Quotes of the Day:
“Show him there is a road to safety, and so create in his mind the idea that there is an alternative to death. Then strike.”
- Tu Mu, quoted in the Art of War. Sun Tzu (450 B.C.)
“It is by combined use of politics and force that pacification of a country and its future organization will be achieved. Political action is by far the more important.”
-Joseph Simon Gallieni. Marshall Gallieni’s instructions to the French forces occupying Madagascar, 22 May 1898.
“Let us learn our lessons. Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on that strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. The statesman who yields to war fever must realise that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events. Antiquated War Offices, weak, incompetent or arrogant commanders, untrustworthy allies, hostile neutrals, malignant fortune, ugly surprise, awful miscalculations - all take their seat at the Council Board on the morrow of a declaration of war.”
- Sir Winston Churchill, My Early Life, 1930
1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, JUNE 10 (PUTIN'S WAR)
2. Ukrainian special-operations forces doubled in size while training with the US, top US special-ops commander says
3. How the Marine Corps went to war with itself over the next war
4. US: China's military activity around Taiwan threatens region
5. The Potential of Integrating Intelligence and Intuition
6. FDD | Hungary’s Orban Is Hardly a Model for American Conservatives
7. Ukraine pleads for weapons as 100-200 soldiers die a day
8. Communism Still Haunts Russia
9. Japanese PM Kishida Lays Out Indo-Pacific Strategy in Shangri-La Speech
10. Bizarre Drone Swarms That Harassed Navy Ships Demystified In New Docs
11. Inflation is at historic highs, but Americans are spending money like they don’t care
12. Lloyd Austin warns China against ‘provocative’ military activity near Taiwan
13. Japan Resets on Defense
14. Putin admits Ukraine invasion is an imperial war to “return” Russian land
15. Life under Russia’s brutal occupation in eastern Ukraine: ‘You can be shot at any moment’
16. Congress targets Harvard, Yale and top universities with China-linked endowments
1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, JUNE 10 (PUTIN'S WAR)
RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, JUNE 10
Karolina Hird, Kateryna Stepanenko, and Mason Clark
June 10, 4:00 pm 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.
Ukrainian officials are increasing the urgency of their requests for more-sophisticated Western-provided weapons systems amid reports of growing Russian artillery superiority. Several Western media outlets reported in the last 48 hours that Ukrainian military and government officials are increasingly highlighting the fact that Ukrainian troops are trapped in an “artillery war” on critical frontlines and are at a distinct disadvantage in terms of artillery systems.[1] Deputy Head of the Ukrainian Main Intelligence Directorate (GUR) Vadym Skibitsky stated that Russian troops possess 10 to 15 artillery pieces to every one Ukrainian artillery piece and that Ukrainian forces have almost completely exhausted their artillery ammunition.[2] Considering the current prevalence of protracted positional battles, especially in the Severodonetsk-Lysychansk area, Ukrainian forces urgently need fresh supplies of artillery systems. As Ukrainian forces use the last of their stocks of Soviet-era weapon systems and munitions, they will require consistent Western support to transition to new supply chains of ammunition and key artillery systems. Effective artillery will be increasingly decisive in the largely static fighting in eastern Ukraine.
Russian military authorities continue to struggle with force generation and are facing the consequences of aggressive forced mobilization efforts. Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU) claimed they captured a new group of Russian prisoners of war who reportedly were recruited through a private military company and told they were going to be providing security services but were instead sent to the frontline in Luhansk.[3] The Ukrainian General Staff similarly reported that units comprised of forcibly mobilized personnel are refusing to participate in combat in the Donbas due to high losses.[4] The Ukrainian Main Intelligence Directorate (GUR) cited intercepted phone calls and claimed that Russian soldiers are refusing to fight and are being threatened with prosecution—despite their lack of equipment and weapons within their units.[5] Such reports are consistent with previous reports that Russian forced mobilization efforts are self-destructive and may result in mounting discontent and declining morale and discipline.[6]
Key Takeaways
- Ukrainian officials are increasing the urgency of their requests for Western weapons systems due to Russia’s artillery superiority.
- Russian forces are continuing ground assaults within Severodonetsk but have yet to secure full control of the city as of June 10.
- Russian forces are preparing to renew offensive operations toward Slovyansk and made minor gains to the north of the city.
- Russian forces are continuing efforts to cut the T1302 Bakhmut-Lysychansk highway and conducting assaults on settlements near the highway.
- Russian troops reportedly took control of the Kinburn Spit in the northern Black Sea, which will allow them to exert further control of the Black Sea coast.
We do not report in detail on Russian war crimes because those 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 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.
- Main Effort—Eastern Ukraine (comprised of one subordinate and three supporting efforts);
- Subordinate Main Effort—Encirclement of Ukrainian troops in the cauldron between Izyum and Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts
- Supporting Effort 1—Kharkiv City;
- Supporting Effort 2—Southern Axis;
- Activities in Russian-occupied Areas
Main Effort—Eastern Ukraine
Subordinate Main Effort—Southern Kharkiv, Donetsk, Luhansk Oblasts (Russian objective: Encircle Ukrainian forces in Eastern Ukraine and capture the entirety of Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts, the claimed territory of Russia’s proxies in Donbas)
Russian forces continued ground assaults within Severodonetsk but have yet to establish full control over the city as of June 10. Ukrainian sources, including the Ukrainian General Staff and Head of the Luhansk Regional State Administration Serhiy Haidai, noted that Ukrainian troops still control the Azot Industrial zone and the Bakhmut-Lysychansk highway but did not provide any more details on the situation within the city.[7] Russian forces continued to heavily shell Lysychansk, Ustynivka, Toshkivka, and Zolote, likely to support operations in Severodonetsk and interdict Ukrainian supply efforts.[8] Much like the previous fighting in Mariupol, the exact nature of the control of urban areas in Severodonetsk likely remains obfuscated as the information environment surrounding hostilities becomes increasingly restricted.
Russian forces continued to prepare for offensive operations from the southeast of Izyum and west of Lyman toward Slovyansk and likely made marginal gains north of Slovyansk on June 10.[9] The Ukrainian General Staff stated that 30 Russian battalion tactical groups (BTGs) are now operating in the direction of Kharkiv Oblast, 10 more than previously reported on June 3.[10] Russian forces on this axis are continuing to prioritize efforts to link advances in southeast Kharkiv Oblast with efforts in northwestern Donetsk Oblast.[11] However, these BTGs have likely suffered heavy combat losses and may be comprised of the remnants of other units. Ukrainian reports of an additional 10 BTGs operating on this axis likely indicate that the Kremlin has reorganized its units and possibly deployed some reinforcements, but it is unlikely that Russian forces have truly increased their available combat power by 50%. Additionally, Russian attacks remain largely road-bound and confined to narrow frontages, and Russian forces will likely struggle to leverage any new weight of numbers.
A Russian Telegram channel stated that Russian forces seized Pryshyb on June 9 and are conducting ground assaults on Sydrove, two villages south of Sviatohirsk and about 20 km north of Slovyansk.[12] While ISW cannot confirm these claims, they are indicative of continued Russian efforts to push southward from Sviatohirsk and suggest that Russian forces have successfully crossed the Siverskyi Donets River in the Sviatohirsk-Tetyanivka area.[13]
Russian forces conducted ground, air, and artillery attacks to the east of Bakhmut on June 10 in a continued effort to cut the Bakhmut-Lysychansk highway. [14] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces are conducting ground assaults on Nyrkove, Mykolaivka, Nahirne, and Berestove (all settlements east of Bakhmut along the T1302 Bakhmut-Lysychansk highway) and that they are advancing on the Vozdvyzhenka-Roty line from the south of Bakhmut.[15]
Supporting Effort #1—Kharkiv City (Russian objective: Withdraw forces to the north and defend ground lines of communication (GLOCs) to Izyum)
There were no significant developments in northern Kharkiv Oblast on June 10. Russian forces continued defensive operations to prevent further Ukrainian advances toward the international border and fired on Ukrainian positions in and around Kharkiv City.[16]
Supporting Effort #2—Southern Axis (Objective: Defend Kherson and Zaporizhia Oblasts against Ukrainian counterattacks)
Russian forces continued to strengthen their defensive lines and conducted ground and artillery attacks along the Southern Axis on June 10.[17] The Ukrainian General Staff noted that Russian forces focused on improving the fortification of their second and third lines of defense and carried out camouflage measures to support defensive operations.[18] Russian sources notably claimed that Russian troops took control of the Kinburn Split–a small peninsula near Ochakiv in the northern Black Sea, on the southern border of Mykolaiv and Kherson oblasts.[19] Russian forces have consistently bombarded Ukrainian naval assets in Ochakiv for the last month, and if these Russian claims are true, control of the Kinburn Split will allow Russian troops to exert greater control of the northwestern Black Sea coast. Russian troops continued to fire on various locations in Mykolaiv, Dnipropetrovsk, Zaporizhia, and Kherson oblasts.[20]
Activity in Russian-occupied Areas (Russian objective: consolidate administrative control of occupied areas; set conditions for potential annexation into the Russian Federation or some other future political arrangement of Moscow’s choosing)
Russian occupation authorities continued measures to set conditions for administrative control of occupied areas on June 10. Ukraine’s Southern Operational Command reported that Russian-backed political collaborators in Kherson Oblast initiated a new wave of unspecified preparations for a referendum on the annexation of occupied territories directly into Russia.[21] Russian occupation authorities are additionally exerting greater control through the education sector and Russian officials are reportedly planning to retrain teachers in the Donbas using Russian curricula.[22] Advisor to the Mayor of Mariupol Petro Andryushchenko similarly reported that occupation authorities in Mariupol have begun importing Russian textbooks into schools in the city.[23] Despite Russian efforts to consolidate control of occupied areas through educational means, occupation authorities are still largely unable to provide adequate social or medical services for residents of occupied territories, and the medical system in Mariupol is reportedly near collapse as a result of mismanagement by Russian authorities.[24]
2. Ukrainian special-operations forces doubled in size while training with the US, top US special-ops commander says
Ukrainian special-operations forces doubled in size while training with the US, top US special-ops commander says
Ukrainian special-operations forces during an exercise in May 2019.
ArmyINFORM/Ukrainian Ministry of Defense
- Since Russia's 2014 invasion of Ukraine, Ukrainian troops have trained closely with the US military.
- That includes Ukraine's special-operations forces, which have doubled in size over that period.
- Since Moscow began its latest attack in February, those Ukrainians have wreaked havoc on the Russians
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Three months into the war, the Ukrainian military has awed the world with its impressive defense against the invading Russian forces.
Ukrainian special-operations forces have played a big part in that resistance. But to develop those skills, Ukraine's operators have been working hard for years and learning from the best.
How the US helped Ukraine's commandos
A US Army Green Beret does a close-quarters-battle drill with Romanian and Ukrainian special operators in Romania, May 6, 2021.
Romanian army/Capt. Roxana Davidovits
Since 2014, US special-operations forces have been training their Ukrainian counterparts on pretty much every skill set and mission set imaginable.
The years-long effort by the US and its NATO allies to train their Ukrainian counterparts has created a solid military force with a robust non-commissioned corps. It also created a cadre of potential recruits for Ukrainian special-operations units, helping those units not only get better but bigger.
"Our special-operations forces help develop and work with other allies to come into Ukraine and help build up the Ukrainian special-operations forces," Gen. Richard Clarke, the head of US Special Operations Command, told members of the House Armed Services Committee at a hearing in April.
Since that training began eight years ago, those Ukrainian forces have "doubled in size," Clarke said.
Ukrainian troops during special-operations training in November 2015.
Andriy Ageev/Ukrainian Ministry of Defense
The SOCOM boss acknowledged that the US effort to train Ukraine's special operators was broad and included conventional US troops and National Guard units. (Special-operations troops from the UK and other NATO militaries have also trained Ukrainians.)
Clarke highlighted that Ukrainian special operators have also added new capabilities, with US operators bringing them up to speed on operational planning, urban warfare, and small-unit tactics, among other things. But it is in the unconventional-warfare mission set where the Ukrainians have learned the most.
Before the first Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014, Ukrainian special operators were aligned with Russian doctrine and practice. As former Soviet republic, Ukraine's military was heavily influenced — and in a lot of ways, it still is — by the Soviet model.
That history means there weren't a lot of differences between Ukrainian and Russian special operators, but that has completely changed after eight years of training with Western commandos.
Ukrainian, Romanian, and US Army Special Forces soldiers during an exercise in Romania, May 6, 2021.
Romanian army/Capt. Roxana Davidovits
Today, Ukraine's military has a competent special-operations component that can tackle any problem that Russia throws at it.
Beyond combat skills, US Army Psychological Operations and Civil Affairs troops worked with the Ukrainians on soft skills that could increase their effectiveness on the battlefield.
From the start of the current conflict in February, Ukrainian forces have conducted highly effective information warfare. The information that Ukrainians have intercepted, sometimes with help, and distributed the world — radio intercepts of Russian troops in disarray and video after video of Russian hardware being destroyed — has compounded the humiliation of Russia's military and security services.
"One aspect is that it was a lot of our civil affairs, our psychological operations, and our Special Forces that were also working side-by-side with Ukrainians," Clarke told lawmakers. "It wasn't just combat forces, but it was also other parts of special operations that work very closely with their Ukrainian partners."
Ukrainian special-operations forces
A Ukrainian special-operations forces soldier secures an opposing-force prisoner during an exercise in Bulgaria, June 17, 2019.
US Special Operations Command Europe
Using their inherent organizational flexibility and taking advantage of the Russians' lackluster force-security practices, Ukrainian special operators took out Russian logistical convoys, starving Russian frontline units of ammo, fuel, and reinforcements.
One tactic Ukrainian commandos used was the employment of small anti-tank weapon teams on quad-bikes or motorcycles. These mobile teams could outrun and outmaneuver the cumbersome Russian columns and use anti-tank missiles or mines to take out Russian tanks, armored personnel carriers, and infantry fighting vehicles.
Videos frequently emerged showing Ukrainian commandos ambushing and destroying Russian mechanized columns and even elite Russian units, such as the VDV airborne forces.
The Russian advance ground to a halt, and Russian troops have since retreated from many areas in northern and northeastern Ukraine. Ukrainian special operators were key to stopping the Russian advance on Ukraine's capital, Kyiv, in particular.
Ukrainian special operators have performed admirably thus far. With the conflict appearing to settle into a new, more static, and more grinding phase, whether Ukraine's military can keep pushing the Russian invaders back will depend on more than its commandos.
Stavros Atlamazoglou is a defense journalist specializing in special operations, a Hellenic Army veteran (national service with the 575th Marine Battalion and Army HQ), and a Johns Hopkins University graduate.
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3. How the Marine Corps went to war with itself over the next war
Detailed analysis from Worth Parker.
Excerpts:
For the Commandant, FD 2030 is simply another form of employing the Warfighting spirit. For his opponents, it represents a critical vulnerability in the ability to do so. Regardless of form, the simple fact remains that the philosophical essence of what it means to be a Marine — to fight, to overcome difficult odds, to win even if it means self-sacrifice — only changes if we as a nation, through our policymakers, decide it must.
But there is an unasked question in all this concern for the future of the Corps and its ability to be the most ready when the nation is least ready. Where has this clamorous debate been for 30 years? Where were the salvos of op-eds as decades of Marine leadership allowed Warfighting’s enduring and compelling voice to obscure an operational reality that rendered the Corps a second land army wearing water wings and mired in three decades of quasi-imperial warfare? It is hard to understand how Warfighting’s brilliant simplicity is honored by a $1.1 trillion F-35 program that did not see combat use until 17 years into the Global War on Terror — by a country not even party to the effort. It is hard to see adaptation and speed in a critically flawed maintenance, safety, and training culture that doomed nine Marines in an amphibious assault vehicle to sink in thousands of feet of water; just one of numerous deadly and preventable mishaps.
The question that must ultimately be answered about any martial plan is whether Marines will live or die, win or lose, by its implementation. On this point, proponents of Warfighting and FD 2030 diverge. But given the years since 2001, and the now suddenly explosive debate about the future form of combat for the Corps, the Marines who do the fighting may certainly be forgiven if they ask the high ranking leaders on both sides why the issue of Marines dying without winning has not been already been addressed with equal or greater vigor. Marines at the sharp end of the spear have been reckoning with it for years.
How the Marine Corps went to war with itself over the next war
Two years into an unprecedented 'redesign' of the service, some are calling the changes an existential threat to the Marine Corps itself.
In 1989, then-Commandant of the Marine Corps Alfred M. Gray reenergized the post-Vietnam Marine Corps with the publication of Warfighting, a visceral statement of the Corps’ combat, leadership, and adaptability doctrine that spoke as much to who Marines are as what they do. Thirty-three years later, the thin manual is known today as Marine Corps Doctrinal Publication One and still canonizes the fighting philosophy of the Marines. But Warfighting has always been controversial. It was written quickly and quietly, by one Marine captain working directly for the Commandant and with minimal input from the broader Marine Corps. Gray’s approach — jamming through innovation against strong headwinds — seems echoed today by Commandant David H. Berger’s efforts to change the design of the Corps with an audacious document called Force Design 2030 (FD 2030), a fact that seems somewhat ironic given the stiff opposition he faces from some of Warfighting’s most ardent advocates.
In Warfighting, the sole author, a Marine captain named John Schmitt, synthesized martial theories and enduring truths about the nature of war. War is a violent struggle between two hostile, independent, and irreconcilable wills; dynamic, uncertain, and chaotic. War is a process of continuous mutual adaptation, of give and take, move and countermove. Speed is a weapon; boldness a source of combat power. Sharp observers of the current war in Ukraine see these truths played out daily. Warfighting is a relatively simple statement of the essential beliefs of the Corps, intentionally written for riflemen and commanders alike. Therein lies its genius.
But Warfighting has always had its critics, and with only one minor revision in 1997, it is aging. In The Blind Strategist, Stephen Robinson rips Warfighting down to the studs. His analysis of American wars since the document’s inception finds far more examples of Marines professing adherence to Warfighting’s maneuver warfare than any actual execution thereof. Moreover, the elegant language that captivated some Marines in the late 1980s reads like a boring history lesson for some Marines today. In 2020, Capt. Walker Mills argued that Warfighting teeters on the verge of irrelevance for its lack of a mention of irregular war, great power competition, or even the Marines’ naval character. He called it an industrial age philosophy for an information age Marine Corps. Mills’ last point hits the hardest, driving at the heart of the very public and ugly debate over current Commandant of the Marine Corps Gen. David H. Berger’s FD 2030.
Marine Lance Cpl. Austin White, a rifleman with 3d Battalion, 2nd Marine Regiment, patrols during an exercise in Okinawa, Japan, on May 11, 2022. (Sgt. Micha Pierce/U.S. Marine Corps)
Instead of massing to fight a 20th century maneuver ground war using tactics applied by the German Wehrmacht — more on this uncomfortable lineage later — under Force Design 2030, or at least the initial version, Marines will disperse to fight in small groups, relying upon stealth for survivability and striking at adversaries with long-range precision weapons. For a service that still derives much of its identity from a history of charging across wheatfields or beaches through storms of steel, it is an undeniable cultural shift.
Since its release, Berger has come under heavy fire from retired Marine generals. Former Commandant Charles C. Krulak led the attacks against Berger’s force design. Along with Gens. Anthony Zinni and Jack Sheehan, Krulak attacked Berger’s plan for discarding the tanks and artillery central to conventional warfare, and maneuver warfare within it. Krulak has since called for a ceasefire because “the discussion about Force Design 2030 and the future of our beloved Corps is degenerating into a partisan street fight, complete with much disinformation, straw man characterizations of opposing positions and slanderous ad hominem attacks.” The internecine firefight has not been lost on Congress, with Marine veterans and Reps. Seth Moulton and Mike Gallagher penning a bi-partisan editorial supporting Berger’s plan, cosigned by six additional Marine veterans now serving in the House.
Critics of Warfighting also argued against what they perceived to be radical change. In 1995, Marines like Lt. Col. Stephen Lauer slammed Warfighting as a rejection of the realities of war, a “tactical dogma” ignoring what he believed to be the Marine Corps’ historically disciplined, do-as-I-say approach to combat leadership. Gray, Krulak, Van Riper, and others had to push past those counterforces within the Marine Corps to make Warfighting a reality.
So, is Warfighting dead text? Does Force Design 2030 represent the new reality of war? Or is there a Venn overlap of unrecognized truth between these two radical documents? And are they really, truly radical? At least one is.
Screw the rules: How Warfighting came to be
Retired Marine Corps Gen. Al Gray speaking in January 2022 at the Marine Corps University. (Cpl. Eric Huynh/U.S. Marine Corps)
Al Gray remains a Marine Corps icon. Gray was an enlisted Marine; a veteran of combat in Korea and Vietnam who once walked into a minefield to save a wounded Marine. He was one of the Corps’ great mavericks, the kind of Marine who dared to break rules, and succeed greatly, in an organization known for rigid standards. As commandant, Gray typically wore camouflage utilities rather than dress uniforms and regularly punched enlisted Marines in the chest — hard — to show affection. Warfighting was Gray’s vision and he bent rules and ignored the conventions of the Marine Corps’ often mind-numbing bureaucracy to bring it to life.
Gray was an impatient intellectual in a Corps suffering through a post-Vietnam anti-intellectual malaise. Commanding the 2nd Marine Division in the early 1980s, he declared maneuver warfare the official doctrine of his division. Then-Lt. John Schmitt was a platoon commander in 3rd Battalion, 6th Marine Regiment. He remembers being called to the base theater at Camp Lejeune along with every officer in the 2nd Marine Division, where Gray declared, “Maneuver warfare is the doctrine of Second Marine Division. Get on board or get left behind.” Though already a “maneuverist,” Schmitt could not have known how much that day would affect his future. Gray kept pushing forward with the maneuver warfare concept and in 1987 when he became commandant, he wasted no time cementing maneuver warfare as the Corps’ foundational doctrine, though years later he would say he regretted using the word doctrine instead of philosophy. It’s an important distinction as Warfighting is more about how Marines should think about warfare than how they should execute warfare.
In another maverick move, Gray ignored the line of colonels outside his office lobbying for the task of composing the document and assigned just one junior officer — then frocked Capt. John Schmitt — to write Warfighting alone and responsible only to Gray, an experience Schmitt now describes as “pretty surreal.” Still, Schmitt did regularly consult with now-retired Lt. Gen. Paul K. Van Riper, a man often recognized for his own martial innovation, as documented in Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking and more deeply examined by Micah Zenko. Van Riper would ultimately be the man who carried Warfighting to the masses.
Maneuver warfare is at the heart and soul of the synthesis of ideas published as Warfighting. Building from B.H. Liddell Hart’s Strategy, Carl Von Clausewitz’s On War, and Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, it embraces warfare as a spiritual art in which the uncertainty and chaos inherent to war become opportunities from which to gain an advantage over the enemy. Marines operate not as puppets dangling from officers’ fingertips, but as semi-autonomous thinkers continuously adapting to find the best and fastest ways to win. Maneuver is primarily a psychological, not a physical concept. Physical movement and killing are always applied with one central intent: to break the will of the enemy. It is an ideal that has inspired warfighters, business professors, and Wall Street executives alike with its clarity, emphasis on initiative, and aggressive spirit.
Marines in the Infantry Officer Course run to their first objective during a live-fire training exercise at Range 410A aboard the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center, Twentynine Palms, Calif., June 9, 2018. (Lance Cpl. William Chockey/U.S. Marine Corps)
As Schmitt was drafting Warfighting, building upon bottom-up momentum generated by informal Marine study groups, Gray brought Marine allies such as Van Riper and Cols. Michael Wyly and Patrick “Paddy” Collins to Quantico, Virginia, in what became known as the “Quantico Renaissance.” He also availed himself of outsiders like William “Bill” Lind and legendary Air Force Col. John Boyd to help plant his flag in the chest of an intellectually stultified Marine Corps. Lind was a controversial figure, an Ivy League scholar of German history with no military experience, a gap that did not prevent him from claiming to have started the debate over maneuver warfare in the 1970s. Boyd was best known for describing the OODA loop, an air-to-air combat concept he broadly applied to ground war theories. Lind and Boyd were both fans of the closely related German military concepts of Blitzkrieg, or “lightning war,” and Auftragstaktik, or mission command, and of Liddell-Hart’s belief in the indirect approach to warfighting.
Gray gave Schmitt minimal guidance. In fact, Schmitt says, Gray refused to give any direct guidance. Instead, the commandant spoke in parables, Schmitt recalled to Task & Purpose.
“I would ask him what he thought and he would look at me and say, ‘Let me tell you a story about Little Al Gray.’ What he was doing was maneuver warfare,” said Schmitt. “He made sure I understood his intent, but he left it up to me to figure out how to accomplish the mission.”
Gray met with Schmitt only twice during the writing process, then signed off on the draft with only one change. Where Schmitt had written within the introduction a charge for every Marine to read Warfighting, Gray inserted, “…and re-read.” If Warfighting had turned out to be just another military document; written, published and largely ignored, this would still be a remarkable story. But it wasn’t remotely ignored.
Schmitt wrote well, distilling the best parts of Clausewitz and Sun Tzu into prose accessible to the Marines who would do the actual fighting. Warfighting has since spawned a series of equally compelling, readable Marine Corps doctrinal publications, or MCDPs, on everything from campaigning to leadership to intelligence. Schmitt had a hand in many of these as well. Taken together, the books anchor Marine Corps training and education. But when it comes to institutional change, the messenger matters as much as the message.
The guest who wouldn’t leave: Bill Lind versus the Marine Corps
Getting an organization of 200,000 people to buy into a book like Warfighting requires salesmanship, a painful lesson Commandant Berger is now learning two years into the life of FD 2030. Gray’s acolytes, including Van Riper, pushed hard to get Marines to adopt all aspects of maneuver warfare. The hard push was only partially successful.
Some shortcomings embedded in the text itself created unavoidable sales challenges. Retired Marine colonel and historian Matt Jones argues that just about everyone agrees with the Clausewitzian nature-of-war descriptions in the first two chapters of Warfighting, concepts broadly accepted across Western militaries. But Jones and others find the last two chapters less convincing, too esoteric, and overly prescriptive. As an example of the contrast, many Marines loved the idea of mission command — being given leeway to adapt and operate without micromanagement — but didn’t quite know what to do with concepts like “surfaces and gaps,” in which the unleashed war machine was analogized to water flowing across the battlefield to find the points of least resistance. Van Riper, Schmitt, and others in Gray’s inner circle needed all the help they could get in selling Warfighting in some parts of the Marine Corps, but while they were energizing Marines with the best parts of Warfighting, Bill Lind was alienating Marine leaders well-positioned to undermine Gray’s initiative.
William Lind during a panel discussion on national security issues in 2014. (CSPAN)
It is hard to find Marines who served in the 1980s or 1990s who have fond memories of Bill Lind. Even before Gray ascended to commandant, Lind wrote an article in The Washington Post calling senior Marine officers inept for failing to prevent the 1983 Beirut barracks attack and personally criticized then-Commandant P.X. Kelley for refusing to embrace his ideas about war and tactics. In the same article, he described war as an intellectual chess match, taking the idea of winning without fighting to an unrealistic extreme. According to Lind, the purpose of a rifle is not to kill, but to suppress the enemy so he can be outmaneuvered. That notion didn’t wear well in a Marine Corps culturally centered on good old-fashioned rifle killing at close range.
Gray and Lind were both enamored of German military concepts from the world wars. But Lind pushed the German example to the point that it became repellent, often showing up unannounced and wearing an ersatz German officer’s uniform at Marine planning sessions, exercises, and training schools like the Infantry Officer Course. Lind had the often-infuriating habit of telling even the most talented Marine officers they were wrong or simply stupid before quoting German Wehrmacht doctrine to set them straight. Many of these officers — all aware that Lind had no actual military experience and that the Germans had lost both world wars — went on to become colonels and generals. They remembered Lind’s words and demeanor and could not have helped associating it with maneuver warfare, a lingering resentment well documented in Marine Corps War College professor Jim Lacey’s 2014 article, “The Continuing Irrelevance of William Lind.” Despite Lind’s issues, Warfighting — a document written in isolation and rammed through the Marine bureaucracy by a maverick leader — remains the philosophical foundation of the Marine Corps. To some, it is ironic that several of its most loyal adherents are also the harshest critics of Commandant Berger’s FD 2030 initiative.
Maverick innovation redux: Force Design 2030
Gen. David Berger
In March 2020, Gen. Berger released Force Design 2030, a document intended to ensure the Marine Corps could meet two challenges: “effectively playing our role as the nation’s naval expeditionary force-in-readiness, while simultaneously modernizing the force in accordance with the National Defense Strategy (NDS)…” This was a relatively anodyne statement for a document that signaled essential cuts and changes to the Corps’ longstanding structure. To its critics, FD 2030 was anathema to maneuver warfare, principles foundational to Warfighting.
In an article for Politico, Paul McLeary and Lee Hudson assert that a group composed of “every living former commandant, along with a slew of other retired four-star generals revered within the Corps…are bristling at different aspects of foundational changes introduced by Commandant Gen. David Berger…”. Former Senator and Secretary of the Navy James Webb, himself a revered Marine, puts the number at 22. Some of the most popular post-9/11 Marine leaders — James N. Mattis, Joseph F. Dunford, and John F. Kelly — may or may not be affiliated, but Gens. Krulak, Zinni, Sheehan, and Lt. Gen. Van Riper are decidedly the public face of a vociferously anti-FD 2030 movement.
By openly criticizing Berger — and the criticisms have sometimes taken on an uncomfortable, personal tone — the group of Marine leaders has traveled beyond normative rules for retired general officers, particularly in the stoic ranks of a service that values order and discipline. In an article on the subject, Former Deputy Secretary of Defense and retired Marine Robert O. Work calls the attacks “unseemly” and a “shakedown,” terms that are themselves starkly aggressive characterizations relative to the normal tone of senior executive communications. A day after Work’s article was published, Van Riper responded that FD 2030 constitutes an “existential threat” to the Corps. If true, FD 2030 might well justify the vitriolic public response from the retired Marine diaspora. Regardless of perspectives, based on their extensive service experience and demonstrated depth of love and commitment to the Corps, one must conclude the retired generals and Marine veterans are as genuinely concerned about the future of the Marine Corps as are the Commandant and his supporters. Their arguments deserve attention.
But is FD 2030 truly an existential threat to the Corps? John Schmitt thinks that’s the wrong question.
“The question is the impact on national security. I just don’t think a high-intensity fight with China in the Pacific is going to be the fight. I think the competition with China is going to take other forms in lots of other places. But if that does turn out to be the fight, I think other components of the force are better prepared and equipped for it,” said Schmitt.
Members of Chinese special operations forces train in Beihai, North China’s Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region on January 4, 2022. (Yu Haiyang/Costfoto/Future Publishing via Getty Images)
“But with regard to Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations (EABO), if this is going to work, we have to commit forces to being inside the Weapons Engagement Zone (WEZ) before hostilities commence. FD 2030 is simultaneously shrinking the pool from which forces may be drawn and committing those reduced forces to a fight that may never come. There is an opportunity cost there.”
FD 2030’s critics’ central critique revolves around the shift to Asia and the focus on China as a pacing threat. They assert that if the Marine Corps focuses on fighting a long-range missile war with China, it will be inherently inflexible, a contravention of the Corps’ historic roles in both crisis response and support to standing war plans. Perhaps most heretically, goes the assertion, FD 2030 will leave the Corps incapable of dealing with the chaotic uncertainty, a factor central to the Marines’ Warfighting philosophy. As Schmitt offered, “When you’re designing your military, one of the main decisions is whether you prioritize the Big One, the existential threat that is frankly unlikely, or the lesser contingencies that are guaranteed. The Navy and Air Force have tended to prioritize the existential threat. The Army has tended to focus on the Big One with the ability to swing to the other contingencies. The Marine Corps, as the nation’s force-in-readiness, has focused on all the other stuff with the ability to shift over to existential fights as needed. Who handles the other stuff if the Corps is not? This seems like a pretty unilateral move by the Marine Corps.”
Marines certainly need to be available to fight in any conflict, anywhere, any time, but even with the significant changes in the appearance of some aspects of the Corps, Berger and other defenders of FD 2030 view this argument by its detractors as a canard.
The Commandant has been unequivocal in his evaluation of the Corps’ capability to meet the demands of the 2018 National Defense Strategy, which specifically directs the Department of Defense to focus on China as a “pacing threat.” Against that standard, Berger says the Marine Corps is “unsuited to future requirements in size, capacity, and specific capability.” It’s a charge more broadly echoed by Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley regarding the entire U.S. Armed Forces.
Commandant of the Marine Corps Gen. David H. Berger speaks to Marines and Sailors during a visit to Marine Corps Air Station, Miramar, Calif., Aug. 27, 2019. (Sgt. Olivia G. Knapp/U.S. Marine Corps)
“I believe we that we are in a fundamental change in the character of war, and by that I mean how you fight, where you fight, the doctrine, the equipment, the tactics, techniques and procedures, and so on,” Milley said recently. “We’re in the middle of a real, unbelievable fundamental change, which is probably the biggest fundamental change in the history of warfare.” Given those full-throated assertions, what does this force design — really, a force redesign — demand of the Corps?
According to the May 2022 update to FD 2030, Berger wants a Marine Corps that can do it all, centered on the ability to win wars. Marines have to be ready to help the joint force win global competition while staying purpose-built for naval campaigns, and also ready to support the full range of operations it has in the past: conventional war, counterinsurgency, humanitarian assistance, etc. In Berger’s view, lumbering armored columns won’t cut it in the fight against China, or even in Europe. Berger dropped the Corps’ tanks entirely, replaced most of its howitzers with rocket and missile launchers, and dropped 12,000 Marines from the rolls to pay for investments in advanced technology to help the Marines compete and win on the modern battlefield. Force Design 2030 is a shift intended to be supported by a “campaign of learning,” a program of design, experimentation, and force reduction that, as briefed, seems as audacious as…Warfighting.
But Berger’s interpretation of the modern character of war stands in stark contrast to that of the retired generals. That lack of buy in and, frankly, his salesmanship of both the document and its ideas has been lacking, a subject well understood by his opponents, who lived the opposition to Warfighting.
Some of the retired generals’ ire seems to have coalesced around the difference between what was intended versus what has actually happened. In their view — and at least to some extent, objectively — the hard cuts in capability came before the routine years of testing and experimentation were remotely completed. Put succinctly, they believe Berger has put the cart before the horse. Berger saw no other choice. He believed that if he let bureaucracy lead innovation, innovation would die. Certainly, there is precedent to support that view, but John Schmitt contrasts the cloistered FD 2030 process with the intellectual free for all that surrounded Warfighting and finds the current approach lacking.
“We had open and frank arguments about maneuver warfare on the pages of the Marine Corps Gazette. By the time Gray became Commandant and made maneuver warfare doctrine, there was institutional buy-in. I don’t think that’s happened here. Anytime you have a closed process, behind closed doors, you risk an echo chamber. John Boyd used to tell us, ‘Cast your net widely’ in pursuit of good ideas. A more open process would have taken longer but had a smoother time of it. Part of the reaction you’re seeing is pushback against the closed process. People don’t feel like they have a say or that their concerns have been heard. There is a lack of feeling of ownership.” Perhaps that’s part of why Berger pulled the trigger, trading consensus for speed and likelihood of success. It’s an issue also noticed by former Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict Owen West, himself a Marine and the son of Marine veteran, former Assistant Secretary of Defense, and FD 2030 opponent Bing West.
“For a one-off prototype you can take some risk, but if you’re doing something like this, something truly transformational, alienating stakeholders on this scale is bad business,” said West. Pressed for his views on issues inherent to FD 2030, West made a very good business case against the level of iterative testing and experimentation conducted in support of FD 2030, noting, “The bureaucratic process is eye-watering, but it has produced evolutionary change for decades. There’s no question it was short-circuited here. Because of that combination of speed and lack of input, the conceptualizations of Stand-in Forces have been all over the place, which is rare for Marine communications. What is the mission of this new force, exactly? The retired community did us all a service by forcing the USMC to hone its argument.”
Gunnery Sgt. Anthony Stockman, a sergeant instructor, evaluates officer candidates during close-order drill at Marine Corps Officer Candidates School aboard Marine Corps Base Quantico, Virginia, June 21, 2019. (Lance Cpl. Phuchung Nguyen/U.S. Marine Corps)
Of course, any argument has an opposing argument. During a fiery debate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, former Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work said, “Look, Title 10 invests in the Commandant of the Marine Corps, and in all service chiefs, the ability to make a POM – a program objective memorandum. And that POM describes how the service chief, the commandant in this case, wants to expend the resources that are being provided to him or her by the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and how he wants to organize the Marine Corps…He briefed it to then-Secretary of the Navy Richard Spencer, who approved the plan. He briefed it to then-Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, who approved the plan. He then briefed Force Design 2030 – and I don’t know if he personally briefed it or the ACMC did, the assistant commandant, to what is called the Deputy’s Management Action Group, which is the place where all of the services come in and say: This is how we want to go forward. I spoke with Deputy Secretary Norquist, who was the deputy secretary at the time. And he said, I vividly remember this, because the commandant came in and did not ask for any money to do the plans he was going to do. He said, I am going to free up — I’m going to divest things. I’m going to free up resources. And I’m going to pay for everything I want to do. And the deputy said, wow, this is — this is different. Normally services come forward and say, I don’t have enough money, please give it to me. But he was very impressed. He asked the China red team, which is the team in the Department of Defense, to look at the plan. And the China red team said, this is a very, very good thing for us to do. So he recommended it be approved by the secretary of defense in the secretary’s program. He did. It was sent to OMB, the Office of Management and Budget, who makes it – creates what is called the BES, the budget estimate submission, that sends it to Congress. In essence, once that goes from Office of Management and Budget, it reflects that the president has approved it. It goes to Congress and was approved in the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act, and again in 2022. So, the whole idea that this was some type of a sleight of hand is crazy. It literally could not happen.”
For all that disagreement, parallels between Gray’s approach to Warfighting and Berger’s approach to FD 2030 are impossible to ignore. Both documents were intended to change the way the Marine Corps fights wars. Both commandants pushed through controversial innovations with limited input (to be fair, Berger and others dispute this assertion). And, for differing reasons, both commandants had problems with salesmanship. The May 2022 FD 2030 Annual Update seems to at least acknowledge this last point: “Our FD 2030 communication has not been effective with all stakeholders.” That may be an epic understatement given the breadth and depth of the retired generals’ high-profile pushback.
Berger’s FD 2030 update tries to address some of the core criticisms from the retired generals. He pushes hard to incorporate maneuver warfare into the design concepts. The word maneuver appears repeatedly. Berger specifically declares that “our maneuver warfare approach is not changing.” This appears to be a reasonable statement. If Warfighting is a philosophy and not a force design, then in theory the two documents can live side by side: One explains warfare and tells Marines how to think about and prepare for fighting, and the other reorganizes the service to meet the demands of a war with China.
The appearance of change versus real change
For all of the angst generated by Warfighting, it really didn’t change much. After it was published, good things happened in the margins. Gray and others implemented programs to bring all Marines up to fighting standards with Basic Warrior Training, a kind of mini-infantry school for non-infantrymen. Adaptability was increasingly emphasized in training and education. But Warfighting arguably didn’t even constitute innovation, as the Marine Corps of the 1990s looked, acted, and fought a great deal like the Marine Corps of the 1980s.
At least since World War I, Marines have struggled to mediate a balance between maverick and warrior virtues, between adaptability and discipline, between loose and strict control, and between the interpretation of war as art and war as science. Schmitt’s prose merged the dialectic. Chapters Three and Four may fall flat for some Marines, but the blunt eloquence of the first two chapters of Warfighting describes war as Marines have always seen it: a chaotic opportunity to aggressively adapt and win; to thrive where others shrivel. Many Marines still like (or even love) Warfighting because its uncompromising language reflects their self-perception as Marines: aggressive, adaptive, and relentlessly committed to winning. Warfighting’s laser focus on the human aspects of warfare serves as a stark reminder to technophiles — including those enamored with the high-tech aspects of FD 2030 — that war is, fundamentally, about people and about their will to fight.
A U.S. Marine communicates with his squad during a training exercise at Twentynine Palms, Calif., Nov. 2, 2018. (Cpl. Timothy J. Lutz/U.S. Marine Corps)
Force Design 2030 unquestionably drives some stark changes for elements of the Marine Corps. But perhaps the distributed approach central to Berger’s design is the pinnacle of Gray’s vision and the plan’s opponents should pause and give credit where it is due. Berger is unquestionably living the aggressive, adaptive, dynamic ethos of Warfighting, the philosophy propagated by many of his critics, and under which he grew and developed as a Marine officer. If FD 2030 works, small units of Marines will be operating with remarkable degrees of autonomy, punching above their weight in a high-order conventional fight. Conversely, while Berger may be right that most combat capabilities remain in place, voluntarily cutting every tank, most howitzers, and three infantry battalions to pay for advanced technology is an aggressive, even risky, move. Krulak, Van Riper, Sheehan, Zinni, and other critics — including Warfighting author John Schmitt — deserve to be heard, and listened to, on the attendant dangers.
For the Commandant, FD 2030 is simply another form of employing the Warfighting spirit. For his opponents, it represents a critical vulnerability in the ability to do so. Regardless of form, the simple fact remains that the philosophical essence of what it means to be a Marine — to fight, to overcome difficult odds, to win even if it means self-sacrifice — only changes if we as a nation, through our policymakers, decide it must.
But there is an unasked question in all this concern for the future of the Corps and its ability to be the most ready when the nation is least ready. Where has this clamorous debate been for 30 years? Where were the salvos of op-eds as decades of Marine leadership allowed Warfighting’s enduring and compelling voice to obscure an operational reality that rendered the Corps a second land army wearing water wings and mired in three decades of quasi-imperial warfare? It is hard to understand how Warfighting’s brilliant simplicity is honored by a $1.1 trillion F-35 program that did not see combat use until 17 years into the Global War on Terror — by a country not even party to the effort. It is hard to see adaptation and speed in a critically flawed maintenance, safety, and training culture that doomed nine Marines in an amphibious assault vehicle to sink in thousands of feet of water; just one of numerous deadly and preventable mishaps.
The question that must ultimately be answered about any martial plan is whether Marines will live or die, win or lose, by its implementation. On this point, proponents of Warfighting and FD 2030 diverge. But given the years since 2001, and the now suddenly explosive debate about the future form of combat for the Corps, the Marines who do the fighting may certainly be forgiven if they ask the high ranking leaders on both sides why the issue of Marines dying without winning has not been already been addressed with equal or greater vigor. Marines at the sharp end of the spear have been reckoning with it for years.
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Russell Worth Parker is a freelance writer and retired United States Marine Corps Special Operations Officer. His more than 27 years of service included infantry and special operations assignments in Iraq and Afghanistan. He may be reached at RWP@russellworthparker.com.
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4. US: China's military activity around Taiwan threatens region
Excerpts:
“Our policy hasn’t changed, but unfortunately that doesn’t seem to be true for the PRC,” he said.
...
“We remain focused on maintaining peace, stability and the status quo across the Taiwan Strait,” Austin said in his address. “But the PRC’s moves threaten to undermine security, and stability, and prosperity in the Indo-Pacific.”
He drew a parallel with the
Russian invasion of Ukraine, saying that the “indefensible assault on a peaceful neighbor has galvanized the world and ... has reminded us all of the dangers of undercutting an international order rooted in rules and respect.”
Austin said that the “rules-based international order matters just as much in the Indo-Pacific as it does in Europe.”
US: China's military activity around Taiwan threatens region
AP · by SYAWALLUDIN ZAIN and DAVID RISING · June 11, 2022
SINGAPORE (AP) — U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin stressed American support for Taiwan on Saturday, suggesting at Asia’s premier defense forum that recent Chinese military activity around the self-governing island threatens to change the status quo.
Speaking at the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore, Austin noted a “steady increase in provocative and destabilizing military activity near Taiwan,” including almost daily military flights near the island by the People’s Republic of China.
“Our policy hasn’t changed, but unfortunately that doesn’t seem to be true for the PRC,” he said.
Taiwan and China split during a civil war in 1949, but China claims the island as its own territory and has not ruled out using military force to take it.
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“We remain focused on maintaining peace, stability and the status quo across the Taiwan Strait,” Austin said in his address. “But the PRC’s moves threaten to undermine security, and stability, and prosperity in the Indo-Pacific.”
He drew a parallel with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, saying that the “indefensible assault on a peaceful neighbor has galvanized the world and ... has reminded us all of the dangers of undercutting an international order rooted in rules and respect.”
Austin said that the “rules-based international order matters just as much in the Indo-Pacific as it does in Europe.”
“Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is what happens when oppressors trample the rules that protect us all,” he said. “It’s what happens when big powers decide that their imperial appetites matter more than the rights of their peaceful neighbors. And it’s a preview of a possible world of chaos and turmoil that none of us would want to live in.”
Austin met Friday with Chinese Defense Minister Gen. Wei Fenghe on the sidelines of the conference for discussions where Taiwan featured prominently, according to a senior American defense official, speaking on condition of anonymity to provide details of the private meeting.
Austin made clear at the meeting that while the U.S. does not support Taiwanese independence, it also has major concerns about China’s recent behavior and suggested that Beijing might be attempting to change the status quo.
Wei, meanwhile, complained to Austin about new American arms sales to Taiwan announced this week, saying it “seriously undermined China’s sovereignty and security interests,” according to a Chinese state-run CCTV report after the meeting.
China “firmly opposes and strongly condemns it,” and the Chinese government and military will “resolutely smash any Taiwan independence plot and resolutely safeguard the reunification of the motherland,” Wei reportedly told Austin.
Chinese Defense Ministry spokesperson Col. Wu Qian quoted Wei as saying China would respond to any move toward formal Taiwan independence by “smashing it even at any price, including war.”
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In his speech, Austin said the U.S. stands “firmly behind the principle that cross-strait differences must be resolved by peaceful means,” but also would continue to fulfill its commitments to Taiwan.
“That includes assisting Taiwan in maintaining a sufficient self-defense capability,” he said.
“And it means maintaining our own capacity to resist any use of force or other forms of coercion that would jeopardize the security or the social or economic system of the people of Taiwan.”
Austin stressed the “power of partnerships” and said the U.S.’s “unparalleled network of alliances” in the region has only deepened, noting recent efforts undertaken with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or ASEAN; the growing importance of the “Quad” group of the U.S., India, Japan and Australia; and the trilateral security partnership with Australia and the United Kingdom, known as AUKUS.
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He dismissed Chinese allegations that the U.S. intends to start an “Asian NATO” with its Indo-Pacific outreach.
“Let me be clear, we do not seek confrontation or conflict and we do not seek a new Cold War, an Asian NATO, or a region split into hostile blocs,” he said.
Australian Defense Minister Richard Marles told the forum that AUKUS, under which Australia will acquire nuclear-powered submarines from the U.S. with the help of Britain, was a technology-sharing relationship, and “not in the set of arrangements as you would describe NATO.”
France’s new defense minister, Sebastien Lecornu, suggested his country was willing to put the matter behind it, saying the alliance with Australia was a long one, recalling the sacrifice of the “young Australians who came to die on French soil during World War I.”
“There are ups and downs in all relations between countries, but when there were real dramas, Australia was there,” he said.
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Rising reported from Bangkok
AP · by SYAWALLUDIN ZAIN and DAVID RISING · June 11, 2022
5. The Potential of Integrating Intelligence and Intuition
Excerpts:
As you can guess by now, I think that precognition is among the forms of intuition that the IC needs to consider. But unlike the efforts from the past century, the work, as much as possible, should be pursued openly and in collaboration with scientific researchers.
A new emphasis on System 1 thinking will inevitably present us with moments of possible precognition. We no doubt will discover skilled precogs among our analysts, who have probably been using these skills all along, perhaps not knowingly. But we will need to use our System 2 analytic minds to distinguish noise from true signals and to develop protocols to explore these signals with rigor.
Many will scoff at these ideas and indeed, the concept of precognition remains controversial within the scientific community. There is a strong bias in the intelligence and scientific communities that all reality is materially-based and that speculation about non-material, non-rational phenomena is delusional and, even worse, a type of con-job. But I’ve yet to see any scientific proof that all reality is materially-based—only assertions, conjecture, and wishful thinking. And the more I’ve read about quantum physics, the nature of time, consciousness, and the mysteries of the mind, the more I’ve come to appreciate the awesome potential of human cognition.
Our people have always been our greatest resource; the time has come to make use of all our minds have to offer.
The Potential of Integrating Intelligence and Intuition
EXPERT PERSPECTIVE — When I was just starting out at CIA, there was an analyst in my group who worked in a particularly methodical way. As she read all the various intelligence reports, she would type on a sheet of paper (and it was a typewriter then) the excerpts that she considered meaningful. She would then cut the paper into strips, so that each strip contained just one excerpt, and filed them in notebooks. When it came time to write an article about a particular issue, she would pull out the relevant strips of paper, organize them into paragraphs, write connecting and transition language and an occasional topic sentence, and, voila! She had an analytic product.
I am not making this up. On occasion, I would walk by this analyst’s cubicle just when she had laid the strips of paper in the optimum order, and I would be sorely tempted to blow on her desk to scatter the strips hither and yon. I never did that, but I did – even as a junior analyst – ask my bosses whether they approved of this approach to analysis. I certainly didn’t. Even early in my career, I appreciated that reality was not a cut-and-paste operation. I remember them shrugging their shoulders and remarking that they couldn’t argue with the productivity. Our analyst was the most prolific member of the team, churning out analytic content at twice the rate of any of the others. But her intelligence reports, accurate in the details, were uninspiring in their insight.
This memory came to mind when I read about the Director of National Intelligence’s ongoing review of how the IC assesses the fighting power of foreign militaries, particularly their “will to fight.” The effective stubbornness of Ukraine’s military surprised US policymakers who had been told by the IC that Russian forces would make short work of its defenses. What were those assessments based on? My hunch is they were based on the available reporting, which probably could account for concrete, objective things such as the quantity and quality of military equipment, and even anticipated tactics. But there were clearly some aspects of the situation that traditional intelligence reports could not account for no matter how meticulously they were assembled.
What is lacking in established intelligence tradecraft and how can we fill in the gaps? This is the question I’ve been examining throughout my 40+ years as an analyst.
The methods of the Intelligence Community—and indeed of most knowledge organizations—skew in favor of rational cognitive practices. But there are any number of major human and societal issues that escape—to one degree or another—rational cognitive examinations.
Emotions—how each individual reacts to a particular event—are an obvious example. But beyond individual emotions, we can also speak of national moods. As was recently argued by Stephen Coleman in the International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, “citizens’ attunement to political mood comprises an element of political orientation that exceeds cognitive explanation.”
What we are witnessing in Ukraine, is the power of a resolute national mood and will to survive. Moods tend to be about everything and nothing, Coleman argues, and can coalesce quickly. At some point, will we witness the development of a new mood among Russians? Will the Intelligence Community see it coming?
The answer: Not if it only pursues rational, cognitive approaches toward making sense of the world.
Making sense of the world requires more than the collation of intelligence reports—regardless of how detailed they are. It’s time for the IC to expand its thinking repertoire by seriously exploring nonlinear and more impressionistic mental practices.
Daniel Kahneman’s publication in 2011 of his landmark book, Thinking Fast and Slow focused new attention on the problems of cognitive biases and the advantages of good thinking. (Kahneman has since admitted that some of the book’s conclusions were based on experiments that are now known to suffer from the replication problems afflicting social science research.) Even if you haven’t read the book, you’re probably familiar with the concept of System 1/System 2 thinking that Kahneman popularized. System 1 thinking could almost be described as non-thinking. It’s automatic and fast and directs much of what we do as humans. System 2 thinking is logical, well-ordered, and slow. It is what we call rational thinking, and we like to tell ourselves that it’s protected from emotional contamination.
The reaction to the book from many organizations, including the Intelligence Community, was to conclude that knowledge workers need to do more System 2 thinking and less System 1 non-thinking. Quick, intuitive reactions to an issue or event (System 1) are riddled with irrational cognitive biases; we’re better off improving our rational, logical thinking practices. This will result in better analysis and support to policymakers…or will it?
My sense is that this overcorrection toward System 2 thinking—and the labeling of more intuitive, less-structured practices as not helpful, error-prone, and perhaps even nonprofessional, has – in my view – been a mistake. Our intuitive System 1 minds are in many ways more powerful than our System 2 processing.
System 1 can connect dots and identify patterns that will escape even the most careful reading of the usual sources. Reading reports and categorizing their contents—the default tradecraft of the intelligence community—may be fine when we’re tracking widgets, but these methods can’t keep up with the complexity of modern times. We already know that artificial intelligence and deep machine learning hold considerable promise in making sense of wildly separate and yet subtly interconnected events—they are essentially an imitation of our System 1 processes. But each of us also comes with an amazing piece of standard equipment—the human brain—that can detect patterns and relationships without our conscious involvement. Yes, we can use artificial intelligence to process reams of data—but it’s becoming clear to me that we won’t know what to do with that data unless the Intelligence Community prioritizes the improvement of our intuition.
The idea that intuition is the much lesser partner of analytic thinking is based on misunderstandings of human thinking processes. When a thought or gut feeling enters our mind unbidden, it is likely the product of behind-the-scenes brain work. Many neurologists now think the brain can best be described as a predicting machine that constantly compares its current perceptions against all its memories. The brain can detect emerging patterns or changes that deserve attention, long before the analytic brain comprehends evidence of a new trend.
As a recent study on creative thinking found, the best results should occur when System 1 and System 2 collaborate on decision making and insight-production. After all, behavioral evidence tells us that the number of confounding factors we confront exceeds all of our System 2 sensemaking abilities; there are more than enough mysteries to go around.
Despite the disregard many have for intuition, some knowledge workers explicitly acknowledge the role of intuition in their work. Historian of Science Jimena Canales has written that, “stories of scientific discovery often turn on moments of imagination, dreams, and the unreal.” Among the scientists who have pointed to dreams as sources for their discoveries are Dimitri Mendeleev, Alfred Russell Wallace, and James Watson. Workers in fields such as marketing and design for whom creativity is essential often employ practices—such as meditation—to better access their intuition. Intuition is particularly essential for dealing with more difficult, wicked problems that cannot be solved through linear thinking.
What can the Intelligence Community do to improve its use of intuitive talents?
First, stop discouraging the application of intuition. I remember a time when intelligence agencies insisted that every analytic judgment be backed by a specific intelligence report. Of course, it’s good practice to base our judgments on sound intelligence but it’s folly to insist upon this as an absolute rule. We are not absolutely certain that intelligence reports and other information we receive accurately represents 100% of reality; in fact, we are certain this is not the case, and we can’t correctly estimate what percentage of reality we fail to capture.
To drive home this point, I would often ask groups of analysts to tell me—if the entire room represented all that could be known about Al Qaeda—what part of the room represented what the Intelligence Community actually knew? On more than one occasion, an analyst held up a coffee cup.
We can’t very well tell policymakers that a group of analysts has a hunch that X or Y could happen, at least not without preparatory groundwork. But we can encourage analysts to engage in quiet individual or group reflections on a regular basis to allow new or different ideas to penetrate their consciousness. As Asta Raami, a researcher on “intentional intuition” notes, any behavior that encourages quieting of thoughts can be helpful in gaining new insights.
Over the years, the IC has experimented with non-traditional analytic methods that had the potential to incorporate intuition. One technique was asking analysts who were covering political instability, to use numerical scoring to keep track of how things were progressing…or not. An individual’s score could reflect not just what she knew analytically but what her intuition might be telling her.
The activity became tedious over time and deteriorated into a box-checking exercise. Prediction markets and crowd-sourcing techniques are other methods that can harness the power of intuition. IARPA (the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity) has sponsored prediction markets but to my knowledge, their results haven’t often been conveyed to policymakers. Even when the IC experiments with non-traditional analytic methods, it has been reluctant (embarrassed?) to use them to support policymakers directly.
One approach that hasn’t been tried, is to explicitly incorporate our intuitive faculties into analytic tradecraft. The Intelligence Community could emulate the best practices developed by other organizations to deepen and harvest System 1 thinking. Analysts would be coached about the limitations of intelligence reporting—how it is inherently incomplete and particularly bad on complex issues and questions of human will and determination.
They would also learn how to apply our thinking abilities—System 1 and System 2—for the situations they are best suited. And in much the same way that brainstorming has been incorporated into analytic work, meditative practices would become a standard analytic technique. Intuition coaches would emerge as a new role in analytic units—individuals adept at helping analysts discern among their moments of intuition and hunches, identifying those worthy of further examination.
The explicit incorporation of intuition into analytic tradecraft is not about intuition replacing analytic reasoning; it is instead about combining both to achieve better results overall. Individuals with deep domain expertise—such as Nobel Prize winners—often have the most compelling intuitive insights. They receive rather than produce these insights because their minds are trained to recognize the value of “out of the blue” ideas.
While intuition can deliver potential leads that traditional analytic tradecraft can pursue or collect against, the IC will need to fight its inclination to standardize intuitive practices. Intuition is a personal experience; some practices that work for one individual will be pointless for others. I often find new ideas entering my mind during a long walk or just after I wake up. Intuition coaches can help analysts identify what works best for them.
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Intuition training leads to precognition.
All of us have the experience of thoughts entering our minds unbidden. But we rarely ask ourselves where those thoughts came from. In recent years, researchers—influenced in part by discoveries in quantum physics about the uncertain nature of time—have explored whether there is in fact, a way for the human brain to receive signals from the future. Lately, I have wondered whether information about the future can leak into the present, and whether humans can detect it.
For more than two decades prior to 1995, the IC studied the idea that precognition is possible. Specifically, both DIA and CIA pursued programs in remote viewing where individuals were asked to put their minds in a state in which they felt they could describe distant physical locations, facilities, and even people—not only as they existed at that moment, but how they would look at some future point.
When CIA inherited the program in the early 1990s, the agency asked the American Institute for Research (AIR) to evaluate its efficacy, and AIR asked psychologist Ray Hyman and statistician Jessica Utts to comb through several years of data. Both reviewers assessed that the remote program’s precognition results were statistically significant. Nevertheless, the CIA decided to kill the program because, according to the official report, it was not clear how to incorporate remote viewing results into standard intelligence reporting.
In the almost thirty years since, the study of precognition has advanced independent of the IC’s level of interest. Precognition has emerged as a statistically significant experimental effect, both when it’s assessed with skilled practitioners and among the general population. Scientists now are working to identify what factors influence precognitive performance; it appears that meditation experience, belief in the phenomenon itself, and positive feelings may all have an impact.
The financial and investment industries, always looking for an edge, have also experimented with precognition, including methods for identifying and training skilled “precogs.”
As you can guess by now, I think that precognition is among the forms of intuition that the IC needs to consider. But unlike the efforts from the past century, the work, as much as possible, should be pursued openly and in collaboration with scientific researchers.
A new emphasis on System 1 thinking will inevitably present us with moments of possible precognition. We no doubt will discover skilled precogs among our analysts, who have probably been using these skills all along, perhaps not knowingly. But we will need to use our System 2 analytic minds to distinguish noise from true signals and to develop protocols to explore these signals with rigor.
Many will scoff at these ideas and indeed, the concept of precognition remains controversial within the scientific community. There is a strong bias in the intelligence and scientific communities that all reality is materially-based and that speculation about non-material, non-rational phenomena is delusional and, even worse, a type of con-job. But I’ve yet to see any scientific proof that all reality is materially-based—only assertions, conjecture, and wishful thinking. And the more I’ve read about quantum physics, the nature of time, consciousness, and the mysteries of the mind, the more I’ve come to appreciate the awesome potential of human cognition.
Our people have always been our greatest resource; the time has come to make use of all our minds have to offer.
Read more expert-driven national security insights, perspective and analysis in The Cipher Brief because National Security is Everyone’s Business.
6. FDD | Hungary’s Orban Is Hardly a Model for American Conservatives
Strongly concur with this conclusion. I just do not see how anyone could think that they could align themselves with Orban.
Conclusion:
Mr. Orbán’s Hungary has been a fair-weather friend to America. The demographically challenged, internationally isolated ethno-state and its politics troubled by delusions of its past grandeur is the wrong place to look for answers about the future of America’s democracy. The sooner Orbán-enamored conservatives realize that they are being taken for a ride, the better.
FDD | Hungary’s Orban Is Hardly a Model for American Conservatives
fdd.org · by Ivana Stradner Advisor · June 10, 2022
Prime Minister Viktor Orbán of Hungary knows how to win. Weeks after being re-elected for a fourth consecutive term, he deftly negotiated a carve-out from the European Union’s embargo on Russian oil. And at the recent Conservative Political Action Conference at Budapest, he was treated like a rock star, illustrating the outsized place that Orbán and Hungary occupy in the imagination of American conservatives.
Yet, Mr. Orbán is no conservative. He is an opportunist who understands his electorate and has tilted the rules of the game to his advantage. Under Hungary’s carefully curated veneer of traditionalism and standing up to “globalists” is a country that is far from a model for American conservatives.
We are no progressives or mushy liberals offended by Mr. Orbán’s attacks on the left’s sacred cows. Rather, having grown up in Hungary’s backyard — in Serbia and Slovakia, respectively — and being proud of our conservative credentials, we are aware of the dangers that his brand of nationalism poses to regional stability and also to American interests.
“Hungary is the laboratory,” Mr. Orbán told CPAC, “where we have managed to come up with the antidote for progressive dominance.” Indeed. Florida’s law, backed by Governor DeSantis, prohibiting teaching about sexual orientation or gender identity from kindergarten to 3rd grade mirrors similar legislation in Hungary.
If Mr. DeSantis revoked some of Disney’s tax privileges in response to the company’s promotion of nontraditional gender and sexual orientations, Mr. Orbán banned gender studies from Hungarian universities.
If you think that culture wars are all there is to conservative politics, Mr. Orbán is your man. Yet, by holding him as a paragon of conservatism, one has to discard free-market economics.
Mr. Orbán’s government has made frequent use of price controls, government-created monopolies and ad hoc levies on foreign-owned companies. He has arbitrarily revoked the broadcasting licenses of media outlets critical of his government, and has encouraged the concentration of media ownership in the hands of an opaque “foundation” administered by his cronies.
Conservatives who are concerned about American progressives’ control of the nation’s leading political, legal, and cultural institutions should be the first to recognize a similar pattern in Hungary — with Mr. Orbán, not the left, in control. Freedom House classifies the country as a hybrid regime, with mostly free but unfair elections, politicized judiciary, and restricted media freedom.
It is one thing to praise Hungary from the comfort of America’s constitutional protections. It is quite another to experience Hungary’s version of cancel culture, in which voicing a critical opinion leads to a loss of employment, harassment, or government-sponsored sting operations.
What else is there to Hungary’s “conservatism”? The Ohio Republican candidate for Senate, J. D. Vance, has spoken highly about Hungary’s family policy, which involves generous benefits to parents. Yet, Hungary’s birth rate has barely budged, remaining less than 1.5 per woman — lower than America’s current rate of 1.7 per woman.
The Fox News host Tucker Carlson is enamored of Hungary’s anti-immigration policies. The chaos of 2015 and the current refugee wave from Ukraine aside, Hungary is just not a very attractive destination for migrants. In fact, Hungary’s population has declined by 250,000 due to aging and emigration.
National sovereignty? It is hard to take Mr. Orbán’s paeans to the nation-state seriously given his own revisionism that would like to see the 1921 Trianon Treaty revised and the territories of surrounding countries returned to Hungary. His Euroskepticism, meanwhile, squares oddly with the fact that Hungary is among the largest recipients of EU funds per capita, raking in over 500 euros per person.
If you do like Mr. Orbán’s idiosyncratic domestic policies and want to label them as “conservatism,” so be it. Semantics aside, Hungary remains one of the most pro-Russian and pro-Chinese countries in Europe. Just this week Mr. Orbán managed to secure an exception in the EU’s latest sanctions package against Moscow that ensures that Hungary can continue to receive Russian oil via pipeline.
His new defense minister, Kristóf Szalay-Bobrovniczky, has extensive business interests in Russia. The Hungarian government even went out of its way to stop the planned EU sanctions on the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, Kirill, known for his weakness for Breguet timepieces.
Hungary was also among the first European countries to join China’s Belt and Road initiative and maintains a strategic partnership with Beijing in fields from vaccines production to digital industries.
Mr. Orbán rebuked the Trump administration’s warnings over security risks posed by Huawei. The Chinese giant also established a Research & Development center at Budapest in 2020 and Mr. Orbán tried to lure, to great public outcry, Shanghai’s Fudan University to open a campus in Hungary.
Mr. Orbán’s Hungary has been a fair-weather friend to America. The demographically challenged, internationally isolated ethno-state and its politics troubled by delusions of its past grandeur is the wrong place to look for answers about the future of America’s democracy. The sooner Orbán-enamored conservatives realize that they are being taken for a ride, the better.
Ms. Stradner serves as an advisor to the Foundation of Defense of Democracies, where her research focuses on Russia’s information warfare and cybersecurity. She tweets at @ivanastradner. Mr. Rohac is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington DC. His research focuses on Central and Eastern Europe, transatlantic relations, and the European Union. He tweets at @DaliborRohac. FDD is a nonpartisan research institute focused on national security and foreign policy.
fdd.org · by Ivana Stradner Advisor · June 10, 2022
7. Ukraine pleads for weapons as 100-200 soldiers die a day
Excerpts:
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy last week put his country’s daily combat death toll at up to 100, but Podolyak said it had grown. Ukrainian officials have pointed at the mounting losses to emphasize their urgent requests for more Western weapons, which have been critical to the country’s unexpected success in holding off Russia’s larger and better-equipped forces.
After a bungled attempt to overrun Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, in the early days of the war, Russia shifted its focus to an eastern region of coal mines and factories known as the Donbas. But its progress there has been plodding.
Podolyak said the delivery of state-of-the-art artillery systems would not only diminish Ukrainian casualties, it would help its the nation’s forces reclaim seized territory. The Ukrainian government also is seeking more multiple-rocket launchers.
Ukraine pleads for weapons as 100-200 soldiers die a day
KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Up to 200 Ukrainian soldiers are dying every day in the war with Russia, and only more and more advanced Western weaponry will reduce the casualties, turn back the Russian offensive and force Moscow to the negotiating table, an adviser to Ukraine’s president said.
Mykhailo Podolyak told the BBC in an interview that aired Thursday the daily loss of between 100 and 200 Ukrainian fighters resulted from a “complete lack of parity” between Ukraine and Russia, which has “thrown pretty much everything non-nuclear” at the war’s front in eastern Ukraine.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy last week put his country’s daily combat death toll at up to 100, but Podolyak said it had grown. Ukrainian officials have pointed at the mounting losses to emphasize their urgent requests for more Western weapons, which have been critical to the country’s unexpected success in holding off Russia’s larger and better-equipped forces.
An injured Ukrainian servicemen is transferred to a medical facility after getting an emergency medical treatment in the Donetsk region, eastern Ukraine, Tuesday, June 7, 2022. (AP Photo/Bernat Armangue)
After a bungled attempt to overrun Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, in the early days of the war, Russia shifted its focus to an eastern region of coal mines and factories known as the Donbas. But its progress there has been plodding.
Podolyak said the delivery of state-of-the-art artillery systems would not only diminish Ukrainian casualties, it would help its the nation’s forces reclaim seized territory. The Ukrainian government also is seeking more multiple-rocket launchers.
“There’s something really important...that our partners need to understand, and that’s until Russia suffers a serious military defeat, no form of dialogue will be possible, and they will continue to be able to try and take parts of our country,” he said.
Podolyak also addressed Western fears that Ukraine’s forces would use Western-supplied rocket launchers to strike targets inside Russia and potentially escalate the conflict to a wider conflagration: “It won’t happen,” he said.
Street battles
Fighting in the Donbas has ground on for more than two months, and the slog continued Friday. A provincial governor said Russian and Ukrainian forces battled “for every house and every street” in Sievierodonetsk, a city that recently has been under steady attack.
Sievierodonetsk is in the last pocket of Luhansk province that has not yet been claimed by Russia or Moscow-backed separatists.
Luhansk Gov. Serhiy Haidai told The Associated Press that Ukrainian forces retain control of the industrial zone on the edge of the city and some other sections amid the painstaking block-by-block fighting.
An envoy for the Luhansk People’s Republic, a self-proclaimed separatist territory, reported Friday that some Ukrainian troops were trapped inside a chemical plant on the city’s outskirts.
“All escape routes have been cut off,” Rodion Miroshnik, Moscow ambassador for the unrecognized republic, wrote on social media.
Ukrainian troops fire with surface-to-surface rockets towards Russian positions at a front line in the eastern Ukrainian region of Donbas on June 7, 2022. (Photo by Aris Messinis/AFP via Getty Images)
“They are being told that no conditions will be accepted. Only the laying down of arms and surrender,” he said.
Miroshnik echoed earlier claims by a Russian defense official that civilians remained on the plant’s grounds. But he stopped short of reiterating allegations that Ukrainian forces were barring them from leaving.
As of Friday afternoon, there was no response from the Ukrainian side.
‘Sham’ trial
The British government said Russia must take responsibility for the “sham trial” of two Britons and a Moroccan who were sentenced to death for fighting against Russian forces in Ukraine.
Britons Aiden Aslin and Shaun Pinner and Moroccan Brahim Saadoun were convicted by a court run by pro-Moscow separatist authorities in the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic, which is not recognized internationally.
Separatist authorities argued that the men were “mercenaries” not entitled to the usual protections accorded prisoners of war.
Aslin’s and Pinner’s families have said the two men were long-serving members of the Ukrainian military. Saadoun’s father told a Moroccan online newspaper that his son is not a mercenary and holds Ukrainian citizenship.
British government minister Robin Walker said Friday that it was “an illegal court in a sham government” but that the U.K. would use “all diplomatic channels to make the case that these are prisoners of war who should be treated accordingly.”
British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss is due to speak to her Ukrainian counterpart, Dmytro Kuleba, later Friday about the case. The U.K. has not announced any plans to speak to Russian officials. It does not recognize the self-proclaimed Donetsk republic and will not officially contact the authorities there.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said the ministry has so far not received any specific appeals about the men from Britain and as such, “we can make an unambiguous conclusion that until now the fate of these citizens was not of interest to London.”
Karmanau contributed from Lviv, Ukraine. Associated Press writers Jill Lawless in London and Jamey Keaten in Geneva contributed.
8. Communism Still Haunts Russia
Excerpts:
If Mr. Putin’s military defeat in Ukraine does ultimately lead to unrest in Moscow, the drama will only heighten. A post-Putin Russia will continue to be Europe’s greatest geopolitical challenge, and so we should be wary about quick fixes in Russian society or politics.
But because Russian bestiality in Ukraine is in part the end result of a century of ideology, it follows that a break from ideology offers the best hope for the future. A day may yet come when the West will have to help Russia. Kirkpatrick, ever the hopeful realist, ended her essay thus: “Liberal idealism need not be identical with masochism, and need not be incompatible with the defense of freedom and the national interest.”
Communism Still Haunts Russia
WSJ · by Robert D. Kaplan
Putin’s tyranny followed organically from the decade of anarchy kicked off by the Soviet collapse.
By
Robert D. Kaplan
June 8, 2022 1:22 pm ET
Illustration: David Klein
Commentary magazine published one of the most important essays of the 20th century in November 1979: “Dictatorships and Double Standards” by Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, who would go on to become President Reagan’s ambassador to the United Nations. Right-wing authoritarian regimes, she explained, controlled only the levers of power and thus didn’t tamper with the “habitual rhythms” of traditional societies; nor were they bent on revolution. Thus, they left their countries intact. Communist systems and ideology sought to remake societies, claiming “jurisdiction over the whole life” of their peoples, and therefore destroyed them utterly from top to bottom for decades to come.
Though Kirkpatrick’s focus was communist regimes in the Third World, no better example of this can be found than Russia, a superficially Europeanized society that sustained more than 70 years of communism. When the Soviet system finally collapsed in 1991, the result was not stability but a decade of near-anarchy. With such an inheritance, Vladimir Putin’s tyranny followed organically.
Mr. Putin has been described accurately as a fascist, owing to his cult of personality and ferocious ultranationalist assault on Ukraine. But as the extreme right and extreme left have always shared uncanny resemblances in their methods of control and demonization of enemies, it is also true that Mr. Putin has been Soviet in his style of rule. He has amassed more personal power than any Russian since Joseph Stalin.
Many were naive when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, thinking communism was consigned to an irrecoverable past. The past three decades have proved to be a mere false start for Russia because the problems of communism are still with us. The Russian Revolution wasn’t preordained. It was a matter of many tenuous and contingent factors. Had Czar Nicholas II remained in power, Russia would likely have evolved into an imperfect constitutional monarchy, not the murderous monstrosity of the past 100 years. To channel Kirkpatrick again, the right-wing option clearly would have done much less damage to Russia than the left-wing one has.
Nothing reveals Mr. Putin’s Soviet inheritance better than the structure and performance of the Russian army in the Ukraine war. Several years of embedding with U.S. ground forces taught me that a Western army is built around its noncommissioned-officer corps: the various sergeants and corporals who impose pride and discipline on the troops. The Russian military that Mr. Putin sent into Ukraine barely had an NCO corps. That didn’t matter much for the mercenaries and special-forces units that had fought Mr. Putin’s small wars.
But with the large conventional Russian force in Ukraine, the absence of a strong and competent NCO corps has been decisive. This is why so many Russian generals have been killed: Rather than remain in the rear directing large-scale movements as in a Western army, they have been deployed at the front and are therefore vulnerable. An army that is the product of Western democracy decentralizes decision making down through the ranks. An army that is the product of a Soviet system does not.
A post-Putin Russia is by no means imminent. The West will need to be patient and understanding. Kirkpatrick was herself cautious about imposing democracy on societies that had little experience of it. “In Britain, the road from the Magna Carta to the Act of Settlement, to the great Reform Bills of 1832, 1867, and 1885, took seven centuries to traverse,” she wrote. As for American history, it “gives no better grounds for believing that democracy comes easily, quickly, or for the asking.”
Daniel Patrick Moynihan reminded us that the central conservative truth is that culture, not politics, determines a society’s success. Russian culture remains the victim of a decadeslong revolutionary left-wing regime followed by a Putinesque variation. The army’s rot is reflective of dark forces in Russian society and politics at large—forces that would likely reveal themselves in the event of a power vacuum.
If Mr. Putin’s military defeat in Ukraine does ultimately lead to unrest in Moscow, the drama will only heighten. A post-Putin Russia will continue to be Europe’s greatest geopolitical challenge, and so we should be wary about quick fixes in Russian society or politics.
But because Russian bestiality in Ukraine is in part the end result of a century of ideology, it follows that a break from ideology offers the best hope for the future. A day may yet come when the West will have to help Russia. Kirkpatrick, ever the hopeful realist, ended her essay thus: “Liberal idealism need not be identical with masochism, and need not be incompatible with the defense of freedom and the national interest.”
Mr. Kaplan holds a chair in geopolitics at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. His most recent book is “Adriatic: A Concert of Civilizations at the End of the Modern Age.”
Appeared in the June 9, 2022, print edition.
9. Japanese PM Kishida Lays Out Indo-Pacific Strategy in Shangri-La Speech
Excerpts:
Kishida struck a more conciliatory tone in the question and answer session. In response to a question from People’s Liberation Army Lt. Gen. He Lei on Kishida’s vision of ties between Japan and China, Kishida said bilateral relations between the two countries were important not only for them, but also for the region and international community. Kishida called upon China to act responsibly and build a constructive relationship. He also pointed out North Korea’s repeated launch of ballistic missiles and efforts to strengthen its nuclear and missile activities in violation of U.N. Security Council resolutions. Kishida said those actions pose “a clear and serious challenge to the international community”.
During his speech, Kishida also spoke about Japan’s planned efforts to strengthen nations in the Indo-Pacific both in security and economic aspects. The security side will include transferring patrol boats in the region, strengthening regional maritime law enforcement capabilities and providing defense equipment and technology transfers. Singapore is one of the countries that will sign a defense equipment and technology transfer agreement with Japan.
Japanese PM Kishida Lays Out Indo-Pacific Strategy in Shangri-La Speech - USNI News
President Joe Biden and Japanese Prime Minster Fumio Kishida in Japan on May 23, 2022. Office of Prime Minister Photo
Japan Prime Minister Fumio Kishida unveiled his strategy for Japan’s role in the Indo-Pacific region during a Friday address at the International Institute for Strategic Studies Shangri-La Dialogue forum in Singapore.
Referring to it as the ‘Kishida vision for peace’, he said it would comprise five pillars of initiatives: maintaining and strengthening the rules-based free and open international order by bringing in new developments towards a free and open Indo-Pacific, enhancing security by advanced reinforcement of Japan’s defense capabilities in tandem with reinforcing the Japan-U.S alliance and strengthening security cooperation with other like-minded countries, promoting realistic efforts toward a world without nuclear weapons, strengthening the functions of the United Nations along with reform of the U.N. Security Council and finally, strengthening international cooperation in new policy areas such as economic security.
While Japan was committed to building a stable international order via dialogue and not confrontation, Kishida said it must be prepared for “the emergence of an entity that tramples on the peace and security of other countries by force or threat without honoring the rules.” He added that in order to prevent such situations, Japan must enhance its deterrence and response capabilities.
With the situation surrounding Japan becoming more severe, Kishida said the Japanese government will unveil a new National Security Strategy at the end of the year. He said he’s determined to reinforce Japan’s defense capabilities within the next five years and secure a substantial increase in the defense budget. Kishida also said Japan would not rule out any options, including obtaining counterstrike capabilities, though he stressed that Japan would not change its posture as a peace-loving nation and it will carry out any efforts in accordance with its constitution and international law.
Kishida criticized Russia for its invasion of Ukraine and reiterated Japan’s commitment to supporting Kyiv and the imposition of sanctions on Russia. He warned that the situation in Ukraine today could be East Asia tomorrow, a veiled swipe at China over its disputed claims in the region. He did not openly name China in his speech, but at the same time pointed to disputes in the East and South China seas, along with tensions over Taiwan. He said that in the East China Sea, unilateral attempts to change the status quo in violation of international law are continuing.
Kishida struck a more conciliatory tone in the question and answer session. In response to a question from People’s Liberation Army Lt. Gen. He Lei on Kishida’s vision of ties between Japan and China, Kishida said bilateral relations between the two countries were important not only for them, but also for the region and international community. Kishida called upon China to act responsibly and build a constructive relationship. He also pointed out North Korea’s repeated launch of ballistic missiles and efforts to strengthen its nuclear and missile activities in violation of U.N. Security Council resolutions. Kishida said those actions pose “a clear and serious challenge to the international community”.
During his speech, Kishida also spoke about Japan’s planned efforts to strengthen nations in the Indo-Pacific both in security and economic aspects. The security side will include transferring patrol boats in the region, strengthening regional maritime law enforcement capabilities and providing defense equipment and technology transfers. Singapore is one of the countries that will sign a defense equipment and technology transfer agreement with Japan.
Earlier on Friday, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin met with Chinese Defense Minister Gen. Wei Fenghe to discuss the U.S.-China defense relations on the sidelines of the Shangri-La Dialogue. A Pentagon news release said the meeting was programmed for 30 minutes, but lasted just under an hour, in which Austin and Wei mostly talked about Taiwan. They also talked about Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine, issues in Northeast Asia, and North Korea, according to the news release.
“Austin and Wei discussed the need for crisis communication between the two militaries. Austin urged China’s People’s Liberation Army to participate more proactively in crisis communications and crisis management mechanisms,” the U.S. Defense Department said in the release, with a senior U.S. defense official noting Wei “was responsive to that.”
China’s Ministry of National Defense issued a statement on the meeting, in which it said China hopes to establish a healthy and stable major-country relationship with the U.S. China said the U.S. must view China’s development and growth rationally, not attack and smear China, not try to contain and suppress China, not interfere in China’s internal affairs or harm China’s interests.
“Stable military-to-military relations are crucial to the development of bilateral relations, and the two militaries should avoid conflict and confrontation,” the statement said.
The Pentagon said that on Taiwan, “The secretary also read chapter and verse of the Taiwan Relations Act and stressed the part about the peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait ‘being of grave concern’ to the United States,” according to the U.S. defense official.
“Austin told Wei that the United States will continue to provide arms with defensive character to Taiwan as called for under the act. Also contained in the act is language that says ‘the United States will maintain the capacity to resist any resort to force that threatens the security of the people on Taiwan,'” the official continued in the release.
Wei Fenghe reiterated Beijing’s stance that Taiwan is a break-away province and that the basis of the U.S.-China relationship is rooted in the American “One-China” policy. Wei added that continued U.S. arms sales to Taipei, “damages China’s sovereignty and security interests,” according to a translation of the statement.
In other regional developments, Russian ships are operating in international waters in the vicinity of Japan based on news releases from the Joint Staff Office (JSO) of the Ministry of Defense. Russian surveillance ship RFS Pribaltica (80) was sighted sailing westward in an area 15 kilometers north of Cape Soya at 7 a.m. that day, according to a JSO news release issued Tuesday. The ship subsequently sailed eastwards through La Pérouse Strait. The release noted that Pribaltica had sailed west through La Pérouse Strait in May. A Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force P-3C Orion Maritime Patrol Aircraft (MPA) of Fleet Air Wing 2 based at JMSDF’s Hachinohe Air Base, Aomori, monitored the Russian ship.
Pribaltica sailed down south and was spotted on Thursday traveling southeast, about 90 kilometers south-southwest of Okushiri Island, Hokkaido, according to a JSO release issued that day. The release added that the ship then traveled through the Tsugaru Strait, which lies between Hokkaido and Honshu in the Pacific Ocean. JMSDF multipurpose support ship JS Suo (AMS-4302) and fast attack craft JS Wakataka (PG-825), along with a JMSDF P-3C Orion MPA of Fleet Air Wing 2 based at JMSDF’s Hachinohe Air Base, Aomori, monitored the Russian ship.
On Friday, the JSO issued another news release stating that on Thursday, a Russian Navy destroyer and four frigates were sighted operating in the waters about 170 kilometers southeast of the Nemuro Peninsula, Hokkaido. The ships were identified in the release by hull numbers corresponding to destroyer RFS Marshal Shaposhnikov and corvettes RFS Sovershennyy (333), RFS Gromkiy (335), RFS Gremyashchiy (337) and RFS Hero of the Russian Federation Aldar Tsydenzhapov (339). JMSDF destroyer JS Yudachi (DD-103) monitored the Russian ships, the release said.
The Russian Ministry of Defence has previously said the Russian Pacific Fleet would conduct a large-scale exercise involving more than 40 ships and about 20 aircraft in the Pacific Ocean and the waters around the Kuril Islands starting June 3, Japan Defense Minister Kishi Nobuo said in a Friday press conference. The Japan Defense Ministry believed the activities of the five ships were related to the exercise. Kishi said the Defense Ministry believes Russia is aiming to demonstrate its ability to operate simultaneously in the Far East, even during the invasion of Ukraine, and that Japan would continue to monitor these activities.
Related
10. Bizarre Drone Swarms That Harassed Navy Ships Demystified In New Docs
Conclusion:
Although many questions remain about these incidents, one thing is clear. Active surveillance of key naval assets is being conducted in areas where they train and employ their most sensitive systems, often within close proximity to American shores. Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence Scott Bray took pains to emphasize in a recent congressional hearing that the military "train as they would fight." Espionage collected in these areas is of extreme value to potential adversaries and poses a serious and ongoing national security threat. The War Zone previously laid out this reality and its implications in great detail in this feature.
We will continue to seek clarification regarding these incidents and keep readers updated as we analyze this complex new set of documents.
Bizarre Drone Swarms That Harassed Navy Ships Demystified In New Docs
A major release of documents provides the highest level of detail yet about mysterious drone swarms involving U.S. Navy ships off California.
BY
JUN 10, 2022 6:20 P
thedrive.com · by Adam Kehoe and Marc Cecotti · June 10, 2022
The War Zone has received a highly significant new set of documents from the U.S. Navy via the Freedom of Information Act about a series of enigmatic drone swarm events that occurred in the waters off Southern California in 2019. These incidents have come to be woven into an ongoing discussion about unidentified aerial phenomena, traditionally known as UFOs. In previous weeks, top defense officials told Congress that the 2019 swarm incidents were caused by drones. These new documents leave little doubt in that regard.
The documents include unprecedentedly detailed briefing materials and photographs from more than a half dozen incidents. Among these new incidents are previously unknown events that occurred in the early months of 2019 and were assessed by the Navy to involve intelligence collection operations. The new photographs also include images of drones apparently operating from an unresponsive civilian ship that was shadowing Navy vessels.
Speculation has swirled around these incidents in the last year, following high-profile leaks of night vision video footage depicting objects with an apparent triangular shape overflying Navy vessels. The unusual appearance of the objects led to widespread speculation that they were otherworldly UFOs, despite evidence that the Navy regarded the objects as conventional drones. The video was recently discussed in a congressional hearing on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena as an example of a solved case. According to Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence Scott Bray, the video was definitively identified as an unmanned aerial system (UAS) following a second swarm event that occurred off the East Coast of the United States this year.
Our previous coverage began with a series of drone incidents that occurred on July 15th, 2019 approximately seventy nautical miles off the east coast of San Clemente Island. A tranche of deck logs from Navy vessels indicated that several ships had encountered drones over an extended period of time.
USN via FOIA
We previously reported the close presence of several civilian vessels in conjunction with these sightings, notably the Hong Kong-flagged bulk carrier MV Bass Strait. Our initial investigation leveraged automatic identification system (AIS) ship location data in conjunction with deck logs to reconstruct the incidents. The terseness of the deck logs and limitations in AIS data left several unanswered questions, such as the origin of the drones and the specifics of their flight behavior. Many of those questions can now be answered.
By Tyler Rogoway
By Joseph Trevithick
By Howard Altman
By Adam Kehoe and Marc Cecotti
By Adam Kehoe and Marc Cecotti
By Tyler Rogoway
By Joseph Trevithick
Among the new documents released to us is this briefing slide, which depicts the course of the Bass Strait relative to the Arleigh Burke class destroyer USS Paul Hamilton, also abbreviated here as PHM, as it transited to a scheduled port call in Long Beach, California. The briefing slide states that the Navy assessed that the commercial cargo ship was likely conducting surveillance on Navy vessels using drones, or unidentified aerial vehicles (UAV). A timeline of events shows that the surveillance lasted for just under four hours. In that time, multiple UAVs were spotted operating around the destroyer.
USN via FOIA
An email sent on July 15th matches these details and references a number of images and one video file. These images were captured by the Ship Nautical Or Otherwise Photographic Interpretation and Exploitation team, or "SNOOPIE team." These teams consist of sailors trained to conduct onboard photographic intelligence in order to document unknown contacts and events of interest.
USN via FOIA
The images from the incident include these photographs of what appears to be the Bass Strait. The Bass Strait's owner and operator, Hong Kong-based Pacific Basin, did not reply to several requests for comment. In several of the pictures, dark spots presumed to be drones can be seen operating around the vessel:
USN via FOIA
USN via FOIA
USN via FOIA
Similar briefings were prepared by other Navy vessels involved in the incidents. The Ticonderoga class cruiser USS Bunker Hill (BKH) noted as many as 11 drones operating nearby. A note on the slide states that the cruiser unsuccessfully attempted to contact the Bass Strait. It also indicates that the UAS incident continued after the Bass Strait departed the area. The exact duration of the incident is less clear, though the timeline indicates drones were spotted over a period of about four and a half hours.
The timeline also indicates that Bunker Hill's AN/SPY-1 radar system held "valid tracks" of the drones, including up to an altitude of 21,000 feet. Although an image of one of the drones is hard to identify in the slide, a caption describes the objects as “Quadcopter style UAS.”
USN via FOIA
Finally, the USS Ralph Johnson (RJN), another Arleigh Burke class destroyer, also prepared briefing slides about the incident. They described intermittent radar tracks of the objects. A legend on the slide shows at least four UAS tracks, and the timeline mentions that lights from as many as 10 additional drones were visually spotted.
USN via FOIA
Notably, Ralph Johnson assessed the UAS as operating in a “safe and professional approach” that was "in accordance with the internationally recognized COLREGs 'rules of the road' and internationally recognized maritime customs" in a draft public affairs statement. It is unclear if this assessment was shared by the other vessels.
USN via FOIA
An email dated July 14, 2019, sent while the incident was in progress, stated that there was a pause between periods of UAS activity. The email further states that no counter unmanned aerial system (CUAS) measures were deployed during the first phase and that the USS Ralph Johnson was not at that time equipped with “DRAKE or other C-UAS equipment.” DRAKE refers to Northrop Grumman’s Drone Restricted Access Using Known EW (DRAKE) system, a portable anti-drone platform. Records previously released to us demonstrated that DRAKE systems were deployed to several ships later in July 2019. This email confirms that at least some ships were entirely without CUAS equipment, which was less common in the 2019 timeframe.
USN via FOIA
A US Navy sailor training with a Northrop Grumman DRAKE electronic warfare system. USN
Events From July 17th To July 30th, 2019
Our previous analysis of deck logs indicated that other events occurred several weeks after the initial events of July 14th and 15th. These events were significantly less clear than the earlier incidents. This is in part because traditional deck logs were not available from Littoral Combat Ships (LCS) due to their use of digital records. Briefing slides can now fill some of these gaps.
The first of these incidents came just days after the initial events. Documents show that the Arleigh Burke class destroyer USS Russell, also referred to by its hull number, DDG 59, and the abbreviation RSL), first reported an interaction with three unknown UAS on July 17th, 2019 approximately 62 nautical miles southwest of San Nicolas Island. The Russell has attracted particular attention in the last year as the vessel that captured the leaked “flying triangle” footage. A briefing slide states that the objects were not distinguishable by the naked eye. The incident occurred over a period of approximately one hour. Notably, a night scope image of an apparently triangular object can be seen in the lower left corner. According to the timeline, one of the objects hovered over the ship at an altitude of about 700 feet.
USN via FOIA
Included among the documents were other images, now highly recognizable from video leaks and congressional hearings. In congressional testimony, defense officials explained that "the triangular appearance is a result of light passing through the night vision goggles, and then being recorded by an SLR camera."
USN via FOIA
The July 21st And 25th Incidents
On July 21st, the USS Paul Hamilton again reported seeing a group of drones. In this incident, the drones were assessed to likely be operated by a “local fisherman operating personal quadcopters.” A note indicates that no videos were captured of the drones due to distance.
USN via FOIA
Several days later, the USS Gabrielle Giffords (GBG), an Independence class Littoral Combat Ship, encountered a set of four drones in the same general vicinity. The drones orbited around the ship during a flight of its own MQ-8B rotary-wing reconnaissance UAS, prompting the nearby USS Pinckney (PKN) to assist in an investigation. The USS Gabrielle Giffords also queried what it believed to be the UAS "homeplate" a term used to indicate an aircraft's home airfield or ship.
Three small boats were identified nearby, with one identifying themselves as a small fishing vessel. The USS Gabrielle Gifford's MQ-8B was deployed again after refueling, but was unable to locate the four UAVs.
USN via FOIA
The July 30th Incident
Deck logs previously indicated that another more complex incident occurred around July 30th, again involving multiple Navy vessels. It should be noted that in this time period, records show that some ships appear to have deployed and trained with a variety of counter drone technologies and techniques. These included the previously mentioned DRAKE system, a man-portable backpack that allows sailors to jam the radio frequency signals used to control drones. The USS Russell in particular is known to have these systems onboard prior to the incident on July 30th.
The exact nature of what happened in this incident was previously unknown due to heavy redactions in ship logs. However, the newly released documents contain several clarifying details.
A briefing slide from the USS Russell shows that the ship observed two groups of lights over a period of about three hours. During that time, several drones flew directly over the USS Russell. As in the earlier incidents, an unidentified pleasure craft was operating in the vicinity. The USS Kidd, another Arleigh Burke class destroyer, was also nearby, but did not report a visual sighting of the drones. The timeline indicates ships were directed by "GZ" but it is unclear what this abbreviation refers to.
USN via FOIA
A lengthier description states that a total of five unknown drones approached the USS Russell in the course of the incident. It also states that communication was never established with the nearby pleasure craft, though a standard UAS warning script was read over the radio.
USN via FOIA
A contemporaneous email from the USS Russell confirms these details, and further indicates that the DRAKE team was activated.
USN via FOIA
Deck logs further revealed that radiofrequency data was captured from the drones during the incident. These details were obtained after The War Zone successfully appealed extensive redactions of the ship logs. A reference to both the drones and the “RF” data can be seen below:
USN via FOIA
In addition to the USS Russell, the USS Paul Hamilton also reported observing multiple drones on July 30th. Though there are relatively few details, a briefing slide describes that multiple drones were observed, with some coming as close as 200 yards (closest point of approach; CPA) to the ship’s bow.
USN via FOIA
As in the other cases, a contemporaneous email report and draft public affairs statement provide further details. The USS Paul Hamilton reported observing and identifying the drones visually via “technical means.” Although an unknown vessel is referenced, it is unclear if this is the same ship that was operating near the USS Russell.
USN via FOIA
Notably, the public affairs statement characterizes the behavior of the drones as dangerous, and not in accordance with the “rules of the road” or “internationally recognized maritime customs.”
USN via FOIA
Finally, a photograph of one of the drones was included with the report:
USN via FOIA
Entirely New Incidents In Early 2019
While our initial investigation focused on the cluster of drone events in July described above, these new records also indicate that at least two other significant drone swarm events occurred in the waters off Southern California earlier in 2019.
The first incident occurred on March 30, 2019. The USS Harpers Ferry (HFY), an amphibious dock landing ship, reported seeing as many as 8 unknown drones flying directly over the ship at an altitude of about 500 feet.
USN via FOIA
A draft public affairs statement further added that the drones were thought to be “conducting collection operations” on the ship.
USN via FOIA
A month later, the USS Zumwalt, the Navy's most advanced surface combatant, encountered a set of six drones on April 24, 2019. In this incident, drones crossed the flight deck of the ship while flying in a “consistent pattern” that did not alter “course, speed, or altitude.”
USN via FOIA
Unclear images of the drones are also attached to the report, though few details can be made out:
USN via FOIA
Drone Swarms: A Growing Issue Since 2019
Based on these documents, the U.S. Navy had at least eight distinct encounters with groups of multiple drones in the waters off California in 2019. The circumstances of these incidents vary widely. Some incidents were assessed to be “collection operations” while others were attributed to local fishermen operating personal quadcopters. While drone overflights of Navy vessels are not new, the use of multiple drones simultenously is an emerging phenomenon.
Drone swarms are an increasingly common occurrence, though precise statistics about the total number and severity of incidents are hard to come by. The War Zone has previously created an interactive database of drone incidents reported to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), accessible here. While this data offers some perspective on the scope of incidents, it suffers from a number of limitations inherent in ad hoc reports. The Biden administration issued a new directive to address data collection, among other provisions, regarding drone incidents earlier this year.
To get a sense of how frequently drone swarms are occurring in recent years, we recently spoke with DroneSec, a drone cybersecurity firm based in Melbourne. DroneSec collects and categorizes drone incident reports on a global basis. The company also co-facilitates the Global Drone Security Network conference, a recurring series that brings together a wide spectrum of industry, academic, and government specialists.
DroneSec CEO Mike Monnik told us that incidents involving multiple drones have increased significantly worldwide since 2019. CTO Jared Page added that “definitely in the last two years there has been a marked increase in activity related to swarms.” The company’s threat intelligence database has registered approximately 151 swarm incidents in that time. According to Page, public reports started to escalate in late 2019.
Though some of these incidents involved things like attempts to hack civilian light displays, many fall in the realm of more nefarious activities. Monnik and Page emphasized that it is increasingly easy for criminals to field drone swarms. DroneSec cited a 2020 Department of Justice audit focused on the use of drones in delivering prison contraband as an example of how swarm technology is increasingly used in practice. The report referenced one notable incident that involved the simultaneous use of 15 drones to distract and overwhelm a prison facility’s security systems. Monnik noted that in recent years it has become more common for criminals to use one or more drones as a “canary” to assess the defenses of a target. Once a target has been shown to be defenseless or easily overwhelmed, subsequent drones can be deployed to accomplish a particular mission.
The team at DroneSec also spoke to the complexity of comprehensively defending against drone threats, emphasizing that no single technical solution exists yet. In the case of the naval incidents, some ships indicated that they did not yet have any operational C-UAS technologies. Monnik and Page explained that drone detection itself remains a very complex problem that often requires specialized radar and radio frequency equipment that is not guaranteed to work in all circumstances.
Addressing these particular security gaps has been a clear priority for the Navy in recent years, with a number of high-profile projects involving directed energy weapons. These concerns are shared broadly throughout the military and United States government. Last year Marine General Kenneth McKenzie Jr. said that drones are "the most concerning tactical development since the rise of the improvised explosive device in Iraq." Battlefield commanders in Syria and Afghanistan have both had to constantly contend with drone threats. Oil facilities in Saudi Arabia have been significant targets of drone attacks in recent years, with massive economic consequences. Within the western hemisphere, drones have been used by non-state criminal actors in Mexico both as means of smuggling and as weapons of war. Domestically, drone swarms have been an issue for nuclear reactor facilities and critical industrial infrastructure.
In addition to the technical challenges posed by drones, the Department of Defense has also struggled to encourage aviators and service members to report what they see, even if they can’t clearly identify it. The unusual commingling of the longstanding UFO issue with drones has arguably created a potent cultural blindspot that can be exploited by adversaries. Arguably, the year-long confusion surrounding the leaked footage from the USS Russell attests to this problem.
Many Questions Remain
In the previous year, it has been difficult to get definitive answers regarding these incidents. In our initial investigation, public affairs officials from the Navy, Coast Guard, and Federal Bureau of Investigations all either declined to comment or referred our questions to the Department of Defense’s spokesperson handling the unidentified aerial phenomenon (UAP) issue. Public affairs officials in multiple agencies have been consistently tight-lipped on this matter, with most information coming strictly through the Freedom of Information Act.
Following last month’s congressional hearing about UAP, we sought further clarification about the national security implications of drone swarms. While the Department of Defense spokesperson acknowledged our questions, they have not provided a comment at the time of writing. The details available in these official Navy documents stand at odds with the widespread perception of Chief of Naval Operations Michael Gilday's statement last year that the Navy was unaware of who was operating the unidentified aircraft. We now know that in several instances, the Navy had significant information about the potential origin of the drones deployed in some of the most serious incidents, although the specific operators remained unknown.
Although many questions remain about these incidents, one thing is clear. Active surveillance of key naval assets is being conducted in areas where they train and employ their most sensitive systems, often within close proximity to American shores. Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence Scott Bray took pains to emphasize in a recent congressional hearing that the military "train as they would fight." Espionage collected in these areas is of extreme value to potential adversaries and poses a serious and ongoing national security threat. The War Zone previously laid out this reality and its implications in great detail in this feature.
We will continue to seek clarification regarding these incidents and keep readers updated as we analyze this complex new set of documents.
thedrive.com · by Adam Kehoe and Marc Cecotti · June 10, 2022
11. Inflation is at historic highs, but Americans are spending money like they don’t care
I guess we have to spend our money quickly before it loses any more value.
Inflation is at historic highs, but Americans are spending money like they don’t care
Prices rose 1 percent in May alone, but spending is still high.
The most newsworthy economic data day used to be jobs, but as job growth continues to be strong, attention is increasingly focused on inflation. That’s because inflation continues to be at historic highs.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, prices rose 1 percent in May alone and 8.6 percent in the past year, a bit higher than economists’ expectations and higher than the 8.3 percent increase in April.
Inflation has become a painful and constant reminder for consumers. They’re seeing inflation in energy, food and housing prices. Particularly as Americans are out traveling again after the pandemic, vacations also seem more expensive than they used to. One of the largest contributors to inflation in May in the “core” categories (i.e., excluding food and energy) was plane tickets, which are being driven up in price by strong demand and expensive fuel.
The question now is how American consumers will respond. Recent data shows that consumers are out and spending again, even if they’re not buying the patio furniture, exercise clothing and appliances they were before.
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Managing Editor Kay Steiger grabbed Grid’s Domestic Economics Reporter Matthew Zeitlin to break down the latest inflation report.
Kay Steiger: What’s happening with inflation numbers? Are we seeing more of the same? Or is the story starting to change?
Matthew Zeitlin: With inflation, there are two stories. One is a set of goods and services that are very linked to the prices of commodities like oil and various grains. This includes food, gas, electricity and so on. Energy prices rose about 4 percent in May alone, with food going up over 1 percent, while the index that excluded food and energy was up “only” 0.6 percent in May.
The second big trend is in services. For a while, the story with inflation was that goods, especially durable goods (thinks cars, furniture, appliances), shot up in price because of huge demand from housebound consumers that then snarled supply chains all over the globe.
But now we’re seeing rising inflation in services — which was at 0.6 percent in May, almost double what it was at the end of last year. Service spending takes up a higher portion of overall spending and is thought by many economists to rise slower — but also fall slower as well.
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KS: We’ve talked a lot about prices, but what about wages? What’s going on there?
MZ: The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ measures of hourly wages, which adjusts for inflation, fell 0.6 percent in May alone and 3 percent over the past year. The monthly fall was the result of 0.3 percent of earnings growth and the 1 percent inflation, while the weekly earnings figure fell 0.7 percent. In the past year, hourly earnings fell 3 percent while weekly wages fell 4 percent because of a slight decrease in average hours worked.
KS: How much are these numbers being driven by gas and energy? Is there any hope of energy prices coming down soon?
MZ: In the past year, energy inflation has been about four times higher than overall inflation, so it’s definitely dragging the number up. For gasoline specifically, there isn’t really an end in sight. Gasoline demand tends to really only substantially fall if there’s some kind of massive economic calamity. Right now, many expect American consumers to eagerly drive this summer and just face the pain at the pump.
With demand expected to be high, the only hope for price relief comes from supply, but that’s unlikely as investors in energy companies are now running them on a tight leash and because refinery capacity in the United States has actually fallen since before the pandemic. Meanwhile, the American embargo of Russian oil does not appear to be ending any time soon, nor does Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which spiked food and energy prices all over the globe.
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KS: Here in the U.S., we’ve been hyper-focused on domestic inflation, but the inflation story is starting to become a common one around the world. Can you talk about where else in the world they are seeing inflation and how that inflation story is different from ours?
MZ: Nearly anywhere you look, there’s inflation. In the United Kingdom, inflation hit 9 percent in April, largely due to gas and electricity prices spiking. In the European countries that use the euro, inflation is up as well, even if the overall economies are somewhat sluggish. Europe is even more directly exposed to energy prices than the United States, thanks to the fact that much of it is dependent on Russia for gas and oil.
Like the United States, some European countries are seeing the highest rates of inflation since the 1980s, even if so-called core inflation, which excludes food and energy prices, is still elevated, even if less so than in the U.S.
Globally, the World Bank warned in a report this week that the economy risks a combination of sluggish growth and high inflation, otherwise known as stagflation, that could have “potentially harmful consequences for middle- and low-income economies alike.” Skyrocketing food and energy prices — and the risk of not just high prices, but actual shortages — have and could be devastating to lower-income countries. Sri Lanka has been thrown into an economic crisis and can no longer afford its fuel and food bill. Furthermore, the rise in interest rates in rich countries to curb inflation could hammer poorer countries as investors rush into rich countries offering high interest rates and leave poorer economies behind.
MZ: This is probably the biggest question in economics and politics right now.
Jason Furman, a former Obama administration economist and a persistent critic of the Biden administration and Federal Reserve’s approach to stimulus, has argued that the differences in how inflation has been experienced in Europe and the United States is due to the United States doing more fiscal stimulus, running the economy hotter, and thus experiencing broad-based, higher inflation. Europe, Furman argues, did less to stimulate the economy, is growing less, spending less, and its high inflation is largely due to high energy costs. Furman even argues that the power of the American consumer and its splurge on goods in 2020 and 2021 even drove up inflation across the world by snarling supply chains and driving up goods prices globally.
On the other hand, there may be a difference in degree. The inflation in the U.S. is also driven by energy prices, and much of the increased purchases of goods can’t be attributed just to stimulus, but also to the unique economic conditions of the pandemic. And the Russian invasion of Ukraine and subsequent spike in food and energy prices has little to do with monetary policy or stimulus; it’s instead a genuine shock to the economy’s ability to supply key commodities.
Thanks to Lillian Barkley for copy editing this article.
12. Lloyd Austin warns China against ‘provocative’ military activity near Taiwan
The SECDEF is getting a lot of press.
Excerpts;
Austin said the US was not seeking a new cold war, an Asian Nato — in a reference to Chinese criticism of the Quad — or a region split into hostile blocs. But Guo said the US was creating exclusive small circles and blocs. “Look at the Quad, look at Aukus,” he told the Financial Times.
Guo also sharply dismissed Austin’s criticism of Chinese intercepts of Australian and Canadian military aircraft, saying, “They are the ones disturbing stability.” Washington has repeatedly dismissed Chinese criticism by pointing out that its aircraft fly in international airspace.
Austin outlined three areas where the US was working more closely with allies, including sharing research and development to ensure they had the right capabilities to deter aggression and stepping up exercises and training.
He added that the US Coast Guard was boosting its presence in the Indo-Pacific, a shift illustrated by the fact that Admiral Linda Fagan was the first Coast Guard commandant to attend Shangri-La Dialogue.
Lloyd Austin warns China against ‘provocative’ military activity near Taiwan
Lloyd Austin warns China against ‘provocative’ activity at Asian defence forum
US defence secretary Lloyd Austin accused China of stepping up coercive behaviour towards Taiwan as he stressed that Washington would maintain its military capacity to resist any force that threatened the country.
Speaking at the IISS Shangri-La Dialogue defence forum in Singapore, Austin said China was engaging in provocative behaviour across the Indo-Pacific region that ranged from dangerous naval and aerial manoeuvres to increasingly assertive military activity around Taiwan.
“We’ve witnessed a steady increase in provocative and destabilising military activity near Taiwan,” Austin said on Saturday. “That includes PLA aircraft flying near Taiwan in record numbers in recent months.
Addressing an audience that included General Wei Fenghe, China’s defence minister, Austin said there had been an “alarming increase” in unsafe aerial intercepts and confrontations at sea by Chinese military ships and aircraft.
Austin referred to recent incidents where Chinese air force fighter jets conducted “dangerous intercepts” in the South China Sea and East China Sea of aircraft flown by US allies — in a reference to Australia and Canada.
Speaking several weeks after President Joe Biden said in Tokyo that the US would intervene militarily to defend Taiwan from any Chinese attack, Austin said Washington would adhere to the Taiwan Relations Act by ensuring that Taiwan maintained a sufficient defence capability.
“And it means maintaining our own capacity to resist any use of force or other forms of coercion that would jeopardise the security or the social or economic system of the people of Taiwan,” he added.
Austin stressed that US policy towards Taiwan had not changed and that the administration remained opposed to any unilateral changes to the status quo across the Taiwan Strait — from Taipei or Beijing.
His comments came as US officials have grown increasingly worried about the Chinese threat to Taiwan, a country over which China claims sovereignty.
Austin used his speech to highlight the Biden administration’s efforts to boost co-operation with allies, including the Quad — a security group that includes the US, Japan, Australia and India — and the Aukus security pact agreed by the US, UK and Australia last year.
Paul Haenle, director of Carnegie China, a think-tank, said Austin’s speech “struck the right balance”, noting that the US defence secretary said US policy towards Taiwan had not changed while “stressing that key components of that policy are helping Taiwan maintain a sufficient self-defence capability and maintain a robust US capacity to resist any Chinese use of force”.
Austin spoke one day after meeting Wei, in what was the first senior-level meeting between the militaries since Joe Biden assumed office.
China’s defence minister Wei Fenghe, centre, ahead of a meeting with US defence secretary Lloyd Austin on the sidelines of the Shangri-La forum on Saturday © Caroline Chia/Reuters
A Chinese defence ministry spokesperson said the meeting was “candid, positive and constructive”. A senior US defence official said the ministers spent the bulk of the meeting discussing Taiwan. The US official said Austin raised concerns that the Chinese military might be trying to change the status quo across the Taiwan Strait “through its operational behaviour”.
Overall, Chinese military officials tried to downplay tensions with the US. Senior Colonel Zhao Xiaozhuo of China’s Academy of Military Sciences said Austin’s remarks were “on the diplomatic side” after the defence secretary evaded a question about how the US and its allies could deter Chinese aggression against Taiwan.
But other Chinese officials expressed intense displeasure. “The US always says one thing but does another,” said Major General Guo Ruobing, commander of the National Security College at the National Defence University.
Austin said the US was not seeking a new cold war, an Asian Nato — in a reference to Chinese criticism of the Quad — or a region split into hostile blocs. But Guo said the US was creating exclusive small circles and blocs. “Look at the Quad, look at Aukus,” he told the Financial Times.
Guo also sharply dismissed Austin’s criticism of Chinese intercepts of Australian and Canadian military aircraft, saying, “They are the ones disturbing stability.” Washington has repeatedly dismissed Chinese criticism by pointing out that its aircraft fly in international airspace.
Austin outlined three areas where the US was working more closely with allies, including sharing research and development to ensure they had the right capabilities to deter aggression and stepping up exercises and training.
He added that the US Coast Guard was boosting its presence in the Indo-Pacific, a shift illustrated by the fact that Admiral Linda Fagan was the first Coast Guard commandant to attend Shangri-La Dialogue.
13. Japan Resets on Defense
Japan Resets on Defense
June 11, 2022
Tokyo must move with caution in a dangerous neighborhood.
In April 2022, Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party announced that it will seek to double Japan’s defense budget. As a reaction to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Tokyo’s reasoning has substantial merit. China and Russia appear to be joining ever closer in their bilateral security relationship – underlined most recently by the bilateral strategic aviation exercise in May. There was also the rather provocative joint Russia-China naval sortie through the Tsugaru Strait last October, which was not well received in Japan, to put it mildly. Meanwhile, North Korea has been launching ballistic missiles with ever greater frequency and there is most likely a nuclear test also in the offing.
Some opportunism could also be at work – for sure. It seems likely that Tokyo’s defense establishment has long wanted to break through the traditional 1% rule that has constrained Japan’s defense spending for many decades. When Germany, the other major defeated power from WW2, took the unprecedented move to massively increase its defense expenditures in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Berlin was subsequently praised in Western capitals, especially in Washington, for making an appropriate response to the extant threat. Tokyo can claim, with some legitimacy, that the Russian threat looms much closer even to Japan’s shores than to Germany’s. Thus, Japanese leaders have moved with alacrity to make this major adjustment that many consider long overdue.
As noted above, tensions have been building in Russia-Japan relations for some time. Moscow has been in the process of updating its defenses on the Kuril Islands, proximate to Japan’s northernmost island of Hokkaido. The so-called “Northern Territories” are a dispute over a handful of small islands that has simmered between Tokyo and Moscow since the end of WW2. The Kremlin has also been in the process of substantially strengthening its Pacific Fleet with new nuclear and conventional submarines. Alas, Shinzo Abe, Japan’s most prominent leader of recent times, had made major exertions to achieve a rapprochement with Russian President Vladimir Putin, but now all those efforts have come to naught.
Tokyo knows well, of course, that Japanese cities could very well be targets in a “Second Korean War” and Pyongyang’s missile tests often arc right over the Japanese archipelago. Yet, the primary concern with respect to Japan’s defense budget is not Russia or North Korea, but rather China. For the last decade, Tokyo and Beijing have been sparring dangerously in the East China Sea. Japanese leaders have decried Chinese human rights policies, the rapid advances of China’s military modernization, and have made geopolitical moves to counter China’s Belt and Road Initiative, including the Quad grouping, which formed the centerpiece of President Joe Biden’s most recent visit. Tokyo has begun in earnest to fortify some of its small islands in the East China Sea and has made increasingly vocal overtures regarding the defense of Taiwan.
Not surprisingly, Japanese discussion of Taiwan has touched a raw nerve in China. On 31 May, a Chinese editorial warned Tokyo about “playing with fire” in the Taiwan context and sharply rebuked “the excitement of some Japanese politicians” over Biden’s answer to a reporter’s question in Tokyo that leaned heavily in the direction of U.S. military intervention. The same editorial underlined that such an outcome would “certainly lead to a direct conflict” between Japan and China. Such an approach may be part of a larger trend in Chines strategic thinking. A major Chinese military magazine devoted a 40-page special section in March 2022 to Tokyo’s inclination to “use Taiwan to ‘contain’ China,” and how that inclination might be defeated.
If such sentiments sound dangerously familiar from the escalation spiral that has enveloped Eastern Europe over the last couple of years, this analogy is unfortunately all too appropriate. The extant dangers in the Western Pacific could end in a catastrophe that makes the war in Ukraine look mild by comparison.
Tokyo’s security situation is exceedingly complex, and some upward readjustment of Japan’s defense expenditures does seem warranted, but this must be done with the utmost caution and a stress on defensive measures only. Japanese leaders will be wise to maintain open channels of communication – both with Moscow and Pyongyang for that matter.
As regards the even harder China question, Japan’s leaders must resist the ever-present temptation to resign themselves to militarized rivalry and even armed conflict with Beijing. If the Taiwan issue is put aside, then any notional Chinese military threat to Japan is minimal and manageable. Indeed, much greater caution is necessary for Tokyo concerning the fate of Taiwan. The late Prof. Ezra Vogel points out in his final, magisterial tome on China-Japan relations that Japan’s initial rule on Taiwan after 1895 was exceedingly brutal. No wonder the island remains a volatile touchstone for Chinese nationalism to this day. Yet in the same important book, Vogel cautions against Beijing’s “superpatriotic passions” and invites both China and Japan to “face history” together, studying whole centuries in the past when the two countries learned constructively from one another.
An objective view of Japanese and Chinese foreign policy interests reveals that they are, in fact, not so distant – both favoring development and stability -- and can be reconciled. For the sake of peace, the U.S. would be wise to devote major diplomatic efforts to bringing these two Asia-Pacific giants closer together.
14. Putin admits Ukraine invasion is an imperial war to “return” Russian land
Excerpts:
This openly imperialistic agenda represents an unprecedented challenge to international law and poses a grave threat to the entire post-WWII global security system. It also exposes the absurdity of appeals to appease Moscow or accept some kind of negotiated settlement that would avoid “humiliating” Russia. There can be no compromise with the Kremlin as long as Putin continues to deny Ukraine’s right to exist and declares his intention to annex entire regions of the country.
If Putin is not decisively defeated in Ukraine, he will surely go further in his mission to “return” lost Russian lands. The list of former Russian imperial possessions that could potentially become targets is extensive and includes Finland, the Baltic States, Poland, Belarus, Moldova, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and the nations of Central Asia. Nor can future Russian attacks on the former Warsaw Pact countries of Central Europe be entirely ruled out. If this sounds far-fetched, it is important to remember that almost nobody in Ukraine believed a Russian invasion was even remotely possible until it actually happened.
Today’s brutal colonial war in Ukraine is a reminder that unlike the other great European empires of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Russia never underwent a period of de-imperialization. Despite collapsing spectacularly in both 1917 and 1991, Russia’s imperial identity is still very much intact and has become a central pillar of the Putin regime. Until Russia enters the modern era and becomes a post-imperial power, peace in Europe will remain elusive. The best way to speed up this process is to ensure Ukraine wins the war.
Putin admits Ukraine invasion is an imperial war to “return” Russian land
Throughout the past few months, Vladimir Putin has offered up all manner of outlandish excuses for his invasion of Ukraine. At various different times he has blamed the war on everything from NATO expansion to imaginary Nazis, while also making completely unsubstantiated claims about Western plots to invade Russia and Ukrainian schemes to acquire nuclear weapons.
The reality, it now transpires, is considerably less elaborate and infinitely more chilling. Putin has launched the largest European conflict since WWII for the simple reason that he wants to conquer Ukraine. Inspired by the czars of old, Putin aims to crush his neighbor and incorporate it into a new Russian Empire.
Putin elaborated on his imperial vision during a June 9 event in Moscow to mark the 350th birthday of Russian Czar Peter the Great. He spoke admiringly of Czar Peter’s achievements during the Great Northern War and drew direct parallels to his own contemporary expansionist policies. The lands taken from Sweden during the Great Northern War were historically Russian and Peter was merely returning them to their rightful owners, Putin stated. “Apparently, it is now also our responsibility to return (Russian) land,” he said in a clear reference to the ongoing invasion of Ukraine.
Putin’s latest comments underline his imperial objectives in Ukraine and expand on years of similar statements lamenting the fall of the Russian Empire. For more than a decade, he has questioned the historical legitimacy of Ukrainian statehood and publicly insisted that Ukrainians are really Russians (“one people”). Putin has also repeatedly accused Ukraine of occupying ancestral Russian lands and has blamed the early Bolsheviks for bungling the border between the Russian and Ukrainian Soviet republics.
His unapologetically imperialistic attitude toward Russian-Ukrainian relations was laid bare in July 2021 in the form of a 7,000-word essay authored by Putin himself which set out to explain the alleged “historical unity” binding the two nations together. “I am confident that true sovereignty of Ukraine is possible only in partnership with Russia. For we are one people,” Putin the amateur historian concluded. This bizarre treatise was widely interpreted as a declaration of war against the entire notion of an independent Ukraine and has since been made required reading for all Russian military personnel.
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The Russian dictator’s obsession with Ukraine reflects his burning resentment over the collapse of the USSR and his lingering bitterness at post-Soviet Russia’s dramatic loss of international status.
This nostalgia is not rooted in a fondness for the ideology of Marxist-Leninism. Instead, Putin regards the disintegration of the Soviet Empire as the demise of “historical Russia” and has spoken of how the 1991 break-up left “tens of millions of our compatriots” living beyond the borders of the Russian Federation. As the former Soviet republic with the deepest ties to Russia and the largest ethnic Russian population, independent Ukraine has come to embody this sense of historical injustice.
Putin’s efforts to “return” Ukrainian land to Russia did not begin with the invasion of February 24. The current campaign of imperial conquest actually started eight years earlier with the Russian takeover of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula, which Putin seized in a lightning military operation that took advantage of political paralysis in Kyiv in the immediate aftermath of the 2014 Euromaidan Revolution.
Following his success in Crimea, Putin then attempted to partition mainland Ukraine by instigating pro-Kremlin uprisings throughout the south and east of the country. This initiative fell flat after Kremlin agents ran into stronger than expected local opposition from Russian-speaking Ukrainian patriots, leaving Putin’s proxies in possession of a relatively small foothold in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region.
Control over Crimea and the Donbas allowed Putin to keep Ukraine destabilized, but his true objective has always been the reestablishment of complete Russian control over the whole country. After eight years of geopolitical pressure and hybrid warfare failed to achieve the desired outcome, and sensing that Ukraine was now in danger of moving irreparably out of the Russian orbit, Putin made the fateful decision in early 2022 to launch a full-scale invasion.
By abandoning all pretense and comparing himself to Peter the Great, Putin has now confirmed that he is waging an old-fashioned imperial war of conquest with the goal of annexing Ukrainian territory. Recent statements from Kremlin officials have also made these imperial intentions explicit. During a visit to southern Ukraine’s Russian-occupied Kherson region in early May, Russian Senator Andrei Turchak declared that the current Russian presence in the region would be permanent. “Russia is here forever,” he stated. “There should be no doubt about this. There will be no return to the past.”
This openly imperialistic agenda represents an unprecedented challenge to international law and poses a grave threat to the entire post-WWII global security system. It also exposes the absurdity of appeals to appease Moscow or accept some kind of negotiated settlement that would avoid “humiliating” Russia. There can be no compromise with the Kremlin as long as Putin continues to deny Ukraine’s right to exist and declares his intention to annex entire regions of the country.
If Putin is not decisively defeated in Ukraine, he will surely go further in his mission to “return” lost Russian lands. The list of former Russian imperial possessions that could potentially become targets is extensive and includes Finland, the Baltic States, Poland, Belarus, Moldova, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and the nations of Central Asia. Nor can future Russian attacks on the former Warsaw Pact countries of Central Europe be entirely ruled out. If this sounds far-fetched, it is important to remember that almost nobody in Ukraine believed a Russian invasion was even remotely possible until it actually happened.
Today’s brutal colonial war in Ukraine is a reminder that unlike the other great European empires of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Russia never underwent a period of de-imperialization. Despite collapsing spectacularly in both 1917 and 1991, Russia’s imperial identity is still very much intact and has become a central pillar of the Putin regime. Until Russia enters the modern era and becomes a post-imperial power, peace in Europe will remain elusive. The best way to speed up this process is to ensure Ukraine wins the war.
Peter Dickinson is Editor of the Atlantic Council’s UkraineAlert Service.
15. Life under Russia’s brutal occupation in eastern Ukraine: ‘You can be shot at any moment’
This is why people resist. They must resist.
Life under Russia’s brutal occupation in eastern Ukraine: ‘You can be shot at any moment’
Kherson was the first major Ukrainian city captured by the Russians. The Russian occupation thus far has included new textbooks — and a new terror.
Gordey Dyachenko, a businessman from Kherson, the southern Ukrainian city that has been occupied by Russian troops since early March, is blunt when asked what life is like under Moscow’s rule: “You can be shot any moment, for any reason, at any one of the Russian checkpoints.”
Kherson fell early in the war, the first Ukrainian provincial capital to end up in Russian hands. Around the city, fierce fighting continues: In recent days, Ukrainian forces have made advances in parts of the Kherson region.
But the city of Kherson — home before the war to nearly 300,000 people — remains occupied. Its location matters: For Russia, Kherson is a critical stop along a potential land bridge linking sections of the eastern Donbas region and Crimea, territories that have been under Russian influence since 2014.
Already, Moscow claims it has restored water supplies to Crimea via a canal in the area that had been blocked by the Ukrainians. Meanwhile, there are signs that the Kremlin is planning to formalize its occupation by annexing Kherson, possibly via a referendum. “The Kherson region’s admission into Russia will be complete, similar to Crimea,” a senior Russian lawmaker wrote in a recent report, according to the Moscow Times. Ukrainians say any such referendum would likely be a sham.
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The occupation
Against this backdrop, Russia has already started imposing its writ in the region — both in the real world, where it has introduced its own currency in the area, and in the virtual one, with the Kremlin rerouting online traffic from Kherson to go through its communications infrastructure. Russian occupying authorities are also pressuring teachers to ditch the Ukrainian curriculum, substituting Russian-language instructions and history textbooks, according to local reports.
A pro-Russian local administration has been put in place, headed by two Ukrainians: Volodymyr Saldo, a former mayor of Kherson, and, Kirill Stremousov, a one-time anti-vaccine blogger. Both men are wanted for treason by Ukraine.
Although it is unclear how many Russian troops are currently operating in and around the city, the Kremlin’s influence is currently estimated to stretch across vast swathes of eastern Ukraine. This includes the previously occupied regions of Crimea, most of the self-declared separatist republics of Donetsk and Luhansk, and now the region around the city of Kherson as well.
Perhaps the most important and impactful element of the occupation in the Kherson region has been the plundering of local resources; Russians have seized grain that was harvested in Kherson before the war and exported it to Russia.
The overall policy seems clear: to transform Kherson — a thriving Ukrainian port city before the war — into a Russian colony.
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Dyachenko, who sold sports equipment before the war, has watched this project to Russify his hometown unfold before his eyes.
For three months, he tried and failed repeatedly to leave, despite promises from the Russians that they would allow safe passage for civilians trying to flee the fighting.
“I tried to leave with my girlfriend when the occupation started,” he told Grid. “We tried to leave by road. We knew we would have to go through a Russian checkpoint, but we thought we would be able to get out. We had no reason to think otherwise.”
The reality was not only different — it was gruesome. Waiting in a long line of cars on the outskirts of the city in the early days of the war, Dyachenko watched from behind the wheel as Russian soldiers went car to car, interrogating those ahead of him. “I saw them drag out drivers who were in the line and then take them to the side of the road, into the bushes,” he told Grid. Then Dyachenko heard gunshots. “They never returned.” Fearful for his own life, Dyachenko promptly turned and headed back into Kherson.
Elena, another Kherson native, didn’t even make it to the city limits. “We actually wanted to escape just as the war began, but my elderly father who lives with me and my toddler didn’t want to leave,” she said. Grid has changed her name because she spoke on the condition of anonymity; she said she fears reprisals from Russian forces.
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By the time Elena’s father agreed to leave, in early March, it was too late: Exit routes were choked with traffic, and fuel was hard to come by. “The traffic was very heavy because everyone was trying to escape, but we did not have enough fuel in the car,” she told Grid.
Stranded in their homes in Kherson, both Elena and Dyachenko say they have witnessed the brutality of Russia’s rule: Anti-Kremlin protests have been met with gunfire, and locals who spoke to Grid said it was common to hear of innocent civilians being shot at random. “Walking down the street, it is not uncommon to stumble upon pools of blood,” Dyachenko told Grid. “There is never any explanation for why it is there or what happened.”
Dyachenko finally managed to escape with his girlfriend in early June. He is not alone: Local officials estimate that some 40 percent of the population has fled the city of Kherson since the war began.
Elena and her family remain in the city, however, still unable to get out. And still in fear of Russian soldiers.
When Russian forces come knocking
Elena’s concerns are well founded, based on reports emerging from the region. Hundreds have been arrested for raising their voices against Russian rule in the region. In a claim that cannot be verified, Ukrainian authorities have accused Russian forces of holding some 600 people in Kherson in “torture chambers.”
Private residences aren’t safe, according to Dyachenko, who told Grid about a visit from the occupying forces in March. He was at home with his girlfriend and father when six Russian soldiers came knocking, asking to check their papers.
After studying Dyachenko’s national ID documents, they asked him about the situation in the Donbas region, where Russian forces have been present in smaller numbers since 2014. “They asked me if I knew anything about the killing of Russian-speaking people in the Donbas,” Dyachenko recalled.
When he said that he didn’t think any such killings had taken place, the Russian soldiers told him politely but firmly that he had been misinformed. “At one point, my father got worried and asked the soldiers if they could leave me alone,” he said. “They told him that they only wanted to talk with me about the situation in Ukraine. They said they did not want to fight.”
Then the soldiers began to school Dyachenko and his family.
“They told us that there is Nazism in Ukraine. That maybe it hadn’t reached Kherson yet, which is why I might be misinformed, but that it had taken hold in Kyiv,” he told Grid. “They said that terrible things were happening in Kyiv. That there were Nazi processions in the streets. That Ukraine was banning the Russian language. They asked me how I felt about it all.”
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It was, Dyachenko told Grid, “emotionally humiliating.” He tried to answer, telling them they were wrong, but ultimately he felt he could only say so much. “They are men with guns,” he said. “They have the power here now. And they can use that power.”
Thanks to Lillian Barkley for copy editing this article.
16. Congress targets Harvard, Yale and top universities with China-linked endowments
Excerpts;
The value of U.S. university endowments totaled more than $800 billion in 2021. The endowments of the 15 private schools Murphy is targeting with legislation he’ll introduce in coming weeks have an estimated combined value of $331 billion.
That legislation would “disincentivize” university endowments from investments in firms listed on U.S. government sanction lists, including the Commerce Department’s Entity List, which targets individuals and companies implicated in any “activities sanctioned by the State Department and activities contrary to U.S. national security and or foreign policy interests.” The bill calls for a 50 percent excise tax on the principal and a 100 percent excise tax on any realized profits from investments in such entities.
Murphy’s initiative echoes the efforts of Keith Krach, former under secretary of State for Economic Growth, Energy and the Environment, who urged university governing boards in 2020 to disclose details of endowment investments in Chinese firms and to divest from those on the Commerce Department’s Entity List or linked to human rights abuses. Universities ignored Krach’s advice.
“I’m old enough to know about the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa … [and] the divestment movement that got started at Berkeley and then spread through campuses,” Krach said. “I really wanted [my divestment proposal] to be kind of a catalyst to create a movement … there’s nothing that can be more effective and have more passion and ground forces than students.”
Congress targets Harvard, Yale and top universities with China-linked endowments
06/09/2022 06:34 PM EDT
A new bill from Republican Greg Murphy is pushing divestment from firms linked to rights abuses, security risks.
Marco Rubio and Mark Warner convened a meeting in April with several dozen college presidents organized by the Association of American Universities to voice congressional concerns about ties to problematic Chinese institutions. | Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images
06/09/2022 06:34 PM EDT
Congress first targeted U.S. universities’ Chinese state-backed Confucius Institutes, then their academic partnerships with China.
Now, some in Congress are preparing to go after America’s top institutions of higher learning and their enormous endowments in potentially problematic Chinese companies.
Rep. Greg Murphy (R-N.C.) is drafting legislation — the Protecting Endowments from Our Adversaries Act — designed to cut U.S. university endowment investments that fund abusive or hostile Chinese entities. Murphy doesn’t yet have co-sponsors for the bill, but told POLITICO that he expects “a lot of interest from a lot of folks in both houses.”
On Thursday, Murphy sent a letter to the 15 private universities with the largest endowments — Harvard, Yale, Duke and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, among them — asking them to purge their investment portfolios of “entities that are supporting the imprisonment of Uyghur Muslims or aiding the Russian Federation’s horrific invasion of Ukraine.” Murphy also wants those schools to vet their endowment portfolios for any “adversarial entities” named on U.S. government sanction lists.
A successful congressional push to sever U.S. university endowments from Chinese investments could provide a template for legislation requiring private sector investors, including private equity firms and hedge funds, to do likewise, downsizing the U.S. financial sector’s relationship with China.
“Our colleges and universities which have been given a tax-free status do not need to be investing in this nation that wants to see our downfall,” Murphy told POLITICO. “I wanted to start with those institutions that have the biggest endowments and I think it will start a snowballing effect to other institutions.”
With Democrats in control, Murphy’s latest effort is unlikely to succeed in this Congress. But his letter is putting universities on notice that Congress wants a say in how they invest their endowments.
The value of U.S. university endowments totaled more than $800 billion in 2021. The endowments of the 15 private schools Murphy is targeting with legislation he’ll introduce in coming weeks have an estimated combined value of $331 billion.
That legislation would “disincentivize” university endowments from investments in firms listed on U.S. government sanction lists, including the Commerce Department’s Entity List, which targets individuals and companies implicated in any “activities sanctioned by the State Department and activities contrary to U.S. national security and or foreign policy interests.” The bill calls for a 50 percent excise tax on the principal and a 100 percent excise tax on any realized profits from investments in such entities.
Murphy’s initiative echoes the efforts of Keith Krach, former under secretary of State for Economic Growth, Energy and the Environment, who urged university governing boards in 2020 to disclose details of endowment investments in Chinese firms and to divest from those on the Commerce Department’s Entity List or linked to human rights abuses. Universities ignored Krach’s advice.
“I’m old enough to know about the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa … [and] the divestment movement that got started at Berkeley and then spread through campuses,” Krach said. “I really wanted [my divestment proposal] to be kind of a catalyst to create a movement … there’s nothing that can be more effective and have more passion and ground forces than students.”
That groundswell of student action has coalesced in the nonprofit Athenai Institute, dedicated to prodding U.S. universities into divesting their endowments of any Chinese Communist Party-linked investments. Athenai’s strategy is to use university divestment of problematic Chinese investments as a roadmap for the private sector to purge its balance sheets of similar holdings.
“University endowments … [are] a substantial pool of money to create momentum for [wider] divestment,” said Athenai’s president, John Metz. “As the pool of university endowment funds and other institutional investor funds which can’t be invested in certain Chinese companies [grows] … it becomes harder for Wall Street to look away.”
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) introduced a bill last month that would prohibit universities from any collaborations with Chinese institutions “in areas of cutting-edge technology that could improve the PLA’s ability to wage war against the United States and its allies.”
Rubio and Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, convened a meeting in April with several dozen college presidents organized by the Association of American Universities to voice congressional concerns about ties to problematic Chinese institutions.
The meeting, which included representatives of the FBI and the Office of the National Director of Intelligence, produced a consensus that “there is a real threat out there and that whatever partnerships that [universities] have with China should be viewed that way,” a meeting attendee told POLITICO. The group shared best practices to counter threats from China, such as nurturing relationships with FBI field offices, and university presidents pledged to continue to cooperate on the issue.
University endowments have a history of links to companies implicated in human rights abuses in China. BuzzFeed reported in 2019 that MIT, Duke and Princeton invested endowment funds in a company linked to human rights abuses against Muslim Uyghurs in Xinjiang. Princeton didn’t respond to a request for comment and Duke and MIT declined to comment.
“For far too long … university endowments have unwittingly helped fund Chinese companies responsible for perpetrating pretty egregious human rights abuses and not to mention China’s military,” said Craig Singleton, senior China fellow at the nonprofit Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “We think there’s a broader recognition that the Chinese Communist Party is keen to leverage American capital against American interests.”
Most private universities are reluctant to discuss the possibility that their massive endowments in index funds may seed Chinese firms implicated in rights abuses or technology development that could pose a threat to national security.
Yale’s University Advisory Committee on Investor Responsibility announced in January that it would begin a review of investments linked to its endowment — which totaled $42.3 billion in June 2021 — “to determine whether some may be deemed ineligible for Yale investment in light of the Chinese government’s widespread human rights violations,” the Yale Daily News reported.
Harvard — which boasts an endowment valued at over $53 billion — is considering reducing its endowment’s investments in China due to “growing political and market risk,” Bloomberg reported in April. Both Yale and Harvard declined POLITICO’s requests for comment.
“The most skeptical response we’ve gotten [from universities] has been, ‘Well, this will be difficult for us because we don’t manage our own passive investments and therefore it’s difficult for us to audit our endowment,’” Metz said.
“There’s precedent within these institutions to move their investments because of things that they either don’t like or feel that are better for our environment,” said Murphy. “If they tell their investment company ‘we want to divest out of companies in China,’ it’s very easily done.”
Catholic University of America is pioneering efforts to vet its endowments for problematic investments. CUA administrators in December responded to a student council resolution urging such divestment by reviewing its endowment portfolio to “align investments with moral beliefs.”
“The University is working with Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS), the leading advocate for shareholder concerns to public companies, to identify any company involved in or benefiting from human rights violations, including Uyghur exploitation,” Amber Roseboom, CUA’s associate vice president of university communications, said in a statement. “The ISS deeper dive … searches thousands of publicly available media and stakeholder services to identify areas of exploitation or concerns for other moral abuses. At this point, the search has not identified a company in which the University invests that is known to be involved in or benefit from Uyghur exploitation.”
CUA has inspired divestment activism at other schools. Georgetown University’s Hong Kong Student Association and Muslim Student Association urged school administrators in January to divest the school’s endowment from any investments “that may implicate the university in the ongoing genocide in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.”
George Washington University has a Uyghur Divestment Committee with an online petition calling for endowment divestment from “companies complicit in the Uyghur genocide.” And last month, Cornell University faculty organized a “teach-in” focused on “Cornell Involvement in the People’s Republic of China.”
“It’s extremely important for Cornell and other universities with large endowments to look carefully at some of those investments particularly with respect to Xinjiang, but not exclusively,” said Eli Friedman, associate professor and chair of International & Comparative Labor at Cornell. “There are other companies in China that are engaged in activities that I think do not comport with our stated values like tech companies that are overseeing massive censorship operations.”
Athenai Institute plans to extend its divestment campaign to the endowments of U.S. service universities, including the U.S. Naval Academy, Air Force Academy, West Point, Coast Guard Academy and National Defense University. “Their endowments are much smaller than those held by public and private universities, but almost all of their endowment funding comes from alumni who may or may not realize that their gifts are being used to invest in Chinese companies supporting China’s military,” said Singleton.
POLITICO contacted all five of those service academies for comment. Only the U.S. Naval Academy responded. “The Joint Investment Committee of the USNA Alumni Association and Foundation specifically and proactively discussed the need for our portfolio to have no direct holdings in such Chinese entities,” Heather Epkins, director of communications at the U.S. Naval Academy Alumni Association & Foundation, said in a statement. “We have instituted a periodic review process and an exit strategy process … to date, we have had no direct holdings and have directed our investment managers, via our Outsourced Chief Investment Officer, to avoid such investment.”
Murphy wants universities to embrace the vetting of their endowment investments for problematic Chinese entities as ethically and financially prudent.
“This isn’t meant to penalize anybody, but this is a real problem,” Murphy said. “What greater issue should [we] be divested from than one that is adversarial to our national security?”
Daniel Lippman contributed to this report.
De Oppresso Liber,
David Maxwell
Senior Fellow, Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation
Senior Advisor, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy
Editor, Small Wars Journal
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
Phone: 202-573-8647
