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Quotes of the Day:
“Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.”
- C.S. Lewis
"Another person will not hurt you with your cooperation. You are hurt the moment you believe yourself to be."
- Marcus Aurelius
"We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely."
- E.O. Wilson, biologist, naturalist, author
1. US to send Ukraine $300 million in military aid
2. Marines want 31 amphibious ships. The Pentagon disagrees. Now what?
3. Fire rages at Russian oil depot; Zelenskyy visits Finland
4. House Republican Threatens to Cut VA Budget over Agency's Warnings About Budget Cuts
5. US military is moving forward with 360-degree missile defense system for Guam
6. Dilemmas of Deterrence
7. The Need to Invest in Long-Range Fires
8. Want to improve US-China relations? Bring back Fulbright
9. Bold action needed to deter China’s invasion of Taiwan
10. Chinese-Philippine Confrontation
11. Make the Center Vital Again
12. Israel Strikes Iranian Weapons at Aleppo Airport Ahead of Raisi’s Visit
13. Xi Jinping Can’t Handle an Aging China
14. Discreetly, Berlin Confronts Russian Spies Hiding in Plain Sight
15. DoD: Retired US officers marching into work for foreign governments
16. Kremlin says Ukraine sent two drones to attack Vladimir Putin
17. America’s infatuation with war turns challenges into conflicts
18. Biden’s half-hearted nuclear deterrence plan by John Bolton
19. The US Air Force has retreated from Taiwan without a shot fired
20. Time to resurrect the Global Engagement Caucus in the House
21. Hamas, Islamic Jihad Fire Rockets at Israel
1. US to send Ukraine $300 million in military aid
Any DPICM?
US to send Ukraine $300 million in military aid
militarytimes.com · by Lolita Baldor · May 2, 2023
The U.S. is sending Ukraine about $300 million in additional military aid, including an enormous amount of artillery rounds, howitzers, air-to-ground rockets and ammunition as the launch of a spring offensive against Russian forces approaches, U.S. officials said Tuesday.
The new package includes Hydra-70 rockets, which are unguided rockets that are fired from aircraft. It also includes an undisclosed number of rockets for the High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, or HIMARS, mortars, howitzer rounds, missiles and Carl Gustaf anti—tank rifles. The weapons will all be pulled from Pentagon stocks, so they can go quickly to the front lines. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because the aid has not yet been formally announced.
The latest shipment comes as Ukrainian officials say they are readying a counteroffensive — with Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov declaring they are in the “home stretch, when we can say: ‘Yes everything is ready.’” Ukrainian officials have said they are stockpiling ammunition to stow it along potentially long supply lines.
Reznikov said Monday that the key things for the assault’s success would be “the availability of weapons; prepared, trained people; our defenders and defenders who know their plan at their level, as well as providing this offensive with all the necessary things — shells, ammunition, fuel, protection, etc.”
The U.S. in recent months has declined to say exactly how much materiel will be sent to Ukraine, but the latest package resembles other previous deliveries. Officials said there will also be trucks, trailers, spare parts, and other maintenance assistance.
This is the 37th package of Pentagon stocks to go to Ukraine since the war began in February 2022, and it brings the total U.S. military aid to about $36 billion.
Officials have said the weapons and other equipment will help as Ukraine prepares to shift from what has been a long and bloody winter stalemate, focused on heavy fighting in Ukraine’s east, particularly around the town of Bakhmut in the Donetsk province.
The General Staff of Ukraine’s armed forces said Russia was continuing to concentrate its efforts on offensive operations in Ukraine’s industrial east, focusing attacks around Lyman, Bakhmut, Avdiivka and Marinka.
2. Marines want 31 amphibious ships. The Pentagon disagrees. Now what?
Will Congress act on this issue? They legislated three Marine Divisions and three Air Wings. Will they legislate X number of amphibs to support them?
Marines want 31 amphibious ships. The Pentagon disagrees. Now what?
Defense News · by Megan Eckstein · May 2, 2023
WASHINGTON — Hundreds of Americans trapped in war-torn Sudan last month needed a way out of the country, but the U.S. Marine Corps, the go-to service for such rescues, couldn’t help.
Typically, this kind of mission would be standard for the Navy and Marine Corps’ amphibious ready group and Marine expeditionary unit, made up of 2,300 Marines aboard three ships who are trained to fight their way into and evacuate citizens from dangerous locations.
Instead, as violence surged, the Pentagon relied on drones to monitor a 500-mile escape route from the capital of Khartoum to the Red Sea city of Port Sudan. For the Americans who fled to the coast, the Pentagon sent an auxiliary transport ship to shuttle them to safety in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.
It was a complicated and risky self-evacuation.
At the same time, off the coast of Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, the Bataan ARG and 26th MEU were conducting a noncombatant evacuation simulation — training for the very operation Americans in Sudan needed. But the group stayed put because it wasn’t yet certified for global missions.
The Navy didn’t have another set of ready amphibious ships to deploy from the East Coast on short notice.
All of this followed a similar situation a few months earlier, when service leaders were unable to send a team to Turkey and Syria to provide aid after a 7.8-magnitude earthquake rocked the region.
Maj. Gen. Roger Turner, the Marine Corps’ operations division director, told Defense News the naval forces “have this razor-thin capacity” with amphibious ships, and when emergencies arise, “there’s no capacity to react.”
It’s a trend that could continue.
Today, the Navy has 31 amphibious ships — what the Marine Corps considers the bare minimum it needs — but the Pentagon plans to shrink the fleet below that number in fiscal 2024. As a result, Turner anticipates the Corps will be more challenged to respond to global crises.
Throughout last year and into this spring, that number — 31 — has been at the center of debates, as the Navy, Marine Corps, Defense Department, Congress and industry weigh in on how many amphibious ships the military needs, what they should look like and how much they should cost.
Now, the argument is about to come to a head.
In June, the Pentagon is expected to complete a study on whether to continue buying amphibious ships and, if so, what capabilities those vessels will have.
The final decision is expected to have major ramifications for the Marine Corps and defense contractor Ingalls Shipbuilding, a division of HII.
For example, the study might back a requirement for 31 ships and recommend continuing to build San Antonio-class vessels at a cost of about $2 billion each. Or the report could recommend a new design that would cost less per ship — an idea the Corps already rejected, and one that could disrupt Ingalls’ production line.
Or there’s a third option: The report could call for a continued pause in the Pentagon buying amphibious ships, which could force Ingalls to close its production line and would force the Marine Corps to reevaluate its amphibious operations plans.
But unless the Office of the Secretary of Defense approves the continued construction of ships, or unless Congress overrides the Pentagon, “trying to maintain even a minimal [amphibious] presence is going to be really difficult,” Turner said.
This comes at a time when he said “aggressive behavior of the [People’s Republic of China] is driving people to us; they want us to be the security partner of choice,” making American amphibious presence all the more important today.
Outsider observers like Mackenzie Eaglen, an expert in military readiness at the American Enterprise Institute think tank, believe the debate itself is problematic.
“Funding disagreements signal indecision to our adversaries on the role of this capability,” she warned.
A 31-ship requirement
For years, the Marine Corps had a requirement of 38 amphibious ships, with the caveat it would accept 34 in a fiscally constrained environment.
This requirement was based on the rationale that the service needed 38 ships to move two entire Marine expeditionary brigades into combat for a forcible entry.
In July 2019, Gen. David Berger took command of the service and quickly released a document titled “Commandant’s Planning Guidance” that backed away from the requirement of transporting those two brigades, saying the Corps would fight differently in the future.
Since then, a range of concepts have emerged, focused on the idea that small units would already be dispersed throughout the Pacific region to be able to tamp down an emerging conflict until additional forces arrive.
The Marine Corps began talking publicly about a 31-ship requirement in 2021, and the Navy acknowledged that requirement in 2022.
According to the director of the Maritime Expeditionary Warfare Division, Shon Brodie, the 31-ship figure is based on an idea that the fleet should do three things:
- Keep two three-ship amphibious ready groups at sea at any given time.
- Support contingency plans that call for five three-ship amphibious ready groups to deploy on short notice.
- Allow for enough ready ships — those not tied up in maintenance — that some would be available for training Marines in events like fleet exercises.
The requirement is specifically divided up into 10 amphibious assault ships (made up of the America-class LHAs and Wasp-class LHDs that host fixed-wing jets like the F-35B), and 21 medium-sized amphibious vessels (either the aging Whidbey Island-class LSDs or the newer San Antonio-class LPDs). An amphibious ready group includes one amphibious assault ship and two medium-sized ships.
Brodie told Defense News this 31-ship requirement is backed by studies undertaken from 2008 to 2022, and reflects ships’ recent maintenance readiness rates, which hover around 40%.
That rate means in a fleet of 31 ships, 12 or 13 might be available at any given time. If six are supposed to be deployed, and another six are getting ready to deploy next, that leaves little to no additional capacity for training or surging in response to natural disasters or conflicts.
This low readiness rate has complicated the discussion and is a key reason the Marine Corps considers 31 ships the bare minimum.
Pilots with the 13th Marine Expeditionary Unit fly over the amphibious transport dock Anchorage on Dec. 8, 2022. (Sgt. Brendan Custer/U.S. Marine Corps)
Bryan Clark, director of the Center for Defense Concepts and Technology at the Hudson Institute think tank, said 31 ships is the right number, but noted “presence is now the driver, rather than warfighting lift requirements.”
While the amphibious ready group and Marine expeditionary unit, or ARG/MEU, team still can storm an island and take it from enemy forces, the group is most often used to train alongside partners and allies, respond to friendly nations after a natural disaster, or rescue American citizens trapped in dangerous countries.
Eaglen said this emphasis on presence as a means of deterrence has contributed to the disagreement with the Pentagon over the 31-ship requirement.
“The rub as I see it between the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the Marine Corps is over amphib ship requirements for operational plans, versus the additional duties of crisis response (and to a lesser extent building partner capacity) the Marines have on a daily basis,” she told Defense News. “To me, the commandant is saying he wants and needs more ships for tasks scoped outside [of warfighting].”
Dakota Wood, a senior research fellow for defense programs at the Heritage Foundation, acknowledged concerns over the amphibious ships’ survivability against Chinese anti-ship missiles, but said “large-scale combat operations against a highly capable enemy like China is only part of the story.”
“Much has been made about China being the most substantial security challenge for the U.S., but Navy-Marine Corps forces, made possible with Marines embarked aboard Navy amphibious ships, have repeatedly [proved] their worth across a range of small crises in various parts of the world,” he told Defense News.
Fleet under fire
Though the Marine Corps maintains it needs 31 ships, the Pentagon has not committed to that requirement.
DoD officials have not spoken publicly on the matter. Asked by Defense News whether the Office of the Secretary of Defense backs the 31-ship requirement, Pentagon spokesman Chris Sherwood said the requirement can’t be considered in isolation and the department is “focused on having the right mix of capabilities to meet the objectives of the 2022 National Defense Strategy.”
The Navy’s fiscal 2023 budget request, shaped by the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the White House before going to Congress, called for truncating the San Antonio-class production line after one final ship that fiscal year. This move would end the San Antonio program after 16 ships, rather than the planned 26.
The FY24 request advances that plan, including no additional LPDs in the five-year spending plan.
With the Marine Corps and the Pentagon at odds, the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the services are conducting a capability and cost analysis to consider alternative ship designs and acquisition strategies that might lower the cost of future amphibious ships. That study is set to conclude in June.
U.S. Navy vessels sail with a Royal Thai Navy ship and a South Korean ship while transiting the Gulf of Thailand during the exercise Cobra Gold on March 3, 2023. (MC3 Joshua Martinez/U.S. Navy)
Marine Corps, and later Navy, leaders have pushed to buy these ships in multiyear procurement contracts, which must generate cost-savings as a condition of service secretaries approving them. These savings are often on the order of 10%. But a top Marine general told Defense News that the Office of the Secretary of Defense wants larger savings by paring down the ship design and capability.
Lt. Gen. Karsten Heckl, the deputy commandant for combat development and integration, told Defense News in March that Pentagon officials had presented him with several rough drawings of ship designs that would be cheaper than the current LPDs.
“None of them are acceptable,” he said. “They’re trying to reduce cost by reducing my requirement. The answer to reduced cost would have been to exercise [two previous congressional authorizations for multi-ship contracts], one of which was a five-ship and would have saved the American taxpayers almost $900 million.”
Heckl, speaking at the annual Sea-Air-Space conference in April, said the Marines had in 2014 worked with the Navy to scale down the LPD design to the cheaper Flight II design, now under construction at Ingalls Shipbuilding. “We drove out cost. We’re done.”
Berger, who was part of that 2014 effort, made the same point in an April 18 Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, saying that “every bit of efficiency [was] squeezed out” of the LPD design.
“If there’s another effort to reduce that further, I know that we went to the minimums in 2014,” the commandant added.
When Navy leadership first rolled out the plan to nix future LPDs, Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Mike Gilday said that as the service prepares for a potential fight against China, it must prioritize programs most relevant to that conflict.
But more recently, top Navy officials said they would like to continue buying LPDs. Gilday told reporters in early April: “We agree on the 31 requirement, we agree on leveraging the multiyear procurement in terms of doing a bundle buy, and hopefully this study that ends in June informs these next steps.”
Sherwood, when asked about the Pentagon’s commitment to restart LPD buys in FY25 and to use multiyear procurement authority, said the Office of the Secretary of Defense plans to ”address the next purchase in our FY25 budget.”
Lawmakers last year included a provision in the FY23 National Defense Authorization Act giving the commandant of the Marine Corps the authority to set the requirement for amphibious ships. That effectively makes the congressionally mandated requirement 31.
Today’s plan
The Navy’s FY24 long-range shipbuilding plan, released April 17, envisions a dwindling amphibious fleet unless a compromise can be reached on building a future LPD-like ship.
Until the amphibious ship study determines the future of the San Antonio program — whether to continue or truncate it; whether to buy ships one at a time or commit to a multi-ship buy; whether to keep the Flight II design or pare it down further — the Navy’s existing long-range plan does not include buying medium amphibious ships.
It continues retiring the aging Whidbey Island LSDs, though, calling for six of the 10 remaining ships to be retired from FY24 to FY26.
Under the baseline plan — the long-range ship plan includes three potential options — the fleet of 31 amphibious vessels today would sit at 29 in a decade, 24 in two decades and 19 in three decades.
If the Navy were to continue buying the San Antonio-class LPDs every other year, for about a billion dollars a year, the fleet could instead sit at 34 in a decade, 34 in two decades and 33 in three decades.
The San Antonio-class amphibious transport dock Fort Lauderdale is seen moored in Florida ahead of its July 30, 2022, commissioning ceremony. (Sgt. Gavin Shelton/U.S. Marine Corps)
Clark said the Office of the Secretary of Defense may not want the Navy to spend $2 billion every other year for a ship it doesn’t highly value right now, particularly because that cadence would generate a fleet slightly larger than the Corps’ 31-ship requirement.
On the other hand, if the Navy stops the production line, lets the fleet size shrink and then later opts to restart the production line, the cost might be exorbitant — if Ingalls could even reconstitute its workforce and supply base.
“Are you better off buying those ships? Is that actually cheaper in the long run than it would be to stop the production line and turn around and restart it?” Clark said. “It may be that it almost becomes a wash.”
That’s the case with aircraft carriers: The Navy essentially pays HII’s Newport News Shipbuilding to keep the production line “activated and fully manned” in order to keep the sole builder of nuclear-powered carriers viable, Clark said. The line isn’t perfectly optimized, as that would create a larger fleet than the Navy needs, but it delivers a new ship every five to six years, and the Navy retains the industrial base to produce these complex ships.
This arrangement “ends up being slightly cheaper than if you started and stopped and started the construction line multiple times,” Clark explained. “The question is: Does Congress or [the Office of the Secretary of Defense] — mostly Congress — want to take that longer term view and say, ‘We’re just going to keep building LPDs on two-year centers because in the end it’s cheaper than to stop and start this line, unless you don’t think you need LPDs [for future operations]?’ “
Several experts expressed concern the Pentagon won’t take long-term measures, like approving multi-ship contracts, to build and maintain a 31-ship fleet.
Brent Sadler, a senior research fellow for naval warfare and advanced technology at the Heritage Foundation, told Defense News that the Office of the Secretary of Defense and its Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation office “don’t see value in amphibs in a China fight, and therefore [they are] not worth the money.”
Eaglen added that the the Office of the Secretary of Defense “is concerned some amphibs are too slow and therefore easy targets after the shooting starts” with China, despite the Marine Corps seeing amphibious ships and the surface connectors they haul as “critical to fighting inside the First Island Chain using Marines as a stand-in force.” (The first island chain stretches from Japan’s East China Sea islands through the Philippines.)
“Ultimately, Congress will be the adjudicator, and they will again side with the commandant,” she predicted.
The cost of falling short of a 31-ship fleet
Berger told the Senate committee that not having enough ships puts at risk Marines’ ability to deter or win a war, plus their ability to respond to global crises.
“You have to be there with allies and partners because they have to believe that the United States is not running away from them, is going to be there even when things get tough,” he said.
The commandant added that “if you still believe … three amphibious ships loaded up with 2,300 Marines, if they have a deterrent value, and I think they do, then you want them right in the adversary’s grill, right in their face where they can see them all the time. … Can we afford conventional deterrence? Absolutely yes, because the alternative is a lot worse.”
U.S. Marines sit in formation in combat rubber raiding crafts during a launch and recovery exercise with the amphibious transport dock New Orleans in the Philippine Sea on Aug. 6, 2022. (Lance Cpl. Yvonne Iwae/U.S. Marine Corps)
Assistant Commandant of the Marine Corps Gen. Eric Smith during a panel discussion at Sea-Air-Space said the service is providing as much airlift as possible for its forces in the Pacific, allowing Marines to get to exercises and respond to problems.
But there are still gaps when no ARG/MEUs are patrolling the Pacific, and Smith warned those would increase if the fleet size decreases.
If Americans traveling or working abroad find themselves in the middle of a violent uprising, “you better hope it’s in the months that we have an ARG/MEU ready to come get you. If you’re a combatant commander and somebody tries to close down a SLOC, a sea line of communication, you’re going to want to hope that’s during the months that we’re there.”
Calling the ARG/MEU the “crown jewel of our expeditionary crisis response capability,” Turner said “with the minimum of 31 ships that has been established and the readiness challenges that we’re facing that we discussed, really the confluence between capacity and readiness has pinched that capability in ways that are really not helpful.”
If the Navy continues down its path of decommissioning the old LSDs and not replacing them with new LPDs, “trying to maintain even a minimal ARG/MEU presence is going to be really difficult.”
“At a time that we should be adding capability, we’re actually reducing capability,” Turner said.
About Megan Eckstein
Megan Eckstein is the naval warfare reporter at Defense News. She has covered military news since 2009, with a focus on U.S. Navy and Marine Corps operations, acquisition programs and budgets. She has reported from four geographic fleets and is happiest when she’s filing stories from a ship. Megan is a University of Maryland alumna.
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Defense News · by Megan Eckstein · May 2, 2023
3. Fire rages at Russian oil depot; Zelenskyy visits Finland
Asking the newest member of NATO how to obtain membership? (The irony is if Russia did not invade Ukraine Finland probably would not be a member of NATO)
Fire rages at Russian oil depot; Zelenskyy visits Finland
AP · by DAVID RISING · May 3, 2023
KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — A massive blaze broke out at an Russian oil depot, local officials said Wednesday, while the Kremlin’s forces used 26 Iranian-made drones in another nighttime attack on Ukraine as the war stretched into its 15th month.
The developments came as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy made an unannounced visit to the Finnish capital, Helsinki, for a one-day summit with Nordic leaders, as he pushes Ukraine’s Western allies to provide Kyiv with more military support.
The Nordic countries have been among Ukraine’s strongest backers.
“The war is ... a turning point for our entire continent,” said Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre, one of the summit attendees. “Here in the north, we have a more unpredictable and aggressive Russian neighbor, and it is important that we discuss together how to face this new situation.”
The oil depot erupted in flames in Russia’s southern Krasnodar region, located east of the Russian-held Crimean Peninsula, according to Krasnodar Gov. Veniamin Kondratyev.
He didn’t say what caused the fire, which was described as extremely difficult to put out. But some Russian media outlets said it was likely caused by a Ukrainian drone attack overnight. There was no official comment on that possibility.
Local residents heard an explosion shortly before the fire erupted, Russian news site Baza said.
Military analysts reckon Ukraine is targeting supply lines in the Russian rear as Kyiv gears up for a possible counteroffensive amid improving weather conditions and as it receives large amounts of weapons and ammunition from its Western allies.
Explosions have also derailed a Russian freight train and hit a Russian airfield in recent days. Analysts say the attacks may be perpetrated by Ukrainian saboteurs.
At the same time, anticipating a Ukrainian counteroffensive, Russian forces are focused on destroying logistical routes and centers of Ukraine’s armed forces, Kyiv military officials say.
Meanwhile, explosions were heard in Kyiv and elsewhere during the night as Ukrainian air defenses shot down 21 of the Russian drones, Ukraine’s Air Force Command said.
No damage or casualties were reported in the third attempt in six days by the Kremlin’s forces to hit Kyiv.
But three people died and five were wounded when a supermarket in the southern Ukrainian city of Kherson came under fire on Wednesday.
According to Ukraine’s Ministry of Internal Affairs, the attack on the “only operating hypermarket in Kherson” happened at around 11 a.m. local time.
A round-the-clock curfew is to be introduced in Kherson from 8 p.m. on Friday through 6 a.m. on Monday, Kherson Gov. Oleksandr Prokudin announced.
“During these 58 hours, it is forbidden to move around or stay on the streets of the city. Also, the city will be closed for entry and exit,” Prokudin said.
The measure is necessary, he said in a video on social media, “so that law enforcement officers can do their job and not put you in danger,” but did not provide further details.
Both Russia and Ukraine reportedly have experienced ammunition shortages after a winter of long-range shelling and missile strikes as the conflict became bogged down in a war of attrition.
Ukraine’s government has been pressing its allies to give it more as officials consider when and how they might start trying to drive Russian forces out of the Ukrainian territory they have occupied.
The U.S. plans to send Ukraine about $300 million in additional military aid, including an enormous number of artillery rounds, howitzers, air-to-ground rockets and ammunition, U.S. officials said late Tuesday.
The new package includes Hydra-70 rockets, which are unguided rockets that are fired from aircraft. It also includes an undisclosed number of rockets for the High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, or HIMARS, mortars, howitzer rounds, missiles and Carl Gustaf anti-tank rifles.
The weapons will all be pulled from Pentagon stocks, so they can go quickly to the front lines, according to the officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because the aid has not yet been formally announced.
New Zealand also said it was increasing its support for Ukraine by adding another year to the deployment of about 100 military personnel who, among other tasks, have been helping train Ukrainian troops in Britain on operating howitzers.
New Zealand Prime Minister Chris Hipkins said it will also donate an additional $3.3 million toward Ukrainian humanitarian, refugee and legal justice efforts. He said New Zealand has spent about $50 million on financial and military support to Ukraine since the war began.
___ Follow AP’s coverage of the war in Ukraine at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine
AP · by DAVID RISING · May 3, 2023
4. House Republican Threatens to Cut VA Budget over Agency's Warnings About Budget Cuts
I have seen a number of social media posts saying Republicans voted to cut VA benefits.
Excerpts:
"Obviously, they have too much money in the communications department if they're spending it on political purposes," Rep. Andy Harris, R-Md., said in suggesting cuts to the VA's press office.
At issue is a bill passed by House Republicans last week that would raise what's known as the debt ceiling in exchange for placing a cap on the overall amount of money the government can spend. The bill does not specifically mandate cuts to the VA or any other department, but it also does not specifically protect any department. Instead, lawmakers would determine later which agencies would take cuts and which ones wouldn't during the annual appropriations process.
While some congressional Republicans have vowed to protect the Pentagon from budget cuts as part of the debt ceiling fight, the Biden administration has issued warnings based on the assumption that every other federal department would face a 22% cut in order to meet the cap in the GOP bill.
House Republican Threatens to Cut VA Budget over Agency's Warnings About Budget Cuts
military.com · by Rebecca Kheel · May 2, 2023
House Republicans are floating investigating the Department of Veterans Affairs or cutting its communications budget as they fume about the Biden administration's messaging on the House GOP's debt limit proposal.
The potential reprisals were suggested by a couple of lawmakers during a press call over the weekend hosted by the No. 3 House Republican, Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., in which Republicans insisted the debt limit and spending cut bill they recently passed would not result in reductions to veterans health care and benefits, contrary to recent VA warnings.
"Obviously, they have too much money in the communications department if they're spending it on political purposes," Rep. Andy Harris, R-Md., said in suggesting cuts to the VA's press office.
At issue is a bill passed by House Republicans last week that would raise what's known as the debt ceiling in exchange for placing a cap on the overall amount of money the government can spend. The bill does not specifically mandate cuts to the VA or any other department, but it also does not specifically protect any department. Instead, lawmakers would determine later which agencies would take cuts and which ones wouldn't during the annual appropriations process.
While some congressional Republicans have vowed to protect the Pentagon from budget cuts as part of the debt ceiling fight, the Biden administration has issued warnings based on the assumption that every other federal department would face a 22% cut in order to meet the cap in the GOP bill.
Ahead of the House vote on the bill, the VA said that a 22% cut would mean being able to handle 30 million fewer outpatient visits than planned, eliminating 81,000 Veterans Health Administration jobs and 6,000 Veterans Benefits Administration jobs, and increasing the disability claims backlog by an estimated 134,000 claims.
The VA warning, along with subsequent statements from congressional Democrats and the White House framing the cuts as written into the GOP bill, infuriated Republicans. On the weekend press call, Stefanik accused the Biden administration of "shamelessly lying" about the contents of the bill.
Citing federal laws against government officials making false statements, Rep. Andrew Clyde, R-Ga., also said that "we need to investigate this."
"It is nothing more than a fear tactic," Clyde continued. "When the Democrats don't have the facts on their side, they use lies, emotion and volume. President Biden is abusing veterans once again, and I think Congress should investigate this."
In response to the latest GOP defenses of their bill, the White House issued a statement Tuesday accusing Republicans of wanting to "hollow out" the VA.
"Unless moderates are willing to stand up to the extreme MAGA groups that have taken over the conference, the House GOP is going to define themselves as so indentured to multinational corporations and billionaires that they're willing to make the biggest cuts to veterans benefits in American history," White House spokesperson Andrew Bates said in the statement, using the abbreviation for former President Donald Trump's "Make America Great Again" slogan.
The political posturing comes as the Treasury Department warned Monday that the U.S. could hit the debt ceiling as soon as June 1, bumping up its previous estimate of defaulting on U.S. debts from somewhere between July and September. The debt ceiling or limit is the amount of money the Treasury Department can borrow in order to pay for spending Congress has already approved through the annual appropriations process. Economists and administration officials have warned that an unprecedented default could cripple the American economy by reducing faith in U.S. credit and increasing interest rates.
Under the House GOP plan, the debt ceiling would be raised by $1.5 trillion or to March 31, 2024 -- whichever comes first. In exchange, discretionary spending in 2024 would be capped at 2022 levels, which is about $130 billion less than this year's spending level. Spending growth over the next decade would also be capped at 1%.
While it would be possible to meet the cap without cutting either the Pentagon, which makes up about half of the discretionary budget, or the VA, which represents more than one-sixth of the non-defense discretionary budget, doing so would require steep cuts to other government agencies that Democrats are not likely to agree to. Left-leaning think tanks have estimated protecting both Pentagon and VA spending would mean more than 30% cuts to everything else.
The bill is dead on arrival in the Democratic-controlled Senate, but House Republicans view the measure as their opening offer in debt ceiling talks. After the Treasury's announcement Monday, the White House said President Joe Biden invited congressional leaders to a meeting next week. The White House has said that it will not negotiate a budget deal tied to the debt ceiling, which it insists should be raised without other stipulations.
Asked Thursday about GOP complaints that the VA's warnings about the effects of the bill were fearmongering and lies, VA Secretary Denis McDonough maintained he had not seen the Republican criticism but said that "if there's something for me to say to my Republican colleagues on the Hill, I'll say that to them personally."
"A fair reading of that [bill] would suggest that we, as we prepare for the provision of care in the next year, be ready for the full range of options, the full range of outcomes," McDonough said at his monthly press conference, while incorrectly asserting the GOP bill includes a carveout for the Defense Department. "And that's what we're doing."
On the House Republican press call over the weekend, House Veterans Affairs Committee Chairman Mike Bost, R-Ill., said he spoke with McDonough on Sunday morning. Bost said he told McDonough that he was "disappointed" but that "the conversation didn't go much past that."
"No veteran will lose benefits," Bost vowed. "In my nine years as a member of Congress, I have never seen the use of an agency that is so vitally important to so many people be used as a political hammer to deliver a message that is false so that it would stir people up to cause our veterans to be used as pawns."
-- Rebecca Kheel can be reached at rebecca.kheel@military.com. Follow her on Twitter @reporterkheel.
military.com · by Rebecca Kheel · May 2, 2023
5. US military is moving forward with 360-degree missile defense system for Guam
US military is moving forward with 360-degree missile defense system for Guam
Stars and Stripes · by Alex Wilson · May 2, 2023
Guam, already home to three major military bases and approximately 10,000 troops, could soon host a 360-degree missile defense system. (Alex Wilson/Stars and Stripes)
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The Defense Department is planning to install a 360-degree missile system on Guam to defend the strategic military waypoint in the Western Pacific against attacks, Guam’s acting governor said Tuesday.
The 360-degree Enhanced Integrated Air and Missile Defense System is a response to perceived threats from potential adversaries like China and North Korea, including ballistic, cruise and hypersonic missiles.
The 360-degree system is expected to combine Army and Navy defensive missile systems with improved radar, Vice Adm. Jon Hill, director of the Missile Defense Agency, said during a press briefing on March 14.
Joint Region Marianas, the installation management command on Guam, notified the island government Tuesday of its plan to erect the system on the island, Guam Acting Gov. Joshua Tenorio said in a news release.
A notice of intent, published by the Missile Defense Agency, opens a 30-day window for public comments on the project’s environmental impact statement, a requirement of the National Environmental Policy Act. Public comment is open from Wednesday through June 2.
Installation of a “360-degree, persistent, air and missile defense” system is the “most important action we can take to increase the joint force’s lethality,” now retired Adm. Philip Davidson, the former head of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, told the Senate Armed Services Committee in March 2021.
Joint Region Marianas supports Naval Base Guam, Andersen Air Force Base and Marine Corps Base Camp Blaz. (Alex Wilson/Stars and Stripes)
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“This system is critical for defending the homeland, including our most important American operating location in the Western Pacific,” he said, according to a transcript.
The 360-degree system is a collaboration between several Defense Department agencies, including the Missile Defense Agency, the Army, Navy and Air Force.
The project is expected to include a new version of the AN/TPY-2 radar system, the AN/TPY-6, alongside the Army’s Integrated Air and Missile Defense Battle Command System, or IBCS, and a command suite, Hill said in March.
“So, it really is a combined, at the simple level, Aegis and IBCS working together on the island,” he said, according to a transcript, referring to the Aegis Combat System commonly deployed on Navy guided-missile destroyers.
The notice of intent will also begin the “scoping process,” in which the missile agency and Guam residents can “define the range of issues and potential alternatives” addressed in the environmental impact statement.
The scoping meetings are scheduled from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. at the University of Guam Fieldhouse on June 14, Okkodo High School on June 15 and Southern High School on June 16.
“Our administration will closely examine their plans as soon as they are made available, and the relevant government agencies will provide the appropriate responses,” Tenorio said in the release. “We also encourage the public to participate in the upcoming scoping process and provide public input.”
Representatives of Guam’s Governor’s Office and Joint Region Marianas did not immediately respond to requests for comment Tuesday afternoon.
Alex Wilson
Alex Wilson
Alex Wilson covers the U.S. Navy and other services from Yokosuka Naval Base, Japan. Originally from Knoxville, Tenn., he holds a journalism degree from the University of North Florida. He previously covered crime and the military in Key West, Fla., and business in Jacksonville, Fla.
Stars and Stripes · by Alex Wilson · May 2, 2023
6. Dilemmas of Deterrence
Excerpts:
For many years, the US refused to say whether it would defend Taiwan. When I visited Beijing as a Pentagon official in the Clinton administration, my hosts asked if our countries would go to war over Taiwan. I replied that no one could know, noting that even though Secretary of State Dean Acheson failed to include South Korea in America’s defense perimeter in his January 12, 1950 speech, the US entered the Korean War only six months later. Relying on what the deterrence theorist Thomas Schelling called “the threat that leaves something to chance,” I warned the Chinese against testing us.
What some call a policy of “strategic ambiguity” might better be described as “double deterrence,” designed not only to prevent China from using force against the island but also to dissuade Taiwan from declaring de jureindependence. Now some analysts worry that this strategy is eroding as China’s military might grows and US lawmakers visit Taiwan in greater numbers. On four separate occasions, Biden has stated that the US would defend Taiwan, only for the White House to follow up each time with a statement reaffirming adherence to the “one China” policy. In this context, steering a path that avoids projecting weakness or provoking escalation will be decisive for avoiding all-out war.
History reminds us that assessing a deterrent’s success can be difficult. There are some factors, like credibility, that are crucial to achieving the desired outcomes. But as dilemmas of deterrence continue to evolve and multiply, studying the strategy’s limits is equally important for finding an approach that works.
Dilemmas of Deterrence
https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/american-dilemmas-of-deterrence-in-north-korea-taiwan-strait-by-joseph-s-nye-2023-05?barrier=accesspaylog
May 2, 2023
JOSEPH S. NYE, JR.
History reminds us that some factors, like credibility, are crucial to the success of countries’ efforts to prevent undesirable behavior by others. But studying the limits of these efforts is equally important for identifying a strategy that works.
CAMBRIDGE – We live in a world where geopolitical stability relies largely on deterrence. But how can we prove that deterrence works?
- Politics
Recharging Europ states.
Consider the ongoing war in Europe. Beginning in December 2021, US President Joe Biden warned Russian President Vladimir Putin that Russia would face severe new sanctions if he invaded Ukraine, to no avail. Then, when the United States and its European allies thwarted Russia’s plans by providing arms to Ukraine, Putin brandished the nuclear option. But Western aid continued unabated.
Did deterrence fail or succeed? Answering this question poses a challenge because it requires assessing what would have occurred absent the threat. It is hard to prove a negative. If I put a sign on my front door saying, “No Elephants,” and there are no elephants in my house, did I deter them? It depends on the likelihood of literate elephants entering in the first place.
The Ukraine war demonstrates how risk reduction is not always an either/or choice, but often a matter of degree. Perhaps Putin, counting on a flimsy Western alliance, believed the sanctions would fail. But he has so far refrained from striking supply lines in NATO countries. And while the West, for its part, has continued to arm Ukraine despite Putin’s nuclear saber-rattling, it has been reluctant to provide longer-range missile systems or modern warplanes.
Credibility is essential for deterrence to work: threatening a maximum response to defend a minor interest strains credulity. This is particularly true when a nuclear power promises to extend its umbrella to defend a distant country.
During the Cold War, the US and the USSR credibly extended their nuclear deterrence to Western and Eastern Europe, respectively. While some analysts were skeptical that the US would risk New York to defend the isolated enclave of West Berlin, the threat worked, partly because of the American troops stationed there. While the so-called Berlin Brigade was too small to defend against a Soviet invasion, it ensured that a nuclear strike on the city would result in American casualties. (At the same time, US forces in Europe, both nuclear and conventional, were not a credible deterrent for Soviet military intervention in Hungary in 1956 or Czechoslovakia in 1968.)
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This history is relevant to the current situation in Korea, where North Korea has nuclear weapons and South Korea remains bound by the Non-Proliferation Treaty. One recent poll found that more than 70% of South Koreans were in favor of their country developing its own nuclear arsenal. Instead, when South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol met with Biden in April, they agreed that the US would station a nuclear-armed submarine near the Korean Peninsula and deepen consultations with South Korea on nuclear and strategic planning, similar to US engagement with NATO allies during the Cold War.
The credibility of US-extended deterrence in this instance, much like in the Berlin example, is reinforced by the presence of 28,500 US troops in South Korea. The two countries are locked in a “community of fate” because North Korea cannot attack South Korea without killing Americans. Forward bases in Japan offer the same guarantee. That is why former US President Donald Trump’s frequent musingsabout the withdrawal of troops from places like Japan and South Korea were so damaging.
Trump’s presidency also highlighted the ineffectiveness of nuclear intimidation and bribes. When North Korea successfully tested an intercontinental ballistic missile in 2017, Trump threatened “fire and fury like the world has never seen,” to no effect. Next, he tried direct diplomacy. After meeting with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un in 2018 – a long-sought foreign-policy goal for the North – he brashly predicted the swift demise of the country’s nuclear-arms program. To no one’s surprise, North Korea did not disarm. As Kim sees it, his reputation and the fate of his family dynasty depend on nuclear weapons.
The case of Taiwan, which China regards as its territory, shows how changing circumstances can test tried-and-true deterrence strategies. When President Richard Nixon and Chairman Mao Zedong met in in 1972 to restore relations between the US and China, they did not see eye to eye on Taiwan’s status. Ultimately, the two sides designed a formula to postpone the matter: the US would recognize “one China,” the People’s Republic on the mainland, but only acknowledge that people on both sides of the Taiwan Strait were Chinese. The US provided weapons to Taiwan in accordance with the Taiwan Relations Act but did not recognize it as a sovereign country.
For many years, the US refused to say whether it would defend Taiwan. When I visited Beijing as a Pentagon official in the Clinton administration, my hosts asked if our countries would go to war over Taiwan. I replied that no one could know, noting that even though Secretary of State Dean Acheson failed to include South Korea in America’s defense perimeter in his January 12, 1950 speech, the US entered the Korean War only six months later. Relying on what the deterrence theorist Thomas Schelling called “the threat that leaves something to chance,” I warned the Chinese against testing us.
What some call a policy of “strategic ambiguity” might better be described as “double deterrence,” designed not only to prevent China from using force against the island but also to dissuade Taiwan from declaring de jureindependence. Now some analysts worry that this strategy is eroding as China’s military might grows and US lawmakers visit Taiwan in greater numbers. On four separate occasions, Biden has stated that the US would defend Taiwan, only for the White House to follow up each time with a statement reaffirming adherence to the “one China” policy. In this context, steering a path that avoids projecting weakness or provoking escalation will be decisive for avoiding all-out war.
History reminds us that assessing a deterrent’s success can be difficult. There are some factors, like credibility, that are crucial to achieving the desired outcomes. But as dilemmas of deterrence continue to evolve and multiply, studying the strategy’s limits is equally important for finding an approach that works.
Writing for PS since 2002
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Joseph S. Nye, Jr., a professor at Harvard University and a former US assistant secretary of defense, is the author, most recently, of Do Morals Matter? Presidents and Foreign Policy from FDR to Trump (Oxford University Press, 2020).
7. The Need to Invest in Long-Range Fires
Conclusion:
If Chinese and Russian weapon investments are indicators of how naval warfare is evolving, the next conflict will span over great oceanic distances. The shooters will not come face to face. There will be no (again, timeless and iconic, and finable for reference) “cockpit to inverted-cockpit” bird-flipping as escalations rise. Just booms of hypersonic weapons, followed by either splashes or explosions.
The Navy understands the importance of long-range fires, as evidenced by the fact that long-range precision fires show up at the top of the chief of naval operation’s force design imperatives. We believe that fielding these weapons via P-8A, and other multi-mission aircraft thereafter, in tandem with the carrier air wing will give senior leaders a multitude of options. They can use the aircraft to assist others to strike targets, or to act as the sensor and the shooter — closing the kill chain in its entirety. This gives the commander more decision space in employing fires, which thus gives her better freedom of maneuver. That option and the subsequent maneuvering space it yields is harder to exercise without multi-mission aircraft in the long-range fires fight.
We have offered several suggestions that might aid in streamlining pursuit of long-range fires across multiple platforms going forward. Though the skirmishes with which we have been concerned reside on the high seas, the force is undoubtedly a joint one — and a combined one at that! Accordingly, the Department of Defense has equity in how the U.S. military collectively pursues long-range fires. And to that end, taking a page out of the Navy’s Navigation Plan might be a sound initial step.
The Need to Invest in Long-Range Fires - War on the Rocks
JOSH PORTZER AND JONATHAN GOSSELIN
warontherocks.com · by Josh Portzer · May 3, 2023
If a naval aviator quotes from the movie Top Gun in the wardroom, they are going to have to buy a round of beers for the squadron. We are prepared to be fined. “He’s too close for missiles, Goose. I’m switching to guns.” It’s an iconic quote. It is also outdated. With the advent and adversary deployment of long-range cruise and ballistic missiles, the distances across which belligerents can attack United States and allied forces has grown considerably. We believe that the era of short-ranged ordnance expended in near-peer conflict above the waterline is all but over.
As the chief of naval operations mentions in his 2022 Navigation Plan, “to build the dynamic kill chains required for [distributed maritime operations], we must modernize and integrate current capabilities for long-range fires, aligning our analysis, prototyping, experimentation, requirements documentation, and capability development.”
The U.S. Navy should acquire more long-range fires. It needs these weapons to meet and defeat threats that have rapidly proliferated in the Indo-Pacific and European theaters. By diversifying its shooter portfolio to augment the carrier air wing, the Navy can give commanders more missile shooters that can fire from ranges outside that of a peer adversary’s defenses. The P-8A Poseidon is a multi-mission maritime patrol aircraft that offers the Navy a platform capable of creating kill chains for direct attack, or of assisting the carrier air wing by passing data for different aircraft to attack.
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The Department of Defense should follow the Navy’s lead, embracing and fully investing in more long-range fires, and across more platforms. The P-8A is a favorable platform to demonstrate how long-range fires on a multi-mission aircraft could augment U.S. capabilities in the Indo-Pacific. As the department considers the long-range fires effort writ large moving forward, there are several programmatic avenues through which it could gain financial efficiencies. Pursuing aerodynamic testing virtually could decrease the cost of fielding new weapon capabilities on a wider range of platforms. Selecting capable weapons that a variety of platforms can carry further capitalizes on economies of scale (in addition to the operational goodness such expanded concepts of combined employment bring). Lastly, continuing to leverage multi-year procurement will not only allow the U.S. military to continue buying more weapons more efficiently, but also signal a message of confidence to its invaluable partners in industry.
The Challengers
There is tendency to label the competition with China as a modern Cold War. The challenges to the United States, however, have evolved since 1991. American adversaries have developed over-the-horizon strike capabilities, enabled by advanced targeting through nodes and networks. These capabilities are designed to push U.S. aircraft and ships outside the range of most air-delivered weapons, which would thereby make a large aerial assault more difficult. The People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force now fields the DF-21 and DF-26 ballistic missiles. These weapons are designed to deliver either nuclear or conventional payloads against both naval and ground-based targets, utilizing ballistic-enhanced trajectories that span great distances and enjoy high speeds. The People’s Liberation Army Navy has also invested in its power-projection capabilities and wields numerous anti-ship cruise missiles and surface-to-air missiles. China’s naval force is also expected to grow past 400 combatants by 2025.
Russia has also developed a series of cruise missiles in the Kalibr-class family of systems. President Vladimir Putin’s regime retains formidable air defenses, and now deploys air-launched cruise and ballistic missiles to hold U.S. Navy targets at risk.
The P-8A Poseidon: A Use-Case for Flexible Kill Chains and Long-Range Fires
The carrier’s air wing is without question the center of gravity for current and future naval fires. However, fighters may be constrained by the weight of long-range weapons. The added weight limits the transit distances and loiter times for fighters. The more weight a fighter carries, the more fuel it needs (and more often). Tanker operations are vulnerable to attack and the Navy cannot assume that logistics will be able to flow into theater uncontested. Though the MQ-25 Stingray will give the carrier an additional (and attritable) organic refueling capability and thereby added lethality, that program is still developing (though, to be sure, it is progressing). Fighters will remain indispensable to carry long-range anti-ship missiles and still be tasked with sea control. However, having a diversified portfolio of shooters helps to manage risk and the P-8A has intrinsic advantages that could help give commanders more options.
The P-8A Has a Flexible Kill Chain
The P-8A Poseidon is a militarized Boeing 737 that conducts a variety of mission sets. Its three core competencies are anti-submarine warfare, anti-surface warfare, and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance. The P-8A’s ability to collect intelligence as well as disseminate data across multiple networks leads to two notable outcomes. It can provide targeting data and information on surrounding maritime tracks to a flight of fighters or a ship that can then strike the target. Alternatively, the P-8A can also find, fix, track, target, engage, and generally assess against a hostile unit. In this way, the P-8A has a flexible kill chain that many other naval units do not enjoy at parity. It may complete the “front end” of the kill chain, the “back end,” or all of it. By employing long-range fires on the P-8A, the Navy acquires the distinct advantage of distributed choice. A commander of a strike group may choose to utilize a carrier-based attack on a unit, whereby a P-8A provides targeting data over the horizon. Or she can direct her air wing to tend to other threats and have the P-8A neutralize a particular threat on its own from a long distance. With more options from which to choose, a commander’s decision space increases, leading to the invaluable increase of maneuvering potential. Though Gen. Joe Dunford was referencing a much broader picture of warfare encompassing the cyber and information domains, as he contends, rapidly commanding the decision space is paramount, given the speed of war.
The P-8A Has the Endurance and Payload Capacity to Carry Multiple Long-Range Weapons
The P-8A can carry five weapon stores internally as well as on four wing stations and two centerline stations. It is theoretically possible to double up two missiles at a single wing station with a connecting pylon, yielding eight possible wing stations total (weight class and flight test depending of course). While the Navy has not yet conducted a full-fledged feasibility study to combine various weight-class combinations on the P-8A’s currently rated and approved stations, there is potential to explore options such as the loading of a 3,000-plus pound weapon on the centerline of the aircraft. Exploring the possibility of expanding the weapons carriage and employment envelope can open doors to more lethal fires that the Navy can employ across the force. Pending the outcome of such a study, the P-8A seemingly then could follow the carrier air wing’s lead in throwing the same “sticks” as the U.S. arsenal of long-range fires increases. This is notable not only because it increases the total number of sticks (and the axes from which they are thrown, which complicates the adversary’s risk calculus), but it is a sound business decision for big Navy. As we will reiterate later, more of the same weapon is (generally) a better buy than numerous types of weapons purchased in lower quantities.
The P-8A also can carry a large amount of fuel. Generally, the aircraft can remain airborne for 10 hours. It also has aerial refueling capability. This ostensibly can keep the P-8A airborne indefinitely with less need to refill from the tanker. The Navy wins in this regard since P-8As are naval assets. Housing such capability solely within the Navy lifeline (at least contingently) gives naval commanders the assurance that the assets they aim to employ remain theirs both before and after mission completion without risk of re-tasking. Furthermore, there are many P-8As to employ, adding to the Navy’s advantage of distributed maritime operations and thus distributed choice of kill chain. More P-8As employed in theater equals more distribution of operations, which then equals more geographic areas in which U.S. adversaries must negotiate risk. We live in a “more is more” battle space in this regard.
The P-8A Has Open Architecture Built Into Its Software
The P-8A operates on Boeing’s Tactical Open Mission Software, which makes it easy to add more weapons to the airplane. As the software builds mature, software developers are better able to design and integrate applications for operators to use on the P-8A that aid in mission planning and human-machine teaming.
The interface also allows for the P-8A to employ a variety of weapons from a variety of defense companies. Raytheon makes the MK-54 lightweight torpedo. McDonnell Douglas (now Boeing) makes the AGM-84 Harpoon missile. More recently, the P-8A has expanded its lethal reach with the testing of the Lockheed Martin-manufactured AGM-158C Long Range Anti-Ship Missile weapon. The program manager for the direct and time-sensitive strike program (PMA-242) recently cited a study underway to look at warfighting potential of equipping the P-8A with Northrop Grumman’s AGM-88G Advanced Anti-Radiation Guided Missile Extended Range. All these weapons integrate (or would integrate) through the open mission software architecture into the P-8A. Though that integration comes with a monetary cost, the process itself is straightforward enough. Using the same baseline software also provides a streamlined, familiar architecture for the operator to manipulate — regardless of the weapon.
Rapidly Acquiring Long-Range Weapons for the Next Conflict
The Navy needs long-range fires and fielding them on long-endurance, multi-mission aircraft such as the P-8A can meaningfully augment the carrier air wing’s lethality. To that end, we believe that there are a few avenues the Department of Defense could pursue to increase lethality, while keeping costs down.
Pursue Aerodynamic Testing Virtually Through Supercomputing
Developing and prototyping weapons can be expensive, but an often-overlooked cost driver is testing the weapon — to include all of the mechanically-based test events needed to show aerodynamic stability and release characteristics. There is a current shift in thought to move more testing into the virtual realm. Supercomputers can radically change how the Department of Defense does business and, equally important, already exist. For instance, the High Performing Computing Modernization Program is a company that uses supercomputers to do various types of flight testing through modeling and virtual simulation. For a given platform that is middle-aged in its acquisition lifecycle, research and development dollars for funding flight testing may be hard to come by unless given externally (and even then, plane availability to conduct the tests and the personnel to fly it may both be limited and thus likely to cause a bottleneck). Supercomputing could allow programmers and program offices alike to put the research money towards the weapon and software development vice the jet fuel and related plane maintenance that sandwiches physical test events. This would become even more germane as the Departments of the Navy and Defense look to deepen their roster of long-ranged ordnance.
Select Weapons with Variable Shooters in Mind
The Long Range Anti-Ship Missile is a compelling weapon because many different aircraft can carry it. The Air Force has adopted this missile as well. This allows the Department of Defense to share procurement costs across directorates and programs, and capitalize greatly on economies of scale. Niche, small-batch weapons may be exquisite in capability but they are limited in their accompanying purchasing power across the services. Further, a common weapon allows for better concepts of employment across platforms, services, and partners.
Continue to Use Multi-Year Procurement for Long-Range Fire Purposes
Another purchasing phenomenon aside from the “buy-in-bulk” is buying across multiple years. Multi-year procurement allows the Department of Defense to circumnavigate some of the risks associated with annual contracting (e.g., various costs rising every year) for certain acquisition programs. While the estimated percentage of cost savings varies, it may likely be in the realm of 5 to 10 per cent. That is still considerable when the order of magnitude is potentially in the hundreds of millions of dollars, across a score of platforms. Equally if not more important, a further gain through this tool is realized as a boost of confidence to U.S. industry partners. If industry knows that next year’s paycheck is not at risk to produce said weapons, then that is more energy that industry may put forward in the weapons manufacture, rather than hedging bets on what the production line becomes if there is no more money to come the following year. The United States continually messages that it wants a stronger industrial base… but it is a two-way street.
Conclusion
If Chinese and Russian weapon investments are indicators of how naval warfare is evolving, the next conflict will span over great oceanic distances. The shooters will not come face to face. There will be no (again, timeless and iconic, and finable for reference) “cockpit to inverted-cockpit” bird-flipping as escalations rise. Just booms of hypersonic weapons, followed by either splashes or explosions.
The Navy understands the importance of long-range fires, as evidenced by the fact that long-range precision fires show up at the top of the chief of naval operation’s force design imperatives. We believe that fielding these weapons via P-8A, and other multi-mission aircraft thereafter, in tandem with the carrier air wing will give senior leaders a multitude of options. They can use the aircraft to assist others to strike targets, or to act as the sensor and the shooter — closing the kill chain in its entirety. This gives the commander more decision space in employing fires, which thus gives her better freedom of maneuver. That option and the subsequent maneuvering space it yields is harder to exercise without multi-mission aircraft in the long-range fires fight.
We have offered several suggestions that might aid in streamlining pursuit of long-range fires across multiple platforms going forward. Though the skirmishes with which we have been concerned reside on the high seas, the force is undoubtedly a joint one — and a combined one at that! Accordingly, the Department of Defense has equity in how the U.S. military collectively pursues long-range fires. And to that end, taking a page out of the Navy’s Navigation Plan might be a sound initial step.
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Lt. Cdr. Josh “Minkus” Portzer and Lt. Cdr. Jonathan “Duck Duck” Gosselin are both P-8A weapons and tactics instructors in the U.S. Navy. The views expressed here are their own.
Commentary
warontherocks.com · by Josh Portzer · May 3, 2023
8. Want to improve US-China relations? Bring back Fulbright
Want to improve US-China relations? Bring back Fulbright programme, advocates say
- Uphill battle looms to restore educational exchange scheme cancelled in 2020 under Donald Trump and kept shut by Joe Biden
- Supporters praise cross-cultural programme for giving ‘fingertip feel for China’ vital to building bilateral understanding
By Bochen Han South China Morning Post8 min
April 28, 2023
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Illustration: SCMP
As tensions between Washington and Beijing keep rising, a loose alliance of former officials, politicians and ordinary US citizens are pushing to restore one of America’s oldest and most prestigious connections to China that observers hail as unmatched in its potential to put the relationship back on track.
The Fulbright China programme, which for over four decades sent American scholars to the country and brought their Chinese counterparts to the US, was cancelled in 2020 by an executive order from then-president Donald Trump over Beijing’s imposition of the national security law in Hong Kong. President Joe Biden has extended the order twice.
Opposition came thick and fast from within and outside the Fulbright community. Seton Hall University professor Margaret Lewis, for example, likened the decision to “shooting ourselves in the foot”, and an alumni-led petition to restore the programme garnered more than 700 signatures in two days.
“Appalled” by the cancellation, Colleen O’Connor and fellow alumni formed a group of 100 volunteers called the Protect Fulbright China Coalition to push for its restoration.
Their efforts led to a legislative drive last year in the form of the Restoring Fulbright Exchanges with China and Hong Kong Act, which, had it become law, would have nullified the section of the executive order that terminated the programme in both Hong Kong and mainland China.
Though that proposal was included in a competition bill that passed the House in February last year, it also failed to become law.
On March 29, Democratic representatives Rick Larsen of Washington, Don Beyer of Virginia and Judy Chu of California reintroduced the Restoring Fulbright Exchanges bill.
However, amid a constant spectre of congressional hearings about threats emanating from China, supporters of the programme face an uphill battle. And even if they gain traction, Beijing’s antipathy towards Western influences raises questions as to whether it would welcome a resumption.
Under the Nationalist government in 1947, China was the first country to sign a Fulbright agreement with the US, though the programme was paused after the Communist Party came into power in 1949. Since restoring operations after the two countries normalised relations in 1979, the US sent more than 3,500 Americans to China under the programme and received more than 1,500 Chinese in the US.
Proponents describe its impact as profound.
“We have many examples of US Fulbright fellows whose research topics later led to them briefing government officials, testifying before Congress, and doing groundbreaking journalism,” said O’Connor, a Fulbright grantee whose exchange took her to Yunnan province from 2012 to 2013.
The Fulbright China programme counts among its alumni Kevin Nealer, a former member of president Barack Obama’s Intelligence Advisory Board; Scott Kennedy, senior adviser in Chinese business and economics at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies; John Pomfret, The Washington Post’s former Beijing bureau chief; and legions of academics.
Resuming the mainland China and Hong Kong programmes – the only ones in Fulbright history to be cancelled by a president – has been widely recommended by various reputable bodies, both to improve relations and American national security.
The Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank, included their reinstatement – as well as the resumption of the Peace Corps China programme, also cancelled in 2020 – in its list of recommendations to the incoming Biden administration.
The call has been repeated in multiple forums after the new Congress began in January, including at a February hearing convened by the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission, a congressional advisory panel.
O’Connor, a constituent of Beyer’s district, said her group wanted to heighten attention on the Fulbright ahead of a potential visit to the US by Chinese President Xi Jinping this year and the coming American presidential election in 2024.
Among those backing the latest push is Laurel Schwartz, a former school principal in Beijing who relocated to the US last year after spending most of the coronavirus pandemic in China.
Though not a Fulbright alumna herself, she wanted to do something “tangible and achievable” to help address information gaps and tensions she witnessed in both countries.
“I was in Beijing when there were very few Americans there other than diplomats, and I saw there, as well as here in the US, a growing sense of fear and ignorance of the other on both sides,” Schwartz said.
Schwartz said it was “eerie” to hear Chinese friends suggest that then-House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s plane be shot down when it flew to Taiwan last August, noting the comments mirrored the hostile rhetoric towards China she now hears in the US.
But because she lived in China, Schwartz added, she was able to directly explain the American perspective to her friends and help reduce misperceptions.
“They reached out to me, and they were able to reach out because they knew me,” she said. “I was there. I was their only way of being beyond the ‘Great Firewall’.”
In the first months of the 118th Congress, US-China relations have soured after observers noted signs of warming relations late last year following Xi and Biden’s meeting in Bali.
Notably, the US postponed a February trip to Beijing by Secretary of State Antony Blinken due to a Chinese surveillance balloon discovered over American skies. The Chinese have been stalling rescheduling efforts, according to the Financial Times.
Fulbright proponents expressed concern over the low numbers of Americans in China.
As of last October, there were fewer than 400 American students in the country – down around 80 per cent from pre-pandemic levels.
Several long-standing foreign study schemes on the mainland, like Harvard University’s summer Chinese language and culture programme, have shifted to Taiwan in recent years.
Schwartz and O’Connor viewed resuming Fulbright as “low-hanging fruit”, saying it is not costly and easily reversible by executive action and that the US State Department, which oversees the overall programme, already has the infrastructure to restart it.
In 2016, the US provided US$5.5 million to the Fulbright China programme, according to the State Department. China contributed about US$1.4 million.
But programme advocates would need to convince the White House that a “credible constituency” exists, according to Dennis Wilder, a research fellow at the Initiative for US-China Dialogue on Global Issues at Georgetown University.
There are organisations in the Biden administration, particularly in intelligence and law enforcement, “who are opposing restoring the Fulbright on national security grounds”, Wilder said, while noting these concerns were not necessarily shared by the White House.
Neither the Trump nor Biden administration spelled out what the concerns with the programme were.
At a Brookings event in February, deputy secretary of state Wendy Sherman called Fulbright “a fantastic programme, really important to both [the US and China]” and that “it’s important for [both sides] to understand each other better”.
The American public has appeared supportive of such exchanges, too. A Pew survey released earlier this month showed that a majority of Americans believed the US and China could cooperate on student exchanges.
O’Connor said securing backing from Republicans in particular had been difficult given current sentiments towards China.
“Behind the scenes, the Fulbright programme continues to receive bipartisan support,” she added. “However, there is a politically fuelled hesitancy to openly speak about increasing cross-cultural understanding between the US and China, on both sides of the aisle.”
Meanwhile, Florida senators Marco Rubio and Rick Scott, both Republicans, lauded Peace Corps’ decision to leave China, after sending volunteer English teachers to rural areas of the country since 1993. Scott described the programme as “[propping] up our adversaries with US tax dollars”.
In response, a group of returned volunteers started a non-profit, the Peace Corps China Association, in January to promote exchange opportunities and bilateral understanding.
Opponents of restoring programmes like Fulbright have raised concerns that sending Americans to China would put them at risk of detention by mainland authorities and reward the country’s human rights abuses.
Fulbright alumni counter they were unaware of any public targeting of programme fellows during Xi’s presidency and that restricting exchanges did not address these concerns, instead undermining US national security by limiting understanding of issues within China.
Wilder, who held posts at the National Security Council and CIA, said people who had spent extensive time in the country had a “fingertip feel for China – that special quality of really understanding how people work and behave in China”.
While other programmes existed to facilitate exchanges, Fulbright carried “special meaning” given its long history as a flagship US government programme for exchange, Wilder added.
“Bringing it back would be one of those signals of trying to get the US-China relationship stabilised, so it has symbolic importance”.
But David Lampton, professor emeritus at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a former Fulbright fellow in Hong Kong, said it was far from certain that the Chinese wanted the programme back.
“One of the first things Xi did was issue a central document called ‘Document No 9’ … to warn against Western ideological subversion, tightening up on Western-style curricula on law, human rights, media freedom,” Lampton said of the Chinese leader’s early days as president.
“Xi was already headed in a direction that was sceptical of such activity, and so Trump ended a programme that Xi didn’t have to end,” he added.
It would not be the first time for China to reject Fulbright. In August 1989, due to fallout from the Tiananmen Square crackdown, China suspended its participation for a year.
The Chinese embassy in Washington did not respond to a request for comment about the programme.
For people like Schwartz, who volunteers her time to advocacy, Fulbright’s fame and symbolism give it unique value.
“While it’s not necessarily a large programme, it’s the marquee person-to-person exchange that is run by the US government. It’s what folks around the world know and respect and has a symbolic value that the other programmes simply cannot match.”
It also offers a “tangible way for us to ‘walk the talk’”, she said, to show we “value academic freedom” and “are separating the Chinese people from the [Communist Party]”.
Bochen Han
Bochen joined the Post as a Washington-based correspondent in 2022 after several years working in the US, China, Myanmar and Thailand. She holds degrees from Duke University and the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.
9. Bold action needed to deter China’s invasion of Taiwan
Wow.
Excerpts:
Given the urgency of increasing deterrence for Taiwan, we propose bringing U.S. B-61 tactical nuclear weapons into the Western Pacific, specifically to Taiwan. The U.S. has fewer than 200 B-61s stationed across five NATO bases, and some number of these could be moved to Taiwan and to bases in the theater, including Guam and Okinawa.
In time, as nascent U.S. rotational access to bases in the Philippines matures, basing of such weapons should also be considered.
Work would have to be quickly accomplished to ensure the safe, secure and survivable basing of U.S. airmen, weapons and U.S. aircraft. The essential element is to have the weapons in the theater, perhaps rotating the weapons and aircraft from host countries. NATO allies would have concerns about any drawdown of the arsenal in Europe. Still, some would remain to deter a Russian conventional invasion or tactical nuclear weapons use against a NATO member.
Augmenting conventional forces on Taiwan and placing B-61s in theater is an important step to deter a Chinese attack and reassure allies of the U.S. determination to deter an invasion of Taiwan. The CCP’s determination to invade Taiwan in the near term compels bold measures to strengthen deterrence so the Sino-American cold war remains cold. U.S. diplomats and military leaders must make this case to the people of Taiwan, who may consider this escalatory.
In reality, peace can come only through real strength, and action is needed now.
Bold action needed to deter China’s invasion of Taiwan
Threat is immediate and growing larger
By James Fanell and Bradley A. Thayer -
Monday, May 1, 2023
m.washingtontimes.com · by The Washington Times http://www.washingtontimes.com
OPINION:
China‘s actions against Taiwan are increasing in scope and intensity. We have documented the exercises around Taiwan, the first (Joint Fire Strike) last August and the second (Joint Anti-Air Raid) last month, and we anticipate a third (Joint Island Landing) this fall, all of which are designed to prepare for the invasion of Taiwan.
Given that the invasion of Taiwan could occur at any time and might come as soon as this year, drastic actions must be taken to deter the People’s Republic of China.
The threat of an invasion of Taiwan is real and increasing in likelihood as evinced by many factors, including the exercises that provide Beijing with the confidence to conduct the invasion without fear of defeat by Taiwan’s forces or allied forces. The exercises were supported and integrated with joint logistics and information dominance.
Moreover, China‘s maritime and aerial penetration of Taiwan’s territory is now routine, increasing frequency and location of the People’s Liberation Army Navy’s carrier operations near Taiwan, Japan and Guam. In addition, Chinese Communist Party leader Xi Jinping’s statements, as well as those from other CCP and government officials, are ever more explicit about realizing their strategic goal of invading Taiwan.
The threat of the invasion of Taiwan is immediate and growing larger. Taiwan matters to U.S. national security for five reasons.
The first is economic. Taiwan is a vibrant and wealthy economy — and a superpower in computer chip production. Any damage to its factories, including their destruction or conquest by China, will reverberate for many years throughout the U.S. and global economies. There may come a day when the U.S. is no longer dependent upon Taiwanese chips, but that day is not today and will not be for many years.
Second, Taiwan occupies key geopolitical real estate. For China, it is a cork in the bottle of the first island chain, and so prevents the Chinese military from easily accessing the Pacific. Taiwan provides close access to mine China’s ports and sustains the sea line of communication from the East and South China seas.
For the U.S. and its allies, Taiwan is valuable for intelligence collection against China and for military bases to threaten China’s forces. Taiwan has stated that there are increasing numbers of U.S. troops on the island, from scores to hundreds. But there should be orders of magnitude more U.S. and allied forces.
Third, in the realm of political warfare, Taiwan is a strong democracy. It demonstrates what China might have been had the CCP not come to power or if it had been overthrown. Taiwan’s existence is a daily reminder of why the CCP is illegitimate.
Fourth, Taiwan is a symbol of U.S. credibility to resist Chinese aggression and thus sustain stability. Standing with Taiwan, as then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi did in August 2022 and current Speaker Kevin McCarthy accomplished in April, provides a tangible indication that the U.S. will resist China’s expansion.
In sum, Taiwan is the new central front. The locus of where the formidable threat is met by indomitable political willpower to respond is coupled with robust conventional and nuclear military capabilities to deter attack. This is how NATO on its central front deterred a Warsaw Pact attack during the Cold War.
Regrettably, although the U.S. conventional force posture on Taiwan is slated to grow, it remains insufficient, as is the presence of U.S. allies. U.S. allies in the Indo-Pacific should consider temporary air and naval group deployments to Taiwan in the same way that NATO forces provide similar support for Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Conventional deterrence, however, remains insufficient given the static U.S. force posture in the region over the past 30 years, especially in comparison with the PLA’s massive modernization over the same time frame.
Given the urgency of increasing deterrence for Taiwan, we propose bringing U.S. B-61 tactical nuclear weapons into the Western Pacific, specifically to Taiwan. The U.S. has fewer than 200 B-61s stationed across five NATO bases, and some number of these could be moved to Taiwan and to bases in the theater, including Guam and Okinawa.
In time, as nascent U.S. rotational access to bases in the Philippines matures, basing of such weapons should also be considered.
Work would have to be quickly accomplished to ensure the safe, secure and survivable basing of U.S. airmen, weapons and U.S. aircraft. The essential element is to have the weapons in the theater, perhaps rotating the weapons and aircraft from host countries. NATO allies would have concerns about any drawdown of the arsenal in Europe. Still, some would remain to deter a Russian conventional invasion or tactical nuclear weapons use against a NATO member.
Augmenting conventional forces on Taiwan and placing B-61s in theater is an important step to deter a Chinese attack and reassure allies of the U.S. determination to deter an invasion of Taiwan. The CCP’s determination to invade Taiwan in the near term compels bold measures to strengthen deterrence so the Sino-American cold war remains cold. U.S. diplomats and military leaders must make this case to the people of Taiwan, who may consider this escalatory.
In reality, peace can come only through real strength, and action is needed now.
• James Fanell is a government fellow at the Geneva Centre for Security Policy, a retired captain in the Navy and a former director of intelligence and information operations for the U.S. Pacific Fleet. Bradley A. Thayer is director of China policy at the Center for Security Policy. He is the co-author with Lianchao Han of “Understanding the China Threat.”
m.washingtontimes.com · by The Washington Times http://www.washingtontimes.com
10. Chinese-Philippine Confrontation
Chinese-Philippine Confrontation
https://geopoliticalfutures.com/chinese-philippine-confrontation/
By George Friedman -
May 2, 2023
Open as PDF
The Philippine coast guard reported last week that two of its ships were involved in a confrontation with the Chinese navy in the South China Sea. According to the Philippines, the Chinese vessels were engaged in unsafe maneuvers. The incident occurred near the Spratly Islands, which have been a point of contention for years.
This episode is of little military significance since the Philippines and China have been dueling in the region for years. What is significant, however, is the timing. In January, the Chinese launched a significant diplomatic opening with the Philippines. Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. had accepted an invitation to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping in China. The meeting, which seems to have gone well, represented a potential threat to the United States, which was the dominant outside power in the region and had considerable influence in the Philippines. (Relatedly, Marcos met with U.S. President Joe Biden in Washington on Monday.)
(click to enlarge)
The Philippines had found itself in – or maneuvered itself into – the tension between China and the United States. A fundamental imperative of Beijing has long been to have unlimited access to the Pacific. China is an exporting power, and its position relative to Taiwan and the Philippines made Beijing vulnerable to a blockade by the U.S. China had concentrated on the northern flank of this problem, trying to seduce or force Taiwan into expelling the U.S. Navy and other American assets in order to secure its access to the Pacific. Another potential route was between the islands of the Philippines, which are plentiful enough to make it difficult for the U.S. to blockade. Finally, there’s the gap between Taiwan and the Philippines that could be used.
The Chinese have tried to intimidate Taiwan by sea and air, hoping that the threat of war might cause Taiwan to change alliances or the United States to withdraw. This has been an increasingly tense area, but neither the Taiwanese nor the Americans buckled.
That left China with the options of either facing an extremely risky naval war with the United States over Taiwan or shifting its focus southward to the Philippines. Hence the summit between Marcos and Xi. Obviously, Xi was eager to go forward with the relationship, but the Philippines backed away. It’s unclear whether this was because Marcos saw greater economic and security benefits in remaining aligned with the United States, or because significant pressure from the U.S. forced the Philippines to step back. Notably, the U.S. was granted expanded access to Philippine military bases following the U.S. defense secretary’s visit to Manila in February.
With this, Xi’s Philippines gambit appears to have failed, or rather backfired, creating another major block between the South China Sea and the Pacific for Beijing. The American wall still has gaps, of course, but the biggest brick between Taiwan and the northern Philippines is unlikely to fall. (It should be noted that the Philippines and China announced on Monday that they will hold talks on fishing rights – which may indicate some sort of accommodation, although it’s far from a solution to the real issues.)
It’s not surprising, then, that the pressure on Taiwan has continued and even intensified. It’s also not surprising that China has been increasingly aggressive in the Spratlys and is engaging the Philippine navy and coast guard with increasing assertiveness. Rather than the door opening, it seems to be closing on a fundamental interest of China: having unfettered access to the Pacific. China is also seeking to force the Philippines to reverse its relations with the United States by raising the possibility of conflict, a strategy it has used with Taiwan for years. But it has never actually moved toward battle. Taking Taiwan would be difficult, and China cannot risk a defeat, which would undermine its international standing and even its internal stature. The Philippine reality makes it even harder for the Chinese to consider war there, particularly with U.S. forces to be housed in the country. But given that it takes time for forces to deploy, if China is going to try to be engaged in an aggressive posture, now is the time to do so. But as in Taiwan, posture and launching a war are very different things, and at this point, it’s unlikely China can rapidly break down the door. The most it has done so far is send ships to harass the Philippine navy and perhaps extract some sort of lesser concessions.
George Friedman
https://geopoliticalfutures.com/author/gfriedman/
George Friedman is an internationally recognized geopolitical forecaster and strategist on international affairs and the founder and chairman of Geopolitical Futures.
Dr. Friedman is also a New York Times bestselling author. His most recent book, THE STORM BEFORE THE CALM: America’s Discord, the Coming Crisis of the 2020s, and the Triumph Beyond, published February 25, 2020 describes how “the United States periodically reaches a point of crisis in which it appears to be at war with itself, yet after an extended period it reinvents itself, in a form both faithful to its founding and radically different from what it had been.” The decade 2020-2030 is such a period which will bring dramatic upheaval and reshaping of American government, foreign policy, economics, and culture.
His most popular book, The Next 100 Years, is kept alive by the prescience of its predictions. Other best-selling books include Flashpoints: The Emerging Crisis in Europe, The Next Decade, America’s Secret War, The Future of War and The Intelligence Edge. His books have been translated into more than 20 languages.
Dr. Friedman has briefed numerous military and government organizations in the United States and overseas and appears regularly as an expert on international affairs, foreign policy and intelligence in major media. For almost 20 years before resigning in May 2015, Dr. Friedman was CEO and then chairman of Stratfor, a company he founded in 1996. Friedman received his bachelor’s degree from the City College of the City University of New York and holds a doctorate in government from Cornell University.
11. Make the Center Vital Again
I am a center kind of guy.
In my opinion the only thing the extreme left and extreme right should be good for is to make the center strong. (note the emphasis on extreme and not on right and left)
Excerpts:
Today, Western democracies are struggling to keep foreign and domestic policy in balance. Commentators including Francis Fukuyama, Robert Kagan, and Kori Schake see the war in Ukraine as a watershed moment for reaffirming the West’s commitment to the liberal order. But the revitalization of the liberal order will depend on more than the resolve of Western democracies in the current international crisis. To rebuild popular support for liberal internationalism, Western leaders must reimagine the relationship between foreign and domestic policy. They must do so by reconnecting their international policies to recognizable benefits at home for working families.
At a time when trade liberalization and other traditional foreign policies have fallen into disfavor, and the domestic coalitions associated with them have splintered, leaders must find new arguments about the necessity of international openness and cooperation. They must also forge new domestic bargains and political alliances to support them. Western democracies cannot return to the postwar liberal order. They can, however, search for new ways of securing the benefits that the former order brought.
Renewal will require innovation, investment, and sustainable development. Some of these processes are already underway. Yet given the depth of the antiglobalist backlash, far more action and vision are needed if Western democracies can hope to revive the political center while still competing geopolitically. It is urgent that they begin.
Make the Center Vital Again
How to Turn Back the Populist Tide and Build Support for the Liberal Order
May 3, 2023
Foreign Affairs · by Peter Trubowitz and Brian Burgoon · May 3, 2023
In the years immediately following World War II, voters on the left and right in Western countries both backed liberal internationalism. They found common cause in their support for policies that sought to expand international trade and cooperation and prevent the spread of communism. For decades, this “vital center,” as Harvard historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., termed it, held. But times have changed. Since the early 1990s, an antiglobalist backlash has seen the support of Western voters for parties favoring trade liberalization and multilateral cooperation fall by nearly 50 percent. The British vote to leave the European Union and the election of U.S. President Donald Trump, both in 2016, famously symbolized this transformation.
The current phase of antiglobalism in the West was birthed in the collapse of the Soviet Union and the breakdown of the postwar compromise between free-market capitalism and social democracy. During the Cold War, political parties across the West—left and right alike—were united in their commitment to combating the threat of communism. On the home front, they maintained a broad consensus in favor of preserving welfare states. When the Soviet Union collapsed, however, the West’s politics changed. Foreign policy was no longer focused on the threat from the east. Political discourse moved on, and new growth strategies were fashioned in a world free of great-power conflict. Liberalizing markets and the rolling back of social protections to promote globalization eroded manufacturing and created a climate of economic insecurity. As voters lost their economic security and their sense of national autonomy, they grew increasingly receptive to appeals from parties on the extremes.
The success of the antiglobalists has proven costly for the West, domestically as well as internationally. At home, a fragmented electorate has made it difficult for governments to muster the power and authority needed to govern in a number of countries, including Austria, Denmark, the Netherlands, Spain, and the United Kingdom. This failure has fueled voter dissatisfaction, which, in turn, leads to greater political volatility and dysfunction. Internationally, this fragmentation has weakened support for Western priorities in multilateral institutions and fueled doubts about the benefits of liberal democracy. Early hopes that the unified response of Western democracies to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine would help break the antiglobalist fever have not been fulfilled. Instead, since the invasion, antiglobalists have made deeper inroads in France, Italy, Sweden, and elsewhere. Meanwhile, the possibility persists that Trump may return to the White House in 2025.
If Western governments hope to tame the antiglobalist passions roiling their societies, they must restore the balance between staying open to the world and safeguarding economic security at home. History is not the guide that many think it is. Turning inward or replaying the Cold War will not fix this problem. A new approach is needed to revitalize the center.
THINGS FALL APART
During the Cold War, the professed commitment of Western leaders to a liberal world order won considerable electoral support. In the United States, liberal internationalism was backed by Democratic and Republican voters alike, as well as by major segments of business, labor, and agriculture. In Europe, voters across the spectrum favored closer economic and security ties with their neighbors, as well as with Washington. In Japan, the ruling Liberal Democratic Party also supported liberal internationalism, willingly tying its security to the United States, at the same time as relying on state-led development, which secured the support of workers and farmers.
Cold War imperatives gave Western voters reason to support liberal internationalism. So did the generous social protections granted by the postwar welfare state. The nature of these welfare provisions varied across the West, and support for them was always stronger on the left. But publics widely accepted the idea that governments were responsible for balancing the imperatives of free markets and economic security. Indeed, postwar Western policymakers viewed the welfare state as an essential part of the East-West struggle for ideological dominance; it softened the rough edges of market capitalism for working-class voters and countered Soviet claims that only communism offered a “worker’s paradise.”
To be sure, Western support for liberal internationalism was never unanimous. Every country had its naysayers. In the United States, progressive Democrats, including Senators Frank Church of Idaho and Vance Hartke of Indiana, worried about unchecked executive power and consequently opposed excessive military spending and interventionism. On the right, isolationist Republicans, including Senators John Bricker of Ohio, Everett Dirksen of Illinois, and William Knowland of California, derided the United Nations and strong transatlantic ties as infringements on U.S. sovereignty. In France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United Kingdom, some dissenting voices fiercely resisted cooperation with the United States, fearing its hegemony. At the same time, debates over neutrality raged in Austria, Sweden, and Switzerland. The critical dividing line in these disputes remained between those parties in the vital center and those on the extremes.
During the Cold War, parties calling for an alternate foreign policy stood little chance of winning public backing. Consistently high levels of Western economic growth, caused by the huge expansion in trade resulting from the postwar economic recovery and the removal of tariffs, helped strengthen this consensus. Suspicions of Soviet intentions and fears of nuclear war also made voters skeptical of left-wing parties that seemed “too soft” on communism, as well as of right-wing parties that were considered too reckless or belligerent to be entrusted with the country’s security. Politicians who strayed too far to the right or to the left—as did U.S. presidential candidates Barry Goldwater and George McGovern in 1964 and 1972, respectively—proved themselves to be unelectable.
Mainstream party support for liberal internationalism remained consistently strong and resilient, despite occasional challenges. The most serious came in the 1970s, when the combination of sluggish growth and runaway inflation caused a strong disagreement between the center-left—which called for increased government spending and market regulation—and the center-right, which argued for privatization, deregulation, and welfare reform. The center-right won. In the early 1980s, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, and U.S. President Ronald Reagan each began experimenting with different center-right economic policies. The success of their programs put pressure on other Western governments to follow suit. Even French President François Mitterrand’s socialist government found it necessary to pivot toward greater market liberalization.
THE CENTER CANNOT HOLD
In the 1990s, however, everything changed. After the end of the Cold War, Western leaders began to see political advantage in liberalizing trade and granting greater authority to international technocrats. Parties on the center-left as well as the center-right saw the resulting market-driven form of globalization as a way to win the support of the most internationally competitive sectors of business and attract younger, educated, and middle-class voters who benefited from market liberalization. The agendas of the leaders in France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States were cut from the same neoliberal cloth.
The enthusiasm of Western leaders for globalization after the Cold War succeeded in expanding markets and the reach of multilateral institutions. The EU and the World Trade Organization took on functions that had once been the exclusive preserve of the nation-state. With the lifting of the Iron Curtain, many industries in western Europe moved east as workers from eastern Europe moved west in search of better jobs. U.S. and Western investment in China accelerated. At the same time, the ideologies and alignments that were frozen by the Cold War began to thaw. As fears of communist expansion and nuclear Armageddon receded, voting for a maverick was no longer potentially fatal. Western voters, accordingly, became more willing to take a chance on those parties, candidates, and platforms that were once considered beyond the pale.
Recognizing this new reality, parties on the far left and far right began to reinvent and reposition themselves. Left-wing parties such as Denmark’s Red-Green Alliance, France’s Communist Party, and Sweden’s Left Party combined traditional antiglobalist politics of trade protectionism with positions on transnational issues, such as global justice, climate change, and nuclear proliferation, to broaden their appeal among younger voters. On the right, parties including Austria’s Freedom Party and France’s Front National jettisoned long-standing rhetorical commitments to laissez-faire capitalism in favor of antiglobalism and social protection, hoping to appeal to disenchanted working-class voters.
Although liberal internationalism has come under sustained assault, it is needed now more than ever.
In the following years, left- and right-wing parties also became adept at using antiglobalism to mobilize voters experiencing hard times. In the wake of the 2008 financial crash and ensuing eurozone crisis, Syriza, a left-wing party in Greece, and Podemos, an anti-neoliberal party in Spain, exploited growing Euroskepticism and opposition to the EU’s demand for austerity to rally voters to their side. In the run-up to the Brexit referendum in 2016, Nigel Farage, the leader of the UK Independence Party, made gains in northern and eastern England by fusing an anti-immigration message with opposition to EU membership. In 2017, Marine Le Pen, the leader of France’s Front National, unsuccessfully ran for president, merging the party’s long-standing opposition to mass immigration with a new “strategic plan for reindustrialization” aimed at French regions hit hard by globalization.
These efforts did not catapult antiglobalist, populist parties into national government, although they did succeed in putting mainstream parties on the defensive by capturing a larger share of the national vote. Parties on the hard right, in particular, experienced unprecedented success in these years, their share of the national vote in Western democracies tripling between 1990 and 2017. This success was due in no small part to these parties’ willingness to fuse the explosive issue of immigration with opposition to trade liberalization and supranational institutions such as the EU; they succeeded in expanding their vote share, especially in impoverished regions.
Antiglobalism also became a driver of change within mainstream parties. Feeling pressure from antiglobalists over trade, immigration, and international cooperation, center-right parties became more nationalist and nativist and, in many cases, more protectionist. On the center-left, social democratic parties in Northern Europe sought to outflank those on their left who criticized globalization as a “race to the bottom” by urging that welfare standards be harmonized to curb the “advantage” of low-wage countries in Southern Europe. In the United States, Trump and Senator Bernie Sanders ran campaigns in 2016 that appealed to white working- and middle-class voters who felt left behind by globalization. At the height of the Cold War, parties on the center-left and center-right had more in common with each other than they did with the parties and factions on the political extremes. Today, in many cases, this is no longer true.
BACK TO THE 1950s
Although liberal internationalism has come under sustained assault, it is needed now more than ever. The rise of China, and increasing Russian aggression, have inaugurated a new age of great-power rivalry. In order to understand how to proceed, many foreign policy analysts such as Michael Beckley, Hal Brands, and Dominic Tierney have begun to study the Cold War for clues on how to revive the vital center. Some suggest that policymakers today can capitalize on voters’ worries about growing Chinese power and assertiveness, just as their predecessors used the specter of Soviet power during the Cold War to steer public opinion. Some go further, drawing stark parallels between a “new axis of autocracy” led by China and the threat posed by the former Soviet Union and its allies in the 1950s.
Foreign threats can certainly boost domestic solidarity. But the Cold War analogy can be misleading. Western solidarity then stemmed from more than fears of Soviet expansion. Western democracies also found common purpose in their commitment to domestic social protections and liberal democracy. Social protection was seen as a complement to fighting communism during the Cold War because the conflict compelled Western leaders to prove that democratic capitalism, rather than communism, could offer workers greater economic security, equality, and opportunity. As U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson put it in 1950: “There is no longer any difference between foreign questions and domestic questions. They are all part of the same question.” Without renewing this embrace of economic security and inclusive growth, invoking the threat of China is not enough to bring antiglobalists back into the fold.
Nor is fearmongering about China likely to unite Western democracies. Some capitals are more concerned by Beijing’s geopolitical ambitions than others. Western governments differ on how best to deal with China, even on the explosive issue of Taiwan. French President Emmanuel Macron’s recent statement that Europe should not become a “vassal” in Washington’s rivalry with Beijing dramatically illustrated the lack of consensus. Most Western leaders favor a mix of carrots and sticks, hoping to maintain access to China’s markets and labor at the same time as they benefit from the protection of U.S. military power. For most Western democracies, dealing with China is not a zero-sum game. Here, too, the Cold War analogy breaks down.
Isolating China is not an option. China’s role in the global economy is too big for it to be cordoned off through decoupling. Combating climate change also necessitates Beijing’s involvement, as China is the world’s largest carbon emitter. Chinese cooperation will be indispensable to any attempt to determine the climate future.
SHORING UP THE CENTER
Today, Western democracies are struggling to keep foreign and domestic policy in balance. Commentators including Francis Fukuyama, Robert Kagan, and Kori Schake see the war in Ukraine as a watershed moment for reaffirming the West’s commitment to the liberal order. But the revitalization of the liberal order will depend on more than the resolve of Western democracies in the current international crisis. To rebuild popular support for liberal internationalism, Western leaders must reimagine the relationship between foreign and domestic policy. They must do so by reconnecting their international policies to recognizable benefits at home for working families.
At a time when trade liberalization and other traditional foreign policies have fallen into disfavor, and the domestic coalitions associated with them have splintered, leaders must find new arguments about the necessity of international openness and cooperation. They must also forge new domestic bargains and political alliances to support them. Western democracies cannot return to the postwar liberal order. They can, however, search for new ways of securing the benefits that the former order brought.
Renewal will require innovation, investment, and sustainable development. Some of these processes are already underway. Yet given the depth of the antiglobalist backlash, far more action and vision are needed if Western democracies can hope to revive the political center while still competing geopolitically. It is urgent that they begin.
Foreign Affairs · by Peter Trubowitz and Brian Burgoon · May 3, 2023
12. Israel Strikes Iranian Weapons at Aleppo Airport Ahead of Raisi’s Visit
Israel Strikes Iranian Weapons at Aleppo Airport Ahead of Raisi’s Visit
fdd.org · by Danielle Kleinman · May 2, 2023
Latest Developments
Israeli missiles struck Aleppo International Airport on the evening of May 1, hitting a warehouse containing large amounts of ammunition. The attack killed a Syrian soldier and wounded seven others, including two civilians. The Aleppo airport suspended operations due to serious damage, with no estimates of when it will reopen.
The strikes occurred just before a May 3 visit to Syria by Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi to meet with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in Damascus. It will be the first visit of an Iranian president to Syria since 2010.
Expert Analysis
“Tehran’s support remains integral to the survival of the Assad regime. Iran provides the oil Syria can’t afford while deploying militias from across the region to reinforce Assad’s broken army. No matter what atrocities Assad commits, Tehran’s support does not waver — after all, it employs the same murderous tactics against its own domestic opponents. The U.S. should be working to cement Assad’s isolation yet instead is encouraging Arab governments to engage with him for the right price.” — David Adesnik, FDD Senior Fellow and Director of Research
Preventing Iran From Gaining a Foothold
Israeli Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant said in an April 20 press briefing that Israel has been increasing attacks in Syria in the past few months to thwart Iranian weapon deliveries and prevent Iran-backed militias from gaining a foothold in the war-torn country. The May 1 strike is the fourth attack on the Aleppo airport in just over seven months. The previous attack, on March 22, targeted an underground munitions depot containing several Iranian military planes.
Close Allies
Iran is the Syrian regime’s closest regional ally. While Iranian leaders have avoided traveling to Syria since the civil war began, Assad has visited Tehran twice since 2011, most recently meeting with Raisi and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in May 2022. Assad’s forces rely heavily on financial, technical, and intelligence support from Iranian forces, such as the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and the Iran-backed Lebanese Hezbollah. In 2020, an Iranian lawmaker stated that Tehran gave Assad between $20 billion and $30 billion in aid. Assad’s war machine has also operated thanks to oil from Iran and Russia.
Iran disguised shipments of weapons and military equipment aboard flights to the Aleppo airport as humanitarian aid for victims of the earthquake that hit Syria on February 6 and killed more than 6,000 Syrians. Syria serves as a conduit for Iran’s provision of advanced weapons — especially precision-guided munitions, or PGMs — to Hezbollah, the U.S.-designated terrorist organization that is the dominant force in Lebanon. PGMs, which can correct their course mid-flight, pose a grave threat to Israel because of the Jewish state’s small size and minimal redundancy of critical infrastructure.
Related Analysis
“Iran Exploited Earthquake to Flood Weapons into Syria,” FDD Flash Brief
“Assad Will Return to Arab League Summit, Courtesy of Saudi Invite,” FDD Flash Brief
“Iranian Military Adviser Killed in Israeli Strike in Syria,” FDD Flash Brief
“Biden is quietly encouraging Assad’s rehabilitation. He should reverse course,” by David Adesnik
“PGMs: Iran’s Precision-Guided Munitions Project in the Shadow of a Nuclear Deal,” by Jonathan Schanzer and Mark Dubowitz
fdd.org · by Danielle Kleinman · May 2, 2023
13. Xi Jinping Can’t Handle an Aging China
Excerpts:
Such trends will severely test China as it ages and shrinks. In urban areas, conflict will increase between the government and surging numbers of urban retirees intent on protecting their benefits. Recent protests offer a taste of China’s future: in February, thousands of retirees from state-owned enterprises gathered in the cities of Dalian and Wuhan to protest local reforms that reduced state contributions to their personal health care accounts. Such scenes will become a regular sight in coming years, involving one state benefit program after another as Chinese authorities are forced to reckon with rapid demographic shifts and increasing budget constraints. Local officials will be sorely tempted to backtrack on or delay measures adversely affecting urban communities while shifting costs to less privileged, less connected, and less vocal rural ones.
For China’s countryside, these trends spell a future of rising desperation. The political economist Nicholas Eberstadt and the demographer Ashton Verdery project that by the middle of this century, roughly half of China’s citizens over 70 will have either one or no children, up from roughly 20 percent today. Eldercare demands will rise across the country, but rural areas will face the heaviest burden. China’s rapidly aging migrants will increasingly face the need to care for themselves and their own aging parents in the countryside with limited support from the state or siblings.
Beijing’s turn inward will hamper its ability to build formal legal channels for international labor flows to respond to China’s rising needs. But pressing domestic demands will simply lead social pressures to evolve in darker, underground directions. Examples might include an expansion of human trafficking of Pakistani and Burmese women into China’s poor rural areas or the emergence of programs nominally bringing international students from less developed countries to China for education -- while in reality exploiting them as a source of low-cost labor.
This is not a recipe for a rise to world dominance, or even long-term social stability. Rather, China’s rapidly aging population and increasingly rigid, autocratic political system will severely hobble the country as it stumbles towards the middle of the twenty-first century.
Xi Jinping Can’t Handle an Aging China
An Increasingly Autocratic System Will Struggle to Halt Demographic Decline
May 2, 2023
Foreign Affairs · by Carl Minzner · May 2, 2023
China is aging and shrinking. The country’s population surged from 540 million in 1949 to a peak of 1.4 billion in 2021 but tipped over into decline in 2022. In coming decades, it will follow the rest of East Asia into a future marked by low fertility, rapid aging, and a steadily declining population. By the middle of the century, China is projected to have up to 200 million fewer people than it does today. Simultaneously, the median age will steadily climb from 38 years old in 2020 to around 50.
Demography is not destiny. Neither a shrinking nor a graying population necessarily spells doom for China. But the challenges presented by a declining labor force and surging numbers of elderly are significant and will require effective long-term planning and unpopular decisions. Official statements made by the Chinese Communist Party indeed flag the importance of addressing the needs of an aging society, and Chinese officials and scholars have warned about the need to raise unsustainably low retirement ages. But China’s evolving political system under an increasingly autocratic General Secretary Xi Jinping looks particularly unsuited to handling these challenges.
As China pivots back to an era of one-man rule, the country’s decades-long practices of technocratic governance are crumbling. This is making it harder to carry out long-term planning, particularly in rural China. What is more, Xi has prioritized political stability over all else, limiting Beijing’s ability to undertake necessary reforms that might harm the interests of vested urban elites, such as trimming their retirement benefits. Beijing’s ideological pivot toward ethnonationalism will undermine China’s ability to rely on inbound migration as a tactic to mitigate the effects of a shrinking labor force. Finally, the Communist Party’s increasing embrace of traditionalist gender roles risks further exacerbating the decline in fertility rate by reinforcing the underlying factors that are driving China’s youth—particularly women—to opt out of marriage and child-rearing.
By the middle of the twenty-first century, China will likely find itself beset by a host of severe internal challenges, including rising tensions with urban elites over pension and health care costs, steadily worsening conditions for the rural elderly, and a toxic atmosphere for women and foreigners that will increasingly constrain the country’s rise as a global power.
BEIJING TURNS AGAINST TECHNOCRACY
China’s most serious demographic challenges lie in its poor rural areas. The country’s elderly population is disproportionally concentrated in the countryside: in 2020, 17.7 percent of rural residents were 65 and older, compared with only 11.1 percent in urban areas. These numbers will soar in the decades to come, placing enormous economic and social strains on communities. Planning for the needs of the rural elderly will be one of toughest tasks facing Beijing’s leaders.
On the surface, China would seem uniquely well equipped to respond to this challenge. After all, it has a massive bureaucracy staffed with experts who regularly churn out detailed policy documents bearing impressive titles, such as the 2019 Mid- and Long-Term National Plan for Responding to Population Aging.
In practice, however, such plans often crumble in the face of China’s hard political realities. As the economist Scott Rozelle and the researcher Natalie Hell have documented, four decades of similar attempts to address the needs of rural children foundered on the Maoist legacy of the hukou (household registration) system, which tightly links citizens’ access to social benefits such as education and health care to their family’s place of registration. In doing so, it has entrenched inequalities between urban and rural residents when it comes to receiving government resources.
The same disparities exist with regard to the rural elderly. Rural residents receive monthly pensions of roughly $26, far less than the $506 their urban counterparts receive. Health care resources and insurance coverage are similarly skewed. As the sociologist Yan Long and the gerontologist Lydia Li have noted, this two-tiered health care system has resulted in both a “disparate distribution of health resources among elders” and a dramatic divergence between how urban and rural residents see their relationships with the state: individuals living in cities view themselves as citizens with rights, whereas rural residents see themselves as “peasants unworthy of state care.”
Xi decided to abandon zero-COVID virtually overnight and without warning.
China’s pivot back toward one-man rule is further eroding Beijing’s capacities to plan for the future. As Xi steadily marginalizes technocratic voices and institutions, state policies are showing worrying signs of catering to his whims. For example, plans rolled out this year to reform rural health care call for expanding the use of traditional Chinese medicine in responding to the needs of the rapidly aging rural population. Serious risks exist that such plans are less a carefully thought-out effort to improve the health of China’s elderly than an example of state bureaucracies tacking into the new political winds created by Xi’s decision to promote traditional medicine as a symbol of national pride, what he refers to as “the treasure of ancient Chinese science and the key to the archive of Chinese civilization.”
Beijing’s handling of the latter stages of the COVID-19 pandemic offers an unsettling preview of the practical problems caused by these political shifts. When Xi tied his personal legitimacy to China’s initially successful “zero COVID’’ policies in 2020-21, he rendered it politically impossible for officials to plan for or even discuss what might follow. Even as the virus became increasingly transmissible, they were forced to rely on escalating lockdowns as their primary tool to combat the pandemic. The country’s vaccination campaign remained patchy, and efforts to import foreign vaccines and stockpile antiviral medications languished. This left the elderly dangerously exposed.
In late 2022, Xi dramatically reversed course. Only weeks after the end of the politically sensitive 20th Party Congress, he decided to abandon zero-COVID virtually overnight and without warning. The elderly found themselves squarely in the path of the virus: rural medical facilities were overwhelmed, and shoppers emptied pharmacy shelves of anti-fever drugs in a wave of panic buying. Elderly rural citizens were left to fend for themselves, encouraged by state media to rely on home treatment with traditional Chinese medicines. Meanwhile, urban elites bought up limited stocks of proven treatments such as Paxlovid for inflated prices on the black market.
As Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations, has noted, these radical policy shifts had serious costs. They subjected hundreds of millions of citizens to exceptionally harsh lockdowns at the apex of zero-Covid policies in 2022 and fueled a death toll of one million to 1.5 million after their abrupt lifting only weeks later.
HOSTAGE TO STABILITY
Demographic change will also force Beijing to revisit promises made to earlier generations regarding government benefits. As Chinese society ages, retirement programs are becoming increasingly unsustainable. Retirement ages, which were set back in the 1950s, remain exceptionally low: 55 years old for women (50 for blue-collar employees) and 60 for men. The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences predicts that the main urban pension fund, a relatively more generous system that covered roughly 450 million urban workers, retirees, and party cadres as of 2020, will run dry by 2035. (China’s underclass, made up of over 500 million migrant workers and rural residents—a much larger portion of the population— are covered by a far skimpier system.) But just as in other countries, such as France, raising retirement ages or cutting back on benefits poses a serious challenge for the government because it risks triggering a widespread public backlash.
One might think China’s rulers more capable of confronting such risks and ramming through necessary reforms than their democratic counterparts, given Beijing’s powerful repressive apparatus. But stability-obsessed party leaders instinctively flinch when confronted with widely shared grievances that could metastasize into collective resistance. Beijing’s abrupt decision to terminate zero-COVID policies in November came immediately after scattered anti-lockdown protests showed signs of leaping from city to city and transforming from complaints about lockdown policies to direct attacks on party leaders.
Such concerns have regularly hamstrung meaningful reforms under Xi. Although Beijing has acknowledged the need to raise official retirement ages for at least a decade, it has not done so. Leaders now vaguely gesture that they will release a plan by 2025. This delay reflects serious concerns that meaningful pension reform would strike at the interests of China’s large established urban middle class, including retired government officials, party cadres, and their family members. These represent a crucial base of support that the party hesitates to offend, unlike other groups that they have repressed in the past—LGBTQ activists, ethnic minorities in Xinjiang, and blue-collar workers laid off by state-owned enterprises in China’s northeast.
Redistributive policies aimed at reducing the rural-urban gap have met a similar fate. As scholars such as Wei Cui and Mary Gallagher have noted, Xi has steadily undone the limited spending reforms launched just over a decade ago under the administration of General Secretary Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao. Meanwhile, Xi’s own “common prosperity” initiative has remained little more than paper promises amid his increasing warnings against the dangers of “welfarism” among China’s disadvantaged.
BEIJING’S NATIVIST PIVOT
Aside from China, every East Asian society facing demographic decline has turned to imported labor to mitigate the effects of declining birth rates and rapid aging. But Xi’s pivot towards ethnonationalism will torpedo Beijing’s ability to use this tool.
Despite fantasies of a twenty-first century workforce populated by robots, technology has not eliminated the need for young human workers. The number of foreign residents in South Korea and Taiwan has surged from negligible levels in the 1980s to over three percent of the population in each today. Another percentage point consists of naturalized foreigners who have obtained citizenship through marriage. Taipei’s streets now echo with the voices of Filipino and Indonesian women caring for elderly and infirm Taiwanese; tens of thousands of Vietnamese men now labor on Taiwanese construction sites and fishing boats.
Other East Asian governments are trying to expand these trends to ameliorate growing labor pressures. Japan relaxed immigration laws in 2019, granting greater rights to foreign blue-collar workers and creating new visas to attract intermediate-skilled workers in a range of fields. Taiwan adopted a parallel reform in 2022, and the head of its National Development Council has proclaimed that Taipei seeks to attract an additional 400,000 migrant workers over the next decade.
Were Beijing serious about planning for its own aging future, it would have its own cards to play. China has a host of embryonic links with Africa, the only region of the world that will experience a youth boom over the coming decades. The number of African international students in China surged from 1,793 in 2003 to over 80,000 in 2018, and a vibrant community of tens of thousands of African traders and migrants had developed in Guangzhou by 2010. Beijing is also engaged in a major expansion of vocational education in Africa. Theoretically, one could envisage carefully crafted programs to train a generation of African technicians to help run China’s factories and African caregivers to look after tens of millions of the rural elderly as China’s population ages and shrinks.
Students and other foreigners in China encountered a wave of hostility with the outbreak of the pandemic.
But that will almost certainly not happen. Under Xi’s banner of “rejuvenating the Chinese nation,” socialist slogans are giving way to a more explicit framing of China in terms of culture and race. Authorities have banned foreign cultural products, whether architecture or Christmas celebrations, deemed inconsistent with China’s own essence, while ethnic policies are pivoting away from Soviet-style autonomy to aggressive assimilationism.
This ethnonationalist turn is fanning latent flames of anti-foreign sentiment. During the early 2010s, local authorities in Guangzhou carried out a tough immigration crackdown that would cut the city’s African community in half by 2016. Students and other foreigners encountered a wave of hostility with the outbreak of the pandemic in early 2020, including mass evictions of hundreds of Africans in Guangzhou that resulted in coordinated diplomatic protests by a range of African nations.
These hardening social attitudes have sunk China’s own tentative efforts to liberalize its migration policy. Since the early 2010s, the government has overhauled its immigration system to deepen ties with the overseas Chinese diaspora and better attract foreign talent. But when Beijing released proposed draft regulations aimed at moderately expanding permanent residency for foreigners in 2020, it triggered a raging maelstrom of online nativist sentiment, with over four billion views of posts on the topic on the social media platform Weibo in a single week. As the scholar Tabitha Speelman has carefully detailed, officials shelved their proposals when faced with overwhelmingly negative commentary, accusations of selling out the nation to “fake foreigners” (that is, Chinese elites who had obtained foreign citizenship), and racist vitriol directed at communities of African traders.
A GRAY FUTURE
Such trends will severely test China as it ages and shrinks. In urban areas, conflict will increase between the government and surging numbers of urban retirees intent on protecting their benefits. Recent protests offer a taste of China’s future: in February, thousands of retirees from state-owned enterprises gathered in the cities of Dalian and Wuhan to protest local reforms that reduced state contributions to their personal health care accounts. Such scenes will become a regular sight in coming years, involving one state benefit program after another as Chinese authorities are forced to reckon with rapid demographic shifts and increasing budget constraints. Local officials will be sorely tempted to backtrack on or delay measures adversely affecting urban communities while shifting costs to less privileged, less connected, and less vocal rural ones.
For China’s countryside, these trends spell a future of rising desperation. The political economist Nicholas Eberstadt and the demographer Ashton Verdery project that by the middle of this century, roughly half of China’s citizens over 70 will have either one or no children, up from roughly 20 percent today. Eldercare demands will rise across the country, but rural areas will face the heaviest burden. China’s rapidly aging migrants will increasingly face the need to care for themselves and their own aging parents in the countryside with limited support from the state or siblings.
Beijing’s turn inward will hamper its ability to build formal legal channels for international labor flows to respond to China’s rising needs. But pressing domestic demands will simply lead social pressures to evolve in darker, underground directions. Examples might include an expansion of human trafficking of Pakistani and Burmese women into China’s poor rural areas or the emergence of programs nominally bringing international students from less developed countries to China for education -- while in reality exploiting them as a source of low-cost labor.
This is not a recipe for a rise to world dominance, or even long-term social stability. Rather, China’s rapidly aging population and increasingly rigid, autocratic political system will severely hobble the country as it stumbles towards the middle of the twenty-first century.
CARL MINZNER is a Senior Fellow for China Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and a Professor at Fordham Law School.
Foreign Affairs · by Carl Minzner · May 2, 2023
14. Discreetly, Berlin Confronts Russian Spies Hiding in Plain Sight
Discreetly, Berlin Confronts Russian Spies Hiding in Plain Sight
The New York Times · by Erika Solomon · May 2, 2023
For years, Germany seemed to tolerate even flagrant Russian operations on its soil. But a new Cold War-like chill has now made the snooping difficult to ignore.
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The Russian Embassy in Berlin in 2021.Credit...Filip Singer/EPA-EFE, via Shutterstock
By
May 2, 2023
BERLIN — Every day as he settles in at his desk, Erhard Grundl, a German lawmaker, looks outside his office window into the embassy he knows may be spying on him.
“I come into the office, and on a windy day, I see the Russian flag waving. It feels a bit like Psalm 23: ‘You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies,’” he said, chuckling. “I’m not religious, but I always think of that.”
In the shadow of Berlin’s glass-domed Reichstag, beyond the sandstone columns of Brandenburg Gate, German parliamentary buildings sit cheek by jowl with Russia’s sprawling, Stalinist-style diplomatic mission. For years, a silent espionage struggle played out here along the city’s iconic Unter den Linden avenue.
Members of Parliament like Mr. Grundl were warned by intelligence offices to protect themselves — to turn computer screens away from the window, stop using wireless devices that were easier to tap, and close the window blinds for meetings.
It seems an almost comical situation for officials in one of Europe’s most powerful nations, where tensions over Russian espionage were something Germany’s government long seemed willing to ignore. That has become increasingly difficult since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, as a Cold War-era style chill settles across the continent and recasts relations with Russia.
Late last month, Russia exposed what it described as a “mass expulsion” of its diplomats in Germany when it announced a tit-for-tat expulsion of more than 20 German diplomats from Moscow. It was a rare sign, security analysts say, of a subdued but growing counterintelligence effort that Berlin is now belatedly undertaking, after years of increasingly brazen Russian intelligence operations on German soil.
At least twice, Russian groups suspected of Kremlin links have hacked German politicians and Parliament — the last time just months before the 2021 elections that ended Angela Merkel’s 16 years at the helm and brought in Chancellor Olaf Scholz.
A few years earlier, a gunman accused of ties to Russian intelligence shot dead a Georgian dissident in broad daylight at the leafy Kleiner Tiergarten park, less than a mile away from Berlin’s government district.
An handout image released by the Metropolitan Police Service shows a still from a covert camera of David Smith taking video of CCTV monitors in the British Embassy security kiosk in Berlin in 2021. He was later arrested and accused of spying for Russia.
In 2021, police arrested a security guard at the nearby British Embassy who had been spying for Russia.
And late last year, in perhaps the most disturbing case of all, a German intelligence officer was unmasked as a mole passing surveillance of the war in Ukraine to Moscow.
Germany’s foreign ministry has been tight-lipped about the latest expulsions — even refusing to call them expulsions. But it acknowledged the diplomats’ departure was linked to “reducing the Russian intelligence presence in Germany.”
Expulsions were long a common German response to Russian operations — including the first parliamentary hack, in 2015, and the invasion of Ukraine, when 40 diplomats were sent back to Moscow. But security experts see the current move as part of a broader effort to bolster counterintelligence and chip away discreetly at what they long warned was an extremely high spy count at the embassy.
Still, analysts like Stefan Meister, of the German Council on Foreign Relations, said years of neglecting counterintelligence would take a long time to repair. When he worked with German spy agencies in 2000, he recalled, they did not have a single Russian speaker on staff. In contrast, he said, Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, had long made Germany, Europe’s largest economy, a top target for espionage.
“We are not where we should be, or should have been,” he said. “The Russians are learning also. They have no limits, they have a lot of resources they put into this hybrid war, the information war. And we are always a few steps behind.”
“Finally, they expel these guys,” he added. “But why did it take so long?”
At the heart of the debate over Germany’s handling of Russian espionage is the Russian Embassy: a palatial complex of soaring stone towers engraved with Soviet hammers and sickles. It has long been a site of fascination, consternation and intrigue.
Before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, even for years after Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, the embassy was famous for lavish parties that attracted top German car industry executives, politicians, soccer stars and actors.
But it had a darker side: Two of its inhabitants have mysteriously fallen to their deaths from embassy windows. In 2021, a diplomat was found outside on the pavement by the German police, who believed he was an undercover agent of the FSB, the Russian secret service branch that Western officials linked to the Tiergarten murder.
Forensic experts collecting evidence at a crime scene in 2019. A gunman accused of ties to Russian intelligence shot dead a Georgian dissident in broad daylight at the Kleiner Tiergarten park.
It is an open secret that most diplomatic missions host spies among their ranks, and for years, a former senior aide to Ms. Merkel told The New York Times, she and her staffers who visited the embassy would trade guesses as to how many worked at the embassy there — sometimes suggesting up to 600.
In a recent documentary for ARD, the country’s state broadcaster, the estimate of embassy staff before the war was said to be more than 500. German officials generally assumed that at least a third of those were spies, the former Merkel aide said.
Germany’s domestic intelligence agency told ARD it found potential espionage equipment on the embassy roof — perhaps to spy on lawmakers across the street, like Mr. Grundl, or Frank Schwabe, from Mr. Scholz’s Social Democrats.
“We are not well enough prepared,” said Mr. Schwabe, who works in the building across from the embassy, and focuses on human rights. “I would actually like to see a targeted security strategy in Germany that really enables members of Parliament, to help them really arm themselves against these kinds of wiretapping attempts.”
For now, he offers visitors like Russian dissidents or civil society actors the option to move to another room — or to position themselves so their lips cannot be read.
Security experts say such tips are not nearly enough to help politicians who appear to be a top target — not just near the embassy, but anywhere, using vans with smaller devices that can tap into phones and hear conversations.
Mr. Meister said lawmakers with sensitive portfolios could be moved farther from the Russian Embassy. “Then again, what isn’t sensitive now? A domestic policy or other issues, like migration, could be used by the Russian side — there is almost nothing that isn’t sensitive at the moment.”
Indeed, Nico Lange, a former German Defense Ministry official, who is now a senior fellow at the Munich Security Conference, said issues like migration were a key topic used by Russia in identifying and recruiting frustrated, far-right sympathizing members of German security and defense forces — like the mole arrested last year, or the security guard stealing information from the British Embassy.
Complicating Germany’s efforts to effectively combat Russian intelligence is the country’s federalized system: Each German state has a different intelligence service.
Mr. Lange acknowledged cooperation and data sharing among the services was improving, but said the setup inevitably has gaps. He also urged legislators to reverse laws granting espionage targets, even abroad, the same constitutional rights as German citizens.
“Intelligence agencies are a tit-for-tat business,” he said. “If you’re not able to gather information, then your partners will not trade with you.”
Frank Schwabe of the Social Democratic Party speaks during a session of the German Parliament in Berlin in 2019. Mr. Schwabe works in the building across the street from the Russian Embassy.Credit...Hayoung Jeon/EPA, via Shutterstock
Mr. Lange’s current worry is that Russian spies are seeking information on weapons or training for Ukrainian soldiers. Already, suspected Russian operatives have been found near military training sites in Germany.
Last month, Poland said it uncovered a Russian spy ring that had hidden cameras on rail lines in the southeast of the country, a major transit route for arms shipments to Ukraine.
But some lawmakers in Germany wonder whether concerns over Russia’s spies have strayed too far from a problem within their own walls: Members of the far-right Alternative for Germany party, whose leaders were frequent guests at the Russian Embassy, hold seats in some of the most important parliamentary committees, from foreign affairs to defense.
Mr. Grundl fretted over the fact that just last week, those far-right colleagues sat on a parliamentary committee while a secret topic was discussed.
“They are sitting in there, and they have the best connections to Moscow,” he grumbled. “That’s the bigger headache to me: the enemy within.”
Christopher F. Schuetze contributed reporting.
The New York Times · by Erika Solomon · May 2, 2023
15. DoD: Retired US officers marching into work for foreign governments
But what if they are supporting US interests by doing so?
From the Quincy Institute.
DoD: Retired US officers marching into work for foreign governments - Responsible Statecraft
responsiblestatecraft.org · by Kelley Beaucar Vlahos, Ben Freeman · April 26, 2023
revolving door
DoD: Retired US officers marching into work for foreign governments
DoD laundry list exposes how much money is on offer for military brass looking to cash in on their connections and influence
April 26, 2023
Written by
Kelley Beaucar Vlahos and Ben Freeman
Members of Congress have obtained a list of former military officers who have done paid work for foreign governments since 2012. It may be a surprise — or not — that the list includes 77 senior officials (Generals and Admirals), and that the countries that employed them represent some of the most repressive governments in the world (Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the UAE).
Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) requested the information from the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the list was included in a broader memo of responses to their questions relating to the activities of retired officers. According to the OSD, there were 450 notifications of employment for foreign governments from 2012 through 2022. Of them, 12 were denied, 21 were administratively closed or withdrawn, and 11 are pending State or DoD approval.
The top country of employment? The UAE. Of the 47 different nations listed in the report, more than half of the approvals were for work with the Emirates, either with the country directly or with contractors working on behalf of the country. Of the total UAE jobs, only 35 disclosed their compensation. The remaining 185 are listed as “not available” or “not reported.”
The UAE’s prominence in this list is especially notable because, while these DoD officials were working for the UAE, its government was masterminding a number of schemes to illegally meddle in U.S. politics and elections. These provocations and the UAE’s enormous legal influence operation in the U.S. did not go unnoticed by the U.S. intelligence community which, last fall, briefed lawmakers on a classified intelligence report outlining UAE efforts to meddle in American politics and bend U.S. foreign policy to its will, as first reported by John Hudson at the Washington Post.
Despite all of this, the Department of Defense reported to Warren and Grassley that just two requests (less than 1 percent) for work with the UAE government were denied.
Some of the senior officials listed here were real go-getters, gaining permission to work for multiple foreign governments at the same time. For example, Major General Charles J. Dunlap Jr. received eight separate approvals to work for foreign governments, including three for the UAE, as well as Canada, Denmark, Israel, and Scotland.
Former NSA head General Keith Alexander was the next highest with five total approvals for work with foreign governments — three with the government of Singapore, one with Saudi Arabia, and one with Japan. (As the Washington Post pointed out yesterday, the Saudi Arabia deal was for $700,000 and was inked after the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018).
“There seems to be a high demand for retired senior military officers to work for foreign governments, particularly autocracies,” noted our colleague and investigative journalist Eli Clifton.
“The obvious question is: What are these former officers bringing to the table in exchange for six-figure paydays? Is it just their experience? Or is it their connections, influence and stature back in Washington?”
There are some other high profile retirees on this list, too. In 2019 Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute had a contract as a senior adviser from the Jones Group International/Libya for $15,000 a month. Lt. General James Clapper worked for the Office of National Intelligence in Australia for an undisclosed amount. H.R. McMaster, former Trump national security adviser, worked on behalf of the Japanese government at the Hudson Institute, beginning in 2019, for $250,000 annually, according to the list.
In addition, former Trump defense secretary Gen. James Mattis served as a conference presenter in the UAE less than a year after leaving office and separately as an adviser for the UAE, both for an undisclosed amount. Adm. William Fallon, who served as the commander of U.S. Central Command from 2007-2008, is listed as part- owner of the Global Alliance Advisors consulting firm, which was expected to get more than $23 million from the government of Qatar (his own compensation was “in excess of $250,000”).
The OSD responses were shared with Responsible Statecraft in addition to Senator Warren’s new report, “Pentagon Alchemy: How Defense Officials Pass through the Revolving Door and Peddle Brass for Gold,” which will be released during today’s Armed Services Subcommittee on Personnel, which she chairs.
The report details some 672 former government officials, military officers, legislative staff and members of Congress working for the top 20 defense contractors in 2022. Of that number, 91 percent were serving as lobbyists.
The top five contractors in the revolving door are no surprise, either — Boeing (85 hires), Pfizer (73 — which also had a lot of defense contracts during COVID), Raytheon (64), General Dynamics (57), and Lockheed Martin, (53).
Critics say both lists — the revolving door stateside and work for foreign governments — highlight the need for reform. On the foreign employment side, hundreds of the names were blocked out as, per DoD rules, the names of individuals with ranks 0-6 and below are withheld. Additionally, while these DoD forms require applicants list their expected compensation for foreign government work, in more than half of all applications this information wasn’t provided. Needless to say, more transparency is necessary.
Stateside, Sen. Warren has proposed legislation that would put a four-year ban on major contractors hiring senior DoD officials or any former employers who worked on their contracts while in government, along with a number of other measures. Quincy Institute defense analyst Bill Hartung says so many of these relationships are brokered to influence U.S. policy and to create business for the military industrial complex, prioritizing “war and preparations for war over dialogue and diplomacy.”
“The more that can be done to rein in these widespread conflicts-of-interest, the better chance we will have of crafting a foreign policy that serves the interests of the public, not self-interested corporations and foreign entities.”
Written by
Kelley Beaucar Vlahos and Ben Freeman
responsiblestatecraft.org · by Kelley Beaucar Vlahos, Ben Freeman · April 26, 2023
16. Kremlin says Ukraine sent two drones to attack Vladimir Putin
Sensational reporting.
Kremlin says Ukraine sent two drones to attack Vladimir Putin
The Washington Post · by Mary Ilyushina · May 3, 2023
RIGA, Latvia — Russia on Wednesday accused Ukraine of staging a drone attack intended to hit the Kremlin residence and kill President Vladimir Putin, an electric allegation that could create justification for Russia to escalate its war in Ukraine.
The alleged assassination attempt, which could not be independently confirmed, was made in a statement shared by the Kremlin press service with Russian state news agencies on Wednesday afternoon. “Tonight, the Kyiv regime attempted a drone strike on the Kremlin residence of the President of the Russian Federation. Two drones were aimed at the Kremlin,” the statement said.
“We regard these actions as a planned terrorist act and an attempt on the life of the president of the Russian Federation, carried out on the eve of Victory Day, the May 9 parade,” the Kremlin said, adding that Putin was not in the building at the time of the alleged attack.
“Russia reserves the right to respond to an attempted strike on the Kremlin where and when it sees fit,” the statement said
Ukrainian officials did not immediately comment on the claim.
Russia has been imposing additional safety measures in preparation for the annual May 9 World War II victory commemorations, when states of the former Soviet Union celebrate the defeat of Nazi Germany. Officials had cited security concerns related to the war for limiting the public events.
Events to mourn fallen soldiers have been canceled in several regions of the country, mostly in Western Russia along the border of Ukraine.
The Washington Post · by Mary Ilyushina · May 3, 2023
17. America’s infatuation with war turns challenges into conflicts
America’s infatuation with war turns challenges into conflicts
BY HARLAN ULLMAN, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR - 05/02/23 1:00 PM ET
The Hill · May 2, 2023
America and Americans are infatuated with war as a concept and a word. Otherwise, the word would not be in such universal use.
While the last time America formally declared war was the day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, no other state — not the Soviet Union, Russia or China — has gone to “war” as many times since then as has America. Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq (twice) were based on resolutions or authorizations to use force.
The so-called “war on terror” is still ongoing. War drums are beating over Taiwan and a possible Chinese invasion. U.S. admirals and generals, while not predicting a war with China, are arguing to prepare for one. Both Houses of Congress seem in agreement with this assessment. And the House Select Committee on The Strategic Competition with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) played a war game on the Taiwan scenario. When did that last happen?
The U.S. has not been sparing in lesser uses of force, from the Cuban Missile Crisis to the failed raid to free U.S. hostages in Iran, invading Grenada, capturing Panama’s president Manuel Noriega, deposing Muammar Gaddafi and bringing Osama bin Laden to justice. Perhaps that is one reason why video war games such as “Call of Duty” are multi-billion dollar businesses.
A succession of presidents relied on wartime analogies in putting that word to good use at home. Lyndon Johnson waged a “War on Poverty.” How many wars on drugs, crime, terror, diseases, illegal immigration and even Jimmy Carter’s “moral equivalent of war”— energy consumption — have been launched? How many have been won? And how much have these wars cost?
Donald Trump did not use the word “war.” But he did threaten North Korea and its leader, Kim Jong Un, with “fire and fury” before he “fell in love” with the dictator. President Joe Biden has not been immune to this. He argues that the conflict (i.e. a surrogate for war) of our time is between democracy and autocracy.
It is also interesting to ask why other countries have not declared war either abroad or domestically. In the Brexit debate, Brexiters did not call for a war on the European Union. One wonders if the U.S. were in that position whether it might have.
What makes America different, and will this trend continue?
The word “war” means crisis and urgency. And in a crisis, it is easier to mobilize political support. War also allows using simple sentences or phrases that can be accepted as aphorisms or truths and thus not challenged. Who would oppose a war on drugs, crime, terror or fill-in-the-blank? And therein lies a double danger applicable to domestic and foreign wars. The first is that simplicity often leads to rushed and simplistic actions that are not well thought out.
The second virtually guarantees failure: the lack of knowledge and understanding of the war that is being fought. The war on poverty is one example. In the nearly six decades since it was passed in 1965, about $22 trillion dollars have been spent by the U.S. government. Yet the poverty rate has been about the same.
The war on drugs has been a bargain. Over the last 50 years, about $1 trillion dollars have been spent. Drug use is increasing beyond that which has become legal. And since 2000, drug overdose deaths have increased five times to over 106,000 last year.
Biden’s health and the threat of an AI presidential campaign The Fed wants more power after the banking collapse. We need real reform — and less Fed.
As this column has pointed out, a flawed race to judgment got us wrongly engaged in too many wars and uses of force, with Vietnam, the second Iraq War and Afghanistan being the saddest examples. But even in Grenada in 1983, the Reagan administration invaded on the specious reason to protect U.S. students at the St. Georges Medical School who the operational commander Vice Admiral Joseph Metcalf said were in no danger. The real reason was to halt Cubans from building a runway that was presumably intended to be used by the Soviet Union. However, the expansion was being made by a British firm with British funding to increase tourism. Being good capitalists, Plessey PLC sought the lowest bidder — Cuba.
The lesson is clear. Before crying wolf, be certain a wolf is present. Before declaring war, at home or abroad, make sure there is a real crisis. Otherwise, we know how this movie will end.
Harlan Ullman, Ph.D., is a senior advisor at Washington D.C.’s Atlantic Council and the prime author of the “shock and awe” doctrine. His 12th book is “The Fifth Horseman and the New MAD: How Massive Attacks of Disruption Became the Looming Existential Danger to a Divided Nation and the World at Large.” He can be reached on Twitter @harlankullman.
The Hill · · May 2, 2023
18. Biden’s half-hearted nuclear deterrence plan
Excerpts:
In other words, first it was too soon to take decisive action, and now it is too late. One might almost conclude that for all the posturing over the years that North Korean (or Iranian) nuclear weapons were “unacceptable,” that’s not really what many U.S. politicians and policymakers actually believed. They were prepared to accept American failure, but they knew it was impolitic to say it out loud in public. We are all now at greater risk because of this hypocrisy.
In the Indo-Pacific and the Middle East, where the menace of nuclear proliferation is all too real, others have refused to give up. In his first year in office, for example, Yoon has made improving ROK-Japan relations, badly damaged by his predecessor, a top priority. Better Tokyo-Seoul cooperation is critical to enhanced three-way efforts with Washington, and Yoon’s diplomacy with Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida is paying dividends. Kishida will visit South Korea, the first such visit in five years, just before the Hiroshima G-7 meeting, to which Yoon is invited.
It’s obviously easier for Kishida to sell U.S. deployment of tactical nuclear weapons in the South than an independent ROK nuclear force, which would instantly raise in Tokyo the complex question of a comparable Japanese capability.
Biden’s half-hearted efforts to enhance U.S. national security should be a significant political vulnerability in the 2024 presidential campaign. It remains to be seen whether Republicans have the wit to make it an issue.
Biden’s half-hearted nuclear deterrence plan
BY JOHN BOLTON, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR - 05/02/23 10:30 AM ET
The Hill · · May 2, 2023
Last week’s summit between President Biden and President Yoon Suk-yeol of the Republic of Korea (“ROK”) had a full agenda, but there is little doubt that Yoon’s top priority was the omnipresent, growing North Korean nuclear threat.
Unfortunately, the celebration of the ROK-U.S. alliance’s 70th anniversary produced a joint statement, the Washington Declaration, that fell far short of what was necessary.
The Declaration’s modest measures will not slow Pyongyang’s efforts to reunite the Peninsula under its control, so tensions in Northeast Asia will almost certainly continue rising.
Reflecting a growing fear that America’s nuclear “extended deterrence” is no longer reliable, either against the North or, importantly, China, South Korean public opinion has increasingly supported an independent nuclear program.
Biden’s response to Beijing’s and Pyongyang’s growing nuclear and ballistic-missile threats, embodied in the Declaration, will do little to alleviate these ROK concerns.
The most palpable new U.S. commitment to opposing North Korean belligerence is that our nuclear ballistic-missile submarines will, for the first time in 40 years, resume docking, occasionally, in South Korea. Anonymous U.S. officials also predicted there would be a “regular cadence” of visits by aircraft carriers, bombers and more.
Did the White House really believe Pyongyang’s leadership thought America’s nuclear arsenal was imaginary? Perhaps. It’s a strange leadership, with strange ideas, so parading the cold steel from time to time might have an effect, if not on China’s Xi Jinping, perhaps on North Korea’s Kim Jung Un.
Far more likely, however, is that neither Kim nor Xi doubt Washington has massive nuclear assets. Instead, ironically but tellingly, they, like South Korea’s citizens, think very little of today’s U.S. leadership, Republican or Democratic.
China and both Koreas perceive a lack of American resolve and willpower to act decisively when ROK and U.S. national interests are threatened. If so, the Washington Declaration’s rhetoric about the U.S. commitment to extended deterrence and strengthening bilateral military ties will be seen as words, and words alone. We are kidding ourselves to believe that having “boomers” pitch up in South Korean waters sporadically will have any deterrent effect.
By contrast, redeploying U.S. tactical nuclear weapons in South Korea, effectively indefinitely, is several orders of magnitude more serious. First, these weapons would remain under sole American control, and immediately available to assist in defending deployed U.S. forces, and their Republic of Korea cohorts. “We go together” (or “katchi kapshida” in Korean) becomes much more than the combined forces’ long-standing slogan when backed by battlefield nuclear capabilities. That is far more palpable than submarine port calls.
Second, tactical nuclear deployments would give heft to the Washington Declaration’s creation of the Nuclear Coordination Group (“NCG”), charged with strengthening extended deterrence, discussing nuclear planning and managing North Korea’s proliferation threat. The new NCG would be far more than just another bureaucratic prop if it had real-world questions like optimizing the deterrent and defensive value of tangible nuclear assets. Lacking concrete responsibilities, how will the new NCG differ from the existing Extended Deterrence Strategy and Consultation Group, and others, which the Declaration says will be “strengthened”?
Third, while the issue of an independent ROK nuclear capability is politically and militarily separate from returning American tactical nuclear weapons to the Peninsula, renewed deployment would nonetheless buy valuable time for Seoul and Washington to evaluate fully the implications of South Korea becoming a nuclear-weapons state. The presence of American nuclear assets on the Peninsula neither precludes nor renders inevitable a separate ROK program, which has the further advantage of keeping Beijing and Pyongyang guessing.
Moreover, the implicit message weakening the Washington Declaration is that America’s antiproliferation efforts to stop Pyongyang from becoming a nuclear power have failed. Consider the proliferation aspect of the NCG’s mandate: it is to “manage” the North Korean threat. Not “defeat” that threat, not “eliminate” or “end” that threat, but merely “manage” it.
This is the language of bureaucrats, not statesmen, and it sounds suspiciously like giving up on working to prevent North Korea from becoming able to deliver nuclear payloads.
It is therefore appropriate to emphasize that those who opposed taking decisive steps against nuclear proliferators like North Korea and Iran long argued that we had ample time for negotiations. Accordingly, they said, efforts at regime change or pre-emptive military action were over-wrought, premature and unnecessary. Now that Pyongyang has detonated six nuclear devices, and Iran continues to progress toward its first, these same people say the rogue states are already nuclear powers, and we must hereafter rely on arms control and deterrence.
In other words, first it was too soon to take decisive action, and now it is too late. One might almost conclude that for all the posturing over the years that North Korean (or Iranian) nuclear weapons were “unacceptable,” that’s not really what many U.S. politicians and policymakers actually believed. They were prepared to accept American failure, but they knew it was impolitic to say it out loud in public. We are all now at greater risk because of this hypocrisy.
In the Indo-Pacific and the Middle East, where the menace of nuclear proliferation is all too real, others have refused to give up. In his first year in office, for example, Yoon has made improving ROK-Japan relations, badly damaged by his predecessor, a top priority. Better Tokyo-Seoul cooperation is critical to enhanced three-way efforts with Washington, and Yoon’s diplomacy with Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida is paying dividends. Kishida will visit South Korea, the first such visit in five years, just before the Hiroshima G-7 meeting, to which Yoon is invited.
It’s obviously easier for Kishida to sell U.S. deployment of tactical nuclear weapons in the South than an independent ROK nuclear force, which would instantly raise in Tokyo the complex question of a comparable Japanese capability.
Biden’s half-hearted efforts to enhance U.S. national security should be a significant political vulnerability in the 2024 presidential campaign. It remains to be seen whether Republicans have the wit to make it an issue.
John Bolton was national security adviser to President Trump from 2018 to 2019, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations from 2005 to 2006 and held senior State Department posts in 2001-2005 and 1985-1989. His most recent book is “The Room Where It Happened” (2020). He is the founder of John Bolton Super PAC, a political action committee supporting candidates who believe in a strong U.S. foreign policy.
The Hill · b May 2, 2023
19. The US Air Force has retreated from Taiwan without a shot fired
The US Air Force has retreated from Taiwan without a shot fired
msn.com · by David Axe 1 hr ago
© Jack Guez/AFP F-15 Eagle fighter aircraft - Jack Guez/AFP
The US Air Force is the biggest and most powerful air force in the world: but maybe not for long. The service is struggling through twin crises – one of money, another of belief in itself – that could narrow its aerial advantage.
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At best, the USAF might emerge a smaller but still world-leading force. At worst, it might cede its lead to its most dangerous rival, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF). It has already made something that looks awfully like a retreat from the Western Pacific, withdrawing squadrons in the face of the growing Chinese menace.
The USAF isn’t the only American armed service that’s shrinking while its Chinese adversary is growing. After wasting billions of dollars on ships that don’t work, the US Navy is contracting even as Xi Jinping’s fleet is expanding.
The Air Force’s problem is similar. A quarter-century ago, the USAF committed to spending much of its $250 billion annual budget on the Lockheed Martin-made F-35 Lightning II stealth fighter – a plane which has been beset by cost overruns and reliability problems.
The $400-billion project has eaten the Air Force. The idea, when the F-35 was new, was for the USAF to have nearly 1,800 of the stealthy fighters by this point. Instead, it has fewer than 500.
Every dollar the USAF feeds the F-35 program is a dollar it can’t spend on planes that are affordable and reliable. For two decades, since the F-35 first flew, the Air Force has bought too few new planes. That forced the service to fly its older planes for longer than their designers intended. Those old jets are finally wearing out, and there aren’t enough new ones to fully replace them.
The math has been brutal for the world’s biggest air force, which today operates around 5,200 aircraft of all types. That’s 1,300 more aircraft than the Russian air force has, and 3,200 more than the PLAAF has. The Russian air force is tied up, and losing planes fast, in Russia’s war on Ukraine. But the Chinese air force has all its strength available for a possible attack on Taiwan, and is adding hundreds of new planes every year.
Meanwhile, the USAF is retiring many aircraft and pulling others out of the Western Pacific, increasingly letting the local airpower balance tip towards China. The aircraft the USAF plans to cut completely in just the next few years include the A-10 Thunderbolt II attack jet (aka the “Warthog”) and the F-15C/D Eagle air-superiority fighter, generally seen as the best fighter in the world in the pre-Stealth era. Some 260 Warthogs and 220 Eagles will go to the boneyard. The USAF also plans to lose roughly 100 of its 220 powerful F-15E Strike Eagle fighter-bombers, and even 30 of its 180 F-22 Raptor stealth superfighters, currently the last word in fighter technology.
In all, more than 600 fighters could get the axe before 2030. That might not be a problem if the USAF were buying enough new jets to replace them. But projected budgets cover just 300 or so new F-35s and 100 upgraded Boeing-made F-15EX Eagle IIs. The F-22’s replacement, the secretive “Next Generation Air Dominance” jet, won’t join the force until the 2030s.
The USAF fighter fleet could shrink from around 1,900 planes to 1,700 planes in the next few years – a contraction of American air power on a scale that hasn’t occurred in decades. The Chinese air force’s steady growth underscores the risk in this reduction. While the USAF sheds its oldest F-22 Raptors, the PLAAF is acquiring its own J-20 stealth fighter. The J-20 is said to be a true fifth-generation plane the equal of America’s F-35 or even the Raptor. China is building a dozen or more J-20s every year. Some 200 are thought to have been built so far, but these are of differing batches with varying levels of technology and the number actually in front-line service is probably considerably smaller.
The retirement of old jets isn’t the only factor in the USAF’s retreat from the Western Pacific. When the service announced, last year, that it would shutter both F-15C/D squadrons at Kadena airbase in Japan – currently the main American fighter hub for a war over Taiwan – the F-15s’ 40 years of constant flying and worsening airframe fatigue weren’t the only factors.
Kadena lies just 350 miles northeast of Taiwan, and roughly the same distance from the Chinese coast. The sprawling base is within range of hundreds of Chinese non-nuclear ballistic missiles. A study by the California think-tank RAND calculated that just 34 of those missiles could render Kadena unusable. A January war game organized by the Washington DC-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) resulted in the USAF losing 200 fighters in the missile barrage preceding a Chinese invasion of Taiwan.
American long-range bombers – including the new B-21 Raider, scheduled for its first flight later this year – could be critical to a successful defense of Taiwan, CSIS found, but short-range fighters were all but irrelevant in all of the scenarios the think-tank gamed out. They never even got a chance to take off as Chinese missiles rained down.
The Air Force’s solution to this dilemma is to remove the permanently-based fighter squadrons from bases near China. Visiting squadrons might stop over at Kadena only briefly before spreading out their jets to smaller outlying airfields, where USAF planners assume they’d be safer from Chinese barrages.
What’s perhaps most galling about this decision is that the Chinese air force weighed the same problem – and came up with a totally different solution. Chinese air bases are vulnerable to American and Taiwanese missiles, just as American airbases are vulnerable to Chinese missiles. But instead of pulling out the hundreds of fighters it has positioned for a war over Taiwan, the PLAAF dug in.
In recent years, the Chinese have built hundreds of reinforced, bunker-like hangars at the airfields closest to Taiwan. These hardened aircraft shelters help protect aircraft from missile attacks. By contrast, the USAF has built just 15 hardened shelters at Kadena.
During a possible war in the Western Pacific, the Chinese air force clearly aims to stand and fight. By contrast, the USAF decided to retreat before the first shot was even fired.
In assuming that fighters no longer matter in a war with China, the Air Force is doubling down on its own failure to build enough new fighters to maintain its overall strength. The organization that should be the biggest advocate for US air power instead has been making the case against air power.
There are practical steps the USAF could take to preserve its air-power advantage, especially against China. The quickest and cheapest is to return permanently-based fighters to Kadena – and spend a few billion dollars building a protective shelter for each plane it plans to stage from the base.
Over the medium term, the solutions get pricier. The USAF should hang on to every viable fighter it has for as long as it can. Maybe those 40-year-old F-15C/Ds are ready to retire. But not everyone agrees that the oldest F-22s should face the axe. And the plan to cull half the workhorse F-15E Strike Eagle fleet has been met with amazement.
Sure, these older planes cost more to upgrade and maintain than factory-fresh jets do. But newly-made jets cost too much up front for the Air Force to buy them in the numbers it needs.
How is grounding hundreds of fighters in order to afford a few pricey new ones justifiable if it means the United States surrendering the sky to China?
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msn.com · by David Axe 1 hr ago
20. Time to resurrect the Global Engagement Caucus in the House
Conclusion:
On the Hill, the demand for information is there, but resources, distractions, and obfuscations limit access while also inhibiting the ability to place what information is gleaned within the necessary contexts to act. It is time for another caucus to jump-start conversations on the Hill. It is also time for the Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy to provide relevant, timely, and actionable advice to Congress.
Time to resurrect the Global Engagement Caucus in the House
Remembering the Global Engagement Caucus proposal that became a real thing
MATT ARMSTRONG
MAY 3, 2023
mountainrunner.substack.com · by Matt Armstrong
Recent conversations reminded me of the Global Engagement Caucus proposal that became a real thing in Congress. Back in 2008, I was able to get funding for an all-day event in January 2009 to discuss US global engagement that included speakers from the former US Information Agency, the State Department, the Defense Department, the US Agency for International Development, think tanks, the press, and Congress. The event came about because it was clear there was an absence of informed discourse around the activities that broadly fell under the umbrellas of public diplomacy, strategic communication, and the soon-to-be-emerging term global engagement. In late summer 2009, I began developing the Global Engagement Caucus proposal with others to try to get Congress more informed, which would hopefully result in more engagement on the underlying and not just obvious issues. Here is how the original proposal to House Members and staff opened:
The Global Engagement Caucus will serve as a critical forum for creating informed and multifaceted understanding of the issues related to strategic communication and public diplomacy in the modern environment. The objectives include:
• Increasing awareness and understanding of the requirements and purpose of strategic communication and public diplomacy.
• Bringing together different but related constituencies that have a stake in successful strategic communication and public diplomacy, including foreign affairs, development, armed services, health, appropriations, and others.
• Supporting America’s governmental, non-governmental, and private actors involved in strategic communication and public diplomacy through better understanding, support, and oversight.
The caucus will facilitate meetings with guest speakers, presentations, Q&A’s, etc., as well as provide email distribution of important and related information. Even with busy schedules and overflowing inboxes, this is a critical issue that requires significant awareness and collaboration to ensure that the mission and purpose is understood and to ensure taxpayer dollars are prudently allocated.
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Several themes were tied together in the conclusion of that one-pager:
Simply put, strategic communication and public diplomacy are the cheapest, most cost-effective, and most enduring methods of influencing people while at the same time denying sanctuary, both ideological and physical, to our adversaries. The realm of engagement is broader than undermining terrorism or holding our enemies accountable for their actions. It extends into all aspects of American life that intersects with foreign audiences such as tourism and trade as well as facilitating greater exposure to global affairs in order to build more meaningful connections for the American public.
“Global Engagement,” however, wasn’t a favored term. Based on early feedback, the project was renamed the Strategic Communication Caucus. In a couple of months, sponsors were found, and the caucus was launched as the Caucus on Strategic Communications and Public Diplomacy.
The caucus held a few meetings, though I only participated in the first meeting (at the request of staff as I had no intention of doing so).
This first meeting hit all the reasons we wanted the caucus: staff came from the Armed Services Committee, the defense appropriations subcommittee, the Foreign Affairs Committee, the foreign affairs appropriations subcommittee, the Congressional Research Service, from the offices of Members interested in the topic but not on these committees, etc. Having this varied bunch in the same packed room – some folks were standing – meant they heard discussions and questions and answers normally outside their purview and learned how the “other side” did things. On the latter point, the defense appropriators grilled Rosa Brooks, which was expected, and then turned to Walter Douglas and asked, to paraphrase, “How do you do budget and plan for your side of it?” The “inter-cultural” (or call it cross-denominational) exposure was a met objective.
I understood the caucus had a few more meetings, but not many. This was not because the demand diminished, but because the necessary quality of care and maintenance of the caucus was not supported. As an outsider, I was able to help get it launched, but once launched I had to be on the outside, which makes perfect sense.
When I was the executive director of the US Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy, I sought to have the commission take its rightful place – and required and expected, if one looks back at the original purpose and the first several decades of the commission – as the facilitator of such conversations the caucus intended to provide. From a one-pager I distributed in August 2011:
On the Hill, the demand for information is there, but resources, distractions, and obfuscations limit access while also inhibiting the ability to place what information is gleaned within the necessary contexts to act. It is time for another caucus to jump-start conversations on the Hill. It is also time for the Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy to provide relevant, timely, and actionable advice to Congress.
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mountainrunner.substack.com · by Matt Armstrong
21. Hamas, Islamic Jihad Fire Rockets at Israel
Hamas, Islamic Jihad Fire Rockets at Israel
fdd.org · by Danielle Kleinman · May 2, 2023
Latest Developments
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said on the morning of May 2 that three rockets “were launched from Gaza toward Israeli territory” following the death of Islamic Jihad leader Khader Adnan after an 86-day hunger strike in an Israeli prison. Later in the day, Palestinian militants in Gaza fired more than 22 rockets toward southern Israel, causing civilian injuries and material damage. The terrorist groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad said they were responsible for the barrage.
The State Department designated Islamic Jihad as a Foreign Terrorist Organization in 1997. The Islamic Republic of Iran is Islamic Jihad’s main patron and funder.
Expert Analysis
“Khader Adnan — a member of a U.S.-designated terrorist organization — routinely incited violence and praised terrorists who murdered innocent civilians. Palestinian terrorist groups will likely exploit his death as a rallying cry to foment violence against Israelis.” — Joe Truzman, Research Analyst at FDD’s Long War Journal
Adnan Was a Key Terrorist Enabler
Khader Adnan, 44, was a veteran Islamic Jihad operative and the main spokesperson of the organization. Adnan began his political life as a member of Islamic Jihad when he studied at the Birzeit University and dedicated many years to outreach for the group. Since then, Israel has arrested Adnan 13 times for his malign activities.
Earlier this year, Israel indicted Adnan for membership in a terrorist organization and for inciting terrorism against the Jewish state. Israeli authorities wrote in the indictment that Adnan is a “known and influential senior [Islamic Jihad] operative … who carried out various organizational activities, including visiting and encouraging the families of Islamic Jihad prisoners, consoling the families of deceased Islamic Jihad operatives … and giving various speeches on behalf of the Islamic Jihad.”
Adnan once called on fellow militants to be “the next person to fire bullets, the next to have his body parts blown all over,” a reference to suicide bombing. In a condolence speech for a terrorist involved in the killing of IDF soldier Noam Raz in 2022, Adnan said, “from this home we will bless all the homes of the martyrs and prisoners. We are united in the uprising against the occupation. We remain on the path of jihad and uprising while carrying the flag, the flag of resistance.”
Related Analysis
“Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) is an Iran-Supported Terror Organization,” FDD Flash Brief
fdd.org · by Danielle Kleinman · May 2, 2023
De Oppresso Liber,
David Maxwell
Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy
Senior Fellow, Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation
Editor, Small Wars Journal
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
Phone: 202-573-8647
email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com
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