materiel there.

At the end of hostilities in the Korean War, South Korea had no way to defend itself against the stronger North, resulting in the 1953 US-Republic of Korea Mutual Defense Treaty. Over the decades, both East Asian nations have become economic powerhouses and built their own defense forces, too, but have struggled to cooperate largely because of Japan’s colonization of the Korean Peninsula in the early 20th century.

“Japan-South Korea has been the incredibly weak link, the weak leg of this trilateral triangle for years, to great frustration of US objectives and US strategists,” Brian Harding, senior expert for Southeast Asia at the US Institute for Peace told Vox. “There are a lot of reasons why there are problems in that relationship, but strategically it’s been a real problem for the United States, so a closer trilateral US-Japan-South Korea relationship is a major new development” particularly when it comes to dealing with the military and nuclear threat coming from North Korea.

Japan in particular has committed to increasing its military might, eschewing its decades-long pacifist position to counter threats from both North Korea and China. “The threat is [...] a military conflict over the Taiwan Strait and because of Japan’s geographic proximity, because of the US-Japan alliance, and because US military assets in Japan are seen as critical for any kind of viable US military intervention in the Taiwan crisis — because of that, if there is any kind of Taiwan conflict, there is a high probability that China would attack Japanese territory,” Mike Mochizuki, associate professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University, told Vox in a January interview.

The US’s relationship with the Philippines is less straightforward and more challenging; to start, the relationship between the two nations is built on colonialism, which actually caused the Philippines to kick US forces out of the country for more than two decades. And although Marcos has become close to the US during his short tenure, his predecessor was “the most pro-China president in Philippines history,” Derek Grossman, senior defense analyst at the RAND corporation, told Vox.

Still a greater challenge for the US in terms of cooperation is Southeast Asia. Though the US has military cooperation agreements with both Thailand and Singapore — which hosts more US troops than the Philippines — non-alignment remains a strong priority for Southeast Asian nations.

Non-alignment is still a potent force, particularly in the Global South, according to Blake Herzinger, a research fellow at the United States Studies Centre in Sydney. “While non-alignment has maybe gone out of vogue, we don’t talk a lot about the non-aligned movement anymore unless you’re quite involved in Southeast Asia and the Global South, it is still a vital national interest of most countries — they would still cling to that non-alignment and they see it in their best interest.” As Vox previously reported, the non-alignment movement began during the Cold War and drew in countries that didn’t care to get caught up in Great Power competition.

Then as now, these nations, mostly in the developing world, prioritized their own interests like economic growth and governance in a post-colonial context. Though non-aligned countries are not forbidden from having security or economic relationships with the so-called great power countries, the group’s main priority is to maintain member nations’ independence and avoid formal agreements with the great powers.

Cooperation with China is a necessity for most in the region

Outside of its relationships with Japan and South Korea, and to an extent the Philippines, the US has to contend with the fact that many of the countries in the region — and with which it is seeking relationships — don’t have militaries, Harding said. “In terms of US defense policy and engagement in the Pacific Islands region, it’s actually a little bit of a tough challenge for US statecraft,” he said. “There are only three militaries in the Pacific Islands region — Papua New Guinea, Fiji, and Tonga. So while there’s a huge interest at the Pentagon, at INDOPACOM, about how to be more focused on the Pacific, there are not a lot of partners.”

It’s out of necessity, then, that the US offers flexibility to those nations as well as non-military support like policing territorial waters and disaster relief.

South Pacific nations can in turn incentivize the US and its partners to pay attention to their specific needs by playing the US and China off each other — a tactic which Papua New Guinea seems to have used to good effect recently. Those nations are also more likely to look to the US for investment after seeing the damage that a Chinese investment deal has done in the Solomon Islands.

Overall, an effective tactic seems to be simply offering an alternative to China as it engages in aggressive and exploitative foreign policy, Herzinger said. “Name a country that borders [China], or even in the same region, that it doesn’t relentlessly bully, needlessly — even when things are good.”

It’s possible that US policy makers have gotten more comfortable with the fact that countries in the region will also cooperate with China because they have to to further their own interests. And no amount of coordination, regional dialogue, or military and economic cooperation can change the fact that the US-China relationship is at its lowest point in decades, with little opportunity for conversation between government officials at the highest levels.

However, offering investment, attention, and diplomacy to these countries may be the only tool available.

Vox · by Ellen Ioanes · May 27, 2023

11. Joe Biden’s advisers say he doesn’t want to drag Pacific allies into ‘headlong clash’ between US and China

Excerpts:

Mira Rapp-Hooper, the director for Indo-Pacific strategy at the NSC, admitted the tone of Biden’s recent comments seeking constructive talks with China was also “an important tool of alliance management”.

She acknowledged that allies and partners, within the region and across the world, “don’t want to feel like they’re being forced to choose between two competing great powers”.

“They don’t want to feel like they’re being trampled by a headlong clash,” Rapp-Hooper said.

“He chose to signal that to the rest of the world, as well, because for so many allies and partners having that bit of breathing space where they feel like they, too, can engage China on constructive terms if they need to or want to is really important.”

Biden cut short his trip to the region, postponing planned trips to Papua New Guinea and Australia, so that he could focus on the high-stakes negotiations with congressional republicans over the debt ceiling.

That forced the cancellation of the planned Quad summit at the Sydney Opera House on Wednesday, although the leaders of the US, Japan, Australia and India still met in Hiroshima.

Joe Biden’s advisers say he doesn’t want to drag Pacific allies into ‘headlong clash’ between US and China

Senior White House official says president hears region’s concerns and ‘does not want conflict’ with China

The Guardian · by Daniel Hurst · May 26, 2023

Joe Biden’s senior advisers have acknowledged countries in the Indo-Pacific don’t want to be “trampled by a headlong clash” between the US and China.

In a webinar with an Australian audience on Friday, senior White House national security council (NSC) officials said the US president wanted to give allies and other close partners “breathing space” to engage with China constructively.

Edgard Kagan, the NSC’s senior director for east Asia and Oceania, said Biden had been listening to the region’s concerns.

“I think the president is very focused on the fact that we cannot strengthen our relations with allies and partners if we just try and jam our views down their throat,” Kagan said. “That’s not who he is.”

Australia ‘diminished’: Penny Wong’s frenetic mission to repair regional ties

Beijing has accused the G7 countries of collaborating to “smear and attack” it at last weekend’s summit in Hiroshima, Japan, after leaders outlined strong concerns about China’s actions in the region.

But after attending the summit, Biden told reporters to expect improvements in the US-China relationship, adding: “In terms of talking with them, I think you’re going to see that thaw very shortly.”

The Australian government is also seeking to “stabilise” its relationship with China, with the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, suggesting he is open to travelling to Beijing later this year if restrictions on Australian exports are removed.

Kagan said on Friday that Biden had “long been very clear that he does not want conflict” with China, even though there would be “very serious competition” between the two countries.

“We both have strong interests and important interests but that doesn’t mean that can’t find ways in which we’re able to at least sit down together, work together where possible,” Kagan told the webinar hosted by the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney.

Mira Rapp-Hooper, the director for Indo-Pacific strategy at the NSC, admitted the tone of Biden’s recent comments seeking constructive talks with China was also “an important tool of alliance management”.

She acknowledged that allies and partners, within the region and across the world, “don’t want to feel like they’re being forced to choose between two competing great powers”.

“They don’t want to feel like they’re being trampled by a headlong clash,” Rapp-Hooper said.

“He chose to signal that to the rest of the world, as well, because for so many allies and partners having that bit of breathing space where they feel like they, too, can engage China on constructive terms if they need to or want to is really important.”

Biden cut short his trip to the region, postponing planned trips to Papua New Guinea and Australia, so that he could focus on the high-stakes negotiations with congressional republicans over the debt ceiling.

That forced the cancellation of the planned Quad summit at the Sydney Opera House on Wednesday, although the leaders of the US, Japan, Australia and India still met in Hiroshima.

Kurt Campbell, the coordinator for Indo-Pacific affairs at the NSC, told the same webinar that Biden still travelled to Japan because postponing the entire trip would be “catastrophic”.

Campbell acknowledged there were “obvious concerns and worries” within the Indo-Pacific about whether the region could “count on the United States” to be a “steady predictable force”.

He said Biden had expressed his “deepest regrets” to Albanese and the pair had still proceeded with the signing of a “blockbuster agreement on climate and the provision of critical minerals”.

All countries must help prevent ‘catastrophic’ war amid China-US tensions, Australian minister says

Biden and Albanese also took steps to ensure “all elements of Aukus”, including the nuclear-powered submarine plan and collaboration on other advanced defence technology, were “on track”.

A report issued by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute on Friday said Aukus and other moves would see the defence relationship between Australia and the US “grow in scope and complexity”

But US military personnel commonly did “not fully grasp” Australia’s sensitivities to maintaining its own sovereignty, according to Col Alan W Throop, a US Army War College fellow at Aspi.

He called on the US Department of Defense to “understand that sovereignty is essential when dealing with the Australian Defence system”.

The Guardian · by Daniel Hurst · May 26, 2023

12. Ukraine has squeezed out of the US-Patriot missile system a capability that the Pentagon did not think possible, military analyst says

Necessity is the mother of invention. I hope we are taking notes and are keeping an open mind to Ukrainian innovations.

Ukraine has squeezed out of the US-Patriot missile system a capability that the Pentagon did not think possible, military analyst says

Business Insider · by Alia Shoaib

A shot of a Patriot missile battery firing an interceptor in a US Army test. The Patriot missile defense system is a ground-based interceptor able to eliminate airborne threats.

US Army photo

Ukraine claims it has used US-made Patriot missile systems to down Russian hypersonic missiles.
A military expert said Ukraine's success with the weapon had amazed the Pentagon.
The weapons are among the most advanced surface-to-air missiles sent to Ukraine.

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Ukraine's success in using the US-made Patriot anti-aircraft missile systems to down Russian weapons has amazed even the Pentagon, a military analyst said.

Ukrainian officials have claimed they have used the weapon to shoot down several Russian hypersonic Kinzhal missiles, which Moscow previously boasted were unstoppable.

"The United States thought for a long time, discussing whether to give us Patriots or not," Ivan Kirichevskiy, an expert at the Ukrainian military news publication Defense Express, told Ukraine's Radio NV, according to Newsweek.

"It turns out that our air defense forces with crash course training literally squeezed out of the Patriot a capability that the Pentagon did not think was possible."

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had long been requesting the US to send defensive surface-to-air missile systems, which can strike aircraft, cruise missiles, and shorter-range ballistic missiles.

The US-provided systems finally arrived in Ukraine in April, with Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov tweeting: "Today, our beautiful Ukrainian sky becomes more secure."

The Netherlands and Germany also said they would send Ukraine the weapons.

It is unclear how many Patriot missile systems Ukraine has, but they are among the most advanced surface-to-air missiles sent to Ukraine.

President Vladimir Putin previously called Russia's hypersonic Kinzhal missiles. "undefeatable." Insider has reported that the vulnerability of their missiles is likely a surprise and embarrassment for Russia, according to the UK Ministry of Defence.

The Patriot is the main air defense system that the US has in its arsenal, with the capability to track 100 targets from 60 miles away.

Last week, Fabian Hoffmann, a doctoral research fellow at the Oslo Nuclear Project, told UK's Sky News that after Ukraine recently claimed to have repelled multiple Russian hypersonic Kinzhal missiles, Russia has "never looked weaker."

"This is a truly remarkable development," he said

Hoffmann added, in a tweet, "The fact that Ukraine was able to defend this attack is amazing, in my opinion, whether the final interception rate is 90% or 100%."

Business Insider · by Alia Shoaib

13. OPINION: The Brilliance of Belgorod

The value of special operations, indigenous forces, and unconventional warfare (coerce, disrupt, overthrow) combined with ADM McRaven's theory of special operations (Relative Superiority is key: Simplicity, Security, Repetition, Purpose, Speed, Surprise) demonstrated here.

Excerpts:

But this was not solely a ‘mission impossible’ type operation; rather, it was also a planned raid designed to create confusion in the Russian rear area and to relieve pressure from Bakhmut. If so, it achieved its objective, and then some, similar to the probing and armed reconnaissance missions conducted in Bakhmut just two weeks ago. As George Barros, a Russia analyst with ISW commented, “If these Russian volunteers indeed penetrated as deep as they claim to have, then it demonstrates that Russian field fortifications don't really mean anything if they're not sufficiently manned.”

...

The raid into Belgorod probably exceeded all expectations. According to Retired-Army Lieutenant General and former Commander of US Army Europe, Mark Hertling, the raid “surprised Russian border guards and the defense ministry, scared local Russian citizens, sent a message to Putin, achieved greater distance with few casualties, and caused the relocation of Russian forces.” But it also served an intelligence purpose – exposing the 3rd Motorized Rifle Division (20th Guards Combined Arms Army, Western Military District) that responded to the incursion, along with other Russian formations in staging areas on the Russian side of the border.

...

The brilliance of Belgorod was in the daring. Daring to bravely challenge the Western-imposed rules of the war. Daring to audaciously deny Putin and his generals any sanctuary. Daring to win at all costs. Zelensky and his generals are masterfully keeping Gerasimov and the Kremlin off-balance, while seeking out an array of new Russian weaknesses to exploit alongside strategic and tactical targets to interdict.

Russia’s day of reckoning is coming and will soon arrive. When it does, the smoldering fires of Bakhmut and Ukraine’s heroic defense thereof, will be fully atoned for because of the critical time the ‘City of Wine and Roses’ gave Kyiv to prepare for its long anticipated counter offensive.

Admiral McRaven's theory of special operations:

OPINION: The Brilliance of Belgorod

Ukraine has boldly changed the rules of the game of Russia’s ‘15-month-old war' by extending the battlefield beyond the borders of Ukraine and into Russia itself.

https://www.kyivpost.com/opinion/17544

By Jonathan Sweet

By Mark Toth

May 27, 2023, 10:37 am | Comments (3)

Fighters of the Russian Volunteer Corps and allied group, the Freedom of Russia Legion, stand next to a seized armoured personnel carrier during a presentation for the media in northern Ukraine, not far from the Russian border, on May 24, 2023, amid Russian military invasion on Ukraine. SERGEY BOBOK / AFP

Neither Russian President Vladimir Putin, nor his under-pressure commanding general in Ukraine, Valery Gerasimov, likely saw this coming. They have been narrowly focused on the battle for Bakhmut and the defense of Crimea. Rear area security – a habitual failure since the beginning of Putin’s ‘special military operation’– must have just moved up on their list of critical elements to address.

On May 22, elements of the pro-Ukrainian, self-styled Russian Volunteer Corps and the Freedom of Russia Legion, composed solely of anti-Putin Russian citizens, used the most essential of the principles of war – surprise, and combined it with speed to achieve an effect that has shaken the confidence of many Russians. According to the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), several Russian sources claimed they advanced and captured “the settlements of Glotovo and Gora Podol – approximately 3km and 5km from the Ukrainian border, respectively.”

Like a hot knife cutting through butter, unimpeded success likely surprised the rebel raiders as much as the Russian defenders caught off-guard . According to Oryx, they captured a BTR-82A armored personnel carrier, and destroyed a 100mm T-12 anti-tank gun and two Ural-4320 trucks.

But this was not solely a ‘mission impossible’ type operation; rather, it was also a planned raid designed to create confusion in the Russian rear area and to relieve pressure from Bakhmut. If so, it achieved its objective, and then some, similar to the probing and armed reconnaissance missions conducted in Bakhmut just two weeks ago. As George Barros, a Russia analyst with ISW commented, “If these Russian volunteers indeed penetrated as deep as they claim to have, then it demonstrates that Russian field fortifications don't really mean anything if they're not sufficiently manned.”

I Left Ukraine for a Week and Felt Guilty for Being Safe

For the very first time since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion, I decided to leave Ukraine, only for a week, but overwhelming guilt and shame engulfed me entirely.

Was the raid a prelude to the counteroffensive? Maybe, given its success in Belgorod. And that has the Kremlin worried. They will need to reposition forces to shore up their border posts along their lengthy border with Ukraine – if not Belarus as well

00:00ADVERTISEMEN

The raid into Belgorod probably exceeded all expectations. According to Retired-Army Lieutenant General and former Commander of US Army Europe, Mark Hertling, the raid “surprised Russian border guards and the defense ministry, scared local Russian citizens, sent a message to Putin, achieved greater distance with few casualties, and caused the relocation of Russian forces.” But it also served an intelligence purpose – exposing the 3rd Motorized Rifle Division (20th Guards Combined Arms Army, Western Military District) that responded to the incursion, along with other Russian formations in staging areas on the Russian side of the border.

Equally as important, the raid further exposed a deepening and critical vulnerability – a badly demoralized Russian army at its wits end. 28 Russian soldiers from assault platoons assigned to the 110th Brigade surrendered to Ukraine’s 59th Motor Rifle Brigade in Avdiiyka on May 21. In a video made after their surrender, the commander complains about a lack of provisions, their weapons, the lack of ammunition and fire support, and then accused the Russian command of “sending them to sure death.”

As Putin’s leaning tower of Jenga teeters ever closer to collapse, Russian propagandists like Olga Skabeyeva are beginning to lodge reservations about the war’s outcome as newly trained soldiers and US and NATO provided weapon systems begin to take their place on the battlefield. During a recent show, Skabeyeva challenged an overly optimistic guest by asking “could there be fighters? And tanks? What about HIMARS? What about long-range artillery? And Storm Shadow? Everything seems impossible, and an attack on Belgorod also seemed impossible the day before yesterday.”

When you factor in the drone that struck the flagpole atop the Kremlin days before the May 9 Victory Day Parade, Zelensky and his generals are making the impossible possible – from shooting down Kh-47M2 Kinzhal missiles to launching cross-border raids. Slowly, confidence in Putin and his ‘special military operation’ is eroding – in the foxholes and in the homes of ordinary Russian citizens.

So is Russian faith in Putin’s Wunderwaffe weapon systems. Those hypersonic Kinzhal missiles? Turns out they might not have been so hypersonic after all. Chalk up yet one more failed Russian weapons system to go along with the T-14 Armata tank, Suppression and Destruction of Enemy Air Defenses (SEAD/DEAD) system failures that likely led to the recent downing of an Su-34 and Su-35 as well as two Mi-8 helicopters, and outdated and outmoded secure communications equipment.

Combined, the erosion of the average Russian soldier’s confidence is becoming contagious and is leading to fear. Like Ukrainian golden sunflower seeds being planted against the backdrop of a crisp blue Spring sky, seeds of doubt are being planted deep into the Russian’s psyche be it in Moscow, border staging areas or in Bakhmut and Crimea.

The brilliance of Belgorod was in the daring. Daring to bravely challenge the Western-imposed rules of the war. Daring to audaciously deny Putin and his generals any sanctuary. Daring to win at all costs. Zelensky and his generals are masterfully keeping Gerasimov and the Kremlin off-balance, while seeking out an array of new Russian weaknesses to exploit alongside strategic and tactical targets to interdict.

Russia’s day of reckoning is coming and will soon arrive. When it does, the smoldering fires of Bakhmut and Ukraine’s heroic defense thereof, will be fully atoned for because of the critical time the ‘City of Wine and Roses’ gave Kyiv to prepare for its long anticipated counter offensive.

The views expressed in this opinion article are the author’s and not necessarily those of Kyiv Post.

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Jonathan Sweet

A retired Army colonel, served 30 years as a military intelligence officer. His background includes tours of duty with the 101st Airborne Division and the Intelligence and Security Command. He led the U.S. European Command Intelligence Engagement Division from 2012-14, working with NATO partners in the Black Sea and Baltics. Follow him on Twitter @JESweet2022.

Mark Toth

A retired economist, historian and entrepreneur who has worked in banking, insurance, publishing, and global commerce. He is a former board member of the World Trade Center, St. Louis, and has lived in U.S. diplomatic and military communities around the world, including London, Tel Aviv, Augsburg, and Nagoya. Follow him on Twitter @MCTothSTL.

14. Consider The 'Porcupine': Western Officials Struggle To Find A New Security Model For Ukraine

Good reporting from Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

Should Ukraine be inducted into NATO or rely on the "porcupine defense?"

Excerpts:

Providing Ukraine with even more training and weaponry would make the country even more “prickly,” like a porcupine, supporters of the concept say, giving a hostile adversary like Russia pause before attacking.

“This strategy aims to create a relationship between Russia and Ukraine similar to that of Israel and Iran, North and South Korea, or East and West Germany during the Cold War,” Lise Howard, a Georgetown University professor, and Michael O’Hanlon, director of research in foreign policy at the Brookings Institution, said in an article published this month.

“Only a clear, committed porcupine strategy is likely to be both politically feasible and truly capable of deterring Russia,” Franz-Stefan Gady, a senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, said in an article published on May 22.

“It means helping Ukraine rearm and train in an agile, lighter way to make sure it can fight a flexible defensive military campaign against any future invading Russian force,” he wrote. “It is a porcupine strategy with a hammer blow at the end.”

...

One question is whether that’s enough on its own -- just give Ukraine lots of weapons -- or whether it needs to be paired with some other security agreement. Another is whether it’s needed.

A “porcupine” model “could be a way to go if we had to make a deal with Russia and Ukraine to end the war,” said Kevin Ryan, a retired U.S. Army brigadier general, now a fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School. “But it’s premature to suggest or push for it now.”

“My preference would be to start induction steps with Ukraine now with an eye to full membership,” he said. “Russia already sees Ukraine as a ‘de facto’ NATO member. And, in my opinion, even though Ukraine is a shambles economically and politically, it has the best military among European members. They would be instant value-added to NATO’s defense.”

“If NATO membership would go too far, the porcupine concept does not go far enough,” Howard and O’Hanlon said in their article, calling for an entirely new organization: the Atlantic-Asian Security Community.

Consider The 'Porcupine': Western Officials Struggle To Find A New Security Model For Ukraine

rferl.org · by Mike Eckel

Forget Finlandization. What about the porcupine?

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is grinding into its 16th month with no end in sight. Impatience is mounting in Western capitals about how long the conflict will rage, how long Ukraine can hold out, and how long Western voters -- U.S. first and foremost -- will continue to support sending billions in weaponry to Kyiv.

The National Counterterrorism Center Must Expand to Better Fight Domestic Terrorists

By BRUCE HOFFMAN and JACOB WARE

MAY 26, 2023

defenseone.com · by Bruce Hoffman

President Joe Biden speaks with the Director of the National Counterterrorism Center Christine Abizaid, as he tours the Center's Watch Floor at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in McLean, Virginia, July 27, 2021. Photo by SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images

Broadening the NCTC’s mission to include homegrown terrorism will require bold executive leadership and congressional action.

Twenty years ago this month, a new counterterrorism intelligence center was established to protect Americans from foreign terrorists, with powers and legal authorities to suit. But the threat has changed, and Congress must now reconfigure the National Counterterrorism Center to centralize and analyze information pertaining to domestic terrorists as well.

While the NCTC—launched in 2004 as the Terrorist Threat Integration Center—was formed to deal with an existing terrorist organization (al Qaeda) championed by an identifiable leader (Osama bin Laden), today’s threat is as much domestic as it also remains foreign; and comes not from an organization but from a leaderless, digitally connected network of likeminded racists, hatemongers, misogynists, and xenophobes spurred to violence by self-perpetuating online echo chambers peddling malignant, exclusionist ideologies and conspiracy theories. A far less pronounced, but nonetheless concerning, development is the accompanying danger of violent extremism from the far-left, which produced the 2017 attack on Republican congressmen and others training for the annual bipartisan charity baseball game, and may be rising in a post-Dobbs world.

Recent administrations have noted the changing threat. The Trump administration’s 2018 National Counterterrorism Strategy was the first to warn about domestic far-right and far-left extremists and issue-specific militants. The Biden administration then laid out a plan to meet the threats in 2021’s National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism, an ambitious document that calls for more data, information-sharing, and efforts to combat root causes behind radicalization and violence.

Yet the government agency responsible for the analysis and synthesis of terrorist threats and implementation of coordinated counterterrorism strategic operations is legally barred from taking meaningful action to counter the growing threat of domestic terrorism. A February report by the Government Accountability Office notes that NCTC “is the primary organization responsible for “analyzing and integrating” all national intelligence related to terrorism and counterterrorism, except for intelligence that pertains exclusively to domestic terrorism. Instead, the NCTC passes on domestic investigations to the FBI to take the lead. Although NCTC participates in a Joint Analytic Cell on domestic terrorism alongside the FBI and DHS, a recent unclassified Strategic Intelligence Assessment and Data on Domestic Terrorism reported that “NCTC does not have analysts focused exclusively on domestic violent extremism threats.” Shockingly, even DHS has just 10.

A central counterterrorism clearinghouse with powerful strategic analytical capabilities is arguably more important today than in those chaotic years after 9/11. In a social-media era defined by rising domestic threats, modern terrorism has grown more diffuse, characterized by blurring ideologies, perpetrators motivated by personal grievances, extremist networks that transcend borders, and few limitations on terrorists’ access to weapons.

The January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol provides one example of how such challenges manifest. Although the FBI has performed admirably in responding to the attack, with the Department of Justice having arrested nearly 1,000 people, it failed completely to heed the voluminous intelligence warning of a threat, coordinate and surge resources with partners, and prevent the incident.

In the face of such a monumental challenge, the importance of an all-source intelligence analysis center with a “big picture” capability to identify both existing and emergent domestic terrorist threat patterns is more urgent than ever. Only in this way can the expeditious sharing of intelligence and data be assured among federal, state, local, and tribal authorities so that all are able to respond effectively. Indeed, the January 6 committee’s chief investigative counsel later reflected that both the FBI and DHS had failed to warn their counterparts and the public about the threat.

Additionally, the NCTC’s strategic orientation is needed to complement the FBI’s intense focus on investigating attacks and reducing threats. Endowing the center with a domestic counterterrorism mandate would provide important long-term intelligence analysis that would enable authorities to better anticipate, predict and respond to emerging, over-the-horizon terrorist threats both domestically as well as internationally. Moreover, a higher-level view would improve our ability to assess and respond to longer-term trends in domestic terrorism—such as rising numbers of juveniles involved in domestic extremist movements or the increasing targeting of political leaders and election workers.

Perhaps most important, though, is NCTC’s unique structure compared to other counterterrorism agencies. The center is largely made up of detailees from 20 other agencies in the intelligence community and beyond, compiling a professional intelligence force that is far more insulated from changing political winds than an FBI that resides under an appointed Attorney General. Collaboration between these analysts of differing expertise will improve the community’s ability to solve complex counterterrorism problems—such as January 6.

Although the NCTC has in the past taken incremental steps to increase its domestic terrorism work, an expansion is urgently required. Broadening the NCTC’s mission to include domestic terrorism will require bold executive leadership and congressional action. Valid concerns over domestic monitoring and surveillance by an arm of the intelligence community, which were behind the limits originally placed on NCTC operations, should be aired and debated given this new, more dangerous environment, where terrorism perpetrated by Americans against their fellow citizens claims more lives than that by foreign terrorists. Close legislative oversight and strictly drawn guidelines should be embraced and enacted, rather than peremptorily dismissed. NCTC’s 20 years of experience in collating information on U.S. citizens drawn to foreign extremist ideologies and adhering to legal protections on such data should also inspire confidence that the agency is well-equipped to protect civil liberties in any domestic counterterrorism investigations.

Bruce Hoffman is senior fellow for counterterrorism and homeland security at the Council of Foreign Relations and a professor at Georgetown University. Jacob Ware is a research fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and an assistant adjunct professor at Georgetown University. They are the authors of the forthcoming God, Guns, and Sedition: Far-Right Terrorism in America, to be published in December by Columbia University Press.

16. Learning the Ukrainian Way of War

Conclusion:

There were always high expectations of each ‘Push’ in the First World War. That war was a gruelling struggle lasting four years. Marshal Pétain, who had defended Verdun, stated in 1918 that what the Allies had achieved that year was ‘a truce for twenty years’. It is not yet known how the Ukrainian counter-offensive will play out, but there is a chance that we are only seeing the first overtures of a very long conflict indeed

Notebooks

Learning the Ukrainian Way of War

MAY 23, 2023
ROB JOHNSON
THEMES: GEOPOLITICS, UKRAINE

Ukraine's approach to the offensive is likely to be intelligent and precise.

https://engelsbergideas.com/notebook/learning-the-ukrainian-way-of-war/?fbclid=IwAR04jzYJqqaOjodogfWGU9fB-4WPuTCapOFAPNVUUMKDffTOlw2yuOfhteM&utm_source=pocket_saves

Ukrainian Border Guard soldiers participate in a military exercise in central Ukraine. Credit: AP Photo/Bernat Armangue / Associated Press / Alamy Stock Photo

Analogies between the current Russian War against Ukraine and the First World War a century ago are striking. After an initial phase of manoeuvre, where Russian forces sought to envelop Kyiv, the invaders were forced to withdraw to regroup. German armies in 1914 had also sought to march in a concentric arc to seize Paris, but, having been checked, they were compelled to consolidate. Russia has tried to punch through Ukrainian lines, maximising its superiority in artillery, and has been drawn into costly assaults at Bakhmut for little appreciable gain. In the First World War, Germany was sucked into the fighting at Verdun, having assumed that artillery would destroy the French defenders. The grand offensive plans of the Russian leaders in 2022, like their German forebears, have degenerated into trench fighting along a static front.

The acquisition or loss of small sections of territory, slight prominences, or an isolated village, require herculean efforts at the tactical level. For weeks, Russian conscript troops have been rushed through rudimentary training, sent to the frontlines, or, if they are lucky, organised into labouring units to construct field defences. They are not told that their own country is the aggressor. German troops of the First World War were informed that they were fighting against the aufmarsch (offensive) of the imperial powers, even though it was Germany that had invaded France and neutral Belgium.

Russia’s armies have now ‘culminated’; that is, they are no longer able to make the progress they did in 2022. Resources are stretched, missile stocks are diminished, and ammunition expenditure is much lower. Nevertheless, Russia’s generals know that Ukraine has been building up for a counter-offensive. Western armour, munitions, artillery, and missiles have been flowing in, and training packages have meant that Ukrainians have been learning how to conduct Western-style combined arms operations. Russia has been trying to delay the coming Ukrainian counter-offensive with missile and drone attacks on infrastructure. In 1917, Germany made similar calculations. Knowing that the United States would bring the Western Allies vast new resources, the German High Command redoubled its efforts with submarine warfare, air bombardments, and preparations for a vast, pre-emptory offensive in the spring of 1918.

There have been high expectations in the Western media of a Ukrainian ‘spring offensive’ in 2023. This has generated some confusion: why did it not materialise? The history of the First World War reminds us that preparation, training, and deployments for large operations take time. Planning for an offensive to take place at the junction of the British and French armies on the Somme began in the autumn of 1915: the attack took place nine months later. For the Ukrainians in 2023, there is also a deception element in play. By keeping Russia constantly in expectation of a large attack, the Russians are forced to hold back their reserves to plug any potential gaps that might occur.

Ukraine may conduct its offensive differently from Russia. The Russians use Soviet doctrine, which privileges probing attacks on multiple axes, then overwhelming fire to neutralise any strong positions, before bypassing them and continuing to advance into depth. Such attacks are usually accompanied by aircraft conducting ground attack missions. This approach can be derailed when resistance is tough at all points, attacked along the line of march from the flanks, when its rear echelons are destroyed by long-range fire, or when the attacking columns get caught in an urban area. All these vulnerabilities have been exposed since February 2022. Similarly, the grand Allied offensives of 1916 suffered most when they relied on saturating ‘area fire’ rather than precision or coordination, when there was no air supremacy, and when insufficiently trained troops were ordered to conduct attacks without use of ‘fieldcraft’ (such as using cover, or making synchronised attacks). Russia, which measures success in terms of territory and force, has repeated these errors, too.

The Ukrainian approach is likely to be far more intelligent, precise, and ‘pulsed’. Instead of one great blundering charge, the Ukrainians may opt to use their long-range firepower to neutralise specific points, such as command posts, logistics depots, individual batteries of artillery, or electronic warfare units. Smaller formations, preceded by drones, may be expected to infiltrate through Russian defences and get into depth. The psychological effect on the Russian soldiers when Ukrainians appear unexpectedly in their rear or overrun positions far behind the front lines could be considerable. This is cognitive and intelligent warfare.

In 1918, the German Army had some success with this sort of ‘breakthrough’ tactic, although, lacking air superiority and sustaining resources, their attacks petered out with heavy losses. By contrast, the Allied counter-offensive of the summer of 1918 was a great success: it combined airpower, armoured units with infantry in intimate support, and coordinated fire from artillery, while communications were maintained in an efficient flow from the sub-tactical to the strategic level. Moreover, the Allies were able to conduct a sustained offensive over weeks because of the organised and abundant logistical systems behind the fighting front.

There were always high expectations of each ‘Push’ in the First World War. That war was a gruelling struggle lasting four years. Marshal Pétain, who had defended Verdun, stated in 1918 that what the Allies had achieved that year was ‘a truce for twenty years’. It is not yet known how the Ukrainian counter-offensive will play out, but there is a chance that we are only seeing the first overtures of a very long conflict indeed.

17. Ukrainians fighting outside Bakhmut see Russian mercenaries withdrawing

Ukrainians fighting outside Bakhmut see Russian mercenaries withdrawing

By Adam Taylor, Anastacia Galouchka and Heidi Levine

May 28, 2023 at 1:00 a.m. EDT

The Washington Post · by Adam Taylor · May 28, 2023

May 28, 2023 at 1:00 a.m. EDT

KOSTYANTYNIVKA, Ukraine — The battle of Bakhmut isn’t over.

From the edges of Kostyantynivka, about 12 miles west of Bakhmut, which Russia captured a week ago, soldiers from Ukraine’s 24th Separate Assault Battalion pounded enemy trenches on the city’s southern flank with artillery fired from an old Soviet D30 howitzer on Saturday.

It was not so different than what they have been doing for weeks. But soldiers here cited one big change.

“The Wagner guys have left and the [regular Russians] have come in,” said a 26-year-old commander who asked to be identified by his call sign, Chichen. He used an anti-Russian ethnic slur to refer to the troops who appear to be replacing the mercenaries, including convicts recruited directly from prisons, who led Russia’s months-long onslaught.

If confirmed, the rotation of forces would mark a major shift, making units under the Russian military’s regular command responsible for holding the city — and allowing Wagner leader Yevgeniy Prigozhin to pull away after claiming to have achieved the only big territorial gain for the Kremlin since last summer.

Moving regular Russian units to defend Bakhmut could create vulnerabilities at other locations along the front, which stretches hundreds of miles — weaknesses that Ukraine might try to exploit as it seeks to snatch back occupied territory in a counteroffensive that could begin at any moment.

After declaring Bakhmut fully under Russian control, Prighozin quickly announced his forces would leave beginning on Thursdaybut his motivations and true plans have been difficult to discern.

Soldiers with the 24th Separate Assault Battalion said they had seen that Wagner fighters had withdrawn and were replaced by regular Russian troops in the areas they were targeting, but emphasized that they could not know for sure if this was a permanent shift, or happening elsewhere.

“Knowing that Wagner is not a fair player, I won’t believe them until we see what the captured [Russian] soldiers are saying,” said a 26-year-old drone operator who asked to be referred to by his nickname, Chuck, for security reasons.

Chuck said he was hopeful that Wagner forces, who adopted unorthodox strategies that they found hard to deal with, would leave. “Fighting with regular Russian forces is not as hard as fighting with Wagner,” he said.

Chichen said it was easier to target regular Russian troops.

“It’s interesting because the Wagner guys were sitting back in their little bunkers not coming out,” he said. “Whereas the Russians, they’re young, they’re fresh, they’re new, and they basically just walk out. Then we give them hell.”

Ukrainian officials have insisted that they still have a small foothold within the Bakhmut city limits and that they are making gains on the flanks of the city, which they said was part of a plan for a “semi-encirclement.”

Theoretically, that plan would allow them to eventually retake the city, in part by forcing the occupying Russians to withstand artillery fire from higher ground. But even some Ukrainian soldiers are not convinced the plan is real.

The effective loss of Bakhmut made little practical difference for this artillery unit, which has used a small former farmhouse to direct its strikes on Russian-occupied territory for months.

But the soldiers in the artillery unit admitted that losing Bakhmut was an emotional blow.

“We’ve been in Bakhmut for almost a year. We know every tree, every field. To see that we’ve lost it now, that plays on your morale,” Chichen said.

The soldiers said they remained perplexed by Wagner’s moves, noting that Prighozin had threatened to withdraw from the Bakhmut in the past. Chichen said the mercenaries’ unusual tactics included remaining in hideouts until after a Ukrainian advance, so they could then attack from behind.

“Around them would be dead bodies, weapons. It looked like the position was abandoned. But then when you come closer, they come out of the hole and shoot you in the back,” said Chichen, who compared the tactic to those used by guerrilla communist forces in the Vietnam War.

The strategy resulted in heavy losses for Wagner, which has seen at least 10,000 killed in action in Bakhmut, according to recent U.S. estimates.

But it allowed the Russian side to make slow advances, steadily pushing Ukraine to the southwestern edge of the city.

The 24th Separate Assault Battalion was first formed as a volunteer force during the fighting with Moscow-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine in 2014 and is now part of the 53 Mechanized Brigade. It recently completed a 10-day assault on Russian-held positions around Bakhmut that was exhausting even measured against the normal fighting here, which is typically relentless.

Chichen said his units were operating 24 hours a day, sometimes firing 100 shells in that period — a huge sum for this stage of the war when both sides have reported acute shortages of ammunition.

Chichen said he missed the fourth birthday of his son, whom he has not seen in six months, for the fight. But infantry soldiers said they were able to make significant gains.

In an old warehouse on the outskirts of Chasiv Yar, a town west of Bakhmut used by Ukrainian troops as a logistics hub, a 29-year-old company commander with the code sign Mozart pulled up a map on his phone to confirm how much ground his troops had gained — 1.5 kilometers, or nearly one mile, had been taken during the past week in the direction of Klishchiivka, a town on Bakhmut’s southern flank, he said.

“The boys are doing well, but it’s hard,” Mozart said.

The infantry units were now in a defensive mode, holding the positions they had taken. He said that his troops were no longer fighting Prighozin’s mercenaries. “In my direction, we don’t have Wagner guys. They’ve left,” he said.

The Ukrainians remain under heavy shelling. Dexter, a 23-year-old medic at the location in Chasiv Yar, which serves as a first aid point, said they were now seeing few injuries from gunfire but many from shelling.

“Everyone is having a hard time, but we’re not letting our heads hang,” Dexter said, speaking over the sound of frequent outgoing fire.

During a visit to a separate medical site in Kostyantynivka, three shells whizzed over the heads of a Washington Post reporting team in the space of 20 minutes. A medic, who wore no protection and regularly treated patients in a flimsy house with no hard cover, did not flinch.

“They’re trying to hit the critical infrastructure. A private house like this isn’t a target,” the medic, Oleg Ivanov, 40, said.

Nobody here knows what the next stage of fighting will look like.

Some Ukrainian officials and analysts have argued that Kyiv has used the battle for Bakhmut to deplete Russia’s force strength and energy ahead of a long-anticipated Ukrainian counteroffensive.

“I have a lot of hopes,” Mozart said of the looming counterattack. “I think it’s going to happen, but I can’t say any more about it.”

“I am not sad,” said Chuck, who said Ukrainians had been able to mount a “decent” response over recent weeks. “The battle of Bakhmut has slowed down our enemy. It’s a meat grinder of their people.”

But other analysts say a policy of “semi-encirclement,” as promoted by Ukrainian military officials, would require more resources to be sent to Bakhmut, when it is not a strategic priority. Right now, many artillery units like Chichen’s are struggling to find enough rounds.

“I don’t know what that thing is about encircling Bakhmut — that seems like an information sphere thing,” Chichen said.

He also emphasized that while many of the Russian reserves seemed inexperienced, which could allow Ukraine to make gains, there were other well-trained units arriving in Bakhmut. “The paratroopers are a very … high level,” he said.

Chichen said it was painful to see via drone footage that Russian forces were now occupying the same building in western Bakhmut that his artillery unit used as a base in the city from summer to early winter this year.

“The Russians are walking there as if it’s their home,” he said. “It’s as if you’re losing your own home. It’s really not pleasant.”

But the 24th Separate Assault Battalion also took a bit of Bakhmut with them too — a small black-and-white cat some of the soldiers have named after the city. Two weeks ago, as the city was falling, the cat gave the artillery team something to celebrate: Bakhmutka had birthed two kittens.

The Washington Post · by Adam Taylor · May 28, 2023

18. Ukraine’s coming counteroffensive has a good chance of succeeding

Excerpts:

The Ukrainian General Staff is not likely to accept the risks inherent in major operations of this sort without confidence that its logistics are in place and its planning is sound. Furthermore, Ukrainian commanders must be encouraged by what they see across the front lines. Facing them are a shattered Russian army that has taken enormous losses in tanks, troops, and munitions; an ineffective Russian air force; and a Russian Black Sea Fleet that can do little but shelter in its anchorage. No outstanding Russian commanders have emerged from the carnage of the past 15 months. One must assume the Russians are currently waiting for Ukraine’s attack with low confidence and a sense of foreboding.

Subsequent phases of the campaign will seek, through diplomacy, continued sanctions, and military force, to liberate Ukraine entirely. Recent moves, such as the UK’s provision of Storm Shadow cruise missiles and other long-range munitions, are changing the military calculus. So, too, will the long-delayed decision to train Ukrainian pilots on the F-16 fighter jet. Putin is counting on support for Ukraine to degrade as allies and partners tire. In fact, Ukraine grows stronger while Russia increasingly turns to obsolete equipment and ever-more reluctant conscripts.

As we are often told, no plan survives contact with the enemy. There will likely be the occasional tactical miscue or operational hiccup during the coming counteroffensive, but a careful assessment suggests the odds are heavily in favor of Ukraine. More savage fighting lies ahead, but the end of the war may gradually be coming into view, and it looks very promising from Ukraine’s perspective.

Ukraine’s coming counteroffensive has a good chance of succeeding

By Richard D. Hooker, Jr.

atlanticcouncil.org · · May 23, 2023

As the Ukrainian General Staff prepares for its much-heralded counteroffensive, retaking Crimea is at the top of the operational wish list. Some experts, including senior US officials, consider this an unrealistic aim. To be sure, there are many challenges. Attacking Crimea from the Kherson region would likely involve an opposed crossing of the Dnipro river, intense fighting to reach the narrow Perekop isthmus, and then essentially frontal attacks against heavily mined barriers to breach successive lines of Russian defenses, all in the face of strong Russian artillery. Ukraine will be hindered by its lack of air power and long-range fires, as well as an absence of amphibious or airborne platforms, making a frontal assault almost the only option.

Nevertheless, while daunting, the task is far from impossible. From the Huns and the Mongols to the British, the Bolsheviks, and the Germans, many invading armies have managed to conquer Crimea. Furthermore, Ukrainian morale, generalship, and combined arms capabilities all exceed Russia’s, while the fielding of up to eleven fresh brigades with excellent Western equipment has greatly strengthened Ukraine’s ground forces.

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What might a Crimean offensive look like? The Ukrainian military may well conduct sophisticated shaping operations using drones, artillery strikes, and special operations forces. A successful crossing of the Dnipro and advance to the isthmus would also shake the resolve and fighting spirit of Russian defenders.

There may, however, be a better way. Past invasions, while successful, often proved extremely costly. The British and French lost 165,000 men during the mid-nineteenth century Crimean War, for example. Given its high losses to date, Ukraine will seek to achieve its strategic objectives while preserving as much of its armed strength and physical infrastructure as possible. Bitter fighting on the Crimean peninsula would also take a heavy toll on civilians. Accordingly, cutting Crimea off from Russia and starving it of military support could achieve Ukrainian war aims at much lower cost.

This approach would see the bulk of Ukraine’s new mobile brigades massing near Dnipro, a major road and rail hub in southeastern Ukraine well outside Russian artillery range, before rupturing the front and driving for Zaporizhzhia. From there, the operational objective would be the capture of Melitopol and the severing of the land bridge from Russia to Crimea.

The open, flat terrain of southern Ukraine and the region’s relatively good road network create favorable conditions for mobile operations and logistical resupply. Supporting efforts would include maintaining pressure on Donetsk and Luhansk in eastern Ukraine to hold Russian forces in place there.

If a thrust to sever Russia’s land bridge proved successful, two options could then be considered. One would be to wheel westward and isolate Russian troops in the Kherson region. Alternatively, Ukrainian forces could turn to the east and attempt to recover Mariupol, which has been occupied by Russia since May 2022.

In either case, seizing Melitopol would cause a crisis among Russian political and military leaders, as Russian forces in the south and east would be cut off from each other, rendering a coherent defense at the operational level impossible. This would dramatically undermine Russian morale and encourage further international support for Ukraine.

If mounted in June, Ukraine’s counteroffensive could potentially be concluded by summer’s end, leaving the Crimean Bridge as the only remaining option for ground resupply of Russian forces in Crimea. Campaign success, however, would bring Ukrainian long-range missiles within range of the bridge, which would also be vulnerable to drone attacks.

Meanwhile, resupply of Russian forces in Crimea by air and sea would become precarious, as ports and airfields would now be vulnerable to drone, missile, and rocket artillery strikes. In short, Crimea would be effectively isolated. Regained Ukrainian control of the North Crimean Canal, Crimea’s principal water supply, would only add to Russia’s logistical woes.

If Ukraine’s counteroffensive makes good progress in the south, the Russian Black Sea Fleet will likely find that it cannot remain in Crimea. With its home port of Sevastopol in range of Ukrainian rocket artillery, the fleet would be forced to withdraw to Novorossiysk on the Russian Black Sea coast, a much poorer anchorage with fewer facilities for naval units.

Putin would probably react to such unprecedented setbacks by reviving threats to respond with nuclear weapons, while simultaneously demanding international intervention in the form of diplomatic pressure on Kyiv for a ceasefire and a negotiated settlement that would leave him in possession of at least some Ukrainian territory. However, Putin’s nuclear saber-rattling has lost much of its impact through overuse, and because China has made it clear that nuclear weapons must be off the table.

As for salvation through diplomacy, major Ukrainian advances on the ground this summer could bring ultimate victory within sight and encourage Ukraine to carry on. If Ukrainian troops are making progress, the country’s leaders will not be in the mood to negotiate and throw away hard-won success at the conference table, however much pressure comes from outside. Allies and partners like the British, the Poles, the Nordics, and the Baltic nations can be counted on to offset other dissenting voices and to reinforce Ukrainian battlefield gains.

Are the Ukrainian armed forces capable of bringing this off? A number of variables will come into play. Adequate quantities of fuel, spare parts, artillery, and air defense munitions along with other classes of supply must be available.

As with the Kharkiv offensive in September 2022, operational security and successful deception operations will be critical. The Ukrainian General Staff must be capable of true operational art. They must be able to sequence combined arms battles and engagements in time and space and across multiple domains to achieve decisive battlefield results. The Russians, too, must cooperate by continuing to demonstrate flawed generalship, low morale, and an inability to synchronize combat power at points of decision.

In war, of course, the future remains uncharted territory. But all signs point to a clear opportunity for the Ukrainian counteroffensive to succeed. In spite of heavy casualties, continuous combat, and an unending rain of missiles on its civilian infrastructure, Ukraine has managed to generate fresh, well-equipped, and well-trained reserves in large numbers. Talented commanders have come to the fore, vetted by years of experience fighting the Russians.

The Ukrainian General Staff is not likely to accept the risks inherent in major operations of this sort without confidence that its logistics are in place and its planning is sound. Furthermore, Ukrainian commanders must be encouraged by what they see across the front lines. Facing them are a shattered Russian army that has taken enormous losses in tanks, troops, and munitions; an ineffective Russian air force; and a Russian Black Sea Fleet that can do little but shelter in its anchorage. No outstanding Russian commanders have emerged from the carnage of the past 15 months. One must assume the Russians are currently waiting for Ukraine’s attack with low confidence and a sense of foreboding.

Subsequent phases of the campaign will seek, through diplomacy, continued sanctions, and military force, to liberate Ukraine entirely. Recent moves, such as the UK’s provision of Storm Shadow cruise missiles and other long-range munitions, are changing the military calculus. So, too, will the long-delayed decision to train Ukrainian pilots on the F-16 fighter jet. Putin is counting on support for Ukraine to degrade as allies and partners tire. In fact, Ukraine grows stronger while Russia increasingly turns to obsolete equipment and ever-more reluctant conscripts.

As we are often told, no plan survives contact with the enemy. There will likely be the occasional tactical miscue or operational hiccup during the coming counteroffensive, but a careful assessment suggests the odds are heavily in favor of Ukraine. More savage fighting lies ahead, but the end of the war may gradually be coming into view, and it looks very promising from Ukraine’s perspective.

Richard D. Hooker Jr. is a nonresident senior fellow with the Atlantic Council. He previously served as Dean of the NATO Defense College and as Special Assistant to the US President and Senior Director for Europe and Russia with the National Security Council.

19. The Evil Empire Isn’t Russia: It’s Fossil Fuel-Based Capitalism, Waging Apocalyptic War On Planet – OpEd

Well now that I have had this explained to me, I know who and what is the threat (note sarcasm).

But as I criticize this crap I must keep in mind Voltaire.

“I wholly disapprove of what you say - and will defend to the death your right to say it.”

Voltaire

The Evil Empire Isn’t Russia: It’s Fossil Fuel-Based Capitalism, Waging Apocalyptic War On Planet – OpEd

May 28, 2023 Andy Worthington 0 Comments

By Andy Worthington

Since Russia invaded Ukraine 15 months ago, the West has been subjected to a pro-war propaganda campaign, on Ukraine’s behalf, on a scale not seen since the run-up to the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003.

I don’t mean to suggest in any way that we shouldn’t feel sympathy for the people of Ukraine, but the relentless reporting of their suffering, which dominated the news, to the exclusion of almost everything else, for several months after the war began, was so all-pervasive that it was difficult to recognize — or to remember — that, as is powerfully explained in ‘Why Are We in Ukraine?’, a major new article for Harper’s Magazine by Benjamin Schwarz and Christopher Layne, the war didn’t happen because Vladimir Putin is a figure of pure evil, but because of over 30 years of provocation by the US.

Since the fragmentation of the Soviet Union, between 1989 and 1991, the US has sought to erase the reality that its relationship with Russia is, necessarily, one of two vast and different political entities, each bristling with nuclear weapons, and has, instead, increasingly regarded itself as the world’s sole superpower, entitled to use NATO to encroach further and further on Russian territory, despite Secretary of State James Baker, in February 1990, convincing Mikhail Gorbachev to give up East Germany by telling him that, if he did so, NATO would “not shift one inch eastward from its present position.”

In breaking that promise, as Schwarz and Layne explain, NATO expansion has been pursued relentlessly by every US administration since. As they describe it, ”In 1999, the Alliance added three former Warsaw Pact nations; in 2004, three more, in addition to three former Soviet republics and Slovenia. Since then, five more countries — the latest being Finland — have been pulled beneath NATO’s military, political, and nuclear umbrella,” and the US intensified Russia’s unease by “conduct[ing] massive military exercises in Lithuania and Poland — where it had established a permanent army headquarters — and, on Russia’s border, in Latvia and Estonia.”

In 2015, moreover, it was reported that the Pentagon was “reviewing and updating its contingency plans for armed conflict with Russia’ and, in likely contravention of a 1997 agreement between NATO and Moscow, the United States offered to station military equipment in the territories of its Eastern European NATO allies, a move that a Russian general called ‘the most aggressive step by the Pentagon and NATO since the Cold War.’”

NATO expansion into Ukraine would be “apocalyptic”

On Ukraine, however, the unease caused by NATO’s encroachment has always been of a different magnitude. As Schwarz and Layne explain, “While Russians of every political stripe have judged Washington’s enfolding of Russia’s former Warsaw Pact allies and its former Baltic Soviet republics into NATO as a threat, they have viewed the prospect of the alliance’s expansion into Ukraine as basically apocalyptic.”

As they proceed to explain, while Russia has “intense and fraught cultural, religious, economic, historical, and linguistic ties with Ukraine”, its “strategic concerns” were always “paramount.” They add that “Crimea (the majority of whose people are linguistically and culturally Russian, and have consistently demonstrated their wish to rejoin Russia) has been the home of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, based in Sevastopol, since 1783. Since then, the peninsula has been Russia’s window onto the Mediterranean and the Middle East, and the key to its southern defenses.”

Losing it to NATO would, therefore, be unthinkable.

When President Bush urged NATO “to put Ukraine and Georgia on the immediate path to NATO membership” at the NATO summit in Bucharest in April 2008, the German Chancellor Angela Merkel and the French President Nicolas Sarkozy understood how dangerous it was, and derailed the proposal, but its significance had already been spelled out explicitly in a classified email to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice from the US ambassador to Moscow, William J. Burns, who warned that ”Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin).” NATO would be seen as “throwing down the strategic gauntlet,” he adding, concluding, “Today’s Russia will respond.”

After 2008, of course, despite the warnings, the path to war continued relentlessly, with, in 2014, the fall of Ukraine’s pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych (in which, as Schwarz and Layne describe it, “circumstantial evidence points to the United States semi-covertly promoting regime change by destabilizing Yanukovych”), and Russia’s retaliation, in which it “annexed Crimea and stepped up its support for Russian-speaking separatist rebels in the Donbas.”

In response, “NATO started training roughly ten thousand Ukrainian troops annually”, as part of an aim to secure its “full integration into European and Euro-Atlantic institutions,” leading, by 2021, to a situation in which “Ukraine’s and NATO’s militaries had stepped up their coordination in joint exercises such as ‘Rapid Trident 21,’ which was led by the Ukrainian army with the participation of fifteen militaries and heralded by the Ukrainian general who co-directed it as intending to ‘improve the level of interoperability between units and headquarters of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, the United States, and NATO partners.’”

A year before the war began, “Russia responded by amassing forces on Ukraine’s border with the intention — plainly and repeatedly stated — of arresting Ukraine’s NATO integration.” As Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov stated at a press conference on January 14, 2022, “the key to everything is the guarantee that NATO will not expand eastward,” and, just two days before the invasion, Vladimir Putin said, “We are categorically opposed to Ukraine joining NATO, because this poses a threat to us, and we have arguments to support this. I have repeatedly spoken about it.”

Once the invasion happened, however, all history was forgotten in the West as the narrative of an evil, unprovoked dictator was pumped out relentlessly, disguising what Schwarz and Layne describe as “a good deal of evidence” to suggest that “the [Biden] administration’s real — if only semi-acknowledged — objective is to topple Russia’s government,” and apparently airbrushing out of history the lessons of the Cold War: that this type of aggression is spectacularly unwise when confronting a nation armed with nuclear weapons.

War fatigue in Europe?

While the pro-war propaganda has been largely successful in the West, support for Russia’s definitive defeat had already waned by June 2022, when polling conducted for the European Council on Foreign Relations demonstrated that, across ten countries — Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Spain, Sweden and the UK — support for Ukraine was high, but respondents were “split about the long-term goals,” divided “between a ‘Peace’ camp (35 per cent of people) that wants the war to end as soon as possible, and a ‘Justice’ camp that believes the more pressing goal is to punish Russia (22 per cent of people).”

By the first anniversary of the war, an Associated Press poll found that “less than half of Americans (48%) [were] in favour of providing weapons to Ukraine, down from 60% in May 2022,” while in Germany an Ipsos survey showed “support for sending weapons and/or air-defence systems to Ukraine” fell from 55% to 48% throughout 2022. In January this year, a poll by Forsa found that, as Unherd described it, “an astonishing 80% of Germans said that it was more important to end the conflict quickly with negotiations than for Ukraine to win.”

In response to this European demonstration of war fatigue, cheerleaders for endless, US-led war at the New York Timespublished an extraordinary response three weeks ago. In “The ‘Peace Dividend’ Is Over in Europe. Now Come the Hard Tradeoffs”, Patricia Cohen and Liz Alderman suggested that “[d]efending against an unpredictable Russia in years to come will mean bumping up against a strained social safety net and ambitious climate transition plans.”

Since the Cold War ended, they wrote, “trillions of dollars that had been dedicated to Cold War armies and weapons systems were gradually diverted to health care, housing and schools” throughout Europe. However, they suggested, “That era — when security took a back seat to trade and economic growth — abruptly ended with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year.”

Kristalina Georgieva, the head of the International Monetary Fund, was quoted as saying, “The peace dividend is gone. Defense expenditures have to go up”, and, as Cohen and Alderman dutifully added, “The urgent need to combat a brutal and unpredictable Russia has forced European leaders to make excruciating budgetary decisions that will enormously affect peoples’ everyday lives. Do they spend more on howitzers or hospitals, tanks or teachers, rockets or roadways?”

Making clear that the US expects Europe to permanently increase its war spending, Cohen and Alderman added that these “sudden security demands, which will last well beyond an end to the war in Ukraine,” raise awkward questions for European leaders about how to continue to fund the “European social safety net”, in the words of Kenneth Rogoff, an economics professor at Harvard, as well as what Cohen and Alderman refer to as outlays “to avoid potentially disastrous climate change” (that word “potentially” being an unnecessary addition to their sentence).

With military spending across the EU and UK “estimated to rise between 53 and 65 percent” in coming years, the article’s authors explain that what this means is that “hundreds of billions of dollars that otherwise could have been used to, say, invest in bridge and highway repairs, child care, cancer research, refugee resettlement or public orchestras is expected to be redirected to the military.”

As they also explain, “the painful budgetary trade-offs or tax increases that will be required” to pay for this endless orgy of expanded militarism “have not yet trickled down to daily life,” breezily adding that “[m]uch of the belt-tightening last year that squeezed households was the result of skyrocketing energy prices and stinging inflation.”

The real war: capitalism vs. the planet

If it seems as farcical to you as it does to me that European populations will put up with demands from the US to drive ever more people into poverty to confront a military threat that shows no signs of wishing to reach out beyond Ukraine, then I hope that the peace movements that have been sidelined and demonized over the last 15 months will grow in strength.

After all, it’s not just the “cost of living crisis” that requires governments to care for their people; it’s also the costs of the “disastrous climate change” that is already with us, and that can’t be wished away.

Already this year, Spain has been wracked with ferocious droughts, with 28 percent less rainfall than expected between October and May, which will have a devastating impact on food supplies, and, as Euronews reported in March, “The era of ‘mega forest fires’ has [also] begun in Spain”, although, shamefully, the article added, “Is climate change to blame?,” as if there could be any other reason.

Meanwhile, devastating floods recently hit the Emilia-Romagna region of northern Italy, caused by parts of the region receiving “half their average annual rainfall in just 36 hours”, as the Guardian explained, and further droughts, wildfires and floods will undoubtedly happen as we reach summer, and as the cooling La Niña weather pattern is replaced by the much hotter El Niño.

As research by the Copernicus Climate Change Service established last month, “widespread heatwaves led to Europe suffering its hottest summer on record in 2022, by a large margin”, while “[t]he heat, plus low rainfall, caused drought that affected more than a third of the continent at its peak, making it the driest year on record”, as the Guardian described it, adding, “Flows in almost two-thirds of Europe’s rivers were lower than average. High temperatures also meant that the carbon emissions from summer wildfires were the highest in 15 years and the European Alps lost record amounts of ice from glaciers.”

This is the real war, but it seems that most of us don’t want to look in the mirror and see that the enemy is ourselves, not some distant, demonized individual who “doesn’t share our values.”

Of course, we’re not directly to blame for extracting the fossil fuels — coal, oil and gas — that, as the UN explains, “are by far the largest contributor to global climate change, accounting for over 75 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions and nearly 90 per cent of all carbon dioxide emissions.”

The blame for that lies directly with the fossil fuel companies themselves, which have known about the effect of their industry on runaway climate change since the 1970s and 1980s, but which hid the information and then persistenty lied about it, leading to the current situation, in which, as recent research from the University of Exeter suggests, two billion people could be “experiencing average annual temperatures above 29°C by 2030, a level at which very few communities have lived in the past”, as the Guardian described it, possibly leading to one billion climate refugees — if that is, chronic food shortages caused by increasing droughts, floods and monstrous heat don’t get us first. Whatever Putin’s crimes, they are surely exceeded by those of the oil company executives who have spent decades protecting their own financial interests while knowing that, in doing so, they threaten the lives of billions, and are knowingly making the planet inhospitable.

However, while the fossil fuel companies and their backers bear the brunt the blame, we — the mass of ordinary people — are queasily dependent on everything produced by the fossil fuel companies, including, to give just one example, the more than one billion cars (one for every seven humans on earth) that are currently pumping out their toxic fumes.

As John Vaillant, the great chronicler of fire in the age of climate change, explained in a recent article for Canada’s Globe and Mail, about the wildfires currently raging in Alberta, “Just imagine how many horses it would take to move a two-ton minivan from Toronto to Ottawa at highway speed. Thanks to superb engineering, we remain blissfully unaware of the violent explosions taking place under the minivan’s hood with every turn of the crankshaft. Thanks to disingenuous advertising and lax laws, we are equally oblivious to the 100 kilograms of CO2 trailing behind us on that single Toronto-to-Ottawa run.”

As he also explained, “A single six-cylinder minivan running at driving-to-school speed — 2,500 RPM — will generate around 10,000 combustions a minute, more than half a million per hour. That’s a lot of fires. Add them all up and you get tens of trillions of individual combustions. That, roughly speaking, is the number of fires humans make every day — uncountable as stars in the universe.” (For more, please check out John’s essential new book, Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World).

And if you’re looking for another reason to call for a peaceful resolution to the Ukraine war — “back[ing] away from the precipice of nuclear annihilation and mov[ing] instead toward a negotiated settlement grounded in foreign policy realism”, as Benjamin Schwarz and Christopher Layne describe it — please bear in mind that an estimated 6% of all global greenhouse gas emissions are produced by the world’s militaries, and the industries that provide their equipment, according to Scientists for Global Responsibility.

The exact amount is unknown, because of a “large loophole” in the 2015 Paris climate agreement, a legacy of the US government securing “an automatic exemption from CO2 targets” for militaries as part of the Kyoto climate protocol in 1997, but as Neta C. Crawford, a political scientist at Oxford University, explained in her 2022 book, The Pentagon, Climate Change, and War: Charting the Rise and Fall of US Military Emissions, the US military is “the single largest institutional fossil fuel user in the world”, with a consumption that us “larger than the emissions of most countries.”

Imagine if, while were being bombarded with war propaganda, day after day last year, and are still being reminded of during most news programmes to this day, the broadcasters involved had devoted all that time and energy to the bigger war: the war that humanity is waging on the very sustainability of our existence on this miraculous planet.

Andy Worthington

Andy Worthington is an investigative journalist, author, campaigner, commentator and public speaker. Recognized as an authority on Guantánamo and the “war on terror.” Co-founder, Close Guantánamo and We Stand With Shaker. Also, photo-journalist (The State of London), and singer and songwriter (The Four Fathers). Worthington is the author of "The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison"

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

If you do not read anything else in the 2017 National Security Strategy read this on page 14:

"A democracy is only as resilient as its people. An informed and engaged citizenry is the fundamental requirement for a free and resilient nation. For generations, our society has protected free press, free speech, and free thought. Today, actors such as Russia are using information tools in an attempt to undermine the legitimacy of democracies. Adversaries target media, political processes, financial networks, and personal data. The American public and private sectors must recognize this and work together to defend our way of life. No external threat can be allowed to shake our shared commitment to our values, undermine our system of government, or divide our Nation."

Access NSS HERE

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