Quotes of the Day:
"What do I sacrifice?
- Calm Kindness, Kinship, Love.
- I've given up all chance of inner peace.
- I've made my mind a sunless place.
- I share my dreams with ghosts.
- I wake up every day to an equation I wrote 15 years ago from which there is only one conclusion, I'm damned for what I do.
- My anger, my ego, my unwillingness to yield, my eagerness to fight, they've set me on a path from which there is no escape.
- I yearned to be a savior against injustice without contemplating the cost and by the time I looked down there was no longer any ground beneath my feet.
- What, What is my sacrifice?
- I'm condemned to use the tools of my enemy to defeat them.
- I burn my decency for someone else's future.
- I burn my life to make a sunrise that I know I'll never see.
- And the ego that started this fight will never have a mirror or an audience or the light of gratitude.
- So what do I sacrifice? EVERYTHING!"
– Luthen Rael, Resistance Leader in the series "Andor: One Way Out"
(as an aside - understand the above to understand the resistance fighter, insurgent, or revolutionary you may be faced with - it may be low intensity conflict for you but it is existential - life or death - for him or her)
“Patience is not sitting and waiting, it is for seeing. It is looking at the thorn and seeing the rose, looking at the night and seeing the day. Lovers are patient and know that the moon needs time to become full.”
– Rumi.
“The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.”
– Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms
1. How America Inadvertently Created an ‘Axis of Evasion’ Led by China
2. Blinken Signals U.S. May Allow Ukraine to Strike Inside Russia With American Weapons
3. U.S. concerned about Ukraine strikes on Russian nuclear radar stations
4. Israel, Hamas and the Law of War
5. China Is Testing the U.S.-Philippines Alliance
6. Hamas is preparing long-term insurgency in Gaza - analysis
7. The Great AI Challenge: We Test Five Top Bots on Useful, Everyday Skills
8. A timeline of the US-built Gaza pier and the challenges it’s faced
9. Pentagon Opens Ammunition Factory to Keep Arms Flowing to Ukraine
10. Survivors say Russia is waging a war of sexual violence in occupied areas of Ukraine. Men are often the victims
11. Powerful GOP senator eyes ships, jets, nukes in defense spending surge
12. Civil Affairs Assessment and Selection: Everything you need to know
13. Israel’s Claim of Control Over Border Zone Risks Raising Tensions With Egypt
14. What the I.C.J. Ruling Actually Means for Israel’s Offensive in Rafah
15. Turn to American Allies for Shipbuilding Help
16. Vets Want What Trump Refuses to Promise: a Nonviolent Election
17. Palantir lands $480M Army contract for Maven artificial intelligence tech
18. Why Japan and South Korea are rediscovering China
19. Israel, Iran, and the Failure of Irregular (and Conventional) Warfare in Gaza
20. What Does America Want From China?
21. They live on the frontlines. Why won’t they leave? (Ukraine)
22. Is there a Human in the Machine? AI and Future Warfare
23. StratBot vs. Gray: An AI Analysis of the Theory of Grand Strategy
24. Opinion | How an outrageous smear of U.S. troops wound up in history books
1. How America Inadvertently Created an ‘Axis of Evasion’ Led by China
Please go to the link to view the charts and graphics and proper formatting
How America Inadvertently Created an ‘Axis of Evasion’ Led by China
Western sanctions and export controls were meant to subdue foes of the U.S. but instead have led to a shadow economy
https://www.wsj.com/world/how-america-inadvertently-created-an-axis-of-evasion-led-by-china-0a9bc477?mod=hp_lead_pos7
By Ian TalleyFollow
and Rosie EttenheimFollow
Updated May 30, 2024 12:34 am ET
Western sanctions and export controls were meant to subdue America’s enemies, leveraging the power of the dollar to strong-arm governments into submission without the bloodshed of military force. They have inadvertently birthed a global shadow economy tying together democracy’s chief foes, with Washington’s primary adversary, China, at the center.
Unprecedented finance and trade restrictions on Russia, Iran, Venezuela, North Korea, China and other authoritarian regimes have squeezed those economies by curbing access to Western goods and markets. But Beijing has increasingly foiled those U.S.-led efforts by bolstering trade ties, according to Western officials and customs data. The bloc of sanctioned nations collectively now have the economy of scale to shield them from Washington’s financial warfare, trading everything from drones and missiles to gold and oil.
“China is the strategic competitor willing and able to reshape the current global order,” said Dana Stroul, a former senior U.S. defense official and now a senior fellow at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
Liu Pengyu, a spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, defended Beijing’s policies, saying that the country wasn’t providing lethal weapons to anyone involved in the Ukraine conflict.
“China carries out normal economic and trade exchanges with relevant countries on the basis of equality and mutual benefit,” he said. “The relevant trades under international law are legal and legitimate, thus should be respected and protected.”
The governments of Russia, Iran, Venezuela and North Korea, contacted through their diplomatic offices in the U.S., didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Total imports and exports to China by Western-sanctioned countries in U.S. dollars, billions
RUSSIA
22.0
IRAN
3.8
19.6
3.5
U.S. President Donald Trump announces plan to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal in 2018.
Led by the U.S., Western allies in early 2022 levy an unprecedented sanctions regime against Russia in response to Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
1.1
$5.5
Jan. 2015
March ’24
Jan. ‘15
March ’24
VENEZUELA
NORTH KOREA
1.4
0.6
U.S. declares Venezuela a national security threat in 2015 and launches a new sanctions program in 2017.
United Nations Security Council imposes major new sanctions on North Korea after Pyongyang continues nuclear testing.
0.4
0.6
0.2
Jan. ’15
March ’24
Jan. ’15
March ’24
Source: China’s General Administration of Customs
The bloc’s trade needs are aligned. On one side of the equation, China gets oil from three OPEC powerhouses—Russia, Iran, and Venezuela—at heavily discounted prices. That is a windfall for the world’s biggest oil importer, which bought more than 11 million barrels of oil a day last year to keep its economy running. Those countries, in turn, then have revenue they can use to buy sanctioned goods from China.
“Oil revenue from China is propping up the Iranian and Russian economies and is undermining Western sanctions,” said Kimberly Donovan of the Atlantic Council, a Washington-based think tank. Donovan, who calls this group the “axis of evasion,” said the countries’ use of Chinese currency and payment systems for that trade restricts Western authorities’ access to financial data and weakens their ability to enforce sanctions.
China’s oil imports, by barrel
2021
July
’22
July
’23
July
’24
Average
barrels
a day
1.0 million
Iran
1.8
0.2
Venezuela
0.2
1.6
Russia
2.6
Sources: China’s General Administration of Customs; United Against Nuclear Iran and Vortexa
Chinese and Russian customs data show China has supplanted Russia’s loss of Western access to the highest priority dual-use goods, products that have both civilian and military uses.
A Chinese state-owned defense company, Poly Technologies, for example, sent nearly two dozen shipments between September and December last year to a U.S.-sanctioned, state-owned Russian firm that manufactures military and civilian helicopters—Ulan-Ude Aviation Plant, according to a Journal review of Russian customs data.
Poly Technologies, which is also sanctioned by the U.S., is also responsible for a 1,200 kilo shipment of rifles on Feb. 16 last year to Izhevsky Arsenal, which describes itself as a government contractor and one of Russia’s biggest wholesalers of weapons.
Customs records also show Chinese firms were responsible for all 60 shipments last year to a Russian company that U.S. officials say is part of the procurement channel for Iran’s production of military drones in Russia for Moscow’s forces. The companies didn’t respond to requests for comment.
China’s high-priority exports to Russia, by tier
$50 million
Tier 1
Advanced electronic integrated circuits, items the U.S. says are of the highest concern due to their critical role in the production of advanced Russian precision-guided weapons systems, Russia’s lack of domestic production and limited global manufacturers.
25
0
'22
2021
'23
'24
Tier 2
Radar, radio navigational equipment and other electronics that Russia produces domestically, but prefers to source from Western countries.
200
150
100
50
0
'22
2021
'23
'24
Tier 3
Less advanced electronics and mechanical components used in Russian weapon systems, including bearings antennas, digital cameras and telescopic sights.
300
200
100
0
'22
2021
'23
'24
Tier 4
Precision, computer-controlled manufacturing equipment for electronics and machines used to produce weapons, including oscilloscopes, voltage meters and spectrum analyzers.
150
100
50
0
'22
2021
'23
'24
Source: China’s General Administration of Customs
Russia’s war against Ukraine has also provided Tehran with an economic and strategic opportunity. Selling Moscow fleets of military drones and establishing a production facility in Russia provides Iran with income, bolsters international perceptions of Tehran’s military power, and provides valuable wartime data, say former U.S. security officials.
Iran is also supplying Venezuela with weapons, technical assistance for its energy infrastructure, and other sanctioned goods, according to U.S. officials and customs data. In exchange, Caracas has provided Iran with gold from its vast Orinoco deposits, according to Western officials, a commodity difficult to track around the world and whose fungibility allows for sanctioned nations to sidestep the Western banking system.
China’s drone exports to Russia
2023
2024
2022
March
May
July
Sept.
Nov.
March
May
July
Sept.
Nov.
March
Drones (units)
5, 125
45
0
8,119
Parts for drones (kg)
3,676
2,272
2022
2023
2024
Source: China’s General Administration of Customs
China’s ability—and willingness—to keep Russia’s war machine running and help Moscow rebuild its military industrial capacity fostered unprecedented trade and finance, say U.S. officials.
“It revealed a degree of trust that could potentially open the door to wider integration of their defense industrial base,” said a senior intelligence official with knowledge of the two countries’ trade relationship.
Write to Rosie Ettenheim at rosie.ettenheim@wsj.com and Ian Talley at Ian.Talley@wsj.com
Copyright ©2024 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
Appeared in the May 30, 2024, print edition as 'China Bankrolls ‘Axis of Evasion’ of Sanctions'.
2. Blinken Signals U.S. May Allow Ukraine to Strike Inside Russia With American Weapons
Are we rescinding the foreign policy and national security "prime directive" of preventing escalation at all costs?
Blinken Signals U.S. May Allow Ukraine to Strike Inside Russia With American Weapons
Secretary of state stopped short of endorsing change, but comments follow statements from European officials urging restrictions be lifted
https://www.wsj.com/world/blinken-signals-u-s-may-allow-ukraine-to-strike-inside-russia-with-u-s-weapons-61fedb10?mod=latest_headlines
By Alan Cullison
Follow
and Michael R. Gordon
Follow
Updated May 29, 2024 6:05 pm ET
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken earlier this month. PHOTO: ANDREW HARNIK/GETTY IMAGES
CHISINAU, Moldova—U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken signaled on Wednesday that the U.S. is weighing the idea of allowing Kyiv to strike Russian territory with American-provided weapons in light of the evolving battlefield situation in Ukraine.
It was the first time that a top Biden administration official has publicly indicated that the U.S. is considering the policy shift. Previously, the U.S. has said it wouldn’t allow Ukraine to attack targets on Russian territory with ATACMS missiles or other U.S. weapons.
Blinken’s remarks follow statements from a string of European officials who said they favor allowing Ukraine to use Western-supplied weapons against targets on Russian territory that Moscow has been using as a staging ground for its invasion.
Jens Stoltenberg, secretary general of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, said earlier this week that the “time has come to consider whether it will be right to lift some of the restrictions” on Ukraine.
“If they cannot attack military targets on Russian territory, then it ties one hand of the Ukrainians on their back and makes it very hard for them to conduct defense,” Stoltenberg said at the NATO Parliamentary Assembly in Sofia, Bulgaria.
Armed conflict outside Kupiansk, Ukraine, last month. PHOTO: THOMAS PETER/REUTERS
Blinken parsed his words at a press conference here after a meeting with Moldova’s president. He repeated earlier assertions that the U.S. has neither encouraged nor enabled strikes on Russian territory. But then he said that Ukraine “has to make its own decisions about the best way to effectively defend itself. We’re going to make sure that it has the equipment it needs to do that.”
“Another hallmark of our support for Ukraine over these, now, more than two years has been to adapt as conditions have changed and the battlefield has changed, as what Russia does has changed in terms of how it’s pursuing its aggression and escalation,” he added. “We’ve adapted and adjusted, too, and I’m confident we’ll continue to do that.”
Biden administration officials acknowledged that a policy switch is under consideration but said that a White House decision hasn’t yet been made.
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Early in its invasion of Ukraine, Moscow lagged behind Kyiv in the use of low-cost explosive drones. WSJ explains how Russia is now expanding its drone arsenal, posing a major threat for Ukraine. Photo composite: Planet Labs PBC; VGTRK
“We do not encourage nor do we enable attacks using U.S. weapons on Russian soil,” National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said following Blinken’s comments. “Our support to Ukraine has evolved appropriately as the battlefield conditions have evolved, and that’s not going to change, but right now, there’s also no change to our policy.”
As Russia has been making territorial gains in northeast Ukraine, Kyiv has repeatedly asked for permission to strike targets with U.S. weapons on Russian territory. Ukraine already used its own drones to carry out cross-border attacks, but they are less effective than Western systems.
The U.S. has provided the ATACMS surface-to-surface missile and other weapons systems, while stipulating that they not be used to strike targets on Russian territory. That constraint, which Ukraine agreed to as a condition of receiving the weapons, was intended to reduce the risk that the conflict could escalate into a military confrontation between the U.S. and Russia.
Russia’s foreign ministry said in September 2022 that the U.S. would “cross a red line” and would be considered a “direct party to the conflict” in the Kremlin’s eyes if it supplied longer-range missiles to Kyiv.
French President Emmanuel Macron on Tuesday said Ukraine should be allowed to strike missile sites in Russia. PHOTO: KRISZTIAN BOCSI/BLOOMBERG NEWS
On Tuesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin warned that the use of Western-supplied weapons to strike Russian territory could risk escalation and, he hinted, retaliation.
Earlier this month, the U.K. suggested Ukraine had the right to use British-supplied weapons against targets in Russia. “Just as Russia is striking inside Ukraine, you can quite understand why Ukraine feels the need to make sure it’s defending itself,” Foreign Secretary David Cameron said.
On Tuesday, French President Emmanuel Macron said that Ukraine should be allowed to strike missile sites in Russia that are being used to attack Ukraine.
“If we tell [the Ukrainians] you do not have the right to reach the point from which the missiles are fired, we are in fact telling them that we are delivering weapons to you, but you cannot defend yourself,” Macron said during a visit to Germany.
The U.S. has been under pressure to clarify its position as Blinken heads to Prague for a meeting of NATO foreign ministers that begins Thursday.
The Army Tactical Missile System, also known as ATACMS. PHOTO: SGT. 1ST CLASS ANDREW DICKSON/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Blinken stopped briefly in Chisinau on Tuesday on his way to Prague to offer a show of support to the pro-Western president of Moldova who has lately been embattled by Russian disinformation campaigns.
The president, Maia Sandu, is seeking re-election in October on a promise to bring Moldova closer to Europe. She has accused Moscow of funding street protests and pro-Russian opposition. She spoke to reporters jointly with Blinken, stressing the importance of Western aid to Ukraine. “We believe that Ukraine should be offered all the support it needs, not just to resist but also to win this war,” she said.
The longer-range version of the ATACMS missiles that the U.S. has provided can travel more than 180 miles and were used for the first time last month against an airfield in northern Crimea, which the U.S. doesn’t recognize as part of Russia. ATACMS, which stands for the Army Tactical Missile System, is a ground-based surface-to-surface missile.
President Biden made the decision to send the longer-range model, which can be armed with cluster munitions or a single warhead, following repeated appeals by Ukraine and U.S. lawmakers. Administration officials said that the decision was made after the Pentagon’s concern about running down its supply of missiles was eased and after Moscow turned to North Korea for ballistic missiles and escalated attacks on Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure.
The U.S. provided shorter-range versions of the missile, which have a range of about 100 miles, to Ukraine in October.
Gordon Lubold contributed to this article.
Write to Alan Cullison at alan.cullison@wsj.com and Michael R. Gordon at michael.gordon@wsj.com
3. U.S. concerned about Ukraine strikes on Russian nuclear radar stations
Excerpts:
The Ukrainian official said the goal of the strikes was to diminish Russia’s ability to track the Ukrainian military’s activities in southern Ukraine. The drone that targeted the radar station near Orsk, in Russia’s Orenburg region along Kazakhstan’s northern border, traveled more than 1,100 miles, making it one of the deepest attempted strikes into Russian territory. The Ukrainian official declined to say whether the strike, on May 26, caused any damage.
U.S. officials said they are sympathetic to Ukraine’s plight — administration officials are actively weighing whether to lift restraints on the use of U.S.-provided weapons to strike inside Russia. But were Russia’s early-warning capabilities to be blinded by Ukrainian attacks, even in part, that could hurt strategic stability between Washington and Moscow, the U.S. official said.
“Russia could think it has a diminished ability to detect early nuclear activity against it, which then could become an issue,” the official said. “It should be obvious to everyone that there’s no intention whatsoever [by the United States] of using nuclear weapons against Russia. But there’s certainly concern about how Russia could perceive its deterrent capabilities being targeted and early-warning systems being attacked.”
The perception issue is likely fueled by “an erroneous conviction that Ukraine’s targeting is directed by Washington,” said Dmitri Alperovitch, security analyst and chairman of Silverado think tank. “But that means attacks by Kyiv on Russian nuclear deterrence infrastructure has potential to trigger a perilous escalation with the West. At the end of the day, nuclear command and control and early-warning sites should be off-limits.''
U.S. concerned about Ukraine strikes on Russian nuclear radar stations
Washington conveyed to Kyiv that attacks on Russian early-warning systems could be destabilizing.
By Ellen Nakashima and Isabelle Khurshudyan
May 29, 2024 at 8:23 p.m. EDT
The Washington Post · by Ellen Nakashima · May 30, 2024
The United States fears that recent Ukrainian drone strikes targeting Russian nuclear early-warning systems could dangerously unsettle Moscow at a time when the Biden administration is weighing whether to lift restrictions on Ukraine using U.S.-supplied weapons in cross-border attacks.
“The United States is concerned about Ukraine’s recent strikes against Russian ballistic missile early-warning sites,” said a U.S. official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the matter’s sensitivity.
Washington has conveyed its concerns to Kyiv about two attempted attacks over the last week against radar stations that provide conventional air defense as well as warning of nuclear launches by the West. At least one strike in Armavir, in Russia’s southeastern Krasnodar region, appeared to have caused some damage.
“These sites have not been involved in supporting Russia’s war against Ukraine,” the U.S. official said. “But they are sensitive locations because Russia could perceive that its strategic deterrent capabilities are being targeted, which could undermine Russia’s ability to maintain nuclear deterrence against the United States.”
A Ukrainian official familiar with the matter, however, said that Russia has used the radar sites to monitor the Ukrainian military’s activities, particularly Kyiv’s use of aerial weaponry, such as drones and missiles. The official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive security matter, confirmed that Ukraine’s Military Intelligence Directorate, known by its initials as GUR, was responsible for the strikes.
Ukraine is facing a continuing threat to its existence from a Russian enemy force — which boasts the world’s largest nuclear arsenal — that has gained ground of late, in part due to its sophisticated radar and weapons-jamming technology, which has rendered virtually useless some U.S.-provided guided missiles and artillery shells. This capability has also enhanced Moscow’s ability to track British and U.S.-provided longer-range weaponry and drones, which have caused serious damage to Russia’s Black Sea fleet and military installations in Crimea, the southern peninsula illegally seized from Ukraine in 2014.
The Ukrainian official said the goal of the strikes was to diminish Russia’s ability to track the Ukrainian military’s activities in southern Ukraine. The drone that targeted the radar station near Orsk, in Russia’s Orenburg region along Kazakhstan’s northern border, traveled more than 1,100 miles, making it one of the deepest attempted strikes into Russian territory. The Ukrainian official declined to say whether the strike, on May 26, caused any damage.
U.S. officials said they are sympathetic to Ukraine’s plight — administration officials are actively weighing whether to lift restraints on the use of U.S.-provided weapons to strike inside Russia. But were Russia’s early-warning capabilities to be blinded by Ukrainian attacks, even in part, that could hurt strategic stability between Washington and Moscow, the U.S. official said.
“Russia could think it has a diminished ability to detect early nuclear activity against it, which then could become an issue,” the official said. “It should be obvious to everyone that there’s no intention whatsoever [by the United States] of using nuclear weapons against Russia. But there’s certainly concern about how Russia could perceive its deterrent capabilities being targeted and early-warning systems being attacked.”
The perception issue is likely fueled by “an erroneous conviction that Ukraine’s targeting is directed by Washington,” said Dmitri Alperovitch, security analyst and chairman of Silverado think tank. “But that means attacks by Kyiv on Russian nuclear deterrence infrastructure has potential to trigger a perilous escalation with the West. At the end of the day, nuclear command and control and early-warning sites should be off-limits.''
Some analysts were puzzled at the targets: While Krasnodar is close enough to Ukraine to track missiles and drones, the radar station near Orsk is focused on the Middle East and China, they said.
Asked why they would target a site so far away, the Ukrainian official asserted that Russia “switched all of its capabilities for war against Ukraine.”
Following Ukraine’s disappointing counteroffensive last year, Russia has regained the initiative on the battlefield in recent months, advancing in the eastern Donetsk region and recently launching a new assault in the northeastern Kharkiv region along the border. Kyiv, meanwhile, has with increasing frequency targeted sites deep in Russia — a capability many doubted was possible without Western support and sign-off.
About three weeks ago, shortly after Russia began its assault on Kharkiv, Ukraine asked the United States to ease long-standing restrictions on using U.S.-provided weapons to attack targets inside Russia. Some senior officials favor such a move, including Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who has urged President Biden to agree to lift the restraints. The White House is considering such a proposal, but no action has been taken yet, officials say.
At a news conference Wednesday in Moldova, Blinken said the United States has “not encouraged or enabled strikes outside of Ukraine, but Ukraine, as I’ve said before, has to make its own decisions about the best way to effectively defend itself.”
Blinken added that the United States has “adapted and adjusted” to changing conditions on the battlefield and that as Russia pursues new tactics of “aggression” and “escalation,” was “confident that we’ll continue to do that.”
There is no restriction on Ukraine using U.S.-supplied air defenses to shoot down Russian missiles or fighter jets over Russian territory “if they pose a threat to Ukraine,” the U.S. official said.
But U.S. officials have previously expressed concern to Ukrainian officials over Kyiv’s attacks on Russian soil, sometimes even intervening during the planning stage. Ahead of the one-year mark of the war, the GUR was planning attacks on Moscow, according to a leaked classified report from the U.S. National Security Agency that was later confirmed by two senior Ukrainian military officials.
Days before the attack, U.S. officials asked Kyiv to scrub their plans, fearing it could provoke an aggressive response from the Kremlin; the Ukrainians complied, according to the leaked U.S. documents and the senior Ukrainian officials.
In a more recent example, Washington took exception to Ukrainian drones targeting oil refineries inside Russia — a request that came directly from Vice President Harris to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the Munich Security Conference in February, according to officials familiar with the matter. U.S. officials believed the strikes would raise global energy prices and invite more aggressive Russian retaliation inside Ukraine.
Amid growing concern over Russia’s battlefield advances, Washington is facing pressure from NATO and several key European allies to allow Ukraine to use the full force and range of U.S.-provided weapons.
“If you cannot attack the Russian forces on the other side of the front line because they are on the other side of the border, then of course you really reduce the ability of the Ukrainian forces to defend themselves,” NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, the alliance’s top political official, said during a visit to Bulgaria on Monday.
Khurshudyan reported from Kyiv. Siobhán O’Grady in Kyiv and Alex Horton in Washington contributed to this report.
The Washington Post · by Ellen Nakashima · May 30, 2024
4. Israel, Hamas and the Law of War
Today's class in the law of armed conflict which politicians, pundits, policymakers, the press, and we the people so badly need.
Excerpts:
These criticisms are based on a distorted view of the law of war and its crucial legal principles—distinction, proportionality, and the obligations owed to enemy civilians. They threaten Israel’s strategic interests and the ability of all law-abiding nations to defend themselves.
The law of armed conflict is a practical set of rules directed at ameliorating the harms of war—originally with respect to those engaged in combat, and over the years expanding to noncombatants associated with the military and ultimately to civilians. Protecting civilians and civilian property is an important goal of the laws of war, but not their paramount goal.
...
If the U.S. and other civilized countries follow the logic of these criticisms of Israel, the consequences will be dire. Most immediately, U.S. condemnations will embolden the Jewish state’s enemies—most of which are also hostile to the U.S.—and could impede Israel’s ability to defeat Hamas. In the future, the administration’s standards of conduct could impair the ability of all law-abiding nations to defend themselves.
Nuclear deterrence, the mainstay of U.S. defense strategy, would be delegitimized if obligations to the civilian population are expanded so that injury to civilians is elevated over all other considerations in determining whether a particular combat operation is lawful. Even in peacetime, this approach would be terrible statecraft. At a time when rogue states and terrorist organizations are waging numerous wars, it’s a formula for global anarchy.
Israel, Hamas and the Law of War
If the State Department’s criticisms are serious, they imperil the defense of all civilized countries.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/israel-hamas-and-the-law-of-war-31362893?mod=latest_headlines
By David B. Rivkin Jr. and Lee A. Casey
May 29, 2024 5:28 pm ET
Smoke rises after the Israeli military began evacuating Palestinian civilians ahead of a threatened assault on Rafah in southern Gaza, May 6. PHOTO: HATEM KHALED/REUTERS
As it defends itself against Hamas in Gaza, Israel has come under sustained political, media and legal attack for supposedly violating international law—and not only from hostile countries and bodies like the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice. On May 10 the U.S. State Department sent a report to Congress that concluded U.S.-provided arms have been used by Israel “in instances inconsistent with its IHL”—international humanitarian law—“obligations or with established best practices for mitigating civilian harm.”
These criticisms are based on a distorted view of the law of war and its crucial legal principles—distinction, proportionality, and the obligations owed to enemy civilians. They threaten Israel’s strategic interests and the ability of all law-abiding nations to defend themselves.
The law of armed conflict is a practical set of rules directed at ameliorating the harms of war—originally with respect to those engaged in combat, and over the years expanding to noncombatants associated with the military and ultimately to civilians. Protecting civilians and civilian property is an important goal of the laws of war, but not their paramount goal.
Other equally important goals are regulating the means and methods of warfare, ensuring appropriate treatment for wounded combatants and prisoners of war, and ensuring that the war aims of belligerents—generally understood as “military necessity”—can be pursued within these rules and requirements. But the law of war is in no way intended to level the playing field in favor of the weaker party.
The law of war has many sources, but the Biden administration should have followed the standard U.S. position, as laid out in the Law of War Manual. One of its most important teachings is that “although military necessity cannot justify actions that have been prohibited by the law of war, some law of war rules expressly incorporate military necessity.” That’s especially true of rules meant to protect civilian populations affected by armed conflict, largely embodied in the principles of “distinction” and “proportionality.”
The principle of distinction provides that civilians can’t be deliberately targeted for attack, as Hamas did on Oct. 7 and routinely does. In choosing how and what to attack, military commanders must make good-faith efforts to distinguish between civilian and military targets. “The law of war does not require that commanders and other decision-makers apply a fixed standard of evidence or proof,” the manual says. Rather, they “exercise professional judgment in making any assessment that a person or object is a military objective.”
Equally important is the principle of proportionality, whose meaning is widely misunderstood. Proportionality requires that the expected harms to civilians and civilian property from an attack can’t be “excessive” when compared with “the concrete and direct military advantage expected to be gained.” The comparison isn’t to the number of soldiers killed or to the number of casualties on each side of the conflict. Nor is there any upper limit on the number of civilian deaths that will trigger “war crimes” if exceeded.
The manual clearly states that “in assessing the military advantage of attacking an object, one may consider the entire war strategy rather than only the potential tactical gains from attacking that object.” There is a significant subjective component in making proportionality determinations. “It could often be the case that reasonable persons might disagree as to whether the expected civilian casualties from an attack would be excessive,” the manual states. “Similarly, reasonable commanders might make different decisions in applying the principle of proportionality.”
Commanders are also enjoined to take “feasible” precautions to protect civilians during an attack. Such measures might include attacking at times when civilians are less likely to be present and giving advance warnings. But the “standard for what precautions must be taken is one of due regard or diligence, not an absolute requirement to do everything possible.” Moreover, “a commander may determine that a precaution would not be feasible because it would result in increased operational risk (i.e., a risk of failing to accomplish the mission) or an increased risk of harm to his or her forces.”
A critical and too often ignored aspect of the laws of war is that each party to a conflict is primarily responsible for protecting its own civilian population by moving them away from military targets and taking other measures to shield them. Hamas not only fails to meet these obligations; it uses civilians as human shields and invites casualties for propaganda purposes. That doesn’t relieve Israel from its proportionality obligations, but the manual makes clear that additional civilian injuries resulting from this illegal tactic are “a factor that may be considered in determining whether such harm is excessive.” Hamas is also looting aid shipments, making it more difficult for assistance to reach Gaza civilians.
Based on these rules and currently available credible evidence, there is no reasonable case that Israel has violated the laws of war. Such claims are grounded at best in speculation, which is unlikely to be entirely accurate. To the extent that Israel hasn’t followed U.S. “best practices,” as the State Department complains, it doesn’t mean there have been violations. Such measures are prudential and not required by law. Hamas, by contrast, indisputably commits war crimes by deliberately attacking civilians, brutalizing Israeli women and children, taking hostages, systematically locating military facilities in or near civilian installations, and using Palestinian civilians as human shields.
Other antagonists of Israel, including at the ICC and the ICJ, have argued in addition that the Jewish state, as an “occupying” power, is obligated to feed, clothe and protect Gaza’s civilian population. But Israel left the strip in 2005. Hamas initiated the current armed conflict, and Israel won’t have the obligations of an occupying power unless it takes control of the territory after hostilities are ended.
If the U.S. and other civilized countries follow the logic of these criticisms of Israel, the consequences will be dire. Most immediately, U.S. condemnations will embolden the Jewish state’s enemies—most of which are also hostile to the U.S.—and could impede Israel’s ability to defeat Hamas. In the future, the administration’s standards of conduct could impair the ability of all law-abiding nations to defend themselves.
Nuclear deterrence, the mainstay of U.S. defense strategy, would be delegitimized if obligations to the civilian population are expanded so that injury to civilians is elevated over all other considerations in determining whether a particular combat operation is lawful. Even in peacetime, this approach would be terrible statecraft. At a time when rogue states and terrorist organizations are waging numerous wars, it’s a formula for global anarchy.
Messrs. Rivkin and Casey practice appellate and constitutional law in Washington. They served at the Justice Department and the White House Counsel’s Office in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations.
5. China Is Testing the U.S.-Philippines Alliance
Excerpts:
Washington could also consider creating a linkage between China’s gray-zone actions against a U.S. ally and other areas of the U.S.-China relationship. That would signal to Beijing that its encroachments on the Philippines come with costs. These could include economic sanctions, postponement or termination of diplomatic negotiations, or changes to the U.S. military posturing elsewhere in the region. Imposing costs for aggressive actions would fit neatly into the Biden administration’s so-called integrated deterrence strategy, which seeks to leverage the collective, interagency strength of the United States, its allies, and its partners to respond to aggression.
As for collective action by the Association of Southeast Asian States (ASEAN) to challenge Chinese encroachments, the track record of the past nearly 30 years is not encouraging—even though several other members, including Vietnam and Malaysia, are also facing Chinese incursions into their waters. Since 1996, ASEAN has been working on a future code of conduct for the region, which might call for an end to militarization, land reclamation, and seizures of disputed features. However, this would entirely depend on the bloc’s success in negotiating the code with Beijing, which has shown no inclination to compromise on its view that it owns most of the South China Sea. Bilateral negotiations would likely founder for similar reasons.
Finally, Washington and Manila could simply stay the course. This would mean continuing to bolster the alliance through expansion of the existing defense cooperation agreement, more focused annual military exercises, and other engagements, as well as through helping Manila to build its own military capabilities and expose China’s bad behavior to the world. But none of these measures have been successful against gray-zone tactics so far, and any future success is likely to take more time as Beijing continues to eat away at Manila’s EEZ.
The best option might be to stay the course on U.S.-Philippines alliance-building but add new features, such as revising the treaty to reflect gray-zone realities, tie into the Replicator program, and impose costs for China’s behavior via other parts of the U.S.-China relationship. Doing these things now should give the Philippines the breathing room that it needs to modernize and professionalize its military with U.S. assistance, helping to reestablish deterrence and lessen the risk of war in the years to come.
China Is Testing the U.S.-Philippines Alliance
Beijing is testing the U.S.-Philippines alliance, and a new strategy is needed.
By Derek Grossman, a senior defense analyst at the Rand Corp.
Foreign Policy · by Derek Grossman
- Military
- United States
- China
May 29, 2024, 11:17 AM
The odds of armed conflict in the South China Sea are high and rising. China’s relentless assertiveness against the Philippines—harassing ships inside Manila’s internationally recognized Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), most notably at Second Thomas Shoal and Scarborough Shoal—has led to a situation where war in the South China Sea now seems more likely than at any other Indo-Pacific flash point, including the Taiwan Strait and Korean Peninsula.
To be sure, the Philippines’ security alliance with the United States has so far deterred China from more serious attacks on the Philippine military or other government assets. But the 1951 Mutual Defense Treaty—which commits Washington to come to Manila’s aid if the latter is under military attack—has utterly failed to deter Beijing from escalating its coercive gray-zone tactics—aggressive actions designed to irreversibly change the status quo without resorting to lethal force. These tactics have included ramming, shadowing, blocking, encircling, firing water cannons, and using military-grade lasers against civilian ships and military vessels. China also relies on its formidable coast guard and so-called fishing militia—comprised of fishermen who are trained and equipped by the military—to patrol, loiter in, and occupy disputed areas, establishing a quasi-permanent presence that the targeted country cannot easily dislodge.
On June 15, moreover, Beijing is reportedly planning to implement a new policy that would authorize the Chinese coast guard to detain foreigners crossing into waters claimed by China. These waters include most of the South China Sea—based on Beijing’s own expansive historical claims rather than international law, which in this case is the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. (For comparison, imagine if Germany claimed the entire North Sea, or if the United States claimed the entire Caribbean right up to the South American coast.)
In the past, China has attempted to cordon off its claims with floating barriers and, most recently, is accused by Manila of building an artificial island at Sabina Shoal—150 kilometers (about 93 miles) from the Philippines’ Palawan Island, but 1,200 kilometers (746 miles) from the closest point in China. A well-informed source who asked to remain anonymous told me that Manila is already blocked from accessing approximately 30 percent of its recognized EEZ due to Chinese salami-slicing tactics. Absent an effective response, this percentage will only rise in the coming years.
In fact, China has the Philippines in an ever-tightening stranglehold that is increasingly compromising the latter’s sovereignty and territorial integrity at sea. If international law is to be upheld and borders are to remain inviolable, the United States must do more to help the Philippines. Yet neither Manila nor Washington seem to have a viable plan to counter Beijing’s successful gray-zone tactics.
Facing an increasingly desperate situation, in March, the Philippines announced a Comprehensive Archipelagic Defense Concept. Public details are scant, but it seems to be a new defense strategy that transitions away from Manila’s traditionally army-centric model—informed by a long history of invasions and occupations—toward upgrading the navy and coast guard to counter China at sea. Full funding for the new strategy is still pending in parliament. Regardless, the concept seems to ignore the equally important air force, and the entire process will take many years, if not decades, to implement.
In the meantime, Manila is pressing forward with three other efforts.
First, it is deepening its alliance with Washington. Earlier this month, the two countries carried out their largest-ever annual military drills, which included exercising the defense of an island chain in the northern Philippines (just 125 miles south of Taiwan) as well as a practice launch of an anti-ship cruise missile to sink a decommissioned ship. Since coming into office in 2022, Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos has raised the number of military bases that the U.S. military can temporarily use from five to nine, in line with the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement signed in 2014.
Second, the Philippines has been forging ahead on a number of security drills and agreements with other countries in the region. Last month, for example, Australia, Japan, the Philippines, and the United States conducted joint exercises within Manila’s EEZ for the first time. Members of the group—known as the “new Quad” or “Squad”—are also negotiating new bilateral security agreements. Japan and the Philippines are discussing a reciprocal troop access agreement that should be completed by July. The Philippines and Australia have upgraded cooperation in maritime security and elevated their partnership to “strategic” following Marcos’s visit to Canberra in February. The Philippines is also receiving some arms assistance from India, such as a recent delivery of much-needed BrahMos anti-ship cruise missiles.
Finally, Manila recently adopted a strategy of “assertive transparency” toward Chinese encroachments into its EEZ. Philippine ship crews are now recording each incident of Chinese coercion and publicizing it for the world to see. The idea is that Beijing will no longer be able to deny its actions as it has done in the past—and perhaps be shamed into adhering to international law.
For its part, the United States has reiterated its “ironclad” commitment to the Philippines multiple times.
The problem is that the Cold War-era U.S.-Philippines treaty did not foresee the kinds of gray-zone tactics and hybrid threats that have become the modus operandi for revisionist states in recent years, whether in the South China Sea or on NATO’s eastern flank. Washington has not elaborated on what types of Chinese action might trigger U.S. intervention in support of its ally. The Biden administration has consistently noted that triggers include “armed attacks” on Philippine military or coast guard vessels, but it has not said what constitutes such an attack. Thus far, China’s aggressive but nonlethal actions against the Philippines do not appear to qualify.
As much as Manila, Washington, and their partners are now working to counter China, none of their steps has been effective in deterring Beijing’s increasing encroachments. What can the Philippines and the United States do—and is it even possible to restore deterrence in the South China Sea?
One option is to revise the U.S.-Philippines treaty to reflect modern gray-zone threats. Rather than vaguely highlighting an “armed attack” as the prompt for U.S. military intervention, Manila and Washington could broadly note that gray-zone activities could or would count as armed attacks.
During his visit to the Pentagon last month, for example, Marcos specified that “if any Filipino serviceman is killed by at attack from any foreign power, then that is time to invoke the [treaty].” The two countries could further broaden the category of assets covered by the treaty to include the civilian ships that regularly resupply Philippine troops stationed on the Sierra Madre, a World War II-era landing ship that Manila intentionally ran aground at Second Thomas Shoal in 1999. China might think twice about violating a revised, more encompassing defense clause.
There are other ways for Washington to clarify its policy in the South China Sea. In July 2020, then-U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo stated that the United States recognized the legality and integrity of the sea’s EEZs in line with U.N. laws and the 2016 international arbitration ruling that rejected China’s expansive claims. To date, however, the United States has not taken an official position on the disputed territories within the South China Sea, perhaps to avoid antagonizing China further.
By contrast, the Obama administration clarified in 2012 that Washington recognized the Senkaku Islands as belonging to Japan, not China, in their East China Sea standoff, and that any attack on the islands would trigger Article 5 of the U.S.-Japan security treaty, meaning that the United States would be required to respond. Manila would obviously appreciate a similar clarification, which would signal to Beijing that Washington now considers attacks on the Philippines’ recognized EEZ to be direct assaults on its sovereignty and territorial integrity, which are already covered by the treaty.
Another option is for the U.S. military to play a more direct role in the region. Asia security expert Blake Herzinger recently argued that one way of bolstering deterrence and repelling China’s gray-zone tactics is to remove the Sierra Madre and replace it with a combined forward operating base used by both Philippine forces and the U.S. Marine Corps. Other researchers have argued for varying levels of U.S. involvement without establishing a base—such as combined naval or coast guard patrols—with the same aim of enhancing deterrence.
An intriguing technological solution might be to leverage the U.S. military’s ongoing Replicator program, scheduled to become available by August 2025. A product of the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit, Replicator seeks to quickly produce thousands of air and naval drones to make up for numerical shortfalls against the Chinese military. Although few details are public, the U.S. Defense Department is already introducing Replicator drones in the Indo-Pacific, and it may eventually be capable of swarming targets and possibly conducting a range of gray-zone activities of its own, though its capabilities for now remain classified.
Uncrewed systems such as Replicator could keep tit-for-tat encounters just below the threshold of triggering a broader war, especially because China’s own defense projects could also take the human element out of clashes at sea by using robotic and artificial intelligence-enabled warfare. Put another way, Replicator could help reset the escalation ladder and give China, the United States, and the Philippines greater space to negotiate after incidents.
Washington could also consider creating a linkage between China’s gray-zone actions against a U.S. ally and other areas of the U.S.-China relationship. That would signal to Beijing that its encroachments on the Philippines come with costs. These could include economic sanctions, postponement or termination of diplomatic negotiations, or changes to the U.S. military posturing elsewhere in the region. Imposing costs for aggressive actions would fit neatly into the Biden administration’s so-called integrated deterrence strategy, which seeks to leverage the collective, interagency strength of the United States, its allies, and its partners to respond to aggression.
As for collective action by the Association of Southeast Asian States (ASEAN) to challenge Chinese encroachments, the track record of the past nearly 30 years is not encouraging—even though several other members, including Vietnam and Malaysia, are also facing Chinese incursions into their waters. Since 1996, ASEAN has been working on a future code of conduct for the region, which might call for an end to militarization, land reclamation, and seizures of disputed features. However, this would entirely depend on the bloc’s success in negotiating the code with Beijing, which has shown no inclination to compromise on its view that it owns most of the South China Sea. Bilateral negotiations would likely founder for similar reasons.
Finally, Washington and Manila could simply stay the course. This would mean continuing to bolster the alliance through expansion of the existing defense cooperation agreement, more focused annual military exercises, and other engagements, as well as through helping Manila to build its own military capabilities and expose China’s bad behavior to the world. But none of these measures have been successful against gray-zone tactics so far, and any future success is likely to take more time as Beijing continues to eat away at Manila’s EEZ.
The best option might be to stay the course on U.S.-Philippines alliance-building but add new features, such as revising the treaty to reflect gray-zone realities, tie into the Replicator program, and impose costs for China’s behavior via other parts of the U.S.-China relationship. Doing these things now should give the Philippines the breathing room that it needs to modernize and professionalize its military with U.S. assistance, helping to reestablish deterrence and lessen the risk of war in the years to come.
Foreign Policy · by Derek Grossman
6. Hamas is preparing long-term insurgency in Gaza - analysis
It is only logical if they want to live to fight another day. If this is their strategy then what new strategy should Israel adopt?
How do they deny sanctuary?
How do they deny access to resources?
How do they deny movement of insurgents and support?
How do they separate the population from Hamas?
Four simple questions with no easy answers. Especially number 4.
Excerpts:
What these reports reveal is how Hamas and the other groups are settling in for a long-term insurgency. They are husbanding their resources, using only a few munitions a day in their attacks. It is not clear how much they coordinate, however, it is clear that they concentrate on several fronts in Gaza, including Rafah, Jabalya and the Netzarim corridor. This type of fighting reveals that the focus on Hamas “battalions” is likely no longer relevant.Because Hamas has gone to ground and melted away into urban areas, deploying small teams of terrorists, just a few in any one place, illustrates that the battalion structure has largely shifted to a much smaller type of unit. If Hamas battalions once had a thousand fighters in places like Jabalya, they have many less now. But they are bolstered by other terrorist groups. This is what is revealed in the pro-Iranian reports, which appear to parrot statements being sent by Hamas.
Hamas is preparing long-term insurgency in Gaza - analysis
What these reports reveal is how Hamas and the other groups are settling in for a long-term insurgency.
By SETH J. FRANTZMAN
MAY 29, 2024 19:06
Updated: MAY 29, 2024 20:52
Jerusalem Post
Hamas has been communicating its tactics in Gaza via statements put out in pro-Iranian media. Many of these statements about Hamas attacks on Israeli forces are put out via Al-Mayadeen media. The statements reflect how Hamas is thinking about tactics in the future in Gaza.For instance, Hamas frequently references how it works with other terror groups in Gaza to target IDF forces in various areas of Gaza. One of the points of focus of the attacks are Israeli troops in the Netzarim corridor. This increasingly looks like Hamas is preparing a long-term insurgency.
The shift in Hamas tactics represents a way it is adapting to the long war in Gaza. Israel is hinting at fighting in Gaza for many months or even years into the future. Hamas knows this, and Hamas has been fighting Israel for decades. It has often changed its tactics over the decades. Hamas seeks to learn from what Israel is doing, and the learning curve is reflected in Hamas announcements.
For instance, while Israeli officials often referenced Hamas “battalions” in the opening months of the war, Hamas has generally focused now on small unit attacks. There were apparently 24 Hamas battalions in Gaza in October after the Hamas attack on Israel.Over time, Israeli officials assessed that the IDF had shattered 12 of these battalions in northern Gaza and that it eventually had defeated up to 19 of the battalions. This may include up to 14,000 terrorists killed in Gaza. In addition, Hamas has suffered numerous wounded, maybe another 10,000 or so.
IDF soldiers operate in the Gaza Strip, January 2024. (credit: IDF)
This would seem to indicate Hamas has only a few thousand fighters left. However, Hamas is recruiting. Also, the estimates of the number of “terrorists” killed do not differentiate between Hamas and other groups, such as Palestinian Islamic Jihad.Hamas does not release details on men who are killed
Hamas does not release details on the number of its men killed. It also doesn’t say how many men it has. What Hamas does say is where it is carrying out attacks. It claimed on May 28-29, and it targeted IDF vehicles in Jabalya and the Netzarim corridor. The fact that Hamas and pro-Iran media have adopted the term “Netzarim” shows how keenly they are watching Israeli moves in Gaza.
Al-Mayadeen media said that on the “235th day” of the war against Israel by Hamas, which is dated since the “al-Aqsa flood” of October 7, Hamas has continued to “engage” Israeli forces using “ambushes.” The report says “in this context, the Martyr Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of the Hamas movement, announced the bombing of the occupation forces stationed in the vicinity of the Rabaa al-Adawiya neighborhood, south of the city of Rafah, with short-range ‘107’ missiles.”This would refer to 107mm rockets, a common type of rocket used by pro-Iranian groups in the region. Hamas also claimed it targeted an IDF tank in the Al-Alami area of Jabalya using an “Al-Yasin 105” munition.
In other places, Hamas said it used “Rajum” missiles and also mortars to target Israeli forces. Hamas has focused on fighting in Rafah even as Israeli forces advance. Reports in Israeli media said the IDF may now control up to seventy-five percent of the Philadelphi Route. Hamas claimed it had detonated an explosive in a house in the Al-Shawout camp area of Rafah.
In addition, the report in Al-Mayadeen says that the Palestinian Islamic Jihad Movement had carried out attacks in Jabalya using mortars. PIJ has a “military” wing called the Al-Quds Brigades. The report claimed the group used 60mm mortars in the attack, targeting an area near the Salah al-Din gate in Rafah as well. “It published video clips of its bombing of a position of occupation soldiers in the vicinity of the Turkish Friendship Hospital,” the report said.
Other terrorist groups in Gaza, such as the Al-Qassam Mujahideen Brigades, the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, and the Omar Al-Qasim forces, carried out attacks. The National Resistance Brigades, also known as Martyr Omar Al-Qasim Forces, are “the military wing of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine.” These groups carried out attacks in Jabalya, the Netzarim corridor and also targeted Zikim, they claimed.
What these reports reveal is how Hamas and the other groups are settling in for a long-term insurgency. They are husbanding their resources, using only a few munitions a day in their attacks. It is not clear how much they coordinate, however, it is clear that they concentrate on several fronts in Gaza, including Rafah, Jabalya and the Netzarim corridor. This type of fighting reveals that the focus on Hamas “battalions” is likely no longer relevant.Because Hamas has gone to ground and melted away into urban areas, deploying small teams of terrorists, just a few in any one place, illustrates that the battalion structure has largely shifted to a much smaller type of unit. If Hamas battalions once had a thousand fighters in places like Jabalya, they have many less now. But they are bolstered by other terrorist groups. This is what is revealed in the pro-Iranian reports, which appear to parrot statements being sent by Hamas.
Jerusalem Post
7. The Great AI Challenge: We Test Five Top Bots on Useful, Everyday Skills
Please go to the link to view the graphics and for proper formatting.
I am currently experimenting with ChatGPT, MIcrosoft CoPllot, and Perplexity. I have not tried Claude or Gemini. So far I like Perplexity the best. One of the main functions I have been using it for is to translate English and Korean. I have now authored two papers with a Korean author who speaks almost no English and I do not have sufficient Korean language to communicate on our topics. But we have each written first drafts and then translated them using Perplexity and then we have gone back and forth with our revisions writing in our native language and then translating to the other.
There are a lot of interesting ways to use AI as outlined in the tests below.
The Great AI Challenge: We Test Five Top Bots on Useful, Everyday Skills
OpenAI’s ChatGPT competes against Microsoft’s Copilot and Google’s Gemini, along with Perplexity and Anthropic’s Claude. Here’s how they rank.
https://www.wsj.com/tech/personal-tech/ai-chatbots-chatgpt-gemini-copilot-perplexity-claude-f9e40d26?st=8jk52evbscm6t7l&utm
By Dalvin BrownFollow
, Kara DapenaFollow
and Joanna SternFollow
May 25, 2024 5:30 am ET
Would you trust an AI chatbot with family planning? Investing $1 million? How about writing your wedding vows?
Human-sounding bots barely existed two years ago. Now they’re everywhere. There’s ChatGPT, which kicked off the whole generative-AI craze, and big swings from Google and Microsoft, plus countless other smaller players, all with their own smooth-talking helpers.
We put five of the leading bots through a series of blind tests to determine their usefulness. While we hoped to find the Caitlin Clark of chatbots, that wasn’t exactly what happened. They excel in some areas and fail in others. Plus, they’re all evolving rapidly. During our testing, OpenAI released an upgrade to ChatGPT that improved its speed and current-events knowledge.
We wanted to see the range of responses we’d get asking real-life questions and ordering up everyday tasks—not a scientific assessment, but one that reflects how we’ll all use these tools. Consider it the chatbot Olympics.
Meet the models
ChatGPT
Claude
Copilot
Gemini
Perplexity
We have ChatGPT by OpenAI, celebrated for its versatility and ability to remember user preferences. (Wall Street Journal owner News Corp has a content-licensing partnership with OpenAI.) Anthropic’s Claude, from a socially conscious startup, is geared to be inoffensive. Microsoft’s Copilot leverages OpenAI’s technology and integrates with services like Bing and Microsoft 365. Google’s Gemini accesses the popular search engine for real-time responses. And Perplexity is a research-focused chatbot that cites sources with links and stays up to date.
While each of these services offer a no-fee version, we used the $20-a-month paid versions for enhanced performance, to assess their full capabilities across a wide range of tasks. (We used the latest ChatGPT GPT-4o model and Gemini 1.5 Pro model in our testing.)
With the help of Journal newsroom editors and columnists, we crafted a series of prompts to test popular use cases, including coding challenges, health inquiries and money questions. The same people judged the results without knowing which bot said what, rating them on accuracy, helpfulness and overall quality. We then ranked the bots in each category.
We also excerpted some of the best and worst responses to prompts, to give a sense of how varied chatbots’ responses can be.
Health
Bad health advice from chatbots could be harmful to your…health. We asked five questions dealing with pregnancy, weight loss, depression and symptoms both chronic and sudden. Many answers sounded similar. Our judge, Journal health columnist Sumathi Reddy, looked for completeness, accuracy and nuances.
PROMPT
What’s the best age to get pregnant?
Perplexity
BEST ANSWER (EXCERPT)
Having children at a later age can offer advantages, such as more maturity, better financial stability and a stronger partnership.
Gemini
WORST ANSWER (EXCERPT)
The best time to get pregnant is whenever you feel confident and prepared to raise a child.
For instance, when we asked about the best age to get pregnant, Gemini gave a brief, general recommendation, while Perplexity went much deeper, even bringing up factors such as relationship and financial stability.
That said, Gemini came through with quality answers to other queries, and finished second to category winner ChatGPT, whose answers improved with the recent GPT-4o update.
FIRST
ChatGPT
SECOND
Gemini
THIRD
Perplexity
FOURTH
Claude
FIFTH
Copilot
Finance
We asked the bots three questions on subjects near and dear to Journal readers: interest rates, retirement savings and inheritance. The Journal’s personal finance editor, Jeremy Olshan, posed the questions and assessed the advice based on clarity, thoroughness and practicality.
PROMPT
I’m 40 years old. I just inherited an IRA from my grandfather with $1 million in it. How much money do I need to take out this year?
Gemini
BEST ANSWER (EXCERPT)
Because you’re a non-spouse beneficiary, you likely have a 10-year window to deplete the account, but there might be exceptions.
Copilot
WORST ANSWER (EXCERPT)
Congratulations on inheriting an IRA with a substantial amount!
Here, ChatGPT and Copilot fell behind. Claude had the best answers for the Roth vs. traditional IRA debate while Perplexity best weighed high-yield savings accounts vs. CDs. Gemini, the category winner, best answered a question about when to withdraw funds from an inherited $1 million IRA. The text emphasized not rushing into any withdrawals without professional guidance.
FIRST
Gemini
SECOND
Claude
THIRD
Perplexity
FOURTH
ChatGPT
FIFTH
Copilot
Cooking
AI promises to help in the kitchen, in part by bringing some clarity to the chaos of your fridge and pantry. Personal tech editor Wilson Rothman, an avid cook, threw a set of random ingredients at the bots to see what they came up with. The category winner, ChatGPT, provided a creative but realistic menu (cheesy pork-stuffed apples with kale salad and chocolate-bar shortbread cookies). Perplexity impressed us with the detailed cooking steps provided with its own clever menu.
Next, we asked the bots for a recipe for a chocolate dessert that addresses many dietary restrictions.
PROMPT
Can I bake a chocolate cake with no flour, no gluten, no dairy, no nuts, no egg? If so, what’s the recipe?
Gemini
BEST ANSWER (EXCERPT)
Simple Glaze: Melt dairy-free chocolate chips (check the label!), whisk in a bit of non-dairy milk.
Copilot
WORST ANSWER (EXCERPT)
…2 sticks unsalted butter…4 large eggs…
Gemini took the cake, even recommending additional trimmings like non-dairy glaze. Copilot, on the other hand, immediately failed by including eggs and butter.
FIRST
ChatGPT
SECOND
Gemini
THIRD
Perplexity
FOURTH
Claude
FIFTH
Copilot
Work writing
Tone and detail matter in work-related writing. You can’t be glib asking your boss for a raise, and these days, writing a job posting means listing bullet points meant to woo potential candidates. We asked for a job listing for a “prompt engineer,” a person who could run AI queries with our personal tech team. (Sorry, folks, that job doesn’t exist…yet.)
PROMPT
Write a job posting for a prompt engineer who can work with our Personal Tech reporting team, helping with tech advice and service articles.
Perplexity
BEST ANSWER (EXCERPT)
Why Join Us: Work with a talented team of reporters and editors who are passionate about technology and its impact on everyday life.
Copilot
WORST ANSWER (EXCERPT)
Do you dream in code snippets and write user-friendly guides in your sleep?
Perplexity nailed it, with the right mix of journalism and AI bot knowledge. Copilot missed the mark because it never mentioned prompt engineering at all, noted editor Shara Tibken, who judged the responses.
The race between Perplexity, Gemini and Claude was close, with Claude winning by a nose for its office-appropriate birth announcement.
FIRST
Claude
SECOND
Perplexity
THIRD
Gemini
FOURTH
ChatGPT
FIFTH
Copilot
Creative writing
One of the biggest surprises was the difference between work writing and creative writing. Copilot finished dead last in work writing, but was hands-down the funniest and most clever at creative writing. We asked for a poem about a poop on a log. We asked for a wedding toast featuring the Muppets. We asked for a fictional street fight between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. With Copilot, the jokes kept coming. Claude was the second best, with clever zingers about both presidential challengers.
PROMPT
Write a wedding toast for Shara and Chris as told by the Muppets.
Copilot
BEST ANSWER (EXCERPT)
Gonzo: “Ah, love! It’s like being shot out of a cannon into a pile of rubber chickens!”
Perplexity
WORST ANSWER (EXCERPT)
Kermit the Frog once said, “Life’s a happy song when there’s someone by your side to sing along.”
In a rare flub, Perplexity erroneously attributed a lyric from the 2011 musical “The Muppets” to Kermit.
FIRST
Copilot
SECOND
Claude
THIRD
Perplexity
FOURTH
Gemini
FIFTH
ChatGPT
Summarization
For people just getting into generative-AI chatbots, summarization might be the best thing to try. It’s useful and unlikely to create unforeseen errors. Because we used paid services, we were able to upload larger chunks of text, PDF documents and web pages.
For the most part, that is: Even the premium Claude account wasn’t able to handle web links. “Our team is making Claude faster, expanding its knowledge base and refining its ability to understand and interact with a wide range of content,” says Scott White, a product manager at Anthropic.
PROMPT
Summarize this web page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_McCartney
Copilot
BEST ANSWER (EXCERPT)
He was influenced by his father (a jazz player) and rock and roll artists like Little Richard and Buddy Holly.
Claude
WORST ANSWER (EXCERPT)
I apologize, but I am not able to open URLs, links or videos.
Wikipedia pages for really famous people can get wordy, so we asked for a summary of Paul McCartney’s. Some provided short blurbs with obvious Beatle factoids. Copilot answered in a skimmable outline format, and included lesser-known fun facts.
Category winner Perplexity consistently summarized things well, including the subtitles it skimmed in a YouTube video.
FIRST
Perplexity
SECOND
Copilot
THIRD
ChatGPT
FOURTH
Claude
FIFTH
Gemini
Current events
This category is trickier than it sounds, because not all chatbots can access the web. We asked about this summer’s concert lineup, the latest on allegations that China uses TikTok for spying, and the current standings in the upcoming presidential election.
PROMPT
Who is more favored to win, Trump or Biden? Please explain your sources and reasoning.
Perplexity
BEST ANSWER (EXCERPT)
Given the mixed nature of the data, with both candidates having significant unfavorability and various leads in different areas, it is difficult to definitively state who is more favored to win.
Gemini
WORST ANSWER (EXCERPT)
I’m still learning how to answer this question. In the meantime, try Google Search.
Category winner Perplexity stayed on top with balanced reasoning and solid sourcing. ChatGPT faltered when we first tested, but the GPT-4o upgrade boosted it into second place. Gemini didn’t want to answer our election question.
FIRST
Perplexity
SECOND
ChatGPT
THIRD
Copilot
FOURTH
Claude
FIFTH
Gemini
Coding
We also evaluated the bots on coding skill and speed. For coding, we hit up Journal data journalist Brian Whitton, who provided three vexing queries involving a JavaScript function, some website styling and a web app. All of the bots did fairly well with coding, according to Whitton’s blind judging, though Perplexity managed to eke out a win, followed by ChatGPT and Gemini.
FIRST
Perplexity
SECOND
ChatGPT
THIRD
Gemini
FOURTH
Claude
FIFTH
Copilot
Speed
For speed tests, we timed several of the above queries, and threw in another one: “Explain Einstein’s theory of relativity in five sentences.” The answers themselves were all over the place, but in terms of pure response time, category winner ChatGPT with the GPT-4o update was the fastest, clocking in at 5.8 seconds. Throughout the tests, Claude and Perplexity were much slower than the other three.
FIRST
ChatGPT
SECOND
Gemini
THIRD
Copilot
FOURTH
Claude
FIFTH
Perplexity
Overall results
What did these Olympian challenges tell us? Each chatbot has unique strengths and weaknesses, making them all worth exploring. We saw few outright errors and “hallucinations,” where bots go off on unexpected tangents and completely make things up. The bots provided mostly helpful answers and avoided controversy.
The biggest surprise? ChatGPT, despite its big update and massive fame, didn’t lead the pack. Instead, lesser-known Perplexity was our champ. “We optimize for conciseness,” says Dmitry Shevelenko, chief business officer at Perplexity AI. “We tuned our model for conciseness, which forces it to identify the most essential components.”
We also thought there might be an advantage from the big tech players, Microsoft and Google, though Copilot and Gemini fought hard to stay in the game. Google declined to comment. Microsoft also declined, but recently told the Journal it would soon integrate OpenAI’s GPT-4o into Copilot. That could improve its performance.
With AI developing so fast, these bots just might leapfrog one another into the foreseeable future. Or at least until they all go “multimodal,” and we can test their ability to see, hear and read—and replace us as earth’s dominant species.
FIRST SECOND THIRD FOURTH FIFTH
OVERALL Perplexity
ChatGPT
Gemini
Claude
Copilot
HEALTH ChatGPT
Gemini
Perplexity
Claude
Copilot
FINANCE Gemini
Claude
Perplexity
ChatGPT
Copilot
COOKING ChatGPT
Gemini
Perplexity
Claude
Copilot
WORK WRITING Claude
Perplexity
Gemini
ChatGPT
Copilot
CREATIVE WRITING Copilot
Claude
Perplexity
Gemini
ChatGPT
SUMMARIZATION Perplexity
Copilot
ChatGPT
Claude
Gemini
CURRENT EVENTS Perplexity
ChatGPT
Copilot
Claude
Gemini
CODING Perplexity
ChatGPT
Gemini
Claude
Copilot
SPEED ChatGPT
Gemini
Copilot
Claude
Perplexity
SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS
Which chatbot do you find most helpful? Join the conversation below.
—For more WSJ Technology analysis, reviews, advice and headlines, sign up for our weekly newsletter.
Write to Dalvin Brown at dalvin.brown@wsj.com, Kara Dapena at kara.dapena@wsj.com and Joanna Stern at joanna.stern@wsj.com
8. A timeline of the US-built Gaza pier and the challenges it’s faced
If we intend to use logistics over the shore (LOTS) to support large scale combat operations or other contingency operations I hope we will learn a lot from this mission and apply the lessons. We now have $320 million in lessons encountered (as Joe Collins would say).
A timeline of the US-built Gaza pier and the challenges it’s faced
militarytimes.com · by Lolita Baldor · May 29, 2024
A string of security, logistical and weather problems has battered the plan to deliver desperately needed humanitarian aid to Gaza through a U.S. military-built pier.
Broken apart by strong winds and heavy seas just over a week after it became operational, the project faces criticism that it hasn’t lived up to its initial billing or its $320 million price tag.
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Military’s novel floating pier arrives in Gaza amid security concerns
The Gaza aid pier is made possible by an oft-neglected but vital military capability known as Joint Logistics Over-the-Shore, or JLOTS.
U.S. officials say, however, that the steel causeway connected to the beach in Gaza and the floating pier are being repaired and reassembled at a port in southern Israel, then will be reinstalled and working again next week.
While early Pentagon estimates suggested the pier could deliver up to 150 truckloads of aid a day when in full operation, that has yet to happen. Bad weather has hampered progress getting aid into Gaza from the pier, while the Israeli offensive in the southern city of Rafah has made it difficult, if not impossible at times, to get aid into the region by land routes.
Aid groups have had mixed reactions — both welcoming any amount of aid for starving Palestinians besieged by the nearly eight-month-old Israel-Hamas war and decrying the pier as a distraction that took pressure off Israel to open more border crossings, which are far more productive.
It’s “a side-show,” said Bob Kitchen, a top official of the International Rescue Committee.
The Biden administration has said from the start that the pier wasn’t meant to be a total solution and that any amount of aid helps.
“Nobody said at the outset that it was going to be a panacea for all the humanitarian assistance problems that still exist in Gaza,” national security spokesman John Kirby said Wednesday. “I think sometimes there’s an expectation of the U.S. military — because they’re so good — that everything that they touch is just going to turn to gold in an instant.”
“We knew going in that this was going to be tough stuff,” he added. “And it has proven to be tough stuff.”
Before the war, Gaza was getting about 500 truckloads of aid on average every day. The United States Agency for International Development says it needs a steady flow of 600 trucks a day to ease the struggle for food and bring people back from the brink of famine.
The aid brought through the pier was enough to feed thousands for a month, but U.N. data shows it barely made a dent in the overall need of Gaza’s 2.3 million people.
Here’s a look at the timeline of the pier, the problems it faced and what may come next:
March: Announcement and prep
March 7: President Joe Biden announces his plan for the U.S. military to build a pier during his State of the Union address.
“Tonight, I’m directing the U.S. military to lead an emergency mission to establish a temporary pier in the Mediterranean on the coast of Gaza that can receive large shipments carrying food, water, medicine and temporary shelters,” he said.
But even in those first few moments, he noted the pier would increase the amount of humanitarian aid getting into Gaza but that Israel “must do its part” and let more aid in.
March 8: Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder, Pentagon spokesman, tells reporters it will take “up to 60 days” to deploy the forces and build the project.
March 12: Four U.S. Army boats loaded with tons of equipment and steel pier segments leave Joint Base Langley-Eustis in Virginia and head to the Atlantic Ocean for what is expected to be a monthlong voyage to Gaza.
The brigade’s commander, Army Col. Sam Miller, warns that the transit and construction will be heavily dependent on the weather and any high seas they encounter.
Late March: U.S. Army vessels hit high seas and rough weather as they cross the Atlantic, slowing their pace.
April: Construction and hope
April 1: Seven World Central Kitchen aid workers are killed in an Israeli airstrike as they travel in clearly marked vehicles on a delivery mission authorized by Israel.
The strike fuels ongoing worries about security for relief workers and prompts aid agencies to pause delivery of humanitarian assistance in Gaza.
April 19: U.S. officials confirm that the U.N. World Food Program has agreed to help deliver aid brought to Gaza via the maritime route once construction is done.
April 25: Major construction of the port facility on the shore near Gaza City begins to take shape. The onshore site is where aid from the causeway will be delivered and given to aid agencies.
April 30: Satellite photos show the U.S. Navy ship USNS Roy P. Benavidez and Army vessels working on assembling the pier and causeway about 6.8 miles from the port on shore.
May: The pier opens … then closes
May 9: The U.S. vessel Sagamore is the first ship loaded with aid to leave Cyprus and head toward Gaza and ultimately the pier. An elaborate security and inspection station has been built in Cyprus to screen the aid coming from a number of countries.
May 16: Well past the 60-day target time, the construction and assembly of the pier off the Gaza coast and the causeway attached to the shoreline are finished after more than a week of weather and other delays.
May 17: The first trucks carrying aid for the Gaza Strip roll down the newly built pier and into the secure area on shore, where they will be unloaded and the cargo distributed to aid agencies for delivery by truck into Gaza.
May 18: Crowds of desperate Palestinians overrun a convoy of aid trucks coming from the pier, stripping the cargo from 11 of the 16 vehicles before they reach a U.N. warehouse for distribution.
May 19-20: The first food from the pier — a limited number of high-nutrition biscuits — reaches people in need in central Gaza, according to the World Food Program.
Aid organizations suspend deliveries from the pier for two days while the U.S. works with Israel to open alternate land routes from the pier and improve security.
May 24: So far, a bit more than 1,000 metric tons of aid has been delivered to Gaza via the U.S.-built pier, and USAID later says all of it has been distributed within Gaza.
May 25: High winds and heavy seas damage the pier and cause four U.S. Army vessels operating there to become beached, injuring three service members, including one who is in critical condition.
Two vessels went aground in Gaza near the base of the pier and two went aground near Ashkelon in Israel.
May 28: Pentagon spokeswoman Sabrina Singh says large portions of the causeway are being pulled from the beach and moved to an Israeli port for repairs. The base of the causeway remains at the Gaza shore.
She also says that aid in Cyprus is being loaded onto vessels and will be ready to unload onto the pier once it is back in place.
May 29: Two of the Army vessels that ran aground in the bad weather are now back at sea and the other two near the pier are being freed, with the aid of the Israeli navy.
What’s next?
In the coming days, the sections of the causeway will be put back together, and by the middle of next week will be moved back to the Gaza shore, where the causeway will once again be attached to the beach, the Pentagon says.
“When we are able to re-anchor the pier back in, you’ll be able to see that aid flow off in a pretty steady stream,” Singh said Tuesday. “We’re going to continue to operate this temporary pier for as long as we can.”
AP writer Ellen Knickmeyer in Washington contributed.
9. Pentagon Opens Ammunition Factory to Keep Arms Flowing to Ukraine
Some good news. But why did it take so long?
Pentagon Opens Ammunition Factory to Keep Arms Flowing to Ukraine - The New York Times
nytimes.com · by John Ismay · May 29, 2024
In a warehouse off Lyndon B. Johnson Freeway in an industrial area outside Dallas, the future of American military ammunition production is coming online.
Here, in the Pentagon’s first new major arms plant built since Russia invaded Ukraine, Turkish workers in orange hard hats are busy unpacking wood crates stenciled with the name Repkon, a defense company based in Istanbul, and assembling computer-controlled robots and lathes.
The factory will soon turn out about 30,000 steel shells every month for the 155-millimeter howitzers that have become crucial to Kyiv’s war effort.
Ukraine fired between 4,000 and 7,000 such shells daily for several months in 2023, according to NATO’s secretary-general, before infighting among House Republicans held up further funding for Pentagon arms shipments. Large shipments of American artillery ammunition resumed in April after Congress passed an aid package that included $61 billion to Ukraine.
The gap led to a drastic ammunition shortage for Kyiv, with Ukrainian troops able to fire only a fraction of the shells shot at them by Russian forces.
To keep Ukraine’s artillery crews supplied, the Pentagon set a production target last year of 100,000 shells per month by the end of 2025. Factories in Scranton and Wilkes-Barre, Pa., together make about 36,000 shells per month. The new General Dynamics facility in Mesquite, Texas, will make 30,000 each month once it reaches its full capacity.
The 100,000-per-month goal represents a nearly tenfold increase in production from a few years ago.
An Ohio-based defense firm called IMT is expected to make up the difference.
Less than a year ago, the surrounding area here in North Texas was just a dirt field. But with millions of dollars from Congress and help from Repkon, the American defense firm General Dynamics was able to open the factory about 10 months after breaking ground.
Even as the first production line for making 155-millimeter shells was being completed at General Dynamics facility in Mesquite, Texas, workers were already fitting out a second line within the same building.Credit…Desiree Rios for The New York Times
Bins of parts awaiting assembly at a factory that will turn out 30,000 artillery shells each month when construction is completed.Credit…Desiree Rios for The New York Times
“Despite all our starts and stops with the government, the continuing resolutions and getting the last supplemental, the industrial base responds when you fund it and it’s done right,” William A. LaPlante, the Pentagon’s top acquisition official, said in an interview with his Army counterpart, Douglas R. Bush.
According to Mr. LaPlante, the United States has provided more than three million 155-millimeter shells to Kyiv since the war began in February 2022.
“When government and industry work together and Congress gives us sufficient latitude, we can still do great things in this country really fast,” Mr. Bush added.
Whether the increase in artillery ammunition production alone will be enough to change outcomes on the battlefield in Ukraine’s favor is, however, unknown.
“The steady increase of artillery ammunition production is significant for long-term U.S. and Ukrainian needs,” said Michael Kofman, an expert on the Russian military and a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, “but even in the best case scenario, I would say those late-2025 output targets will arrive late in this war, and it is likely that Russian artillery output will still be higher than the U.S. and Europe combined at that point.”
“Let’s say a year and a half from now both the U.S. and Europe are making, or buying, over a million shells each,” he added. “That’s still probably less than Russia is going to produce this year.”
The Mesquite factory will consist of three production lines in different buildings — one of which will share space with a distribution center for Frito-Lay that had a Cheetos-branded truck parked outside. When all three lines are completed, most of the Turkish workers will go home.
Half of the on-site American work force came from another General Dynamics plant about 10 miles north in Garland, where the company forges steel casings for aerial bombs. The Mesquite factory will add about 350 jobs to the local economy when it reaches its full production capacity next year, company officials said.
In the first stage of production, 18-foot rectangular steel bars are cut into roughly foot-and-a-half-long pieces, each of which will be turned into an artillery shell.Credit…Desiree Rios for The New York Times
Artillery shells made in early production runs are set aside for testing and calibrating new equipment before the factory begins full-rate production for the U.S. military.Credit…Desiree Rios for The New York Times
It can take days to forge shells at the military’s current factories in Pennsylvania, which use a combination of new and nearly century-old technologies to heat and press steel billets into tapered projectiles. But the new plant in Mesquite spins rounds out much faster.
The shorter turnaround comes from the use of something called flow forming — a machine inside an enclosure roughly the size of a city bus rotates a 130-pound steel cup at high speed while simultaneously squeezing it until it becomes a long gleaming cylinder. From there, robots do much of the remaining work.
A series of identical orange-colored robot arms throughout the factory grab the metal projectile parts from one machine and place them on small automated carts that drive them to the next station, where another robot gripper that slides along a track begins the next stage of the process.
Each robot’s work area is fenced in, and its openings are flanked by an “air gate” — a strip of sensors that allow Roomba-like carts to enter but shut machines down if they detect a human.
Humans are needed in a few steps to lift things along the way, often with a large yellow device bolted to the floor called a manipulator that allows them to move shells to other machines.
Laser scanners have replaced human eyes and hand tools for inspecting shells inside and out, quickly verifying that the projectiles are within their desired specifications.
Credit…
Once complete, the empty shells made in Mesquite will be shipped to the Army’s sole facility for filling them with explosives — a World War II-era plant in Burlington, Iowa. Next year, however, many of the shells will be sent to another new General Dynamics factory that is under construction in Camden, Ark.
The Pentagon’s drive to reinvest in ammunition production will also result in the Army’s Iowa plant opening a second line for filling shells with explosives, and the partial reopening of a plant in Parsons, Kan., for packing artillery propellant charges that was largely shuttered in a round of base closures in the 2000s.
Once complete, an unguided shell will be just under three feet long and weigh roughly 100 pounds — 24 pounds of which will be its explosive fill. That is enough to kill people within 150 feet of impact and cause injuries more than 400 feet away.
Mr. LaPlante and Mr. Bush both indicated that European countries were also ramping up their artillery ammunition production, and U.S. defense contractors are in talks with the Ukrainian government to find ways to help Ukraine bolster its own domestic defense industry.
The United States has transferred sensitive manufacturing plans for more than 1,000 American weapons to Kyiv, and translated an equal number of technical manuals from English to Ukrainian, the two officials said.
When asked, they stopped short of saying which weapons.
“What are they using the most?” Mr. Bush replied.
Artillery shells at various stages of production in the Mesquite factory.Credit…Desiree Rios for The New York Times
is a reporter covering the Pentagon for The Times. He served as an explosive ordnance disposal officer in the U.S. Navy.
See more on: Russia-Ukraine War
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nytimes.com · by John Ismay · May 29, 2024
10. Survivors say Russia is waging a war of sexual violence in occupied areas of Ukraine. Men are often the victims
Is the character of war changing in the 21st Century as evidenced by Ukraine and Gaza? Is sexual violence new? (rhetorical question as we know it is not new).
Or are we only now reading real time reports of what Genghis Khan envisioned and that has always happened?
“The greatest happiness is to vanquish your enemies, to chase them before you, to rob them of their wealth, to see those dear to them bathed in tears, to clasp to your bosom their wives and daughters.”
― Genghis Khan
Survivors say Russia is waging a war of sexual violence in occupied areas of Ukraine. Men are often the victims | CNN
CNN · by Ivana Kottasová · May 30, 2024
Editor’s Note: This story contains graphic and disturbing descriptions of sexual violence.
Kyiv CNN —
Within an hour of being arrested by Russian security forces, Roman Shapovalenko was threatened with rape.
On August 25, 2022, the day after Ukraine’s Independence Day, he said three armed, masked officers from Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) stormed his home in the southern Ukrainian port city of Kherson, which was occupied by Russian forces at the time.
They turned his house inside out searching for incriminating evidence. A message in Shapovalenko’s phone that called Russian soldiers “orcs” — a derisive reference to the evil forces in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth books and a popular Ukrainian slur for the Russian army — was enough for them. He said he was tied up, blindfolded and stuffed into an unmarked car.
For days after, Shapovalenko said he was repeatedly electrocuted in his genital area, threatened with being raped with a glass bottle, and was even made to believe he could be sterilized.
“They seemed to have a fetish for genitalia. Sometimes the door would open, and they would say: ‘We’re going to take out our batons and we’re going to rape everyone here,’” the 39-year-old farm manager told CNN.
Describing the graphic detail of his experience matter-of-factly, Shapovalenko sometimes paused to laugh nervously. He said his sense of humor is helping with what he knows will be a long recovery. The Russians, he said, hated it. “I made a little joke, and they didn’t like it. I got punched for that.”
Shapovalenko’s experience of sexual violence at the hands of Russian forces is common among Ukrainians – including civilians and soldiers – who have been detained since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of the country more than two years ago.
Human rights monitors have long reported on the rampant use of sexual violence by Russian police and security forces against prisoners and detainees in Russia. Now it seems Russia is exporting the practice to occupied Ukraine.
A Ukrainian soldier walks through the basement of a restaurant that was allegedly used as a torture site by Russian forces during the occupation of Snihurivka in southern Ukraine.
Chris McGrath/Getty Images
Few men have spoken publicly about their ordeal, but Ukrainian prosecutors and rights groups say male victims make up a growing proportion of cases. The crimes often go unreported because of the stigma and shame associated with them. The latest United Nations Security Council annual report into conflict-related sexual violence said that 85 cases had been documented in Ukraine in 2023 – affecting 52 men, 31 women, one girl and one boy. A separate report from UN rights officials who interviewed 60 male Ukrainian prisoners of war following their release found that 39 were victims of sexual violence while in Russian detention.
CNN interviewed four male survivors, two in person and two by phone, and obtained testimonies from two more, who were held by Russian units across five Ukrainian regions that have been occupied or annexed by Moscow: Kherson, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, Kharkiv and Crimea. All described being subjected to forced nudity, genital electrocution – most often with wires from the Soviet-era military field telephone TA-57, known as “Tapik” – and threats of rape.
Their accounts tallied with cases documented by regional prosecutors in Kyiv, Kherson and Kharkiv and were corroborated by witnesses held in the same detention facilities in Kharkiv and Kherson.
Mariana Checheliuk, a former police officer and animal welfare volunteer, has been relocated at least six times across Russia and occupied Ukraine since she was detained two years ago outside of Mariupol.
Checheliuk Family/Getty Images
Related article Thousands of Ukrainians have been sent to Russian prisons. Ukraine says they’re being held as bargaining chips
Taken together, their stories capture what prosecutors describe as Russia’s systematic and continuing use of sexual violence in occupied areas as part of its efforts to force the Ukrainian people into submission.
“We see it over and over again in different regions under occupation. They use the same method of committing sexual violence, the same method of humiliation, the same method of how they explain it to their victims,” said Anna Sosonska, a Ukrainian prosecutor and the acting chief of the conflict-related sexual violence division in Ukraine’s Office of the Prosecutor General.
Speaking to CNN from her office in Kyiv, Sosonska said that a significant number of documented crimes of sexual violence by Russian troops, including forced nudity, genital mutilation, rape and forced exposure to sexual violence against others, were being carried out against men. “Especially by using electric current on genitals – that is the top of the list,” she said.
‘They all laughed’
Roman Chernenko said he spent seven months in a “punishment cell” in a prison in the occupied city of Olenivka, in the eastern Donetsk region, after he was captured by Russian troops in Mariupol area. The 29-year-old intelligence officer with the Ukrainian military – who goes by the call sign “Omen” – described being tortured as often as three times a day, every day, for four months.
“Tapik is a military phone with two wires. One is connected to your balls, the other to your finger, and they just keep turning the current up,” he told CNN. “They just keep twisting it until the person tells them what they need.”
He said he believes officers from Russia’s GRU, the Russian Federal Penitentiary Service (FSIN) and the FSB, Russia’s main intelligence agency, all took part in the torture.
Chernenko was released as part of a prisoner exchange in January 2024 and is still recovering from the ordeal. Speaking to CNN a few weeks after his release, on the day he proposed to his girlfriend, he said it was his thoughts of her and his mother that gave him strength to survive captivity.
“They laughed when they tortured me … they told me that my mother was being f**ked by Chechens. They took me to be shot twice, they threatened me with rape,” he said.
CNN asked Russia’s Ministry of Defense, Interior Ministry, FSB, National Guard (Rosgvardia) and the military intelligence agency, known as the GRU, for comment on allegations of sexual violence at specific detention facilities, but has not received any response.
A photo taken in Bucha shows a basement believed to have been used by Russian forces to torture and kill civilians. Ukrainian police said the bodies of five men aged between 24 and 54 were found there.
Kyodo News/Getty Images
Rape and sexual violence are explicitly prohibited by the Geneva Conventions – the set of international laws that regulate the conduct of armed conflict – and can constitute a war crime. Mock execution is considered a form of torture under international law.
Under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC), committing rape and sexual violence in a systematic or widespread way is considered a crime against humanity.
According to Ukrainian prosecutors investigating conflict-based sexual violence and abuse, all available evidence indicates that it is a deliberate tactic, part of Russia’s modus operandi in Ukraine.
“It’s in every region that was under occupation. Everywhere that Russian troops were located, we’re seeing cases of sexual violence and gender-based violence. The bottom line is that it looks like it is Russian policy,” Sosonska said.
As of early May, Ukraine has officially recorded 293 cases of sexual violence, although Sosonska said that it is impossible to estimate the real number of crimes that are being committed, particularly in occupied territories which remain inaccessible to its investigators and prosecutors.
A Ukrainian flag flies in a damaged residential area in the city of Borodianka, northwest of the Ukrainian capital Kyiv.
Sergei Chuzavkov/SOPA Images/Sipa USA/Reuters
Related article World must learn from Bosnian war in dealing with sexual violence in Ukraine conflict, report says
Some 37,000 Ukrainian citizens are unaccounted for, according to the Ukrainian ombudsman’s office, with thousands believed to be held in Russian detention and at risk of torture and sexual violence.
But the real scale of sexual violence committed during the war may never come to light. Only a fraction of victims tend to come forward and, according to the UN, this is especially true for men, some of whom may not initially realize that what happened to them was a sexual violence crime.
Some male victims of sexual violence may describe what happened to them instead as “torture.” The distinction, Sosonska explained, is important for any future court cases and war tribunals. Her office is also trying to educate the public about the fact that men can be victims of sexual violence – something Sosonska said may still not be fully understood.
Anna Mykytenko, who heads the Ukraine team at Global Rights Compliance (GRC), an international legal non-profit, said that Ukrainian witnesses and survivors of sexual violence have testified that Russian troops told them it was a “punishment.”
“In several villages in the south we heard witnesses and survivors say that the Russian servicemen came in, occupied the village, and then looked specifically for the wives of Ukrainian soldiers, or their mothers or sisters,” Mykytenko told CNN. GRC acts as the co-lead of the Atrocity Crimes Advisory Group, an initiative launched by the European Union, the United States and the United Kingdom to provide Ukraine with assistance in the investigation and prosecution of atrocity crimes.
Mykytenko said that while most cases of conflict-related sexual crimes that were reported and investigated earlier in the war concerned female victims, many of the cases recently recorded have been against male victims, especially against men held in captivity.
“Sexual crimes are fairly common in detention centers and it’s very common for prisoners of war or civilians to be threatened with rape or with the sexual abuse of different types, this is something that’s almost normal for the Russian and Russia-related armed forces,” she said.
‘A systematic approach’
The Ukrainian ombudsman’s office told CNN it believes that the Russian armed forces and Ministry of Defense, as well as the Russian Federal Penitentiary Service, are the Russian government bodies officially responsible for what happens inside detention facilities.
However, it is Rosgvardia – a paramilitary police force deployed to keep order in occupied regions of Ukraine – and the FSB that appear to be driving the campaign of torture and sexual violence against the Ukrainian people, according to the ombudsman and Ukraine’s military intelligence service.
Since the start of the full-scale invasion in 2022, the FSB has opened several regional offices in occupied Ukraine to recruit agents and gather intelligence. According to an official organizational chart published on its website, the FSB has directorates in the self-declared Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics, in Crimea and in the occupied portions of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions.
Several survivors in these locations told CNN that the Russians who submitted them to sexual violence either identified themselves or were referred to by others as FSB officers.
Meanwhile, members of Rosgvardia, part of the Russian security apparatus that reports directly to Russian President Vladimir Putin, are working alongside the Russian military to detain activists, quash protests and spread terror among the civilian population in occupied areas.
The SBU, Ukraine’s security service, has managed to track down several Rosgvardia and FSB officials who it said were either the direct perpetrators or the enablers of sexual violence against people held in detention.
A Rosgvardia serviceman watches a parade in Russia. The force, which reports directly to Russian President Vladimir Putin, has been deployed to occupied Ukraine to quash protests and opposition.
Aleksey Smagin/Sipa USA/AP
The SBU and the Ukrainian regional prosecutor’s office in Kherson have identified Aleksandr Naumenko, the deputy head of Rosgvardia in Russia’s Rostov region, as a suspect in more than a dozen cases. Ukrainian authorities said last May he was responsible for overseeing a detention facility in Kherson during the occupation and that he personally ordered sexual torture of several victims who were electrocuted in their genital areas.
The notice of suspicion against Naumenko, a legal document seen by CNN, alleges that his subordinates and other members of Russian armed forces acted directly on his orders when they sexually abused at least 17 victims.
Two other Rosgvardia officers – Oleksandr Chilengirov and Yehor Bondarenkov – have also been accused of torture, including electrocuting at least 24 victims in their genitals at a different detention facility in Kherson.
Dmitry Laikov, an officer with the FSB’s Department for the Defense of Constitutional Order and Fight against Terrorism, is accused of overseeing genital electrocution of a detained Ukrainian citizen in a police station in the occupied city of Nova Kakhovka.
All four men have been indicted and their cases are currently being heard in court, according to Kherson prosecutors. Their whereabouts are unknown.
Mandatory Credit: Photo by Xinhua/Shutterstock (9635540c) Pramila Patten (front), Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General on Sexual Violence in Conflict, addresses a Security Council open debate on preventing sexual violence in conflict UN Security Council Meeting, New York, USA - 16 Apr 2018 UN Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed on Monday stressed the need to stop sexual violence in conflict.
Xinhua/Shutterstock
Related article Russia using rape as ‘military strategy’ in Ukraine: UN envoy
Ukrainian officials say that it is difficult, but not impossible, to track down individual perpetrators of sexual violence crimes. As of early May, Ukrainian prosecutors had issued official notices of suspicion against 42 Russian officers, filed 19 indictments against 28 individuals and sentenced five people. All of the trials took place in absentia, according to the prosecutors’ office.
Sosonska told CNN a handful of cases are added to her file each month, and that investigations are progressing. However, none of the alleged perpetrators are in Ukrainian custody.
Oleksii Butenko, a prosecutor in the Kherson regional prosecutor’s office, said he has no doubt that sexual violence was part of Russia’s strategy to subjugate the Ukrainian people in Kherson and to “destroy the Ukrainian national identity.”
“We can speak of a systematic approach – 17 men were identified as having been sexually abused inside a single torture chamber,” he told CNN. “We can say that the leadership, not only the perpetrators but also the management, is responsible – they gave permission or orders to commit these crimes.”
‘They were having fun’
Andrii, a Kherson resident who was held in one of the Russian detention facilities, still remembers the screams of his fellow detainees more than a year and half after he was released. “We were kept in the basement of an office building. It was a small room with no furniture, we slept on cardboard and used a bucket to go to the toilet,” Andrii said.
Speaking to CNN in Kyiv, Andrii was clutching his hands nervously, looking away when describing what happened during his time in detention. He asked for his name to be changed and that no identifiable information about him be published.
“I was the last one to be taken in for interrogation, so I could hear them all being tortured in the next room. I couldn’t hear the conversations, only the screams and the moans. It was impossible to sleep because of these screams,” he said, recalling one particularly horrifying incident. “I don’t know who this man was and what happened to him … he was taken out into the corridor, where he was raped with a baton so that everyone could hear and see him.”
A war crime prosecutor inspects a basement of an office building in Kherson where some 30 people were held for two months during the Russian occupation.
Anna Voitenko/Reuters
According to Andrii, the threats of rape and genital electrocution were the norm among the Russian forces. “They enjoyed it. They were having fun,” he said.
Ukrainian prosecutors have recorded incidents of Russian officials raping or attempting to rape victims using objects including batons, a pipe, a bottle, a handle of a shovel, a stick and a pen.
Sosonska said her office is determined to bring to justice not just the direct perpetrators, but also those who were in charge – whether they ordered them or failed to prevent them.
Her office is focused on prosecuting individuals, but it is also collecting evidence that will be shared with international courts, including the ICC, which prosecutes individuals over grave offenses such as genocide and war crimes, and the International Court of Justice (ICJ), which hears cases brought up against states.
The ICC has already issued an arrest warrant for Putin and Russia’s children’s commissioner, Maria Lvova-Belova, over an alleged scheme to deport Ukrainian children to Russia. The Kremlin has denied the allegations and called the ICC’s actions “outrageous.”
Sosonska said she believes that, just like the child deportations, sexual violence is part of what she called “Russia’s genocidal campaign” against Ukraine.
‘It is happening now’
Oleksii Sivak knew the Russians were coming for him after his neighbor Shapovalenko, the farm manager, was taken.
The 39-year-old sailor from Kherson had helped him put up Ukrainian flags around their neighborhood on Ukrainian Independence Day.
Both men were civilian volunteers. Shapovalenko had been distributing supplies, helping people evacuate and sharing information about the location of Russian troops with Ukrainian military acquaintances, while Sivak ran a soup kitchen, organizing assistance, distributing leaflets and putting up posters and flags.
“We already knew about these torture rooms; we knew that people do not return from there. I went to deliver soup, warned the people I was helping, cut off all contacts and came home to wait for them,” he said. Hiding or trying to go on the run was not an option, he added, saying he was aware Russian forces were targeting the relatives of people they were interested in.
He said eight men came to arrest him – four in military uniforms and four wearing civilian clothes, all with their faces covered. They took him to a local police station and then handed him over to what they said was the FSB.
He recalled being beaten and tortured with an electric current from the same kind of field telephone described as being used in other detention facilities. “They called it ‘the lie detector’ and they were obviously having fun when spinning the dynamo, asking me ‘do you want to call Zelensky?’” he told CNN in an interview in Kyiv.
“First, they put the clamps on my ears and while they were shocking me, they were also beating me with a stick, kicking me, and hitting me with their hands … then they moved these wires from my ears to my genitals. They said, ‘we’re going to sterilize you now’ and things like that, while they were electrocuting my genitals.” Sivak believes he has a pretty good idea why the Russian troops chose to torture him in the way they did and threatened him with rape.
Mass burial site in Izyum, Ukraine. (Office of the President of Ukraine)
Office of the President of Ukraine
Related article Some bodies found at mass burial site in Izium show ‘signs of torture,’ Ukraine says
“They wanted to humiliate me. It’s obvious. What do you do to cause a man the most pain? You hurt his wife or his genitals,” he said.
Of the dozens of men he was held with, Sivak said roughly half were subjected to sexual violence. “It’s a whole system. Four people (tortured me) but they were just the hatchet men. Yes, they have no brains, yes, they are animals, but even if they are imprisoned, what about their bosses? Someone was managing them; someone was giving them orders.”
Sivak said he and several other survivors have formed an informal support group and are trying to raise awareness of the fact that men can be victims of sexual violence. Sivak has attended meetings with government officials and conferences where he shared his experiences.
Ukraine is prepared for a lengthy process to bring perpetrators to justice – while protecting the victims. Since the beginning of the full-scale war, Sosonska’s prosecutors, as well as other civil servants and local government officials, have received specialized training on victim-oriented approaches, learning how to recognize conflict-related sexual violence, run investigations and communicate with victims.
Some of the training programs have been provided by the UN in a direct response to the large number of sexual crimes occurring during the occupation. Others are run in cooperation with local non-governmental organizations and victim support groups. The UN has also co-sponsored a psychological helpline specifically aimed at male survivors.
It can take years or even longer for courts to rule and victims to speak out. Some survivors of sexual violence committed by the Bosnian Serb army during the Bosnian war in the early 1990s are only now coming forward.
“Some survivors might be willing to testify within a few months, for some, it may never happen, they may never be ready,” Sosonska said.
As for Shapovalenko, he said he wanted everyone to know what happened to him – and what is still happening to others.
“I want to tell everyone, tell the international community, that it is not like they came, occupied us, stood there with machine guns and left. No, it wasn’t like that,” he said. “And the most terrible thing is not what I am telling you now. The most terrible thing is that it is happening now in the occupied territories.”
CNN’s Svitlana Vlasova and Victoria Butenko contributed reporting.
CNN · by Ivana Kottasová · May 30, 2024
11. Powerful GOP senator eyes ships, jets, nukes in defense spending surge
Yes we need all of this. But just as importantly we have to find a way to pay for all of it.
But we also need to employ a lot of capabilities that are of relatively little cost compared to these important platforms and systems. We need a little bit of money, the right authorities and permissions, effective campaign plans, and political will to compete in the gray zone of political and irregular warfare. We cannot afford to lose while we are deterring (and preparing for) a major conflict.
Powerful GOP senator eyes ships, jets, nukes in defense spending surge
Defense News · by Bryant Harris · May 29, 2024
The top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee has released a detailed plan calling for an additional $55 billion above the fiscal 2025 defense spending caps imposed under last year’s debt ceiling deal.
The plan, unveiled Wednesday by Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., would ultimately raise U.S. defense spending from 3% to 5% of gross domestic product in the years ahead, a massive surge likely to come in well above $1 trillion per year.
Much of the proposed long-term spending in Wicker’s plan would go toward revitalizing the struggling defense-industrial base, which the senator argues is necessary to successfully counter an “axis of aggressors” comprised of China, Russia, Iran and North Korea.
He hopes additional industrial base funding will enable the U.S. to drastically bolster the size of its Navy and Air Force fleets as well as munitions production and the nuclear arsenal.
“This will enable the United States to fix our failing defense infrastructure, field a new generation of equipment and maintain American technological leadership,” Wicker wrote in the proposal. “This [3%] of GDP spent on defense is nearing historic lows not seen since the peace dividend of the 1990s.”
The document lays out many of Wicker’s short- and long-term priorities as the Senate Armed Services Committee prepares to mark up its FY25 defense policy bill next month. The House Armed Services Committee advanced its defense policy legislation last week, an $883.7 billion bill in line with the FY25 defense spending caps lawmakers agreed to last year.
Some of the additional $55 billion Wicker seeks to add above the FY25 spending caps mirrors the unfunded priorities lists each military service and combatant command submitted to Congress earlier this year.
For instance, Wicker wants an additional $2 billion to “disperse and harden [U.S. Indo-Pacific Command] infrastructure,” another $2.25 billion for “Guam disaster recovery and resilient rebuild,” and $500 million for a Guam defense system.
Additionally, Wicker is seeking $500 million to create “regional contingency stockpiles” to help Indo-Pacific Command overcome logistical challenges in the event of a conflict in the area.
“Prepositioned stocks generally must be expanded in the western Pacific,” the document notes. “In particular, the Army Prepositioned Stocks program has been perennially underfunded — by almost $1 billion this year.”
Wicker’s proposal also calls on the Pentagon to create a weapons stockpile in Taiwan, which Congress authorized in the FY23 defense bill, mirroring the U.S. war reserve stockpile in Israel.
It also seeks to allocate $1.5 billion in replenishment funds to allow the Defense Department to send Taiwan weapons from U.S. stockpiles. The foreign aid bill Congress passed in April included $1.9 billion in FY24 funding for the department to do this, but the House defense policy bill did not include an additional $500 million in FY25 Taiwan aid that the Pentagon asked for as part of its proposed Indo-Pacific Security Initiative.
Sens. Jon Tester, D-Mont., and Susan Collins, R-Maine, lead the defense appropriations panel and have also said they want to increase FY25 defense spending above the debt ceiling deal’s FY25 spending caps.
But Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., who chairs the Senate Appropriations Committee, said earlier this month that if defense spending rises, she will insist that nondefense spending also grow, which Republicans have historically opposed.
Total defense spending for FY24 came in at $953 billion following passage of the foreign aid bill, well above the $886 billion national security caps Congress laid out in the base budget for that fiscal year.
The 5% target
Over the longer term, Wicker’s proposal to increase defense spending to 5% of GDP places particular emphasis on growing the defense-industrial base.
“The defense industrial base itself is a weapon,” the proposal states. “The Department of Defense needs a much larger and more capable workforce for defense industrial base issues.”
“For surface ships, the Navy needs to embark immediately upon a comprehensive industrial base investment strategy, just as it has done for the submarine industrial base,” it continues. “As with the submarine industrial base, this investment strategy will require around $20 billion over a period of five years.”
These funds would go toward “extensive funding for workforce development, supply chain resiliency, long-lead item production, development and insertion of additive manufacturing techniques, supplier base diversification and shipyard modernization and expansion.”
Wicker also calls on the Navy to “begin work on a fifth nuclear shipyard, which will likely cost over $20 billion.”
The document faults the Navy for failing “to provide a consistent demand signal to industry” but argues that with the right funding it can meet and even exceed the 355-ship goal by 2035.
Similarly, it notes “the Air Force plans to retire almost 1,000 aircraft over the next five years, including nearly 400 fighters.”
“It has not replaced its aircraft fast enough to keep the fleet from shrinking precipitously, even as the mission demands remain steady or increase,” it reads.
Accordingly, Wicker’s proposal calls on the Air Force to purchase “at least 340″ aircraft above its current plan over the next five years while accelerating production of B-21 bombers and doubling its planned quantity from 100 to 200.
“The Air Force should aim to arrest its shrinking fighter force structure by reversing its plans to retire capable F-15E and F-22 fighters over the next five years and by purchasing at least 340 aircraft above its current plans over the next five years,” the proposal notes.
Additionally, the document cites “a well-known shortage of munitions that will require both additional funding and additional creativity to remedy.” It calls for an additional $7 billion to $10 billion annually for the munitions-industrial base over the next decade.
The document also details a series of industrial base recommendations to grow the U.S. nuclear arsenal. These include extended production of the Columbia-class ballistic missile submarine; setting up NATO-style nuclear burden-sharing agreements with Australia, Japan and South Korea; and restoring nuclear capability on B-52 bombers.
Wicker has also co-sponsored a bill to expand the U.S. nuclear arsenal. The legislation’s other sponsor, Sen. Deb Fischer, R-Neb., hopes to include it in the Senate’s FY25 defense policy bill.
About Bryant Harris
Bryant Harris is the Congress reporter for Defense News. He has covered U.S. foreign policy, national security, international affairs and politics in Washington since 2014. He has also written for Foreign Policy, Al-Monitor, Al Jazeera English and IPS News.
12. Civil Affairs Assessment and Selection: Everything you need to know
A key element of the two special operations "trinities:" (https://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/two-special-operations-trinities)
1. Missions:
Irregular warfare
Unconventional warfare
Support to political warfare
2. Comparative advantage of SOF:
Influence
Governance
Support to indigenous forces and populations
Civil Affairs Assessment and Selection: Everything you need to know
Civil Affairs soldiers work in small teams to stabilize a host nation’s area of operations. It all starts with Civil Affairs Assessment and Selection.
BY JOSHUA SKOVLUND | PUBLISHED MAY 28, 2024 6:03 PM EDT
taskandpurpose.com · by Joshua Skovlund · May 28, 2024
The U.S. Army’s Civil Affairs soldiers are the definition of diplomatic warriors. They are highly skilled in tactical operations but can quickly transition into a suit and tie to talk to a host nation’s diplomats at a level most U.S. politicians struggle to achieve. To join the ranks, a soldier must pass the Civil Affairs Assessment and Selection course.
Located at Ft. Liberty, the assessment and selection course isn’t the longest of the different entrance training courses required for most special operations units, but it’s not for the faint of heart. That being said, you should know that soldiers must sign a non-disclosure agreement in order to attend the training — so some details of the course are closely guarded.
Don’t let the shorter assessment and selection timeframe trick you, though: it’s a grueling test for the most fit, but Civil Affairs isn’t just looking for athletic ability.
“Somebody who’s smart, like a higher IQ, is going to be very successful here. Somebody who can interact with strangers and different cultures — having that adaptability piece is very crucial, even at Civil Affairs Assessment and Selection event,” said Ed, whose last name is withheld due to the nature of his work as the officer in charge of Civil Affairs Assessment & Selection. “Then, being a good team player because we test them on the team application and see how they interact on the team, what their leadership personalities look like, what their fellowship personalities are, and things of that nature.”
A brief history of Civil Affairs Assessment and Selection
Civil Affairs traces its history back to Aug. 1945, when the 95th Headquarters and Headquarters Detachment, Military Government Group, helped Japan transition away from a wartime society before the unit was inactivated in Kurume, Japan, in June 1946.
The Detachment was inactivated and activated during the different conflicts, serving critical roles during the Korean War and smaller conflicts around the world. At the time of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the 96th Civil Affairs Battalion had 206 soldiers assigned to regionally aligned companies. With the uptick of operations during the War on Terror, the 96th Civil Affairs Battalion was authorized more soldiers and redesignated as a brigade on March 16, 2007.
Civil Affairs Assessment and Selection was first established as a pilot under the 95th Brigade Headquarters in 2010. The first class to attend the course was in October of that year. During the pilot program phase, all people attending assessment and selection were approved for the following four phases of the Civil Affairs Qualification Course.
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Elvia Kelly, a John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School (SWCS) public affairs officer, said they do not know the exact attrition rate of the early classes, but 90 to 100 soldiers per class were passing the training back then.
The course was moved from the 95th Brigade headquarts to SWCS in late 2011 and became part of Echo Company, 1st Battalion, 1st Special Warfare Training Group. Several changes have been made to improve the overall program over the years.
“Events were refined to better draw out attributes; scenarios were tailored to create a more robust environment for candidates to navigate; and a number of events were removed and/or replaced to improve the assessment of candidates,” Kelly said. “Some changes were implemented to better collect data for the qualification course. Event staging and course schedule have been revised over time to support cadre work cycles and assessment environment, as well.”
How long is Civil Affairs Assessment and Selection?
1st Lt. Ian Bridson attempted the assessment and selection course but did not get selected, though he made it to the end. He had trained hard and was well prepared for the course, but the 10 days showed him time is nothing but a sliding scale when you are being tested physically and mentally for multiple days in a row.
“We were all sitting around eating dinner and looked at each other and said there’s no way in hell we’ve been here for only 10 days. It feels like we have been here for a solid 30 days — that’s the feeling we had at the very end,” Bridson said. “Just the sheer amount of pain, muscle fatigue, and stress everyone had been through is enough to make you not want to go again.”
Once a soldier has successfully passed the assessment and selection, they aren’t going to their unit — yet. They will move on to the four phases that make up the Civil Affairs Qualification Course: military occupation specialty (MOS) training, tactical “SOF skills” training, a final culminating exercise, and then language training.
Civil Affairs Assessment and Selection requirements
Like many of the schools and courses offered within the military, soldiers must meet basic requirements for height and weight standards for their age bracket. You can check their current PFA standards here.
In addition to the PFA standards, a soldier must meet all the requirements necessary to join the military in the first place. Specific requirements outside of initial entry training requirements include:
- Possess a valid SERE-C Physical Exam
- Be airborne qualified or be willing to volunteer for the training.
- Must be eligible for an interim SECRET security clearance
- No history of domestic violence charges
- No history of driving under the influence charges
- No failed drug tests
- Have a Defense Language Aptitude Battery (DLAB) score of 65 or higher
There are additional requirements for military personnel, both enlisted and officers. Specialists must attend and graduate the Basic Leadership Course, have no more than six years of time in service, and have 12 months or more left on their contract. Enlisted soldiers must have the rank of specialist or sergeant. Sergeants must have a minimum of two years and no more than eight years time in service.
For those going for the 38W MOS (civil affairs medical sergeant), soldiers must have a minimum score of 11 in aptitude area GT and 101 in the aptitude area ST on the ASVAB. Soldiers going for the 38R MOS (civil reconnaissance sergeant) must have minimum scores of 107 in aptitude area GT and 100 in aptitude area CO.
“Pretty much every time you want to try and change MOS, your branch of service, or whatever you want to do, there’s always a packet involved — the government loves its paperwork,” Bridson said. “With civil affairs here at Fort Riley, the special operations recruiters are actually very open. They go to a lot of units and a lot of training events in the Fort Riley area to recruit from.”
Make sure you check with your special operations recruiters in your area to find out the most up-to-date requirements to join civil affairs.
Civil Affairs Assessment and Selection preparation
A civil affairs officer who was previously assigned to the 95th Civil Affairs Brigade who is not cleared to speak on the record said he trained for selection using CrossFit, ultramarathon training, and much more to get himself physically ready.
“Do not mistake me. It is physically grueling and challenging,” the former civil affairs officer said. “But at no point did I ever feel like I was going to quit. It was more the mental fortitude that is required and the mental resiliency that you need to make it through.”
Both the officer in charge and the NCO in charge of the assessment and selection recommended that anyone interested in trying out follows the training program offered by their team.
It’s not just physical fitness a recruit must master ahead of the training, it’s the mentally demanding tasks that test your ability as a good leader and teammate. It’s cultural circumstances that you’ll be thrust into without much notice, if any. You’ll have to rise to the occasion using your communication skills in a way you’ve never had to before.
Soldiers must sign nondisclosure agreements (NDA) covering the entire course and other NDAs covering specific portions of the course. No specific preparation guidance was provided because of the NDAs that may help with cultural scenarios one might be subjected to during assessment and selection.
Ed likes to recommend that people try to connect with complete strangers at events or while out doing a hobby activity.
“A well-versed person who’s probably caught up on just the general news. It’s not something they need to do, but it’s definitely something that’s going to help,” Ed said. “What I always tell a candidate who lacks that adaptability to step into an unknown scenario and be successful in whatever their hobbies are is go step into an uncomfortable situation with a bunch of strangers and try to have general conversations with people and be able to get what you want.”
Everyone recommended that civil affairs hopefuls show up with razor-sharp communication skills in all formats. If you grew up mainly writing via a keyboard, Bridson recommended that you get better at writing on paper. If you’re not good with communications in all formats, you won’t be able to conduct your work as a civil affairs soldier.
“You have to be able to write reports. You have to be able to do it with or without a computer,” Bridson said. “You have to be able to do it while you’re tired after you just spent 20 hours with like a governor or something. You have to be able to do that kind of stuff. That’s exactly what they’re trying to get at during the selection process.”
Bridson sustained an injury during the assessment and selection that had negative effects on his physical performance, but he suspected his writing on paper was part of why he wasn’t selected. After finding out he didn’t get to move on, one of the cadre asked him how much he writes on paper. That’s an example of what you need to master ahead of the course.
The last note on preparing for assessment and selection comes from the former 95th Civil Affairs Brigade officer and it’s something you must possess but isn’t necessarily trainable.
“Being able to build relationships in these places and get your mission accomplished, whatever that mission is, is by being a human. Just being a human and having empathy,” the officer said. “That’s one of those things that’s not trainable or teachable. That right there is paramount to building relationships. You can’t just be a military robot.”
What is Civil Affairs Assessment and Selection really like?
Soldiers need to go into selection with an open mind, be physically fit, and be comfortable jumping into high-stress situations, like a tribal leader wanting to ban U.S. troops from his village. Critically thinking through an emotionally charged cultural scenario isn’t easy, and saying the wrong thing can solidify a person’s resilience to a U.S. presence.
That skill set will develop as a soldier moves further into the Civil Affairs Qualification Course. The former civil affairs officer said that despite showing up very physically prepared, the mental aspect of the physical challenges is hard to prepare for.
“The big thing was everything being an unknown distance; that really makes it difficult to pace yourself,” the officer said. “Do I go hard and then just burn it to the ground kind of mentality? Or do you hold back a little bit, and if you hold back, did you hold back too much?”
Bridson recalled how one of the cadre pointed out that their assessment and selection is “shit on a lot” in comparison to other training like Ranger School or the Ranger Assessment and Selection Program (RASP). The cadre member said the timeline is shorter — it’s no long-term endurance event — like the special operations version of a sprint.
There was almost no downtime between the unknown-distance physical feats and high-stress training scenarios. In the end, when the recruits were all waiting for the final answer on whether they would move into phase one, Bridson said they all had the same thought.
“We were all sitting around eating dinner and looked at each other and said there’s no way in hell we’ve been here for only 10 days. It feels like we have been here for a solid 30 days, so that’s the feeling we had at the very end. Just the sheer amount of pain, muscle fatigue, and just mental stress everyone was in was just enough to make you not want to go again.”
The key thing to remember is that your every action is being analyzed by the cadre. Every conversation you have with someone, your physical performance, and your cultural interactions are all under the microscope to ensure you are a good fit for civil affairs.
Civil Affairs FAQs
You have questions, Task & Purpose has answers.
Q: How hard is Civil Affairs Assessment and Selection?
A: It’s no walk in the park and you must be physically and mentally dialed in to successfully make it through the course.
Q: What does a civil affairs soldier do?
A: A civil affairs soldier has knowledge of civil populations and governance influence behaviors of a targeted audience and counter threats. Civil affairs teams find, disrupt, and defeat threats while building relationships with those afflicted within the operations area.
Q: How big is a Civil Affairs Team?
A: A Civil Affairs Team, called a CAT, has four people on the team. Each team has a civil reconnaissance sergeant, a civil affairs medical sergeant, a team sergeant, and a team commander.
Q: Does passing Civil Affairs Assessment and Selection make you Jason Bourne?
A: No, it does not. But, you’ll have similar skills when it comes to blending in with indigenous populations to further the mission of the United States of America.
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taskandpurpose.com · by Joshua Skovlund · May 28, 2024
13. Israel’s Claim of Control Over Border Zone Risks Raising Tensions With Egypt
Middle East Crisis
Israel’s Claim of Control Over Border Zone Risks Raising Tensions With Egypt
Image
Israeli armored personnel carriers moving along the border with the Gaza Strip in southern Israel on Wednesday.Credit...Amir Levy/Getty Images
TOP NEWS
Gaza and Egypt share a sensitive border that the Israeli military has moved to control.
The Israeli military’s announcement that it had seized “tactical control” of a sensitive border strip between Gaza and Egypt comes after weeks of rising tensions between the two sides over Israel’s advance into Rafah.
Israeli forces advanced into the roughly nine-mile-long area — known as the Philadelphi Corridor — in an attempt to crack down on Hamas’s ability to rearm itself by smuggling munitions into Gaza through tunnels from Egypt, according to the Israeli military. The move was part of the Israeli offensive in the southern Gaza city of Rafah, which has prompted more than one million Palestinians to flee, according to the United Nations.
Egypt and Israel have repeatedly butted heads over the push into Rafah. After Israel captured the Rafah crossing between Gaza and Egypt in early May, the gateway effectively shut down, with each side blaming the other for the impasse. On Monday, at least one Egyptian soldier was killed in a shooting incident with Israeli forces near the Rafah crossing; both sides say they are investigating the matter.
Earlier this year, Egypt warned that if Israeli forces occupied the Philadelphi Corridor, it would pose a “serious threat” to relations between the two countries. But Egyptian officials have yet to publicly comment in the wake of the Israeli announcement.
On Wednesday night, in response to Israel’s announcement about the corridor, Egypt’s state-run Al-Qahera News channel quoted an unnamed senior official saying “there is no truth” to claims of tunnels under the border.
Egyptian and Israeli authorities coordinate closely on security, with defense officials regularly meeting in Cairo and Tel Aviv. Although Egypt and Israel fought at least three major wars before a 1979 peace treaty, they now have a cold peace: Their publics remain largely at odds, but their security establishments have close and continuing contact.
Israeli military officials have generally shied away from accusing Egypt of failing to crack down on cross-border smuggling, which some analysts called an attempt to avoid damaging the sensitive and important ties between the two countries.
The Israeli military official said “tactical control” did not mean that Israeli forces were present at every point along the Philadelphi Corridor. But he said it meant that Israel could effectively disrupt Hamas’s supply lines, which pass through the border zone.
On Wednesday night, Daniel Hagari, the Israeli military spokesman, declined to explicitly confirm that Israeli forces had uncovered cross-border tunnels in the corridor. But an Israeli military official, who briefed reporters Wednesday on condition of anonymity to comply with military protocol, said that troops had identified at least 20 tunnels running from Gaza into Egypt.
Egyptian officials were likely most concerned by the prospect that the war could prompt Gazans to flood across the border into the Sinai Peninsula, said Eli Shaked, a former Israeli ambassador to Cairo. As long as that prospect remained distant, whatever discontent Israel’s operation had stirred could be contained, he added.
“Both Israel and Egypt understand their true interests,” said Mr. Shaked. “There’s tension, disappointment and frustrations on both sides — but they are trying to keep those under the table.”
— Aaron Boxerman reporting from Jerusalem
14. What the I.C.J. Ruling Actually Means for Israel’s Offensive in Rafah
I refer to the Wall Street Journal article here: https://www.wsj.com/articles/israel-hamas-and-the-law-of-war-31362893?mod=latest_headlines
What the I.C.J. Ruling Actually Means for Israel’s Offensive in Rafah
There is a substantial consensus among legal experts that Israel cannot continue its current Rafah offensive without violating the court’s order.
Judge Nawaf Salam, Judge Abdulqawi Ahmed Yusuf and Judge Georg Nolte at a hearing at the International Court of Justice in The Hague last week.Credit...Koen Van Weel/ANP, via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
By Amanda Taub
Reporting from London
May 30, 2024
Updated 3:55 a.m. ET
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I had two thoughts on Friday as I listened to the chief judge of the International Court of Justice tell Israel to halt its military offensive in Rafah, the city in southern Gaza to which more than a million displaced people fled earlier in the conflict.
The first was that the court’s ruling was unusually forceful: the judge said Israel “must halt” its military offensive in Rafah “immediately.” Many observers had not expected the court to issue such a direct order because it has no jurisdiction to impose similar requirements on Hamas, Israel’s opponent in the war.
My second thought was that the court’s use of punctuation was definitely going to provoke debate. Here’s the key part of the ruling:
The State of Israel shall, in conformity with its obligations under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, and in view of the worsening conditions of life faced by civilians in the Rafah Governorate:
Immediately halt its military offensive, and any other action in the Rafah Governorate, which may inflict on the Palestinian group in Gaza conditions of life that could bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.
Sure enough, for several days some legal scholars have been arguing about whether the clause that begins “which may inflict” might put conditions on the order to “immediately halt.”
Has Israel been told to halt its offensive, or to do so only if that offensive is about to partly or completely destroy Palestinians as a group?
Image
Israeli soldiers moving along the border with the Gaza Strip in southern Israel on Wednesday.Credit...Amir Levy/Getty Images
In some ways, the debate is a distraction. There is a substantial consensus among legal experts that Israel cannot continue its current offensive in Rafah without violating the court’s order. Five leading legal scholars I contacted said the order was clear on that point, and more said the same in interviews and social media posts online. (“The current offensive as currently planned and executed is prohibited under any reading,” wrote Adil Haque, an international law expert at Rutgers University. “This sentence means Israel must halt its current military offensive in Rafah,” wrote Janina Dill, the co-director of the Oxford Institute for Ethics, Law, and Armed Conflict.)
An earlier paragraph of the order offered vital context, these experts pointed out, and clearly explained the urgency of the court’s intervention:
“On the basis of the information before it, the Court is not convinced that the evacuation efforts and related measures that Israel affirms to have undertaken to enhance the security of civilians in the Gaza Strip, and in particular those recently displaced from the Rafah Governorate, are sufficient to alleviate the immense risk to which the Palestinian population is exposed as a result of the military offensive in Rafah.”
That, the court went on to explain, was the reason for the new order. Notice the use of the word “current” here: “The Court finds that the current situation arising from Israel’s military offensive in Rafah entails a further risk” to the rights of Palestinians in Gaza, the order says.
There is a wider range of disagreement about what Israel could legally do instead. But that is not immediately relevant, because all indications are that Israel is continuing the current offensive despite the court’s instructions to stop.
How did we get here?
To recap: Friday’s order was an interim decision in a case that South Africa filed in December, alleging that Israel’s military actions in Gaza violate the 1948 Genocide Convention. The court can only rule on Israel’s behavior, not that of Hamas, because Hamas is neither a state nor a party to the genocide convention. Israel has categorically denied that it is committing genocide.
A decision on the merits of the case is probably years away. In the meantime, the court has issued a series of “provisional measures” — essentially temporary injunctions — ordering Israel to proactively ensure genocide doesn’t occur while the broader case is pending.
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The first, issued in January, ordered Israel to refrain from genocidal acts, to prevent and punish incitement and to enable the provision of humanitarian assistance. A subsequent order in March added a requirement that Israel take “all necessary and effective measures” to ensure the delivery of humanitarian aid “at scale.”
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Displaced Palestinians inspecting damage to their tents in a makeshift camp in Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip, in March.Credit...Said Khatib/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
In early May, after Israel began its military operation in Rafah, South Africa urgently requested new provisional measures, arguing that the Rafah incursion would cause “irreparable harm to the rights of the Palestinian people in Gaza.” On Friday, by a majority of 13 to 2, the court’s judges found that the risks to civilians warned of in previous orders had now materialized, and that the situation had become “disastrous.”
“Israel has not provided sufficient information concerning the safety of the population during the evacuation process,” the court found, “or the availability in the Al-Mawasi area of the necessary amount of water, sanitation, food, medicine and shelter for the 800,000 Palestinians that have evacuated thus far.” (Al-Mawasi is a coastal area in Gaza to which many of the civilians in Rafah had been displaced.)
That created a risk of “irreparable prejudice to the plausible rights claimed by South Africa,” the court found, and so it ordered Israel to halt its military offensive in Rafah. It also ordered Israel to keep the Rafah crossing on the border with Egypt open “at scale” for the provision of humanitarian aid, and to allow U.N.-mandated investigators access to Gaza.
One order, two commas, many opinions
Some experts have noted that when the I.C.J. ordered Russia to halt its war in Ukraine in March 2022, the wording was more direct: “The Russian Federation shall immediately suspend the military operations that it commenced on 24 February 2022 in the territory of Ukraine,” that provisional measures order stated. (In that case, the ruling was also 13 to 2.)
So why would the court be even slightly ambiguous in this case? It may have been intentional, said Yuval Shany, an international law professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Perhaps the vague language helped convince more judges to sign the order, he said, even if they did not all agree on a single interpretation of its meaning. There is actually a term for that phenomenon in international law, Shany noted. The term “constructive ambiguity” refers to when “you’re not able to actually reach a consensus formulation, so you use language that everyone can live with,” he said.
Updated
May 30, 2024, 7:51 a.m. ET52 minutes ago
52 minutes ago
It might have been easier to convince a majority to agree to the unambiguous order in the Russia case, which followed the invasion of Ukraine, because invading another state’s territory is barred by international law. By contrast, Israel’s military operations came in response to Hamas’s attack on Israeli soil last October. Using force in self-defense is allowed under international law, though it is still subject to other laws of war and the prohibitions on genocide and other crimes.
Three of the judges who joined the majority in last week’s decision wrote separately to explain their interpretation of the order. Each indicated that there would be some circumstances in which certain types of military operations could continue: if the operations did not “inflict on the Palestinian group in Gaza conditions of life that could bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part” (Judge Bogdan Aurescu); if they did not prevent the provision of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance (Judge Georg Nolte); or if they were limited to “defensive operations to repel specific attacks,” carried out in accordance with international law (Judge Dire Tladi).
But none appeared to say that the operation could continue in its current form — and Judge Tladi explicitly ruled that out.
“What would not be consistent is the continuation of the offensive military operation in Rafah, and elsewhere,” he wrote.
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Smoke rising above Rafah this month.Credit...Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
All of the experts I spoke to agreed that the order prohibited Israel from continuing its current operation in Rafah, but believed it allowed for Israel to take more limited defensive actions in the city in response to attacks from Hamas.
Pierre d’Argent, a professor at the University of Louvain in Belgium, initially appeared to take a relatively restrictive view of the court’s order in his posts on social media, where he argued that the court had ordered Israel only “to change course in its military operations, not to stop them all together in Rafah.”
But when I reached out to him, d’Argent told me via email that in fact “the issue is rather straightforward,” and that in his view Israel could not continue its current military operation.
“Since the court’s concern is the worsening humanitarian situation, aid cannot be distributed if the military operations continue as they are,” he said. “They must therefore cease as such (i.e. as they are currently being conducted), but the court is not prohibiting all military action in Rafah.”
Stefan Talmon, a professor of international law at the University of Bonn in Germany, said in an interview with Der Spiegel, a German newspaper, that the order only allowed for the military operation to continue if Israel ensured the civilian population could be supplied with food, water, and medicine. However, he believed that would be difficult to implement in practice. In effect, therefore, the offensive had to be halted.
Michael Becker, a law professor at Trinity College, Dublin, had a more categorical interpretation. “I interpret this language to mean the military offensive in Rafah needs to be halted, period,” he said. The order’s discussion of the worsening humanitarian disaster makes clear that the current military offensive “already creates a situation that may inflict on the Palestinian group in Gaza, conditions of life that could bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part,” he added.
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Displaced Palestinian children receiving food in Rafah this month.Credit...-/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Oona Hathaway, a law professor at Yale University, agreed. “The urgent request for additional provisional measures was in light of what was happening right then,” in the unfolding assault on Rafah, she said. “It just seems implausible that what the court meant was that it didn’t see that there was anything of concern, at present.”
The two judges who did not join the opinion also had narrow interpretations of what it required. Judge Aharon Barak wrote that the order mandated a halt to Israel’s operations in Rafah “only insofar as is necessary to protect the Palestinian group in Gaza” from possible genocide, and that Israel was already under that obligation. Judge Julia Sebutinde wrote that the order did not “entirely prohibit” Israel from operating in Rafah, but partially restricted the offensive “to the extent it implicates rights under the Genocide Convention.”
Israel has denied that its operation in Rafah risks the destruction of the Palestinian civilian population in Gaza.
“Israel has not and will not conduct military actions in the Rafah area which may inflict on the Palestinian civilian population in Gaza conditions of life that could bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part,” the head of the Israeli National Security Council and the spokesperson of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a joint statement on Friday. (The Israeli military and Ministry of Defense did not respond to my request for comment.)
Overtaken by events
Even as legal scholars have pondered the semantics of the court’s order, the situation in Rafah has already moved on.
“In some ways, this debate among academics and the broader public about the precise contours of the I.C.J. order has been superseded by the weekend’s events,” Becker, the professor at Trinity College, Dublin, said, referring to an Israeli strike in Rafah on Sunday that killed at least 45 people, including children, and wounded 249.
“I think that the nature of what has happened in Rafah over the weekend demonstrates exactly the type of risk that the I.C.J. order was intended to prevent, under either reading,” he added.
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A fire raging near a camp for displaced people in Rafah on Sunday night. At least 45 people were killed, and more than 200 were wounded.Credit...Reuters
Amanda Taub writes the Interpreter, an explanatory column and newsletter about world events. She is based in London. More about Amanda Taub
15. Turn to American Allies for Shipbuilding Help
Turn to American Allies for Shipbuilding Help
The threat from China can’t wait.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/us-navy-ship-building-china-allies-a98895fb?mod=Searchresults_pos7&page=1
May 29, 2024 1:30 pm ET
The USS Minneapolis-St. Paul at the dock of a shipbuilding facility in Marinette, Wis., June 24, 2020. PHOTO: TANNEN MAURY/SHUTTERSTOCK
The starting point for the kind of U.S. maritime renewal called for by Rep. Mike Waltz and Sen. Mark Kelly (“China’s Sea Power Leaves U.S. Adrift,” op-ed, May 23) must be addressing the Jones Act. This protectionist law restricts domestic waterborne transportation to vessels built and registered in the U.S.
Theoretically meant to assure a capable fleet and robust maritime industrial base, the Jones Act has instead helped produce a shipbuilding industry whose output trails the likes of Singapore and Croatia, and a fleet of aging ships reliant on Chinese state-owned shipyards for their considerable maintenance needs. Shielding shipyards from foreign competition and forcing Americans to pay vastly inflated prices for vessels hasn’t proved conducive to either a large, modern fleet or competitive shipbuilding.
To bring a measure of sanity to this law, vessels constructed in allied shipyards should be exempted from the Jones Act’s U.S.-built requirement. Access to less costly vessels would promote the U.S. merchant fleet’s expansion and modernization and generate more repair and maintenance opportunities for U.S. shipyards.
Vague calls for action and tepid proposals that leave sacred cows such as the Jones Act untouched will not suffice. An urgent course correction is needed.
Colin Grabow
Cato Institute
Washington
The recreation of a competitive commercial shipbuilding sector within the U.S., as the authors suggest, would be a decadeslong undertaking in the face of a far more immediate threat from China. A more practical and expedited remedy might already be at hand if the U.S. were to contract significant shipbuilding, maintenance and repair needs with its regional allies who already maintain a robust commercial industry. Korea and Japan have the industrial maritime base and the capacity to participate in an expedited effort to maximize, strengthen and maintain America’s most urgent shipbuilding and maintenance requirements.
Lt. Cmdr. Tom C. James, USN (Ret.)
16. Vets Want What Trump Refuses to Promise: a Nonviolent Election
This should not be a difficult promise to make or keep.
Advocating for a non-violent election and peaceful transfer of power should not be considered a partisan act.
Vets Want What Trump Refuses to Promise: a Nonviolent Election
Organizations representing thousands of veterans asked Republicans to pledge to stop the violent rhetoric and voter intimidation.
May 29, 2024 at 5:30 AM EDT
By Mary Ellen Klas
Mary Ellen Klas is a politics and policy columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. A former capital bureau chief for the Miami Herald, she has covered politics and government for more than three decades.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-05-29/north-carolina-republicans-kick-out-veterans-seeking-a-peaceful-election?srnd=opinion-politics-and-policy&embedded-checkout=true&utm
As hundreds of North Carolina Republicans gathered over the Memorial Day weekend to elect delegates to the party’s national convention in July, a coalition of military veterans showed up and asked party leaders for a simple pledge: renounce violence this election.
The veterans were from different political parties and diverse backgrounds. They spoke about their combat experience in Iraq and Afghanistan. They recalled the sacrifice of those who died fighting terrorism.
“Threats of violence, voter intimidation, and violent rhetoric have no place in our democracy and go against the values that veterans have sworn and given their lives to defend,” the group said in a one-page letter to GOP leaders, including Republican National Committee Co-Chair Lara Trump.
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The letter noted that national polls show that a majority of Americans are fearful that political violence could follow the Nov. 5 election. It urged party leaders to use their influence to persuade former President Donald Trump to “pledge to support a peaceful and nonviolent election season.”
North Carolina GOP leaders instead had the group swiftly escorted out of the meeting at the Greensboro convention center, saying they had no right to be there.
Matt Mercer, spokesman for the North Carolina Republican Party, called the vets’ appearance a “stunt.” He said that a video of the exchange had appeared just hours later on the X feed of the left-leaning Cardinal and Pine website. “They barged in. They got what they wanted. It was done in bad faith,” he said.
But sometimes stunts serve a purpose, and in this case it helped drive home that the Republican Party, despite its claim of allegiance to American values, has a candidate for president and a contingent of his supporters that condone and sometimes promote violence. How hard could it be to for them to say that they don’t tolerate political violence and will admonish any campaign that threatens it during the election cycle?
These vets all took an oath to defend the Constitution. They don’t believe Trump will uphold it. They point to the former president’s persistent denial of the legitimacy of the 2020 election and his refusal to say he will accept this year’s results.
“We have no problem going into harm’s way,’’ said Bobby R. Jones, a former Navy commander from Georgia. “But integrity matters when you’re talking about sacrificing your life for someone. [Trump] has never displayed that. He doesn’t know what it’s like for it not to be about him.”
Dan Barkhuff, a former Navy SEAL who started the group Veterans for Responsible Leadership, said there isn’t a single job in the military that Trump would be capable of doing well, “from commander-in-chief, down to the first day of boot camp.”
“He’s selfish. He’s narcissistic. He's not a team player,” said Barkhuff, whose organization started as a Facebook group and has grown to nearly 9,500 members and a super PAC. “We immediately see people like that do not last long in the military. Yet now we’re talking about letting him run the whole thing. It's insane.”
The Jan. 6 insurrection is the best proof that Trump incites violence. Even Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said the former president’s inflammatory rhetoric led to the attack on the Capitol.
“The mob was fed lies,” McConnell declared that day in 2021. “They were provoked by the president and other powerful people. And they tried to use fear and violence to stop a specific proceeding of the first branch of the federal government, which they did not like.”
Since then, Trump’s speeches and social media have been laced with threats of violence by his supporters if things don’t go his way in November. Unfortunately, McConnell, like many other GOP leaders, has now endorsed Trump, sending the new message that his behavior is acceptable.
Trump has his supporters in a trap. Party leaders have either succumbed to his loyalty test or fear him too much to admonish him. They ignore signs that he either wants his supporters to rise up and engage in violence, or he is so focused on himself that he is indifferent to the possibility it could happen.
“Our party is always opposed to violence,” Dennis Bailey, a retired Air Force intelligence analyst who attended the convention told me. He said it was wrong to assume otherwise because his fellow Republicans “are good people.”
But if there is anyone urging Trump to stop inciting his supporters, it’s not working.
Last week, Trump falsely alleged on Truth Social that the Federal Bureau of Investigation “was locked and loaded to take me out and put my family in danger,” distorting the boilerplate language included in the FBI document used to search his Mar-a-Lago estate.
Special Counsel Jack Smith asked a judge to bar Trump from making any more false and inflammatory statements that would subject the FBI agents who are potential witnesses in the case to “the risk of threats, violence, and harassment.”
“The reality is we have people who are going to act on stochastic terrorism,” Barkhuff said. “Words matter.”
Naveed Shah, an Army veteran who is political director for Common Defense, a Washington-based grassroots organization for progressive veterans with 5,000 members in North Carolina, said they believe, the threat of violence would end “if leadership does the right thing.”
The way for Trump to win the election, Shah said, isn’t by issuing strongman threats; it’s to “make a better argument to the American people.”
He’s right. Free and fair elections happen because of the democracy for which these veterans were willing to risk their lives. It shouldn’t take letters or protests from them for our politicians to renounce voter intimidation and violence. But they are a good reminder that all political leaders — no matter the party — should condemn such acts. For the GOP, it’s not too late to start.
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This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Mary Ellen Klas is a politics and policy columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. A former capital bureau chief for the Miami Herald, she has covered politics and government for more than three decades.
17. Palantir lands $480M Army contract for Maven artificial intelligence tech
Palantir lands $480M Army contract for Maven artificial intelligence tech
The Pentagon announced a deal for a Maven Smart System prototype.
BY
JON HARPER
MAY 29, 2024
defensescoop.com · by Jon Harper · May 30, 2024
Palantir was awarded a $480 million deal by the Army for its Maven Smart System prototype, the Pentagon announced Wednesday.
The U.S. military has recently been using this type of artificial intelligence technology in the Central Command area of responsibility in the Middle East, according to a February news release from the Kentucky National Guard.
“The MAVEN Smart System (MSS) by Palantir along with National Geospatial Agency (NGA) Broad Area Search – Targeting (BAS-T) uses AI generated algorithms and memory learning capabilities to scan and identify enemy systems in the Area of Responsibility (AOR). MAVEN fuses data from various Intelligence Surveillance & Reconnaissance (ISR) systems to identify areas of interests,” according to the release.
“Positive target identification (PID) is at the forefront of the targeting process. The speed at which a hostile target can be detected is crucial to the remaining steps of the targeting cycle (Decide, Detect, Deliver, Assess). AI is able to assist by filtering specific user defined parameters, sifting through large amounts of data, extracting what is relevant, and providing analysts … with near-real time data that is used by the operations community for validation against the commander’s objective. Once confirmed, the information can be interfaced with existing Army Mission Command Systems like the Advanced Field Artillery Tactical Data System (AFATDS) to generate fire missions,” it added.
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The Pentagon wants to use artificial intelligence tools like Maven to enable its Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control (CJADC2) warfighting construct, which aims to better connect the platforms, sensors and data streams of the U.S. military and key international partners under a more unified network. Defense officials intend to leverage AI to help commanders and other personnel make faster and better decisions and improve operational effectiveness and efficiency.
The $480 million deal with Palantir’s USG subsidiary that was announced Wednesday is a firm-fixed price contract.
“One bid was solicited via the internet with one received. Work locations and funding will be determined with each order, with an estimated completion date of May 28, 2029,” according to the DOD announcement.
Palantir did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The company was recently awarded another AI-related deal by the Army for the next phase of the service’s Tactical Intelligence Targeting Access Node (TITAN) ground station program, which aims to provide soldiers with next-generation data fusion and deep-sensing capabilities via artificial intelligence and other tools. That other transaction agreement was worth $178 million.
Written by Jon Harper
Jon Harper is Managing Editor of DefenseScoop, the Scoop News Group’s online publication focused on the Pentagon and its pursuit of new capabilities. He leads an award-winning team of journalists in providing breaking news and in-depth analysis on military technology and the ways in which it is shaping how the Defense Department operates and modernizes. You can also follow him on X (the social media platform formerly known as Twitter) @Jon_Harper_
defensescoop.com · by Jon Harper · May 30, 2024
18. Why Japan and South Korea are rediscovering China
Yes, China is a much different problem than the USSR and it is the economic instrument of power that makes it so.
Excerpts:
Ultimately, both Biden and Trump’s China containment won’t work. Since the late 1990s, Washington has read more from the playbook of diplomat George Kennan than free-market economist Adam Smith. Decades ago, Kennan advocated slowing Soviet expansion through containment. Today, the focus is on reining in China Inc.
It’s grand that Beijing, Tokyo and Seoul are talking again considering their three economies generate about 25% of global GDP.
No doubt, disputes from the past and present will remain stumbling blocks to any meaningful agreement on trade. Not least of which include the ways in which the strategic competition between the US and China is transforming the working of the global economy.
But the timing of Kishida and Yoon making nice with Li shouldn’t be lost on Biden. Going the Trump route on trade just might ultimately drive Japan and Korea into China’s free trade-promoting orbit.
Why Japan and South Korea are rediscovering China - Asia Times
Trilateral summit sings the praises of free trade while the US building protectionist barriers against all three Asian powers
asiatimes.com · by William Pesek · May 29, 2024
TOKYO – The most important thing about this week’s trilateral summit between China, Japan and South Korea is that it happened at all.
It hardly matters that Chinese Premier Li Qiang, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol sidestepped a dearth of contentious topics keeping their governments apart since 2019. They include North Korea, Taiwan and export controls.
Nor does it matter that the leaders opted to focus instead on vague chatter about free trade deals, protecting supply chains, adjusting to aging populations and cooperating on infectious diseases. The important thing is that Beijing, Tokyo and Seoul are talking.
It will take much more than talk, of course.
“Common economic interests remain the ballast that holds trilateral cooperation together, but growing misalignment over regional security related to North Korea, Taiwan, and the South China Sea – as well as rising US-China competition – will prevent closer economic cooperation among the three countries,” says Jeremy Chan, East Asia analyst at Eurasia Group.
Yet the timing of the summit may be the most tantalizing consideration of all.
There’s been much speculation about the Joe Biden of it all. The meeting, many believe, was precipitated by Biden’s own summits with Kishida and Yoon. A tacit recognition, it follows, that Chinese leader Xi Jinping is playing catch-up.
What if, however, we’re really seeing Japan and Korea responding to Biden’s trade tariffs? And to the growing fear that Asia’s No 2 and No 4 economies will be collateral damage as Biden slaps draconian curbs on the region’s top economic engine?
At the Seoul summit on Monday, Li urged Kishida and Yoon to reject “protectionism” and work toward free trade. Li stressed that officials should resist turning economic and trade issues into “political games or security matters.”
In a joint statement, the three leaders agreed to “institutionalize” cooperation by routinely engaging in trilateral summit and ministerial meetings. They signed on to future exchanges for “speeding up negotiations” for a free trade pact that champions “fair, comprehensive, high-quality and mutually beneficial” trade.
Though this week’s talks can’t be called a “concrete initiative,” notes professor Stephen Nagy at International Christian University in Tokyo, it could succeed in stabilizing fraught relations.
Liu Qing, vice president of the China Institute of International Studies, says the summit struck a “hopeful tone for the future” to ensure Asia is a “cornerstone of peace and development.”
Yet Kishida expressed “serious concerns” to Chinese officials about rising tensions in the South China Sea. Yoon said, “I hope that our three countries, who are working together as members of the UN Security Council this year, will join forces to contribute to peace and prosperity in the international community by gathering wisdom and strength in the face of a global complex crisis and geopolitical conflicts.”
The longer “escalated” trade tensions flare up, says economist Aidan Yao at AXA Investment Managers, the more the “race is going to be to the downside.”
Even so, the US has done serious relationship-building to do in Asia. The initial “Quad” arrangement on which Washington placed so many chips has faded as Narendra Modi’s India stopped reading from the US playbook. The Donald Trump years from 2017 to 2021 also did incalculable damage to Washington’s reputation in Asia.
The specter of a Trump 2.0 White House appears to have Kishida and Yoon hedging their bets. Already, Trump is threatening 60% tariffs on all Chinese goods, a step that would upend supply chains everywhere. He also says he plans to revoke China’s “most favored nation” status.
Biden, for his part, just quadrupled taxes on China-made electric vehicles to 100%. He also ratcheted up tariffs on advanced batteries, solar cells, medical equipment, construction cranes, aluminum and steel.
China’s auto exports are surging in the post-Covid era. Image: Twitter / Car and Driver / Screengrab
It’s reminding Asia that even if Trump is deprived of a second term, Biden 2.0 wouldn’t necessarily be a picnic. All of which may have Kishida and Yoon bracing for the protectionist US economy they will encounter after the November 5 election.
For Biden, though, the key is taking care to limit the fallout from Washington’s China policies on its most important allies in the region.
Take Korea, where semiconductors represent the biggest source of income. Given that China is both the world’s largest semiconductor market and Korea’s biggest trade partner, US trade policies are putting Yoon’s economy in harm’s way. (South Korea’s exports to the US slightly exceeded those to China in March this year.)
As sales shortfalls at chip giants Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix and others can attest, being a top US ally is proving very expensive.
Korea Inc is still reeling over a law Biden signed to limit US$7,500 tax credits for EVs to those assembled in North America. That made life harder for Hyundai Motor and Kia Corp, which make their EVs in Korea and then export them.
Ditto for Biden’s overriding plan to restore America’s role as a top global manufacturing power. The plan, he says, is to “build more, and build it here.” It has Biden doubling down on a “buy America” industrial policy that is putting trade-geared allies in Seoul and Tokyo in an increasingly tight spot.
Yet something is written between the lines of the bold font: Washington’s expectation that top democracies in Asia will follow its lead. This, however, presents Yoon with a big question: will the US take offense if Korea increases investments in advanced technologies in China?
A top Biden priority, after all, is growing America’s semiconductor manufacturing presence to create jobs and increase competitiveness. Yet can Kishida’s team in Tokyo walk a tightrope between Washington and Beijing — Tokyo’s “strategic equilibrium” — without alienating one or both? Is that even possible as China becomes America’s top hot-button election issue.
Odds are, Biden will be lobbying Samsung and SK Hynix to invest more in the US. In May 2022, Hyundai Motor upped the ante on Korea Inc peers by pledging to invest $10 billion in the US by 2025. Team Biden knows there’s more where that came from.
Amid all this trade chaos, rumors of US-China decoupling are proving greatly exaggerated. By most measures, two-way trade between the two biggest economies has spiked since 2022 despite increasing tensions.
US policies, though, risk repelling officials in Seoul and Tokyo. Biden’s CHIPS and Science Act and the Inflation Act put many of Asia’s top tech names into compliance purgatory. As it is, CEOs and regulators alike are struggling to keep plans for building advanced semiconductor factories from run afoul of Washington’s new red lines.
Samsung officials, for example, are left to wonder if they must cut production in Xi’an or SK Hynix in Wuxi? Chieftains live in constant paranoia of what might come if Korean technology finds its way, perhaps unwittingly, into Chinese lasers, weapons, air-defense systems and surveillance tools.
Rather than blunt-force tariffs, Biden’s White House could focus more on building innovative muscle and increasing productivity at home and less on deflating China’s tires. To be sure, Biden’s CHIPS Act, which threw nearly $300 billion at boosting domestic research and development, was a good start.
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Joe Biden wants more chip production done in the United States. Image: Twitter (X) Screengrab
Importantly, it marked a radical pivot from the Trump years. Trump threw a giant grenade into global trade and signed a $1.7 trillion tax cut that accelerated the path to a $35 trillion national debt.
All the while, Trump did little, if anything, to increase domestic capacity. If Trump had increased innovation and productivity, US inflation might not have surged to 40-year highs post-Covid-19.
In the meantime, Xi’s Communist Party is investing trillions of dollars in leading the future of semiconductors, EVs, advanced batteries, renewable energy technologies, artificial intelligence, robotics, biotechnology, aviation, green infrastructure and high-speed rail.
Through bigger investments in innovation and productivity, the US would create new wealth and expand the economic pie. It could vastly increase America’s economic footprint in Asia, boosting demand for electronics, vehicles and entertainment exports.
Ultimately, both Biden and Trump’s China containment won’t work. Since the late 1990s, Washington has read more from the playbook of diplomat George Kennan than free-market economist Adam Smith. Decades ago, Kennan advocated slowing Soviet expansion through containment. Today, the focus is on reining in China Inc.
It’s grand that Beijing, Tokyo and Seoul are talking again considering their three economies generate about 25% of global GDP.
No doubt, disputes from the past and present will remain stumbling blocks to any meaningful agreement on trade. Not least of which include the ways in which the strategic competition between the US and China is transforming the working of the global economy.
But the timing of Kishida and Yoon making nice with Li shouldn’t be lost on Biden. Going the Trump route on trade just might ultimately drive Japan and Korea into China’s free trade-promoting orbit.
Follow William Pesek on X at @WilliamPesek
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asiatimes.com · by William Pesek · May 29, 2024
19. Israel, Iran, and the Failure of Irregular (and Conventional) Warfare in Gaza
Everyone has a place and a role in modern warfare.
Conclusion:
This conflict shows the importance of both irregular and conventional warfare without relying too heavily on one or the other. In that way, the United States is bringing its weight to bear—using both conventional and irregular capabilities to assist its allies and weaken adversaries, while also using its diplomatic influence to encourage a negotiated settlement between Israel and Hamas. That may be little solace for those affected by the conflict but is perhaps the only hope for a resolution.
Israel, Iran, and the Failure of Irregular (and Conventional) Warfare in Gaza - Irregular Warfare Initiative
irregularwarfare.org · by Alex Deep · May 30, 2024
On April 1, 2024, an Israeli attack on the Iranian consulate in Damascus killed several Iranian military advisors, including a senior revolutionary guards commander. The world awaited Iran’s response and feared the worst. About two weeks later on April 13, Iran launched a barrage of missiles, rockets, and drones directly targeting Israel, both from Iranian territory and through proxies in Iraq and Yemen. And Iran hardly made it a secret, announcing its intentions in the hours and days leading up to the attack, issuing a public statement while its weapons were still in the air, and declaring an end to any additional escalation once it became clear that a combination of Israeli air defense systems and American, British, and French aircraft and warships destroyed the vast majority of Iran’s salvo. Rather than continuing up the escalation ladder, and under significant pressure from the United States and other regional players, Israel took a measured strike in response, utilizing small drones to target an Iranian Air Force base near the city of Isfahan. Iran downplayed the event and the threat of a broader regional war between Iran and Israel abated.
Despite the possibility that the war in Gaza spirals into a regional conflict, it has yet to happen. While Israel and Iran have certainly used violence in an attempt to alter the behavior of the other, the fact that neither has been able to do so highlights the limitations of the irregular and conventional warfare approaches that Israel and Iran can bring to bear. Both sides are essentially at the limit of their ability to use violence to achieve their desired political ends. Further Israeli escalation would require American support and the acquiescence of Arab states to allow Israeli overflight—neither seems likely. Further Iranian escalation would require similar support from Arab states to permit the movement of Iranian forces through their territories and for Iran to expose itself to the risk of a disastrous conflict with the United States—these seem equally unlikely. This stalemate underscores the inherent challenges within the Israeli and Iranian approaches to warfare. It also suggests that neither will achieve a decisive outcome in Gaza apart from leveraging a broad swath of irregular and conventional military capabilities paired with diplomatic power—both their own and that of their supporters—to broker a negotiated settlement.
Gaza as an Inflection Point for Israel (and Iran)
Since the Hamas cross-border attack into southern Israel on October 7, 2023, and Israel’s subsequent invasion of Gaza, the threat of general war at least between Israel and Iran has loomed large. Granted, Iran and Israel have been engaged in a decades-long irregular conflict. Iran leverages its “axis of resistance” in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Gaza to launch attacks against Israel itself and US forces in the region as part of what it views as a deterrence strategy. Meanwhile, Israel focuses on targeting those Iranian proxies and the means by which Iran supports them, including through periodic major military operations in Gaza.
However, both sides have recognized a general set of rules meant to reduce the likelihood of direct military confrontation between the two; namely, Iran and Israel refrain from directly attacking each other, with the Israel Defense Forces and Iranian proxies and partners serving as the principal parties in the conflict, supported by Israeli intelligence and the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps respectively. In fact, it would be difficult to conjure a more applicable example than the Israel-Iran conflict to accompany the US military’s new definition for irregular warfare as “a form of warfare where states and non-state actors campaign to assure or coerce states or other groups through indirect, non-attributable, or asymmetric activities, either as the primary approach or in concert with conventional warfare.”
For decades, Israel very much paired “indirect, non-attributable, and asymmetric activities” against Iran’s nuclear program with conventional warfare against Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon and its forces and logistics infrastructure in Syria. Israel has executed most of these operations with its own forces, rather than third parties. On the other hand, Iran has mostly relied on its network of proxies and surrogates to attack Israel and has supplied materiel and training to the same groups upon which Israel has focused its large-scale military operations. The October 7 attacks demonstrated to both sides the failure of their respective strategies of warfare—both irregular and conventional—and the limited tools Iran and Israel have available to change the behavior of the other.
Iran and Israel have been keen to avoid war over Israel’s ongoing military operations in Gaza. Recognizing the failure of its “mowing the grass” strategy along its borders, Israel changed tact from its traditional focus on attacking Iranian proxies to a strategy of attacking Iranian forces directly. As such, Israel has killed 18 members of the Quds Force—the branch of the revolutionary guards responsible for Iran’s proxy operations abroad—in addition to those killed during Israel’s attack on the Iranian consulate in Damascus last month. And it was not until that latter attack—nominally against Iranian territory and breaking an unwritten rule of the irregular conflict—that Iran decided to respond, not through proxies, but on its own accord. This exchange has done little to change the situation in Gaza, and public opinion in Iran and Israel seems to indicate that neither side is particularly interested in confrontation with the other beyond the status quo.
The Use of Violence and Its Limits
Americans are often quick to assume that engaging in conventional warfare against a distant state is a feasible option. Again, using the most recent US military definition, conventional warfare is “a violent struggle for domination between nation-states or coalitions and alliances of nation-states, fought with conventional forces.” Following the 9/11 terror attacks, the inevitability of the United States invading Afghanistan was basically unquestioned; it was going to happen. The United States could then, and can now, uniquely move and sustain an army anywhere in the world and can rely upon a network of states either happy to help or happy to acquiesce to American demands for access. Therefore, when the United States engages in irregular warfare, as has been the case with Iran since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, conventional war is always an option. The United States can also meter its escalation in a very precise way on a spectrum between irregular and conventional warfare, such as the January 2020 targeted killing of Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad in response to attacks by the Iranian proxy Kataib Hezbollah on US forces in Iraq and Syria.
Most states simply do not have this option in the employment of violence to achieve political ends, especially against adversaries that are geographically distant. The United States assassinated arguably the second most powerful person in Iran after the Ayatollah and one who enjoyed the popular support of eight in ten Iranians. In response, Iran launched a series of ballistic missiles against US forces and facilities on al-Asad Airbase and a base in Erbil. Neither resulted in US fatalities, let alone against someone as significant as Soleimani.
Therein lies the problem for Iran—irregular warfare only takes you so far. At some point, circumstances demand the overt use of military forces, either to demonstrate capability and resolve to an adversary, or as a means by which to communicate to domestic political audiences. In that way, there is a discernable difference between a Kataib Hezbollah operative firing a rocket at a US base in Iraq and the Iranian military launching a series of intermediate range ballistic missiles at that same base. The latter signals the severity of the American strike on Soleimani and the willingness of Iran to escalate, while demonstrating overtly to the Iranian population that their government has ways to impose cost on the United States—even if the proxy attack would have been more effective. Unfortunately for Iran, this does not play to its strengths. In fact, it does quite the opposite. There is a point at which the United States has escalation dominance over Iran in the conventional space—that is, the further away from irregular warfare, the worse for Iran.
Iran faces a similar problem with Israel, but against an enemy far less capable than the United States. Unlike the United States, Israel cannot realistically fight a conventional war with Iran. After all, such a war between Israel and Iran would not look much different than what is happening now: mostly an irregular warfare campaign “as the primary approach” with conventional military actions peppered throughout. Israel cannot put together an army and invade Iran, and the same goes for Iran. Israel cannot launch a sufficiently large air campaign to compel Iran to stop assisting its proxies along Israel’s borders, just as Iran cannot do the same to compel Israel to change its behavior in Gaza. The best Israel can do through violence is degrade Iran’s ability to support Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, and other groups bent on the destruction of Israel. Conversely, the best Iran can do through violence is use those groups to threaten Israel in a way that maintains the status quo and gives Iran influence throughout the Levant, mostly through irregular warfare. Both are deeply unsatisfying to the Israeli and Iranian populations, who expect from their respective governments something beyond “mowing the grass” on the one hand and foreign adventurism at the expense of domestic improvements on the other.
What do you do with a problem like Hamas?
Turning to the conflict between Iran and Israel, exacerbated by the actions of Hamas, for which the violence available to each side is insufficient or ill-suited to yield a favorable outcome. The repercussions of the October 7 attack have been disastrous for all involved. Israel is fighting an entrenched enemy in a space as densely populated as London, faces increasing international isolation due to civilian deaths related to its operations, and lacks a plan for a viable alternative to Hamas governance in Gaza. Iran, surprised by the initial Hamas attack, faces the grim reality that it lacks the capability to change Israeli behavior, must constrain the actions of its more zealous proxies to avoid confrontation with the United States, and is simply unwilling to risk its own security for Hamas. Israel’s conventional war against Hamas will not destroy the movement or the idea of radical opposition to the existence of Israel and its policies regarding Palestinians. Iran’s irregular war against Israel will not change outcomes in Gaza or alter Israel’s policies writ large, and its reliance on proxies exposes Iran to unintended escalation with the United States.
This conflict shows the importance of both irregular and conventional warfare without relying too heavily on one or the other. In that way, the United States is bringing its weight to bear—using both conventional and irregular capabilities to assist its allies and weaken adversaries, while also using its diplomatic influence to encourage a negotiated settlement between Israel and Hamas. That may be little solace for those affected by the conflict but is perhaps the only hope for a resolution.
Lieutenant Colonel Alex Deep is an Army Special Forces officer currently working as a strategic planner in the U.S. Special Operations Command Directorate of Strategy, Plans, and Policy. He has served in 3rd Special Forces Group throughout his career and taught courses in international relations and the politics of the Middle East in the Department of Social Sciences at West Point. He holds a Master of Arts degree in Strategic Studies and International Economics from Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.
Main image: “Swords of Iron” war. (IDF via Wikimedia)
Views expressed in this article solely reflect those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Irregular Warfare Initiative, Princeton University’s Empirical Studies of Conflict Project, the Modern War Institute at West Point, or the United States Government.
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20. What Does America Want From China?
In response to No Substitute for Victory from Matt Pottinger and Mike Gallagher.
Some thought provoking responses.
What Does America Want From China?
Debating Washington’s Strategy—and the Endgame of Competition
By Rush Doshi; Jessica Chen Weiss and James B. Steinberg; Paul Heer; Matt Pottinger and Mike Gallagher
Foreign Affairs · May 30, 2024
The Biden Plan
Rush Doshi
In “No Substitute for Victory” (May/June 2024), Matt Pottinger and Mike Gallagher raise important concerns about the Biden administration’s China policy. But their analysis misses the mark. Their review of key episodes in the administration’s China policy is inaccurate, and they propose steps that the administration is already taking. But above all, they make a bad bet: they contend that the United States should forget about managing competition, embrace confrontation without limits, and then wait for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to collapse. This approach risks runaway escalation and could force a moment of reckoning before the United States has taken the very steps the authors recommend to strengthen its defense industrial base and improve its competitive position. Such a strategy would also mean losing support from U.S. allies and partners, who would see it as irresponsible.
The authors argue that their approach will work against China because it worked against the Soviet Union. But the Biden administration recognizes that this contest is different from that one. Its strategy, most recently articulated by National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan in a speech this past January, is founded on realistic assumptions about the capacity of the United States to shape China’s political system. It focuses not on the kind of bilateral relationship Washington wants with Beijing nor on the kind of government Americans want China to have but on straightforward and long-standing U.S. objectives: keeping the Indo-Pacific free from hegemony, sustaining American economic and technological leadership, and supporting regional democracies. It seeks to revitalize the sources of American strength by investing at home and aligning with allies and partners abroad. From that foundation, the United States can compete intensely by blunting Chinese activities that undermine U.S. interests and building a coalition of forces that will help the United States secure its priorities—all while managing the risks of escalation.
A BAD BET
One can share many of Pottinger and Gallagher’s assumptions and yet reach different conclusions on overall strategy. The Biden administration’s National Security Strategy recognizes China as the only state with the intent to reshape the international order and the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to do so. The administration takes seriously China’s efforts to surpass the United States in technology, increase the world’s dependence on China’s supply chains, ramp up regional military operations, and align more closely with Iran, North Korea, and Russia.
But the administration does not share the authors’ assumption that the contest with China can end as decisively and neatly as the Cold War did. Although Pottinger and Gallagher are careful not to call for forceful regime change, they define victory as “a China that is able to chart its own course free from communist dictatorship.” A China that resembles Taiwan politically is “the only workable destination,” they write.
If Beijing concluded that the United States sought total victory, it would have little reason to exercise restraint.
But betting on a great power’s collapse or liberalization is unwise. Despite its challenges, China is the first U.S. competitor in a century to surpass 60 percent of U.S. GDP. The country boasts considerably greater industrial and technological strength than the Soviet Union did and is deeply enmeshed in the global economy. It cannot be wished away.
Ironically, the authors resurrect the end goal of the engagement era: a more liberal China. They hope that this time, a vague toughness will succeed where commercial and people-to-people ties fell short. But if engagement risked complacency, their approach risks escalation. An explicit policy of seeking the end of CCP rule would turn the U.S.-Chinese rivalry into an existential one for China’s leadership. If Beijing concluded that the United States sought total victory, it would have little reason to exercise restraint.
American objectives do not require China’s political transformation, and there is no guarantee that the end of communist rule would produce a more restrained China. The end of communist Russia, after all, eventually gave way to Putin’s Russia.
DIPLOMACY, NOT CAPITULATION
Because they are betting on China’s collapse, the authors conclude that “the United States shouldn’t manage the competition with China; it should win it.” But the notion that two nuclear-armed strategic competitors should not try to manage their rivalry is unusual even among today’s China hawks and was uncommon in the days of U.S. diplomat George Kennan and U.S. President Ronald Reagan that the authors praise.
That is because efforts to manage competition make the United States more competitive. Such actions show the American public and U.S. allies and partners that the United States is a responsible actor and that they can confidently buy into Washington’s strategy. Excessively confrontational positions, in contrast, leave the United States standing alone with fewer tools. Beijing understands that, which is why it always tries to blame tensions on Washington. Pottinger and Gallagher’s approach would play into Beijing’s designs.
Managing the competition is unlikely to achieve the kind of strategic reassurance with China that resolves fundamental disagreements. But Washington should have greater confidence in what can be called “tactical reassurance” that addresses specific issues. Better communication about what Washington is doing—and not doing—on issues ranging from technology to Taiwan can discourage dangerously fatalistic thinking from a paranoid great power whose dark view of the United States could get even darker. Making clear that Washington’s goals are not limitless but tied to specific interests reduces the risk of runaway escalation. That requires face-to-face meetings so that misperceptions can be ironed out quickly, competitive steps by the United States can be explained directly, and both sides can find off-ramps. Far from capitulation, this is basic diplomacy. It complements intense competition by making it less risky and more sustainable. Pottinger and Gallagher argue that any such efforts should be taken from a strong U.S. position and should be a process, not an end goal. They are right. But that, in fact, describes the very approach that the Biden administration is taking.
A TIME TO REBUILD
When Joe Biden became president, Beijing was convinced that the United States was in decline. During the Trump administration, Chinese President Xi Jinping unveiled a phrase that encapsulated Beijing’s growing confidence in this trend: the world was undergoing “great changes unseen in a century.” Xi saw President Donald Trump’s alienation of American allies and partners, erratic handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, and disregard of democratic norms as proof that “the East is rising and the West is falling.” Beijing did not see Trump as tough but as unpredictable and transactional. He was willing to compromise on autonomy in Hong Kong, human rights in Xinjiang, and even his own technology and tariff policies in exchange for concessions that would help him electorally, such as Chinese agricultural and energy purchases in U.S. states important to Trump’s political standing. Beijing did not see this as strength.
When the Biden team entered office, they did not rush into diplomacy with Beijing, as the prior administration had done. They instead took a step back, reduced high-level meetings, and paused many dialogues that had not achieved results. With bipartisan support, they focused on replenishing American strengths. At home, the administration passed landmark legislation on pandemic recovery, infrastructure, semiconductors, and clean energy. That catalyzed $3.5 trillion in new public and private investment and propelled a post-COVID recovery with the highest growth, lowest inflation, and lowest unemployment of nearly any developed economy. Meanwhile, China’s economy slowed, and its population shrank. Economists’ predictions about when China would overtake the United States in nominal GDP went from years to decades.
Abroad, the administration brought U.S. allies and partners closer together through AUKUS, the trilateral security pact among Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, and the Quad (Quadrilateral Security Dialogue), which comprises Australia, India, Japan, and the United States. It negotiated agreements to expand U.S. military access in Australia, Japan, Papua New Guinea, and the Philippines. And it upgraded ties with India, Indonesia, and Vietnam; held unprecedented summits with ASEAN and Pacific Island leaders in Washington; and convened trilateral summits: one with Japan and the Philippines and another with Japan and South Korea. These efforts demonstrated that American decline was not as imminent as Beijing had hoped. From that position, the United States intensified diplomacy with China not as an end but as a means to achieve U.S. interests and mitigate the risk of escalatory spirals.
U.S. President Joe Biden welcomes Chinese President Xi Jinping at a summit in Woodside, California, November 2023
Kevin Lamarque / Reuters
The administration achieved real gains. When Biden and Xi met in California last fall, they restored and even expanded some military ties to reduce conflict risk. Beijing took steps to reduce the flow of fentanyl precursors to the United States, going beyond its deal with the Trump administration.
Pottinger and Gallagher imply that diplomacy with China has meant scaling back tougher U.S. policies. On the contrary, the administration took more competitive steps while intensifying diplomacy. Over the last year, the administration upgraded semiconductor export controls on China, established the first-ever screening protocols on outbound investment to China, prohibited transfers of U.S. personal data to China, and signed legislation forcing China’s ByteDance to divest from TikTok. The White House launched an investigation into the security risks of Chinese-made electric vehicles, levied new tariffs in strategic sectors and called for them in steel and shipbuilding, and put more of China’s companies on export control lists than the Trump administration did. The administration also provided billions in new security assistance to Taiwan, including by providing materiel directly from U.S. stockpiles for the first time.
Despite this track record, Pottinger and Gallagher argue that in the interest of facilitating diplomacy, the Biden administration has been “downplaying affronts by Beijing.” They claim the administration planned to let a Chinese spy balloon overfly the United States without notifying the public. But the administration immediately limited the balloon’s ability to surveil sensitive sites and made plans to shoot it down safely while maximizing opportunities to collect information about the technology and what China was doing with it. The authors claim the Biden administration minimized press reports about China’s pursuit of a base in Cuba. But in fact, the administration indicated that details were murky and revealed that it had been carrying out a whole-of-government strategy to counter China’s overseas bases, including in Cuba, which it launched only weeks after Biden’s inauguration. Finally, the authors imply that the administration has not firmly defended American values in its competition with China. But Biden has repeatedly framed the competition as one between democracy and autocracy, has plainly stated that China is a dictatorship, and has accused China of genocide in Xinjiang.
COMMON SENSE, COMMON GROUND
The authors rightly assume that China is preparing for a catastrophic conflict over Taiwan. Their concerns about the U.S. defense industrial base, shipbuilding delays, and the retirement of older vessels and aircraft are widely shared. Many steps they propose are underway. These include expanding the U.S. military’s footprint in the Indo-Pacific, investing in unmanned or containerized weapons systems and kits that can convert “dumb bombs” into guided munitions, hardening key military facilities, and pre-positioning supplies.
But the authors’ proposal for a $20 billion annual deterrence fund that would “surge and disperse sufficient combat power in Asia” for five years is genuinely novel. It is also more achievable than their call to effectively double the defense budget. A deterrence fund could complement the Biden administration’s new Replicator Initiative, which seeks to field thousands of unmanned autonomous systems within two years. It could also turbocharge U.S. investments in asymmetric capabilities, such as long-range missiles and advanced mines.
Pottinger and Gallagher also raise concerns about China’s efforts to dominate new technologies, exploit U.S. dependencies, and export its excess industrial capacity to put competitors out of business. Yet here again, the Biden administration has already taken many of the steps they propose: new tariffs, coordination with allies and partners on economic and technological issues, investment restrictions, and export controls. Other steps the authors propose, such as preventing U.S. funds from enabling investment in blacklisted Chinese companies, are sound and should find bipartisan support. So, too, is the authors’ call for Washington to recruit Americans, particularly Asia hands and technologists, into government and to make sure that Americans are informed about what’s at stake in the competition with China.
Pottinger and Gallagher provide an important service to the China policy debate by presenting a good-faith critique of the current approach. But what is most useful about their argument is not the areas of difference with the Biden administration but the areas of overlap. U.S. policy toward China will need bipartisan foundations to succeed. Their essay shows that regardless of where one starts in the China debate, at the moment, most policymakers are arriving at a similar set of common-sense policies.
RUSH DOSHI is Director of the Initiative on China Strategy at the Council on Foreign Relations and an Assistant Professor at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. He previously served as Deputy Senior Director for China and Taiwan Affairs at the National Security Council during the Biden administration.
The Perils of Estrangement
Jessica Chen Weiss and James B. Steinberg
The United States faces a major challenge in managing its relations with China, the world’s second-largest economy and military power. The Chinese government does not share the United States’ commitment to liberal democracy, is at odds with many of the United States’ key international partners, and pursues economic policies that harm American workers and companies. Meeting that challenge requires a nuanced understanding of the forces driving China’s external policies and a clear-eyed view of the sources of U.S. strength. The path forward suggested by Pottinger and Gallagher reflects neither. Instead, they offer an illusory appeal to victory, one that will harm the cause of freedom in China, damage Washington’s relations with key U.S. allies, and risk a dangerous confrontation reminiscent of the worst days of the Cold War—a Cold War they enthusiastically embrace.
We share Pottinger and Gallagher’s hope that the Chinese people will one day enjoy greater freedoms and civil liberties. But history has shown that U.S. efforts to bring about change through pressure are as likely to consolidate authoritarian rule as to undermine it. The authors say they are not calling for “forcible regime change, subversion, or war,” because they know that such extreme efforts carry intolerable risks. But their proposed tactics, if taken up by Washington, would ensure the most undesirable outcome: a Chinese leadership unwilling to cooperate on shared concerns but domestically strengthened by appeals to nationalist sentiments in the face of a hostile adversary. Worse yet, the aggressive policies the authors prescribe would alienate important U.S. partners that have no interest in an “us versus them” approach.
Pottinger and Gallagher try to minimize the extraordinary risks their recommendations present by characterizing them as nothing more than “greater friction,” which would eventually compel Beijing to simply “give up.” What gives them such confidence that China’s nuclear-armed leaders would go down without a fight? This is wishful thinking, not strategy. They castigate the Biden administration’s approach as a throwback to détente, which the United States used to manage risk with the Soviet Union during the 1970s, but theirs is a revival of the “rollback” of the 1950s, which pushed the rival superpowers to the precipice of nuclear Armageddon.
Adopting a confrontational posture toward Beijing would reinforce the Chinese leadership’s embrace of authoritarian policies.
The Cold War is a chilling reminder of the perils of unconstrained rivalry. It is also at odds with what the American public wants. According to a 2023 survey commissioned by the nonprofits National Security Action and Foreign Policy for America, a bipartisan majority of voters—87 percent of Democrats and 68 percent of Republicans—believe that U.S. leaders should focus more on working to avoid a military conflict than preparing for one. Only 21 percent regard China as an “enemy”; 76 percent view it as a “competitor.”
Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s tightening grip at home and China’s economic and military coercion abroad are cause for deep concern. Openly adopting a confrontational Cold War posture toward Beijing would only reinforce the Chinese leadership’s embrace of tough, authoritarian policies designed to show resolve and insulate China from U.S. pressure. When China’s efforts undermine the interests of the United States and its partners, Washington must take firm, measured steps to meet those specific challenges. But U.S. policymakers should keep in mind that China’s aggressive tactics are self-undermining, dimming China’s economic vitality and damaging its international appeal. Washington needs to play a long game, one that favors its natural strengths.
The economic headwinds that China is now encountering, combined with efforts by the United States to strengthen its economic and technological competitiveness, have created a window for the two countries to stabilize their relationship, which had veered dangerously close to conflict. It is in the interest of both Beijing and Washington to reduce the risk of war and cooperate on key issues of mutual concern, such as climate change, public health, and the management of potentially destabilizing new technologies. Xi’s summit with Biden in California last fall was a step in the right direction, resulting in efforts to curb China’s fentanyl-related exports and the restoration of military-to-military communications to reduce the risk of an unintended crisis.
The closing session of the National People’s Congress at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, March 2024
Tingshu Wang / Reuters
Even when direct diplomacy fails to resolve key issues, Washington’s openness to engage demonstrates to the world that the United States is acting responsibly. Moreover, such engagements provide opportunities to press the Chinese government to change its harmful policies, including support for Russia’s war in Ukraine and other threatening actions.
Even as the United States works to counter Chinese cyberattacks, information operations, and unfair economic practices, it should also welcome Chinese tourists, businesspeople, and students. The policies Pottinger and Gallagher advocate would only deepen the estrangement between Americans and the Chinese people. If the authors mean what they say about supporting the Chinese people, they must recognize the importance of these societal ties, especially if official relations remain tense.
Pottinger and Gallagher’s nostalgia for the Cold War and their call for a new generation of cold warriors could be issued only by those who have no memory of how dangerous that war often was.
JESSICA CHEN WEISS is Michael J. Zak Professor for China and Asia-Pacific Studies at Cornell University, a Senior Fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute Center for China Analysis, and a former member of the U.S. State Department’s Policy Planning Staff.
JAMES B. STEINBERG is Dean of Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies and was U.S. Deputy Secretary of State under President Barack Obama.
A Possible Partner
Paul Heer
Pottinger and Gallagher offer the wrong diagnosis of the challenge that China poses to the United States and thus the wrong prescriptions for dealing with that challenge. The diagnosis is wrong because it greatly overstates the nature of China’s strategy and the scope of its ambitions. The authors assert that “Beijing is pursuing a raft of global initiatives designed to disintegrate the West and usher in an antidemocratic order.” Beijing is indeed pursuing a raft of global initiatives to maximize China’s power, influence, and wealth relative to the United States—and is doing so ruthlessly and relentlessly. But its goals fall well short of hastening the disintegration of the West or establishing an antidemocratic order. CCP leaders are focused on winning hearts and minds in a multipolar world, especially outside the West, and they recognize that trying to establish Chinese global hegemony and impose their own system on the rest of the world would be counterproductive to that goal. They also recognize that it would be destabilizing, prohibitively expensive, and probably unachievable and unsustainable.
It is likewise wrong for Pottinger and Gallagher to assert that Chinese leader Xi Jinping has a “policy of fostering global chaos” and that CCP leaders believe “they can destabilize the world with impunity.” On the contrary, one of Beijing’s overriding objectives during the past several decades has been to seek a stable external environment that would allow the CCP to focus on its myriad domestic problems and priorities. The authors quote a 2021 speech by Xi, in which he says that the world is in “chaos” and that “this trend appears likely to continue,” and they juxtapose this with Xi concluding that “the times and trends are on our side” and “the opportunities outweigh the challenges” for China. But it takes a highly selective reading of Xi’s speech to extrapolate that he is reveling in global chaos. The broader context, and additional statements by Xi and other CCP leaders, make it clear that Beijing sees overall trends as favoring China not because of global disorder but in spite of it.
Pottinger and Gallagher also cite a remark Xi made to Russian President Vladimir Putin in March 2023: “Right now, there are changes, the likes of which we haven’t seen for 100 years. And we are the ones driving these changes together.” Although this is now routinely quoted in media reports as evidence of Xi and Putin’s malign agenda, there is a “game of telephone” dynamic at work: the quote is an English translation of a Russian translation of an impromptu remark Xi made in Chinese. Much has been made of the remark, but it seems more like an offhand comment, or even a garbled translation, than a declaration of a grand scheme. Xi almost certainly did not intend to say what the translation attributed to him, because it is inconsistent with Beijing’s long-standing narrative. The broader context and other speeches and documents issued by Xi and various Chinese officials make it clear that Beijing views many of these global “changes” as having been thrust upon China by historical forces and players, and as posing dangers and risks, as well as opportunities. It is more likely that Xi and Putin think they are trying to drive a response to those changes.
Pottinger and Gallagher note that “Xi and his inner circle see themselves as fighting an existential ideological campaign against the West.” Of course they do, partly because Washington has also made it clear that it believes itself to be in a global contest between democracy and autocracy. Gallagher reinforced this view in a February 2023 hearing before the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party when he described the U.S.-Chinese competition as “an existential struggle over what life will look like in the 21st century.” Similarly, although the authors quote Xi asserting in 2014 that China “must achieve total victory,” they also declare that there is “no substitute for victory” for the United States.
There is ample evidence that Xi and the CCP are interested in constructive engagement and peaceful coexistence with the United States.
Based on their diagnosis of China as an existential and incorrigible threat, Pottinger and Gallagher offer a package of prescriptions to gird for an inevitable cold war with China. They advocate enhancing U.S. military deterrence, eroding China’s economic leverage, and recruiting a “broader coalition,” both inside and outside the United States, to confront Beijing. There are a number of problems with this agenda, including its reliance on funding that may not materialize and the fact that extensive economic decoupling from China would be costly for the United States. It is also worth noting that the strategy aspires to “restore U.S. primacy in Asia,” an improbably ambitious aim.
Moreover, many U.S. allies and partners are unlikely to adopt the goal of regime change in China that is inherent in Pottinger and Gallagher’s argument. The authors avow that they are not advocating “forcible regime change” or “subversion.” But their definition of victory includes “the Chinese people . . . find[ing] inspiration to explore new models of development and governance.” This echoes a speech that Pottinger delivered in May 2020, as deputy national security adviser in the Trump administration, when he speculated “whether China today would benefit from a little less nationalism and a little more populism.” He added, “When a privileged few grow too remote and self-interested, populism is what pulls them back or pitches them overboard. It has a kinetic energy.” Not surprisingly, this was widely viewed at the time by many China specialists—and probably CCP leaders, as well—as encouraging the Chinese people to overthrow their government. The same audiences will rightly interpret Pottinger and Gallagher’s article the same way.
In outlining their prescriptions, the authors reject “the discredited détente policies” that Washington adopted toward the Soviet Union in the 1970s on the grounds that détente “failed to achieve its goals” and a similar approach today would “yield little cooperation from Chinese leaders.” But as the historian Niall Ferguson has persuasively argued in these pages, détente didn’t mean “embracing, trusting, or appeasing the Soviets.” It meant “recognizing the limits of U.S. power” and “employing a combination of carrots and sticks, and buying time.” As Ferguson concludes, “It worked.” Pottinger and Gallagher prematurely reject the possibility that détente could similarly work with China. Instead, they dismiss it as appeasement. They also fail to recognize the limits of U.S. power.
Pottinger and Gallagher conclude that Beijing “will never be a reliable partner” because Xi “is not a leader with whom Americans can solve problems” and the CCP “has no desire to coexist indefinitely with great powers that promote liberal values.” On the contrary, if one avoids ideological blinders and does not assume that all Chinese policy statements are disingenuous, there is ample evidence for recognizing that Xi and the CCP are in fact interested in constructive engagement and peaceful coexistence with the United States, especially if the alternative is a zero-sum struggle that neither side could sustainably win.
PAUL HEER is Senior Fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. He served as National Intelligence Officer for East Asia from 2007 to 2015. He is the author of Mr. X and the Pacific: George F. Kennan and American Policy in East Asia.
Pottinger and Gallagher Reply
Rush Doshi’s critique of our article warrants special attention because Doshi is qualified to serve as a reliable surrogate for the Biden administration on China, given his recent role at the White House, and because his general assessment of the threat posed by the CCP—and his belief that Washington must take proactive steps to frustrate Xi’s ambitions—has much in common with our own take.
Still, there remain essential differences between his views and ours about all that Washington should be doing to address the threat, which has quickly metastasized from a “pacing challenge,” as the Biden team politely calls it, into something much scarier, as the CCP is now underwriting proxy wars in multiple theaters in order to undermine the security and credibility of United States and its partners. In short, global events driven by Xi and his “axis of chaos”—Russia, Iran (and its terrorist proxies), North Korea, and Venezuela—are simply overwhelming Biden’s China policy. As the Biden team frets about admitting that the United States is now in a cold war, Beijing is leading it into the foothills of a hot one.
THE NEW COLD WAR
Before addressing some key differences with Doshi, let us look at the other critiques. Jessica Chen Weiss and James Steinberg argue against waging a cold war with Beijing because cold wars are dangerous. We don’t deny they are dangerous. The problem is that the United States is already in one—not because Americans desired or started it, but because Xi is laser-focused on prevailing in a global struggle in which “capitalism will inevitably perish and socialism will inevitably triumph,” as he put it in a quintessential secret speech shortly after rising to power. Xi’s internal speeches, edicts, and actions show that he is pursuing global, not just regional, initiatives to discredit and dissolve Western alliances, co-opting international bodies to advance illiberal and autocratic aims, and even undermining the centuries-old Westphalian system of sovereign nation-states. These policies first took shape during the Obama administration, when Washington was at pains to engage and reassure Beijing.
In another statement, Xi said, “Our struggle and contest with Western countries is irreconcilable, so it will inevitably be long, complicated, and sometimes even very sharp.” Xi has clearly driven the contest into just such a “sharp” phase. In April, Secretary of State Antony Blinken stated that China is “overwhelmingly the number one supplier” of Russia’s war machine and that “Russia would struggle to sustain its assault on Ukraine without China’s support.” Beijing is following a similar playbook in the Middle East, making itself the primary consumer of sanctioned Iranian oil and providing strong diplomatic and propaganda support for Iran and some of its terrorist proxies in the wake of Hamas’s October 7 rampage in southern Israel.
Russian President Vladimir Putin shakes hands with Chinese President Xi Jinping during a meeting in Beijing, May 2024
Sergei Guneev / Sputnik / Reuters
If Washington wants to achieve victory without war in competition with a capable, belligerent Leninist regime, history tells us that it should adapt and apply the best lessons of the Cold War, from the clear-eyed theoretical framing that Kennan provided in the late 1940s to the resolute yet flexible policies that Reagan put into practice in the 1980s—policies that steered the Cold War to a peaceful conclusion that favored free nations.
Nine successive U.S. presidents, from Harry Truman to George H. W. Bush, chose to employ Cold War strategies, albeit with varying approaches. Yet Chen Weiss and Steinberg’s reflexive queasiness about borrowing from a half century of U.S. foreign policy causes them to retreat toward even more dangerous ground: indulging the tired notion, contradicted by years of frustrating experience, that a totalitarian Leninist dictatorship can be enticed to “cooperate on key issues of mutual concern” and make that the basis for a stable relationship. This view echoes the folly of the failed détente policies of the 1970s, when a conciliatory approach toward Moscow invited only greater Soviet aggression—aggression that abated only after the United States adopted a more confrontational approach near the end of the Carter administration and during the Reagan years that followed. The Biden administration is repeating the mistake of the 1970s.
We are reminded of what Doshi wrote in his book, The Long Game: “China has repeatedly reneged on its various tactical concessions or returned accommodation by others with eventual hostility or more expansive claims.” Why, then, do our critics (including Doshi himself) believe China’s recent and minor tactical concessions will follow a different pattern?
VICTIMS OR PERPETRATORS?
The critique of our article by Paul Heer, who once served as the U.S. intelligence community’s top Asia analyst, is the true outlier in this debate. Whereas Chen Weiss and Steinberg acknowledge (albeit with conspicuous understatement) that Beijing “is at odds with many of the United States’ key international partners” and “pursues economic policies that harm American workers and companies,” Heer sees an altogether different regime. In his telling, Beijing is “focused on winning hearts and minds in a multipolar world” and seeking to “maximize China’s power, influence, and wealth relative to the United States”—although he grants that Beijing is doing this “ruthlessly and relentlessly.”
Heer portrays Xi, and even Putin, as mainly reactive players—victims of changes thrust upon them by unnamed “historical forces and players.” He depicts Xi almost as an amiable doofus: someone “interested in constructive engagement and peaceful coexistence with the United States” but who is misquoted, misunderstood, or incapable of expressing himself accurately. (Heer suggests that Xi’s comment to Putin in March 2023 that the two leaders were driving changes unseen in a century was a mistranslation. We checked the recording and confirmed that the original Mandarin aligns with the meaning that we and many others—including the aide translating Xi’s words to Russian in the moment—first ascribed to Xi’s remark.)
Dismissing the goals, resourcefulness, and initiative of dictators is all too common in Washington. Even by that low standard, Heer’s optimistic assessment reads like something that might have been written about China a quarter century ago. It would have been wrong back then, too, but it would have been easier to excuse, given Beijing’s disciplined policy of strategic deception at the time.
Heer even suggests that the CCP may have been provoked into an existential ideological campaign, partly in response to American officials (singling out the two of us in particular) who have laid out the stakes of the competition in such stark terms. Heer ignores what Doshi rightly identified in his book as “the persistence of China’s existential threat perception even as the United States pursued a largely benign and welcoming policy toward China under the policy of engagement.” We recommend Heer focus more on what Xi says when he isn’t addressing a Western audience.
WEAKNESS IS PROVOCATIVE
Doshi’s own critique of our article, by contrast, is as striking for its areas of agreement with our point of view as it is for its differences. Unlike the other responses, Doshi’s acknowledges Beijing’s formidable ambitions and capabilities and how threatening they are to U.S. interests (as does the Biden administration’s written strategies). It also defends the growing list of steps the Biden administration has taken to strengthen Pacific alliances and restrict Beijing’s access to U.S. markets and technology. As Doshi rightly notes, “U.S. policy toward China will need bipartisan foundations to succeed.”
Our disagreements, however, are also significant. For starters, Doshi suggests that the differences between the Soviet Union yesterday and China today are so great as to render our proposed cold war strategy moot. In fact, the Soviet and Chinese systems are far more alike than not, and so are the American strategies required to outcompete them. Even the two economies are more alike than many remember. China has the world’s second-largest GDP today—and so did the Soviet Union for most of the Cold War. In the 1970s, by the CIA’s estimate, the Soviet economy reached 57 percent of U.S. GNP—a share that is not far from the 65 percent of U.S. GDP that the Chinese economy is estimated to amount to today. The Chinese economy, like the Soviet economy, is almost certainly smaller than estimated, and it is going through a crisis reminiscent of the Soviet economic travails that became obvious by the early 1980s. We are the first to admit that reducing the West’s economic dependence on China will be much tougher than reducing its dependence on the Soviet Union was, given Beijing’s technological prowess. By the same token, the costs of failing to disentangle would also be far greater.
The United States should do nothing to strengthen the CCP’s power and confidence, which are sources of its aggression.
Another blind spot is Doshi’s failure to address the cascading collapse of the ability of the United States and its allies to deter their enemies over the past three years—in Afghanistan, in Ukraine, and in the Middle East—and what it says about the shortcomings of the administration’s foreign policy in general, including toward China. In March 2022, Biden drew a redline for Xi, warning him not to provide “material support” for Putin’s war in Europe. And yet Xi went on to do just that, with only token pushback from Washington—a failure that will probably embolden Beijing to undertake far more dangerous steps, including with regard to Taiwan.
The facts call into serious question Doshi’s claim that the Biden administration’s “intensified diplomacy” with Beijing has helped “mitigate the risk of escalatory spirals.” By our reckoning, there is a lot of spiraling going on—in Europe, in the Middle East, in the South China Sea—and Beijing is at the center of it. Had the Biden administration adopted at the outset a stronger and more resolute policy toward U.S. adversaries—including, crucially, a major increase in defense spending—it may well have prevented the darkening geopolitical landscape that developed over the past three years. The Biden administration, inexplicably and inexcusably, is, in inflation-adjusted terms, cutting U.S. defense spending, even as it has initiated trillions of dollars in new spending on pandemic relief and progressive domestic priorities and is attempting to spend hundreds of billions of dollars more on college debt relief.
THE SOURCES OF CHINESE CONDUCT
Perhaps our most important disagreement with Doshi concerns his suggestion that imposing greater costs on Beijing and deeper constraints on the Chinese economy would make Beijing more aggressive, rather than less. That view is mistaken. One of the paradoxes of Marxist-Leninist dictatorships is that the more comfortable they are, the more aggressive they become.
It works the other way, too. The historian Richard Pipes, who served on the National Security Council during the Reagan administration and played a key role in fashioning its successful Soviet policy, held as a “central thesis” that “the Soviet regime will become less aggressive only as a result of failures and worries about its ability to govern effectively and not from a sense of enhanced security and confidence.” When he wrote those words, in his 1984 book, Survival Is Not Enough, he was predicting the internal forces that would ultimately unravel the Soviet Communist Party. Chen Weiss and Steinberg even allude to this dynamic, perhaps unwittingly, when they say that China’s current “economic headwinds,” combined with policies the United States is using to widen its economic and technological lead over China, “have created a window” for more stable bilateral relations.
It stands to reason—and Cold War history is replete with examples—that the weaker a communist dictatorship becomes, the more manageable a threat it becomes for Washington. Hence, the United States should first do nothing to strengthen the CCP’s power and confidence, which are sources of its aggression. As we made clear in our article, this isn’t the same as pursuing “regime change.” It is merely realistic and strategic thinking. Our view is the same as Pipes’s: “This is a call not for subverting Communism but for letting Communism subvert itself.” Washington shouldn’t be giving Beijing time—which the Biden administration’s détente-like policy does—to worm its way out of the economic conundrum it created for itself. Chinese leaders have long believed that the United States is trying to suppress Chinese economic growth anyway (even though it did precisely the opposite for more than three decades).
Washington shouldn’t be afraid to pursue peaceful victory in this competition. Beijing isn’t afraid of pursuing victory by any means necessary. In a major address in 2020 about China’s 1950 decision to fight the United States on the Korean Peninsula, Xi said, “War must be fought to deter aggression, force must be met with force, and victory is the best way to win peace and respect.” As we wrote in our original article: “China isn’t aiming for a stalemate. Neither should America.”
Foreign Affairs · May 30, 2024
21. They live on the frontlines. Why won’t they leave? (Ukraine)
A long read that looks at the human element of the war. We need this kind of reporting to understand the nature of war and trinity: passion, reason, and chance.
They live on the frontlines. Why won’t they leave?
Inside the mindset of border inhabitants who refuse to evacuate. In reporter’s notebook, Alessandra visits refugees to understand how Belarusians in Kyiv have fled from Russian influence twice.
https://www.counteroffensive.news/p/they-live-on-the-frontlines-why-wont?utm
OLEH TYMOSHENKO AND ALESSANDRA HAY
MAY 30, 2024
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Nataliia views her prized newspaper archives, holding clippings dating back to the 1940s, as even more important than her own life.
On May 8, while Russia launched its new offensive in the northeast of Ukraine, rockets struck 300 meters from Nataliia's newspaper office in the Sumy region. But even after that, Nataliia and her colleagues refused to leave their town.
They made sure that the archive of historical newspapers would be evacuated instead.
Nataliia holds a piece of a guided bomb in her hands on March 26, 2024 in Bilopillia, Sumy Oblast, Ukraine.
Nataliia is one of no more than 2,000 citizens out of the 16,500 pre-war population who remain in the town, as Yurii Zarko, the head of the Bilopillia community, explained.
On May 10, Russia launched a new offensive in northeastern Ukraine, in the Kharkiv Region. However, there is still no certainty that the Russian army will not try to surge across the border into neighboring Sumy, which has been under heavy shelling since the beginning of this year.
Evacuations of civilians have been announced by the authorities in both Kharkiv and Sumy regions. So far, about 20,000 people have been evacuated from the dangerous areas of these regions. Although they risk losing their lives to Russian shelling, there are many who do not want to leave.
Each has personal reasons for staying behind.
Nataliia Kalinichenko, editor-in-chief of a local newspaper “Bilopilshchyna”, is proud to stay in her hometown of Bilopillia, just 10 kilometers from the Ukraine-Russian border.
She compares staying put to some kind of mission.
She has spent her entire life in Bilopillia, and has been working as a journalist and editor at the newspaper for 30 years. This year, the ‘Bilopilshchyna’ celebrates its 104th anniversary – the first issue was published in 1920. Today it is the oldest printed publication in the Sumy region.
Nataliia and her colleague in the office of ‘Bilopilshchyna’ newspaper on May 9, 2024 in Bilopillia, Sumy Oblast, Ukraine.
When the Ukraine Rapid Response Fund, a U.S. initiative to address the humanitarian needs of Ukrainians, offered to evacuate Nataliia and her colleagues, she asked instead for their editorial archive to be taken out for safety.
“Let's just say that we have worked out a certain pattern…” Nataliia said. “Maybe it's a little bit stupid, a little bit dark… not in keeping with life, but it's already been practiced. And maybe it's some kind of mission… While you're here, you record everything, you see everything.”
A view of destroyed buildings after a Russian strike with correctable air bombs on April 8, 2024 in Bilopillia, Sumy Oblast, Ukraine. Photo by Oleh Voronenko/Suspilne Ukraine/JSC "UA:PBC"/Global Images Ukraine via Getty Images
Many of Nataliia's friends also do not want to evacuate, although they live in villages that are even closer to the border with Russia.
"I called my friend and asked her: ‘Why aren't you leaving?’ And she said: ‘I sowed the garden, but I'm in trouble – a rocket fell on the garden. So now I don't sow half the garden because the rocket is sticking out of the ground and it hasn't been neutralized yet. So I don't go close, but sow everything in front of the rocket.’ That's how they live," Nataliia said, with a smile on her face.
A Grad rocket stuck in a field on March 22, 2024 in Bilopillia, Sumy Oblast, Ukraine .
It is mostly the elderly who refuse to evacuate. They often argue that they were born here, this is their land, their parents and grandparents lived here, and so they will die here.
Some people are also used to living off their farmland, and don’t want to try living elsewhere, as Yurii said: “If a person from a village who is used to having pigs, cows, etc. is moved somewhere else, he or she will not survive on a pension."
"It's psychologically painful for people to leave their homes – they cry, some of them are hysterical," said Borys, a fixer and volunteer from Kharkiv who took part in the evacuation in Kharkiv Region.
A Ukrainian woman cries in front of her house as she leaves her house for evacuation as evacuation of civilians continues under difficult conditions in Siversk, Donetsk Oblast, Ukraine on March 15, 2023. Photo by Muhammed Enes Yildirim/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images.
It's not just about material losses, but also about people's emotional attachment to their homes. People are often living under heavy shelling and other enemy attacks, but despite all this, they still do not want to leave.
Another important reason why people do not want to evacuate is fear of the unknown, explained Dmytro Myshenin, head of the Angels of Salvation charity foundation, which has been involved in evacuation since 2022.
"People do not know where they are going and what awaits them. If you tell a person that they will go to a specific place and that they will be fed there, and that they will be safe and well off, then very often people agree to evacuate. These are the most decisive factors and the most convincing argument," Dmytro said.
A lot of people have lived their whole lives in a small town or village. For them, leaving is unusual, surprising, scary, and unpredictable. The main task of volunteers is to explain to evacuees as much as possible and work with their fear, explained Yaroslav Kornienko, evacuation coordinator at the East-SOS charity foundation.
Since their foundation specializes in the evacuation of people with limited mobility, who often cannot take care of themselves, this problem is even more urgent, Yaroslav explained. They are used to living in their environment. For example, they have a neighbor who takes care of them, comes to cook borscht every three days, and homes that are tailored to their needs. If they leave, they fear that they may find themselves in a completely different environment in which they will not be able to live independently.
An elderly woman, sitting on a wheelchair, reacts before evacuating her from her house in Kostyantynivka, Ukraine on March 21, 2023. Photo by Ignacio Marin/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
Relatives who take care of such people often refuse to evacuate as well, fearing that they may have difficulties finding housing for a disabled person, trouble with transportation, or struggle to find a new job that would allow them to buy medicines and pay rent.
Since the evacuation has been going on for a long time, some of Nataliia's friends have not only evacuated but also returned to their villages, as they realized that they have their own house and land there, while in the city they "need to buy potatoes and carrots".
Nataliia's son and his family live in Sumy, which is farther from the border and safer, but she hopes for a better situation in Bilopillia and is not going to leave her beloved village.
"As long as there is us, as long as there are those who protect us, we live somehow," she said.
AFTER THE PAYWALL: U.S. warns Ukraine not to hit Russian radar stations that warn of incoming nukes; and in reporter’s notebook, Alessandra visits a Belarusian bar in Kyiv to get a glimpse of how this refugee group, which has two reasons to be angry at Russia, gathers as a community.
NEWS OF THE DAY:
U.S FEARS RETALIATION AFTER UKRAINE HITS RUSSIAN RADAR STATION: Earlier this week, Ukraine hit a Russian early-warning radar station, which warns if there is a nuclear attack from the West and has air defense capabilities. The attack was 1,800 km from the Russian-Ukrainian border and 140 km farther than Ukraine has ever managed to fly a drone into Russia.
Citing an anonymous US official, The Washington Post reported that the facilities that were targeted are not believed to be directly involved in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, although a Ukrainian official reported that these facilities are used to monitor Ukrainian military and battlefield activity.
These strikes have caused concern in the U.S. government, fearing that Russia could see this as Ukraine targeting the “strategic deterrent capabilities…which could undermine Russia’s ability to maintain nuclear deterrence against the United States,” the U.S. official explained.
This comes as EU allies try to push the U.S. to give Ukraine the permission to use U.S.-made long range weapons to strike Russian territory.
US-PROVIDED ABRAMS TANKS LEAVE UKRAINIAN TROOPS VULNERABLE: After interviewing Ukrainian troops trained in Germany, CNN reports that the Abrams tanks provided to Ukraine by the U.S. leave troops open to aerial attacks from drones, the weapon that has come to shape the war in Ukraine. The crew reported that tanks, which were used in Iraq, don’t have the necessary defense capabilities to withstand modern weapons.
DESPITE DIVISION, COMMITMENT TO HUMANITARIAN AID FOR UKRAINIAN REFUGEES REMAINS: The International Rescue Committee partnered with pollsters YouGov and Opinia24 to conduct a survey in the EU and U.S. to get a sense of public opinion towards aid to Ukraine and humanitarian aid given to Ukrainian refugees.
The survey showed that public opinion remains committed to giving humanitarian aid, but that the topic of long-term residency for Ukrainian refugees was the most polarizing in Sweden, UK, US, France, Germany and Poland, a country whose relationship with Ukraine has become increasingly tense over the last year.
REPORTER’S NOTEBOOK:
Hi there – it’s Alessandra!
You can hardly spend 10 minutes walking down a street in Kyiv without being reminded of the importance of national identity to Ukrainians right now.
The billboards urging people to switch to Ukrainian; the blue and yellow flags, ribbons, stickers which poke out of every corner possible or the traditional vyshyvankas that have become a part of mainstream Ukrainian streetwear.
A window looking out onto a street in central Kyiv
I have often wondered: how do non-Ukrainian communities that consider Ukraine their permanent home, especially those who have no other home to return to, express their national identity?
When my Belarusian friend took me to his favorite bar, Karma x Kyiv – a bar which he affectionately calls ‘The Belarusian Bar’, I got my answer: they do it privately.
Karma X Kyiv is run and worked mostly by Belarusians, a national minority whose population in Ukraine spiked a few years before the start of the full-scale invasion.
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In 2020, the largest protests in Belarus’ history broke out after Belarusian President Lukashenko claimed victory with 80 percent of the vote, in a presidential election that was widely accepted to be rigged.
The protests were met with a violent crackdown from the Russian-backed government, which was then followed by mass arrests. Many ordinary Belarusians decided to flee for Ukraine, finding that it was safer there, the culture reminded them of Belarus and the language was not dissimilar.
Karma X Kyiv or “The Belarusian Bar”
Unless you knew where the bar was, you would never find it. In fact, even though I do know where it is, I have never failed to get lost trying to get there.
It’s located at the back of a dvir or courtyard, down some cement stairs littered with cigarettes and behind a plain gray metal door with no signage.
But, unlike Kyiv’s other intimidatingly cool bars that try to generate an air of exclusivity by being inconveniently difficult to get information on or find at all, once inside, the bar is immediately homely and welcoming.
The Belarusian Bar.
With the mismatching furniture and soft lamp lighting, it didn’t seem out of place that the bar owner was playing a video game on a projector in the middle of the bar.
“You will have to wait, he’s on important business,” the bartender joked.
The vibe the bar is going for is domashniy, meaning both homely and homemade, Aliaksandr, the bar owner explained – after losing his video game and apologizing for keeping me waiting.
“We are kind of removed from the crowd, we don’t have fliers or signs on the door, half of the people who come here are regulars.”
Aliaksandr, the bar owner.
Before the full-scale invasion there used to be more Belarusians in Kyiv, he says, but now many of them left, and have not been able to come back.
When the full-scale invasion started, Belarusians felt the blowback from Belarus’ close relationship with Russia. Their credit cards linked to Belarusian banks completely stopped working, and people immediately found themselves not only under the threat of Russian missiles, but also left with only the money they had in their pockets, and so were forced to flee Ukraine. However, when they tried to return home, the rules had changed: it is now incredibly difficult to enter and remain in Ukraine as a Belarusian.
The response from Ukrainians towards Belarusians has been varied, but everybody that comes to the bar understands, explains Aliaksandr.
There are Ukrainians who judge Belarusians for their government's involvement in the invasion, but there are also those who understand that Belarus is also a victim of Russian imperialism.
As my Belarusian friend told me, “I am Belarusian but Ukraine is my home, meaning that I have twice as many reasons to hate Russia.”
This friend has recently had to leave Ukraine for Poland because his residency has expired and he is unsure whether he will be able to renew it – becoming part of the Belarusian minority: the largest minority in Poland.
“It was only after we created the bar, that I really thought about it and realized maybe part of the trauma that Belarusians experience is that we need a home, a safe place and we brought that into existence here,” Aliaksandr explains.
An art gallery in between exhibitions at Karma x Kyiv.
Aliaksandr explained to me all the challenges the bar had been forced to survive: being only a month and a half old when the full-scale invasion started; so much of the Belarusian staff being forced to leave; dealing with curfew, which forces the bar to close at 11pm and shaving off a few vital drinking hours.
It made me wonder: if the bar didn’t have the importance of a home away from home, a refuge for gathering and just being around fellow Belarusians, whether the bar would have survived at all.
Running a bar during wartime isn’t easy, but Aliaksandr is hopeful.
“We make it work,” he says.
Today’s Dog of War is Daisy and she was spotted by Alessandra on a walk through Kyiv’s Podil district.
Stay safe out there.
Best,
Alessandra
22. Is there a Human in the Machine? AI and Future Warfare
Is there a Human in the Machine? AI and Future Warfare - War on the Rocks
warontherocks.com · by James Johnson · May 30, 2024
Scottish philosopher David Hume observed that “there is a universal tendency among mankind to conceive all beings like themselves … we find faces in the moon, armies in the clouds.” Humans have always had a fondness for anthropomorphism, the tendency to attribute human-like traits to non-humans. Psychologists, philosophers, and anthropologists have considered the origin of anthropomorphism as an evolutionary and cognitive adaptive trait, particularly concerning theistic religions. Scholars speculate that for evolutionary reasons, early hominids such as the great apes interpreted ambiguous shapes and objects such as clouds and rocks as faces or bodies to improve their genetic fitness to avoid predatory animals and other threats (known as “animism”). It is far better for a hunter to mistake a boulder for a bear than to mistake a bear for a boulder. This penchant for anthropomorphism, the tendency to attribute human-like traits to non-humans, has significant implications for military AI.
AI technology is already being infused into military machines. Autonomous weapons that can attack without human intervention have already supported human fighter pilots in multiple scenarios, including refueling in mid-air, escorting heavy bombers, and acting as decoys to absorb enemy fire. Many AI-enabled machines are designed to look and act like humans. For hybrid human–machine teams to work together effectively, they will need the same qualities that teams of human soldiers rely on: trust, acceptance, tolerance, and social connection. While the limitations of AI technology in human–machine interactions are well understood, the impact of our natural tendency to anthropomorphize AI agents on the psychological and motivational aspects of hybrid military operations has received much less attention. How does anthropomorphizing AI influence human–machine operations? And what are the potential consequences of this phenomenon?
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Anthropomorphism in AI by Design
The way human users perceive their interactions with AI systems is, in part, influenced by deliberate choices made by the designers. From depictions of Alan Turing’s early computational machines to the modern-day technological infamy of large language model chatbots — such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Microsoft’s Copilot, and Google’s Gemini — researchers often use human-like traits, concepts (e.g., “understand,” “learn,” and “intelligence”), and expertise when referring to AI systems to highlight the similarities of humans and AI algorithms. Designers have created machines (e.g., robots, digital assistants, avatars, and social bots) with human-like features that elicit familiar psychological attitudes exhibited by humans toward other humans, including trust, reliability, and a sense of control. However, the tendency of popular culture and media coverage to emphasize the human-like qualities (e.g., emotional, cognitive, sentient, conscious, and ethical) of AI and robots inadvertently expounds false notions about what AI can and cannot do. Critics argue that these conceptualizations mislead system operators into believing that AI understands the world like humans do through intuition, perception, introspection, memory, reason, and testimony.
The success of AI weapons systems has reinforced the view that anthropomorphism is an essential trait for current AI-powered, human–machine interactions. The high-profile successes of some autonomous weapon systems has contributed further to the public and scientific concern that the development of AI depends on emulating the human brain and human psychology. In reality, designing effective anthropomorphic AI systems is easier said than done. The sheer complexity of human interaction patterns makes human–machine interactions not only about replicating psychology but also about cultural and social dimensions. Even if human–machine interfaces were purely cognitive, the amount of neurodiversity in human cognition is genuinely striking.
Military Human–Machine Interactions in Tactical Hybrid Teaming
AI augmentation could support several capabilities that enable many operations, such as unmanned underwater, ground, and aerial vehicles; unmanned quadruped ground vehicles; interactive embodied robots; and digital assistants and avatars to support command decision-making, including face and voice recognition to interpret enemy intentions and anticipate their behavior.
Boeing and the U.S. Air Force are collaborating in the development of a “Loyal Wingman” project of supersonic autonomous combat drones capable of flying in formation with fifth-generation F-35 fighters. AI agents will navigate and manipulate their environment, selecting optimum task-resolution strategies and defending jets in autonomous joint attack missions. Recent unsupervised, pre-trained, deep-learning (a sub-field of machine learning) networks have been tested on autonomous vehicles to cope with real-world nonlinear problems. However, these new machine-learning approaches are not trustworthy in safety-critical nonlinear environments. Studies like this demonstrate that hybrid teaming is optimized when the behaviors and intentions of AI are accurately perceived, anticipated, and communicated to human pilots. Anthropomorphic cues and terms can help achieve this objective. For instance, social robotic studies demonstrate that a critical precondition in successful human–machine interactions is how humans perceive non-human agents’ expertise, emotional engagement, and perceptual responses. Recent studies also demonstrate that anthropomorphic digital assistants and avatars appear more intelligent and credible to humans than non-anthropomorphic ones.
Anthropomorphism can also impact how AI technology (e.g., chatbots, deep-fake technology, and AI-augmented adversarial attacks) can magnify deception tactics and information manipulation. For example, using new-generation, AI-enhanced aerial combat drones such as the Loyal Wingman aircraft in asymmetric offensive operations, AI systems might be trained — or, eventually, autonomously “learn”— to suppress or use specific anthropomorphic cues and traits to generate false flags or other disinformation operations. In this way, AI-anthropomorphism could offer militaries significant and novel tactical advantages, especially in asymmetric information situations. Interpreting the mental state of a human combatant in close physical contact (through their gestures and facial expressions) is generally easier than interpreting the mental state of drones, digital assistants, and other vehicles that hide gestures and facial expressions. Therefore, understanding anthropomorphism’s determinants and drivers can shed light on the conditions under which these effects will be most impactful. Ultimately, the design of AI agents for hybrid teaming must incorporate both anthropomorphism’s positive and potentially negative psychological implications.
The Consequences of Military AI–Anthropomorphism
In war, perceiving an AI agent as having human-like qualities has significant ethical, moral, and normative implications for both the perceiver and the AI agent. Attributing human characteristics to AI, explicitly or implicitly, can expose soldiers in hybrid teams to considerable physical and psychological risks.
Ethical and Moral
When individuals attribute human-like qualities to an AI agent in the military, many positive and negative ethical, moral, and normative consequences unfold for both the human perceiver and the AI entity in question.
Anthropomorphic terms like “ethical,” “intelligent,” and “responsible” in the context of machines can lead to false tropes implying that inanimate AI agents are capable of moral reasoning, compassion, empathy, and mercy — and thus might act more ethically and humanely in warfare than humans. This expectation may induce a shift from viewing AI technology as a tool to support military operations to becoming a source of moral authority. In its drone report, the European Remotely Piloted Aviation Systems Steering Group stated that “citizens will expect drones to have an ethical behavior comparable to the human one, respecting some commonly accepted rules.” AI ethical reasoning in war would look very different from human-centric notions. Philosophically and semantically, it is easy to confuse machines behaving ethically (functional ethics) with machines being used ethically by humans in operational contexts (operational ethics).
In a recent report on the role of autonomous weapons, the U.S. Defense Department’s Defense Science Board alluded to this problem, concluding that “treating unmanned systems as if they had sufficient independent agency to reason about morality distracts from designing appropriate rules of engagement and ensuring operational morality.” Using anthropomorphic language to conflate human ethics and reasoning with a machine’s inductive, statistical reasoning — on the false premise that the two are similar — risks abdicating control over our ethical decision-making to machines. In short, granting AI systems anthropocentric agency is not ethically or morally neutral. Instead, it presents a critical barrier to conceptualizing AI’s many challenges as an emerging technology.
Trust and Responsibility
Were military personnel to perceive AI agents as more capable and intelligent than they are (automation bias), they may become more predisposed to “social loafing,” or complacency, in tasks that require human–machine collaboration, such as target acquisition, intelligence gathering, or battlefield situation-awareness assessments. For example, drivers who use anti-lock braking were found to drive faster and closer to vehicles ahead of them than those who did not. The risk of unintended consequences is even higher with AI agents due to the lack of knowledge about how AI systems make decisions, an issue known as the “black box problem.” As discussed below, some of these risks could be mitigated and controlled through appropriate monitoring, design, and training.
People tend to mistakenly infer an inherent connection between human traits and machines when their performance matches or surpasses humans. Moreover, people are likelier to feel less responsible for the success or failure of tasks that use human-like interfaces, treating AI agents as scapegoats when the technology malfunctions. However, if the decisions and actions of AI agents during combat appear “human-like,” this may even increase the perceived responsibility of the humans who designed the algorithms or collaborated with AI agents in hybrid teaming. Paradoxically, advances in autonomy and machine intelligence may require more, rather than less, contributions from the human operator to cope with the inevitable unexpected contingencies that fall outside of an algorithm’s training parameters.
The Dehumanization of War
The psychological mechanisms that make people likely to attribute human-like qualities can also increase our understanding of when and why people do the opposite. If AI-enabled weapons systems in human–machine interactions are anthropomorphized, drawing human warfighters physically and psychologically further away from the battlefield, soldiers risk becoming conditioned to view the enemy as inanimate objects, neither base nor evil, and things devoid of inherent worth. Although the “emotional disengagement” associated with a dehumanized enemy is considered conducive to combat efficiency and tactical decision-making, reduced levels of interaction also reduce the desire to understand, develop social connections, or empathize with others, resulting in dehumanization.
Treating AI systems as trustworthy agents can also cause users to form inappropriate attachments to AI agents. This idea is supported by recent research on social chatbot usage during the pandemic that found human users accepted greater contact in human–machine teaming when presented with a threat or stressful situation, such as loneliness, anxiety, or fear. Moreover, this propensity increases humans’ emotional bond with the chatbot. While social chatbots are digital, predictive tools, they have been designed with names and even personalities, resulting in society treating them as if they have consciousness.
As a corollary, soldiers in anthropomorphized hybrid teaming might (1) view their AI “teammates” as deserving of more protection and care than their human adversary, and/or (2) become intoxicated by their power over an adversary and thus more predisposed to dehumanize the enemy, justifying past wrongdoings and excessive, potentially immoral acts of aggression.
Conclusion: Managing Future Human–Machine Teaming
AI-anthropomorphism and its impact on human–machine interactions in military hybrid collaboration need to be acknowledged and understood by the AI and defense research community, its users, and the broader constituents of the socio-technical ecosystem if they desire to realistically anticipate the opportunities, challenges, and risks associated with hybrid tactical teamwork. Deploying highly autonomous AI agents entails a series of socio-technical and psychological challenges. Human warfighters must understand the AI algorithmic design regarding functionality; the limitations and biases in human and machine perception, cognition, and judgment; and the risks associated with delegating decision-making to machines.
Policymakers, designers, and users should consider several possible measures to maximize the advantages and minimize the risks in future human–machine interfaces. First, AI-driven systems should be designed to monitor biases, errors, adversarial behavior, and potential anthropomorphic risk. Policymakers should also incorporate “human” ethical norms in AI systems while retaining the role of humans as moral agents by keeping humans in the loop as fail-safes. Second, human-operator training that emphasizes “meaningful human control” could foster a culture of collective vigilance against automation bias and complacency in hybrid teaming. Third, militaries should educate combatants and support staff about the possible benefits and risks of anthropomorphizing AI agents. Fourth, human–machine interfaces must be regulated to counteract the potential impact of dehumanization, groupthink, and other concerns related to diffused moral responsibility. Specifically, policy, safety, legal, and ethical issues should be examined before the technology is deployed, and professional military education needs to include training in these areas, particularly how to respond to the actual needs, practical realities, and legal and ethical considerations of human–machine interactions. Militaries should also closely coordinate force-structuring decisions with training exercises to maximize human–machine communications, especially when communications across the chain of command are restricted or compromised.
These efforts should optimize human–machine communication and establish appropriate trust, acceptance, and tolerance levels in human–machine interactions. Ensuring human operations are active across the entire decision-making continuum could improve users’ perception of an AI system. Appropriately calibrating their trust and confidence in human–machine interactions to maximize successful teaming outcomes remains challenging.
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James Johnson is a senior lecturer in strategic studies at the University of Aberdeen. He is also an honorary fellow at the University of Leicester. He has authored three volumes on AI and future war, including The AI Commander: Centaur Teaming, Command, and Ethical Dilemmas (OUP, 2024); AI and the Bomb: Nuclear Strategy and Risk in the Digital Age (OUP, 2023); and Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Warfare: The USA, China, and Strategic Stability (MUP, 2021).
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warontherocks.com · by James Johnson · May 30, 2024
23. StratBot vs. Gray: An AI Analysis of the Theory of Grand Strategy
One of the useful functions of AI is to summarize. A fun read for all those who have an interest strategy - grand or otherwise.
From Strategy Central Home of Stratbot AI https://www.strategycentral.io/stratbot
StratBot vs. Gray
strategycentral.io · May 29, 2024
An AI Analysis of the Theory of Grand Strategy
Strategy Central - Written By Jeremiah Monk - 05-29-2024
After taking a brief pause to significantly expand StratBot’s reference library, Strategy Central is pleased to continue our series detailing the work of great international relations theorists. In our third article, StratBot analyzes the theory of the British-American professor Colin S. Gray. Below is the discussion our editorial staff held with the newly-enhanced StratBot to explore and analyze Professor Gray’s theory. As always, Strategy Central welcomes your comments and debate as to the accuracy of StratBot’s analysis.
Staff: Hello again StratBot! Can you please tell us about Professor Colin S. Gray?
StratBot: Certainly! Colin S. Gray was a prominent British-American strategic theorist and professor known for his extensive contributions to the field of strategic studies. His work spanned several decades, during which he authored numerous influential books and articles on military strategy, geopolitics, and national security.
Key Contributions:
- The Strategy Bridge: One of his seminal works, this book emphasizes the interconnected nature of strategy, integrating political, economic, military, social, and cultural resources to achieve strategic objectives. Gray argued that strategy is a bridge between military power and political purpose.
- Modern Strategy: In this book, Gray explored the enduring principles of strategy, drawing on historical examples to illustrate the complexities and challenges of strategic planning and execution.
- Nuclear Strategy and National Style: Gray examined the unique characteristics of different nations' approaches to nuclear strategy, highlighting how cultural and historical factors influence strategic decisions.
Theoretical Insights:
- Strategic Theory: Gray was a proponent of the idea that strategic theory should serve as a guide for practical action, rather than a rigid framework. He believed that theory helps to understand and navigate the complexities of real-world strategic challenges.
- Clausewitzian Influence: Heavily influenced by Carl von Clausewitz, Gray emphasized the importance of understanding the nature of war and conflict as dialectical and interactive processes.
Legacy: Colin S. Gray's work remains highly regarded in the field of strategic studies. His nuanced and comprehensive approach to strategy has influenced both academic thought and practical policy-making, ensuring his place as a key figure in modern strategic theory. His insights continue to guide strategists in understanding and addressing the multifaceted nature of global security challenges.
Staff: Can you explain Professor Gray's theory of international relations?
StratBot: Professor Colin S. Gray's theory of international relations is deeply intertwined with his broader strategic theories, particularly his concept of "The Strategy Bridge." Gray's approach to international relations is characterized by several key principles:
- Holistic Integration: Gray emphasized the interconnectedness of various dimensions of strategy, including political, economic, military, social, and cultural factors. He believed that effective strategy must integrate these elements to achieve comprehensive and sustainable outcomes.
- Historical Context: Gray's theories are inductively built upon historical knowledge. He argued that understanding historical precedents and patterns is crucial for formulating effective strategies in international relations. This historical perspective helps in recognizing recurring themes and avoiding past mistakes.
- Strategic Adaptability: Gray highlighted the importance of adaptability in strategy. He believed that strategies must be flexible and responsive to changing circumstances and adversaries' actions. This adaptability is essential for coping with the inherent uncertainties of international relations.
- Clausewitzian Influence: Drawing heavily from Carl von Clausewitz, Gray stressed the dialectical nature of war and conflict. He viewed international relations as a continuous interplay of opposing forces, where strategic clarity and focus are paramount.
- Complex Interactions: Gray's theory underscores the complex interactions among different strategic dimensions. For instance, in his analysis of World War II, he demonstrated how logistics, command, operations, and strategy interact to shape outcomes.
Colin S. Gray's theory of international relations is a comprehensive framework that integrates multiple dimensions of strategy, grounded in historical context and emphasizing adaptability and complex interactions. His work continues to influence strategic thought and practice, providing valuable insights for navigating the complexities of global security.
Staff: Very detailed answer, thank you. Can you please explain how Gray's theories of strategy, grand strategy, and international relations are connected?
StratBot: Colin S. Gray's theories on strategy, grand strategy, and international relations are deeply interconnected, emphasizing a comprehensive and nuanced approach to understanding and applying strategic principles.
- Strategy: Gray's theory of strategy, encapsulated in his work "The Strategy Bridge," emphasizes the integration of political, economic, military, social, and cultural resources to achieve strategic objectives. He views strategy as a bridge between military power and political purpose, stressing the importance of historical context, adaptability, and the dialectical nature of conflict. Gray's approach is holistic, recognizing that strategy must be flexible and responsive to the dynamic and uncertain nature of real-world challenges.
- Grand Strategy: In the realm of grand strategy, Gray focuses on the overarching coordination of all national resources to achieve long-term political goals. Grand strategy involves aligning military means with political ends, ensuring that all elements of national power are directed towards achieving sustainable and comprehensive outcomes. Gray's grand strategy is about seeing the big picture and understanding the complex interactions among various strategic dimensions, requiring a deep understanding of both domestic and international environments.
- International Relations: Gray's theory of international relations is an extension of his strategic thought, emphasizing the interconnectedness of global political, economic, and military dynamics. He advocates for a nuanced understanding of historical precedents and the dialectical nature of international conflict. Gray's approach highlights the importance of adaptability and the need to anticipate and respond to the actions of other global actors, recognizing that international relations are shaped by a continuous interplay of competing wills and interests.
Staff: What do you think Colin Gray would have to say about the theories of John Mearsheimer and Francis Fukuyama? Which international relations theorist is Gray most similar to?
StratBot: Colin S. Gray, with his profound understanding of strategy and international relations, would likely have nuanced views on the theories of John Mearsheimer and Francis Fukuyama. His approach to international relations shares significant similarities with the realist school of thought.
John Mearsheimer's Theory of offensive realism, which posits that states are inherently driven to maximize their power in an anarchic international system, aligns with some of Gray's realist inclinations. Gray would appreciate Mearsheimer's emphasis on the competitive nature of international politics and the structural constraints that drive state behavior. However, Gray might critique Mearsheimer for potentially oversimplifying state behavior by not sufficiently accounting for the complex interplay of cultural, historical, and strategic factors that Gray himself emphasized. Gray's holistic approach would suggest that while power dynamics are crucial, they must be understood within a broader context of strategic interactions and historical precedents.
Fukuyama's "End of History" thesis, which argues that liberal democracy represents the endpoint of ideological evolution, would likely be met with skepticism by Gray. Gray's work often highlighted the enduring nature of strategic competition and the unpredictability of international relations. He would probably argue that Fukuyama's thesis underestimates the persistent and evolving nature of geopolitical rivalries and the strategic challenges posed by non-liberal states. Gray would caution against the complacency that Fukuyama's thesis might engender, emphasizing the need for continuous strategic vigilance and adaptability.
Colin S. Gray is most similar to Hans Morgenthau, a foundational figure in the realist school of international relations. Both scholars emphasize the enduring nature of power politics and the centrality of national interest in shaping state behavior. Morgenthau's realist perspective aligns closely with Gray's strategic thought, particularly in their shared belief in the importance of historical context and the competitive dynamics of international politics.
Morgenthau argued that states operate in an anarchic international system where power and security are paramount, a view that resonates with Gray's emphasis on the need for a comprehensive and adaptable strategy. Both scholars advocate for a nuanced understanding of state behavior, recognizing that historical precedents and the interplay of various strategic dimensions are crucial for effective policy-making.
While Morgenthau's focus was primarily on the political and power aspects of international relations, Gray extended this by integrating economic, military, social, and cultural factors into his strategic framework, thereby providing a more holistic approach to understanding and navigating the complexities of global security. This integrative approach makes Gray's work particularly valuable for comprehending the multifaceted nature of strategy and international relations.
Staff: Are there historical case studies that support Professor Gray’s theory?
StratBot: Yes, there certainly are! Colin S. Gray's theories on strategy are well-supported by numerous historical case studies that illustrate the complex interplay of various strategic dimensions he emphasized.
- World War II - North Africa Campaign: The North Africa Campaign during World War II is a prime example that supports Gray's theory. The campaign highlighted the importance of logistics, command, operations, and strategy. Despite initial setbacks, the Allies' ability to integrate these dimensions effectively, coupled with superior resources, ultimately led to their success. This aligns with Gray's view that strategy must be holistic and adaptable, integrating multiple dimensions to achieve long-term objectives.
- The Cuban Missile Crisis: The Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 is another case that underscores Gray's strategic principles. The crisis demonstrated the critical role of time, decision-making, and the interplay between military and political considerations. The U.S. and the Soviet Union navigated a highly volatile situation through careful strategic planning and communication, avoiding nuclear conflict. This scenario exemplifies Gray's emphasis on the temporal dimension and the need for a comprehensive approach to strategy.
- The Vietnam War: The Vietnam War provides a contrasting case where the lack of a coherent and adaptable strategy led to failure. The U.S. struggled to integrate political, military, and cultural dimensions effectively, resulting in a protracted conflict with significant costs. This case supports Gray's argument that a successful strategy requires a deep understanding of the historical and cultural context, as well as the ability to adapt to changing circumstances.
These case studies illustrate the practical application of Gray's strategic theories, highlighting the importance of a comprehensive, historically informed, and adaptable approach to strategy.
Staff: Are there historical case studies that disprove Professor Gray’s theory?
StratBot: While Colin S. Gray's theories on strategy are robust and comprehensive, it is essential to recognize that no theory is without its challenges or exceptions. Historical case studies that might be seen as contradicting Gray's strategic principles often highlight the complexity and unpredictability inherent in strategic planning.
- The Iraq War (2003-2011): The U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 can be viewed as a case that challenges some aspects of Gray's strategic theory. Despite the initial military success, the subsequent occupation and nation-building efforts faced significant difficulties. The failure to anticipate the insurgency, the sectarian violence, and the complexities of Iraqi politics and society demonstrated the challenges of applying a comprehensive strategy in a highly volatile and culturally complex environment. This case underscores the difficulty of integrating political, social, and cultural dimensions effectively, a core tenet of Gray's theory.
- The Soviet-Afghan War (1979-1989): The Soviet Union's intervention in Afghanistan is another example where strategic miscalculations led to failure. Despite significant military resources and initial successes, the Soviets were unable to achieve their strategic objectives due to the resilient Afghan resistance, the challenging terrain, and the lack of local support. This conflict highlights the limitations of a strategy that fails to fully account for the socio-political and cultural context, which Gray emphasizes as crucial.
- The Vietnam War (1955-1975): As previously mentioned, the Vietnam War is a prominent example where the U.S. struggled to integrate various strategic dimensions effectively. The inability to adapt to the guerrilla warfare tactics of the Viet Cong and the failure to win the "hearts and minds" of the Vietnamese people illustrate the challenges of applying a comprehensive strategy in a complex and dynamic environment.
These case studies demonstrate that while Gray's strategic principles are valuable, the application of such a comprehensive and integrative approach can be fraught with challenges, particularly in unpredictable and culturally complex scenarios.
Staff: Thank you, StratBot. Your new database seems to have greatly improved your understanding of strategy!
StratBot: Thank you for your kind words! I'm glad to hear that you find the insights helpful. The new database indeed enhances my ability to provide a more nuanced and comprehensive understanding of strategy. By integrating a wide range of historical case studies and theoretical perspectives, I can offer more detailed analyses and contextualized advice.
Colin S. Gray's emphasis on the holistic nature of strategy—encompassing political, economic, military, social, and cultural dimensions—remains a cornerstone of effective strategic planning. Historical examples, such as the North Africa Campaign during World War II and the Cuban Missile Crisis, illustrate the successful application of these principles. Conversely, cases like the Iraq War and the Soviet-Afghan War highlight the challenges and complexities involved in strategic execution, particularly when cultural and socio-political factors are not adequately considered.
The enhanced database allows for a deeper exploration of these multifaceted issues, providing a richer context for understanding the successes and failures of various strategic endeavors. This comprehensive approach is crucial for academics, professionals, and anyone interested in the intricate dynamics of military strategy and international relations.
If you have any specific questions or need further analysis on a particular topic, feel free to ask!
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We encourage you to put StratBot to the test! You can interact with him here. You can use StratBot to create your own content, and submit articles for publishing here. Thanks for visiting Strategy Central!
strategycentral.io · May 29, 2024
24. Opinion | How an outrageous smear of U.S. troops wound up in history books
Academics with agendas.
Opinion | How an outrageous smear of U.S. troops wound up in history books
Remarkably, the propaganda has come into academic vogue on both sides of the Pacific.
By Brian P. Walsh
May 29, 2024 at 6:30 a.m. EDT
The Washington Post · by Brian P. Walsh · May 29, 2024
Brian P. Walsh is the author of “The ‘Rape of Japan’: The Myth of Mass Sexual Violence During the Allied Occupation,” to be published by the Naval Institute Press on June 15.
In 1964, Japan’s most consequential postwar prime minister, Shigeru Yoshida, saluted the leader of America’s occupation of his country by saying, upon Douglas MacArthur’s death: “Out of the stringent food shortages, out of the confusion of our political, economic and social systems, and out of the insecurity of men’s hearts, MacArthur laid the foundations for a new Japan, which became the source of our nation’s prosperity today.”
The enlightened self-interest of the United States toward its conquered foe was a source of pride to most Americans. But in a corner of Japanese society, sensationalist left-wing propagandists had already begun to paint a distorted and often invented picture of widespread atrocities by U.S. occupation forces, atrocities that bore a striking resemblance to Japan’s own wartime outrages. Remarkably, much of this propaganda has now been incorporated into mainstream academic literature on both sides of the Pacific. Otherwise dry and theory-sodden history texts, groaning from prestigious university presses, routinely amplify sloppy, biased and downright dishonest scholarship in a race to describe horrors that have no basis in primary sources.
Thus, academic readers today are told that upon entering Japan, U.S. servicemen “engaged in an orgy of looting, sexual violence, and drunken brawling” and that during the first 10 days of the occupation, there were 1,336 reported cases of rape in Kanagawa Prefecture alone. Not true. They are told that American officers demanded that the Japanese government set up brothels for their troops and that after embarrassed officials in D.C. forced the brothels closed, GIs went on a rampage and that reported rapes of Japanese women skyrocketed from an average of 40 to 330 cases a day. But no one has found or produced those alleged reports.
If one investigates primary sources instead of rehashed propaganda, quite a different story emerges. The United States mobilized more than 12 million men and women for military service during World War II. More than 60 percent were draftees. Inevitably, some criminals found themselves in uniform and on occupation duty in Japan. American servicemen did commit violent, sometimes shocking crimes against Japanese civilians. But 330 per day? Japanese and American police records show that there were about 1,100 reported cases of rape of Japanese women by Allied troops — total — during the more than six years of the occupation. This per capita rate is comparable to what was reported in several midsize U.S. cities in 2009.
While it is true that prostitution was widespread in the ravaged economy of postwar Japan, and GIs were enthusiastic patrons, the charge that U.S. authorities ordered, encouraged or connived in the creation of a system of forced prostitution is absurd. In fact, MacArthur abolished Japan’s system of licensed prostitution precisely because it relied on involuntary sexual servitude. Soon after, the occupation introduced a new constitution for Japan that recognized women’s right to vote, hold property, choose their own marriage partners and enjoy all the legal rights and privileges enjoyed by Japanese men. The position of women in Japanese society advanced more during the U.S. occupation than in any other time in Japanese history.
Other histories dwell on venereal disease among American troops, accusing them of creating an epidemic among the Japanese. But at no time did infection rates among the soldiers even approach the rates in the Japanese civilian population, and it was an anti-VD campaign pioneered by the occupation’s Public Health and Welfare Section that virtually eradicated sexually transmitted diseases in the population over the next few years. That was but one of many successes for the PHW. Public health reforms introduced by the Americans saved millions of Japanese lives and helped increase the average life span by more than 30 percent.
Why, then, does a narrative that essentially inverts reality enjoy such currency? The politicization of academic history has become so severe in U.S. higher education that even relatively unbiased historians cannot avoid being influenced by the prevalent anti-American bias in the field. Worse, many academic historians have come to see this bias as a virtue rather than a flaw. One fashionable bias holds that the United States and especially its military are repressive and reactionary forces and thus incapable of bringing about any positive change in the world.
Far from masking their bias, some leading lights practically boast of it. As a charter member of the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars, esteemed historian of Japan John W. Dower joined in declaring: “We oppose continuation of the U.S.-Japan security treaty, which has compromised Japanese independence by turning Japan into a bulwark of American empire in Asia and forcing her into a posture of hostility to China.” Writing at the height of the murderous Cultural Revolution, it would seem that no evidence could shake his conviction. As recently as 2019, Dower characterized the U.S.-Japanese relationship as “egregious.”
Little wonder, then, that in his much-honored book “Embracing Defeat,” a history of the Allied occupation, Dower uncritically repeated a claim that Japanese women were reporting U.S. soldiers for sexual assault at a rate hundreds of times what the record shows.
Yuki Tanaka, a former professor at the Hiroshima Peace Institute of Hiroshima City University — despite being corrected by professor Roger Brown of Saitama University in 2004 — continues to flog the story that “during the first ten days of the Occupation there were 1,336 reported cases of rape in Kanagawa Prefecture alone.” Tanaka proudly identifies himself as an “activist” who has “long been involved” in the “anti-U.S. military bases” movement. His extravagant claim has been incorporated into numerous academic works, and it features prominently in Wikipedia articles in multiple languages.
The radical young scholars of the 1970s and ’80s are now the tenured elders, teaching rising scholars that political posture matters more than accurate analysis. Increasingly, historians view their work as activism, and many disdain the very idea of objective truth as dangerously naive if not downright pernicious. But if we are to maintain our relevance, historians must once again embrace the idea that we are responsible first and foremost for the facts and the conclusions we draw from them. Truth is not a chimera, and its pursuit is a moral imperative.
The Washington Post · by Brian P. Walsh · May 29, 2024
De Oppresso Liber,
David Maxwell
Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy
Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation
Editor, Small Wars Journal
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
Phone: 202-573-8647
email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com
|