Quotes of the Day:

“Your knowledge is far more important than your degree.” 

- Paul Dirac

"Learning and leadership are indispensable to each other. " 

- John F. Kennedy

"We can disagree and still love each other unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist."

- James Baldwin

1. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, May 7, 2023

2. U.S. Think Tank Reports Prompted Beijing to Put a Lid on Chinese Data

3. Iran hid weapons among earthquake aid to target U.S. troops, leak says

4. U.S. and Allies Look at Potential China Role in Ending Ukraine War

5. In Ukraine, A New Chance to Judge the Patriot Missile

6. To Keep Hackers Out of US Weapons, the Pentagon Needs to Get In

7. Ukraine war: 'Mad panic' as Russia evacuates town near Zaporizhzhia plant

8. ‘What is this insane war?’: a philosopher on Ukraine’s frontlines

9. Henry Kissinger on a potential artificial intelligence arms race

10. Is There a Security Umbrella for Ukraine?

11. The 25 Most Expensive Weapons in the US Military Budget Next Year

12. To counter Russia in Africa, Biden deploys a favored strategy

13. Failures in the “Deterrence Failure” Dialogue

14. Can Ukraine Get Justice Without Thwarting Peace?

15. Catastrophic Success: What if the Ukrainian Counteroffensive Achieves More than Expected?

16. THE OUTER LIMITS OF LIBERALISM

17. U.S. Sanctions Drive Chinese Firms to Advance AI Without Latest Chips

18. China says relations with US on 'cold ice,' but stabilizing ties a 'top priority'

19. Homemade, Cheap and Lethal, Attack Drones Are Vital to Ukraine

20. What to know about Air Force Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., the next potential Joint Chiefs chair

21. Could Taiwan’s next president impact a potential cross-strait crisis?

22.  Warren Buffett says US, China can compete and both ‘prosper’ amid rising tensions

1. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, May 7, 2023

Maps/graphics/citations: https://understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-may-7-2023

Key Takeaways

• Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin and Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov may have compelled the Russian theater commander in Ukraine, Army General Valery Gerasimov, to resume artillery ammunition distribution to Wagner forces in Bakhmut despite Gerasimov’s desired de-prioritization of that effort.
• Kadyrov’s threats to transfer his forces to Bakhmut may have blackmailed the Russian military command into allocating ammunition to Wagner mercenaries.
• Kadyrov likely supported Wagner’s blackmail efforts against the Russian military command to reestablish his position within the circle of power of the Kremlin.
• Gerasimov's apparent need to negotiate with subordinate commanders and those commanders’ ability to force his hand suggests that chain of command problems are significantly impacting the Russian military's ability to conduct coherent theater-wide operations.
• These events raise questions about Russia’s ability to coordinate a coherent theater-wide defensive campaign.
• Prigozhin’s and Kadyrov’s ability to significantly influence Russian military command decisions relies on Putin’s willingness to appease them and his reliance on their forces – both of which will likely degrade after further blackmail efforts.
• Prigozhin’s continued fight to complete the capture of Bakhmut contradicts his consistent narrative that capturing Bakhmut lacks strategic value.
• Russian forces continued limited offensive operations northeast of Kupyansk and south of Kreminna.
• Russian forces made some territorial gains in Bakhmut as of May 7 and continued limited offensive operations on the Avdiivka-Donetsk front.
• Russian sources claimed that Ukrainian forces launched up to 23 drones at Crimea on the night of May 6 to 7.
• Russian federal subjects are continuing to recruit and form regional armed formations and volunteer battalions.
• Russian occupation authorities continue to plan and carry out forced evacuations from Zaporizhia Oblast.

RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, MAY 7, 2023

May 7, 2023 - Press ISW

Download the PDF

Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, May 7, 2023

Kateryna Stepanenko, Grace Mappes, Riley Bailey, Layne Philipson, and Frederick W. Kagan

May 7, 2023, 6:25pm ET

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

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

Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin and Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov may have compelled the Russian theater commander in Ukraine, Army General Valery Gerasimov, to resume artillery ammunition distribution to the Wagner forces in Bakhmut despite Gerasimov’s desired de-prioritization of that effort. Prigozhin announced on May 7 that he had obtained a document from the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) that promised to supply Wagner forces with the ammunition and weapons necessary to maintain offensive operations in Bakhmut.[1] Prigozhin has not published the official document and ISW cannot verify Prigozhin’s claims at this time. The Russian MoD likely has not fundamentally changed its intention of deprioritizing offensive operations and conserving munitions across the theater, as ISW has recently assessed. Prigozhin and Kadyrov likely effectively blackmailed the Russian MoD into allocating resources to Wagner forces in Bakhmut by threatening to pull Kadyrov’s Chechen forces from other parts of the theater to relieve Wagner forces in Bakhmut.[2] Prigozhin also claimed that the MoD gave Wagner complete freedom of operations in Bakhmut and appointed Army General Sergey Surovikin as an intermediary between the MoD and Wagner, actions that would indicate that Gerasimov and possibly Minister of Defense Sergei Shoigu lack the ability to command Prigozhin and Kadyrov as subordinates but must instead negotiate with them as peers.[3] This assessment assumes that Prigozhin’s claims that the MoD was withholding shells but has now agreed to supply them are true—the MoD has made no official statements regarding those claims—and Ukrainian officials report that they have not observed a decline in Wagner shelling during this period (see below).[4]

Kadyrov’s threats to transfer his forces to Bakhmut may have blackmailed the Russian military command into allocating ammunition to Wagner mercenaries. Kadyrov published a letter on May 6 asking Russian President Vladimir Putin to order Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Director of the Russian National Guard (Rosgvadia) Viktor Zolotov to authorize the transfer of Chechen “Akhmat” units from “other directions” to assume Wagner’s positions in the Bakhmut direction.[5] Kadyrov’s letter to Putin bypassed the Russian chain of command, and the withdrawal of Chechen forces from other parts of the theater likely posed a risk to Russian defensive lines, a risk that Gerasimov and Shoigu, or Putin, appear to have been unwilling to take. ISW previously observed Akhmat units operating in the Bilohorivka area on the Svatove-Kreminna line and in Zaporizhia Oblast, and their withdrawal from those positions might undermine Russia’s defensive preparations ahead of the planned Ukrainian counteroffensives.[6] Shoigu and Gerasimov, who have been consistently loyal to Putin’s orders, may alternatively have decided to allocate ammunition to Wagner at Putin’s direction. Kadyrov’s and Prigozhin’s apparently successful joint blackmail efforts further indicate that Gerasimov does not actually control all the Russian forces in Ukraine, despite being the nominal theater commander. Gerasimov likely attempted to assume control over all Russian irregular forces over the winter of 2023 but had failed in that endeavor even before losing favor with Putin in the spring.[7]

Kadyrov likely supported Wagner’s blackmail efforts against the Russian military command in order to reestablish his position within the circle of power in the Kremlin. Kadyrov had previously held an influential position within the Putin's close circle in until apparently losing favor recently, likely because his forces played a limited role in active combat operations in Ukraine throughout late fall of 2022 and winter of 2023.[8] Putin belittled Kadyrov during their meeting on March 13 where Kadyrov appeared visibly nervous when reporting on the Chechen fighters’ role in Ukraine.[9] Kadyrov likely saw Prigozhin’s threats to withdraw from Bakhmut as an opportunity to play up the effectiveness of his forces against the backdrop of Gerasimov‘s and Shoigu’s failures to deliver decisive victories during the winter-spring offensive.

Gerasimov's apparent need to negotiate with subordinate commanders and those commanders’ ability to force his hand suggests that chain of command problems are significantly impacting the Russian military’s ability to conduct coherent theater-wide operations. The position of overall theater commander should in principle allow Gerasimov to command any Russian unit or ground forces commander in Ukraine, even those in charge of irregular formations such as Wagner and Akhmat. Prigozhin and Kadyrov appear to be able to largely make independent decisions concerning their forces, however, a phenomenon that appears to have become more pronounced the longer these forces have had de facto control over certain sectors of the frontline. Wagner and the Russian MoD appeared to have recently reached an agreement about the delineation of responsibilities between conventional and irregular forces. The Russian military command deployed Russian Airborne Forces (VDV) to defend the flanks around Bakhmut around when Wagner began advancing in the city itself, for example.[10] ISW previously assessed that the Russian military command had likely recently decided to reprioritize efforts and resource allocation to prepare to receive potential Ukrainian counteroffensive operations but did not set conditions to appease Prigozhin or offset Wagner’s likely degradation in the Bakhmut area.[11] The subsequent upheaval over the de-prioritization of Bakhmut and the Russian military command's reversal on supplying Wagner is likely to undermine this theater-wide effort.

These events raise questions about Russia’s ability to coordinate a coherent theater-wide defensive campaign. The Russian military command appears to be increasingly delegating responsibilities for different sectors of the front in Ukraine to various Russian commanders while the power of the theater commander continues to wane.[12] Gerasimov’s degraded abilities to control his commanders will likely further limit the Russian military’s ability to conduct coherent operations involving different areas of responsibility. ISW has previously assessed that factional dynamics within the Russian military are shaping decision making to an unusual degree, and the increasing erosion of the Russian chain of command is likely caught in a self-reinforcing feedback loop with the Russian military’s growing factionalism.[13] ISW assesses that Putin is unlikely to remove Gerasimov as overall theater commander for reputational reasons, and therefore Prigozhin’s and Kadyrov’s public undermining of Gerasimov may have lasting impacts on the power of the overall theater commander’s position.[14] Putin may seek to reward commanders he favors with responsibility beyond their official positions instead of outright appointing them to a higher position.[15] The Russian military is highly unlikely to solve these chain of command issues in the near term, and these problems will likely influence how Russian forces on different axes respond to potential Ukrainian counteroffensive operations.

Prigozhin’s and Kadyrov’s ability to significantly influence the Russian military command decisions relies on Putin’s willingness to appease them and his reliance on their forces, both of which will likely degrade after further blackmail efforts. Both Prigozhin and Kadyrov retain likely differing amounts of favor and personal contact with Putin despite their individual tensions with the Russian military command.[16] The decision to blackmail and subsequently humiliate the Russian military command may have expended a fair amount of Prigozhin‘s and Kadyrov’s political capital to influence operational and strategic level military decision-making. Such high-profile blackmailing is likely not a feasible long-term strategy for Prigozhin and Kadyrov given their reliance on Putin’s favor to bend the MoD to their demands. Prigozhin has already lost favor with Putin in recent months, with recent events appearing to demonstrate that he needed Kadyrov’s own capital to successfully blackmail the Russian military command into additional ammunition provision. Putin notably avoids firing members of his inner circle, however, instead rotating them into and out of favor, influence, and resources.[17] Prigozhin and Kadyrov are unlikely to generate such extreme effects again without damaging their relationships with Putin.

Prigozhin’s continued fight to complete the capture of Bakhmut contradicts his consistent narrative that capturing Bakhmut lacks strategic value. Prigozhin released a 41-point letter on May 6 (prior to his announcement about the provision of additional ammunition) criticizing the Russian MoD for intentionally refusing to support Wagner in Bakhmut.[18] Prigozhin claimed that he and Surovikin organized “Operation Bakhmut Meatgrinder” in October 2022 to provoke Kyiv into throwing Ukrainian forces into Bakhmut en masse.[19] Prigozhin reiterated that Wagner’s main task in Bakhmut has always been to exhaust Ukrainian forces in a meat-grinder, and not to capture the settlement.[20] Prigozhin claimed that completing the capture of Bakhmut is not operationally significant, rejecting Shoigu’s March 7 claim that taking Bakhmut would open the way for further Russian offensive efforts in Donbas, a narrative that Prigozhin has consistently maintained since November 2022.[21] Prigozhin’s long-standing claims that Bakhmut is not of strategic importance contradict his demands that the Russian MoD provide Wagner the necessary ammunition to allow it to complete the capture of Bakhmut, suggesting that Prigozhin continues to prioritize his own personal aims over those of the Russian military command and good of the overall Russian war effort.[22]

Key Takeaways

• Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin and Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov may have compelled the Russian theater commander in Ukraine, Army General Valery Gerasimov, to resume artillery ammunition distribution to Wagner forces in Bakhmut despite Gerasimov’s desired de-prioritization of that effort.
• Kadyrov’s threats to transfer his forces to Bakhmut may have blackmailed the Russian military command into allocating ammunition to Wagner mercenaries.
• Kadyrov likely supported Wagner’s blackmail efforts against the Russian military command to reestablish his position within the circle of power of the Kremlin.
• Gerasimov's apparent need to negotiate with subordinate commanders and those commanders’ ability to force his hand suggests that chain of command problems are significantly impacting the Russian military's ability to conduct coherent theater-wide operations.
• These events raise questions about Russia’s ability to coordinate a coherent theater-wide defensive campaign.
• Prigozhin’s and Kadyrov’s ability to significantly influence Russian military command decisions relies on Putin’s willingness to appease them and his reliance on their forces – both of which will likely degrade after further blackmail efforts.
• Prigozhin’s continued fight to complete the capture of Bakhmut contradicts his consistent narrative that capturing Bakhmut lacks strategic value.
• Russian forces continued limited offensive operations northeast of Kupyansk and south of Kreminna.
• Russian forces made some territorial gains in Bakhmut as of May 7 and continued limited offensive operations on the Avdiivka-Donetsk front.
• Russian sources claimed that Ukrainian forces launched up to 23 drones at Crimea on the night of May 6 to 7.
• Russian federal subjects are continuing to recruit and form regional armed formations and volunteer battalions.
• Russian occupation authorities continue to plan and carry out forced evacuations from Zaporizhia Oblast.

We do not report in detail on Russian war crimes because these activities are well-covered in Western media and do not directly affect the military operations we are assessing and forecasting. We will continue to evaluate and report on the effects of these criminal activities on the Ukrainian military and the Ukrainian population and specifically on combat in Ukrainian urban areas. We utterly condemn these Russian violations of the laws of armed conflict, Geneva Conventions, and humanity even though we do not describe them in these reports.

• Russian Main Effort – Eastern Ukraine (comprised of two subordinate main efforts)
• Russian Subordinate Main Effort #1 – Capture the remainder of Luhansk Oblast and push westward into eastern Kharkiv Oblast and encircle northern Donetsk Oblast
• Russian Subordinate Main Effort #2 – Capture the entirety of Donetsk Oblast
• Russian Supporting Effort – Southern Axis
• Russian Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts
• Activities in Russian-occupied areas

Russian Main Effort – Eastern Ukraine

Russian Subordinate Main Effort #1 – Luhansk Oblast (Russian objective: Capture the remainder of Luhansk Oblast and push westward into eastern Kharkiv Oblast and northern Donetsk Oblast)

Russian forces continued limited offensive operations northeast of Kupyansk and south of Kreminna on May 7. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces conducted unsuccessful offensive operations near Synkivka, Kharkiv Oblast (8km northeast of Kupyansk); Bilohorivka, Luhansk Oblast (12km south of Kreminna); and Spirne, Donetsk Oblast (25km south of Kreminna).[23] The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) claimed that Russian forces suppressed four Ukrainian sabotage and reconnaissance groups near Kyslivka (22km southeast of Kupyansk) and Synkivka in Kharkiv Oblast and Novoselivske, Luhansk Oblast (14km northwest of Svatove).[24]

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

Russian forces made some territorial gains in Bakhmut as of May 7. Geolocated footage indicates that Wagner Group forces advanced further west in Bakhmut and near Sakko i Vanzetti (15km north of Bakhmut).[25] The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) claimed that the Wagner Group forces captured two blocks in northern and western Bakhmut.[26] A Russian milblogger claimed that the Wagner Group forces made marginal advances in northern Bakhmut and continued attacking Ukrainian positions in western and southern Bakhmut.[27] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces continued attacking in Bakhmut, and Russian forces conducted unsuccessful ground attacks near Bohdanivka (6km northwest of Bakhmut), Khromove (immediately west of Bakhmut), Ivanivske (6km west of Bakhmut), Chasiv Yar (12km west of Bakhmut), Stupochky (12km southwest of Bakhmut), Predtechyne (14km southwest of Bakhmut), and Niu York (30km southwest of Bakhmut).[28] A Wagner-affiliated milblogger claimed that Wagner artillery has increased its rate of fire in the Bakhmut area following the May 7 artillery ammunition delivery from the Russian MoD.[29] Ukrainian Eastern Group of Forces Spokesperson Colonel Serhiy Cherevaty stated on May 7 that Wagner units – not Chechen units – are continuing to attack in Bakhmut and noted that Russian artillery fire did not decrease in the city despite claims of “shell hunger” in the area.[30] Ukrainian Eastern Group of Forces Commander Colonel General Oleksandr Syrskyi stated on May 7 that Russian forces increased the rate of shelling in the Bakhmut area and that Russian forces still hope to capture the city by the May 9th (Russian Victory Day).[31]

Russian forces conducted limited ground attacks on the Avdiivka-Donetsk City line on May 7. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces conducted unsuccessful ground attacks near Avdiivka, Pervomaiske (11km southwest of Avdiivka), and Marinka (27km southwest of Avdiivka).[32] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces failed to advance on the southern approaches to Avdiivka and in Marinka, and that Russian forces increased the rate of artillery fire along the Avdiivka-Donetsk City frontline.[33]

Russian forces did not conduct any confirmed or claimed ground attacks in western Donetsk Oblast on May 7.[34] The Russian MoD claimed that Russian forces repelled a Ukrainian reconnaissance in force operation near Velyka Novosilka, Donetsk Oblast (32km northwest of Vuhledar) and a sabotage and reconnaissance group near Levadne, Zaporizhia Oblast (23km northeast of Hulyaipole).[35]

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

The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) acknowledged that Ukrainian forces maintain a presence on islands in the Dnipro River delta as of May 7. The Russian MoD claimed on May 7 that Russian forces struck a Ukrainian command center on Velykyi Island (23km southwest of Kherson City).[36]

Russian forces continued routine fire west of Hulyaipole and in Dnipropetrovsk, Kherson, and Mykolaiv oblasts on May 7.[37] Ukraine’s Southern Operational Command reported that Russian forces launched five Kh-22 missiles against Mykolaiv Oblast and one against Kherson Oblast.[38] Ukraine’s Southern Operational Command also reported that Russian forces struck Kherson City, likely with two Oniks coastal defense missiles.[39]

Ukrainian forces continued to target Russian logistics on the east (left) bank of Kherson Oblast on May 7. Ukraine’s Southern Operational Command reported that Ukrainian aviation units struck two Russian manpower and equipment concentrations in Kakhovka and Skadovsk raions.[40]

Russian sources claimed that Ukrainian forces launched up to 23 drones at Crimea on the night of May 6 to 7. The Russian MoD claimed that Russian air defenses destroyed 22 Ukrainian drones over the Black Sea, and Sevastopol Occupation Governor Mikhail Razvozhaev claimed that Ukrainian forces launched at least 10 drones towards Crimea and Sevastopol.[41] A prominent Russian milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces launched 22 Mugin-5 drones and a Tu-141 Strizh drone and that Russian air defense units of the 31st Air Defense Division of the Black Sea Fleet alongside unspecified electronic warfare units downed all the drones near Sevastopol and Hvardiyske (19km north of Simferopol).[42] The MoD’s acknowledgement of the claimed Ukrainian drone attack is a departure from its regular claims and may be a part of a larger Russian informational effort not to downplay Ukrainian capabilities ahead of a potential Ukrainian counteroffensive.[43]

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

Russian federal subjects are continuing to recruit and form regional armed formations and volunteer battalions. A Tula Oblast news outlet reported that Tula Oblast is proposing to create a separate volunteer battalion to unite Tula volunteers that are scattered along different battalions and frontlines.[44] The outlet noted reports that Tula Oblast Governor Alexey Dyumin is supporting the creation of this volunteer battalion. Head of the Republic of Bashkortostan Alik Kamaletdinov claimed that the region is recruiting volunteers for a regional motorized rifle regiment that will encompass existing Dayan Murzin and Severnye Amury volunteer battalions.[45] Kamaletdinov announced that Bashkortostan opened 72 mobile recruitment points and relaxed the health and age standard for recruits and claimed that more men are interested in volunteering since the Russian MoD improved the conditions for volunteer service. Kamaletdinov clarified that Bashkortostan’s Shaymuratov and Dostavalov volunteer battalions operate as part of their own military formations, while the Slavat Yulaev volunteer battalion belongs to the Russian national guard (Rosgvardia).

Select Russian parliamentarians are enlisting to serve in the war likely in an attempt to promote contract service in Russia. The Kremlin-affiliated outlet Kommersant reported that two members of the Russian Communist Party from Kazan and Almetyevsk joined a volunteer battalion and are undergoing training in Tambov Oblast.[46] Both officials signed a six-month contract with the Russian MoD.

The UK MoD assessed that Russia is facing the worst labor shortages in decades based on the Russian Central Bank’s survey.[47] The bank surveyed 14,000 employers and found that the number of available employees is at the lowest level since 1998. The UK MoD assessed that the Covid-19 pandemic, high emigration rates, and the war in Ukraine had decreased Russian population by two million more people than expected.

Activities in Russian-occupied areas (Russian objective: Consolidate administrative control of annexed areas; forcibly integrate Ukrainian civilians into Russian sociocultural, economic, military, and governance systems)

Russian occupation authorities continue to plan and carry out forced evacuations from Zaporizhia Oblast. Zaporizhia Oblast occupation head Yevgeny Balitsky claimed on May 7 that 1,552 people (including 632 children, 145 patients from neuropsychiatric centers, and 10 people with limited mobility) have relocated from areas included in evacuation orders.[48] Zaporizhia Oblast occupation official Vladimir Rogov claimed on May 6 that evacuations from frontline settlements are taking place on a purely voluntary basis and that there is no forced evacuation.[49] Rogov stated that Russian occupation authorities continue to adjust and expand settlements included in the partial evacuation order, emphasizing that peaceful localities along the frontline are not included in the lists.[50]

Russian forces and occupation authorities are setting conditions to make life unbearable in occupied Zaporizhia Oblast to accelerate forceful evacuations. Ukrainian Zaporizhia Oblast officials stated on May 6-7 that Russian forces and occupation authorities are intentionally sparking panic in occupied Tokmak and Enerhodar by withholding humanitarian supplies and raising the prices of food and other goods in stores. Ukrainian Zaporizhia Oblast officials also stated that the Russian occupation authorities are removing medical equipment from hospitals and discharging patients early, offering them continued medical care if they evacuate to territory deeper in the Russian rear.[51]

Significant activity in Belarus (ISW assesses that a Russian or Belarusian attack into northern Ukraine in early 2023 is extraordinarily unlikely and has thus restructured this section of the update. It will no longer include counter-indicators for such an offensive.)

ISW will continue to report daily observed Russian and Belarusian military activity in Belarus, but these are not indicators that Russian and Belarusian forces are preparing for an imminent attack on Ukraine from Belarus. ISW will revise this text and its assessment if it observes any unambiguous indicators that Russia or Belarus is preparing to attack northern Ukraine.

Nothing significant to report.

Note: ISW does not receive any classified material from any source, uses only publicly available information, and draws extensively on Russian, Ukrainian, and Western reporting and social media as well as commercially available satellite imagery and other geospatial data as the basis for these reports. References to all sources used are provided in the endnotes of each update.

2. U.S. Think Tank Reports Prompted Beijing to Put a Lid on Chinese Data

Excerpts:

The wider scope of the campaign is intended to ensure the party-state’s control over narratives about China. The part of it focused on restricting overseas access to databases began in earnest after some reports based on publicly available information set off alarms among senior Chinese officials, according to the people with knowledge of the matter.

The reports, these people said, included analyses written by the Center for Security and Emerging Technology at Georgetown University and the Center for a New American Security, co-founded by Kurt Campbell, the White House’s coordinator for the Indo-Pacific.

Using open-source data, several of the reports focused on areas that Beijing considers sensitive, such as what it calls civil-military fusion—the interplay between China’s civilian research and commercial sectors and its defense sector to advance the country’s military capabilities.

Because of opaque policy-making and a lack of direct access to Chinese businesses and authorities, many Western think tanks and research firms have resorted to looking for information on procurement, corporate ownership and policy in documents that can be found on the Chinese internet.

...

Some publications by the Center for a New American Security, according to the people, have rattled China’s leadership, including 2019 testimony made by a senior fellow at the center to the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, a group Congress has charged with providing policy recommendations based on its evaluation of national security and trading risks associated with China.

That testimony indicated that China’s military was actively exploring ways to use artificial intelligence to enhance its combat power. The Center for a New American Security, co-founded by Mr. Campbell in 2007, is considered one of Washington’s go-to policy institutes for defense matters. The center and the National Security Council, where Mr. Campbell works, didn’t respond to questions.

U.S. Think Tank Reports Prompted Beijing to Put a Lid on Chinese Data

Some reports based on publicly available information alarmed officials

By Lingling WeiFollow

May 7, 2023 8:08 am ET

https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-think-tank-reports-prompted-beijing-to-put-a-lid-on-chinese-data-5f249d5e?mod=hp_lead_pos4

A recent campaign to restrict overseas access to China-based data sources was partly triggered by a drumbeat of U.S. think tank reports on sensitive Chinese practices that alarmed Beijing, according to people with direct knowledge of the matter.

Increasingly worried about perceived Western threats, Beijing in recent weeks expanded an anti-espionage law and stepped up pressure on foreign companies specializing in collecting information, such as auditors, management consultants and law firms. In addition, access to Chinese databases including Shanghai-based Wind Information has tightened for foreign think tanks, research firms and other nonfinancial entities.

The wider scope of the campaign is intended to ensure the party-state’s control over narratives about China. The part of it focused on restricting overseas access to databases began in earnest after some reports based on publicly available information set off alarms among senior Chinese officials, according to the people with knowledge of the matter.

The reports, these people said, included analyses written by the Center for Security and Emerging Technology at Georgetown University and the Center for a New American Security, co-founded by Kurt Campbell, the White House’s coordinator for the Indo-Pacific.

Using open-source data, several of the reports focused on areas that Beijing considers sensitive, such as what it calls civil-military fusion—the interplay between China’s civilian research and commercial sectors and its defense sector to advance the country’s military capabilities.

Because of opaque policy-making and a lack of direct access to Chinese businesses and authorities, many Western think tanks and research firms have resorted to looking for information on procurement, corporate ownership and policy in documents that can be found on the Chinese internet.

The online sleuthing is making Beijing increasingly concerned about the security of Chinese data as competition with the U.S. intensifies. Some Chinese officials say several Washington-based think tanks have mined the country’s open-source data to help validate a hard-line U.S. policy toward China, such as heightened restrictions on the sale of high-tech products to Chinese companies.

One of the U.S. think tank reports that got Chinese authorities’ attention, according to the people, is a policy brief published by the Center for Security and Emerging Technology in June, titled “Silicon Twist.” It focuses on Chinese military access to advanced chips designed by American companies and manufactured in Taiwan and South Korea.

“By analyzing thousands of purchasing records, this policy brief offers a detailed look at how China’s military comes to access these devices,” according to a blurb of the article on the center’s website. The report didn’t identify the sources for the procurement data it analyzed.

Chinese leader Xi Jinping set up the Cyberspace Administration of China to police the internet. PHOTO: JADE GAO/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

Also on Beijing’s radar, said the people who have consulted with Chinese authorities, is a catalog compiled by the center for Chinese initiatives aimed at recruiting scholars and students in support of China’s strategic goals, called “The Chinese Talent Program Tracker.”

The information in the catalog, according to an introduction on the center’s website, resulted from analysis of sources publicly available on Chinese government websites, state media and Chinese university websites.

The Cyberspace Administration of China, an agency set up by Chinese leader Xi Jinping to police the internet, in March notified various Chinese data providers to restrict overseas access to information involving corporate-registration information, patents, procurement documents, academic journals and official statistical yearbooks, said the people who have consulted with Chinese authorities.

As a result, the academic database China National Knowledge Infrastructure, or CNKI, informed foreign universities and other research institutions that their access to its digital records would be limited, effective April 1.

“Like many other organizations and university libraries across the country, we were notified about changes to our CNKI access in March,” said Lynne Weil, spokeswoman for the Center for Security and Emerging Technology, founded in 2019. “This disruption is dismaying and a loss for the research community, particularly those who study China. But it will not discourage us from doing our work.”

China’s cybersecurity regulator didn’t respond to a request for comment.

In an email, a spokesman at the Chinese Embassy in Washington said, “I don’t have specific information on the situation you mentioned. But in principle, China actively promotes international research cooperation.” The spokesman added, “We actively support foreign experts to play a part, sometimes a leading part, in some of our research programs.”

Some publications by the Center for a New American Security, according to the people, have rattled China’s leadership, including 2019 testimony made by a senior fellow at the center to the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, a group Congress has charged with providing policy recommendations based on its evaluation of national security and trading risks associated with China.

That testimony indicated that China’s military was actively exploring ways to use artificial intelligence to enhance its combat power. The Center for a New American Security, co-founded by Mr. Campbell in 2007, is considered one of Washington’s go-to policy institutes for defense matters. The center and the National Security Council, where Mr. Campbell works, didn’t respond to questions.

As part of Beijing’s campaign to curtail overseas access to Chinese data, Wind Information, whose economic, financial and corporate data are widely used by analysts and investors both inside and outside the country, is conducting a compliance review of contracts that have yet to be completed or come up for renewal, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

Among the Western policy institutes that haven’t been able to complete their contracts with Wind, the people said, is the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank whose research on China ranges from economic policy and trade to security.

In addition to the heightened scrutiny of U.S. think tanks’ contracts, Wind recently cut off foreign access to specific data sets such as those involving corporate-registry information.

Intensified information restrictions have analysts and investors fretting over a lack of official clarity on what types of data will be off limits—at a time of greater uncertainty over China’s economic and policy direction.

The lack of clarity “gives the government ample latitude in determining the companies and activities that would be subject to mandatory disclosure or security reviews,” said a new report by the Atlantic Council’s GeoEconomics Center, a Washington think tank, and Rhodium Group, a New York-based economic-research partnership.

Write to Lingling Wei at [email protected]

Copyright ©2023 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

Appeared in the May 8, 2023, print edition as 'China Limits Data After Reports Emerge'.

3. Iran hid weapons among earthquake aid to target U.S. troops, leak says

Iran hid weapons among earthquake aid to target U.S. troops, leak says

THE DISCORD LEAKS | Iranian operatives and their affiliates in Iraq moved swiftly to capitalize on the February disaster that left tens of thousands dead, U.S. intelligence alleges

By Alex Horton, Mustafa Salim and Steve Hendrix

Updated May 7, 2023 at 1:35 p.m. EDT|Published May 7, 2023 at 12:53 p.m. EDT

The Washington Post · by Alex Horton · May 7, 2023

Iran and its proxies are enabling attacks on U.S. troops in Syria through clandestine weapons shipments hidden within humanitarian aid that has flowed into the region after a catastrophic earthquake killed tens of thousands earlier this year, according to classified U.S. intelligence and an Israeli military official familiar with the matter.

The findings, outlined in a leak of U.S. secrets circulated on the Discord messaging platform and obtained by The Washington Post, raise dire questions about the ability of the United States and its allies to intercept Iranian-sourced arms used routinely to target American personnel, partner forces and civilians in the Middle East. The top-secret document, which has not been previously disclosed, amplifies earlier reports of Iran’s alleged efforts to conceal defensive military equipment within aid deliveries to Syria after the February disaster devastated that country and neighboring Turkey.

A U.S. defense official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive disclosures, declined to address the document’s authenticity but said the activity it describes is consistent with past efforts by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to “use humanitarian aid going into Iraq and Syria as a way to get materials to IRGC-affiliated groups.”

Iran’s mission to the United Nations did not return a request for comment. Last month, Iranian officials told the Reuters news agency that its report, detailing Tehran’s alleged use of cargo planes to smuggle air defense systems into Syria under the guise of earthquake assistance, was “not true.” Reuters attributed its reporting to nine people in Syria, Iran, Israel and the West.

Iran’s alleged smuggling of offensive weapons into Syria includes unspecified small arms, ammunition and drones, according to the leaked U.S. intelligence assessment. The document says those deliveries were made using vehicle convoys from Iraq coordinated through friendly militant groups there and the Quds Force, Iran’s elite expeditionary unit that specializes in managing proxy fighters and intelligence gathering.

The Israeli military official, who like others interviewed for this report spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive information, affirmed that the Quds Force was involved in such activity.

In the earthquake’s immediate aftermath, Iran and its affiliates moved quickly to exploit the chaos, the leaked intelligence document contends. On Feb. 7, a day after the disaster leveled scores of homes and other buildings, setting off desperate rescue efforts, a militia group based in Iraq “allegedly orchestrated the transfer of rifles, ammunition and 30 UAVs hidden in aid convoys to support future attacks on U.S. forces in Syria,” it says. UAV is military shorthand for unmanned aerial vehicle.

On Feb. 13, a Quds Force officer directed an Iraqi militia group to “embed weapons within legitimate earthquake aid,” the leaked U.S. document indicates, noting that another Quds Force officer maintained a list of “hundreds” of vehicles and goods that entered Syria from Iraq after the earthquake, an apparent effort to manage where all of the trafficked weapons were headed.

The leaked U.S. assessment also implicates the “PMC chief of staff,” an apparent reference to Abu Fadak Al-Mohammedawi, a senior official with Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Forces. The consortium of Shiite militias, aligned in many cases with Iran, was instrumental in the U.S.-led campaign to dislodge the Islamic State group from key Iraqi cities, even though anti-American sentiment runs deep among its members. The Popular Mobilization Forces are also known as the Popular Mobilization Committee, or PMC.

The group denied claims that its affiliates have used humanitarian assistance shipments as a conduit for weapon deliveries. The aid packages were authorized by the Iraqi government and reached Syrian people in need, said Moayad Al Saadi, a spokesperson. Such allegations, he said, “will not discourage the Iraqi people from helping the Syrian brothers and standing with them in their humanitarian ordeal, away from any political or other considerations.”

The leaked intelligence findings spotlight an uncomfortable reality: that even as 2,50o U.S. troops continue to serve in Iraq as advisers, working alongside the Iraqi army, the government in Baghdad appears unwilling to pursue those who pose a threat to both militaries.

Iraq’s prime minister, Mohammed Shia al-Sudani, came into office last year with the backing of Iranian-linked groups. A spokesperson declined to provide a response on the record. A senior official in his office, however, denied the U.S. document’s findings, calling them “fake” and saying there is no pretext needed to supply weapons to groups in Syria that work with Iran.

“In reality the borders are wide open; in fact we are still suffering from illegals sneaking through the Syrian border,” this official said. “Which means if these documents are right, it’s possible any time. Why wait for an aid convoy as a justification?”

Israel has targeted convoys suspected of hauling weapons to Syria and Lebanon, the leaked intelligence documents says, but the risk of hitting bona fide humanitarian deliveries has posed challenges. It is “very likely” that the Israelis will continue their interdiction efforts, but they require “stricter intelligence confirmation prior to striking alleged aid shipments,” the document says.

In Syria, where roughly 900 U.S. troops work with local forces to stifle a resurgence of the Islamic State, the threat from Iranian-aligned groups is persistent, U.S. officials say.

In March, for instance, a U.S. contractor working at a base there was killed by what the Pentagon said was an Iranian-made drone. The attack wounded another contractor there, and several U.S. service members suffered head injuries from the explosion.

U.S. officials are confident that the drone that killed U.S. contractor Scott Dubis was not smuggled into the country in one of the earthquake aid convoys, the U.S. defense official said, declining to provide further details.

Dubis, a longtime U.S. military contractor from South Carolina, was killed March 23 while working on an armored vehicle on a U.S. base near Hasakah, a city in northeastern Syria. The hangar he was working in during the attack was not as well protected as the rest of the base, a second U.S. military official said. An Avenger air defense system was there to guard against aerial threats, the official said, and it remains unclear why and how the system failed to engage the drone.

Soon after Dubis’s death, U.S. fighter jets struck the Iranian-backed militias believed to be responsible for the attack, prompting a stern warning to Tehran from President Biden, who said the United States would respond forcefully to violent attacks on American personnel.

Mike Dubis, Scott Dubis’s older brother, told The Post that U.S. officials have not provided his family with any details about the investigation. The lack of information has been dispiriting, he said, because serious questions remain about how the militants were able to penetrate the defenses of a U.S. military base.

“It sounds like not enough is being done to prevent it,” Mike Dubis said.

Salim reported from Baghdad and Hendrix from Jerusalem. Louisa Loveluck in London contributed to this report.

The Washington Post · by Alex Horton · May 7, 2023

4. U.S. and Allies Look at Potential China Role in Ending Ukraine War

Excerpts:

Western leaders are now slowly moving toward a consensus that halting the conflict might be the best option, said Fiona Hill, a former National Security Council official responsible for Russian policy, now with the Brookings Institution.

“This seems to be where we are trending,” she said. “Freeze the conflict and stop the slaughter, because everybody would like this to stop.” 

Mr. Putin has shown no public sign of winding down the war or his objectives, despite mounting losses. Any durable arrangement will most likely involve Mr. Zelensky’s acceptance of occupation of Ukrainian territory by Russia, Ms. Hill said.

“Is it sufficient for Ukraine to have effectively given up territory and countless lives and to say, ‘OK, this is what we died for?’ ” Ms. Hill asked.

U.S. and Allies Look at Potential China Role in Ending Ukraine War

An expected offensive by Ukraine is seen as paving way for negotiations with Russia

By Bojan Pancevski and Laurence Norman n Berlin and Vivian Salama in Washington

Updated May 7, 2023 2:45 pm ET

https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-and-allies-look-at-potential-china-role-in-ending-ukraine-war-2d6cbb4d?mod=hp_lead_pos1

Some U.S. and European officials said they believe that Ukraine’s planned spring offensive could pave the way for negotiations between Kyiv and Moscow by the end of the year, and that China could help bring Russia to the table.

The willingness to encourage negotiations and seek out a role for China in talks represents a shift in Western thinking, particularly in the U.S., which has been highly skeptical of any involvement for Beijing given China’s longstanding support for Moscow. Secretary of State Antony Blinken publicly expressed cautious optimism recently that Beijing could help defuse the conflict. 

The approach is based on the belief that neither side has the ability to continue fighting indefinitely, and that Beijing’s willingness to play a role in international peace talks should be tested, the officials said. Still, they remain uncertain about Russia’s willingness to negotiate a cease-fire under Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The interest in negotiations brings Washington in closer alignment with some European countries, which are eager to see the conflict end, or at the very least moderate in intensity, and have been the most intent on discussing some resolution this year. The U.S., the U.K. and other countries have been publicly saying that Ukraine should be supported as long as it takes to defeat Russia. 

“We have been clear that we will continue to support Ukraine as they defend their country from Russia’s unprovoked invasion, and that support will continue,” said Adam Hodge, a spokesman for the National Security Council. “Unfortunately, we see no signs that Russia is preparing to stop its attacks on the Ukrainian people. That’s why we are committed to continuing to help Ukraine protect its people against Russian aggression.”

French President Emmanuel Macron has been the most explicit in pushing Ukraine to seek negotiations with the Kremlin after the spring offensive. Officials at the White House and State Department have long maintained that all wars end at the negotiating table, but said that it will require a genuine interest on the part of Russia to approach any talks in good faith. The military aid dispatched to Ukraine is designed to put Kyiv in a stronger negotiating position.

Key U.S. officials on the National Security Council are in favor of negotiations, according to European officials, while the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency have been more skeptical, eager to see how the offensive goes before pitching for a diplomatic off-ramp.

An NSC spokesperson disputed European accounts that there is division within the administration. The State Department and the CIA didn’t respond to a request for comment.

The high attrition rates of Ukrainian troops and materiel have been cause for concern in Europe. PHOTO: LIBKOS/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Senior officials in Paris and Berlin who are familiar with their leaders’ discussions with President Biden say they expect the White House to attempt to facilitate talks following the Ukrainian offensive’s anticipated gains.

The aim is for Ukraine to regain important territory in the south, a development that could be interpreted as a success even if Russia retains chunks of territory its forces have occupied. 

Olaf Scholz, the German chancellor, will host Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in Berlin this month on what is set to be his first trip to Germany since Russia invaded in February 2022. While Mr. Scholz won’t pressure Mr. Zelensky into talks, Mr. Biden is expected to signal to the Ukrainian leader that cease-fire talks might be opportune in the coming months, European officials said.

The push to negotiate comes in the midst of concern on both sides of the Atlantic that the scale of support provided by allies to Ukraine for the coming push will be hard to match in the future if the war grinds into a stalemate. The supply of ammunition is a key problem because Western industrial capacity has proven unable to meet its own demands while supporting Ukraine, several officials and industry leaders said.

A number of senior officials across European governments expressed concern about the high attrition rates of troops and materiel in Ukraine, whose population is less than one-third of Russia’s.

The European push for negotiations isn’t a consensus. Poland, the Baltic states, other smaller nations and some officials from the U.K. believe that Ukraine should be given the time it needs to make gains—even if the coming spring offensive doesn’t reshape the battlefield.

Russia faces challenges sustaining its war effort, which some believe could force it to the negotiating table. Testifying May 4 on Capitol Hill, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines said U.S. intelligence agencies assess that Mr. Putin has little interest in negotiating a definitive settlement of the conflict and is still assuming that the West’s will to support Ukraine will erode over time. 

“We continue to assess that Putin most likely calculates that time works in his favor,” said Ms. Haines. 

She added that the Russian leader has probably scaled back his near-term goals in Ukraine of consolidating control in the east and south of the country and ensuring that Kyiv never joins the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. If Mr. Putin accedes to a “negotiated pause” in the conflict, she said, his goal might be to use the time to rebuild Russia’s forces for future offensive operations.

It couldn’t be determined what any sort of negotiations would look like, but officials in Paris and Berlin said they are interested in a broadly framed cease-fire agreement that would potentially involve China among its guarantors.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken recently expressed cautious optimism that Beijing could help defuse the war in Ukraine. PHOTO: ELIJAH NOUVELAGE/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

In February, China called for peace talks to end the war in Ukraine, outlining its plan in a 12-point document, and casting itself as a neutral mediator. 

That same month, Mr. Macron offered in private to Mr. Zelensky to host a peace conference in Paris to negotiate a cease-fire when Kyiv decides the time is right. Mr. Zelensky said he would only participate if Mr. Biden and Chinese leader Xi Jinping attended. 

“China will continue to promote negotiations for peace and make its own efforts for an early cease-fire and restoration of peace,” the Chinese Embassy in Washington said in a statement.

Mr. Macron and his officials, as well as other Europeans officials, have since prodded Beijing to play a constructive role in diplomacy. Those efforts culminated in Mr. Xi calling Mr. Zelensky in April for the first time since the war began, although officials briefed on the conversation said the call deflated hopes that the Chinese leader would shift away from supporting Russia and contained no clear commitments to uphold Ukraine’s demands. 

Mr. Xi, who made a high-profile visit in March to the Kremlin, where he expressed support for Mr. Putin, will soon dispatch an envoy to Kyiv. 

“It is too early to be able to say anything, and we are now waiting for Xi’s representative to arrive in Kyiv,” said a senior member of the Ukrainian government.

Nonetheless, key European leaders are now confident that China is eager to remain involved in eventual cease-fire negotiations, several European officials said.

That sentiment was echoed by Mr. Blinken. “In principle, there’s nothing wrong with that,” he said last week at a Washington Post forum. He added that if there are countries with significant influence “that are prepared to pursue a just and durable peace, we would welcome that. And it’s certainly possible that China would have a role to play in that effort.” Mr. Blinken also said he wasn’t sure that Beijing accepted the proposition that Moscow was the aggressor.

Until recently, a number of U.S. and European officials were saying that China’s open support for Russia since the war began made Beijing unpalatable as a negotiating partner for ending the war.

Kyiv welcomes any country that can play a constructive role in their pursuit of peace, but didn’t believe Beijing was crucial, Ukraine’s ambassador to the U.S., Oksana Markarova, said recently.

Western leaders are now slowly moving toward a consensus that halting the conflict might be the best option, said Fiona Hill, a former National Security Council official responsible for Russian policy, now with the Brookings Institution.

“This seems to be where we are trending,” she said. “Freeze the conflict and stop the slaughter, because everybody would like this to stop.” 

Mr. Putin has shown no public sign of winding down the war or his objectives, despite mounting losses. Any durable arrangement will most likely involve Mr. Zelensky’s acceptance of occupation of Ukrainian territory by Russia, Ms. Hill said.

“Is it sufficient for Ukraine to have effectively given up territory and countless lives and to say, ‘OK, this is what we died for?’ ” Ms. Hill asked.

Warren P. Strobel contributed to this article.

Write to Bojan Pancevski at [email protected], Laurence Norman at [email protected] and Vivian Salama at [email protected]

5. In Ukraine, A New Chance to Judge the Patriot Missile

Excerpts:

It is not clear whether Ukraine is getting PAC-2 or PAC-3 Patriots. “Ukraine’s military did not reveal which version of the Patriot missile system it received,” reports Ponomarenko.

But Ukrainian forces, like the Israeli forces in 1991, will likely be in a good position to use ground debris to help evaluate the results of any Patriot use. They will be able to quickly determine if a system report of a “probable kill” is actually a successful intercept.

The performance of the Patriot system in Ukraine must not be manipulated to promote other agendas. The defense of Ukraine is too important. We all have to hope the Army has absorbed the lessons of past failures and that the new, improved Patriots can provide Ukraine the protection it desperately needs.

In Ukraine, A New Chance to Judge the Patriot Missile

The much-lauded air-defense system has a decidedly mixed record. The Pentagon should watch its performance carefully.

defenseone.com · by Joe Cirincione

Ukraine is taking delivery of its first Patriot air-defense batteries, the weapon so highly and baselessly lauded during the 1991 Gulf War. Now, as upgraded Patriots take the battlefield once again, U.S. officials must judge how they fare—accurately, this time.

Video released by Ukrainian defense officials show Patriots provided by NATO countries deploying in Ukraine. DOD officials announced on May 3 that U.S.-supplied units have also arrived in country. “In high-intensity combat against the hardest targets, the Patriot can confirm or disprove its widely-regarded reputation as one of the world’s best air defense systems,” wrote Illia Ponomarenko for The Kyiv Independent on May 2.

The weapon has a checkered past. In 1991, U.S. officials and media excitedly reported a 100-percent success rate for the system, with claims that Patriots had intercepted Scud missiles launched from Iraq at Israel and Saudi Arabia. But the following year, Congressional hearings found that these claims were misleading and highly inaccurate. I was the lead staffer for the House Government Operations Committee investigation.

Rather than destroying 41 of 42 Scuds engaged, as President George H.W. Bush claimed at the end of the war, investigators from the Congressional Research Service and the General Accounting Office determined that Patriots only hit between zero and four of 44 Scuds engaged.

The incorrect claims of Patriot PAC-2’s success stem from misunderstanding of the way the interceptor works, how the system gauges its success, and its users’ failure to conduct ground damage assessments to determine whether the target was actually hit.

The PAC-2 variant sprays fragments, like a shotgun blast, as it nears a target. Explosions seen in the sky in the 1991 war were not signs of a Patriot hitting an incoming Scud, but of proximity fuzes detonating as the Patriot neared a Scud or a Scud fragment, or by the missile automatically self-destructing after missing a Scud, or by Patriots flying after false targets.

Nor can the system determine if a Patriot missile actually hits its intended target. It can only determine that it detonated near a point in space where it calculated the target should be, sending back a “probable kill” indicator.

These indicators are inaccurate. In the Gulf War, many of the targets turned out to be debris from the poorly designed Scuds as they broke up in flight. At least 45 percent of the 158 Patriots launched in the war were launched against debris or false targets, the Army reported.

The gap between assumptions and fact appeared during examination of the very first claimed Patriot hit on January 18, 1991. Television viewers were shown images of a Patriot streaking into the cloudy night sky and exploding. Announcers assumed a hit. In fact, there was no Scud there. The congressional investigation uncovered that there was no satellite confirmation of a Scud launch that day, nor was there any ground damage found. The Army confirmed as a result of the investigation that the Patriot system had registered a false target, the result of radar interference from nearby jet aircraft, and launched a Patriot which eventually self-destructed.

As a result of the congressional investigation, the Army revised its claims, saying it only had high confidence that the Patriot hit 25 percent of the Scuds, or 11 missiles. That claim is still higher than independent assessments.

Nonetheless, the myth of the Patriot’s success endures in both official and media sources. For example, the missile-defense lobby still claims the Jan. 18 phantom Scud “was brought down by two Patriot missiles” and “was the first anti-missile missile fired during combat operations.” Exaggerated claims of success against short-range missiles were used then and now to boost proposed budgets and estimates of effectiveness for anti-missile systems against long-range missiles.

Upgrade to PAC-3

In the decade after the Gulf War, the Pentagon upgraded its Patriots to a more effective PAC-3 configuration. While this new version has hit several short-range missiles and drones in combat, it has also mistakenly shot down U.S. and allied aircraft and missed several targets.

The PAC-3 “hit-to-kill” interceptor and improved electronics likely make the newer Patriots more effective at hitting short-range missiles, but there is still doubt.

“I am deeply skeptical that Patriot has ever intercepted a long-range ballistic missile in combat—at the least, I have yet to see convincing unclassified evidence of a successful Patriot intercept,” wrote Jeffrey Lewis in his 2018 review of the Patriot’s performance in Gulf combat.

The system may face just such longer-range missiles in Ukraine, where the military hopes it can intercept Russia’s Su-35 fighters, the S-300/400 missiles now used for surface attacks, and particularly the KH-22 cruise missiles that have devastated buildings in Ukrainian cities. They are not expected to be used against lower-value drone targets; Patriot manufacturer Raytheon charges $4 million for each missile.

It is not clear whether Ukraine is getting PAC-2 or PAC-3 Patriots. “Ukraine’s military did not reveal which version of the Patriot missile system it received,” reports Ponomarenko.

But Ukrainian forces, like the Israeli forces in 1991, will likely be in a good position to use ground debris to help evaluate the results of any Patriot use. They will be able to quickly determine if a system report of a “probable kill” is actually a successful intercept.

The performance of the Patriot system in Ukraine must not be manipulated to promote other agendas. The defense of Ukraine is too important. We all have to hope the Army has absorbed the lessons of past failures and that the new, improved Patriots can provide Ukraine the protection it desperately needs.

defenseone.com · by Joe Cirincione

6. To Keep Hackers Out of US Weapons, the Pentagon Needs to Get In

Excerpt:

Modern military systems are bespoke, technology-dependent weaponry. A network attack against one of these weapons is not an if but a when; some are likely already taking place. The fundamentals of visibility and control, well understood from the world of enterprise cyber-security, will be the deciding factor in the next era of warfare.

To Keep Hackers Out of US Weapons, the Pentagon Needs to Get In

Constant surveillance of data flows is key to spotting dangerous intrusions.

BY EGON RINDERER

CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER, SHIFT5

MAY 6, 2023

defenseone.com · by Egon Rinderer

The Pentagon’s efforts to protect its data networks mustn’t stop at its industrial & IT systems; its vehicles and weapons are vulnerable as well. But the military’s ability to defend these systems is hampered by its inability to monitor even their most basic inner workings.

We’ve been warned about the threats. Last year, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency detailed how Russia stole sensitive information about weapons from U.S. defense contractors. The Government Accountability Office has issued several reports of its own.

Many systems aboard U.S. weapons and military vehicles are built to conceal these inner workings, even from their customer. There are several reasons for this “black box” approach. Component seals can simplify the task of maintaining such things as flight-worthiness certifications. They can help suppliers win and keep lucrative support contracts. And, in theory at least, they deny attackers knowledge of key systems.

But if a half-century of enterprise IT has taught us anything, it’s that the “security through obscurity” approach fails, every time. Indeed, it hurts the Pentagon’s ability to understand their systems’ vulnerabilities and to know when they have been compromised. It also strips the military of valuable data that could be used to guide maintenance, predict component failure, and even improve training.

But there is a way that the Pentagon might access key data without breaching component manufacturers’ seals. Complex weapons and vehicles use open, standards-based serial buses to move data between components. These paths are open by design. Monitoring these paths can help defenders understand what cyber techniques adversaries are using, detect them, develop indications and protections, and potentially mitigate them.

For example, suppose an adversary discovers a way to exploit an aircraft via a radio-frequency channel. By sending crafted data to some always-on RF receiver, a malicious message could theoretically be injected into a bus-connected component, then onto the bus itself. This could produce results ranging from anomalous to catastrophic, left largely up to the attacker. A system that allows visibility into the bus can detect the intrusion; one that does not, cannot.

Such visibility runs counter to long-held tradition among defense manufacturers. In reality, the ability to understand the nature of the “whole” of the platform, which is indeed greater than the sum of its parts, benefits the manufacturer without undue risk to their intellectual property while allowing the platform owner assurance. These interconnecting data-buses are the “open” element of the platform through which interaction takes place between components provided by a diverse set of sub-vendors and it is at this layer that attackers find a low barrier to entry.

It is no trivial task to collect, label, and retain the data that passes over the buses of a military platform. A single vehicle produces a staggering volume of data and during conflict may go significant lengths of time between data pulls in RF-contested environments. The acquisition of bus data means accommodating hundreds of hours of lossless local cache as well as retention in the cloud, while meeting DoD storage policies and limitations of vehicle size, weight, and power restrictions.

But it is necessary. Every frame, from every bus, all the time, regardless of protocol, is valuable. Consider avionics on a fly-by-wire aircraft. A pilot uses a stick or pedal to effect physical change. Moving the stick forward produced a digital signal that must result in immediate change: move a flight surface. There can be no latency between input and action. Every component constantly reports its status so that any input is immediately detected and actioned. This “reporting” happens in real-time, is measured in nanoseconds, and occurs on every single device on every single bus.

To identify anomalies, all those transmissions must be recorded and analyzed. An “anomaly” may only show up in a single frame from this endless stream of messages. Furthermore, the ability to analyze this collected data from across the fleet in aggregate yields insight that is impossible to find in isolation.

The data also must be properly translated and labeled so it can be used to train machine-learning models and produce useful information for operators. The nearer translation, tagging and labeling happens to moment of capture, the higher the value of the data as it decreases time to action and increases residual value in post-analysis. Additional meta-data such as GPS, phase-of-flight information or RF-spectrum activity allows for better primary data enrichment. This can yield accurate predictions about, say, component failure and other events that affect operational readiness and sustainment cost.

Modern military systems are bespoke, technology-dependent weaponry. A network attack against one of these weapons is not an if but a when; some are likely already taking place. The fundamentals of visibility and control, well understood from the world of enterprise cyber-security, will be the deciding factor in the next era of warfare.

defenseone.com · by Egon Rinderer

7. Ukraine war: 'Mad panic' as Russia evacuates town near Zaporizhzhia plant

As an aside we need to think about wars that take place in countries that have nuclear power plants. (for me - think South Korea with 24 plants)

Ukraine war: 'Mad panic' as Russia evacuates town near Zaporizhzhia plant

BBC · by Menu

• Published
• 13 hours ago

Image source, Ivan Fedorov

Image caption,

The Ukrainian mayor of Melitopol, Ivan Fedorov, posted these pictures on Saturday evening of the "mad" five-hour queues to leave the evacuated area

Russia has sparked a "mad panic" as it evacuates a town near the contested Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, a Ukrainian official says.

Russia has told people to leave 18 settlements in the Zaporizhzhia region, including Enerhodar near the plant, ahead of Kyiv's anticipated offensive.

The Ukrainian mayor of Melitopol, Ivan Fedorov, said there were five-hour waits as thousands of cars left.

The UN's nuclear watchdog warned a "severe nuclear accident" could occur.

Speaking to the BBC's Newshour programme Rafael Grossi - the director of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) - said the evacuation of residents near the nuclear plant indicated the possibility of heavy fighting between Russian and Ukrainian forces around the plant.

Although the plant's reactors were not producing electricity they were still loaded with nuclear material, he said.

Mr Grossi added that he had had to travel through a minefield when he visited the plant a few weeks ago.

Earlier, the IAEA warned in a statement that situation at the Zaporizhzhia plant was "becoming increasingly unpredictable and potentially dangerous".

Operating staff were still at the site but there was "deep concern about the increasingly tense, stressful, and challenging conditions for personnel and their families".

It said IAEA experts at the plant had "received information that the announced evacuation of residents from the nearby town of Enerhodar - where most plant staff live - has started".

On Friday, the Russian-installed regional head Yevgeny Balitsky said that "in the past few days, the enemy has stepped up shelling of settlements close to the front line".

"I have therefore made a decision to evacuate first of all children and parents, elderly people, disabled people and hospital patients," he wrote on social media. .

The IAEA has issued warnings previously about safety at the plant - which Russia captured in the opening days of its invasion last year - after shelling caused temporary power cuts.

In March the IAEA warned the plant was running on diesel generators to keep vital cooling systems going, after damage to power lines.

Since Russia launched its invasion in February 2022 the number of staff at the plant has declined, the IAEA says, "but site management has stated that it has remained sufficient for the safe operation of the plant".

Russian forces occupy much of the Zaporizhzhia region but not the regional capital Zaporizhzhia, which lies just north-east of Enerhodar across the Dnipro reservoir.

On Sunday, the Ukrainian general staff said civilians were being evacuated to the cities of Berdyansk and Prymorsk, further inside Russian-held territory.

The exiled mayor of Melitopol, Ivan Fedorov, wrote on Telegram that shops in the evacuated areas had run out of goods and medicine.

He also said hospitals were discharging patients into the street amid fears that electricity and water supplies could be suspended if Ukraine attacks the region.

And he claimed that two-thirds of evacuation convoys - allegedly made up of civilians - consisted of retreating Russian troops. The BBC cannot verify this claim.

"The partial evacuation they announced is going too fast, and there is a possibility that they may be preparing for provocations and (for that reason) focusing on civilians," Mr Fedorov added.

BBC · by Menu

8. ‘What is this insane war?’: a philosopher on Ukraine’s frontlines

Excerpts:

As a result, Lévy views the war, in and out of the film, as a conflict for nothing less than the soul of Europe, the future of liberalism, and the sanctity of human rights. “I think that without the resistance of the Ukrainians, maybe the Baltic states would be invaded at this moment. Certainly the Chinese would have started their operation on Taiwan, and so on,” he said.

“I’m not sure the west understands, really, what is at stake,” he added. “I made those movies, and especially the last one, to try to convince. At least to remind the truth, and if possible to convince.”

‘What is this insane war?’: a philosopher on Ukraine’s frontlines

Polarizing French intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy embedded with Ukrainian defenders for revealing and damning new documentary

The Guardian · by Adrian Horton · May 6, 2023

In the fall of 2022, Bernard-Henri Lévy, one of France’s most famous and polarizing public intellectuals, traveled to Ukraine for a series of visits along the fault lines of the Russian invasion. He witnessed bombed-out apartment buildings in Kyiv, where he had once met with the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, and where civilians were still liable to be awakened in the night by Russian blasts. He accompanied miners deep into the earth in Pavlograd, toured the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, joined the Ukrainian navy on a patrol outside Odesa, met with commanders of an international legion in a nondescript room whose only decoration was, inexplicably, a Big Mouth Billy Bass.

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Such is the collage of lasting images captured in Slava Ukraini (“Glory to Ukraine”), Lévy’s documentary filmed over 10 trips to the country: devastating, resilient, admirable, often infuriating, sometimes surreal, at times relaxed and even a little funny. The 95-minute documentary, Lévy’s second film on the conflict, traces the three-month arc of the Ukrainian counter-offensive through many of the occupied eastern territories, from Kyiv to Bakhmut, Lyman, Izium, Kharkiv and Donbas, culminating with the liberation of Kherson in November.

The film plays as a war diary, each chapter a different location and a different tone, though all connected by a current of fury and defiance. Lévy begins his journey in the shadows of the war – a shot of a stuffed bear left on an empty swing, a smudged church icon half-buried in rubble, plenty of destroyed Soviet buildings; a woman wearing fatigues, pushing a stroller in heels (she tells Lévy she and her toddler live underground, for safety); mounds of sand in the woods which denote mass graves. By mid-film, he’s embedded with an international legion on the frontline of the counter-offensive, facing drone attacks that nearly destroy one cameraman’s car. And yet, life goes on – in Kyiv, children play and people casually chat as sirens blare.

“The big surprise for me was that there was no fatigue,” Lévy told the Guardian in a recent interview. “Normally after six months, eight months, one year, you are fatigued. But the fatigue was in the west, not in Ukraine.” Western audiences may have grown tired of reading about Putin’s unnecessary and cruel incursion on Ukrainian territory; many might not even know the war is ongoing. Lévy made his film, he says, to argue for a sense of urgency, and to showcase “the indomitable, untamable resistance, high spirit, courage, optimism of these people in spite of the ruins, in spite of the losses, in spite of the disaster”.

Lévy, a writer, philosopher and television personality ubiquitous enough in France to be known simply as BHL, has drawn criticism for the rigor of his methods (in one of his books, he seriously cited at length a philosopher invented as a satirical character by the writer Frédéric Pagès; he later complimented the author for the persuasiveness of his creation). Some have mocked the 74-year-old, born in French Algeria to a Sephardic Jewish family, for being a dilettante – a decadent, out-of-touch pop philosopher touring war zones in such conflict-ridden places as Bosnia, Darfur, Libya and Kurdistan.

Slava Ukraini, co-directed with Marc Roussel, does not necessarily counter those charges. Lévy’s strolls around the eastern front with a bulletproof vest strapped over a designer suit, and plays vox pop with Ukrainians with various shades of frustration or terror (many willingly tell their story or show off their dire conditions, both as a statement of fact and a testament to their resilience). His French narration trends flowery and pedantic (steelworkers are the “nobility of the proletariat” who “forged” victory; trenches toured on the front are “that archaic habit of men”). It’s never clear in the film how Lévy inserted himself into the Ukrainian foreign legion.

But the images he captures, as well as the testimonies from numerous Ukrainians, are striking and raw. There’s the woman making Ukrainian borscht over a fire in her backyard, tending a wish that the war will lighten enough to see everyone for her 70th birthday. An elderly woman who demonstrates, desperately and defiantly, how she spent a freezing night in a chair in her bathroom, the walls opened to the cold by airstrikes. There are countless shots of building skeletons, as well as several corpses. We see a photo taken of Lévy with the legion; weeks later, he can point to some of them who are already gone. War zones are chaotic, but the logic of the Russian offensive on civilian targets confounds even those fighting them. “What is this insane war, where the enemy attacks a city with no collective or strategic importance?” Lévy asks in voiceover.

The Russian motivation, as he can see it, is “to really negate, deny, destroy the Ukrainian identity”, said Lévy, dating back to what he calls the “real beginning” of the war, when Russia invaded the Crimea in 2014 with little international blowback. “Putin starts from the hypothesis that Ukraine does not exist, that Ukrainian culture does not exist,” he said. “Therefore in order to make the reality match with his creed, what can he do? Kill, bomb, destroy, scorched earth. If I dare give a certain logic to this crazy war, it is in the logic of the denial of the Ukrainian identity. This barbarity matches with this logic of the denial of the very existence of Ukraine.”

A still from Slava Ukraini. Photograph: Cohen Media Group

As a result, Lévy views the war, in and out of the film, as a conflict for nothing less than the soul of Europe, the future of liberalism, and the sanctity of human rights. “I think that without the resistance of the Ukrainians, maybe the Baltic states would be invaded at this moment. Certainly the Chinese would have started their operation on Taiwan, and so on,” he said.

“I’m not sure the west understands, really, what is at stake,” he added. “I made those movies, and especially the last one, to try to convince. At least to remind the truth, and if possible to convince.”

The sentence he heard most from his many conversations with Ukrainians – be it soldiers, mothers, miners, children, grandmothers – was that “we not only defend our fatherland, we defend yours, because we defend Europe.”

“The Ukrainians often thank us for our help. It should be the reverse,” said Lévy. “We should thank them. This was my feeling constantly – the ones who should thank is not them but us.”

Lévy is careful not to speculate on the future of the war in the film, instead focusing on eyewitnesses. But after numerous trips, he has a “conviction that the Ukrainians will win”. It’s just a matter of how long, at what cost, and with what help from western nations. “Every week, every day, has a real cost,” he said. “And by delaying this victory, by refusing to speed, the west takes huge responsibility. The more the victory of Ukraine is delayed, the more the disaster grows.”

Slava Ukraini premiered in February in France and will open in US theaters this month. But of particular significance to Lévy was a screening this past week at the United Nations, where Russia just wrapped a shameful tenure as president of the security council. “I hope that they will see what I know,” said Lévy of the many diplomats in attendance that night. “I hope that they will figure out what they owe. And I hope that this will have an effect in some of the states that will be represented that night.”

• Slava Ukraini is out in US cinemas now with a UK date to be announced

The Guardian · by Adrian Horton · May 6, 2023

9. Henry Kissinger on a potential artificial intelligence arms race

Henry Kissinger on a potential artificial intelligence arms race

BY TED KOPPEL

MAY 7, 2023 / 10:12 AM / CBS NEWS

CBS News · by Ted Koppel

That Henry Kissinger is still alive will come as news to some people. He's hard of hearing, blind in one eye, and has had multiple heart surgeries. Yet, he says, he works about 15 hours a day. And – incredibly – he remains relevant on a global scale.

Koppel asked, "If you had one of your aides here pick up the phone and call Beijing and say, 'Dr. Kissinger would like to speak with President Xi,' would he take your call?"

"There's a good chance that he'd take my call, yes," he replied.

And Russian President Vladimir Putin? "Probably, yes."

"If a president were to come to you and say, 'Henry, would you fly to Moscow and talk to Putin?'"

"I would be inclined to do it, yes," Kissinger said. "But I would be an advisor, not an active person."

"I wasn't thinking about reinstating you as Secretary of State," Koppel laughed. "Of course, you'd be an advisor."

"Yes, absolutely."

In anyone else, the arrogance would be staggering. But the nimbus of photographs surrounding Kissinger displaying former U.S. presidents (living and dead) whom he has served or advised is compelling, confirmation of the old adage, "If you can do it, it ain't braggin'."

Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. CBS News

Kissinger believes that the current crisis in Ukraine may be approaching a turning point. "Now that China has entered the negotiation, it will come to a head, I think, by the end of the year," he said. "We will be talking about negotiating processes and even actual negotiations."

You might think that, on the cusp of turning 100 years old, Kissinger is sympathetic to an 80-year-old or a 76-year-old running for president. He's skeptical. "It takes a certain capacity, physically," he said. "There's some advantages in maturity. There are dangers in exhaustion, and a limited capacity to work."

Kissinger has been at the center of things for longer than most Americans have been alive. Back in July of 1958, a young Mike Wallace asked an even younger Harvard professor to explain why the threat of massive nuclear retaliation (which was then U.S. policy) made absolutely no sense: "It means that against almost any form of attack we base our policy on a threat that will involve the destruction of all mankind," Kissinger said then. "And this is too risky, and I think too expensive."

Today, Kissinger said, "One of the positive outcomes of the policy that was in fact pursued by every American administration of both parties was that nuclear weapons have not been used for 75 years, nor were they used by any adversary. So that, I think, is an accomplishment."

In 1971, on a secret mission, Kissinger set the stage for President Richard Nixon's historic visit to China the following year. Over the past 50 years, China has evolved to become a world power. Koppel asked, "As you look back now, is the world better off because of that opening? Or is it a more dangerous place now?"

"No, China's reentry into the international system would have happened," Kissinger replied. "You cannot exclude it from the international system."

Today, China seems poised to take Taiwan by military force, and President Biden has said that the United States would come to Taiwan's defense.

"So, we have a problem," said Kissinger, "which is that it could evolve into a general war between two high-tech countries. That's something that requires urgent attention."

"But it's a dangerous period?"

"From that point of view, it's a very dangerous period."

President Richard Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in the Oval Office in Washington, October 16, 1973. John Duricka/AP

As secretary of state in 1973 and '74, Kissinger fashioned a new style of diplomacy, sometimes spending weeks flying between capitals. "Shuttle diplomacy," they called it. Egyptian President Anwar Sadat was an early convert: "I like him as a man before everything. And then after that as a statesman. As a statesman, I admire him, really."

Kissinger laid the groundwork for an uneasy peace between Egypt and Israel that has lasted now for almost 50 years.

By 1974, Kissinger, the brilliant, all-but-anonymous Harvard academic, was hot stuff. This was how ABC News' Howard K. Smith introduced a special titled "Kissinger: An Action Biography": "He's been named the most admired American, [and] has won the Nobel Peace Prize. A constitutional amendment has been offered that would let him run for president. It won't pass, but what a tribute."

By the summer of 1974, however, the American presidency itself was in crisis. The country was obsessed by Watergate, and Kissinger was determined (as he told a very much younger Ted Koppel), that he and U.S. foreign policy be seen as separate and apart.

Koppel: "Mr. Secretary, if you ever felt that foreign policy was being manipulated for the sake of domestic political reasons, what would you do?"

Kissinger: "I would resign, and I would say so publicly. Foreign policy has to reflect the continuing values of the American people, and it cannot be the subject of partisan policy."

It would be Nixon who resigned. Kissinger stayed on as secretary of state.

What will history's judgment be? Kissinger's career has been one of extraordinary achievement, and relentless controversy. The bombing of Cambodia. The war in Vietnam. Argentina. Chile. Many of his critics were not even alive when the events they condemn occurred.

Koppel asked, "There are people at our broadcast who are questioning the legitimacy of even doing an interview with you. They feel that strongly about what they consider, I'll put it in language they would use, your criminality."

"That's a reflection of their ignorance," Kissinger replied. "It wasn't conceived that way. It wasn't conducted that way."

"There is no question, when you and President Nixon conceived of the bombing of Cambodia, you did it in order to interdict – "

"Come on. We have been bombing with drones and all kinds of weapons every guerilla unit that we were opposing," Kissinger said. "It's been the same in every administration that I've been part of."

"The consequences in Cambodia were particularly – "

"Come on now."

"No, no, no, were particularly – "

"This is a program you're doing because I'm gonna be 100 years old," Kissinger said. "And you're picking a topic of something that happened 60 years ago. You have to know that it was a necessary step. Now, the younger generation feels that if they can raise their emotions, they don't have to think. If they think, they won't ask that question."

Henry Kissinger and "Sunday Morning" senior contributor Ted Koppel. CBS News

Well beyond an age at which most people are unwilling or unable to learn about the latest technology, Kissinger became obsessed with the subject of artificial intelligence. He collaborated with two co-authors on a 2021 book, "The Age of AI and Our Human Future."

Koppel asked, "In theory, the United States has declared that it will always maintain and insist upon human control of artificial intelligence. From a practical point of view, it's impossible."

"Well, it's a highly desirable objective, but the speed with which artificial intelligence acts will make it problematical in crisis situations," Kissinger replied.

A wartime situation, for example, in which AI recommends a course of action that the President and his advisors consider horrifyingly unwise. "In relying on the answer, we cannot double-check it," said Kissinger, "because we cannot review all the knowledge that the machine has acquired. We are giving it that knowledge. But this will be one of the big debates. I am now trying to do what I did with respect to nuclear weapons, to call attention to the importance of the impact of this evolution."

"But you know there will also be an artificial intelligence arms race?"

"Yes, but it's going to be different. Because in the previous arms races, you could develop plausible theories about how you might prevail. It's a totally new problem intellectually."

Just the thing to engage Henry Kissinger at 100.

For more info:

• henryakissinger.com

Story produced by Dustin Stephens. Editor: Ed Givnish.

CBS News · by Ted Koppel

10. Is There a Security Umbrella for Ukraine?

Excerpts:

In the final analysis, Europe faces a grim future. The division of the continent into two nuclear-armed armed camps—Russia and Belarus on one side, NATO on the other—is a recipe for cold, unforgiving, and unadorned peace on the continent. But even this hibernal version of security looks set to exclude Ukraine, a country that has suffered so much and yet still cannot gain access to the spartan security umbrellas that others have at least managed to clamber beneath.

NATO’s next cold war with Russia will be freezing indeed. But it will be even worse on the outside.

Is There a Security Umbrella for Ukraine?

19fortyfive.com · by Peter Harris · May 7, 2023

Is There a Security Umbrella for Ukraine? – Vladimir Putin’s unprovoked war against Ukraine is the largest interstate conflict on European soil since 1945. It has been a terrible war, with enormous loss of life. Credible accounts of war crimes abound. Urban centers such as Mariupol, Lyman, and Bakhmut are now in ruins. The amount of human misery and suffering is incalculable.

Yet despite the horrors unfolding in Ukraine, analysts mostly agree that the conflict has a low chance of escalating to become a general European war. To be sure, there is a great deal of fear about Russian expansionism in Poland and the Baltic states. These anxieties must not be trivialized. But nor should they be taken as representative of how the rest of Europe feels about the war.

Ukraine Changes Everything…and Nothing

Simply put, there is little evidence that most Europeans view their own physical security as being affected by what is happening in Ukraine. How exactly have NATO and Russia managed to prevent the horizontal escalation of the war in Ukraine? What gives the West confidence that the war will not spill over into neighboring countries? And what lessons might be applied to keep Ukraine (and others) safe from Russian predation in the future?

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the United States and its European partners have tried three primary ways of maintaining peaceful relations with the Russian giant: political integration, economic cooperation, and extended deterrence in the form of US security guarantees to NATO members. Of these, only the last has stood the tests of time, divergent security interests, and war.

The political and economic love-bombing of Russia was supposed to build a constructive east-west relationship. The wager was that Russia could be turned into a friend and trusted partner—a fully Westernized country with which NATO members could have no major quarrel.

Toward this end, the West invited Russia to join Western-led organizations during the 1990s and 2000s, such as the Council of Europe, G8, World Trade Organization, NATO’s Partnership for Peace program, and the NATO-Russia Permanent Joint Council. At the same time, Europeans made themselves highly reliant upon Russian oil and gas, and rolled out the red carpet for Russian oligarchs.

As we now know, however, the wager did not pay off. Russia has not democratized. Its leaders have not become converts to the “liberal” world order. The levers of power in Moscow are still being pulled by people whom Russia’s neighbors have reason to fear.

Extended deterrence, on the other hand, was never meant to foster friendly relations with Russia. It was only ever intended to stave off a general war in Europe. In this sense, the US security umbrella is forbidding, frigid, and dissatisfying; it is a distressing artefact of the Cold War, which most Europeans surely wish could be consigned to history.

But at least extended deterrence has the distinct advantage of having actually worked. Russia still fears that, if it attacks a NATO member, it might be drawn into an unwinnable war with the United States and its powerful Western European allies. The West, for its part, refrains from attacking Russia directly because it fears the consequences of war with a nuclear-armed great power.

There is nothing automatic about this deterrence regime. It will always be a challenge for the United States to credibly threaten to fight Russia in defense of, say, Estonia. War between Russia and NATO could still happen as the result of recklessness, miscalculation, or desperation. But all things being equal, it seems obvious that the mutual threat of nuclear annihilation has helped to keep Russia and NATO at peace even during a period of war on the European continent—no trivial thing.

What does all this mean for the future of security and stability on the European continent? First, Europe must come to terms with the fact that there is no hope of a warm peace between Russia and the West, at least not while Vladimir Putin remains alive and in charge. For the foreseeable future, political cooperation with Europe’s worst war criminal will be superficial at best.

Nor is there going to be any appetite for restoring economic interdependence as a pillar of relations with Russia. On the contrary, Western firms and governments will be slow to resume commercial ties. For better or worse, then, the ossification of Europe into two political and economic camps should probably be regarded as inevitable. Bare peace is about as good as things will get for the foreseeable future.

But if extended deterrence and nuclear weapons are going to be the greatest—and most terrifying—guarantees of peace on the European continent, where does this leave countries such as Ukraine, Moldova, and Georgia that have no formal allies to call upon and no nuclear umbrella to cower under? Who—if anyone—will provide for their defense?

For its part, Ukraine wants NATO membership. Kyiv has made no secret of this fact. So far, however, the alliance has refused to open its arms. Others have suggested that Ukraine must develop a unilateral capacity to deter future Russian aggression, whether by acquiring nuclear weapons or adopting a sort of impregnable “fortified neutrality” posture. But this is easier said than done. Ukraine cannot simply choose to become strong enough to deter its powerful neighbor to the east.

The Future of Europe

In the final analysis, Europe faces a grim future. The division of the continent into two nuclear-armed armed camps—Russia and Belarus on one side, NATO on the other—is a recipe for cold, unforgiving, and unadorned peace on the continent. But even this hibernal version of security looks set to exclude Ukraine, a country that has suffered so much and yet still cannot gain access to the spartan security umbrellas that others have at least managed to clamber beneath.

NATO’s next cold war with Russia will be freezing indeed. But it will be even worse on the outside.

Dr. Peter Harris is an associate professor of political science at Colorado State University, a non-resident fellow at Defense Priorities, and a contributing editor at 19FortyFive. Follow him on Twitter, @PeterHarrisCSU.

19fortyfive.com · by Peter Harris · May 7, 2023

11. The 25 Most Expensive Weapons in the US Military Budget Next Year

Quite a list of platforms.

Is this the MICC? (military industrial congressional complex)

We are an equipment centric platform based military,

The 25 Most Expensive Weapons in the US Military Budget Next Year – 24/7 Wall St.

247wallst.com · by Angelo Young May 7, 2023 10:32 am

Special Report

After months of congressional delays, U.S. president Joe Biden signed the 2023 defense budget, approved by Congress, in late December. The act approved the Pentagon to spend $816.7 billion on defense in the current fiscal year, and recently, the Department of Defense released its fiscal year 2024 budget request, asking lawmakers to approve an $842 billion budget — about $26 billion more than the current budget and $100 million more than fiscal year 2022.

Whatever the final FY2024 Pentagon budget turns out to be, by the time it reaches the president’s desk later this year one thing is certain: The United States will continue to be a big global outlier in defense spending as the nation invests heavily on maintaining its air, land, and sea military superiorities with new, upgraded – and often extremely expensive – hardware. (Here is how the world’s top military spenders compare to the U.S.)

To identify the 25 most expensive new weapons the military is buying next year, 24/7 Wall St. reviewed the DOD’s recently-released Fiscal 2024 Budget Request. To find the cost of each weapons system we divided the total requested budget allocation of each weapons system by the number of units requested. These unit cost figures may not always be equivalent to the total sticker price of a given weapon for reasons including rounding; spending on research, development, testing, and evaluation; planned modifications to existing weapons; or because often part of the budget for a particular weapon is early payment on weapons that will be bought in years to come. All data is from the DOD budget proposal, Program Acquisition Cost By Weapons System document. (Also see, the 35 billion-dollar weapons in the 2024 U.S. military budget.)

While all 25 weapons on the list have a budget allocation of more than $10 million, two have total FY2024 budget allocations that top $10 billion. One of these highest-ticket allocations is an order for 83 high-tech F-35 fighter jets for $10.2 billion, a year after the DOD allocated $9.1 billion in FY2023 for 77 of these jets. The DOD has also allocated $10.6 billion for two Virginia class nuclear-powered fast-attack submarines. In FY2023, the DOD allocated $17.6 billion for two of these submarines.

Eight other weapons have FY2024 budget allocations of between $1.7 billion and $5.9 billion, a list that includes two Arleigh Burke destroyers for $4.6 billion and a newcomer to the list of costliest weapons: the $5.9 billion USS Columbia (SSBN-826) next generation nuclear ballistic missile submarine. This vessel is currently under construction at the General Dynamics Electric Boat facility at Quonset Point, Rhode Island, with an expected delivery date of 2027, followed by years of testing before its first patrol, according to the U.S. Naval Institute.

Nine of the weapons systems on the list, costing between $968 million and $5.9 billion per unit, will be used by the U.S. Navy, reflecting just how costly it is to maintain U.S. naval superiority relative to other branches of the military. Five of these high-cost weapons will go to the U.S. Army, including 50 Black Hawk and 42 new or remanufactured Apache helicopters, each costing $18.3 million and $19.7 million, respectively, and 34 modified or upgraded M-1 Abrams tanks at $23.5 million apiece.

The U.S. military is investing $54.4 billion on these 25 weapons systems in the upcoming fiscal year. Here are the most expensive new weapons the U.S. military is buying next year.

Click here to see the most expensive new weapons the military is buying next year.

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247wallst.com · by Angelo Young May 7, 2023 10:32 amThe 25 Most Expensive Weapons in the US Military Budget Next Year

https://247wallst.com/special-report/2023/05/07/the-25-most-expensive-weapons-in-the-us-military-budget-next-year/2/

Angelo Young

May 7, 2023 10:32 am

Source: Public Domain / Wikimedia Commons

25. Aegis Sea-Based Weapons System

> Weapon cost, FY2024: $17.4 million per acquired missile system

> Requested acquisition, FY2024: 48 missile systems (39 interceptors, 9 hardware+software installs)

> Acquisition spending, FY2024: $835.4 million — #27 most expensive

> Requested acquisition, FY2023: 77 missile systems (71 interceptors, 6 hardware + software installs)

> Acquisition spending, FY2023: $1.2 billion — #21 most expensive

> Service branches: Joint Service

> Primary contractor(s): Boeing

00:20

01:26

Homeland Security UH-60 Black ... (CC BY 2.0) by D. Miller

24. UH-60 Black Hawk

> Weapon cost, FY2024: $18.3 million per acquired helicopter

> Requested acquisition, FY2024: 50 helicopters (24 UH-60Ms, 26 UH-60Vs)

> Acquisition spending, FY2024: $915.5 million — #26 most expensive

> Requested acquisition, FY2023: 63 helicopters (35 UH-60Ms, 28 UH-60Vs)

> Acquisition spending, FY2023: $1.2 billion — #20 most expensive

> Service branches: Army

> Primary contractor(s): Sikorsky, Redstone Defense Systems

ALSO READ: 35 Billion-Dollar Weapons in the 2024 US Military Budget

Source: Public Domain / Wikimedia Commons

23. Paladin Integrated Management

> Weapon cost, FY2024: $19.6 million per acquired artillery vehicle

> Requested acquisition, FY2024: 24 artillery vehicles

> Acquisition spending, FY2024: $469.2 million — #42 most expensive

> Requested acquisition, FY2023: 43 artillery vehicles

> Acquisition spending, FY2023: $680.1 million — #37 most expensive

> Service branches: Army

> Primary contractor(s): BAE Systems

Missile Training (CC BY 2.0) by @USArmy

22. THAAD Terminal High Altitude Area Defense

> Weapon cost, FY2024: $19.7 million per acquired missile defense system

> Requested acquisition, FY2024: 11 missile defense systems

> Acquisition spending, FY2024: $216.8 million — #57 most expensive

> Requested acquisition, FY2023: 18 missile defense systems

> Acquisition spending, FY2023: $240.0 million — #56 most expensive

> Service branches: Joint Service

> Primary contractor(s): Lockheed Martin

Source: Courtesy of Boeing

21. AH-64E Apache: Remanufacture/New Build

> Weapon cost, FY2024: $19.7 million per acquired helicopter

> Requested acquisition, FY2024: 42 helicopters

> Acquisition spending, FY2024: $828.9 million — #28 most expensive

> Requested acquisition, FY2023: 33 helicopters

> Acquisition spending, FY2023: $693.9 million — #36 most expensive

> Service branches: Army

> Primary contractor(s): Boeing

The 25 Most Expensive Weapons in the US Military Budget Next Year

https://247wallst.com/special-report/2023/05/07/the-25-most-expensive-weapons-in-the-us-military-budget-next-year/3/

Angelo Young

May 7, 2023 10:32 am

AirTractor Paris... (CC BY-SA 3.0) by PvK

20. AO Armed Overwatch / Targeting

> Weapon cost, FY2024: $22.2 million per acquired aircraft

> Requested acquisition, FY2024: 12 aircraft

> Acquisition spending, FY2024: $266.8 million — #52 most expensive

> Requested acquisition, FY2023: 9 aircraft

> Acquisition spending, FY2023: $246.0 million — #55 most expensive

> Service branches: Joint Service

> Primary contractor(s): L-3 Harris

Source: Rockfinder / iStock via Getty Images

19. M-1 Abrams Tank Modification/Upgrades

> Weapon cost, FY2024: $23.5 million per acquired tank

> Requested acquisition, FY2024: 34 tanks

> Acquisition spending, FY2024: $800.3 million — #31 most expensive

> Requested acquisition, FY2023: 90 tanks

> Acquisition spending, FY2023: $1.2 billion — #17 most expensive

> Service branches: Army

> Primary contractor(s): General Dynamics Land Systems

24/7 Wall St.

18 of the Deadliest Weapons in History

Source: Stocktrek Images / Stocktrek Images via Getty Images

18. Tomahawk Tactical Tomahawk Cruise Missile

> Weapon cost, FY2024: $23.9 million per acquired missile

> Requested acquisition, FY2024: 34 missiles (34 for Marines)

> Acquisition spending, FY2024: $811.5 million — #30 most expensive

> Requested acquisition, FY2023: 68 missiles (13 for Marines, 55 for Navy)

> Acquisition spending, FY2023: $781.8 million — #32 most expensive

> Service branches: Navy

> Primary contractor(s): Raytheon Missiles & Defense

Source: Courtesy of Boeing

17. MH-139A Grey Wolf

> Weapon cost, FY2024: $35.6 million per acquired helicopter

> Requested acquisition, FY2024: 7 helicopters

> Acquisition spending, FY2024: $249.1 million — #54 most expensive

> Requested acquisition, FY2023: 5 helicopters

> Acquisition spending, FY2023: $197.4 million — #59 most expensive

> Service branches: Air Force

> Primary contractor(s): Boeing

Source: Stocktrek Images / Stocktrek Images via Getty Images

16. CH-47 Chinook

> Weapon cost, FY2024: $40.4 million per acquired helicopter

> Requested acquisition, FY2024: 6 helicopters

> Acquisition spending, FY2024: $242.1 million — #56 most expensive

> Requested acquisition, FY2023: 9 helicopters

> Acquisition spending, FY2023: $437.8 million — #47 most expensive

> Service branches: Army

> Primary contractor(s): Boeing

SPECIAL REPORT

The 25 Most Expensive Weapons in the US Military Budget Next Year

https://247wallst.com/special-report/2023/05/07/the-25-most-expensive-weapons-in-the-us-military-budget-next-year/4/

Angelo Young

May 7, 2023 10:32 am

MQ-9 Reaper (CC BY-SA 2.0) by Chris Hunkeler

15. MQ-9 Reaper

> Weapon cost, FY2024: $60.7 million per acquired drone

> Requested acquisition, FY2024: 5 drones (5 for U.S. Navy/Marines)

> Acquisition spending, FY2024: $303.6 million — #47 most expensive

> Requested acquisition, FY2023: 5 drones (5 for U.S. Navy/Marines)

> Acquisition spending, FY2023: $438.6 million — #46 most expensive

> Service branches: Joint Service

> Primary contractor(s): General Atomics–Aeronautical Systems Incorporated

Source: my_public_domain_photos / Flickr

14. F-15 Eagle

> Weapon cost, FY2024: $120.8 million per acquired fighter jet

> Requested acquisition, FY2024: 24 fighter jets

> Acquisition spending, FY2024: $2.9 billion — #6 most expensive

> Requested acquisition, FY2023: 24 fighter jets

> Acquisition spending, FY2023: $2.6 billion — #7 most expensive

> Service branches: Air Force

> Primary contractor(s): Lockheed Martin

ALSO READ: The 25 Companies Making Billions Building The World’s Weapons

Source: my_public_domain_photos / Flickr

13. F-35 Joint Strike Fighter

> Weapon cost, FY2024: $122.9 million per acquired fighter jet

> Requested acquisition, FY2024: 83 fighter jets (35 for U.S. Navy/Marines, 48 for Air Force)

> Acquisition spending, FY2024: $10.2 billion — #2 most expensive

> Requested acquisition, FY2023: 77 fighter jets (34 for U.S. Navy/Marines, 43 for Air Force)

> Acquisition spending, FY2023: $9.1 billion — #1 most expensive

> Service branches: Joint Service

> Primary contractor(s): Lockheed Martin

Source: WhitcombeRD / iStock Editorial via Getty Images

12. C-130J Hercules

> Weapon cost, FY2024: $138.1 million per acquired plane

> Requested acquisition, FY2024: 2 planes (2 KC-130Js)

> Acquisition spending, FY2024: $276.2 million — #51 most expensive

> Requested acquisition, FY2023: 21 planes (16 C-130Js, 5 KC-130Js)

> Acquisition spending, FY2023: $2.3 billion — #9 most expensive

> Service branches: Joint Service

> Primary contractor(s): Lockheed Martin ; Marietta, GA

Source: Public Domain / U.S. Marine Corps photo by Lance Cpl. Molly Hampton

11. CH-53K Heavy Lift Replacement Helicopter

> Weapon cost, FY2024: $146.4 million per acquired helicopter

> Requested acquisition, FY2024: 15 helicopters

> Acquisition spending, FY2024: $2.2 billion — #11 most expensive

> Requested acquisition, FY2023: 12 helicopters

> Acquisition spending, FY2023: $2.3 billion — #10 most expensive

> Service branches: Navy / Marine Corps

> Primary contractor(s): Boeing, General Electric Company

The 25 Most Expensive Weapons in the US Military Budget Next Year

https://247wallst.com/special-report/2023/05/07/the-25-most-expensive-weapons-in-the-us-military-budget-next-year/5/

Angelo Young

May 7, 2023 10:32 am

Source: Public Domain / Wikimedia Commons

10. NSSL & RSLP Launch Enterprise

> Weapon cost, FY2024: $190.8 million per acquired Launch service

> Requested acquisition, FY2024: 15 Launch services

> Acquisition spending, FY2024: $2.9 billion — #8 most expensive

> Requested acquisition, FY2023: 10 Launch services

> Acquisition spending, FY2023: $1.9 billion — #11 most expensive

> Service branches: Space Force

> Primary contractor(s): to be determined

N/A (CC BY 2.0) by Kansas City District U.S. Army Corps of Engineers

9. KC-46A Tanker

> Weapon cost, FY2024: $192.2 million per acquired plane

> Requested acquisition, FY2024: 15 planes

> Acquisition spending, FY2024: $2.9 billion — #7 most expensive

> Requested acquisition, FY2023: 15 planes

> Acquisition spending, FY2023: $2.5 billion — #8 most expensive

> Service branches: Air Force

> Primary contractor(s): Lockheed Martin

24/7 Wall St.

The 18 Most Expensive Planes in the US Air Force

Source: Public Domain / Wikimedia Commons

8. MQ-25 Stingray

> Weapon cost, FY2024: $249.7 million per acquired drone

> Requested acquisition, FY2024: 3 drones

> Acquisition spending, FY2024: $749.0 million — #34 most expensive

> Requested acquisition, FY2023: 1 drone

> Acquisition spending, FY2023: $882.9 million — #28 most expensive

> Service branches: Navy / Marine Corps

> Primary contractor(s): Boeing, Lockheed Martin

Source: Public Domain / Wikimedia Commons

7. MQ-4C / RQ-4 Triton/Global Hawk/NATO AGS

> Weapon cost, FY2024: $255.0 million per acquired drone

> Requested acquisition, FY2024: 2 drones

> Acquisition spending, FY2024: $510.0 million — #40 most expensive

> Requested acquisition, FY2023: 3 drones

> Acquisition spending, FY2023: $788.6 million — #30 most expensive

> Service branches: Joint Service

> Primary contractor(s): Northrop Grumman; Rancho Bernardo, CA

Source: Public Domain / Wikimedia Commons

6. T-AO 205 John Lewis Class Fleet Replenishment Oiler

> Weapon cost, FY2024: $967.6 million per acquired ship

> Requested acquisition, FY2024: 1 ship

> Acquisition spending, FY2024: $967.6 million — #24 most expensive

> Requested acquisition, FY2023: 1 ship

> Acquisition spending, FY2023: $958.2 million — #26 most expensive

> Service branches: Navy

> Primary contractor(s): General Dynamics

The 25 Most Expensive Weapons in the US Military Budget Next Year

https://247wallst.com/special-report/2023/05/07/the-25-most-expensive-weapons-in-the-us-military-budget-next-year/6/

Angelo Young

May 7, 2023 10:32 am

Source: Public Domain / Wikimedia Commons

5. FFG(X) Constellation Class Guided Missile Frigate

> Weapon cost, FY2024: $1.1 billion per acquired ship

> Requested acquisition, FY2024: 2 ships

> Acquisition spending, FY2024: $2.1 billion — #12 most expensive

> Requested acquisition, FY2023: 1 ship

> Acquisition spending, FY2023: $1.1 billion — #22 most expensive

> Service branches: Navy

> Primary contractor(s): Huntington Ingalls Industries

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Source: Public Domain / Wikimedia Commons

4. AS(X) Submarine Tender Replacement

> Weapon cost, FY2024: $1.7 billion per acquired ship

> Requested acquisition, FY2024: 1 ship

> Acquisition spending, FY2024: $1.7 billion — #14 most expensive

> Requested acquisition, FY2023: 0 ship

> Acquisition spending, FY2023: None

> Service branches: Navy

> Primary contractor(s): SpaceX. United Launch Alliance (ULA), Northrop Grumman, Rocket Lab, USA, VOX Space

ALSO READ: How the World’s Top Military Spenders Compare to the US

Source: Public Domain / Wikimedia Commons

3. DDG 51 Arleigh Burke Class Destroyer

> Weapon cost, FY2024: $2.3 billion per acquired ship

> Requested acquisition, FY2024: 2 ships

> Acquisition spending, FY2024: $4.6 billion — #5 most expensive

> Requested acquisition, FY2023: 3 ships

> Acquisition spending, FY2023: $8.0 billion — #2 most expensive

> Service branches: Navy

> Primary contractor(s): Raytheon Missile & Defense

Source: national_museum_of_the_us_navy / Flickr

2. SSN 774 Virginia Class Submarine

> Weapon cost, FY2024: $5.3 billion per acquired submarine

> Requested acquisition, FY2024: 2 submarines

> Acquisition spending, FY2024: $10.6 billion — #1 most expensive

> Requested acquisition, FY2023: 2 submarines

> Acquisition spending, FY2023: $7.0 billion — #3 most expensive

> Service branches: Navy

> Primary contractor(s): Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control

Source: Public Domain / Wikimedia Commons

1. SSBN 826 Columbia Class Ballistic Missile Submarine

> Weapon cost, FY2024: $5.9 billion per acquired submarine

> Requested acquisition, FY2024: 1 submarine

> Acquisition spending, FY2024: $5.9 billion — #3 most expensive

> Requested acquisition, FY2023: 0 submarines

> Acquisition spending, FY2023: $5.9 billion — #4 most expensive

> Service branches: Navy

> Primary contractor(s): Bechtel National Incorporated

12. To counter Russia in Africa, Biden deploys a favored strategy

Recognize the enemy's strategy. Understand it. EXPOSE it (to inoculate populations and friends, partners, and allies) , and attack it with a superior political warfare strategy.

To counter Russia in Africa, Biden deploys a favored strategy

By ERIN BANCO and ANASTASIIA CARRIER

05/07/2023 07:00 AM EDT

Politico

As in the weeks before the Ukraine invasion, the U.S. is sharing what it knows about Putin and his paramilitary force.

U.S. officials have in recent months engaged in talks with officials in the Central African Republic, Chad, Rwanda, Burkina Faso and the Democratic Republic of Congo to share U.S. intelligence related to Wagner. | Sophie Garcia/AP Photo

By Erin Banco and Anastasiia Carrier

05/07/2023 07:00 AM EDT

As Russia’s paramilitary organization, the Wagner Group, expands its presence in African countries, the Biden administration is pushing back with one of its prized tactics: sharing sensitive intelligence with allies in Africa in an attempt to dissuade countries from partnering with the group.

The administration has used this tactic with increasing frequency, including in the months leading up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. It serves the dual function of alerting allies to looming threats and placing adversaries on notice that the U.S. knows what they’re doing.

Now, those tactics are being deployed as part of a broader push to prevent Moscow from gaining an economic and military foothold in countries in Africa, including those that have previously worked with Washington, according to interviews with four U.S. officials with knowledge of the effort.

The U.S. has in recent months shared intelligence related to an alleged Wagner plan to assassinate the president of Chad as well as its attempts to access and control key natural resource extraction sites in countries such as Sudan and the Central African Republic, among other initiatives.

The aim is to highlight for African officials how working with Wagner is likely to sow chaos in the long term despite its promises to bring peace and security to countries facing political turmoil and violence, the officials said.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Central Intelligence Agency declined to comment on the administration’s strategy. The National Security Council also declined to comment.

Russian officials did not respond to POLITICO’s request for comment about Wagner’s connection to the state or its activities in Africa.

The escalation of the administration’s information sharing comes after more than a year of heightened tensions between Washington and Moscow. The war in Ukraine has pitted the two countries against each other, with the U.S. providing billions in weapons to Kyiv and Russia continuing to launch attacks on Ukrainian soldiers and civilians.

The recent sharing of intelligence on Wagner highlights how the standoff between the U.S. and Russia extends beyond the battlefield in Ukraine to Africa, where Biden officials say Russia is using Wagner as a proxy to strike deals and help make inroads on behalf of the Kremlin. And it underscores the degree to which the Biden administration believes Wagner — and the Kremlin — pose a long term threat to U.S. interests on the continent.

“The best way to fight Wagner is with the truth,” said one of the U.S. officials. “Where we can find credible information that undermines Wagner’s malign influence, of course, we want more people to know about it, and that includes our partners, and the public.”

Information as a weapon

The Wagner Group is increasingly involved in countries across Central Africa as a security and propaganda force protecting and promoting local political leaders.

The four American officials, all of whom were granted anonymity to speak freely about a sensitive ongoing intelligence and diplomatic effort, described a growing sense of alarm about Wagner’s inroads in those countries.

Wagner’s activities in Africa were further detailed in several documents obtained from inside the business empire of Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of Wagner. POLITICO previously reported on some of the details of those documents, including how Prigozhin spread his forces and media network to Africa.

POLITICO accessed the documents via an international journalism collaboration with outlets in the U.S. and Europe. The German news outlet WELT first obtained the documents and shared them with other media organizations overseen by Axel Springer, which also owns POLITICO. The documents span several years — from 2017 to 2021. POLITICO has only included information from the documents in this report that it could verify with other sources, including open-source reporting.

Prigozhin did not respond to a detailed list of questions.

The U.S. concerns and assessments about Wagner, including its operations in Africa, were also reflected in the highly classified intelligence allegedly leaked by 21-year-old Massachusetts Air National Guard member Jack Teixiera, according to more than 50 documents reviewed by POLITICO. Teixiera disseminated the materials on Discord, a social media messaging site, in recent months.

Over the past year, the U.S. has shared with allies sensitive intelligence about Wagner’s battlefield movements and operations in Ukraine. National security and State Department officials have also denounced Wagner publicly from the podium. As recently as this spring, officials have spoken about Wagner’s atrocities in Ukraine, including its brutality in the eastern city of Bakhmut, and its purchasing of weapons from North Korea.

But the move to share intelligence about Wagner in Africa — and the diplomatic endeavor to deliver that information — has played out much more quietly.

Although the U.S. often shares intelligence — particularly with long-standing allies in Europe — it has historically fostered a somewhat careful approach to divulging intelligence in an effort to protect sources and methods. The current intelligence-sharing on Wagner is widespread — spanning multiple countries and continents — including with countries the U.S. does not traditionally hold robust relations in the intelligence arena.

U.S. officials have in recent months engaged in talks with officials in Central African Republic, Chad, Rwanda, Burkina Faso and the Democratic Republic of Congo to share U.S. intelligence related to Wagner. Diplomats have pressed officials in some of those countries to avoid working with Wagner or to help persuade other neighboring nations to cease interacting with the group.

Representatives from the countries with which the U.S. has shared the Wagner intelligence did not respond to requests for comment.

The administration is also using the intelligence-sharing strategy as a way of highlighting how Wagner’s presence in some countries — and its inability to restore security there — is bad for business. The idea is that if Wagner is seen as disrupting the flow of trade and investment, it could drive a wedge between Beijing, a long-time investor in Africa, and Moscow — an alliance that has only strengthened in recent months and continues to concern Washington.

Washington has urged officials in countries not to partner with Wagner not only because of the potential long-term security concerns it could present the U.S. but also because of the impact that the paramilitary group’s actions in Africa could have on the battlefield in Ukraine.

U.S. officials fear Wagner could use profits it reaps from mining concessions and other business contracts in Africa to help aid Russia’s war efforts. Some experts have said Wagner’s access to minerals and its ability to export them to market is overblown — and that its profits are marginal and not likely to make an impact on the battlefield in Ukraine. But U.S. officials have in recent weeks gathered specific intelligence related to Wagner’s attempts to use its international connections, including those in Africa, to help support its fight in Ukraine.

In February, Wagner personnel met with Turkish contacts to purchase weapons and equipment from Turkey for Wagner’s efforts in Mali and Ukraine, according to a signals intelligence report included in one of the documents allegedly leaked by Teixeira. Another section of that document says the U.S. has gathered intelligence that shows the transition president in Mali has also considered acquiring weapons from Turkey on Wagner’s behalf.

Representatives for Mali and Turkey declined to comment on the documents.

Despite its support from the Kremlin and its ability to secure lucrative contracts in Africa, some experts who study Wagner maintain that the U.S. and its allies have historically held far greater sway among African government officials than Prigozhin and his fighters.

“There’s no question Wagner has a strategy in Africa … to connect neighboring states under Wagner influence. Washington is trying to disrupt that for a host of reasons,” said Cameron Hudson, analyst and consultant at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “But let’s not put Wagner on par with the United States government. These are not equals — the United States doesn’t see them as equals. What we have seen is Wagner doesn’t have an ability — by itself — to create winners and losers in these countries.”

Making inroads

Wagner is helmed by Prigozhin, a former caterer for Russian President Vladimir Putin. Since 2017, Prigozhin has expanded the group into an international military and influence force with tentacles that span the globe.

The organization, which has strong ties to the Russian state, including its security services, is known for its work helping prop up regimes in the Middle East, in countries such as Syria. And its forces are leading the fight in parts of Ukraine, especially in the eastern city of Bakhmut, where Russians and Ukrainian soldiers are locked in a bloody battle. Wagner is viewed by U.S. officials as having gained newfound prominence in the wake of Moscow’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

In recent years, Prigozhin has expanded Wagner’s operations to Africa, helping foster relationships for the Kremlin in countries such as Libya, Sudan, Central African Republic, Chad and Mali. The group’s work includes securing critical mineral and oil sites in Africa as well as protecting government officials.

Its presence in those countries has prompted senior officials in the Biden administration to draft a new road map for routing the group out of the region, the U.S. officials said.

Although Wagner has worked on the continent for years, the Biden administration is newly worried about the extent to which the group’s activities there are not only threatening regional stability but are also being used by the Kremlin as a way to develop long-term influential relationships — relationships that could potentially sideline Washington for years to come.

Washington’s stated strategy for the Sahel region, which Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced from Africa in 2022, lays out U.S. thinking about Russia’s influence on the continent. Without naming Wagner, the document describes how Moscow uses “private military companies” to foment “instability for strategic and financial benefit.”

POLITICO has obtained and reviewed a series of internal documents from Prigozhin’s empire that detail how the leader of Wagner has expanded the paramilitary group and his businesses across the continent, specifically in Sudan and Central African Republic.

They also mention the Democratic Republic of Congo. The documents confirm previous reporting, including by POLITICO, about Wagner’s operations in Africa. But they also provide unusual detail about the close connection between Prigozhin’s businesses, Wagner and the local African governments and militaries.

Prigozhin set up offices in Sudan in 2017 and has in recent years built out a sprawling business network in the country.

Prigozhin established his operations in Sudan by working with government officials — including former President Omar al-Bashir, who was ousted from power by the military in 2019 — and by securing lucrative mining contracts.

A CNN investigation last year revealed the extent to which Russia was smuggling gold out of Sudan and using Wagner to help plunder the country’s natural resources. According to the U.S. officials who spoke with POLITICO, Wagner appears to conduct much of its mining business through Meroe Gold. The U.S. and Europe have both sanctioned the entity. Meroe could not be reached for comment.

Wagner also has a history of supporting the country’s security services.

Prigozhin’s operatives in Sudan also work on disinformation and misinformation campaigns in the country to sway political events on the ground, according to documents and experts who study Wagner’s work in the country.

Several of the documents from inside Prigozhin’s business empire outline detailed media strategies to suppress protests and to pay local Sudan journalists to promote content in support of the ruling party and against the opposition of then-president Bashir. One outlines recommendations on how to manage protests that swept the country in 2018 that threatened to topple the government of Bashir. The New York Times reported on a similar memo in June 2022.

Among the suggestions included in the memo POLITICO reviewed: The creation of a Russian-run internet center that would control the narrative about the government and launch a campaign portraying protesters in a negative light. The plan also laid out plans to control the protests by blocking foreigners’ access to areas with demonstrations and infiltrating the ranks of the protest’s organizers.

Several of the documents obtained by POLITICO show the expansion of Wagner’s military activities in the country, including its connection to the country’s military. The organization has helped train soldiers over the years, the documents show.

One of the documents appears to show a request by a Prigozhin-linked business to pay for the use of the Khartoum military airbase to ensure the arrivals and departures of employees and cargo. Another memo from 2021 outlines Wagner positions in the country, including on several bases. It also lists Prigozhin employees serving in other command centers where they coordinate with the Sudanese military and police, including Aswar, a company controlled by Sudanese military intelligence. Aswar could not be reached for comment.

It is unclear whether, or the extent to which, Russia, Wagner or any of Prigozhin’s affiliate entities are currently involved in the ongoing violence in Sudan. U.S. officials did not answer questions about whether they assessed that the paramilitary group is currently providing aid or helping prop up either side of the conflict.

“The interference of external entities in Sudan’s internal conflict will only lead to more human suffering and delay the country’s transition to democracy,” a State Department official said in a statement.

Putting down roots

Wagner has also set up command centers in the Um Dafuq region of western Sudan, where it has been accused of attacking civilians. It has used the town as a base for supporting its gold-mining activities in Central African Republic.

The paramilitary organization set up shop in CAR in 2017, creating cultural centers and other local initiatives to make inroads with the government. Since then, it has moved in to protect the country’s gold mines and is training government forces, according to documents obtained by POLITICO and one of the U.S. officials.

One 11-page document POLITICO obtained from Prigozhin’s network from 2020 details Wagner’s training of government forces and its protection of CAR President Faustin-Archange Touadéra. Another lists in detail the location of Wagner fighters, including how many soldiers are stationed at each base throughout the country. Other documents in the Prigozhin tranche detail media campaigns carried out by employees of the Wagner leader — many of which were designed to spread Russian propaganda, discredit the French and organize protests against United Nations peacekeepers in the country.

The documents also appear to show Prigozhin and his operatives considering engaging in political influence and research operations in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Military leaders in the country have denied Wagner is present in the country. But the materials show how Prigozhin’s people over the years have gathered information on officials inside the country, including their political backgrounds and popularity among the people.

U.S. concerns increased after the departure of French troops from countries such as Mali and Central African Republic, when Wagner gained a greater foothold, striking deals with local officials. Wagner has seized on the security vacuum left in the wake of France’s departure in those countries, offering local officials protection and training for its armies. Representatives at the French Embassy in Washington did not respond to comment.

U.S. officials have also received readouts and other assessments from officials in Ivory Coast relaying the fear that Wagner’s presence in Burkina Faso — from which France recently withdrew — could potentially destabilize the country, according to one of the leaked classified documents allegedly posted by Teixeira, the Massachusetts Air National Guard member.

Sharing intel to disrupt Wagner

In attempting to blunt the fallout from the vacuum created by France’s departure, U.S. officials have shared intelligence on Wagner’s operations not just with African countries but also with global media.

“We’ve seen it in Syria, we’ve seen it in Ukraine, and now we’re seeing it in Africa — a strategy where we are trying to shine a light on [Wagner and Russian] activities, because they have such a robust propaganda campaign that is going to either obscure what they’re doing or to pump out disinformation about what they’re doing,” Hudson said. “The only antidote to that from a U.S. perspective is to release what we know.”

U.S. officials have stressed with African leaders the need to distance themselves from the paramilitary group. While outreach to each country is different, American officials have underscored with all parties the extent to which Wagner actually creates security problems rather than resolves them.

“Wagner doesn’t improve security. They are perfectly happy to go out and kill people and pretend that [those people are] terrorists,” one of the U.S. officials said. “But if you look at over time, with some minor exceptions where they’re able to displace violent groups from one place temporarily, they create more terrorists than they actually eliminate.”

Chad, a country of about 17 million people located at the northern tip of Central Africa that has historically held close ties to France, has been an increasing source of worry and stepped-up communications among officials.

In 2021, former President Idriss Déby died and his son, Gen. Mahamat Déby, took over. In October 2022, his transitional government orchestrated and carried out a bloody crackdown against protesters demanding democratic civilian rule. Dozens of people died in the protests. Human Rights Watch also documented instances of torture and unlawful detentions.

Despite the government’s crackdown, the U.S. has since continued to maintain diplomatic ties with N’Djamena. The U.S. has for months communicated with local officials in Chad about Wagner and the threat the paramilitary poses to the country, according to one of the four U.S. officials, who is familiar with those diplomatic conversations.

In several of those discussions, officials in Chad raised concerns about Wagner’s creeping presence in the region, including its ties to rebel fighters, and requested additional support from Washington.

African officials have in the past cited Wagner to request additional U.S. financial and military aid. But Washington’s engagement is not transactional, one of the U.S. officials said.

Last month, American officials informed government officials in Chad that Wagner was developing an operation to destabilize the transition government in the country by offering rebels material support to execute a plot that would have potentially killed transition President Déby. The administration also disclosed that information to The Wall Street Journal, one of the U.S. officials said.

“We had informed the Chadian government of this specific plot. The Chadian government’s long been aware of the other threats that Wagner has posed to the government. This was a different threat stream and we made them aware of it,” the official said.

Russia has denied the allegations about the plot to kill Déby.

Thwarting Russia’s plans

The administration’s goal was not only to share the intelligence for Chadian officials but also to disclose it publicly through the media as a way of blunting Wagner’s operation. The U.S. officials said they are confident their strategy worked.

“The Chadian government’s awareness of it has reduced the threat level,” the official said.

U.S. officials have also brokered conversations about Wagner operations in CAR, where the government is entrenched in active fighting with rebels despite the declaration of a cease-fire in 2021. That fighting has spilled over borders and drawn military engagement from Rwanda, Cameroon and the U.N. peacekeeping mission in CAR known as MINUSCA.

American officials have shared intelligence specifically related to Wagner’s business operations in the country and shared it not only with local officials but also officials from neighboring countries with an interest in removing Wagner from the region.

One revelation was that Wagner has helped secure a large gold mine in the middle of the country since 2017. It now essentially controls the site and over the past 10 months has significantly expanded its exploration pits, as POLITICO previously reported.

American officials have shared the details of that rapid expansion with local government officials and have estimated that the paramilitary group could one day reap large sums of money if it finds a way to export the gold to market.

Washington has also shared information related to Wagner’s broader military activities in CAR with allies in Europe and Africa, including Portugal and Rwanda.

An uphill battle

It’s unclear whether the broader U.S. strategy of countering Russia in Africa will work.

So far, African governments that have engaged in security and business contracts with the Russian paramilitary group, such as CAR, have not broken off ties.

Faustin-Archange Touadéra, the president of CAR, is being protected by Wagner soldiers and his government relies on the organization to help in its fight against the rebels who are attempting to unseat the government in Bangui.

Officials in CAR and its neighboring countries have at times pushed back against U.S. attempts to dissuade them from dealing with Wagner. They’ve said they need greater assistance in dealing with Wagner and that in some instances the group offers legitimate security.

There is also a possibility that the U.S. could choose to restrict some of the intelligence it shares on Wagner following the recent leak of intelligence by Teixeira — a move that could infringe on the administration’s strategy in countering Russia. Biden officials have already begun to discuss whether parts of the federal government need to update their policies not only on who has access to classified information but also how often and how widely it shares that intelligence with allies.

President Joe Biden has also ordered U.S. agencies to temporarily restrict the flow of sensitive information while the Justice Department concludes its investigation into the leak of classified documents.

POLITICO

Politico

13. Failures in the “Deterrence Failure” Dialogue

Excerpts:

Ukraine deserves Western support while also acknowledging that deterrence is not simply a two-way street. Deterrence is a multiway intersection — one that exists not only before but also during war. And as Russett puts it, “one should avoid presenting an opponent with options which are all highly unpalatable to him.”

This point has implications for the future of the war in Ukraine. Moving forward, even while ensuring that Putin’s forces suffer greatly in Ukraine, he should also be led to believe that an expansion of the conflict, whether in severity or geography, is not the most palatable of his highly unpalatable options. The International Criminal Court’s warrant for Putin’s arrest makes this task more difficult. In the event of the collapse of his forces and the prospect of a one-way ticket to The Hague — which would mean an end to Putin’s survival as he knows it — a set of perfectly rational calculations could lead to mutual extinction. This would be the ultimate deterrence failure.

Meanwhile, recent successes bear reflection and merit additional attention in the ongoing public dialogue on deterrence. The successful deterrence of a wider war in Europe hasn’t required a Cold War-level U.S. troop presence on the continent. It hasn’t required a missile defense shield. And it hasn’t required any “forceful manifestations on the battlefield.” In fact, these are provocative steps that could undermine the deterrence successes that the West has enjoyed thus far. Each would instead be akin to a large, literal step toward deterrence theorist Thomas Schelling’s brink: an uneven slope along which the point of no return is unclear to all.

Failures in the “Deterrence Failure” Dialogue - War on the Rocks

warontherocks.com · by Collin Meisel · May 8, 2023

In reflecting on Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine over the past year, some observers have drawn a clear conclusion: deterrence failed.

It is unequivocally true that the United States failed to deter President Vladimir Putin from invading Ukraine despite clear threats of a “swift, severe and united response” in the form of sanctions and “moving a pipeline” of defensive equipment through to Ukraine’s military in advance of the invasion. But this failure has come with a laudable deterrence success: preventing a wider war. Focusing only on the former at the expense of the latter muddies conversations about deterrence and risks drawing the wrong lessons for policymakers seeking to deter future aggression.

Consider Nadia Schadlow’s recent commentary in the Wall Street Journal, which argues, “The White House has consistently broadcast what it won’t do, removing a crucial component of deterrence: the ability to amplify risk through ambiguity.” True, this weakened deterrence of an invasion of Ukraine — but it did so in the context of maintaining strategic stability and providing an assurance (which must be paired with deterrence) that a wider war was not in Putin’s interest.

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Too often, recent conversations around “deterrence failure” have been used to argue for a more muscular American foreign policy, including a beefed-up U.S. military presence on the European continent and an “even more forceful manifestation of [the will to deter conflict] on the battlefield.” By ignoring deterrence success, namely the deterrence of a wider war in Europe, these conversations fail to acknowledge the significant, high-stakes tradeoffs that would come with many of the strident, even aggressive, policy prescriptions that have been put forth in the present “deterrence failure” dialogue.

History as a Guide

It is understandably difficult to see the invasion of Ukraine as any form of success. But to appreciate how much worse things could have been, consider the attack on Pearl Harbor.

When leaders consider whether to initiate a war, they also face the question of what type of war and with whom. Imperial Japanese leaders, who determined that peace was an unacceptable option, opted to directly initiate a wider war with the United States and its allies rather than attempting to keep its war limited to Southeast Asia. In contrast, Putin has thus far opted to keep his war limited to conventional means on Ukrainian territory. By recognizing that he has been deterred from pursuing other more severe options, we can better appreciate the nuances of deterrence, allowing for continued success at the strategic and global levels even among failures at the conventional and local levels.

Leading up to Dec. 7, 1941, Japanese leaders faced a dilemma. Amid Japan’s war in China and its preparations for a wider war after signing the Tripartite Act with Germany and Italy, Japan’s military faced a shortage of natural resources that threatened to reduce its empire to “empty shadows.” Matters were made worse by a U.S. embargo on exports to Japan. In order to save the empire, Japan’s leaders determined that they must “secure the raw materials of the South Seas” through an attack on the Dutch East Indies and British Malaya. Yet, this risked conflict with the United States.

According to an equation proposed by political scientist Bruce Russett, Japanese leaders were forced to consider several factors: the utility of war as a result of an attack on the Dutch East Indies and British Malaya; the utility of an attack not resulting in war, weighted by the probability of a lack of meaningful resistance; and the utility of not attacking in the first place. If the sum of the utilities of war and attack were greater than the utility of peace, then attack would be the best course of action. Japan’s leaders were certain that an attack on the Dutch East Indies and British Malaya would lead to a war with the United States (thus a high likelihood of facing meaningful resistance) and that the costs of war would be high. However, their belief was also that the costs imposed by peace were effectively infinitely negative: “disintegration as a nation,” in historian Roberta Wohlstetter’s words.

Fast forward to 2022 and consider Putin’s calculus in the lead-up to the invasion of Ukraine. Any such assessment is of course speculative, but we can begin to make sense of his seemingly nonsensical decision to attack. If Putin’s ruminations on “Ancient Rus” and the centrality of Kyiv to Russia’s identity are to be taken as sincere, then an independent Ukraine poses a serious — perhaps even existential — threat to Russia’s “rightful” place in the world in his eyes. In Russett’s formulation, the utility of peace would be a large negative value. Meanwhile, systematically “overreporting one’s successes and concealing weaknesses to superiors” among Russian intelligence created the illusion of ample support from within Ukraine for their prospective invasion. Thus, Russian leaders may have expected a lack of meaningful resistance. In Russett’s equation — where the utilities of war and attack, weighted by the probability of meaningful resistance, are compared against the utility of peace — the benefits of war could be fairly small and still outweigh the perceived costs of peace.

As we know, Putin opted for a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in his campaign to resist Western dominance. And yet Japan chose an even more extreme option — attacking the United States directly. What explains the difference?

The lessons of Japanese leaders’ well-documented decisions are revealing. Deep interdependence between the Dutch, the British, and the Americans dramatically increased the likelihood of staunch resistance to Japanese attacks on the Dutch East Indies and British Malaya and thus made them less likely. And yet, paradoxically, it made the likelihood of a direct attack on the United States more likely. Faced with the unacceptably high costs of peace, Japanese leaders had in their mind no acceptable choice but war — the only question was how to wage it. In their estimation, it was better to attack the fleet at Pearl Harbor — the most threatening element of their future collective enemy — first, while surprise was still on their side.

Ultimately, the decision to attack in a personalized authoritarian regime such as Putin’s Russia rests with one person alone — and, as any parent of a toddler knows, some actions are evidently undeterrable. Yet, the West’s approach to deterrence with respect to Ukraine should not be considered a total failure. Desiring to eliminate the supposed Western threat in Ukraine and knowing that an even more threatening United States might get involved directly and impose high costs on Russia, Putin could have opted to attack the West directly. He was deterred from doing so.

Implications for Policy

Both the nuclear “balance of terror” and conventional balance of power have made a direct attack on NATO forces — the supposed true threat to Russia — a highly unpalatable option. Meanwhile, Putin may have thought that the West would react mildly, much as it did when his forces took Crimea in 2014. A deeper interdependence between Ukraine and the West might have signaled otherwise — although, as Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor reveals, perhaps at a devastating cost.

In light of the United States and Russia’s possession of strategic nuclear forces, this trade-off will be familiar to many international relations scholars. It is the stability-instability paradox, where stability at the nuclear level allows for instability at the conventional level because, for example, Putin understands that the West is unlikely to risk a general nuclear war over a conflict waged by Russia on a non-allied state. In other words, Putin’s willingness to attack Ukraine is symptomatic of a deterrence success at the strategic level, where there is relative stability.

Nuclear war aside, stability can be understood at the local and global levels. The present war in Ukraine is arguably a case of severe instability at the local level but general stability at the global level. Despite incidents that might have led to a wider war, such as the confusion following a missile strike in Poland last November and material support from third countries for belligerents on both sides, the conflict has remained within Ukrainian borders and between Russian and Ukrainian troops. As Jeffrey Lewis and Aaron Stein wrote in these pages last year, both the United States and Russia are deterring and are being deterred by one another at the strategic and global levels.

In an effort to translate successes at the strategic level to the conventional and local level in Ukraine, some have called for an accelerated admission of Ukraine into NATO. Once Ukraine was part of NATO, would that substantially increase deterrence of further Russian aggression against Ukraine? It is highly plausible, given the protection that NATO membership appears to provide from kinetic — if not cyber — attacks. However, the risk of a Russian attack would be substantially increased during the potentially lengthy wait between Ukraine’s application for NATO membership and its admission into the alliance. It would effectively be Putin’s last chance to subjugate Ukraine.

Ukraine deserves Western support while also acknowledging that deterrence is not simply a two-way street. Deterrence is a multiway intersection — one that exists not only before but also during war. And as Russett puts it, “one should avoid presenting an opponent with options which are all highly unpalatable to him.”

This point has implications for the future of the war in Ukraine. Moving forward, even while ensuring that Putin’s forces suffer greatly in Ukraine, he should also be led to believe that an expansion of the conflict, whether in severity or geography, is not the most palatable of his highly unpalatable options. The International Criminal Court’s warrant for Putin’s arrest makes this task more difficult. In the event of the collapse of his forces and the prospect of a one-way ticket to The Hague — which would mean an end to Putin’s survival as he knows it — a set of perfectly rational calculations could lead to mutual extinction. This would be the ultimate deterrence failure.

Meanwhile, recent successes bear reflection and merit additional attention in the ongoing public dialogue on deterrence. The successful deterrence of a wider war in Europe hasn’t required a Cold War-level U.S. troop presence on the continent. It hasn’t required a missile defense shield. And it hasn’t required any “forceful manifestations on the battlefield.” In fact, these are provocative steps that could undermine the deterrence successes that the West has enjoyed thus far. Each would instead be akin to a large, literal step toward deterrence theorist Thomas Schelling’s brink: an uneven slope along which the point of no return is unclear to all.

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Collin Meisel is associate director of geopolitical analysis at the University of Denver’s Frederick S. Pardee Center for International Futures at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies. He is also a geopolitics and modeling expert at The Hague Centre for Strategic Studies, a Netherlands-based security and defense think tank.

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warontherocks.com · by Collin Meisel · May 8, 2023

14.  Can Ukraine Get Justice Without Thwarting Peace?

Excerpts:

So why do proposals for an aggression tribunal continue to enjoy the traction that they do? The prospect of entrenching the norm against aggressive war has enormous appeal. As international lawyers, we are familiar with the stirring speech that Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, on loan to the Nuremberg tribunal, offered in his opening remarks on November 21, 1945, when he spoke of the proceedings as “one of the most significant tributes Power has ever paid to Reason.” We also share the fervent wish to see power once again bend the knee to international law in the service of a more peaceful world. Right now, however, that lies outside the realm of the possible, and trying to create legal accountability without adequate consideration of the impact on conflict resolution in Ukraine could well render a horrific situation that much messier.

But there are other options. Rather than pushing forward to establish a new judicial body at this time, the United States and Ukraine’s other partners should lay out a more cautious, phased approach. They should convey to Kyiv, as well as the experts who are pushing for more robust measures, that it would be unhelpful to take further steps toward setting up a new court or tribunal in the midst of the fighting. At the same time, they should reinforce their support for the International Centre for the Prosecution of the Crime of Aggression in the Hague as a first step to assisting in any eventual prosecutions. This interim prosecutor’s office is tasked with supporting and enhancing investigations into the crime of aggression. The United States has endorsed this body and U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland recently announced that an experienced U.S. federal prosecutor would be detailed to this body. These are meaningful moves, but they are less likely to be seen as directly threatening Kremlin leadership, or to complicate any peace talks, than the creation of a new court or tribunal designed specifically for Ukraine.

If history takes an unexpected turn and Russian leaders wind up available to stand trial abroad, then it will be time to talk about a new judicial body. In the meantime, Ukraine’s Western partners should continue helping Ukraine frustrate Russia’s aggressive designs on the battlefield and gathering evidence of its crimes. They should hold back on bolder steps until the day when the ends of peace and justice are more clearly aligned, and Nuremberg’s legacy can be more fully honored.

Can Ukraine Get Justice Without Thwarting Peace?

Now Is Not the Time to Create a Special Tribunal for Russia

By Brian Finucane and Stephen Pomper

May 8, 2023

Foreign Affairs · by Brian Finucane and Stephen Pomper · May 8, 2023

Ever since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, some of the leading lights in international law have joined Ukrainian and Western officials in calling for the creation of a special tribunal to prosecute the Russian leaders responsible for initiating the brutal, illegal war. The tribunal would be set up specifically to try the crime of aggression—that is, a manifest violation of the UN Charter’s prohibition on the use of force. The International Criminal Court already has jurisdiction over Russian atrocities committed on Ukrainian territory. But aggression is a different kind of crime: it is about the decision to go to war in the first place rather than unlawful killings or other crimes committed during conflict. Because of a U.S.-backed loophole in the Rome Statute, the treaty that established the ICC, the court cannot bring aggression prosecutions against nationals of Russia, China, the United States, and all other countries that are not parties to the treaty.

Proponents have pressed to create a new judicial body to fill this gap, though most proposals only apply to the war in Ukraine. Former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has argued that such a court is needed to fortify the norm against conquest, deter future aggressors, and afford a measure of justice for the war’s victims. “The crime of aggression is Putin’s original and foundational crime, the one that has been the starting point for all the other atrocities,” Brown wrote in February. Although supporters of this idea disagree about the form the new body should take, they agree that Russia’s aggression must not go unpunished in a court of law. Making the case for urgent and dramatic action to hold Russian actors responsible for aggression, international lawyers and advocates have described this as a new “Nuremberg moment.” In a May 4 speech in The Hague, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky himself invoked Nuremberg when he called for the establishment of a new aggression tribunal.

References such as this to the Nuremberg military tribunals, which took place after World War II to hold Nazi officials accountable for both aggression and atrocity crimes, are highly resonant, but also misleading. The Nuremberg trials, as well as their counterparts in the Far East, came at the end of a globe-spanning total war that finished with the Axis powers’ defeat, surrender, and occupation, as well as the capture of their leaders. The Allies used these trials to demonstrate their commitment to the rule of law and to expose the defendants’ depravity. Because the Allies were able to impose terms on Germany or Japan, they were also in a position to try their leaders and enforce the sentences the war court passed down.

Russia’s unlawful war on Ukraine appears to be on a different trajectory. It is unclear how the conflict will end, but Russian surrender is not in the cards. One likely scenario is a negotiated deal; another is a frozen conflict. Moscow’s political leadership will remain almost certainly ensconced for the foreseeable future, and international actors will continue to need to work with them in forums such as the United Nations. Ukraine’s Western partners are trying to weaken Russia, but they are also trying to steer clear of a direct conflict, aware that any confrontation the Kremlin sees as posing an existential threat could bring the risk of escalation, including the use of nuclear weapons.

Plans to stand up a new tribunal do not easily fit into this landscape. Seeking accountability for Russian President Vladimir Putin and other senior Kremlin officials now, while Russia and Ukraine remain locked in combat, is hard to reconcile with any realistic Western war aims. A big push to prosecute Russian leaders for starting the war signals a desire to remove Russia’s leadership, risks escalation, and would almost surely complicate diplomacy to bring the war to an end. If establishing such a court ultimately proves futile, it could also weaken rather than strengthen the international criminal justice project. Rather than barreling ahead and risking a full-on collision between the interests of peace and justice, Ukraine and its partners should pursue a sequenced approach in which accountability efforts are better harmonized with the goals of conflict resolution.

A LOOPHOLE IN THE LAW

There are very few examples of war-time leaders being tried on aggression charges, and fewer still of trials that took place while the leaders were still waging war. Most precedents date back to the post–World War II International Military Tribunal, which the victorious Allies created at Nuremberg to prosecute senior German leaders. The other most notable case comes from Nuremberg’s sister tribunal held in Tokyo, which was created to try Japanese officials. There have also been a handful of domestic trials, including those conducted in Ukraine following Russia’s 2014 occupation of Crimea, including one that resulted in the in absentia conviction of Ukraine’s former president, Victor Yanukovych.

This sparse record is no accident. The powers driving the creation of the post–Cold War architecture for international criminal law—the United States chief among them—were ambivalent about lumping together the crime of aggression with so-called atrocity offenses (genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes). U.S. officials worried about the lack of clarity and consensus around what constitutes aggression. They also feared the exposure they might be creating for themselves and up their chains of command. The U.S. government fretted that these legal changes would hamper Washington’s ability to build coalitions to undertake operations such as NATO’s intervention in Kosovo in 1999, which lacked UN Security Council authorization and which was widely seen as unlawful. (The United States has hewed to the position that its actions in Kosovo were “legitimate,” but it has not argued that they were legal.) Senior U.S. officials were also concerned about the ICC being drawn into political thickets that would undercut its effectiveness. They foresaw that the threat of being prosecuted for aggression could impel leaders to fight to the last rather than negotiate for peace.

Against this backdrop, the ICC Rome Statute did not cover the crime of aggression when it became effective in 2002. Instead, it bracketed the issue for a later date. When member states eventually did fill in the definitional gap at a conference in Kampala in 2010, the United States quietly insisted on including a loophole that prevented the court from exercising jurisdiction over a charge of aggression against nationals of countries that were not parties to the Rome Statute, a group that includes China, Russia, the United States, and several other significant military powers, such as India, Israel, and Turkey. Moreover, even with this level of protection secured for itself, Washington did not warm to the idea of aggression as an international crime. After the Kampala conference, U.S. officials lobbied ICC member states not to ratify the aggression amendment, hoping to forestall the moment when it would come into effect, and to narrow the scope of its applicability.

Ultimately, despite U.S. efforts, the amendment took effect in 2017. But with the ICC already struggling with its caseload, and given political headwinds from the United States and elsewhere, at least some experts expected that the crime of aggression would move to the back of the international legal agenda for the foreseeable future.

RUSSIA BREAKS THE RULES AND CHANGES THE GAME

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 rocked the international law community. Appalled by Russia’s vast criminality—and seeing both an opportunity and an imperative to reinforce the global norm against illegal war—prominent Western scholars joined former officials (and some current ones) in calling for the creation of a judicial body that could close the international legal gap and punish Russia for its trespasses. These efforts were spurred on by vigorous Ukrainian advocacy.

Arguments in support of an aggression tribunal ranged from the moral to the practical. Many have argued that prosecuting Russian officials would be necessary to deter future wars of aggression. Brown invoked the Nuremberg tribunal’s observation that aggression “is the supreme international crime” in that it is the parent of all criminality that happens in war. Law professor Oona Hathaway noted that pursuing Putin and his associates for war crimes and other atrocities (as the ICC is already doing) would fail to account for lives and property lost in actions that may technically be permissible under the laws of war. International lawyer Philippe Sands argued that prosecuting Putin before an international tribunal would further delegitimize him, possibly create an incentive for those in his inner circle to “peel off,” and perhaps offer Ukraine leverage in future negotiations.

To date, expert discussion and media coverage have tended to focus mainly on different models for overcoming the technical barriers to prosecution, while glossing over the impracticality of these proposals. The technical issues are significant: although Ukraine’s domestic courts already have the authority to try Russians for aggression, they would almost certainly be required under international law to recognize immunities for Russia’s heads of state and government, as well as its foreign minister. Thus, a Ukrainian prosecution of Putin, at least while he is in office, would not be possible. And it’s unlikely that any prosecution on charges of aggression against Ukraine that excluded the key architect of the war would be seen as legitimate, especially since the Rome Statute definition of aggression applies only to those in a position to control or direct a state’s armed forces.

Russian surrender is not in the cards.

Against this backdrop, Ukraine (together with some of its Eastern European partners and many experts) has pressed for the creation of an international tribunal by means of a UN General Assembly resolution. A tribunal backed by the General Assembly might stand a greater, though not certain, legal chance of being able to prosecute Russia’ top leaders. Unless they came into the tribunal's custody, however, it would have to do so in absentia.

By contrast, many of Ukraine’s most important Western partners, initially led by Germany, have instead endorsed the creation of a “hybrid” court within the Ukrainian system that would draw on “international elements.” What this would entail remains vague: it might mean Ukraine’s Western backers lending advisers or financial support to Ukraine; establishing the court outside Ukraine, possibly in the Hague; or even the application of non-Ukrainian law in any prosecution by the tribunal. Germany has conceded that a hybrid tribunal would be unable to prosecute Putin while he remains in office, though such a court might at least prosecute some military leaders and Duma members who voted for the war.

Given decades-old U.S. reservations about prosecuting the crime of aggression, it was unclear whether Washington would support any of these models. But in March, after extended deliberations within the Biden administration, the U.S. government announced that it was lining up behind an “internationalized national court” along the lines of the German approach. Weeks later, the G-7 endorsed this approach. Even though this represented a remarkable movement away from the traditional U.S. posture, the reaction from Kyiv was distinctly chilly. Andrii Smyrnov, the deputy head of Ukraine’s Presidential Office, suggested that a hybrid tribunal would be unconstitutional and expressed concern that it would demote the crime of aggression to a bilateral dispute rather than a matter of international concern. Other Ukrainian officials and frustrated scholars worried that an aggression court with no hope of prosecuting Russia’s top leader would not be worth its salt, and they criticized the United States for showing too little ambition at a historic moment. At his speech in The Hague, Zelensky flatly rejected the hybrid model, calling into question the viability of an approach that presupposes Ukrainian buy-in and cooperation.

REAL WORLD WORRIES

The technical challenges surrounding efforts to set up an aggression tribunal are significant, no matter which model is pursued. But the even bigger—and in our view more consequential—geopolitical costs and practical challenges of creating such a tribunal tend to be overlooked. A fuller reckoning would recognize that to establish an aggression tribunal at this moment in the war would be difficult to reconcile with both global attitudes and battlefield realities.

First, states in the so-called global South have been decidedly cool to the idea of aggression prosecutions. With often fragile economies and their own national interests to look after, few want to be put in a position where they must choose between rival great powers squaring off in a war that is for them geographically remote. These countries are also conscious of the extent to which modern global criminal justice efforts have focused on countries such as theirs, particularly those that have been adversaries of the West. By contrast, they consider that Western powers and their partners have been ringfenced from facing accountability for their own abuses in places such as Afghanistan and Iraq.

These concerns have started to surface at the UN. Late in 2022, Ukraine unsuccessfully floated a UN General Assembly resolution endorsing the idea of a tribunal and asking Secretary-General António Guterres to set out options for its creation. Some skeptical European officials predict such a proposal to establish a tribunal might get as few as 60 and perhaps no more than 90 votes—out of 193 member states—if a vote is held in the UN General Assembly. At a recent Brookings Institution event, Martin Kimani, Kenya’s ambassador to the UN who forcefully denounced irredentism and the unlawful use of force on the eve of Russia’s invasion, cautioned against “believing that legalism will deliver us from this major conflict and its escalation dangers.” For Western states eager to maintain the most united possible global front against Moscow, these words – from perhaps the United States’ closest partner in East Africa – merit careful consideration.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine rocked the international law community.

A second basket of concerns is more practical. Simply put, proceedings that target Russia’s sitting leadership clash with Western objectives in a way that the post-World War II prosecutions of German leaders did not. Probably most worrying is what these efforts communicate to Moscow about the West’s designs for effecting regime change in Moscow, an end state that Western leaders have taken pains to say they do not seek. Creating a tribunal would signal to the Kremlin that its options are either to win and remain free or to lose and face prosecution, making the war’s stakes existential for leaders that control the world’s largest nuclear arsenal. (Arguably arrest warrants that the ICC has issued against Putin and one of his commissioners already do this; creating an aggression tribunal would unhelpfully reinforce that message.)

Creating a judicial body to prosecute Russian leaders for the crime of aggression would also complicate future diplomacy. If and when negotiations to end the war get under way, Russia will almost certainly ask for a release from criminal liability as part of any settlement. It is unclear how Western countries would respond this request. The UN Security Council may have powers that would allow it to supersede international obligations relating to the tribunal, and Kyiv might be able drop charges or grant clemency in the case of a hybrid court, but political considerations could make it hard to wield these tools. Standing up a new aggression court could also gum up what little is left of East-West diplomacy on issues such as the Black Sea grain deal as well as priority areas distinct from the war, including humanitarian access in Syria, assistance in Afghanistan, and peacekeeping in Africa.

The last area of concern is in the realm of principle. An ad hoc tribunal created to prosecute Russian officials would have no jurisdiction over crimes of aggression being committed outside Ukraine – giving a free pass to Western countries and their partners. This would only reinforce the view of Global South countries that the United States and its allies see international criminal justice institutions as a selective tool that applies only to their adversaries.

MOSCOW IS UNLIKELY TO FALL

Perhaps these would be risks worth taking if the purported benefits of establishing a new aggression court were certain, but many of the asserted upsides seem more rooted in aspiration than a sober assessment of costs and benefits. The reality is that the power wielded by a nuclear-armed Russia is not analogous to Nazi Germany after its defeat, nor to the countries and regions where ad hoc tribunals had some success in the post-Cold War period. Putin and his inner circle are well entrenched. Few analysts see much likelihood of them leaving power either during or at the end of the war. It is no easier to imagine Russia surrendering Putin (or for that matter Duma delegates or Russian flag officers) than it is to imagine the United States surrendering Bush administration officials to a judicial body for invading Iraq.

Thus, whatever form an aggression court or tribunal takes, it will have to make a choice. It can conduct trials in absentia, which would hardly make the court a beacon of due process and the rule of law. Or it can pursue no trials at all, and risk perversely amplifying the sense that aggressors can act with impunity. In the meantime, there seems little reason to hope that the unenforceable threat of prosecution for aggression will create useful leverage over the Kremlin, or lead to the “peeling away” of his inner circle.

So why do proposals for an aggression tribunal continue to enjoy the traction that they do? The prospect of entrenching the norm against aggressive war has enormous appeal. As international lawyers, we are familiar with the stirring speech that Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, on loan to the Nuremberg tribunal, offered in his opening remarks on November 21, 1945, when he spoke of the proceedings as “one of the most significant tributes Power has ever paid to Reason.” We also share the fervent wish to see power once again bend the knee to international law in the service of a more peaceful world. Right now, however, that lies outside the realm of the possible, and trying to create legal accountability without adequate consideration of the impact on conflict resolution in Ukraine could well render a horrific situation that much messier.

But there are other options. Rather than pushing forward to establish a new judicial body at this time, the United States and Ukraine’s other partners should lay out a more cautious, phased approach. They should convey to Kyiv, as well as the experts who are pushing for more robust measures, that it would be unhelpful to take further steps toward setting up a new court or tribunal in the midst of the fighting. At the same time, they should reinforce their support for the International Centre for the Prosecution of the Crime of Aggression in the Hague as a first step to assisting in any eventual prosecutions. This interim prosecutor’s office is tasked with supporting and enhancing investigations into the crime of aggression. The United States has endorsed this body and U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland recently announced that an experienced U.S. federal prosecutor would be detailed to this body. These are meaningful moves, but they are less likely to be seen as directly threatening Kremlin leadership, or to complicate any peace talks, than the creation of a new court or tribunal designed specifically for Ukraine.

If history takes an unexpected turn and Russian leaders wind up available to stand trial abroad, then it will be time to talk about a new judicial body. In the meantime, Ukraine’s Western partners should continue helping Ukraine frustrate Russia’s aggressive designs on the battlefield and gathering evidence of its crimes. They should hold back on bolder steps until the day when the ends of peace and justice are more clearly aligned, and Nuremberg’s legacy can be more fully honored.

• STEPHEN POMPER is Chief of Policy at the International Crisis Group. During the Obama administration, he served as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Multilateral Affairs and Human Rights at the National Security Council and as Assistant Legal Adviser for Political-Military Affairs at the U.S. State Department.
• BRIAN FINUCANE is Senior Adviser in the U.S. Program at the International Crisis Group and a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Reiss Center on Law and Security at NYU School of Law. During the Obama and Trump administrations, he served as an Attorney Adviser in the Office of the Legal Adviser at the U.S. State Department. 

Foreign Affairs · by Brian Finucane and Stephen Pomper · May 8, 2023

15. Catastrophic Success: What if the Ukrainian Counteroffensive Achieves More than Expected?

Excerpts:

Critics of this more hesitant approach will largely say that it is up to Ukraine when and how to proceed with military operations and when to negotiate. They will say, factually, that Crimea is part of Ukrainian sovereign territory and that reclaiming the peninsula would not just end the war but would also be the ultimate justice against Russian aggression. They will say that because Putin’s threats of nuclear use have so far proven empty they will remain empty.

Such criticisms, while to some degree valid, are dangerous and shortsighted. The use of a nuclear weapon would drastically change not just the war, but the entire world. Given what we know about Putin, it is in fact plausible that a tactical nuclear weapon could be used, particularly if Crimea is threatened by advancing Ukrainian forces. This threat, moreover, is amplified depending on how quickly momentum on the battlefield shifts.

That is precisely why preparations must be made now in case, once again, the world is surprised at Ukraine’s ability to fight back against Russian aggression.

Catastrophic Success: What if the Ukrainian Counteroffensive Achieves More than Expected? - Modern War Institute

mwi.usma.edu · by Alex Betley · May 8, 2023

Around the world—in European capitals, in Washington DC, and even in Moscow—the outcome of the coming Ukrainian counteroffensive seems to have already been largely determined.

As recently as March, the director of national intelligence, Avril Haines, described a “grinding, attritional war in which neither side has a definitive military advantage.” Britain’s defense secretary, Ben Wallace, was recently quoted cautioning realism, saying, “There is not going to be a single magic-wand moment when Russia collapses.” The Russians believe much of the same, calculating that they can hold off Ukraine defensively and play the waiting game until launching another offensive when Western support has waned.

But what if all of this turns out wrong? What if Ukraine ends up routing Russian occupation positions relatively swiftly and effectively, with the Russian military in a hopeless retreat?

Given recent reporting, it is not altogether clear that the United States and its allies are fully prepared for such a contingency, which, although perhaps less likely than the alternatives, is not as unlikely as many may think; and if leaders are not prepared, they should start preparing now, so as to avoid finding themselves on the back foot in a crisis of significant consequence.

To start, there are a variety of reasons why Ukraine might perform better than expected in its coming counteroffensive effort.

Although its backers have not supplied Ukraine the same long-range missiles that allowed it to recapture Kherson and Kharkiv last fall, the West has nonetheless provided training, intelligence, and material capabilities key to a successful counteroffensive. This includes new air defense systems, 230 tanks, 1,550 armored vehicles, and drones capable of striking behind Russian lines. New Ukrainian units are also training in combined-arms techniques. Although such advanced maneuver warfare has previously proven difficult, even impossible, on the battlefield due to Russian communications jamming, overcoming previous limitations could provide Ukrainian troops a key advantage. The ultimate test will be if Ukrainian materiel and training can punch through or work around the dense defensive layers Russia has built up over the winter.

Moreover, it is not clear that Russia is actually prepared to successfully defend its gains in eastern and southern Ukraine. Although the Russians seem to be improving their ability to utilize drones and artillery fire, the competence of Russian commanders has been wanting since the beginning of the conflict. In addition, Russia lacks well-trained soldiers, has expended much of its cruise missile stores, has depleted ammunition faster than it can be replaced, and has experienced an astonishing one hundred thousand casualties since last December.

Lastly, that Ukraine might surprise the world should itself come as no surprise. Since the beginning of the war—when most observers thought Ukraine would last barely a week—Ukraine’s will to fight, its societal resilience, and its leadership have all demonstrated the critical importance of these difficult-to-measure factors in military success.

Despite the above, it appears neither Russia nor the United States believes the counteroffensive will be overwhelmingly successful. In internal meetings, Russia’s defense minister, Sergei Shoigu, has confidently emphasized that because it enjoys numerical advantages in personnel and equipment, Russia will eventually prevail. However, this is the same failed logic that underpinned expectations of a quick Russian victory at the beginning of the war. A sole focus on personnel and equipment neglects an adequate accounting of training, morale, logistical support, and leadership.

Additionally, Shoigu’s confidence in such discussions may be meant to appease Putin. A common weakness of tyrants is the uncanny ability to surround themselves with sycophants, a weakness of Putin’s which seems to have only grown with time.

The United States also appears to be preparing for stalled Ukrainian advances, as discussions within the Biden administration are already well underway to prepare the ground for related negotiations. This, more than anything, is the result of an increasing realization that Ukraine’s supporters cannot continue to supply armaments to Ukraine at needed levels without diminishing their own military preparedness.

Neither side, then, appears to be preparing for the event of a quick and cascading Russian loss.

If the counteroffensive is surprisingly successful, Putin will be forced to respond in one of two ways—negotiation or escalation. Given Putin’s belief in the value of a long-game scenario, his willingness to absorb significant costs, and the potentially disastrous domestic political consequences of unfavorable negotiations, it is more likely than not that Putin would choose escalation. In a situation where Russian forces are routed, Putin would face only two realistic escalation options: throw more human bodies at the Ukrainians or use a nuclear weapon.

In the case of the former option, Russia already appears to be preparing new rounds of mobilizations, with the Wagner Group restarting troop recruitment from Russian prisons. However, as was recently seen in Bakhmut and elsewhere, new Russian soldiers are poorly trained. Conscripts are thus often killed in droves—and not even the Russians have an infinite supply of human lives. New recruits could slow the tide of a Ukrainian advance, but if momentum is on Ukraine’s side, it may be unlikely these new recruits could decisively weigh in Russia’s favor.

That leaves nuclear escalation. Much debate has surrounded Russian nuclear doctrine, particularly when, how, and why Russia might choose to employ a nonstrategic weapon on the battlefield. Nonetheless, one aspect of doctrine Russia has been consistent on is that Russia would at least consider the use of a nuclear weapon if Russian territory is being attacked. Since its annexation of Crimea almost a decade ago, Russia very much considers Crimea part of the Russian homeland. Therefore, any serious threat to Crimea, at a minimum, runs the risk of nuclear use. This risk is significantly enhanced by an effective counteroffensive threatening Crimea in which momentum appears to be clearly with the Ukrainians.

Thus, the stakes of such a scenario are extremely high. Regardless of likelihoods, the United States and its allies must have a response prepared, which should reflect three imperatives.

Firstly, the United States must continue to signal to Russia that the consequences of using a nuclear weapon would be disastrous and likely involve direct US military intervention. The United States will be helped in this endeavor if China stands by its statements, as outlined in a recent twelve-point peace plan for Ukraine, that the sovereignty of all countries should be respected and a nuclear weapon cannot be used in the conflict. Importantly, China has stated it does not recognize Russia’s annexation of Crimea, blunting Russian arguments that a threat to Crimea might be considered a legitimate threat to the Russian homeland.

Secondly, the United States must use its leverage over Ukraine to ensure that Ukrainian forces do not advance into Crimea until an opportunity for negotiations has presented itself. Prominent media voices such as journalist Anne Applebaum and retired Lieutenant General Ben Hodges have consistently advocated for the retaking of Crimea, arguing that such a move would effectively end the war. This may or may not be true, but the risks of nuclear escalation do not today warrant such an aggressive strategy. The Biden administration’s unwillingness to provide Ukraine long-range missiles such as those used in last fall’s counteroffensive seems to confirm this hesitancy.

Thirdly, the groundwork for any negotiations must involve China, Russia’s only great power backer. The incentive for China is obvious. Working with the United States and the belligerent parties to end the war would boost China’s prestige and credibility in Europe at a time when many in the West are walking a tightrope on how, where, and when to engage China. This opens the possibility that China might be a fair partner in a peace deal, something Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, is now welcoming. Thus, in addition to preparing for other contingencies, the United States should find ways sooner rather than later to work with the Chinese on how crisis management might proceed in the event of a successful Ukrainian counteroffensive. This advanced preparation and communication will serve as a counterweight to the potential for catastrophic disaster.

Critics of this more hesitant approach will largely say that it is up to Ukraine when and how to proceed with military operations and when to negotiate. They will say, factually, that Crimea is part of Ukrainian sovereign territory and that reclaiming the peninsula would not just end the war but would also be the ultimate justice against Russian aggression. They will say that because Putin’s threats of nuclear use have so far proven empty they will remain empty.

Such criticisms, while to some degree valid, are dangerous and shortsighted. The use of a nuclear weapon would drastically change not just the war, but the entire world. Given what we know about Putin, it is in fact plausible that a tactical nuclear weapon could be used, particularly if Crimea is threatened by advancing Ukrainian forces. This threat, moreover, is amplified depending on how quickly momentum on the battlefield shifts.

That is precisely why preparations must be made now in case, once again, the world is surprised at Ukraine’s ability to fight back against Russian aggression.

Alex Betley works as an aerospace and defense consultant in Washington, DC. He holds an MALD from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University, where he was an international security studies research fellow and senior editor with the Fletcher Security Review.

The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.

Image: A Ukrainian soldier during training at Grafenwoehr Training Area, Germany, May 3, 2022 (credit: Sgt. Spencer Rhodes, Florida Army National Guard)

mwi.usma.edu · by Alex Betley · May 8, 2023

16. THE OUTER LIMITS OF LIBERALISM

A thoughtful essay and long read of political philosophy - including "autonomy based liberalism" versus "gift based liberalism" and the right to decide when to die.

Conclusion:

John Stuart and Harriet Taylor Mill believed in individual autonomy. But they also believed that a just society has a vision not only of freedom but also of goodness, of right and wrong. Humans, John Stuart Mill wrote, “are under a moral obligation to seek the improvement of our moral character.” He continued, “The test of what is right in politics is not the will of the people, but the good of the people.” He understood that the moral obligations we take on in life—to family, friends, and nation, to the past and the future—properly put a brake on individual freedom of action. And he believed that they point us toward the fulfillment of our nature.

The good of humanity is not some abstraction—it’s grounded in the succession of intimates and institutions that we inherit, and that we reform, improve, and pass on. When a fellow member of the procession is in despair, is suffering, is thinking about ending their life, we don’t provide a syringe. We say: The world has not stopped asking things of you. You still have gifts to give, merely by living among us. Your life still sends ripples outward, in ways you do and do not see. Don’t go. We know you need us. We still need you.

THE OUTER LIMITS OF LIBERALISM

What happens when a society takes individualism to its logical conclusion?

By David Brooks

Illustrations by Vartika Sharma

The Atlantic · by David Brooks · May 4, 2023

In October of 1858, John Stuart Mill and his wife, Harriet, were traveling near Avignon, France. She developed a cough, which seemed like just a minor inconvenience, until it got worse. Soon Harriet was racked with pain, not able to sleep or even lie down. Mill frantically wrote to a doctor in Nice, begging him to come see her. Three days later her condition had worsened further, and Mill telegraphed his forebodings to his stepdaughter. Harriet died in their hotel room on November 3.

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Mill sat alone with her body in their room for a day. He was despondent over the loss of his marriage: “For seven and a half years that blessing was mine. For seven and a half years only!”

Later that same month, he sent a manuscript to his publisher, which opened with a lavish dedication to Harriet. He subsequently wrote that she had been more than his muse; she had been his co-author. The book was, he said, “more directly and literally our joint production than anything else which bears my name, for there was not a sentence of it that was not several times gone through by us together.” The book’s “whole mode of thinking,” he continued, “was emphatically hers.”

The book was called On Liberty. It is one of the founding documents of our liberal world order. Individuals, the Mills argued, have the right to be the architect of their own life, to choose whom to marry, where to live, what to believe, what to say. The state has no right to impinge on a citizen’s individual freedom of choice, provided that the person isn’t harming anyone else.

A society organized along these lines, the Mills hoped, would produce a rich variety of creative and daring individuals. You wouldn’t have to agree with my mode of life, and I wouldn’t have to agree with yours, but we would give each other the space to live our fullest life. Individual autonomy and freedom of choice would be the rocks upon which we built flourishing nations.

The liberalism that the Mills championed is what we enjoy today as we walk down the street and greet a great variety of social types. It’s what we enjoy when we get on the internet and throw ourselves into the messy clash of ideas. It is this liberalism that we defend when we back the Ukrainians in their fight against Russian tyranny, when we stand up to authoritarians on the right and the left, to those who would impose speech codes, ban books, and subvert elections.

After he sent in the manuscript, Mill bought a house overlooking the cemetery where Harriet was buried, filled it with furniture from the room in which she’d died, and visited every year for the rest of his life. It’s a sad scene to imagine—him gazing down at her grave from the window—but the couple left us an intellectual legacy that has guided humanity another step forward in civilization’s advance.

Many good ideas turn bad when taken to their extreme. And that’s true of liberalism. The freedom of choice that liberals celebrate can be turned into a rigid free-market ideology that enables the rich to concentrate economic power while the vulnerable are abandoned. The wild and creative modes of self-expression that liberals adore can turn into a narcissistic culture in which people worship themselves and neglect their neighbors.

These versions of liberalism provoke people to become anti-liberal, to argue that liberalism itself is spiritually empty and too individualistic. They contend that it leads to social breakdown and undermines what is sacred about life. We find ourselves surrounded by such anti-liberals today.

I’d like to walk with you through one battlefield in the current crisis of liberalism, to show you how liberalism is now threatened by an extreme version of itself, and how we might recover a better, more humane liberalism—something closer to what the Mills had in mind in the first place.

In 2016, the Canadian government legalized medical assistance in dying. The program, called MAID, was founded on good Millian grounds. The Canadian Supreme Court concluded that laws preventing assisted suicide stifled individual rights. If people have the right to be the architect of their life, shouldn’t they have the right to control their death? Shouldn’t they have the right to spare themselves needless suffering and indignity at the end of life?

As originally conceived, the MAID program was reasonably well defined. Doctors and nurses would give lethal injections or fatal medications only to patients who met certain criteria, including all of the following: the patient had a serious illness or disability; the patient was in an “advanced state” of decline that could not be reversed; the patient was experiencing unbearable physical or mental suffering; the patient was at the point where natural death had become “reasonably foreseeable.”

To critics who worried that before long, people who were depressed, stressed, or just poor and overwhelmed would also be provided assistance to die, authorities were reassuring: The new law wouldn’t endanger those who are psychologically vulnerable and not near death. Citing studies from jurisdictions elsewhere in the world with similar laws, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau declared that this “simply isn’t something that ends up happening.”

But the program has worked out rather differently. Before long, the range of who qualifies for assisted suicide was expanded. In 2021, the criterion that natural death must be “reasonably foreseeable” was lifted. A steady stream of stories began to appear in the media, describing how the state was granting access to assisted suicide to people who arguably didn’t fit the original criteria.

If you are having thoughts of suicide, please know that you are not alone. If you’re in danger of acting on suicidal thoughts, call 911. For support and resources, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 988 or text 741741 for the Crisis Text Line.

For example, the Associated Press reported on the case of Alan Nichols. Nichols had lost his hearing in childhood, and had suffered a stroke, but for the most part was able to live independently. In June 2019, at age 61, he was hospitalized out of concern that he might be suicidal. He urged his brother Gary to “bust him out” of the facility as soon as possible. But within a month, he applied for a physician-assisted death, citing hearing loss as his only medical condition. A nurse practitioner also described Nichols’s vision loss, frailty, history of seizures, and general “failure to thrive.” The hospital told the AP that his request for a lethal injection was valid, and his life was ended. “Alan was basically put to death,” his brother told the AP.

In The New Atlantis, Alexander Raikin described the case of Rosina Kamis, who had fibromyalgia and chronic leukemia, along with other mental and physical illnesses. She presented these symptoms to the MAID assessors and her death was approved. Meanwhile, she wrote in a note evidently meant for those to whom she had granted power of attorney: “Please keep all this secret while I am still alive because … the suffering I experience is mental suffering, not physical. I think if more people cared about me, I might be able to handle the suffering caused by my physical illnesses alone.” She was put to death on September 26, 2021, via a lethal injection, at the age of 41.

Read: Is aid in dying a better death?

In The Free Press, Rupa Subramanya reported on the case of a 23-year-old man named Kiano Vafaeian, who was depressed and unemployed, and also had diabetes and had lost vision in one eye. His death was approved and scheduled for September 22, 2022. The doctor who was to perform the procedure emailed Vafaeian clear and antiseptic instructions: “Please arrive at 8:30 am. I will ask for the nurse at 8:45 am and I will start the procedure at around 9:00 am. Procedure will be completed a few minutes after it starts.” Vafaeian could bring a dog with him, as long as someone would be present to take care of it.

About two weeks before the appointment, Vafaeian’s 46-year-old mother, Margaret Marsilla, telephoned the doctor who was scheduled to kill her son. She recorded the call and shared it with The Free Press. Posing as a woman named Joann, she told the doctor that she wanted to die by Christmas. Reciting basic MAID criteria, the doctor told her that she needed to be over 18, have an insurance card, and be experiencing “suffering that cannot be remediated or treated in some way that’s acceptable to you.” The doctor said he could conduct his assessment via Zoom or WhatsApp. Marsilla posted on social media about the situation. Eventually, the doctor texted Marsilla, saying that he would not follow through with her son’s death.

Personally, I don’t have great moral qualms about assisted suicide for people who are suffering intensely in the face of imminent death. These cases are horrible for individuals and families. What’s important here is that the MAID program has spilled beyond its original bounds so quickly.

When people who were suffering applied to the MAID program and said, “I choose to die,” Canadian society apparently had no shared set of morals that would justify saying no. If individual autonomy is the highest value, then when somebody comes to you and declares, “It’s my body. I can do what I want with it,” whether they are near death or not, painfully ill or not, doesn’t really matter. Autonomy rules.

Within a few years, Canada went from being a country that had banned assisted suicide to being one of the loosest regimes in the world.

Within just a few years, the number of Canadians dying by physician-assisted suicide ballooned (the overwhelming majority of them by lethal injection). In 2021, that figure was more than 10,000, one in 30 of all Canadian deaths. The great majority of people dying this way were elderly and near death, but those who seek assisted suicide tend to get it. In 2021, only 4 percent of those who filed written applications were deemed ineligible.

If autonomy is your highest value, these trends are not tragic; they’re welcome. Death is no longer the involuntary, degrading end of life; it can be a glorious act of self-expression. In late 2022, the Canadian fashion retailer La Maison Simons released a branding video that paid tribute to the assisted suicide of a 37-year-old woman afflicted with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, which affects the body’s connective tissue. The video, titled “All Is Beauty,” was released the day after the woman’s death. In a series of lush images of her on tourist-destination beaches and at a dinner party, the video portrayed her death as “the most beautiful exit”—a sort of rich, Instagram-ready consumer experience that you might get from a five-star resort.

Back in 2016, critics of the MAID law saw this coming. They warned that soon enough, people in anguish and near death wouldn’t be the only ones given assistance to die. That warning turned out to be understated. Within a few years, Canada went from being a country that had banned assisted suicide to being one of the loosest regimes in the world.

Some people leading pathos-filled lives have begun to see assisted suicide as a release from their misery. Michael Fraser, though not terminally ill at age 55, had become unable to walk and suffered from an array of medical problems—liver disease and incontinence, as well as mental-health issues after what he described as prolonged sexual abuse as a child. His monthly check from the Ontario Disability Support Program was barely enough to live on. “Some of the struggles he talked to me about was this feeling of not being worthy,” the doctor who gave Fraser a lethal injection on July 2, 2022, told the Toronto Star. “There’s a social aspect to poverty, a hierarchy, that affected his psyche. He told me that it did.”

Vartika Sharma

As assisted suicide has become an established part of Canadian society, the complex moral issues surrounding the end of life have drifted out of sight. Decisions tend to be made within a bureaucratic context, where utilitarian considerations can come to dominate the foreground. Or as the president of the Quebec College of Physicians, which regulates medical practice in the province, put it, assisted suicide “is not a political or moral or religious issue. It is a medical issue.” A materialist cost-benefit analysis, for some people, crowds out affirmations that life is sacred, and socioeconomic burdens weigh heavily in the balance.

Tyler Dunlop is a physically healthy 37-year-old man who suffers from schizoaffective disorder and PTSD, and has no job or home or social contact. “When I read about medically assisted dying,” he told a local news website earlier this year, “I thought, well, logistically, I really don’t have a future.” Knowing that “I’m not going anywhere,” as he put it, he has started the process for approval under MAID. The New Atlantis published slides from a Canadian Association of MAID Assessors and Providers seminar, in which a retired care coordinator noted that a couple of patients had cited poverty or housing uncertainty, rather than their medical condition, as their main reason for seeking death.

Health-care costs also sometimes come into play. According to the Associated Press, Roger Foley, a patient at a hospital in Ontario who has a degenerative brain disorder, was disturbed enough by how often the staff talked about assisted dying that he began recording their conversations. The hospital’s director of ethics informed Foley that if he were to stay in the hospital, it would cost Foley “north of $1,500 a day.” Foley replied that he felt he was being coerced into death. “Roger, this is not my show,” the ethicist replied. “I told you my piece of this was to talk to you about if you had an interest in assisted dying.” (The hospital network told The Atlantic that it could not comment on specific patients for privacy reasons and added that its health-care teams do not discuss assisted dying unless patients express interest in it.)

These trends have not shocked Canadian lawmakers into tightening the controls on who gets approved for MAID, or dramatically ramping up programs that would provide medical and community-based help for patients whose desperation might be addressed in other ways. On the contrary, eligibility may expand soon. On February 15, a parliamentary committee released a set of recommendations that would further broaden MAID eligibility, including to “mature minors” whose death is “reasonably foreseeable.” The influential activist group Dying With Dignity Canada recommends that “mature minors” be defined as “at least 12 years of age and capable of making decisions with respect to their health.” Canada is scheduled to move in 2024 to officially extend MAID eligibility to those whose only illness is a mental disorder.

The frame of debate is shifting. The core question is no longer “Should the state help those who are suffering at the end of life die?” The lines between assisted suicide for medical reasons, as defined by the original MAID criteria, and straight-up suicide are blurring. The moral quandary is essentially this: If you see someone rushing toward a bridge and planning to jump off, should you try to stop them? Or should you figure that plunging into the water is their decision to make—and give them a helpful shove?

I don’t mean to pick on Canada, the land of my birth. Lord knows that, in many ways, Canada has a much healthier social and political culture—less bitter and contentious—than the United States does. I’m using the devolution of the MAID program to illustrate a key feature of modern liberalism—namely, that it comes in different flavors. The flavor that is embedded in the MAID program, and is prevalent across Western societies, is what you might call autonomy-based liberalism.

Autonomy-based liberalism starts with one core conviction: I possess myself. I am a piece of property that I own. Because I possess property rights to myself, I can dispose of my property as I see fit. My life is a project that I am creating, and nobody else has the right to tell me how to build or dispose of my one and only life.

The purpose of my life, in this version of liberalism, is to be happy—to live a life in which my pleasures, however I define them, exceed my pains. If I determine that my suffering outweighs my joys, and that things will never get better, then my life isn’t working. I have a right to end it, and the state has no right to prevent me from doing so; indeed, it ought to enable my right to end my life with dignity. If you start with autonomy-based liberalism, MAID is where you wind up.

But there is another version of liberalism. Let’s call this gifts-based liberalism. It starts with a different core conviction: I am a receiver of gifts. I am part of a long procession of humanity. I have received many gifts from those who came before me, including the gift of life itself. The essential activity of life is not the pursuit of individual happiness. The essential activity of life is to realize the gifts I’ve been given by my ancestors, and to pass them along, suitably improved, to those who will come after.

Gifts-based liberals, like autonomy-based liberals, savor individual choice—but our individual choices take place within the framework of the gifts we have received, and the responsibilities to others that those gifts entail. (This understanding of choice, I should note, steers a gifts-based liberal away from both poles in the American abortion debate, endorsing neither a pure abortion-rights stance rooted in bodily autonomy, nor a blanket ban that ignores individual circumstances and pays no heed to a social consensus.) In our lives, we are citizens and family members, not just individuals and property owners. We have obligations to our neighbors as well as to those who will come after us. Many of those obligations turn out to be the sources of our greatest joy. A healthy society builds arrangements and passes laws that make it easier to fulfill the obligations that come with our gifts. A diseased society passes laws that make it easier to abandon them.

I’m going to try to convince you that gifts-based liberalism is better than autonomy-based liberalism, that it rests on a more accurate set of assumptions about what human life is actually like, and that it leads to humane modes of living and healthier societies.

Let me start with four truths that gifts-based liberalism embraces and autonomy-based liberalism subverts:

You didn’t create your life. From the moment of your birth, life was given to you, not earned. You came out bursting with the gift of being alive. As you aged, your community taught you to celebrate the prodigality of life—the birds in their thousands of varieties, the deliciousness of the different cheeses, the delightful miracle of each human face. Something within us makes us desperately yearn for longer life for our friends and loved ones, because life itself is an intrinsic good.

The celebration of life’s sacredness is so deeply woven into our minds, and so central to our civilization, that we don’t think about it much until confronted with shocking examples of when the celebration is rejected. For example, in the early 2000s, a German man named Armin Meiwes put an ad online inquiring whether anybody would like to be killed and eaten. A man came by and gave his consent. First, Meiwes cut off the man’s penis, and the two men attempted to eat it together. Then Meiwes killed and butchered him; by the time of his arrest, he had consumed more than 40 pounds of his flesh. Everything was done with the full consent of both participants, but the extreme nature of the case forced the German court system not only to sentence Meiwes to life in prison, but to face an underappreciated yet core pillar of our civilization: You don’t have the right to insult life itself. You don’t have the right to turn yourself or other people into objects to be carved up and consumed. Life is sacred. Humanity is a higher value than choice.

You didn’t create your dignity. No insignificant person has ever been born, and no insignificant day has ever been lived. Each of us has infinite dignity, merely by being alive. We can do nothing to add to that basic dignity. Getting into Harvard doesn’t make you more important than others, nor does earning billions of dollars. At the level of our intrinsic dignity, all humans are radically equal. The equal dignity of all life is, for instance, the pillar of the civil-rights movement.

Suddenly people who are ill or infirm are implicitly encouraged to feel guilty for wanting to live.

Once MAID administrators began making decisions about the life or death of each applicant based on the quality of their life, they introduced a mode of thinking that suggests that some lives can be more readily extinguished than others—that some lives have more or less value than others. A human being who is enfeebled, disabled, depressed, dwindling in their capacities is not treated the same way as someone who is healthier and happier.

When such a shift occurs, human dignity is no longer regarded as an infinite gift; it is a possession that other humans can appraise, and in some cases erase. Once the equal and infinite dignity of all human life is compromised, everything is up for grabs. Suddenly debates arise over which lives are worth living. Suddenly you have a couple of doctors at the Quebec College of Physicians pushing the envelope even further, suggesting that babies with severe deformations and limited chances of survival be eligible for medically assisted death. Suddenly people who are ill or infirm are implicitly encouraged to feel guilty for wanting to live. Human dignity, once inherent in life itself, is measured by what a person can contribute, what level of happiness she is deemed capable of enjoying, how much she costs.

You don’t control your mind. “From its earliest beginning,” Francis Fukuyama writes, “modern liberalism was strongly associated with a distinctive cognitive mode, that of modern natural science.” In liberal societies, people are supposed to collect data, weigh costs and benefits, and make decisions rationally. Autonomy-based liberalism, with its glorification of individual choice, leans heavily on this conception of human nature.

Gifts-based liberals know that no purely rational thinker has ever existed. They know that no one has ever really thought for themselves. The very language you think with was handed down as a gift from those who came before. We are each nodes in a network through which information flows and is refracted. The information that is stored in our genes comes from eons ago; the information that we call religion and civilization comes from thousands of years ago; the information that we call culture comes from distant generations; the information that we call education or family background comes from decades ago. All of it flows through us in deep rivers that are partly conscious and partly unconscious, forming our assumptions and shaping our choices in ways that we, as individuals, often can’t fathom.

Gifts-based liberals understand how interdependent human thinking is. When one kid in high school dies by suicide, that sometimes sets off a contagion, and other kids in that school take their own life. Similarly, when a nation normalizes medically assisted suicide, and makes it a more acceptable option, then more people may choose suicide. A 2022 study in the Journal of Ethics in Mental Health found that in four jurisdictions—Switzerland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Belgium—where assisted dying is legal, “there have been very steep rises in suicide,” including both assisted and unassisted suicide. The physician who assists one person to die may be influencing not just that suicide but the suicides of people he will never see.

From the March 2010 issue: Ludwig Minelli crusades for “the last human right”

Gifts-based liberals understand the limitations of individual reason, and have a deep awareness of human fallibility. Gifts-based liberals treasure having so many diverse points of view, because as individuals, we are usually wrong to some degree, and often to a very large degree. We need to think together, over time, in order to stumble toward the truth. Intellectual autonomy is a dangerous exaggeration.

Gifts-based liberals understand that at many times in life, we’re just not thinking straight—especially when we are sick, in pain, anxious, or depressed. My friend the Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson, who died of cancer last year, once said, “Depression is a malfunction of the instrument we use to determine reality.” When he was depressed, lying voices took up residence there, spewing out falsehoods he could scarcely see around: You are a burden to your friends; you have no future; no one would miss you if you died. This is not an autonomous, rational mind. This is a mind that has gone to war with its host.

In these extreme cases, human fallibility is not just foolish; it is potentially fatal. To cope with those cases, societies in a gifts-based world erect guardrails, usually instantiated in law. In effect the community is saying: No, suicide is out of bounds. It’s not for you to decide. You don’t have the freedom to end your freedom. You don’t have the right to make a choice you will never be able to revisit. Banish the question from your mind, because the answer is a simple no. Individual autonomy is not our ultimate value. Life and belonging are. We are responsible for one another.

You did not create your deepest bonds. Liberal institutions are healthiest when they are built on arrangements that precede choice. You didn’t choose the family you were born into, the ethnic heritage you were born into, the culture you were born into, the nation you were born into. As you age, you have more choices over how you engage with these things, and many people forge chosen families to supplant their biological ones. But you never fully escape the way these unchosen bonds have formed you, and you remain defined through life by the obligations they impose upon you.

Autonomy-based liberals see society as a series of social contracts—arrangements people make for their mutual benefit. But a mother’s love for her infant daughter is not a contract. Gifts-based liberals see society as resting on a bedrock of covenants. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks once captured the difference this way: “A contract is a transaction. A covenant is a relationship. Or to put it slightly differently: a contract is about interests. A covenant is about identity. It is about you and me coming together to form an ‘us.’ ”

A society constructed on gifts-based liberalism does everything it can to strengthen the bedrock layer of covenants. The MAID program, by contrast, actively subverts them. It has led a mother to plead with a doctor not to end her son’s life. It has left a man enraged, feeling that he and his other family members were shut out of the process that led to the killing of his brother. The state, seeing people only as autonomous individuals, didn’t adequately recognize family bonds.

We now live in societies in which more and more people are deciding that death is better than life.

Families have traditionally been built around mutual burdens. As children, we are burdens on our families; in adulthood, especially in hard times, we can be burdens on one another; and in old age we may be burdens once again. When these bonds have become attenuated or broken in Western cultures, many people re-create webs of obligation in chosen families. There, too, it is the burdening that makes the bonds secure.

I recently had a conversation with a Canadian friend who told me that he and his three siblings had not been particularly close as adults. Then their aging dad grew gravely ill. His care became a burden they all shared, and that shared burden brought them closer. Their father died but their closeness remains. Their father bestowed many gifts upon his children, but the final one was the gift of being a burden on his family.

Autonomy-based liberalism imposes unrealistic expectations. Each individual is supposed to define their own values, their own choices. Each individual, in the words of Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, is left to come up with their own “concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, of the mystery of human life.” If your name is Aristotle, maybe you can do that; most of us can’t. Most of us are left in a moral vacuum, a world in which the meaning of life is unclear, unconnected to any moral horizon outside the self.

Jeffrey Rosen: The Supreme Court justice who believed in America

Autonomy-based liberalism cuts people off from all the forces that formed them, stretching back centuries, and from all the centuries stretching into the future. Autonomy-based liberalism leaves people alone. Its emphasis on individual sovereignty inevitably erodes the bonds between people. Autonomy-based liberalism induces even progressives to live out the sentence notoriously associated with Margaret Thatcher: “There is no such thing as society.” Nearly 200 years ago, Alexis de Tocqueville feared that this state of affairs not only makes

men forget their ancestors, but also clouds their view of their descendants and isolates them from their contemporaries. Each man is forever thrown back upon himself alone and there is a danger that he may be shut up in the solitude of his own heart.

As Émile Durkheim pointed out in 1897, this is pretty much a perfect recipe for suicide. We now live in societies in which more and more people are deciding that death is better than life. In short, autonomy-based liberalism produces the kind of isolated, adrift people who are prone to suicide—and then provides them with a state-assisted solution to the problem it created in the first place.

Gifts-based liberalism, by contrast, gives you membership in a procession that stretches back to your ancestors. It connects you to those who migrated to this place or that, married this person or that, raised their children in this way or that. What you are is an expression of history.

This long procession, though filled with struggles and hardship, has made life sweeter for us. Human beings once lived in societies in which slavery was a foundational fact of life, beheadings and animal torture were popular entertainments, raping and pillaging were routine. But gradually, with many setbacks, we’ve built a culture in which people are more likely to abhor cruelty, a culture that has as an ideal the notion that all people deserve fair treatment, not just our kind of people.

This is progress. Thanks to this procession, each generation doesn’t have to make the big decisions of life standing on naked ground. We have been bequeathed sets of values, institutions, cultural traditions that embody the accumulated wisdom of our kind. The purpose of life, in a gifts-based world, is to participate in this procession, to keep the march of progress going along its fitful course. We may give with our creativity, with our talents, with our care, but many of the gifts people transmit derive from deeper sources.

A few years ago, the historian Wilfred McClay wrote an essay about his mother, a mathematician, in The Hedgehog Review. One day he mentioned to her that H. L. Mencken had suffered a stroke late in life that left him unable to read or write and nearly unable to speak. His mother coolly remarked that if such a fate ever befell her, he should not prolong her life. Without a certain quality of life, she observed, there’s no point in living.

Sometimes the old and the infirm, those who have been wounded by life and whose choices have been constrained, reveal what is most important in life.

A couple of years later, she suffered a near-fatal stroke that left her unable to speak. She cried the most intense sobs of grief McClay had ever heard. It might have appeared that her life was no longer worth living. But, McClay observed, “something closer to the opposite was true. An inner development took place that made her a far deeper, warmer, more affectionate, more grateful, and more generous person than I had ever known her to be.”

Eventually McClay’s mother moved in with his family. “It wasn’t always easy, of course, and while I won’t dwell on the details, I won’t pretend that it wasn’t a strain. But there are so many memories of those years that we treasure—above all, the day-in-and-day-out experience of my mother’s unbowed spirit, which inspired and awed us all.”

She and her family devised ways to communicate, through gestures, intonations, and the few words she still possessed. She could convey her emotions by clapping and through song. “Most surprisingly, my mother proved to be a superb grandmother to my two children, whom she loved without reservation, and who loved her the same way in return.” McClay noted that her grandkids saw past her disability. They could not have known how they made life worth living for her, but being around her was a joy. After she died, McClay writes that “it took a long time to adjust to the silence in the house.” He concluded, “Aging is not a problem to be solved, my mother taught us. It is a meaning to be lived out.”

Read: Why disability-rights advocates are fighting doctor-assisted suicide

Sometimes the old and the infirm, those who have been wounded by life and whose choices have been constrained, reveal what is most important in life. Sometimes those whose choices have been limited can demonstrate that, by focusing on others and not on oneself, life is defined not by the options available to us but by the strength of our commitments.

If autonomy-based liberals believe that society works best when it opens up individual options, gifts-based liberals believe that society works best when it creates ecologies of care that help people address difficulties all along the path of life. Autonomy-based liberalism is entrenching an apparatus that ends life. Gifts-based liberalism believes in providing varieties of palliative care to those near death and buttressing doctors as they forge trusting relationships with their patients. These support structures sometimes inhibit choices by declaring certain actions beyond the pale. Doctors are there for healing, at all times and under all pressures. Patients can trust the doctor because they know the doctor serves life. Doctors can know that, exhausted and confused though they might be while attending to a patient, their default orientation will be to continue the struggle to save life and not to end life.

John Stuart and Harriet Taylor Mill believed in individual autonomy. But they also believed that a just society has a vision not only of freedom but also of goodness, of right and wrong. Humans, John Stuart Mill wrote, “are under a moral obligation to seek the improvement of our moral character.” He continued, “The test of what is right in politics is not the will of the people, but the good of the people.” He understood that the moral obligations we take on in life—to family, friends, and nation, to the past and the future—properly put a brake on individual freedom of action. And he believed that they point us toward the fulfillment of our nature.

The good of humanity is not some abstraction—it’s grounded in the succession of intimates and institutions that we inherit, and that we reform, improve, and pass on. When a fellow member of the procession is in despair, is suffering, is thinking about ending their life, we don’t provide a syringe. We say: The world has not stopped asking things of you. You still have gifts to give, merely by living among us. Your life still sends ripples outward, in ways you do and do not see. Don’t go. We know you need us. We still need you.

This article appears in the June 2023 print edition with the headline “The Canadian Way of Death.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

The Atlantic · by David Brooks · May 4, 2023

17. U.S. Sanctions Drive Chinese Firms to Advance AI Without Latest Chips

Will chips be to China in the 21st Century what oil and natural resources were to Japan in the 1930s?

U.S. Sanctions Drive Chinese Firms to Advance AI Without Latest Chips

Research in China on workarounds, such as using software to leverage less powerful chips, is accelerating

https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-sanctions-drive-chinese-firms-to-advance-ai-without-latest-chips-f6aed67f?mod=hp_lead_pos5

By Karen HaoFollow in Hong Kong and Raffaele HuangFollow in Singapore

May 7, 2023 10:00 am ET

U.S. sanctions are spurring Chinese tech companies to accelerate research to develop cutting-edge artificial intelligence without relying on the latest American chips.

A Wall Street Journal review of research papers and interviews with employees found that Chinese companies are studying techniques that could allow them to achieve state-of-the-art AI performance with fewer or less powerful semiconductors. They are also researching how to combine different types of chips to avoid relying on any one type of hardware.

Chinese telecommunications provider Huawei Technologies, search firm Baidu BIDU 1.73%increase; green up pointing triangle and e-commerce giant Alibaba Group BABA 0.88%increase; green up pointing triangle are among those seeking ways to milk more utility out of existing computer chips. 

Using these workarounds to catch up with American AI leaders remains a significant challenge, researchers and analysts said. Some experiments have shown promise, however, and if advanced successfully, the research could allow Chinese tech firms to both weather American sanctions and make them more resilient to future restrictions, they said. 

Huawei and Baidu declined to comment. Alibaba didn’t respond to a request for comment.

As the race heats up to commercialize ChatGPT-like models, companies globally are in need of more powerful chips and seeking ways to squeeze more out of them to drive down the exploding costs of AI development. 

For Chinese companies, the issue is more critical: U.S. sanctions have cut them off from the most advanced chips made by the likes of Nvidia NVDA 4.06%increase; green up pointing triangle and they have rapidly consumed existing American chip stocks to create their own ChatGPT equivalents, say employees, AI researchers and industry analysts.

“You can just tell, reading between the lines, that they’re trying to find any compute under the sun to compensate for the lack of top-tier hardware,” said Susan Zhang, an AI researcher at Meta Platforms who specializes in AI infrastructure and large language models. In the AI industry, compute refers to the amount of computing power available in a set of chips.

Beijing’s highest decision-making body said last month that China should encourage innovation in the development of artificial general intelligence.

After the Commerce Department imposed sweeping restrictions on supplying chips to China last October, the Biden administration has indicated it could implement further sanctions.

Chinese companies are cut off from Nvidia’s A100 chips, the most popular within the industry for AI development, and the next generation version, the H100 released in March, which offers more computational power.

U.S. restrictions on semiconductor exports mean that Chinese AI developers no longer have access to the Nvidia A100 chips favored by the industry. PHOTO: FEATURE CHINA/BARCROFT MEDIA/GETTY IMAGES

Nvidia created downgraded versions of its chips for the Chinese market, called the A800 and H800, respectively, to meet sanction requirements. Both modified chips reduce the capacity of a chip to communicate with others.

The products provide an effective alternative for developing small-scale AI models, such as those used in the recommendation algorithm driving ByteDance’s short-video app TikTok. But the handicap throttles the development of larger AI models, which require the coordination of hundreds or thousands of chips.

OpenAI released ChatGPT a month after the chip sanctions were announced. The launch triggered a global frenzy to develop generative AI, software that can produce text and images and requires an unprecedented amount of computational power to develop. UBS analysts estimate that it takes between 5,000 and 10,000 A100 chips to train these kinds of large AI models. OpenAI didn’t respond to a request for comment.

A survey by a Chinese-government-linked semiconductor industry association released at a recent closed-door industry conference showed the supply constraints, finding that there were around 40,000 to 50,000 A100s in China available for training large-scale AI models, according to a person who attended the meeting. The association didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Chinese companies such as Alibaba and Baidu, which stockpiled A100s before the sanctions, have heavily restricted the use of foreign advanced chips internally, reserving them for the most computationally intensive tasks, according to people familiar with the matter.

Baidu suspended use of its A100s across teams, including its self-driving unit, to pool them for the development of its ChatGPT equivalent, Ernie Bot, before its launch date, the Journal previously reported.

Baidu has sought in recent years to incorporate domestic chips into its AI development, including Hygon Information Technology’s DCU and Huawei’s AI training chip Ascend, as well as its own called Kunlun, according to open-source research papers and people familiar with the matter. Many of the domestic chips remain unreliable for training large-scale models, however, because they are prone to crashing, some of the people said. 

Baidu pooled its stash of A100 chips to develop the AI-powered Ernie Bot. PHOTO: TINGSHU WANG/REUTERS

Many Chinese firms are now trying to combine three or four less-advanced chips, including the A800 and H800, to simulate the performance of one of Nvidia’s most powerful processors, according to Yang You, a professor at the National University of Singapore who runs an AI infrastructure company, HPC-AI Tech.

In April, Tencent unveiled a new computing cluster—a set of connected chips for large-scale AI model training using Nvidia’s H800s.

This approach can be costly: If a U.S. firm needs 1,000 H100s to train a large language model, a Chinese firm could need 3,000 or more H800s to achieve the same results, Mr. You said. 

That is driving some firms to accelerate the development of techniques to train large-scale AI models across different types of chips, Mr. You said, an area of research that was already common among Chinese firms with limited hardware resources that were keen on cutting costs. Alibaba, Baidu and Huawei have sought to use various combinations of A100s, older generation Nvidia chips known as V100s and P100s as well as Huawei Ascends, papers show.

By contrast, using multiple types of chips is rarely seen among U.S. companies because of the technical challenges of getting them to work reliably, AI experts said. “This is a last-ditch resort,” Meta’s Ms. Zhang said.

In parallel, Chinese firms have sought to use various software techniques to reduce the computational intensity of training large-scale AI models, an approach that has accelerated globally, including among U.S. companies. Unlike U.S. companies, however, Chinese companies have been more aggressive in combining multiple software techniques together, papers show.

OpenAI’s launch of ChatGPT in November triggered a global frenzy to develop generative AI. PHOTO: CLARA MOKRI FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

While many of these methods are still being ironed out in the global research community and difficult to implement, Chinese researchers have seen some success.

In a paper in March, Huawei researchers demonstrated how they could use such techniques to train its latest-generation large language model using only the company’s Ascend chips and without Nvidia chips. Despite some shortcomings, the model, known as PanGu-Σ, reached state-of-the-art performance on a few Chinese-language tasks, including reading comprehension and grammar challenges, the researchers wrote in the paper.

Dylan Patel, chief analyst at semiconductor research and consulting firm SemiAnalysis, said Chinese researchers’ pain points will only exacerbate without access to the new Nvidia H100, which includes an extra performance-boosting feature especially helpful for training ChatGPT-like models.

But a paper last year from Baidu and Peng Cheng Laboratory, a Shenzhen-based research institute, showed researchers were training large language models in a way that would make the feature unnecessary. Mr. Patel said it looked promising even though the research was in its early stages.

“If it works well, they can effectively circumvent the sanctions,” he said.

Write to Karen Hao at [email protected] and Raffaele Huang at [email protected]

Copyright ©2023 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

Appeared in the May 8, 2023, print edition as 'China AI Makers Work Around U.S. Sanctions'.

18. China says relations with US on 'cold ice,' but stabilizing ties a 'top priority'

China says relations with US on 'cold ice,' but stabilizing ties a 'top priority' | CNN

CNN · by Nectar Gan,Mengchen Zhang · May 8, 2023

Hong Kong CNN —

China’s foreign minister said Monday a “series of erroneous words and deeds” by the United States had placed relations between the two superpowers on “cold ice,” but stabilizing ties is a “top priority.”

Qin Gang made the comments during a meeting in Beijing with US ambassador Nicholas Burns, their first since a dispute over a Chinese balloon shattered efforts to mend ties earlier this year.

Qin said US actions and words had undermined “hard-won positive momentum” following Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s meeting with US President Joe Biden in Indonesia last year.

“The agenda of dialogue and cooperation agreed by the two sides has been disrupted, and the relationship between the two countries has once again hit the cold ice,” he said according to a Chinese Foreign Ministry statement.

The United States has yet to issue a readout of the meeting.

Tensions between the world’s two biggest economies soared in February after a suspected Chinese spy balloon flew over the continental US and was subsequently shot down by the American military.

The incident prompted US Secretary of State Antony Blinken to postpone a planned trip to Beijing – a visit seen as an important step in repairing fraught diplomatic ties that are at their worst in decades. There has been no indication whether the trip will be rescheduled.

“The top priority now is to stabilize Sino-US relations, avoid a downward spiral and prevent any accidents between China and the US,” Qin told Burns, according to the Chinese readout. “This should be the most fundamental consensus between China and the US.”

NUEVA ECIJA, PHILIPPINES - APRIL 13: US and Philippine troops fire a Javelin anti-tank weapon system during the 'Balikatan' or 'shoulder-to-shoulder' US-Philippines joint military exercises in Fort Magsaysay on April 13, 2023 in Nueva Ecija, Philippines. More than 17,000 Philippine and US soldiers started their largest joint military exercise yet, known as 'Balikatan' or 'shoulder-to-shoulder,' which includes live-fire drills at sea, as the two nations strengthen defence ties amid shared concerns about China's assertiveness in the Asia-Pacific region. The joint military exercises took place as China completed three days of war games around Taiwan, coinciding with Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen's visit to the United States.

Ezra Acayan/Getty Images

A weapons stockpile and asymmetric warfare: How Taiwan could thwart an invasion by China -- with America's help

Qin urged the US to “reflect deeply” and “meet China halfway” to push bilateral relations out of their current predicament.

“(The US) can’t talk about communication on the one hand, but keep suppressing and containing China on the other hand,” he said, adding that Washington must respect China’s bottom lines and stop undermining its sovereignty, security and development interests – in particular on the issue of Taiwan, a self-governing democracy Beijing claims as its own.

Reiterating Beijing’s talking points, Qin urged the US to stop the hollowing out of the “one China” principle and end support for “Taiwan independent” forces.

Under Washington’s longstanding “one China” policy, the US acknowledges Beijing’s position that Taiwan is part of China, but has never officially recognized the Chinese Communist Party’s claim to the democratic island of more than 23 million. Under the Taiwan Relations Act, Washington is also bound by law to provide Taiwan with the means to defend itself.

Under Xi, China has ramped up economic, diplomatic and military pressure on Taiwan in recent years, increasing fears he may one day make an attempt to follow through on his goal of “reunifying” the island with the mainland.

‘Better channels’

Monday’s meeting was Qin’s first with Burns since the former Chinese ambassador to the US was promoted to foreign minister in December.

It also followed Burns’ comments last week that the US is “ready to talk” to China.

“Our view is we need better channels between the two governments and deeper channels, and we are ready to talk,” Burns said at an event at the Stimson Center, which he attended virtually.

“We’ve never been shy of talking, and we hope the Chinese will meet us halfway on this,” he said.

Beijing cut off talks with Washington on major issues, from climate change to military relations, in August last year in response to then US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s high-profile visit to Taipei.

The two sides resumed climate talks following Xi and Biden’s meeting on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Bali, Indonesia last November.

Burns told the Stimson Center event that the US has been calling on China to open all of the channels suspended following Pelosi’s Taiwan trip. He reiterated Blinken’s visit to China would be rescheduled “when conditions are appropriate.”

CNN · by Nectar Gan,Mengchen Zhang · May 8, 2023

19. Homemade, Cheap and Lethal, Attack Drones Are Vital to Ukraine

Homemade, Cheap and Lethal, Attack Drones Are Vital to Ukraine

The New York Times · by Andrew E. Kramer · May 8, 2023

Fighting superior Russian firepower, Ukrainian forces turn off-the-shelf drones into deadly weapons by adapting them to carry explosives.

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A Ukrainian service member cleaning an aerial vehicle during training exercises outside Kyiv this month.Credit...Nicole Tung for The New York Times

By

Reporting from Ivanivske, near the front lines in eastern Ukraine.

May 8, 2023, 5:00 a.m. ET

Buzzing like an oversize mosquito, a small drone lifted off from a farm field in eastern Ukraine, hovered for a bit, then raced toward Russian positions near the battle-ravaged city of Bakhmut.

“Friends, let’s go!” said the pilot, Private Yevhen. With a pair of virtual reality goggles strapped around his head, he used joysticks to steer the craft and its payload of two pounds of explosives.

Cobbled together from hobby drones, consumer electronics and computer gaming gear, handmade attack drones like this one have emerged as one of the deadliest and most widespread innovations in more than 14 months of warfare in Ukraine.

Along the front line, drones extend the reach of soldiers, who can fly them with pinpoint accuracy to drop hand grenades into enemy trenches or bunkers, or fly into targets to blow up on impact. Self-destructing drones, in particular, are easily constructed, and thousands of soldiers on both sides now have experience building them from commonly available parts — though the Ukrainians say they use such weapons more frequently than their Russian opponents.

These small craft proliferated on the battlefield last fall, long before Russia said on Wednesday that two explosions over the Kremlin were a drone strike. Kyiv and Moscow have blamed each other for the incident, and if attack drones did, in fact, fly over the Kremlin walls, it is unclear what type they were, what kind of range they had, or who was responsible.

A drone operator holding a drone during training exercises outside Kyiv.Credit...Nicole Tung for The New York Times

For years, the United States deployed Predator and Reaper drones in Iraq and Afghanistan that cost tens of millions of dollars apiece, and can fire missiles and then return to their bases. Ukraine, in contrast, has adapted a wide array of small craft that are widely available as consumer products, from quadcopters to fixed-wing drones, to spot artillery targets and drop grenades.

Exploding drones belong to a class of weapons known as loitering munitions, for being able to circle or hover before diving down on a target.

Russia manufactures a self-destructing drone specifically for military use, the Lancet, and it has made extensive use of Shahed attack drones bought from Iran. The United States has provided to the Ukrainian military a purpose-built loitering munition, the Switchblade.

Such industrially made craft have longer ranges and some have heavier payloads than the homemade weapons used in Ukraine. But the Switchblade, like the Shahed, often navigates to preprogrammed targets, a system that Ukrainian soldiers say is less effective than their hand-built alternatives, steered remotely by operators.

Soldiers and civilian volunteers make these in garage workshops, experimenting and inventing with 3-D printed materials, explosives and custom-built software to try to avoid Russian electronic countermeasures.

They have produced some drones that drop bombs large enough to destroy armored vehicles and can be reused, and cost as much as $20,000.

The smaller, more common self-destructing drones like those flown by Private Yevhen cost a few hundred dollars. They are built around a type of drone used for hobby racing, usually a model made by the Chinese company DJI, with explosives attached using zip ties or tape. They are single-use, disposable weapons; once armed and launched, they cannot even be landed safely.

A Ukrainian service member repairing a drone during training outside Kyiv.Credit...Nicole Tung for The New York Times

“I see huge potential” for the weapon in the type of trench fighting that has dominated the war, Maj. Kyryl Veres, the commander of a Ukrainian brigade stationed near Severesk, to the north of Bakhmut, said in an interview. “Any equipment can be hit in a place where the enemy thinks he is a million percent safe.”

A cheap drone destroying a far more expensive armored personnel carrier is a striking example of asymmetric warfare, used to overcome an enemy’s technological or numerical advantages. And despite the influx of Western weapons, Ukrainian forces remain outgunned by the Russians.

“The Ukrainian army should use unusual, asymmetrical tools of war,” said Serhiy Hrabsky, a retired army colonel and commentator on the war for Ukrainian media.

He drew a parallel to the roadside bombs that insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan used, to devastating effect, against the U.S. military, which called them improvised explosive devices. Ukraine, Colonel Hrabsky said, is using “improvised kamikaze drones.”

He added that “the art of war is not static.”

The experience of flying with virtual reality goggles, providing an immersive view from the drone’s camera, is like playing a high-stress video game. The missions are far from risk-free for the pilots. The short range of the drones while carrying explosive loads — about four miles, typically — means the pilots must fly from trenches at or near the front line, where they are vulnerable to artillery and snipers.

Still, the drones are lethally effective. The Ukrainian military has posted dozens of videos recorded by the drones as they swoop in on targets, with devastating accuracy.

Pilots chase and hit moving tanks or fly through the open doors of armored vehicles to explode inside, as soldiers at the last moment try to jump to safety. And they routinely fly drones into bunkers, which was the intention of Private Yevhen, who was stationed near a front line in the battle for Bakhmut.

Ukrainian service members walking past an old Ukrainian aircraft outside Kyiv.Credit...Nicole Tung for The New York Times

On a recent, crystalline spring morning, the thicket of trees he operated from was a veritable drone airport: Several units operated surveillance craft while others were seeking to drop hand grenades on Russian trenches.

After the drone took off with a whir, Private Yevhen let it hover for a moment to test the controls. The drone dropped back to earth — a nerve-racking moment, as the explosive was already triggered to detonate. But it did not. He took off again.

If all went according to plan, he would soon see the rapidly approaching entryway to a bunker and at the last moment perhaps a glimpse of doomed Russian soldiers. His hands trembled on the control console.

Two other drones accompanied the attack craft, flying nearby to guide and film the strike. A spaghetti swirl of wires, plugs and screens in a bunker tied the system together.

In the moments after taking off, the pilots called out altitude and the passing of way points on the landscape below.

“Do me a favor and go right,” Private Yevhen told a pilot accompanying him.

The drones reached the critical area where Russian electronic countermeasures could jam their signals, causing pilots to lose control and even crash.

“Stable, stable,” he said of his radio connection. Then Private Yevhen lost control.

“Where did you fly?” he asked his wingman, trying to regain his bearings.

“I’m out here,” the other pilot said.

But Private Yevhen’s exploding drone had gone down several hundred yards short of the target. Neither he nor the accompanying surveillance drones, which were out of position when it went down, could tell if it had exploded or simply settled onto a fields. Whether Russian jamming or a technical flaw had downed the craft was also unclear.

This time, the work of constructing the exploding drone and the risk of getting close enough to launch under artillery fire had resulted only in lessons learned, not a successful strike.

“All is lost,” he said, taking off his goggles. “It just fell down.”

A Ukrainian service member operating a drone while wearing goggles during training exercises outside Kyiv.Credit...Nicole Tung for The New York Times

Maria Varenikova contributed reporting from Ivaniske, Ukraine.

The New York Times · by Andrew E. Kramer · May 8, 2023

20. What to know about Air Force Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., the next potential Joint Chiefs chair

Excerpts:

Even before Biden announces his decision, Brown on Friday received praise as a top choice from those inside and outside the military.

“He embodies both the joint and service perspective, but especially helpful will be his deep knowledge and experience in the Indo-Pacific theater – the key to this ‘decisive decade,’” said retired Marine Corps Maj. Gen. Arnold Punaro, a former staff director of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

“As Chairman, General Brown will be in a position to drive the joint force and joint operations to deal with the threats posed not only by China, but also Russia, Iran, and North Korea.”

What to know about Air Force Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., the next potential Joint Chiefs chair

BY ELLEN MITCHELL - 05/07/23 6:00 AM ET

The Hill · · May 7, 2023

President Biden is expected to soon announce that he has chosen Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr. to become the country’s senior-most military officer later this year.

If formally nominated and approved by the Senate, Brown, 60, would become chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, replacing Army Gen. Mark Milley, whose term ends at the end of September.

The appointment would be historic, as Brown would be only the second Black man to become chairman after Gen. Colin Powell, who was selected more than three decades ago by President George H. W. Bush.

It would also mean that, with Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin in his current role, the top two senior Pentagon positions would be filled by Black men for the first time in U.S. history.

Brown would also be the first Air Force officer to become Joint Chiefs chair in more than a decade. Not since retired Gen. Richard Myers, who was in the role until 2005, has the Air Force had one of its own hold the esteemed position.

Though Brown’s nomination is not final until Biden formally announces his pick – a looming decision first reported by Politico – here are some things to know about the next potential Joint Chiefs chair.

He’s been outspoken on racism – and has already gone viral

Brown is perhaps most known for an Air Force video released shortly after Minneapolis police officers murdered George Floyd, an act that set off a wave of protests and civil unrest across the country.

Then the commander of Pacific Air Forces, Brown spoke on camera of his experiences as a Black man in America and in the military.

The timing of the video was significant, as it was posted on June 5, 2020, days away from a Senate vote on his nomination to be the Air Force’s next chief of staff. That vote would also make him the first Black person to serve in that role in the country’s history.

“I’m thinking about how full I am with emotion, not just for George Floyd, but the many African Americans that have suffered the same fate as George Floyd. . . . I’m thinking about my Air Force career, where I was often the only African American in my squadron, or as a senior officer, the only African American in the room,” he said.

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

Senior defense leaders rarely make such public commentary, and the publicity from it brought the national debate over racism and inequality firmly into the military sphere.

“I can’t fix centuries of racism in our country, nor can I fix decades of discrimination that may have impacted members of our Air Force,” Brown said. “I’m thinking about how I can make improvements personally, professionally and institutionally so that all airmen both today and tomorrow, appreciate the value of diversity and can serve in an environment where they can reach their full potential.”

A decorated background

Brown, a former F-16 fighter pilot, didn’t have a typical route to the skies. He attended Texas Tech University on an ROTC scholarship, rather than the Air Force Academy, and has said he only expected to serve in the military for four years. What’s more, he’s been frank about his early years in ROTC, saying that he almost quit after one semester.

After receiving his civil engineering degree and commissioned as an officer in 1984, he eventually made it to MacDill Air Force Base, Fla. in 1986 to train on F-16s.

By the early 1990s he was an F-16 instructor pilot at the Air Force Weapons School at Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada, considered a top job for instructors. He would eventually reach more than 3,000 flying hours, including 130 in combat.

But he was also gaining valuable experience at the Pentagon, first as an aide-de-camp to then-Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Ron Fogleman in 1994, then later in 2004 as a lieutenant colonel working for retired Gen. Hawk Carlisle, the former head of Air Combat Command.

From there, Brown’s career began to pick up steam, and he held stints as head of F-16 fighter wings in Italy, commander of U.S. Air Forces Central Command, then deputy chief of U.S. Central Command. In the last two roles, he helped direct the air war against the Islamic State group.

By summer 2018, Brown had taken command of Pacific Air Forces, serving in that role for nearly two years before he was nominated for Air Force chief of staff in March 2020.

He’s been projected to be the front runner

Brown may have an illustrious military career but he’s not the only one to be a contender for Joint Chiefs chair.

Biden has also reportedly considered Marine Corps Commandant Gen. David Berger for the top job and has met with both men.

But several of Brown’s colleagues have hinted at his possible accension, with Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall giving a nod and a wink to that back in March.

“Gen. Brown is an exceptional leader with broad strategic perspectives, and a thoughtful, measured approach to any problem set,” Kendall said in a March 7 speech, “I would hate to lose such a great partner. But there is a chance someone who outranks me considerably might see those same attributes in CQ.”

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Even before Biden announces his decision, Brown on Friday received praise as a top choice from those inside and outside the military.

“He embodies both the joint and service perspective, but especially helpful will be his deep knowledge and experience in the Indo-Pacific theater – the key to this ‘decisive decade,’” said retired Marine Corps Maj. Gen. Arnold Punaro, a former staff director of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

“As Chairman, General Brown will be in a position to drive the joint force and joint operations to deal with the threats posed not only by China, but also Russia, Iran, and North Korea.”

The Hill · · May 7, 2023

21. Could Taiwan’s next president impact a potential cross-strait crisis?

Could Taiwan’s next president impact a potential cross-strait crisis?

BY ZOE LEUNG AND CAMERON WALTZ, OPINION CONTRIBUTORS - 05/07/23 1:00 PM ET

The Hill ·  · May 7, 2023

Amid simmering cross-strait tensions, experts and officials alike have predicted that a Chinese invasion of Taiwan could happen in the next 10 years, if not sooner. However, the headlines shroud the crucial role that Taiwan will play in shaping the cross-strait dynamics. Amid escalating U.S.-China strategic competition, the island’s 2024 presidential election will shape crisis management in East Asia.

A new president from the current ruling party, the independence-leaning Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), would continue to erect barriers to unification with the People’s Republic of China (PRC), including cementing Taiwan’s identity as a democratic beacon and further strengthening integrated deterrence with the U.S. and its allies in Asia. Although Beijing considers Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen to be a separatist, she was uniquely moderate on cross-strait relations compared to her party’s leadership bench.

The DPP’s nominee to succeed Tsai, Vice President Lai Ching-te, represents a faction that favors a harder line on Taiwanese independence than Tsai. However, he has recently softened his tone to meet the popular preference for the status quo. Should Lai win the presidency, Beijing would probably turn up the pressure on Taiwan, even though Lai is unlikely to launch a move toward formal independence.

Should voters elect a yet-named candidate from the unification-leaning Kuomintang (KMT), that president would likely take a more conciliatory approach to appease Beijing. Thus far, the KMT’s campaign has focused on portraying itself as the only party that can work effectively with the PRC, presenting voters with the binary choice between peace and prosperity versus tensions and sanctions. Though factions of the KMT still support unification with the PRC, the Taiwanese public’s hostility toward unification means that any move to open that door would be politically untenable.

Instead, a KMT president would likely focus on economic and social integration with Beijing as a means of delaying questions of unification. This approach would appeal to Taiwanese businesses and voters who wish to return to the era of relative cross-strait stability under Tsai’s predecessor, Ma Ying-jeou. Still, a potential cross-strait détente would require serious concessions from Taipei.

Taiwanese voters, regardless of their ideal preference for formal independence or unification, overwhelmingly support maintaining the cross-strait status quo in practice. Still, they are polarized on which party’s strategy is optimal for doing so. Further complicating voters’ choices, a potential longshot third-party run by former Taipei mayor Ko Wen-je, though very unlikely to win, could cause Taiwan’s next president to be elected without an outright majority or popular mandate.

Beijing, of course, has a horse in this race and would prefer a more amenable KMT president. What remains to be seen is which tactics the PRC will use to sway Taiwan’s voters.

Beijing has significant penetration into Taiwan’s society to influence public opinion by covertly spreading disinformation and overtly threatening war. The PRC has previously rewarded Taipei with diplomatic truces and trade agreements when Taiwan’s authorities were compliant and lashed out by banning exports and freezing official contacts when they rebelled. How Beijing leverages its economic power and influence network leading up to 2024 may either attract or repulse Taiwanese swing voters. With “peaceful reunification” still Beijing’s preferred policy outcome (while economic and military coercion is not being ruled out), its ability to persuade Taiwan’s public that unification is the best — or only — way forward can play a decisive role in the 2024 elections.

Historically, Beijing’s actions have influenced Taiwan’s election outcomes. In 1997, the PRC conducted missile drills off Taiwan’s coast to intimidate supporters of incumbent Lee Teng-hui days before the island’s first democratic presidential election, which backfired by rallying voters to support Lee. Moreover, major KMT losses in Taiwan’s 2014 local elections and 2016 national elections were attributed, in part, to a nationalist backlash against President Ma Ying-jeou’s engagement with the PRC. The 2019 Hong Kong protests and subsequent dismantling of the “one country, two systems” formula also notably propelled Tsai Ing-wen to reelection in 2020.

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In line with this trend, foreign affairs may sway this election too. The recent meeting between Tsai and U.S. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and the ensuing Chinese military drills can be viewed as either promising or unsettling by Taiwanese swing voters. Cross-strait tensions are prone to spiraling, with any number of perceived provocations begetting countermeasures. Such an action-reaction cycle between the U.S. and China in the run-up to 2024 could stir Taiwanese politics and alter the election’s outcome.

Taiwan’s upcoming election will shape its relationship with Beijing and Washington in one way or another. With the escalating U.S.-China rivalry, the stakes are high. Though it is hard to imagine Taiwan’s next president flipping the geostrategic chess board, the DPP and KMT’s differing strategies will influence Beijing’s aggressiveness, Taiwan’s vulnerability to coercion and perhaps even the timeline of a potential cross-strait crisis.

Zoe Leung is the senior director of research at the George H. W. Bush Foundation for U.S.-China Relations. Cameron Waltz is the editor-in-chief of the Intercollegiate U.S.-China Journal.

The Hill · by Al Weaver · May 7, 2023

22.  Warren Buffett says US, China can compete and both ‘prosper’ amid rising tensions

 Warren Buffett says US, China can compete and both ‘prosper’ amid rising tensions

BY JARED GANS - 05/06/23 4:08 PM ET

The Hill  · May 6, 2023

Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett said the United States and China can compete and “prosper” simultaneously amid rising tensions recently between the two countries.

Buffett said at his company’s annual meeting on Saturday that the two countries need to understand that they cannot push each other too hard, as either country is capable of destroying the other.

“Both places are going to be competitive, and both can prosper,” he said. “That’s the vision that is out there that China will have a more wonderful country. The United States will have a more wonderful country.”

Buffett said a situation where both countries can succeed will be “imperative” for the next century, and leaders of the two nations should avoid “inflammatory” actions that would raise tensions.

His comments come as the U.S. and China have had heightened tensions over the past few years and especially in recent months.

China has increasingly stepped up military drills near Taiwan recently, at times in response to U.S. contact with the self-governing democratic island. A series of drills happened for days around the island in August after Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who was serving as House Speaker at the time, visited.

U.S. intelligence has also indicated that China has been providing at least nonlethal aid to Russia to help with its invasion of Ukraine, despite China’s officially stated policy of neutrality in the conflict. Officials also believe China has considered sending lethal aid to support Russian troops, which Beijing has denied and the U.S. has strongly warned the Chinese government against.

Tensions also rose after a surveillance balloon that officials identified as owned by China traveled across the continental U.S. in February. China has said the balloon was only to track weather and was blown off course by wind.

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The U.S. military shot the balloon down after a few days, but the balloon was reportedly able to gather some intelligence about sensitive military sites.

Buffett said the U.S. used to be in a similarly tense situation with the Soviet Union during the Cold War with a policy of mutually assured destruction, a recognition that nuclear war would destroy both sides in a conflict, preventing a war from breaking out. But he said the principle also came with a “very, very, very close call” in the Cuban Missile Crisis.

“Now you’re playing with a game that you can’t really make a huge mistake in,” he said, referring to the current situation between the U.S. and China. “The better that’s understood in both countries, the more the leaders feel that their citizenry does understand that, the better off we’ll be.”

The Hill · · May 6, 2023

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Foundation for Defense of Democracies

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: [email protected]