Quotes of the Day:
“Character, in the long run, is the decisive factor in the life of an individual and of nations alike.”
- Theodore Roosevelt
“The supreme quality for leadership is unquestionably integrity. Without it, no real success is possible, no matter whether it is on a section gang, a football field, in an army, or in an office.”
- Dwight D. Eisenhower
"You have the power over your mind- not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength."
- Marcus Aurelius
1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, JUNE 18 (PUTIN'S WAR)
2. Ukraine war could last for years, warns Nato chief
3. The nature of war is not changing in Ukraine
4. The Return of Industrial Warfare
5. How the US Could Lose the New Cold War
6. Texas A&M’s Unreported Foreign Funding
7. High Casualties: Russia Pulls Out All the Stops to Find Fresh Troops
8. The US Needs a New Solarium for a New Grand Strategy
9. Uvalde Officer Passed Up Shot at Gunman for Fear of Hitting Children
10. ‘I had to cut off the head, bro’: Myanmar soldiers swap slaughter stories.
11. Dangerous Straits: Wargaming a Future Conflict over Taiwan
12. Peter Thiel helped build big tech. Now he wants to tear it all down.
13. Ukraine Intensifies Strikes Against Russian-Controlled Areas
14. Biden’s Patent Gift to Beijing
15. U.S. senators introduce broad Taiwan bill to boost security aid
16 Where Are the Rockets for Ukraine?
17. Patriot Front and Pride: How right-wing influencers are driving extremists to real-world violence
18. Opinion | How to Celebrate Juneteenth
19. The joy of Juneteenth: America’s long and uneven march from slavery to freedom
1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, JUNE 18 (PUTIN'S WAR)
RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, JUNE 18
Karolina Hird, Mason Clark, George Barros, and Grace Mappes
June 18, 3:30 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.
Russian forces made marginal gains on the outskirts of Severodonetsk on June 18 but have largely stalled along other axes of advance. Russian troops are likely facing mounting losses and troop and equipment degradation that will complicate attempts to renew offensive operations on other critical locations as the slow battle for Severodonetsk continues. As ISW previously assessed, Russian forces will likely be able to seize Severodonetsk in the coming weeks, but at the cost of concentrating most of their available forces in this small area. Other Russian operations in eastern Ukraine—such as efforts to capture Slovyansk and advance east of Bakhmut—have made little progress in the past two weeks. Russian forces are continuing to fight to push Ukrainian troops away from occupied frontiers north of Kharkiv City and along the Southern Axis, but have not made significant gains in doing so, thus leaving them vulnerable to Ukrainian counteroffensive and partisan pressure.
The Russian military continues to face challenges with the morale and discipline of its troops in Ukraine. The Ukrainian Main Intelligence Directorate released what it reported were intercepted phone calls on June 17 and 18 in which Russian soldiers complained about frontline conditions, poor equipment, and overall lack of personnel.[1] One soldier claimed that units have been largely drained of personnel and that certain battalion tactical groups (BTGs) have only 10 to 15 troops remaining in service.[2]
Key Takeaways
- Russian forces secured minor gains on the outskirts of Severodonetsk and likely advanced into Metolkine, but Russian operations remain slow.
- Russian forces continued efforts to interdict Ukrainian lines of communication along the T1302 Bakhmut-Lysychansk highway and conducted ground and artillery strikes along the highway.
- Russian forces seek to push Ukrainian forces out of artillery range of railway lines around Kharkiv City used to supply Russian offensive operations toward Slovyansk.
- Russian forces did not take any confirmed actions along the Southern Axis and continue to face partisan pressure in occupied areas of southern Ukraine.
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 against Severodonetsk and its outskirts and secured minor gains in the southeastern suburbs of the city on June 18.[3] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian troops had partial success while attacking Metolkine, (just south of Severodonetsk) where they have been fighting for the last few days, though ISW cannot independently confirm what areas of the town Russian forces seized.[4] Russian forces likely intend to capture the southern suburbs of Severodonetsk and advance to the bank of the Severskiy Donets river before assaulting the center of Ukrainian resistance in the Azot chemical plant. Russian forces are additionally fighting for control of Syrotnye, another nearby suburb of Severodonetsk.[5] Russian forces continued to fire on Severodonetsk and Lysychansk.[6]
Russian forces continued to launch attacks toward Slovyansk from the southeast of Izyum on June 18 but did not make any confirmed advances.[7] Fighting continued around Krasnopillya, a village along the E40 highway less than 20 km northwest of Slovyansk.[8] Russian troops exerted continual artillery fire on settlements southeast of Izyum and west of Lyman in order to set conditions for further attempts to advance on Slovyansk.[9] Russian forces seek to capture Slovyansk to sever one of Ukraine’s lines of communications to Severodonetsk and Lysychansk but are making only incremental progress towards the city.
Russian forces continued ground and artillery attacks east of Bakhmut in order to interdict Ukrainian lines of communication along the T1302 Bakhmut-Lysychansk highway on June 18.[10] Head of the Luhansk Regional State Administration Serhiy Haidai stated that Ukrainian forces repelled a Russian attack in Nyrkove, a settlement along the Luhansk-Donetsk Oblast border within 5 km of the T1302 highway.[11] Russian forces additionally conducted unsuccessful attacks against Hirske and Berestove, likely with the intent of interdicting Ukrainian lines of communication along the T1302 highway and complicating Ukrainian operations to support the Severodonetsk-Lysychansk area.[12]
Supporting Effort #1—Kharkiv City (Russian objective: Withdraw forces to the north and defend ground lines of communication (GLOCs) to Izyum)
Russian forces continued offensive operations to prevent Ukrainian troops from advancing further toward the international border on June 18.[13] The Ukrainian General Staff noted that Russian forces are taking measures to prevent Ukrainian troops from reaching Russian rear areas that are supporting operations toward Slovyansk and are laying additional railways to restore supply lines to Slovyansk.[14] Russian-controlled rail lines in northern Kharkiv Oblast are likely the primary means Russian forces are employing to supply ongoing operations to capture Slovyansk, and Russian forces have prioritized securing and repairing railways in this area throughout the war. While Ukrainian forces are unlikely to be able to quickly advance the dozens of kilometers into Russian-held territory in Kharkiv Oblast that would be required to directly sever these rail lines, Russian forces likely seek to push back Ukrainian forces to prevent their artillery from interdicting Russian supply routes. Russian forces additionally continued to fight for control of Dementiivka and Pitomnyk, both north of Kharkiv City, and conducted artillery strikes around northeastern Kharkiv Oblast.[15]
Supporting Effort #2—Southern Axis (Objective: Defend Kherson and Zaporizhia Oblasts against Ukrainian counterattacks)
Russian forces fired on Ukrainian positions along the Southern Axis but did not make any confirmed attacks on June 18, a pause from the steady localized attacks of the past several weeks.[16] Russian forces continued efforts to improve engineering equipment along the Inhulets River.[17] A Russian Telegram channel noted that Russian forces launched massive, unspecified strikes along the Mykolaiv-Kherson Oblast border, likely in response to recent limited Ukrainian counterattacks in the area.[18]
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 to face partisan activity in occupied areas on June 18. The Ukrainian Resistance Center reported that unidentified Ukrainian partisans conducted an IED attack against Yevhen Sobolev, a Russian collaborator, in Kherson City on June 18.[19] Such partisan actions will likely continue to complicate the implementation of occupational agendas and pro-Russian sentiment in occupied areas.
[6] https://t.me/luhanskaVTSA/3557
2. Ukraine war could last for years, warns Nato chief
Criminal act?
Excerpts:
Russian officials often criticise Nato military support for Ukraine and in an interview last week with the BBC the country's Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, cited the prospect of Ukraine joining the Western alliance as a reason for the invasion in the first place.
"We declared a special military operation because we had absolutely no other way of explaining to the West that dragging Ukraine into Nato was a criminal act," Mr Lavrov told the BBC.
Ukraine is not a member of Nato and although it has expressed a wish to join there is no timeframe for this.
Ukraine war could last for years, warns Nato chief
By Leo Sands
BBC News
Published
3 hours ago
Image source, Getty Images
Image caption,
Nato's secretary-general speaking after a meeting with the military alliance's defence ministers on 16 June
The West must prepare to continue supporting Ukraine in a war lasting for years, Nato's chief has warned.
Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said the costs of war were high, but the price of letting Moscow achieve its military goals was even greater.
His comments came as UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson also warned of the need to brace for a longer-term conflict.
Both Mr Stoltenberg and Mr Johnson said sending more weapons would make a victory for Ukraine more likely.
"We must prepare for the fact that it could take years. We must not let up in supporting Ukraine," the Nato chief said in an interview with German newspaper Bild.
"Even if the costs are high, not only for military support, also because of rising energy and food prices."
The Western military alliance chief said that supplying Ukraine with more modern weapons would increase its chances of being able to liberate the country's eastern Donbas region, much of which is currently under Russian control.
For the last few months Russian and Ukrainian forces have battled for control of territory in the country's east - with Moscow making slow advances in recent weeks.
Writing in the Sunday Times, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson accused Russia's Vladimir Putin of resorting to a "campaign of attrition" and "trying to grind down Ukraine by sheer brutality."
"I'm afraid we need to steel ourselves for a long war," he wrote. "Time is the vital factor. Everything will depend on whether Ukraine can strengthen its ability to defend its soil faster than Russia can renew its capacity to attack."
The prime minister, who visited Ukraine's capital on Friday, said supplies of weapons, equipment, ammunition, and training to Kyiv needed to outpace Moscow's efforts to rearm itself.
War in Ukraine: More coverage
Ukrainian officials have spoken bluntly in recent days about the need to boost the supply of heavy weapons to the country if Russian forces there are to be defeated.
On Wednesday the country's Defence Minister, Oleksiy Resnikov, met some 50 countries in the Ukraine Defence Contact Group in Brussels to ask for more arms and ammunition.
The country's Western allies have so far offered it major weapons supplies but Ukraine says it has only received a fraction of what it needs to defend itself and is asking for heavier arms.
Russian officials often criticise Nato military support for Ukraine and in an interview last week with the BBC the country's Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, cited the prospect of Ukraine joining the Western alliance as a reason for the invasion in the first place.
"We declared a special military operation because we had absolutely no other way of explaining to the West that dragging Ukraine into Nato was a criminal act," Mr Lavrov told the BBC.
Ukraine is not a member of Nato and although it has expressed a wish to join there is no timeframe for this.
In other updates:
- A pair of captured top Ukrainian military commanders responsible for defending the port city of Mariupol have been transferred to Russia, Russian state media report. The fate of hundreds of other Ukrainian soldiers detained after the siege in the city's Azovstal steel plant is unclear
- A senior Russian lawmaker says a Lithuanian ban on the transit of certain goods through its territory to the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad breaks international agreements. The governor of Kaliningrad, which is separated from the rest of Russia, says goods will now reach the enclave from Saint Petersburg by ferry instead
-
Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky has made his first trip to the country's war-torn southern front. He visited the hold-out city of Mykolaiv and the port of Odesa, both of which have been targeted in Russian efforts to seize Ukraine's Black Sea coast.
3. The nature of war is not changing in Ukraine
Apologies. I am late in sending this. For all those who think the nature of war is changing.
The nature of war is not changing in Ukraine
BY MICHAEL P. FERGUSON, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR - 06/16/22 3:30 PM ET
THE VIEWS EXPRESSED BY CONTRIBUTORS ARE THEIR OWN AND NOT THE VIEW OF THE HILL
During his commencement speech at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley was blunt about the future of warfare. In addition to describing an increasingly unstable world, he reminded the graduating class that “the nature of war is not going to change — it’s immutable.” Since Russia’s February incursion, the world has watched in awe as the Ukrainian Army pushed back its invaders with western-furnished anti-tank missiles, Starlink satellite support and Turkish drones. To some, this remarkable feat suggests that the nature of war is somehow changing, but the opposite is likely true.
In its simplest form, the nature of war involves the use of politically sanctioned violence to generate policy concessions from a human opponent. The means employed to drive these concessions represent the changing character of warfare, but tanks and algorithms do not concede anything, the leaders employing them do. Military thinkers from Thucydides to Carl von Clausewitz have therefore characterized war as a fundamentally human endeavor driven by emotion, necessity and innovation. The world needs to be reminded of this truism occasionally because it is not accepted wisdom, especially in an age when exquisite technologies paint fanciful visions of tomorrow’s battlefields. But the battlefields of today tell a different story.
At a Pentagon press briefing in late May, when asked what type of security assistance had been most effective in Ukraine, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin responded: “Long range missiles, tanks…and some [drones]…the fight is really shaped by artillery in this phase.” His comments echo those of an adviser to Ukraine’s senior defense official Gen. Valery Zaluzhnyi, who explained that drones and Javelin missiles were useful, but it was artillery that broke Russia’s advances.
The Russo-Ukrainian war is not a signpost of military revolution. It is an example of a smaller but capable power benefitting from sound leadership and unprecedented materiel support. The most recent aid package approved by Congress had a price tag of $40 billion — more than a quarter of Ukraine’s GDP before the war began. After Russia’s invasion, the U.S. Army spearheaded a coalition planning cell that combined the efforts of 20 countries in support of Ukraine’s defense. When paired with aid from all supporting nations, including Harpoon anti-ship missiles from Denmark, security assistance to Ukraine could soon equal or exceed its GDP. This aid, however, would be useless if not employed properly.
First-hand accounts attributed the early May operation’s success to superior human reconnaissance, predictive intelligence and accurate artillery strikes enabled by rather simple drone feeds. At its core, the artillery technology employed by the Ukrainian army has existed for more than a century — that is, beyond line-of-sight precision indirect fire systems. Only recently did Ukraine receive the more sophisticated American M777 Howitzers and French self-propelled Caesar cannons. Still, none of this is particularly revolutionary.
In 1970, author Alvin Toffler predicted that the 21st century would experience a sort of “future shock” as civilizations were exposed to new technologies too rapidly. Russia’s war on Ukraine has had the opposite effect, resulting in something akin to past shock as the modern European landscape is reacquainted with old horrors. As geopolitical analyst Peter Zeihan stated recently during a presentation at Fort Benning, Georgia, “there’s nothing that says progress is one way.” This distinction between war’s nature and character is an important consideration for policymakers.
Confusing the two can result in flawed assumptions related to deterrence and conflict termination, giving public officials an inflated sense of control over war’s conditions. Despite the incessant coverage of military hardware in Ukraine, nothing has captured the world’s attention like Russia’s atrocities, and for good reason. These potential war crimes unite NATO, but they also generate political pressure on western officials to offer Moscow “off ramps” that might put an end to the suffering.
Henry Kissinger’s suggestion that Ukraine concede land to Russia is one example. Rather than producing favorable outcomes, it is more likely that such painful concessions would only spread the “germs of another war,” as British officer Sir B. H. Liddell Hart wrote in 1954. Hart referred to this fallacy as mistaking the military aim for the national object — in other words, mistaking war’s character for its nature. The Kremlin has sacrificed too much to be content with a meager détente negotiated in the interest of the very enemy it uses to justify its invasion.
Even with all the modern weapons money can buy, abstract changes to war’s character are not destroying Russian battalions. Properly trained and equipped Ukrainians willing to die defending their country are doing that. This is true in Ukraine now and it will be true for the United States in any potential future war. Congress would do well to keep this in mind as it establishes priorities for the next National Defense Authorization Act amid competing innovation demands and the lowest propensity for military service on record.
The war in Ukraine will have far reaching implications for everything from global energy diversification to supply chain management. But no matter how badly some onlookers want to frame the conflict as a crystal ball into a futuristic battlefield, the mass graves in Bucha and Mariupol pull us back to reality. There may come a time when advanced technologies alter the brutal realities of armed conflict, but that time is not now. War’s terrible nature is not changing in Ukraine — it is being confirmed there.
Capt. Michael P. Ferguson is an officer in the U.S. Army with decades of operational experience throughout Iraq, Afghanistan, Europe and Africa. He is co-author of a forthcoming book on the military legacy of Alexander the Great (Routledge, 2023).
The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the policies or positions of the U.S. Army, the U.S. Department of Defense or the U.S. government.
4. The Return of Industrial Warfare
Yes the question is, can the US remain the arsenal of democracy? That was our nation's superpower. Do we still have it?
The Return of Industrial Warfare
Alex Vershinin17 June 2022
Can the West still provide the arsenal of democracy?
The war in Ukraine has proven that the age of industrial warfare is still here. The massive consumption of equipment, vehicles and ammunition requires a large-scale industrial base for resupply – quantity still has a quality of its own. The mass scale combat has pitted 250,000 Ukrainian soldiers, together with 450,000 recently mobilised citizen soldiers against about 200,000 Russian and separatist troops. The effort to arm, feed and supply these armies is a monumental task. Ammunition resupply is particularly onerous. For Ukraine, compounding this task are Russian deep fires capabilities, which target Ukrainian military industry and transportation networks throughout the depth of the country. The Russian army has also suffered from Ukrainian cross-border attacks and acts of sabotage, but at a smaller scale. The rate of ammunition and equipment consumption in Ukraine can only be sustained by a large-scale industrial base.
This reality should be a concrete warning to Western countries, who have scaled down military industrial capacity and sacrificed scale and effectiveness for efficiency. This strategy relies on flawed assumptions about the future of war, and has been influenced by both the bureaucratic culture in Western governments and the legacy of low-intensity conflicts. Currently, the West may not have the industrial capacity to fight a large-scale war. If the US government is planning to once again become the arsenal of democracy, then the existing capabilities of the US military-industrial base and the core assumptions that have driven its development need to be re-examined.
Estimating Ammo Consumption
There is no exact ammunition consumption data available for the Russia–Ukraine conflict. Neither government publishes data, but an estimate of Russian ammunition consumption can be calculated using the official fire missions data provided by the Russian Ministry of Defense during its daily briefing.
Number of Russian Daily Fire Missions, 19–31 May
Although these numbers mix tactical rockets with conventional, hard-shell artillery, it is not unreasonable to assume that a third of these missions were fired by rocket troops because they form a third of a motorised rifle brigade’s artillery force, with two other battalions being tube artillery. This suggests 390 daily missions fired by tube artillery. Each tube artillery strike is conducted by a battery of six guns total. However, combat and maintenance breakdowns are likely to reduce this number to four. With four guns per battery and four rounds per gun, the tube artillery fires about 6,240 rounds per day. We can estimate an additional 15% wastage for rounds that were set on the ground but abandoned when the battery moved in a hurry, rounds destroyed by Ukrainian strikes on ammunition dumps, or rounds fired but not reported to higher command levels. This number comes up to 7,176 artillery rounds a day. It should be noted that the Russian Ministry of Defense only reports fire missions by forces of the Russian Federation. These do not include formations from the Donetsk and Luhansk separatist republics, which are treated as different countries. The numbers are not perfect, but even if they are off by 50%, it still does not change the overall logistics challenge.
The Capacity of the West’s Industrial Base
The winner in a prolonged war between two near-peer powers is still based on which side has the strongest industrial base. A country must either have the manufacturing capacity to build massive quantities of ammunition or have other manufacturing industries that can be rapidly converted to ammunition production. Unfortunately, the West no longer seems to have either.
Presently, the US is decreasing its artillery ammunition stockpiles. In 2020, artillery ammunition purchases decreased by 36% to $425 million. In 2022, the plan is to reduce expenditure on 155mm artillery rounds to $174 million. This is equivalent to 75,357 M795 basic ‘dumb’ rounds for regular artillery, 1,400 XM1113 rounds for the M777, and 1,046 XM1113 rounds for Extended Round Artillery Cannons. Finally, there are $75 million dedicated for Excalibur precision-guided munitions that costs $176K per round, thus totaling 426 rounds. In short, US annual artillery production would at best only last for 10 days to two weeks of combat in Ukraine. If the initial estimate of Russian shells fired is over by 50%, it would only extend the artillery supplied for three weeks.
The expenditure of cruise missiles and theatre ballistic missiles is just as massive. The Russians have fired between 1,100 and 2,100 missiles. The US currently purchases 110 PRISM, 500 JASSM and 60 Tomahawk cruise missiles annually, meaning that in three months of combat, Russia has burned through four times the US annual missile production. The Russian rate of production can only be estimated. Russia started missile production in 2015 in limited initial runs, and even in 2016 the production runs were estimated at 47 missiles. This means that it had only five to six years of full-scale production.
If competition between autocracies and democracies has really entered a military phase, then the arsenal of democracy must radically improve its approach to the production of materiel in wartime
Flawed Assumptions
The first key assumption about future of combat is that precision-guided weapons will reduce overall ammunition consumption by requiring only one round to destroy the target. The war in Ukraine is challenging this assumption. Many ‘dumb’ indirect fire systems are achieving a great deal of precision without precision guidance, and still the overall ammunition consumption is massive. Part of the issue is that the digitisation of global maps, combined with a massive proliferation of drones, allows geolocation and targeting with increased precision, with video evidence demonstrating the ability to score first strike hits by indirect fires.
The second crucial assumption is that industry can be turned on and off at will. This mode of thinking was imported from the business sector and has spread through US government culture. In the civilian sector, customers can increase or decrease their orders. The producer may be hurt by a drop in orders but rarely is that drop catastrophic because usually there are multiple consumers and losses can be spread among consumers. Unfortunately, this does not work for military purchases. There is only one customer in the US for artillery shells – the military. Once the orders drop off, the manufacturer must close production lines to cut costs to stay in business. Small businesses may close entirely. Generating new capacity is very challenging, especially as there is so little manufacturing capacity left to draw skilled workers from. This is especially challenging because many older armament production systems are labour intensive to the point where they are practically built by hand, and it takes a long time to train a new workforce. The supply chain issues are also problematic because subcomponents may be produced by a subcontractor who either goes out of business, with loss of orders or retools for other customers or who relies on parts from overseas, possibly from a hostile country.
China’s near monopoly on rare earth materials is an obvious challenge here. Stinger missile production will not be completed until 2026, in part due to component shortages. US reports on the defence industrial base have made it clear that ramping up production in war-time may be challenging, if not impossible, due to supply chain issues and a lack of trained personnel due to the degradation of the US manufacturing base.
Finally, there is an assumption about overall ammunition consumption rates. The US government has always lowballed this number. From the Vietnam era to today, small arms plants have shrunk from five to just one. This was glaring at the height of the Iraq war, when US started to run low on small arms ammunition, causing the US government to buy British and Israeli ammunition during the initial stage of the war. At one point, the US had to dip into Vietnam and even Second World War-era ammo stockpiles of .50 calibre ammunition to feed the war effort. This was largely the result of incorrect assumptions about how effective US troops would be. Indeed, the Government Accountability Office estimated that it took 250,000 rounds to kill one insurgent. Luckily for the US, its gun culture ensured that small arms ammunition industry has a civilian component in the US. This is not the case with other types of ammunition, as shown earlier with Javelin and Stinger missiles. Without access to government methodology, it is impossible to understand why US government estimates were off, but there is a risk that the same errors were made with other types of munitions.
Conclusion
The war in Ukraine demonstrates that war between peer or near-peer adversaries demands the existence of a technically advanced, mass scale, industrial-age production capability. The Russian onslaught consumes ammunition at rates that massively exceed US forecasts and ammunition production. For the US to act as the arsenal of democracy in defence of Ukraine, there must be a major look at the manner and the scale at which the US organises its industrial base. This situation is especially critical because behind the Russian invasion stands the world’s manufacturing capital – China. As the US begins to expend more and more of its stockpiles to keep Ukraine in the war, China has yet to provide any meaningful military assistance to Russia. The West must assume that China will not allow Russia to be defeated, especially due to a lack of ammunition. If competition between autocracies and democracies has really entered a military phase, then the arsenal of democracy must first radically improve its approach to the production of materiel in wartime.
Lt Col (Retd) Alex Vershinin has 10 years of frontline experience in Korea, Iraq and Afghanistan. For the last decade before his retirement, he worked as a modelling and simulations officer in concept development and experimentation for NATO and the US Army.
The views expressed in this Commentary are the author’s, and do not represent those of RUSI or any other institution.
Have an idea for a Commentary you’d like to write for us? Send a short pitch to commentaries@rusi.org and we’ll get back to you if it fits into our research interests. Full guidelines for contributors can be found here.
5. How the US Could Lose the New Cold War
Fat chance that we can "again make our economic, social, and political systems the envy of the world." Those on the extreme right AND left will never allow that to happen.
Excerpts:
I could go on, but the point should be clear: If the US is going to embark on a new cold war, it had better understand what it will take to win. Cold wars ultimately are won with the soft power of attraction and persuasion. To come out on top, we must convince the rest of the world to buy not just our products, but also the social, political, and economic system we’re selling.
The US might know how to make the world’s best bombers and missile systems, but they will not help us here. Instead, we must offer concrete help to developing and emerging-market countries, starting with a waiver on all COVID-related intellectual property so that they can produce vaccines and treatments for themselves.
Equally important, the West must once again make our economic, social, and political systems the envy of the world. In the US, that starts with reducing gun violence, improving environmental regulations, combating inequality and racism, and protecting women’s reproductive rights. Until we have proven ourselves worthy to lead, we cannot expect others to march to our drum.
How the US Could Lose the New Cold War
Jun 17, 2022
Since the United States seems serious about confronting China in an extended contest for global supremacy, it had better start getting its own house in order. Other countries will not want to ally themselves with a power that rests on increasingly uncertain economic, social, and political foundations.
NEW YORK – The United States appears to have entered a new cold war with both China and Russia. And US leaders’ portrayal of the confrontation as one between democracy and authoritarianism fails the smell test, especially at a time when the same leaders are actively courting a systematic human-rights abuser like Saudi Arabia. Such hypocrisy suggests that it is at least partly global hegemony, not values, that is really at stake.
For two decades after the fall of the Iron Curtain, the US was clearly number one. But then came disastrously misguided wars in the Middle East, the 2008 financial crash, rising inequality, the opioid epidemic, and other crises that seemed to cast doubt on the superiority of America’s economic model. Moreover, between Donald Trump’s election, the attempted coup at the US Capitol, numerous mass shootings, a Republican Party bent on voter suppression, and the rise of conspiracy cults like QAnon, there is more than enough evidence to suggest that some aspects of American political and social life have become deeply pathological.
Of course, America does not want to be dethroned. But it is simply inevitable that China will outstrip the US economically, regardless of what official indicator one uses. Not only is its population four times larger than America’s; its economy also has been growing three times faster for many years (indeed, it already surpassed the US in purchasing-power-parity terms back in 2015).
While China has not done anything to declare itself as a strategic threat to America, the writing is on the wall. In Washington, there is a bipartisan consensus that China could pose a strategic threat, and that the least the US should do to mitigate the risk is to stop helping the Chinese economy grow. According to this view, preemptive action is warranted, even if it means violating the World Trade Organization rules that the US itself did so much to write and promote.
This front in the new cold war opened well before Russia invaded Ukraine. And senior US officials have since warned that the war must not divert attention from the real long-term threat: China. Given that Russia’s economy is around the same size as Spain’s, its “no limits” partnership with China hardly seems to matter economically (though its willingness to engage in disruptive activities around the world could prove useful to its larger southern neighbor).
But a country at “war” needs a strategy, and the US cannot win a new great-power contest by itself; it needs friends. Its natural allies are Europe and the other developed democracies around the world. But Trump did everything he could to alienate those countries, and the Republicans – still wholly beholden to him – have provided ample reason to question whether the US is a reliable partner. Moreover, the US also must win the hearts and minds of billions of people in the world’s developing countries and emerging markets – not just to have numbers on its side, but also to secure access to critical resources.
In seeking the world’s favor, the US will have to make up a lot of lost ground. Its long history of exploiting other countries does not help, and nor does its deeply embedded racism – a force that Trump expertly and cynically channels. Most recently, US policymakers contributed to global “vaccine apartheid,” whereby rich countries got all the shots they needed while people in poorer countries were left to their fates. Meanwhile, America’s new cold war opponents have made their vaccines readily available to others at or below cost, while also helping countries develop their own vaccine-production facilities.
The credibility gap is even wider when it comes to climate change, which disproportionately affects those in the Global South who have the least ability to cope. While major emerging markets have become the leading sources of greenhouse-gas emissions today, US cumulative emissions are still the largest by far. Developed countries continue to add to them, and, worse, have not even delivered on their meager promises to help poor countries manage the effects of the climate crisis that the rich world caused. Instead, US banks contribute to looming debt crises in many countries, often revealing a depraved indifference to the suffering that results.
Europe and America excel at lecturing others on what is morally right and economically sensible. But the message that usually comes through – as the persistence of US and European agricultural subsidies makes clear – is “do what I say, not what I do.” Especially after the Trump years, America no longer holds any claim to the moral high ground, nor does it have the credibility to dispense advice. Neoliberalism and trickle-down economics were never widely embraced in the Global South, and now they are going out of fashion everywhere.
At the same time, China has excelled not at delivering lectures but at furnishing poor countries with hard infrastructure. Yes, these countries are often left deeply in debt; but, given Western banks’ own behavior as creditors in the developing world, the US and others are hardly in a position to point the finger.
I could go on, but the point should be clear: If the US is going to embark on a new cold war, it had better understand what it will take to win. Cold wars ultimately are won with the soft power of attraction and persuasion. To come out on top, we must convince the rest of the world to buy not just our products, but also the social, political, and economic system we’re selling.
The US might know how to make the world’s best bombers and missile systems, but they will not help us here. Instead, we must offer concrete help to developing and emerging-market countries, starting with a waiver on all COVID-related intellectual property so that they can produce vaccines and treatments for themselves.
Equally important, the West must once again make our economic, social, and political systems the envy of the world. In the US, that starts with reducing gun violence, improving environmental regulations, combating inequality and racism, and protecting women’s reproductive rights. Until we have proven ourselves worthy to lead, we cannot expect others to march to our drum.
Writing for PS since 2001
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Joseph E. Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate in economics and University Professor at Columbia University, is a former chief economist of the World Bank (1997-2000), chair of the US President’s Council of Economic Advisers, and co-chair of the High-Level Commission on Carbon Prices. He is a member of the Independent Commission for the Reform of International Corporate Taxation and was lead author of the 1995 IPCC Climate Assessment.
6. Texas A&M’s Unreported Foreign Funding
Texas A&M’s Unreported Foreign Funding
Why the school says $100 million from Russia and Qatar is exempt from reporting requirements.
By
Neetu Arnold
June 17, 2022 1:58 pm ET
Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas, Jan. 24, 2020.
Photo: texas a m university handout/Shutterstock
Intellectual property theft and economic espionage by foreign governments have become major problems at U.S. colleges and universities. That’s why federal law requires colleges to report foreign-sourced gifts and contracts worth at least $250,000 in a calendar year. The Education Department in 2019 launched an investigation into foreign funding at several prominent American institutions of higher learning. Among the targets was Texas A&M, a network of 11 universities and eight state agencies with a $7.2 billion annual budget.
Texas A&M has reported receiving more than $700 million from foreign countries between 1995 and 2022, with the largest amounts coming from Qatar and China. The Education Department closed its investigation in January 2021, and Texas A&M appeared to be in compliance with federal requirements, even claiming to have overreported the amount of foreign funds it received by more than $2 million. But my analysis of publicly available documents and data reveals that Texas A&M continues not to report more than $100 million in research funds originating in Russia and Qatar.
These unreported funds have paid for research at the Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station, or TEES. Headquartered in College Station, TEES specifically focuses on the commercialization of engineering and technology research on cybersecurity, nuclear nonproliferation and artificial intelligence. Under Texas’ education law, TEES “is a part of The Texas A&M University System under the management and control of the board of regents of The Texas A&M University System.”
Russian entities have funded projects at TEES on hydrocarbon reservoir modeling. Qatar-backed research has been wider in scope, generally focusing on advancing technical capabilities for the small Gulf state. Projects have ranged from cybersecurity enhancements to medical advancements to better oil-recovery practices.
According to the Education Department’s College Foreign Gift Reporting database, Texas A&M has never received any funding from Russian entities. But TEES and Russian university Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology, or Skoltech, crafted a deal worth roughly $4 million (211,635,000 Russian rubles) in November 2014, only months after Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula in Ukraine.
This wasn’t the only deal with Skoltech at the time: Petroleum engineering professor John Killough secured an $8.7 million grant with Skoltech in 2013. Both deals were eventually canceled—in 2016 and 2015, respectively—and Mr. Killough said in an email that he received “somewhat less than” $3.2 million for the 2013 grant owing to the “devaluation of the ruble” and premature cancellation because of “sanctions for the Crimean invasion.”
Skoltech was founded in 2011 through a partnership with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In February 2022, MIT cut ties with Skoltech in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
I also investigated eight contracts TEES signed with the Qatar National Research Fund between 2010 and 2019. These deals collectively were worth close to $100 million. The Research Fund is backed by the Qatari government and requires all grant proposals to address how the research to be funded will benefit the energy-rich Gulf state. Qatar became the largest foreign donor to American universities in recent years even as these schools have come under fire for working with a country that supports censorship and subjects migrant laborers to poor working conditions.
In a June 2019 letter to Texas A&M, the Education Department explained that its guidelines for Section 117 of the Higher Education Act require the university to report all funds from “affiliated foundations and non-profit organizations” that “operate substantially for the benefit or under the auspices of Texas A&M University.”
But TEES spokeswoman Lisa Akin told me via email that TEES is “not a university or college” and is, therefore, exempt from these reporting requirements. According to Ms. Akin, TEES is “not an intermediary and does not act on behalf of Texas A&M University.”
This isn’t true, for three reasons.
First, Texas A&M and its affiliated branch campuses often benefit from these contracts. Of the 110 foreign-funded TEES research projects I looked at, 106 listed Texas A&M professors or researchers as principal investigators. Some professors even listed these projects on their résumés to demonstrate the funds they’ve attracted to Texas A&M, not TEES. Projects sometimes specify that the research will use Texas A&M facilities. One project under the 2014 Skoltech agreement, “High Performance Simulation in Conventional Onshore Reservoirs,” clearly states that it is “planned research at Texas A&M University.” Research agreements with the Qatar National Research Fund also list multiple projects in which Texas A&M or one of its branch campuses are sub-awardees. These endeavors benefit the university and use Texas A&M facilities and personnel.
Second, the Qatar National Research Fund would never have approved many of these projects if Texas A&M didn’t have a campus in Qatar, which it does. The Research Fund only accepts proposals from entities located in Qatar. While TEES now has a “division” in the country, it is on the grounds of Texas A&M University-Qatar.
Third, Texas A&M officials are involved with these contracts. Dimitris Lagoudas, a Texas A&M professor of aerospace engineering who is affiliated with TEES, was listed as an “authorized representative” in the 2014 Skoltech agreement under the title of “Texas A&M Associate Vice Chancellor for Research.” Even though TEES refuses to acknowledge that it often acts on behalf of Texas A&M, a $4.7 million contract with the Qatar National Research Fund in 2015 clearly states that the research would be conducted “under the auspices of Texas A&M University at Qatar Research Program.”
César O. Malavé, dean of Texas A&M-Qatar, signed a contract on behalf of TEES with the Qatar National Research Fund as recently as November 2019—and marked it with an official Texas A&M seal. Texas A&M officials sometimes signed two separate grant agreements with the Qatar National Research Fund on the same day: one ostensibly for the university and the other ostensibly for TEES. The university agreements were reported to the Education Department. The TEES agreements were not, though they were typically more lucrative.
The evidence indicates that TEES and Texas A&M are essentially the same entity, at least for the purposes of Section 117 reporting. And the Qatari funds may only scratch the surface of foreign money Texas A&M has received but not reported. TEES has or has had partnerships with entities in India, Saudi Arabia and Japan. There are seven other Texas A&M state agencies that also should be required to report foreign funds. If they don’t, the Education Department should reopen its investigation into Texas A&M.
Foreign funding disclosure is necessary to protect U.S. national security and to promote transparency, especially in security-relevant research areas like those at TEES. Americans should know if foreign countries—and which ones—are vying for influence at top U.S. research institutions. The Biden administration’s lax enforcement of Section 117 continues to send a message to universities that foreign funding disclosure doesn’t matter.
Ms. Arnold is a senior research associate at the National Association of Scholars.
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Appeared in the June 18, 2022, print edition.
7. High Casualties: Russia Pulls Out All the Stops to Find Fresh Troops
But isn't the math still on Russia's side?
High Casualties: Russia Pulls Out All the Stops to Find Fresh Troops
The Russian army is suffering high casualties in the war against Ukraine and Vladimir Putin badly needs fresh troops. He wants to avoid a general mobilization, so the military is relying on other methods.
15.06.2022, 12.08 Uhr
Spiegel · by Christina Hebel, DER SPIEGEL
Kirill Krechetov still has clear memories of the moment he found the white-and-red envelope in his mailbox. Inside was a summons instructing him to show up the next day at his local draft office. "Damn it, now I have to go to Ukraine," he recalls cursing to himself. Over the telephone, he says he was immediately filled with fear.
DER SPIEGEL 24/2022
Foto:
Mikhail Palinchak / SOPA Images / LightRocket / Getty Images / DER SPIEGEL
The article you are reading originally appeared in German in issue 24/2022 (June 10th, 2022) of DER SPIEGEL.
Krechetov, 35, is a construction worker and the father of a two-year-old daughter. He lives in Nizhny Novgorod, located about seven hours by car east of Moscow. Speaking rapidly, he asks that his real name not be used out of concern for his safety. Ten years ago, Krechetov completed his mandatory military service with a special unit belonging to the military intelligence agency GRU, and he is now a private first class in the reserves. He was initially contacted several weeks before the summons letter landed in his mailbox – in the form of a message sent via the messaging service Viber: Kirill Ivanovich, we are waiting for you, Krasnodarski Krai, 10th Brigade of the GRU Special Forces." Krechetov deleted the message. "I know how many of our boys are dying in Ukraine." He has learned of the casualty numbers, he says, from Telegram. "They only lie on the television."
The envelope with the heading "Military Correspondence," on the other hand, seemed far more binding than the Viber message. Krechetov headed for the draft office, where he was brought to the boss. What took you so long, the commander wanted to know. "We need you." They presented Krechetov with a contract, according to which he would be paid 300,000 rubles per month, the equivalent of around 4,500 euros, a sum that is more than seven times as high as the average salary in the region.
One of the military letters that have been sent to reservists in Nizhny Novgorod
"Fill this out," the military official told him. "You can choose three, six or 12 months and then sign here." Krechetov just shook his head. "Who is going to take care of my family if I return home in a coffin?" he asked. His parents are over 70 years old, and his mother is ill. When the official realized that he wouldn’t be able to convince Krechetov, he laid a blank sheet of paper on the table and told the reservist to write down the reasons why he refused to fight for Russia. Only then was he allowed to leave.
At first, Krechetov thought that only former special forces like himself would be summoned. Now, though, he knows that many men from Nizhny Novgorod received summons in the mail. "They are writing to everybody who has ever performed military service before."
Krechetov’s story shows just how badly the Russian army needs soldiers. The war against Ukraine, which must be referred to in Russia as a "special military operation for the protection of the Donbas," has been underway for almost four months now.
Nationwide Recruitment Effort
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s troops have suffered heavy losses, with a significant share of the country’s military involved in the offensive, including ground troops, paratroopers, the air force, the navy and the national guard. The military badly needs fresh fighters. The army was forced to withdraw from the regions surrounding Kyiv and Kharkiv, but in the Donbas, the Russian military is relying on brute force to achieve its aims. Dozens of soldiers on both sides are being killed each day in this war of attrition.
And new soldiers for the war effort aren’t just being recruited from Nizhny Novgorod in central Russia. Across the country, from Kaliningrad in the west to the eastern region of Amur, men of fighting age are being summoned. At least 2 million Russians are part of the country’s reserve force, though the precise number is classified.
The Russian army is using all means at its disposal to find reinforcements. They are luring them with attractive offers, issuing threats and even simulating a general mobilization by sending out huge numbers of summons to reservists – which some, either out of ignorance or fear, interpret as a call up order.
But an official call up can only take place once Putin declares a general mobilization. That, though, would be an indirect admission of his army’s weakness, a military force that had been considered vastly superior to Ukraine’s army prior to the invasion. More importantly, a general mobilization would have a more direct impact on the daily lives of Russians, which the Kremlin wants to avoid at all costs. The result has been a kind of veiled mobilization.
Russia’s leaders would like life to continue as normally as possible for the country’s citizens despite 15 weeks of war. And thus far, that effort has been largely successful, with the majority of Russians continuing to support the "special military operation." Many aren’t particularly interested in learning what exactly their military is doing in Ukraine. The death and destruction is being denied and obscured while Russia is honoring its own casualties as heroes, awarding them posthumous medals and even naming streets after them in some places. Huge posters celebrate them as "heroes of victory."
Despite all that, no widespread enthusiasm for the war in Ukraine has developed in the country. And that has become a problem for the recruitment offices, since they must apparently fill a quota, as an official document that was made public in the far-eastern region of Transbaikal seems to indicate. Human rights lawyers have also come to believe that Moscow has issued recruitment offices with requirements for how many people they must enlist for the war.
Russian President Vladimir Putin with injured soldiers in a Moscow hospital: The Kremlin is promising high wages to those who sign up to fight.
Foto: Mikhail Metzel / SNA / IMAGO
In order to accelerate that recruitment effort, the Russian parliament abolished the age limit for contract soldiers in expedited proceedings. Now, people up to the age of 65 can sign their first deal with the military, instead of the age limit of 40 that had previously applied.
The terms of the deals being offered are striking, with recruits receiving offers of at least 200,000 rubles – around 3,000 euros – a month for their troubles, a sum that used to be reserved solely for mercenaries, such as those fighting for the Wagner Group. Depending on specialization, rank and experience, offers can even be much higher than that, such as the one made to Kirill Krechetov in Nizhny Novgorod. Furthermore, Putin has decreed that the families of fallen soldiers are to receive more than 12 million rubles, the equivalent of 190,000 euros.
"The cannon fodder is coming into the recruitment offices on their own."
Reserve Sergeant Mikhail Danilov
It is a strategy that appears to be finding success primarily in the regions, as Sergei Krivenko, head of the human rights group Citizen Army Law, confirms. There are enough people ready to fight, he says, and lines have even developed in front of recruitment offices like the one in the northern city of Cherepovets. Some callers, he says, have even complained to him and his staff that the army only wants to place them under contract in August instead of signing them immediately.
"The cannon fodder is coming into the recruitment offices on their own," says Mikhail Danilov, a reserve sergeant. Danilov works as a freight forwarder in the Nizhny Novgorod region and has thus far not responded to his summons, accepting the fact that he might be fined up to 40 euros.
Coming Back in a Zinc Coffin
The recruitment offices in the region are primarily being visited by men "who want to make money quickly," says Danilov, who also asked us not to use his real name. He says he is still in touch with a number of former comrades from his tank brigade, which is based in the Nizhny Novgorod region, where a new battalion of contract soldiers has been formed. "The men are sent to Ukraine and come back in a zinc coffin. They are losing around 40 percent of the people they send into battle," he says. Western military experts believe that the severe losses can be blamed on the poor training of Russian reservists, who usually do not receive regular instruction.
In Bashkortostan, a Russian republic in the Ural Mountains, the army pledged a one-time payment of almost 3,800 euros on top of the already generous wages to new enlistees. Several hundred men reported for duty in the capital of Ufa in response to the offer. Meanwhile, the military is also contacting other potential recruits by telephone in an effort to encourage them to join the fight. People like Nikita Yuferev from St. Petersburg.
Yuferev found himself speaking to an unfamiliar woman’s voice when he answered a call from an unknown number in late May. The woman told him she was from the recruitment office. "We are offering you a contract for service in Ukraine." Yuferev is 34 years old and is a local political operative for the liberal Yabloko Party. He was so surprised by the call that he simply hung up. When he called back later, he learned that all men of fighting age in his district were receiving similar calls. Yuferev referred to them as "cold calls," of the kind mobile phone companies sometimes use to sell new contracts.
On top of that are the appeals and advertisements that can be seen in buses and the entrances to residences. "The country needs defenders," they read. Army mobile recruitment offices have also been deployed recently in greater numbers. The white trucks, printed with the Russian flag, were recently seen in St. Petersburg, with the army also seeking to recruit new contract soldiers in the northern naval city of Severomorsk and in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk.
Young men in an enlistment office in Novosibirsk
Foto: Kirill Kukhmar / ITAR-TASS / IMAGO
Those subject to conscription have the hardest time of it. More than 250,000 recruits between the ages of 18 and 27 are called up each year by the military on two specific days. Basic training to become a "srochnik" takes a year. Weapons training is generally completed within just a few months, after which the young men are distributed to their units. Even though Putin pledged right at the beginning of the war that new conscripts would not be sent to the warzone, many of them were deployed to Ukraine, nonetheless. Some officers have already been disciplined as a result. It is an extremely sensitive issue for Putin, who wants to avoid upsetting the families of the recruits.
But, as always in Russia, the rules are easily bent, particularly when it comes to young, inexperienced conscripts who generally don’t dare to contradict their commanders. There has been an increasing number of cases of recruits being forced by their commanders to sign as contract soldiers after just a few months. According to applicable law, doing so is allowed after just three months. "The moral and psychological pressure being exerted on the conscripts is enormous," says the human rights activist Krivenko, who has been focusing on the circumstances of soldiers in Russia for 20 years. "They are completely at the mercy of their commanders."
There is also significant pressure in Buryatia, a constituent republic on Lake Baikal just north of Mongolia. The region, which is almost as large as Germany by land area, now has the largest number of fallen troops in the country. Citing publicly available sources, the independent online portal People of the Baikal has reported 179 deaths, with funerals taking place in Buryatia on an almost daily basis.
Widespread Fear
Among the first deaths was the 19-year-old soldier Alexei Martynov, who fell near Kyiv on March 15. Most recently, two young men aged 22 and 24 were buried in their home villages: Anatoliy Shvezov and Alexander Batoshapov. They had only signed their military contracts in April. In early May, they died at the front.
A sign posted at a building entrance in Ulan-Ude, Buryatia: "Your country needs heroes, defenders and true patriots."
The hidden mobilization has been particularly intense in Buryatia. The army has been using the messenger service Viber to send attractive offers, which include generous salaries, social benefits and a healthy pension – the complete package. "They have called everyone I know: Don’t you want to participate in the special operation?" reports one woman from the region who asked to remain anonymous. "As if it was nothing more than an invitation to the café." There are also reports of army members going door-to-door.
The fear in Buryatia is widespread. Everyone knows about the recruitment effort, but few dare to talk about it openly, and certainly not with journalists. Men from Buryatia tend to avoid complaining, and they certainly don’t do so in public. "Because of their upbringing, they find complaining to be embarrassing," says Andrei Rintshino, a lawyer for the Free Buryatia Foundation. The organization is opposed to the war and supports the rights of ethnic Buryats. They make up roughly 30 percent of the constituent republic’s population and belong to the Mongol peoples. Rintshino says he has primarily been receiving calls from the mothers, wives and sisters of soldiers in their search for advice.
"Once the men are in the recruitment offices, they are promised wonderful lives and a mountain of money."
Andrei Rintshino, lawyer for the Free Buryatia Foundation
Army officials in the region have thus far had an easy time of it. The republic is one of the poorest areas in Russia and there are hardly any jobs to be had, but it is home to more than two dozen military bases. Both ethnic Buryats and ethnic Russians see the military as a reliable employer.
Rintshino says that military officials use both the carrot and the stick approach in their search for new recruits, using all the tricks at their disposal. They also send out summons, allegedly to confirm the accuracy of personal data on file. "Once the men are in the recruitment offices, they are promised wonderful lives and a mountain of money to convince them to join the patriotic fight," says Rintshino. Some of those who sign up, he says, do so in the hopes of avenging family members who were killed in Ukraine.
The burial of a soldier in the village of Ust-Kiran in Buryatia: Funerals are taking place almost daily in the region.
Foto: Baikal-Journal
Men who have already served as conscripts or contract soldiers and are not interested in going to Ukraine face coercion, says the lawyer. The military threatens them with red "traitor" stamps in their IDs or are even told they will be dragged before a war tribunal. "It’s an absurd threat," but it happens, nonetheless.
A call to the regional recruitment office results in several invitations for an interview and a medical examination the very next day. An official says that the office is currently looking for men to join a tank brigade. When asked whether it is possible to prematurely back out of a contract and pull out of Ukraine, she says: "Of course, it’s no problem at all."
In reality, though, it’s not quite that simple. Rintshino knows of around 250 men who wanted to leave the warzone prematurely. According to the rules, they must submit their request to their commanding officer along with a written explanation. Commanders generally exhibit little understanding. One young soldier in his early 20s, says Rintshino, faced discussions with six officers and FSB officials as a result of his request. Now, he no longer wants to talk of returning home.
Slowly, though, says Rintshino, the high casualty numbers are leading to a shift in attitudes. Many in the region are saying that the leadership in Moscow is wasting the lives of Buryat soldiers on the front lines. Monks in some Buddhist monasteries have begun urging Buryat families to "bring their sons home."
In Nizhny Novgorod, Kirill Krechetov has recently received additional messages, including from a former comrade from his time as a conscript. "Come over. Where are you?" he wrote. Krechetov responded by asking where he should come to. "To Mariupol," was the answer.
Krechetov says he was part of a group of 11 conscripts in the special forces brigade. And all of them, except for him, are now fighting in Ukraine. They don’t have much to lose, says Krechetov – they have no families and they need the money. "They are all still alive. For now."
Spiegel · by Christina Hebel, DER SPIEGEL
8. The US Needs a New Solarium for a New Grand Strategy
Many of us love the Solarium Project and think it is the gold standard for developing national security strategy (or grand strategy). But can it be replicated? Probably not but that does not not mean we should not try to emulate the strategic and critical thinking that took place. If I were king for a day I would require a Solarium project to take place every two years at the National War College in the summer following each presidential and midterm election.
The US Needs a New Solarium for a New Grand Strategy
A new grand strategy is desperately needed to meet not only the military threat posed by Russia, but the more comprehensive threat from China.
By James P. Farwell and Michael Miklaucic
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The United States and its allies are in a strategic quagmire. Buffeted along the full spectrum of hybrid warfare by peer, near-peer, and nonstate adversaries, they are challenged in every domain of contemporary conflict. Russia’s Ukraine invasion upended the already threatened liberal, rules-based order and down-shifted expectations about the behavioral boundaries within which states might act. China’s unprecedented rise as an economic, technological, and military rival has catalyzed a tectonic shift in the global balance of power. The revival of Sino-Russian alignment further complicates the West’s strategic predicament.
Arguably the U.S. and its allies have not crafted a grand strategy for geostrategic competition since containment and mutual assured destruction forged the bipolar world of the late 20th century. In recent years the collective Western strategic disposition has been reactive, never proactive, and rarely strategically effective.
Today a new grand strategy articulating an enduring strategic vision is desperately needed to meet not only the military threat posed by Russia, but the more comprehensive threat – economic, technological, military, and indeed ideological – from China.
What is the Solarium Project?
In 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower recognized that the United States lacked a grand strategy for combating global communism. He wanted to defeat it and recognized the need for a grand strategy to achieve that goal.
To meet the challenge, Eisenhower initiated Project Solarium, named for a room in the White House. He created three task forces from a bipartisan community of national security experts. Bipartisanship was critical since a grand strategy integrating all the elements of national power would require support throughout the political class and the nation. The task: Present recommendations for a grand strategy to defeat communism.
In the end Eisenhower opted for containment, advocated by George Kennan. The strategy consisted of three complementary aspects. The Atlantic Alliance would oppose any Soviet effort to expand its territory. It would fight to discredit and de-legitimize Communism as a failed ideology. It would offer a democratic political system and a rules-based international order as a positive alternative.
A New Solarium
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A modern Project Solarium could forge a new grand strategy designed for today’s global threat environment. Input and support from both parties in the United States, as well as U.S. partners abroad, is essential to preserve continuity between administrations. The strategy should define our enduring, shared interests, the global threat environment, and viable strategies to respond to the most pressing threats. A New Solarium project should evaluate competing approaches to today’s challenges.
Even with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, there is broad consensus that the longer-term, and more existential challenge to the liberal, rules-based world order is from China. We need to define what relationship we desire with China, and what is in our best interest. We need to ask: Is China a competitor or an enemy? What end-state is desired? Are we seeking to divide the world into spheres of influence, in which, for example, China is pre-eminent in Asia and the West pre-eminent in Europe? How would that work? Do we want to contain Chinese economic or territorial expansion, or do we want to defeat China’s efforts to become a true global superpower?
It is precisely the task of a New Solarium to determine the most viable strategic courses we might adopt; however, to advance the conversation we envision these three most obvious strategic options for discussion; 1) Defeat China, 2) Bifurcation, and 3) Managed competition. Each of these has its advocates and critics; each has advantages and disadvantages.
Strategy 1: Defeat China
China’s economic growth over the past several decades has been both impressive and alarming. Its growing military power and stated design to resume its historical position of global dominance by 2049 justify a robust retaliatory strategy to defeat China and deprive it of its strategic objective, like the Cold War containment strategy.
A grand strategy along those lines would seek to isolate and contain China, treating it as an adversary or enemy, and in concert with partners and allies, move aggressively to challenge its global initiatives, claims to the nine-dash line, and claims to extended fishing and mineral rights; counter its economic coercion and debt traps; and expose Huawei and other Chinese commercial juggernauts as tools for espionage.
The West would aggressively move to discredit and de-legitimize China’s 2049 vision of global dominance and reverse China’s recent diplomatic, information, and economic gains in Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America, while limiting China’s growth potential within Asia. It would seek to maintain the United States’ position of military dominance in Asia, by reinforcing the tensile strength of the first island chain links, and particularly the autonomy of Taiwan.
To defeat China the West must also engage its extraordinarily innovative collective private sector to win the race for dominance in the most critical technology areas such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, quantum technology, neuroscience, and others. The U.S. and its allies must accomplish demonstrable dominance such that China, like the Soviet Union in the 1980s, realizes this is a race it cannot afford and cannot win.
This strategy will recognize and exploit China’s intrinsic and organic weaknesses, such as its dependence on imported fuels, food and water vulnerability, and demographic challenges. It will attempt to prevent China from regaining the double-digit economic growth it needs to escape the middle-income trap.
If successful in these efforts, the West would be in a good position to defeat China in the diplomatic and information dimensions, as partners, allies, and neutral nations will see the benefits of alignment with the United States and the West. China would – in this scenario – be forced to accept the status quo of a liberal, rules-based world order under U.S. and Western dominance, with China as a powerful, but ultimately resigned, outlier.
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Strategy 2: Bifurcation
This scenario envisions a bifurcated world with a Western alliance on one side, and a China-centric entente on the opposite. China is pursuing “the China Dream” to achieve global military and economic supremacy by 2049. It rejects a rules-based international order that respects democracy, freedom of the press, and other values the West embraces, but unlike Russia, whose ambitions are focused on its periphery, and contrary to Beijing’s public statements, China’s ambitions are global.
China claims it seeks merely to protect its sovereign territory. But its definition of what that territory embraces keeps expanding. In theory, the nine-dash line in the South China Sea represents the maximum of Chinese historical claims. Its aggressive marketing of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), Huawei’s 5G infrastructure, the Thousand Talents programs, and its aggressive “Three Warfares” concept that employs economic, diplomatic, and political coercion, backed up by its military, more truly express its ambitions.
To achieve the “China dream,” China is betting heavily on new technology, including artificial intelligence, quantum computing, 6G, cloud computing, and computer processors designed and built within the framework of such policies as “military-civil fusion,” “Made in China 2025,” and “China Standards 2035.”
Western efforts over the past 30 years to engage and incorporate China within the liberal, rules-based world order have failed. China’s leaders have by now made it crystal clear they will not accept that role. The bifurcation strategy would recognize we are in a de facto Cold War 2.0. It would consist of a policy of containment; treating the China-centric entente as a unit and an adversary, politically, economically, and militarily; and being prepared should armed conflict erupt. This approach would echo limited elements of the Cold War containment policy, primarily to stop expansion of adversarial influence or territorial control.
The approach would be built on disciplined de-coupling of supply chains as well as cessation of trade with China. It would require a legislative and economic approach both penalizing private sector violators of the de-coupling policy, as well as incentivizing them to establish supply-chain autonomy and re-shoring production and manufacturing.
The bifurcation strategy acknowledges global spheres of influence for each bloc with the reluctant recognition that engagement is imprudent and reduces security. It would rest on an implicit agreement by both blocs not to interfere or encroach on activities within the other bloc.
Strategy 3: Managed Competition
The managed competition strategy accepts the multipolar world paradigm with Beijing and Washington each working to build strategic if fluid coalitions, competing for allegiance or at least alignment with Europe, India, and other powers. Like the bifurcation strategy, a managed competition approach acknowledges spheres of influence, but accepts their fluidity with opportunist nations either sliding between blocs or remaining neutral. Through economic, diplomatic, and informational efforts each bloc seeks to expand or strengthen its relative power and influence at the expense of the other.
A managed competition strategy would avoid armed conflict with China, but aggressively challenge and discredit such Chinese initiatives as the BRI while presenting competing ideas that are more attractive.
The managed competition strategy does not exclude commercial and financial interaction – even extensive interaction. Trade between the competing blocs will take place according to classic market principles such as comparative advantage, economies of scale, and gains from trade, with extreme caution and scrutiny in industries that impact on national or international security. Cooperation would be possible on such global issues as climate or pandemic management, though China has clearly shown that even regarding such global challenges it will always subordinate collective interest to national interest.
In this scenario, the West will challenge Beijing’s efforts to employ economic or other coercion to silence criticism of China. It will impose retaliatory punishments for Chinese conduct that undercuts national sovereignty or trust in political or social institutions. The managed competition strategy will support and assist allies as they build their own military capabilities and work to integrate those capabilities. China is paranoid about being surrounded or isolated, so planning for this scenario must factor in Chinese reactions and how to address them.
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In a managed competition scenario, we work aggressively to find areas of common interest with China to minimize tensions, while protecting U.S. interests such as intellectual property rights and a level playing field for trade. We treat China as a competitor and rival rather than an enemy, without ceding primacy in any geographical region, using alliances to counter Chinese economic or military expansion. We aggressively compete with China for influence in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and the Americas, while discrediting and de-legitimizing its 2049 vision.
Every administration confronts serious challenges; however, today’s complex and intractable challenges appear to exceed the current bureaucratic methodology that has given us the anemic national and alliance strategies of the past several decades. It would be the role of a new Solarium to clearly define the strategic challenges, our strategic objectives, and viable, credible strategies for attaining those objectives.
The three example options described above are simple, obvious, and have been widely discussed; hopefully a new Solarium would produce more innovative strategic options. Whatever options emerge from a new Solarium, ultimately the key decisions regarding national grand strategy must be made by the president of the United States and his allied and partner counterparts. And even with bold national and international leadership, the actual implementation of any strategy will depend on legislative branch leaders who put nation above party.
Even with these caveats taking a leaf from Eisenhower, the U.S. government – for both this or any succeeding administration – would profit greatly by assembling the kind of diverse, bipartisan team that made Project Solarium a strategic milestone on the road to strengthening U.S. national security and paving the way for the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union. We need a new Solarium now, more than ever.
James P. Farwell
James P. Farwell has advised U.S. Special Operations Command and the Defense Department. He is an associate fellow at King’s Centre for Strategic Communication at King’s College in London, and he is the author of “Information Warfare.”
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Michael Miklaucic
Michael Miklaucic is a senior fellow at the National Defense University and the editor-in-chief of its journal PRISM.
9. Uvalde Officer Passed Up Shot at Gunman for Fear of Hitting Children
I hate to second guess any man or woman in the arena who is faced with the chaos and heat of the moment but this incident will reinforce the doctrine to engage the threat as soon as possible. Looking back it certainly appears this officer had the best opportunity to prevent the carnage. Why did not he not take the shot? We will never know but one thing might be able to be discerned from this is if he was concerned with collateral damage was it because he did not have confidence in his ability to hit the target with his rifle (which is more accurate than a handgun all things being equal) and therefore second guessed himself and assessed it to be safer not to risk hitting innocent bystanders? Does this call for more training of police officers? More time on the range being necessary? More scenario based live fire training? Again, I hate to second guess the officer but we do have to try to learn from this tragedy.
Excerpts:
The quick arrival of several officers on May 24 reflected the speed with which the initial response took place, and contrasted sharply with what would become a protracted delay in finally confronting the gunman after he began shooting inside a pair of connected fourth-grade classrooms.
It also made clear the agonizing decisions law enforcement officers had to make as they confronted the gunman, who was firing shots outside the school; the officer who arrived with a rifle had only seconds to make a decision, and feared that firing his weapon could have meant hitting children, the senior sheriff’s deputy said.
Uvalde Officer Passed Up Shot at Gunman for Fear of Hitting Children
A police officer had a chance to shoot the gunman before he entered a school, according to a chief deputy sheriff. The officer declined to take the shot, fearing injuries to others.
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A makeshift memorial after a shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, that left 19 children and two adults dead.Credit...Callaghan O'Hare for The New York Times
June 17, 2022
UVALDE, Texas — A city police officer armed with an AR-15-style rifle hesitated when he had a brief chance to shoot the gunman approaching a school in Uvalde, Texas, because he did not want to hit children, according to a senior sheriff’s deputy who spoke to the officer.
The fateful decision, which has not been previously reported, represented the second missed opportunity for officers arriving at Robb Elementary School to prevent a massacre by intervening while the gunman was still outside the school. Officials have said that an officer from a different department, the Uvalde school district police force, arrived early but drove past the gunman, not seeing him in the parking lot of the school.
The quick arrival of several officers on May 24 reflected the speed with which the initial response took place, and contrasted sharply with what would become a protracted delay in finally confronting the gunman after he began shooting inside a pair of connected fourth-grade classrooms.
It also made clear the agonizing decisions law enforcement officers had to make as they confronted the gunman, who was firing shots outside the school; the officer who arrived with a rifle had only seconds to make a decision, and feared that firing his weapon could have meant hitting children, the senior sheriff’s deputy said.
Two teachers and 19 children were fatally shot after the gunman entered the school, and 11 were wounded, including a teacher.
The police response is now the subject of at least three investigations by the Texas Rangers, the U.S. Justice Department and a special committee of the Texas Legislature. A local district attorney has also been involved in the state’s investigation and has been handling media inquiries; she did not respond to a request for comment on the new details about the earliest stages of the police response.
Windows at Robb Elementary School are now boarded up.Credit...Ivan Pierre Aguirre for The New York Times
The Texas Department of Public Safety, which includes the Rangers, referred questions to the district attorney. The Uvalde Police Department, whose officer was said to have had line of sight on the gunman, did not respond to a request for comment.
A central focus of the inquiries has been the one hour and 17 minutes that elapsed from the time the gunman entered the classrooms and began shooting at 11:33 a.m. until a team of Border Patrol agents and a sheriff’s deputy from Zavala County entered the rooms and killed the gunman at 12:50 p.m.
The investigations are now showing that several officers arrived at the school before the gunman ever went inside, rushing to the scene after the first 911 calls around 11:29 a.m. reported that a truck had crashed near the school and that its driver was outside shooting.
At least two law enforcement cars arrived in close succession at the school, according to investigatory documents reviewed by The New York Times. One was driven by an officer from the small police force that patrols Uvalde’s schools. Another arrived less than a minute later, at 11:32 a.m., with officers from the Uvalde Police Department.
At that point, the gunman was still shooting outside of the school.
Officials have said he was firing at the building and toward a nearby funeral home, but arriving officers believed in the moment that the gunfire was directed at them, said Chief Deputy Sheriff Ricardo Rios of Zavala County, who also responded to the shooting in the neighboring county.
“My understanding, after talking to several officers that were there, was that the gunman engaged two City of Uvalde officers when they got there, outside the building,” Chief Deputy Rios said.
He said the two officers, including one with the long gun, took cover behind a patrol car. They wanted to return fire, he said, but held off.
Police tape and barricades that were used across the street from Robb Elementary School.Credit...Tamir Kalifa for The New York Times
Chief Deputy Rios, recounting his conversation with one of the officers, said that he was surprised and replied with a blunt question.
“I asked him, ‘Why didn’t you shoot? Why didn’t you engage?’ And that’s when he told me about the background,” he said. “According to the officers, they didn’t engage back because in the background there was kids playing and they were scared of hitting the kids.”
In one of the initial 911 calls, at 11:29 a.m., a caller told dispatchers about the gunfire outside and also that there were children running, according to the documents. It was not clear where those children were or if there were others in the line of fire in those first minutes.
The chief deputy sheriff said that any attempt to shoot the moving gunman would have been difficult, and that the officer would undoubtedly have faced harsh criticism and possibly even a criminal investigation had he missed and hit a bystander in the distance, especially a child.
The chance passed “really quick” he said, perhaps in a matter of seconds.
“I’m not bashing him or anything. I get it,” he said. “The Ranger who took my statement even said: ‘It’s come to the point where we’re second-guessing ourselves shooting somebody because we’re scared. Every bullet has our names.’”
On the day of the shooting, Chief Deputy Rios raced to the school in Uvalde along with his boss, the sheriff of Zavala County, Eusevio E. Salinas. As they were going, they learned that one of their off-duty deputies, Jose Luis Vasquez, was already en route.
Deputy Vasquez eventually ended up on the team of officers who later stormed the classrooms and killed the 18-year-old gunman, Salvador Ramos.
The police response is now the subject of at least three investigations by the Texas Rangers, the U.S. Justice Department and a special committee of the Texas Legislature. Credit...Ivan Pierre Aguirre for The New York Times
At the time when the shooting began, Deputy Vasquez had been heading to the gym in his department truck, dressed in a T-shirt and shorts. He rushed to the school anyway, Sheriff Salinas said. His daughter was a student at Robb Elementary, the chief deputy sheriff said.
Sheriff Salinas said he and Chief Deputy Rios arrived at the school at some point after 12 p.m. to find a chaotic scene, with both uniformed law enforcement and plainclothes officers responding.
“I saw a guy in street clothes carrying a shotgun,” Sheriff Salinas said. “I immediately pointed my gun at him, but a female officer popped up right beside him, so I said, ‘Wait a minute, this might be an off-duty officer.’” (He later learned that the man was an off-duty Border Patrol officer who had been at a nearby barbershop and borrowed the weapon from the barber.)
He said officers had established a perimeter around the school, and he saw, beyond that, a truck belonging to Deputy Vasquez, its lights flashing. He said he and Chief Deputy Rios remained outside the building until after the gunman, who used an AR-15-style rifle in his attack, was killed.
“We were there for assistance. The radio was pretty silent. It was real strange,” the sheriff said. “There was neighbors across the street, a lady watering her plants, another man working on his yard. Like nothing. Like nothing.”
Sheriff Salinas said he did not realize until later that his other deputy had been part of the team responsible for killing the gunman. He still did not know how it ended up that way, he said. Deputy Vasquez declined a request for an interview.
Chief Deputy Rios said his fellow deputy and others had been pressing to go in earlier and confront the gunman. “He told me that they wanted to go in,” he said. “He was saying, ‘Let’s go in, let’s go in.’”
Investigators are still looking into the reason for the long delay.
Investigators searching for evidence the day after the shooting.Credit...Jae C. Hong/Associated Press
State officials have said the incident commander was Chief Pete Arredondo, who leads the small school district police force and has jurisdiction over the schools. He said in an interview with The Texas Tribune that he did not consider himself in charge of the response. Through his lawyer, Chief Arredondo declined a request for an interview.
Documents reviewed by The Times show that several ballistic shields had arrived at the school by noon, but that Chief Arredondo had been focused on getting a key to the classrooms where the gunman was holed up.
It was not apparent from the documents or video reviewed by The Times that anyone had checked the doors to see if they were locked.
By 12:46 p.m. Chief Arredondo told officers in the hallway outside the classrooms, who included Deputy Vasquez, who was armed with an AR-15-style rifle and protected by a bulletproof vest, that they could go in. “If y’all are ready to do it, you do it,” Chief Arredondo said, according to a transcript of body camera footage reviewed by The Times.
The team of officers took a key that had been located, turned it in the door and entered, Chief Deputy Rios said, citing information from his fellow deputy.
“Joe says it like this, he goes: ‘Rick, it was quiet. I just scanned really quick, and I just heard the door squeaking open, creeeeeeek,’” said Mr. Rios, referring to a closet door inside one of the classrooms, Room 111. “‘And then he just started shooting at us, bop bop bop bop bop.’”
As the gunfire inside the classroom began, a Border Patrol agent with a ballistic shield lowered it to the ground to protect the team’s legs, Chief Deputy Rios said. Deputy Vasquez was just behind the Border Patrol agent, pointing his gun around one side of the shield.
Jessie Rodriguez, the father of Annabell Guadalupe Rodriguez, 10, one of the victims at Robb Elementary School.Credit...Lisa Krantz/Reuters
Deputy Vasquez reported that after he had fired several shots, his gun jammed. But the other officers continued to fire, separated by only several feet from the gunman.
Immediately after the gunman’s death, other officers and medical workers rushed to help the wounded.
“I remember they had a small child and they were working on her, CPR, chest compressions, and taping her,” Sheriff Salinas said, adding that he had kept his distance. He did not know if the girl survived.
10. ‘I had to cut off the head, bro’: Myanmar soldiers swap slaughter stories.
Photos and maps at the link:
‘I had to cut off the head, bro’: Myanmar soldiers swap slaughter stories.
Myanmar troops swap slaughter stories
Evidence of atrocities revealed on a soldier’s lost cell phone
Editor's note: This story contains images and descriptions that some readers may find disturbing. Reader discretion is advised.
By Khin Maung Soe and Nayrein Kyaw for RFA Burmese
Two armed men stand behind a tangle of bodies leaking blood which congeals in the dust. Each of the five victims is blindfolded, hands tied behind their back, and appear to have been killed by gunfire or a blade to the throat. The armed men – one with his rifle slung over his shoulder and the other smoking a cigarette – strike a nonchalant pose that is recorded for posterity in a series of grisly photos captured on a soldier’s phone.
These graphic images are among a cache of files recently obtained by RFA Burmese that document atrocities apparently committed by soldiers during military operations in Myanmar’s war-torn Sagaing region. The files include a video in which those two same armed men brag about how many people they have killed, and how they have killed them.
The content was retrieved from a cell phone that was found by a villager in Sagaing’s Ayadaw township where the military had been conducting raids amid an offensive against the anti-junta People’s Defense Force (PDF) paramilitary group. An intermediary who obtained the video and photos forwarded them to RFA in Washington.
Among the many images is one of about 30 men with their hands tied behind their backs on the grounds of a monastery.
Among the many images is one of about 30 men with their hands tied behind their backs on the grounds of a monastery. Two of them appear to be the same men who are seen dead in the photos taken a day later of the five victims of execution.
Another series of photos shows a young man with his arms bound behind him, his face puffy and bloodied. An outstretched hand holds his chin up, forcing him to look into the camera, while a second hand holds a knife to his chest over his heart.
The images also include many ‘selfie’ photos of a soldier, seemingly the phone’s owner. He also features in the video and the photos of the dead bodies.
The 10 1/2-minute video shows him and two other men mugging for the camera and chatting in crude terms about the number of people they have killed and what they did with the bodies. The phone’s owner, who wears a wide smile and sometimes slurs his words, has a hand grenade pinned to his chest. More armed men can be seen in the background.
“You said you killed 26 people. How did you kill them? Just shooting them with a gun?” asks the phone’s owner of one of his fellow soldiers.
“Of course, we killed them with our guns. But not with our hands,” the soldier responds.
“For us, we even killed a lot by slitting their throats. I, myself, killed five,” the phone’s owner says.
“I have never [slit throats],” the third soldier chimes in.
The second soldier then reconsiders his personal tally of death. “I think eight,” he says. “I killed eight [by slitting throats].”
Clues in the images
A closer look at the photos provides proof that these men serve in Myanmar’s military. Soldiers in the photos sport the arm badge of the Myanmar Army and, in at least one photo, the Northwest Military Command based in Sagaing. Soldiers are seen with bamboo baskets normally used as backpacks by junta soldiers. Numbers on rifle butts in the photos even help identify one military unit.
RFA asked Capt. Lin Htet Aung, a defector from the military who has joined the anti-junta Civil Disobedience Movement (CDM), about the evidence. He said the numbers “708” and “4” seen on the guns indicate they are from the 4th Company of the Light Infantry Battalion 708 (708 LIB). The battalion belongs to the Yangon-based Military Operations Command No. 4 (MOC-4) which has been deployed to Sagaing and Magway regions and may be involved in joint operations there, he said.
When contacted about the material recovered from the cell phone, junta Deputy Information Minister Maj. Gen. Zaw Min Tun told RFA that authorities had opened a probe into the matter.
“Regarding these incidents, we can respond only after investigation in the field,” he said. “We are now investigating it.”
The statements made by the men in the video appear in line with reports of attacks on civilians by junta troops in Sagaing and elsewhere in Myanmar, amid military offensives against the PDF, ethnic armies, and other anti-junta forces.
There have been widespread reports of soldiers arbitrarily detaining residents during village raids, looting their homes, setting buildings ablaze, and torturing, raping, and murdering inhabitants they accuse of assisting the armed resistance. The junta has previously denied such allegations or attributed the incidents to the PDF.
Sagaing region, home to around 5.3 million people, has seen some of the worst fighting between the military and the opposition since the junta seized power in February 2021. Thai NGO Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (Burma) says junta authorities have killed nearly 2,000 people in Myanmar since the coup, including at least 683 in Sagaing.
In photos from the phone, soldiers have the arm badge of the Northwest Military Command, which is based in Sagaing region.
The images obtained by RFA provide a rare glimpse into the lives of perpetrators of the ongoing atrocities in Myanmar under junta rule. While the victims of raids have documented the aftermath of such incidents, it is rare to hear directly from those responsible, speaking in detail about how they committed the acts and attempting to justify them.
A careful review of the data from the images found they had been taken on a Chinese-made OPPO phone. The photo of the young man being interrogated at knifepoint was taken on April 28, 2022, while the photo of the bound captives was taken on May 10, and the photos of the five execution victims were taken on May 11.
Local media reports suggest killings by the military took place in Ayadaw township around the time the photos were taken. According to a May 11 Facebook post by the Ayadaw Post, junta troops entered Ayadaw’s Chin Pin village, shot six guards, and abducted 30 people on May 7.
But reporting by RFA indicates the photos may actually have been taken in neighboring Ye-U township. One of the slain men in the May 11 photo was wearing a t-shirt advertising a grocery store in the township.
This photo (blurred to cover the graphic scene) shows the phone owner and a man who also appeared in the video standing next to five slain men lying in pools of blood. Two of the slain men also can be seen in the photo from the previous day showing about 30 men with their hands tied behind their backs on the grounds of a monastery.
A resident of Ye-U told RFA that the May 10 image of the 30 men with their hands tied appears to have been taken at Mon Taing Pin monastery in the township. A separate source also confirmed that another photo, taken April 26 and showing a roofed walkway, resembles a pagoda at Wet Phyu village, which lies 17.5 miles (28 kilometers) to the west of Mon Taing Pin. RFA is not naming these and other sources for safety reasons.
RFA previously reported that 27 people were killed in Ye-U township’s Mon Taing Pin and In Pin villages some time between May 10 and May 12. Villagers said the incident began late on May 9, when Mon Taing Pin village came under fire from small arms, artillery and mortars. Initially, two PDF members guarding the village were killed in the gunfire before the military raided it.
One villager in Mon Taing Pin said the soldiers rounded up several dozen men from the village, aged between about 20 and 60, and they were detained in the monastery. He said the men were beaten up and killed and then put inside houses in the village which were set on fire.
Photos provided to RFA by residents of the aftermath of the incident included images of razed buildings, human remains nearly completely incinerated by fire, bloated corpses, and the lower part of a severed torso – the legs of which had also been removed and left at the scene.
Boasting of killing
Details about the disposal of victims’ bodies provided by the three soldiers in the video found on the cell phone sound strikingly similar to the state of the remains discovered in Ye-U township last month. And the lack of emotion in the soldiers’ voices as they discuss the incident suggests that killing has become normal behavior for them.
“Seriously. I have killed people before. And I don’t like blood. It’s nauseating, though I killed them. Cut them in three parts,” the phone’s owner says.
“I killed those whom I caught. And the sergeant told us to cut them in three pieces and bury them,” the soldier who claims to have killed more than two dozen people responds.
The phone’s owner goes on to describe covering up his handiwork, using slurred speech that suggests he isn’t sober.
“One guy had his head blown off at the back. He had burns all over his body and his skin was peeling off. Yuck, it was horrible,” he says.
“I had to cut off the head, bro. I had to chop it off [and it took] five or six tries … Pieces of flesh came out, like pork. But human flesh is yellowish.”
He goes on to brag that he is “an expert in killing.”
The photos on the phone include many selfies of a soldier, who appears to have been the phone owner. He also is seen in the video and the photos of the slain men.
But the boasting is intermingled with more plaintive comments, in which the soldiers compare themselves to “driftwood,” obliged to follow orders, and lament that they could be killed at any time.
“Do you know why I didn’t complain then [when we had to cut up the bodies]? [Our superiors] were leading the fight and I didn’t want to say anything. Otherwise, there’s no need to cut off their heads,” the phone’s owner says at one point.
“What is life? It’s a fight. You win or you die. But our lives don’t seem to matter whether we live or not … [This video is] just for the record. We’re brothers. If I get killed, you won’t see me anymore, but you can remember me with this.”
Reports of the military’s targeting of civilians since the coup led to U.S. sanctions last year against the 33rd Light Infantry Division (33 LID) and the 77th Light Infantry Division (77 LID) of Myanmar’s Army over “excessive force, including killings” following their deployment to Mandalay and Yangon, respectively.
The 33 LID was also the target of U.S. sanctions in 2018 “for engaging in serious human rights abuse” against the ethnic Rohingya during alleged “terrorist” clearance operations a year earlier in Rakhine state. Atrocities committed by soldiers from the 33 LID and the 99 LID during that campaign, which forced more than 740,000 Rohingya to flee across the border to Bangladesh and was subsequently designated an act of genocide by Washington, were documented in a groundbreaking investigative report by Reuters news agency in June 2018.
In all, 144 photos were found on the phone. Some of the images have been blurred due to the graphic nature of the content or to protect the privacy of the individuals.
Web page produced by: Minh-Ha Le
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Translated: Khin Maung Nyane
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Video: Chris Billing
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Editing: Paul Eckert, Kyaw Kyaw Aung, Kyaw Min Htun, H. Léo Kim, Paul Nelson, Joshua Lipes, Mat Pennington
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© 2022 RFA
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11. Dangerous Straits: Wargaming a Future Conflict over Taiwan
Dangerous Straits: Wargaming a Future Conflict over Taiwan
June 15, 2022
Executive Summary
Until recently, U.S. policymakers and subject matter experts have viewed the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC’s) forcible unification with Taiwan as a distant threat. But the mix of rapid Chinese military modernization, a narrow window for localized near-parity with the U.S. military, and growing pessimism about the prospects for peaceful unification may lead the PRC to perceive that it has the ability to pursue a successful operation against Taiwan. Beijing’s lessons learned from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine could prompt the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to adjust its war plans for Taiwan to become more effective and deadly. Coupled together, these developments may suggest an accelerated timeline for seizing Taiwan. It is therefore urgent that the United States, in conjunction with its regional allies and partners, identify ways to deter the PRC from invading Taiwan and prevent a future conflict.
To do so, the Gaming Lab at CNAS, in partnership with NBC’s Meet the Press, conducted a high-level strategic-operational wargame exploring a fictional war over Taiwan, set in 2027. The wargame sought to illuminate the dilemmas that U.S. and Chinese policymakers might face in such a conflict, along with the strategies they might adopt to achieve their overarching objectives. The game was intended to produce insights as to how the United States and its allies and partners could deter the PRC from invading Taiwan and could better position themselves to defend Taiwan and defeat such aggression should deterrence fail.
The wargame indicated there is no quick victory for either side if China decides to invade Taiwan. Neither side felt as though it had lost the fight over Taiwan, and even though China hoped to achieve a swift and decisive victory, it was prepared for a long fight. Beijing was faced with a dilemma: whether to keep the war limited and hope the United States did not become involved, or to preemptively strike U.S. targets to improve Chinese probability of success, but at the high cost of prolonging the conflict. In such a scenario, neither Beijing nor Washington is likely to have the upper hand after the first week of the conflict, which suggests a protracted conflict.
Moreover, a conflict over Taiwan may quickly lead to consequences far beyond what Beijing and Washington intend. The wargame demonstrated how quickly a conflict could escalate, with both China and the United States crossing red lines. There is a high risk that deterrent signals may be misread in a potential future fight due to differences in military strengths and weaknesses, and these shape the types of escalation Beijing and Washington are likely to select. As the wargame illustrated, despite its declared policy of no first use, China may be willing to brandish nuclear weapons or conduct a limited demonstration of its nuclear capability in an effort to prevent or end U.S. involvement in a conflict with Taiwan.
A conflict over Taiwan may quickly lead to consequences far beyond what Beijing and Washington intend. The wargame demonstrated how quickly a conflict could escalate, with both China and the United States crossing red lines.
The wargame highlighted an additional asymmetry in this tension: the role that capable U.S. allies and partners could play in a future conflict. Not only does China lack such relationships, but capable military partners on the U.S. side add significant combat power, depth, and strategic significance to efforts to defend Taiwan. This further complicates PRC decision-making about how it to may choose to invade Taiwan, and about how it may seek to deter U.S. and allied involvement.
Ultimately, the wargame indicates that the United States and its allies and partners have an opportunity to take steps to significantly strengthen deterrence and ensure that the PRC never sees an invasion of Taiwan as a profitable option. But, in order to change the Indo-Pacific military balance in their favor and develop the advancements in capability, posture, and planning that can hold PRC aggression at bay, the United States and its allies and partners must take immediate steps in several key areas.
First, the U.S. Department of Defense should make sustained investments in long-range precision-guided weapons and undersea capabilities, while also developing additional basing access in the Indo-Pacific region to facilitate operations and enhance survivability. The DoD should deepen its strategic and operational planning with highly capable allies such as Japan and Australia to improve their collective ability to respond to Chinese aggression against Taiwan. Additionally, DoD planning should move beyond defeating a rapid invasion to consider how to fight a protracted war and make changes to facilitate long-term operations and favorable war termination. Finally, the department ought to explore the risks of escalation in the context of a war with China, so that these can be anticipated, prevented, and managed.
Second, the U.S. Congress should enable key improvements through the Pacific Deterrence Initiative and should help shape Taiwan’s military posture. Third, Taiwan must improve its defensive capabilities by investing in asymmetric, resilient, and attritable capabilities by increasing training for its active and reserve forces; and by stockpiling key weapons and supplies.
Authors
Senior Fellow and Director, Defense Program
Stacie Pettyjohn is a Senior Fellow and Director of the Defense Program at CNAS. Her areas of expertise include defense strategy, posture, force planning, the defense budget, ...
Fellow, Defense Program
Becca Wasser is a Fellow for the Defense Program and co-lead of The Gaming Lab at CNAS. Her research areas include defense strategy, force design, strategic and operational pl...
Senior Fellow, Defense Program
Chris Dougherty is a Senior Fellow for the Defense Program and co-lead of the Gaming Lab at CNAS. His primary areas of research include defense strategy, operational concepts,...
12. Peter Thiel helped build big tech. Now he wants to tear it all down.
Excerpts:
This account is based on interviews with more than a dozen people familiar with Thiel’s thinking, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations.
Since March of 2021, Thiel has pumped more than $20 million into 16 political campaigns, including the Ohio Senate race where close associate J.D. Vance last month won the Republican nomination, in part by attacking Big Tech and social media censorship. Thiel also has given at least $13.5 million to acolyte Blake Masters, a Republican candidate for Senate in Arizona who serves as president of Thiel’s personal foundation and has positioned himself as an adversary of Big Tech.
New reporting shows Thiel has set his sights on transforming American culture — and funding its culture wars — through what his associates refer to as “anti-woke” business ventures, including a right-wing film festival, a gay dating app for conservatives founded by a former Trump administration ally and a firm, Strive Asset Management, that will “pressure CEOs to steer clear of environmental, social and political causes,” said Vivek Ramaswamy, the firm’s co-founder such as oil companies “committing to reduce production to meet environmental goals.”
More such investments are coming, the people said — though Thiel himself isn’t sure of the endgame.
Peter Thiel helped build big tech. Now he wants to tear it all down.
Inside the billionaire investor’s journey from Facebook board member to an architect of the new American right
June 19, 2022 at 6:00 a.m. EDT
On a summer morning in 2019, Rep. Matt Gaetz was having breakfast at the Los Angeles mansion of billionaire investor Peter Thiel, who would become one of the Republican Party’s biggest donors. At the time, Thiel was locked in a to-be-or-not-to-be debate over whether to leave the board of Facebook. Aware of Thiel’s love of Shakespeare, Gaetz (R-Fla.) playfully dubbed him Hamlet.
Like many Republicans, Gaetz viewed the social media giant as increasingly monopolistic and dangerous. He and another guest, entrepreneur and former right-wing provocateur Chuck Johnson, encouraged Thiel to leave the company. But Thiel demurred, telling the pair that he hoped to change it from within, according to two people familiar with the conversation.
Last month, Thiel finally stepped down from the social network, formally dissolving one of the most powerful partnerships in the history of Silicon Valley. As Facebook’s first outside investor, its longest-serving board member and a close adviser to CEO Mark Zuckerberg since he launched the company as a Harvard sophomore in 2004, Thiel helped alter the direction of the company whose products serve billions.
Thiel’s ambition to serve as an architect of the American right had grown increasingly at odds with his position on the board of one of the movement’s top enemies — a political shift that dovetailed with his own growing alienation from Silicon Valley.
Reports at the time said that Thiel left the Facebook board to focus on politics, including a slate of 2022 congressional candidates aligned with former president Donald Trump.
But interviews with members of his inner circle indicate that his departure was years in the making, driven by a growing philosophical rift between Thiel and Facebook as conservatives became uncomfortable with the tech industry’s willingness to police online speech. Thiel, according to those close to him, lost his appetite to serve as Facebook’s defender as his political aspirations matured.
This account is based on interviews with more than a dozen people familiar with Thiel’s thinking, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations.
Since March of 2021, Thiel has pumped more than $20 million into 16 political campaigns, including the Ohio Senate race where close associate J.D. Vance last month won the Republican nomination, in part by attacking Big Tech and social media censorship. Thiel also has given at least $13.5 million to acolyte Blake Masters, a Republican candidate for Senate in Arizona who serves as president of Thiel’s personal foundation and has positioned himself as an adversary of Big Tech.
New reporting shows Thiel has set his sights on transforming American culture — and funding its culture wars — through what his associates refer to as “anti-woke” business ventures, including a right-wing film festival, a gay dating app for conservatives founded by a former Trump administration ally and a firm, Strive Asset Management, that will “pressure CEOs to steer clear of environmental, social and political causes,” said Vivek Ramaswamy, the firm’s co-founder such as oil companies “committing to reduce production to meet environmental goals.”
More such investments are coming, the people said — though Thiel himself isn’t sure of the endgame.
“Peter deeply believes that there is huge opportunity in creating a parallel economy,” said Ramaswamy, a former biotech CEO and author of “Woke, Inc.: Inside America’s Social Justice Scam.”
“Serving Americans who are disaffected from corporate America today would be the backbone of the next generation of major companies — and almost nobody is going after that opportunity in a serious way,” he said.
Thiel’s growing political clout mirrors that of another Silicon Valley billionaire, Elon Musk, a self-proclaimed libertarian who espouses increasingly right-wing views to his 94 million Twitter followers, as he finalizes his deal to buy the social network. The men are not close — Thiel pushed out Musk when the two ran PayPal — but they’ve become more aligned politically, often echoing each other’s rhetoric as they criticize “socially responsible” investing and express concern about Big Tech’s control of speech.
They share a mutual PayPal-era friend, David Sacks, who has vetted individuals interested in political opportunities with both billionaires, according to one of the people. Thiel is enthusiastic about Musk running Twitter, two associates said.
Thiel and Musk may herald the rise of a new breed of tech billionaire, turning their deep pockets and distinct ideologies away from the companies that made their fortunes toward building a new version of the American right. It’s a powerful group that has the potential to anoint a rising generation of political leaders, transforming both the GOP and Silicon Valley.
During Trump’s presidency, new reporting shows Thiel’s relationship with Facebook became increasingly strained, beset by conflicts that left him feeling that the company was acting against his values, according to four people. In a 2021 talk alongside former Trump Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Thiel criticized Facebook for supporting “woke politics” and “de-platforming” the account of former president Trump.
“Since at least 2018, he’s become very concerned about Facebook. He was uncomfortable with how they were using their monopolistic power,” said another one of the people familiar with his thinking. “But he was reluctant to leave because he felt he could do more, affect more change, from the inside.”
By 2022, Thiel was convinced: His change would be made from the outside.
From asset to alienation
Thiel declined requests for an interview. Facebook referred The Post to Zuckerberg’s public comments on Thiel’s departure from the board. “Peter has been a valuable member of our board and I’m deeply grateful for everything he has done for our company — from believing in us when few others would, to teaching me so many lessons about business, economics, and the world,” Zuckerberg said in a news release.
Thiel has always been an outlier among Facebook’s largely liberal staff and board of directors. A gay self-proclaimed libertarian and a German immigrant who came to the U.S. as a young boy, he earned his initial wealth in Silicon Valley by co-founding the payments processor PayPal in 1998. He put a $500,000 angel investment into Facebook in 2004, when Zuckerberg was still a student at Harvard.
He also was an early and enthusiastic participant in the culture wars. As an undergraduate at Stanford University, he founded the right-wing campus newspaper Stanford Review, which published articles calling liberal professors secret Marxists and railed against the inclusion of non-White authors in the school’s curriculum, according to journalist Max Chafkin, author of the Thiel biography, “The Contrarian.”
Still, Thiel was long considered Facebook’s most influential board member, giving Zuckerberg opinions that went against the grain of other top advisers, said three of the people.
“Mark listened to him,” one of the people said. “Mark appreciated the contrarian impulse. Peter stood for a diversity of opinion on the platform, and Mark stood for a diversity of opinion on the board.”
And Thiel’s influence could be felt throughout the company. In his best-selling 2014 book, 'Zero to One,” he argued that businesses should strive to make such a singular product that they become monopolies — while entrepreneurs consolidate power to run their companies like monarchies. Zuckerberg appeared to heed these lessons, multiple people said, from the structure of Facebook’s board, which gives the CEO the majority of voting shares and ultimate control, to his aggressive efforts to purchase or copy nascent competitors, a strategy that has given rise to accusations that the company is a monopoly. (Facebook denies these accusations.)
For years, Thiel acted as a bridge builder with conservatives, particularly in the spring of 2016, after the tech site Gizmodo reported that a small group of employees were intentionally blocking right-leaning news outlets from trending topics, a feature used to showcase popular news stories on the platform. That summer, Thiel helped counter charges of liberal bias by brokering a closed-door meeting between Zuckerberg and prominent conservative politicians and publishers, including Fox News host Tucker Carlson.
Some Facebook executives thought Thiel was overstepping to help his soon-to-be political allies. Those tensions would explode later that summer, when Thiel donated $1.25 million to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and spoke in support of him at the Republican National convention.
The move put the investor on a collision course with Facebook’s Democratic board members and liberal employee base. After Thiel’s convention speech, he received an email from fellow board member, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, who called the decision “catastrophically bad judgment.” Hastings declined to comment.
Feeling attacked, Thiel shared the email with Johnson, who later leaked it to the New York Times, according to two of the people. Thiel’s leak caused a rift and sense of betrayal within the board , according to two people familiar with the matter.
Thiel’s support of Trump — along with comments that resurfaced from a book co-authored with David Sacks that “a multicultural rape charge may indicate nothing more than a belated regret” and that some rape charges are “seductions that are later regretted” — provoked outcry within Facebook during election season, but Zuckerberg continued to defend his adviser. (Thiel apologized for the comments.)
“We can’t create a culture that says it cares about diversity and then excludes almost half the country because they back a political candidate,” Zuckerberg wrote, according to a leaked copy of an October 2016 memo referencing “concerns about Peter Thiel.”
Thiel stayed on the board after the incident, but soon began to speak about a desire to resign, three of the people said. In 2017, he largely sold off his remaining Facebook shares.
After Trump won the presidency, Thiel, with assistance from Masters, began to tap talent in Silicon Valley to work with the new administration. At the same time, he became increasingly embedded in a right-wing philosophy that began to view “Big Tech censorship” as a target and was highly critical of China.
He became close with Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon, a China hawk, in the run-up to the 2016 election. After returning from a book tour in the country, Thiel began to espouse increasingly strong anti-China views, including the belief that U.S. tech companies were harboring Chinese spies. In 2019 he claimed that Google, a longtime target of Thiel’s attacks, was being “infiltrated” by Chinese intelligence and called the company “treasonous.” He later attacked Apple for relying on China for its supply chain.
Zuckerberg had courted China for years in hopes of breaking into its lucrative market.
Soon after Thiel escalated his anti-China rhetoric, Zuckerberg did an about-face. In a 2020 congressional hearing, the CEO accused China of stealing U.S. technology. New evidence suggests this may have been partially due to Thiel’s influence: Thiel and Zuckerberg spoke about China, and Facebook’s sudden anti-China stance was in part fueled by a desire among company executives to curry favor with people in Trump’s orbit, they said.
Meanwhile, the right’s stance on social media was already beginning to change. Following revelations in 2017 that Russian operatives had used Facebook to sow widespread disinformation, and the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, which was organized and promoted on social media, tech companies created new rules about hate speech and misinformation, hiring thousands of content moderators to enforce them.
The result: a series of crackdowns that disproportionately impacted conservatives, who were more likely to break these rules. Among the earliest targets were conspiracy theorist and media personality Alex Jones and alt-right influencer Milo Yiannopoulos, whose ban came after he’d participated in a harassment campaign against actress Leslie Jones.
“For people on the right, all this was seen as retribution for winning the 2016 election,” said Amalia Halikias, Masters’ campaign manager and a former campaign policy director for Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), another longtime beneficiary of Thiel’s largesse.
Thiel’s proteges were leveraging this alleged persecution to build momentum. Hawley would go on to become one of the biggest critics of Big Tech in the Senate, along with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), another elite law school graduate who has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from Thiel since his first Senate bid in 2012.
The reluctant kingmaker
By 2018, Thiel had become so alienated from Silicon Valley that he relocated his home and his investment firms to Los Angeles, said several of the people.
His connections with the far-right, meanwhile, were growing. Thiel, who had long been a quiet donor to conservative think tanks became a funder of the National Conservatism Conference, an emerging venue for rising populist figures on the right. He grew closer with Johnson, who’d met Thiel at a conference while a college student, and who has been permanently banned from Twitter since 2015, for allegedly attacking a Black Lives Matter activist. (Johnson, who has sued Twitter over his suspension, says his removal was unfair and that his tweet was “part of a journalistic project.”)
Through Johnson, Thiel became friendly with Gaetz, then viewed as a rising star in the GOP. The pair enjoyed long philosophical conversations about what they perceived as the power of technology companies to silence people and threaten American democracy, two of the people said. Last year, Gaetz suggested that his supporters use their Second Amendment rights to fight against Silicon Valley’s ability to “cancel” people who don’t “conform to their way of thinking.” (A Gaetz spokesperson said at the time that the interpretation was a “wildly irresponsible mis-framing” of his comments.)
In addition to his support of candidates that attacked Facebook, Thiel has also undermined both the company and Zuckerberg personally, new reporting shows. He was upset that Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, gave more than $400 million to nonprofits to help fund election administration during the 2020 election, a donation viewed by the right as disproportionately helping Democrats. It prompted an angry joint New York Post op-ed from Vance and Masters, who had discussed the issue with Thiel, the people said.
In 2021, Thiel followed his Stanford Review friend and fellow investor Keith Rabois to Miami, where they bought waterfront mansions and opened up a branch of Thiel’s venture capital firm Founder’s Fund.
Though Thiel largely sat out the 2020 presidential election, in March 2021 he gave $10 million to the long-shot candidacy of Vance, a former employee who wrote the best-selling book “Hillbilly Elegy.” A $10 million contribution to Masters followed in April.
With Thiel’s help securing Trump’s endorsement and a last-minute infusion of $1.5 million, Vance won the Ohio primary, said a person familiar with the inner workings of the campaign. Vance now faces Democrat Tim Ryan in the race to replace retiring Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio), a moderate who endorsed Vance’s primary opponent.
Though Thiel has expressed doubts about whether the Trump administration was too chaotic to achieve its aims, according to two of the people, he maintains ties with Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner. Thiel had lunch with Trump at Mar-a-Lago as recently as February, one of the people said. He had brought Masters to meet with Trump in the hopes of securing an endorsement, two people said.
Vance’s argument — that he was a former Silicon Valley insider who turned against it — resonated powerfully with GOP primary voters, said Luke Thompson, who ran a Thiel-funded super PAC that supported Vance.
At his campaign rallies and town halls, Vance got his biggest applause when he went after tech companies, railing against bans of prominent conservatives, including Vance himself, who was briefly suspended for what Twitter said was a misunderstanding about whether his account was legitimate.
“I bet half the people in this room have been shadow-banned on Facebook,” Vance said at a rally in Dayton during the last week of his campaign.
But Thiel’s association with Facebook sometimes hurt both men, particularly Masters. When Masters campaigns in Arizona, locals ask why his main funder is a Facebook board member. His opponent recently ran an attack ad calling Masters a “puppet of California Big Tech.”
Masters’s response, like Vance’s, has been to say that insiders can dismantle the system from within.
Thiel has given a total of at least $20,188,842 this cycle, making him the fifth largest GOP donor according to the Center for Responsive Politics Open Secrets database. But the database only tracks disclosures through March 31, so the tally does not account for Thiel’s latest donations to Masters and Vance, or his investment in dark money groups that seek to influence the GOP’s trajectory but are not tied to a specific candidate.
He has also given small amounts to more than a dozen other candidates, some of whom have embraced the falsehood that widespread election fraud caused Trump to lose the presidency.
Despite his large checks, people who know Thiel say that the perception of him as a political kingmaker is wrong. He takes bets on individuals he knows well, rather than casting a wide net, they say. Unlike other megadonors, Thiel has not created a full-fledged political operation, with employees whose job is to vet political giving opportunities.
“Most donors are interested in spreading their influence across many candidates,” Thompson said. “They don’t want to put all their eggs in one basket.”
People familiar with Thiel’s giving style noted that he treats politics like venture capital and candidates like start-up founders, giving large amounts early on to support ideas and people with potential.
And Thiel, the people said, is not sure what he wants. He has told people he is unsure whether he will support Trump in 2024, said a longtime associate, who noted it was unclear whether Thiel himself believes in the “big lie.”
“There’s an ambivalence toward the political apparatus as a whole and more of a focus on trusted individuals. He is well past the point of dabbling, but there is still this hesitancy,” said one of the people.
Unlike Musk, whose main megaphone for provocation is Twitter itself, Thiel is a behind-the-scenes operator who has focused on investments that cater to consumers who he thinks are overlooked by societal institutions that have moved to the left.
In addition to the film festival, he has funded a Catholic prayer app, the conservative dating app, and a right-wing YouTube alternative Rumble. A recent investment is Strive, a firm that aims to rival megafirms like Vanguard and will buy large stakes in companies and push them away from environmental, social, and what the group describes as political agendas that the hurt the bottom line.
“He isn’t like the general putting his chips on the table and drawing out a coherent plan,” said a person familiar with Thiel’s thinking. “He is taking strong sniper shots for people and things he cares about. He is more like a professor. But intellectually, he is in battle mode.”
Though he is not active on Twitter, Thiel engages in rhetorical bomb-throwing. During his keynote at a Miami cryptocurrency conference in April, a crowd cheered and booed as Thiel angrily read out what he described as his personal “hate list” — individuals and ideas that he said were the true enemies of cryptocurrency, and therefore, economic progress.
When Facebook announced Thiel’s decision not to stand for reelection to the board this spring, many Facebook employees openly rejoiced, two people said.
But Thiel is expected to continue to informally advise Zuckerberg, and his influence is unlikely to fade completely. The company did not want him to leave the board, two people said.
But being free of the formal Facebook connection, the people said, will allow Thiel to push his ideas in bigger ways — even if he himself does not know quite what that future looks like.
“The left wants a villain. The right wants a sugar daddy,” said one of the people. “I can see how he could slot into that role. But there’s no grand vision for it.”
Josh Dawsey contributed to this report.
13. Ukraine Intensifies Strikes Against Russian-Controlled Areas
Ukraine Intensifies Strikes Against Russian-Controlled Areas
Donetsk comes under worst artillery barrages since fighting erupted there in 2014, as Russia hits cities across Ukraine with missiles
By Yaroslav TrofimovFollow
June 19, 2022 9:05 am ET
Ukraine intensified artillery and missile strikes against the Russian-controlled parts of the Donbas region, targeting weapons depots and military bases in an effort to stall
a Russian offensive, while Moscow unleashed new salvoes of long-range missiles—some of them shot down by air defenses—on cities across Ukraine.
The city of Donetsk, the biggest in Russian-controlled Donbas, this weekend came under the worst artillery barrages since the conflict in eastern Ukraine began in 2014. The strikes hit military facilities, according to video footage of burning ammunition depots posted on local social-media channels, but also damaged civilian infrastructure. The Russian-appointed mayor of Donetsk, Aleksey Kulemzin, whose office was also hit by the shelling, said five civilians had been killed.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine was launched by President Vladimir Putin on Feb. 24 with the ostensible goal of protecting Donbas, one-third of which has been controlled by Russian proxies since 2014. But Russian forces have been unable to dislodge Ukrainian troops from the immediate outskirts of Donetsk in nearly four months of fighting.
Questioned about this failure at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum on Friday, Mr. Putin said that a frontal attack on Ukrainian positions near Donetsk would cause too many casualties and called for patience as Russian troops carry out a complex campaign to encircle Ukrainian forces in the region.
A building at a local market stands charred by shelling in Donetsk, a Russian-controlled city in eastern Ukraine.
PHOTO: ALEXANDER ERMOCHENKO/REUTERS
The body of a man lay covered on Saturday after a rocket strike in the eastern city of Lysychansk.
PHOTO: ARIS MESSINIS/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
For the past month and a half, the fighting in Donbas concentrated around the city of Severodonetsk, the administrative center of the Ukrainian-controlled part of the Luhansk region, which together with the Donetsk region makes up Donbas. While Russian troops have made slow gains in the city, at tremendous cost to both sides, they have so far failed in their efforts to take it over completely or to cut off the main access road to the remaining Ukrainian-held parts of Luhansk, such as the town of Lysychansk that overlooks Severodonetsk. Ukraine’s military said Sunday it repelled a Russian probe near the town of Toshkivka, forcing Russian forces to retreat.
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That Russian offensive is likely to have been further stalled by a successful Ukrainian missile strike on an ammunition storage facility used by Russia and its proxy forces in the town of Krasny Luch, deep in the rear of Russian-controlled Luhansk. While the strike, using the Tochka-U ballistic missile, took place on Thursday, it was only over the weekend that the extent of the damage became clear, with footage showing a devastated wasteland littered with burned artillery shells. According to pro-Russian military correspondents, the Krasny Luch facility was the principal warehouse of Russian ammunition for the Severodonetsk offensive.
Russia’s main response to Ukrainian attacks in Donbas has been to intensify strikes against Ukrainian cities and infrastructure facilities. Russian missiles late Saturday hit oil refineries in the towns of Shebelyne near Kharkiv and Novomoskovsk near Dnipro, causing giant fires. A rescue worker died in Novomoskovsk when a burning fuel tank exploded Sunday morning, according to the regional government.
Ukrainian soldiers move a howitzer into position in Ukraine's eastern Donbas region.
PHOTO: EFREM LUKATSKY/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Children playing in the Kyiv-area suburb of Borodyanka, which came under attack early in the war.
PHOTO: SERHII KOROVAYNY FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Russia also continued hitting the northeastern city of Kharkiv itself with Iskander missiles and long-range artillery. While Ukrainian forces pushed Russian troops from the immediate outskirts of Kharkiv last month, that counteroffensive stalled as Russia poured reinforcements into the area, seeking to prevent Ukrainian troops from reaching the nearby Russian border.
Not all Russian long-range missile strikes are successful, especially as Ukraine in recent weeks started using its jet fighters to intercept incoming missiles. That is what happened Sunday morning over the towns of Irpin and Bucha near Kyiv, where a cruise missile was shot down, according to regional officials. In the southern Odessa region, two SS-N-26 Onyx supersonic missiles launched from Crimea were successfully intercepted, according to the regional administration there.
Ukraine has repeatedly asked Western partners for more and better weapons, particularly air-defense systems that could protect the country’s cities from Russian missiles. While Slovakia has provided Ukraine with a Soviet-designed S-300 system, no Western wide-area air-defense platforms have been supplied so far. Germany last month promised to deliver the modern Iris-T air-defense system, which could protect an entire city such as Kyiv or Odessa, but it will take months before it is actually shipped.
14. Biden’s Patent Gift to Beijing
What are we thinking?
Excerpts:
Despite their victory, waiver advocates aren’t satisfied. “Vaccines have already lost relevance,” India’s Minister of Commerce and Industry Shri Piyush Goyal said. The West’s “hope is to unburden their chest of any guilt today, show the world that we have been so magnanimous today, kick the can down the road for therapeutics and diagnostics which are really now essential.”
Guilt for what? Saving millions of lives through biotech innovation?
The only silver lining is the agreement doesn’t extend to Covid testing technologies and therapeutics, at least for now. But it requires WTO members to decide within six months whether to do so. Will the Biden Administration rush to the ramparts to defend Pfizer’s Paxlovid patents this fall? Don’t bet on it.
Why did the Biden Administration and Europeans go along with the deal? Maybe they figure countries won’t take advantage of it because Covid vaccines are plentiful. But this is short-sighted. Now that the WTO has set the precedent of breaking patents during emergencies, there will surely be more demands to do for other “essential” technologies.
Biden’s Patent Gift to Beijing
WSJ · by The Editorial Board
A WTO Covid vaccine deal undermines U.S. intellectual property.
June 17, 2022 7:11 pm ET
Ambassadors discuss before the opening ceremony of the 12th Ministerial Conference at the headquarters of the World Trade Organization in Geneva, June 12.
Photo: martial trezzini/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
The World Trade Organization was created to protect free-trade rules to spread prosperity. Now it’s becoming a vehicle to raid U.S. innovation. See Friday’s agreement by the WTO’s 164 members that lets developing countries, including China, steal intellectual property for Covid vaccines.
The White House is flogging the deal as a diplomatic victory. But it’s an enormous defeat for U.S. national interests that will benefit China and set a precedent that erodes intellectual property protection. This won’t be the last time global grifters seek to pilfer U.S. technology.
The WTO fight began in fall 2020 when India and South Africa submitted a resolution to suspend IP protection for Covid vaccines, therapeutics and tests. They quickly rallied support from low-income countries and progressives who complained about a lack of “equity.” Never mind that the U.S. and Europe financed the development of these technologies.
Succumbing to pressure from the left, President Biden endorsed an IP waiver. He also undercut European allies who opposed the patent giveaway. And for what? Vaccine makers had already committed billions of doses to developing countries. Now the world is awash in vaccine doses and tens of millions are thrown out because low-income countries lack the healthcare infrastructure to distribute them. This makes the WTO agreement all the more perplexing.
WTO rules already set out a process for compulsory patent licensing of drugs in developing countries during public-health emergencies. These rules require some due process and fair compensation for drug makers. They also protect against public disclosure of clinical trial data that include trade secrets. The new agreement overrides these rules.
An earlier draft of the compromise would have prevented China from taking advantage of the waiver. Friday’s agreement doesn’t. It merely says that developing countries such as China “with existing capacity to manufacture COVID-19 vaccines are encouraged to make a binding commitment not to avail themselves of this Decision” (our emphasis).
In short, there’s nothing legally binding to stop China from stealing U.S. mRNA technology, using it to develop its own vaccines including for other diseases, and then selling the shots under their own brands. The agreement lasts five years so it could potentially cover a future combined mRNA vaccine for Covid, flu and respiratory syncytial virus.
Despite their victory, waiver advocates aren’t satisfied. “Vaccines have already lost relevance,” India’s Minister of Commerce and Industry Shri Piyush Goyal said. The West’s “hope is to unburden their chest of any guilt today, show the world that we have been so magnanimous today, kick the can down the road for therapeutics and diagnostics which are really now essential.”
Guilt for what? Saving millions of lives through biotech innovation?
The only silver lining is the agreement doesn’t extend to Covid testing technologies and therapeutics, at least for now. But it requires WTO members to decide within six months whether to do so. Will the Biden Administration rush to the ramparts to defend Pfizer’s Paxlovid patents this fall? Don’t bet on it.
Why did the Biden Administration and Europeans go along with the deal? Maybe they figure countries won’t take advantage of it because Covid vaccines are plentiful. But this is short-sighted. Now that the WTO has set the precedent of breaking patents during emergencies, there will surely be more demands to do for other “essential” technologies.
Lo, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres recently proclaimed that “renewable energy technologies, such as battery storage, must be treated as essential and freely-available global public goods” and “removing obstacles to knowledge sharing and technological transfer—including intellectual property constraints—is crucial for a rapid and fair renewable energy transition.”
Semiconductors and genetically engineered crops could become fair game too. IP protection encourages companies to invest in new technology. It is a major reason the U.S. is more innovative than China. By undermining the incentives that underpin innovation, the WTO agreement will hurt America, and that means the world too.
Copyright ©2022 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
Appeared in the June 18, 2022, print edition.
15. U.S. senators introduce broad Taiwan bill to boost security aid
Excerpts:
The senators' Taiwan Policy Act of 2022 threatens severe sanctions against China for any aggression against Taiwan, and would provide $4.5 billion in foreign military financing over the next four years, as well as designate Taiwan a "major non-NATO ally," according to the text.
The sponsors -- Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Menendez, a Democrat, and Republican Lindsey Graham -- said it would be the most comprehensive restructuring of U.S. policy toward Taiwan since the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979 -- the bedrock of U.S. engagement with the island since Washington opened up relations with China that year.
U.S. senators introduce broad Taiwan bill to boost security aid
Proposal would provide $4.5bn in foreign military financing over next 4 years
U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Menendez said in a statement: "As Beijing continues to seek to coerce and isolate Taiwan there should be no doubt or ambiguity about the depth and strength of our determination to stand with the people of Taiwan and their democracy." © Reuters
June 18, 2022 05:10 JST | U.S.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- A duo of U.S. senators introduced a bill on Thursday to significantly enhance support for Taiwan, including provisions for billions of dollars in U.S. security assistance and changes to the decades-old law undergirding Washington's unofficial ties with the Chinese-claimed democratic island.
The U.S., which accuses China of ramping up military coercion toward Taiwan, is its main supporter and arms supplier -- a point of increasing friction between Washington and Beijing, whose relations are already at their lowest point in decades.
The senators' Taiwan Policy Act of 2022 threatens severe sanctions against China for any aggression against Taiwan, and would provide $4.5 billion in foreign military financing over the next four years, as well as designate Taiwan a "major non-NATO ally," according to the text.
The sponsors -- Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Menendez, a Democrat, and Republican Lindsey Graham -- said it would be the most comprehensive restructuring of U.S. policy toward Taiwan since the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979 -- the bedrock of U.S. engagement with the island since Washington opened up relations with China that year.
"As Beijing continues to seek to coerce and isolate Taiwan there should be no doubt or ambiguity about the depth and strength of our determination to stand with the people of Taiwan and their democracy," Menendez said in a statement.
He said the bill sent a clear message that China should not make the same mistakes Russia made in invading Ukraine.
"The danger will only grow worse if we show weakness in the face of Chinese threats and aggression toward Taiwan," Graham said. Senate aides said the pair hoped to have the committee vote to send the bill to the Senate floor as early as next week.
Washington and Beijing have stood firm on their opposing views about Taiwan's right to rule itself.
"If the U.S. insists on taking actions that will harm China's interests, we are compelled to take resolute countermeasures," Liu Pengyu, spokesman for China's embassy in Washington, said in response to a question about the bill.
One U.S. official familiar with the bill said some of its elements made President Joe Biden's administration and the State Department uneasy, given concerns it could antagonize China.
Any legislation would also have to pass the House of Representatives, and another expansive bill intended to boost U.S. competitiveness with China has been languishing in Congress for months.
The White House and State Department did not respond to a request for comment.
Should it become law as currently written, the bill would "prioritize and expedite" arms sales to Taiwan until Congress determines the threat to the island has significantly abated, as well as direct the secretary of defense to establish a training program to increase Taiwan and U.S. armed forces' interoperability.
The U.S. president would be required to impose sanctions on Chinese officials, including its president, in response to "significant escalation in hostile action in or against Taiwan," such as undermining or overthrowing Taiwan's government or occupying the island.
It would amend parts of the Taiwan Relations Act, including by adding that U.S. arms provisions to Taiwan be "conducive to deterring acts of aggression" by China.
It would also push the State Department to seek negotiations to rename Taiwan's de facto embassy in Washington to the Taiwan Representative Office and would elevate the role of Washington's top official in Taiwan by requiring Senate confirmation for the post.
Beijing has never renounced the use of force to bring Taiwan under its control, and Chinese Defense Minister General Wei Fenghe last week said China's military "would have no choice but to fight at any cost and crush any attempt of Taiwan independence."
16. Where Are the Rockets for Ukraine?
Time and distance (law of physics) prevents a quick flash to bang time (flash = administration announcements, bang= rounds on Russian targets).
Where Are the Rockets for Ukraine?
WSJ · by The Editorial Board
The U.S. has supplied only four advanced rocket-launch system known as Himars in the war with Russia. Kyiv says it needs 60.
June 17, 2022 7:04 pm ET
Ukrainian service members fire a BM-21 Grad multiple rocket launch system near the town of Bakhmut, Donetsk region Ukraine, June 12.
Photo: GLEB GARANICH/REUTERS
The battle for eastern Ukraine has been raging for more than 60 days, and it was foreseeable and foreseen that this long-range artillery duel would favor Russia. The mystery is why U.S. weapons support continues to be halting, and the latest example is the anemic offerings of multiple-launch rocket systems.
The Biden Administration this week announced another $1 billion in security assistance for Ukraine, and included are more munitions for a rocket system known as Himars. These rocket launchers pack a punch with precise munitions, and they can “shoot and scoot” to elude Russian retaliation.
But the U.S. hasn’t provided nearly enough launchers to blunt the Russian equipment advantage. Ohio Republican Rob Portman, who is co-chairman of the Senate Ukraine caucus, on the Senate floor this week offered a blunt assessment of the facts on the ground: Brutal fighting continues in Severodonetsk, where the Russians are making grinding progress, and the Luhansk region could fall within weeks if the Ukrainians can’t get longer-range artillery.
“Because the Russians have more artillery than the Ukrainians and their weapons have longer ranges,” the Senator explained, “the Russian forces concentrate massive firepower on Ukrainian positions at distances, which the Ukrainian forces cannot reach.” Then the Russians “move in. They destroy territory. They occupy it.” The “disparity in the quality and quantity of artillery” has put Ukraine at “a distinct disadvantage.”
How many rocket systems do our friends need? A Ukrainian military adviser told the Guardian earlier this month: “If we get 60” systems “then the Russians will lose all ability to advance anywhere, they will be stopped dead in their tracks. If we get 40 they will advance, albeit very slowly with heavy casualties; with 20 they will continue to advance with higher casualties than now.”
And how many rocket systems has the U.S., the world’s premiere military power, offered so far? Four. And these launchers, which the Biden Administration announced on June 1, won’t reach the battlefield with trained crews until roughly the end of the month, U.S. defense officials have estimated. The Brits and Germans have offered their own rocket systems—but only three apiece.
As Sen. Portman noted, the U.S. is also withholding rockets with the longest range. The ostensible reason is that the Biden Team worries about Ukrainians striking into Russian territory. But the Ukrainians have promised only to defend their sovereign land, and withholding the weapons suggests we don’t trust them.
The stakes are high, and not only for Ukraine. If the Russian military mops up the Donbas, Vladimir Putin will have grabbed more land that he can sell at home as a victory. He can then regroup and push southwest toward Odessa, robbing the Ukrainians of their coast line and building a bridge to Transnistria in Moldova. Europe will be less secure, and Mr. Biden will bear some responsibility.
Skeptics of U.S. aid to Ukraine like to say we can’t support the country forever. But that’s all the more reason to get Kyiv the right weapons sooner and in enough numbers so Ukraine can stop and then roll back Russian advances. That’s the only way to get Mr. Putin to the negotiating table with any hope of a cease-fire on Ukrainian terms favorable to NATO.
17. Patriot Front and Pride: How right-wing influencers are driving extremists to real-world violence
Patriot Front and Pride: How right-wing influencers are driving extremists to real-world violence
Police pulled 31 members of a neofascist group called Patriot Front from a U-Haul truck last weekend, arresting them on charges of conspiring to riot at a local LGBTQ event in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho.
The incident is the most high-profile example of a growing online trend: militant far-right groups targeting community Pride gatherings to stage aggressive, even violent confrontations.
Hear more from Jason Paladino about this story:
Far-right extremist groups, particularly Patriot Front and the Proud Boys, have increasingly turned their attention and efforts on smaller communities. They appear to target these events for confrontation, harassment and worse, often in the hopes of generating viral online content, experts told Grid.
“People with giant audiences are aware of, and need to take responsibility for, the fact that their audience is listening,” said Ari Drennen, LGBTQ program director for Media Matters for America, a left-leaning media watchdog group. “And if they’re going to give the location of Pride events while saying falsely, ‘Hey, this is where the pedophilia is happening,’ that’s basically exactly what happened with Pizzagate.”
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Pizzagate was an alt-right conspiracy theory, spread by Alex Jones and other right-wing influencers through social media, which alleged that Hillary Clinton and others operated a child sex trafficking ring out of a D.C. pizza restaurant. The false narrative, pushed by right-wing influencers, prompted hundreds of threats against the parlor and its employees. In 2016, a North Carolina man attempted to raid the restaurant armed with a handgun and an AR-15-style rifle, and fired multiple rounds inside.
“I would be worried about something way, way more deadly and dangerous unfolding,” Michael Edison Hayden, spokesperson for the Southern Poverty Law Center, told Grid.
From Instagram to Coeur d’Alene
Organized, premeditated confrontations are growing and bringing the threat — and sometimes reality — of violence along. It’s a result of opportunism and an evolving right-wing media landscape, said extremism and hate crimes trackers. The incidents can create viral videos for the groups who conduct them, and the spread of those videos can help grow online followings, attract recruits and generate donations.
The events the groups target range from local Pride parades to drag queen story hours at libraries. In one instance, a controversy involving a trans student at a Wisconsin high school led to bomb threats that closed the school after the story was elevated by the far-right influencers.
Many politicians aligned with the Trump wing of the Republican Party have made inflammatory comments calling gay, lesbian and transgender Americans a danger to children, repeating old, homophobic tropes. A network of far-right online influencers, including Libs of TikTok, run by Brooklyn real estate agent Chaya Raichik, searches for and promotes announcements of LGBTQ events.
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Raichik’s activities are known to major platform operators like Instagram and Twitter, who have suspended her at least three times over the past several weeks for violating “Community Guidelines” and engaging in “hateful conduct” and “targeted harassment.” In each case, Raichik’s accounts were eventually restored. Neither Twitter nor Meta, Instagram’s parent company, immediately responded to a request for comment.
A month before the Pride event in Coeur d’Alene, organizers and local business sponsors found themselves awash with threats from fundamentalist Christians, fascist groups and a far-right motorcycle club called the Panhandle Patriots. The motorcycle club publicly threatened to “confront” attendees of the event and released a flyer ahead of time that read “FULL 2A ENCOURAGED,” a reference to bearing arms in the Second Amendment. “If they want to have a war, let it begin here,” it said.
Another flyer, like other online postings, used a smear long hurled at the LGBTQ community, calling them a threat to children.
Organizers reacted a week in advance. “These actions were in response to well-publicized threats made and ongoing harassment, hate speech, and disinformation campaigns by a small minority targeting the event, and supporting local businesses and sponsors,” said a news release from North Idaho Pride Alliance released a week before the event.
“We’re not going back”
Coeur d’Alene organizers looked forward to having their Pride gathering for the first time in two years, since covid-19 disrupted the tradition. But the country had changed in those two years.
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“This year we’ve experienced an unprecedented amount of their negativity,” Sam Koester, president of the North Idaho Pride Alliance’s board, told the Spokesman-Review. “That’s always a super scary thing to think about, especially with all the mass shootings happening in the country. Safety is very important for us.”
Thirty years ago, a crowd like the one gathered last week might have been expected. The headquarters of the Aryan Nations for years was just outside Coeur d’Alene, providing a home for several Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazi and Christian nationalist organizations. In the 1980s, the group held international gatherings of white supremacists and advocated for the Pacific Northwest to be a white homeland, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
But the city, like most of the world, had changed since then. “We’re not going back to the days of the Aryan Nations,” said Coeur d’Alene Mayor Jim Hammond in a press conference on Tuesday, a few days after his town had captured international attention. “We are past that, and we will do everything we can do stay past those kinds of problems.”
It wasn’t a local movement from the past bringing hate to Coeur d’Alene. Of the members of Patriot Front arrested that day, just two were from Idaho. It was a global phenomenon from the internet, drawing in far-right extremists from around the country.
From online hype to a potential riot
The chronology of how plans for a small Idaho community’s Pride Month event were amplified to an international audience of millions, first reported by the Southern Poverty Law Center, shows how a network of far-right influencers is increasingly shaping dangerous real-world events.
On June 5, a Twitter account with just over 1,000 followers tweeted an image promoting the upcoming “Pride in the Park” event in Coeur d’Alene. The next day, the Idaho Tribune, a conservative online media organization, published an item about the event.
On June 7, Libs of TikTok retweeted the posting to its 1.2 million followers, adding: “‘Family friendly drag dance party’ being promoted by the Satanic Temple in Idaho. We are living in hell.” Hours later, far-right influencer Paul Joseph Watson, an Alex Jones protégé, also tweeted about the event to more than 1 million followers.
The flurry of online actors using “conspiratorial framing for what is essentially a nonissue,” is nothing new, said Hayden.
Hayden drew a parallel between the threats to the LGBTQ events and past far-right social media activity around an alleged “caravan” of migrants “invading” the United States around the time of the 2018 midterm elections that was amplified by Fox News and then-President Donald Trump. That same language about a migrant caravan “invasion” was reportedly echoed in writings by perpetrators of mass shootings in Pittsburgh and El Paso, Texas.
While the topics that far-right online actors have converged upon in recent years have varied, what they have in common is an ability to capture attention online.
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“They’ve hit something that they’re getting good traffic on,” Hayden said of the far right’s recent focus on LGBTQ events. And not just in Idaho.
That same weekend in Arlington, Texas, a 21-plus drag brunch was targeted by a group of around 15 far-right activists, including some in Proud Boys and InfoWars shirts. The disruption was sponsored by Protect Texas Kids, an anti-trans group. On the group’s website, it claims to be fighting back against “leftist curricula, and personal agendas of aligned teachers, [who] indoctrinate them with Critical Race Theory (CRT), anti-American sentiments, and much more.” A confrontation between a trans activist and the group was caught on video.
In late May, Libs of TikTok posted a tweet noting the date, time and location of a Drag Queen Story Hour event at the San Lorenzo Library in Alameda County, California.
When the event was held June 11, the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement, members of the Proud Boys extremist group disrupted it by shouting homophobic and transphobic slurs in a “violent demeanor.”
Videos of the event show one man wearing a shirt with an AR-15 and text that reads “KILL YOUR LOCAL PEDOPHILE,” in the signature yellow and black color scheme of the Proud Boys. The incident is being investigated as a hate crime, the Associated Press reported.
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On Wednesday, Libs of TikTok retweeted a video showing the men shouting slurs at the San Lorenzo Library. “It’s really hard to read any other way than her tacit approval for that kind of response to her content,” Drennen said.
Raichik did not respond to a request for comment.
“People should go out”
Experts warn that the viral, culture-war-outrage-machine could be contributing to horrific mass shootings. Following the panic over “migrant caravans” in 2018, several events of mass violence followed, with shooters leaving screeds that reference “Great Replacement Theory,” something often referenced in right-wing media.
“This is the first time that Patriot Front has targeted a Pride event,” said Morgan Moon, an investigative researcher at the Anti-Defamation League. The group usually assembles at monuments in flash mob-style gatherings on patriotic holidays, but has long included anti-LGBTQ elements in its messaging.
In 2018, Patriot Front reportedly placed white supremacist flyers reading “America: Revolution is Tradition” on the lawn of openly gay Ohio congressional candidate Rick Neal and glued flyers to the main entrance of an LGBTQ resource center in Tacoma, Washington, that read “Keep America American.”
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In May 2020, the group reportedly placed a sticker that said “For the nation against the state” at the center of a mural on the wall of an LGBTQ resource center in Orlando, Florida, that serves as a memorial to the 49 victims killed in the Pulse nightclub shooting. That same month, according to Anti-Defamation League data, the group distributed more propaganda at an LGBTQ center in Reading, Pennsylvania.
In January, 400 gigabytes of the group’s private data were leaked to leftist news website Unicorn Riot. In the data, researchers found videos of Patriot Front members burning transgender pride flags, while a member reads from a manifesto. “To those who destroy our nation, we will destroy your symbols and all that you worship.”
In the face of threats and hate, SPLC’s Hayden counseled presence and vigilance. “I think it’s bad to internalize this and say, ‘I’m not going to go to Pride events’ and things like that, I’m not going to express myself publicly,” he told Grid. “That’s what they want. They’re trying to intimidate people. People should go out, and they shouldn’t be afraid to confront anti-LGBTQ people.”
Thanks to Lillian Barkley for copy editing this article.
18. Opinion | How to Celebrate Juneteenth
Excerpts:
But because the proclamation was issued in the middle of the Civil War, only a small number of slaves were released immediately. In fact, at the time, the main purpose of the order may well have been as a propaganda tool. As the National Archives points out, “it captured the hearts and imagination of millions of Americans and fundamentally transformed the character of the war.”
In the Gallup poll, the percentage of people saying Juneteenth should be taught in public schools rose, from 49 percent last year to 63 percent this year.
Sure, many will squander the day. That happens with every federal holiday. Sadly, many people now see Memorial Day more as a time to cook out rather than to mourn. But the day also allows space to reflect and honor those who fell in battle.
We must look at Juneteenth becoming a federal holiday in the same way: to focus attention, but also to allow space.
Opinion | How to Celebrate Juneteenth
Charles M. Blow
How to Celebrate Juneteenth
June 18, 2022, 3:00 p.m. ET
Credit...Jae C. Hong/Associated Press
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Juneteenth has been a part of my family tradition for as long as anyone can remember.
It marks the day in 1865 — June 19 — when some of the last enslaved people in the United States, in Texas, learned that they had been freed, roughly two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation was issued.
My mother recalls going to large Juneteenth celebrations as a child in the 1950s, where some men would play baseball and others would play guitars and harps, where women would arrive with their own picnic spreads of fried chicken and fresh baked rolls and her great-uncle would barbecue a goat.
She told me recently that she would just be excited to have a “nice blouse and a gathered skirt that was starched and ironed, and socks and sandals.” Those skirts would often be made from the cloth of feed sacks. “That was our dress-up day,” she said.
By the time I came along, those celebrations had died down. We remembered and marked the day, but without much celebration.
As the author Joyce King wrote in The Dallas Morning News in 2017, some Black people had come to associate the holiday with stigma: “Some Blacks loathed Juneteenth. To them it meant celebrating the fact that even the news of freedom was late.”
Last year, in the wake of the previous summer of protests after the murder of George Floyd, Juneteenth was made a federal holiday, and I must say that evoked in me a sense of pride that a day about Black history would be honored, but also trepidation that the day would lose some of its cultural potency and succumb to commercialization.
Maybe that is, on some level, inevitable with federal holidays. Sure enough, this year stores sold all kinds of Juneteenth tchotchkes. Seeing them, my mother scoffed, “Don’t make it ghetto; keep it sacred.” The trinket that really stuck in my craw was a Juneteenth tiara with metallic tinsel at Walmart.
Judging by the comments I’ve seen online and the conversations I’ve had recently with other Black people, I’m far from the only person worried about the commercialization and degradation of the day as it scales up to a federal holiday. But upon further reflection, I think that is the wrong way to think about it. We have to think less about what making the day a federal holiday should compel and more about what it allows, centering Black people as we do so.
Some people weren’t able to celebrate Juneteenth on the day because they couldn’t afford to take off work. (I often took the day off, out of deference and tradition, but it, of course, cost me a vacation day.) Now Black people as well as everyone else should be able to get the day off as a paid holiday — and revel in it.
They can also use the day to educate themselves. Last year, on the verge of Juneteenth becoming a federal holiday, a little more than a quarter of Americans knew nothing at all about it and another third knew “a little bit,” according to Gallup. This year, the percentage who know nothing about the holiday has fallen to 11 percent and the percentage who know a little has ticked down to 29 percent.
Even my family, who had been celebrating Juneteenth for generations, knew very little about it. My mother and I went to the same school — decades apart, of course — a Black institution that had existed in some form since 1887.
But she recalls no specific classroom instruction on the holiday and neither do I. Independently, we both realized that we have begun to educate ourselves more about the day in recent years, with my mother, who will be 80 in November, using “a little activity book” that a local church had purchased to teach its children about the holiday. As she put it, “I’ve learned more from that book than I’ve ever known about Juneteenth.”
Having Juneteenth enshrined as a national holiday makes it more likely that all Americans are taught not only about the day itself but also about the legacy of enslavement, more likely to interrogate the very notion of freedom and examine the imperfections of the emancipation order.
President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on Jan. 1, 1863, freeing enslaved people held in the states that had seceded, not in the states that hadn’t.
But because the proclamation was issued in the middle of the Civil War, only a small number of slaves were released immediately. In fact, at the time, the main purpose of the order may well have been as a propaganda tool. As the National Archives points out, “it captured the hearts and imagination of millions of Americans and fundamentally transformed the character of the war.”
In the Gallup poll, the percentage of people saying Juneteenth should be taught in public schools rose, from 49 percent last year to 63 percent this year.
Sure, many will squander the day. That happens with every federal holiday. Sadly, many people now see Memorial Day more as a time to cook out rather than to mourn. But the day also allows space to reflect and honor those who fell in battle.
We must look at Juneteenth becoming a federal holiday in the same way: to focus attention, but also to allow space.
19. The joy of Juneteenth: America’s long and uneven march from slavery to freedom
The joy of Juneteenth: America’s long and uneven march from slavery to freedom
Illustration by Temi Coker for The Washington Post
Updated June 14 at 3:53 p.m.
Originally published June 17, 2021
On June 19, 1865, Union Army Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger stepped onto a balcony in Galveston, Tex. — two months after the Civil War had ended — and announced that more than 250,000 enslaved people in Texas were free. President Abraham Lincoln had freed them two and a half years earlier in his Emancipation Proclamation, but since Texas never fell to Union troops in battle, they’d remained in bondage.
The newly emancipated responded with cries of joy and prayers of gratitude — a celebration that became known as Juneteenth. Black Texans marked the day each year with parades and picnics, music and fine clothes. The gatherings grew through the aborted promise of Reconstruction, through racial terror and Jim Crow, and through the Great Depression, with a major revival in the 1980s and 1990s.
During the summer of 2020, amid the racial-justice protests following the murder of George Floyd, millions of White Americans became aware of Juneteenth for the first time. Some companies announced they would give employees the day off on Juneteenth, and momentum grew to make it a national holiday. Last summer, the U.S. did just that, as President Biden signed a bipartisan bill into law on June 17.
“Great nations don’t ignore their most painful moments. They embrace them,” Biden said during a ceremony in the East Room of the White House. “Great nations don’t walk away. We come to terms with mistakes we made. And remembering those moments, we begin to heal and grow stronger.”
1908
Martha Yates Jones, left, and Pinkie Yates, daughters of the Rev. Jack Yates, in a carriage decorated for Juneteenth outside Antioch Baptist Church in Houston. (MSS0281-PH037, Schlueters Advertising and Souvenir Photographs/Rev. Jack Yates and Antioch Baptist Church Collection/African American Library at the Gregory School/Houston Public Library)
1999
Singers from Zion Church at a Juneteenth celebration in Landover, Md. (Mark Gail/The Washington Post)
1995
The Oak Park Drill Team during Juneteenth celebrations in Minneapolis. (Marlin Levison/Star Tribune/Getty Images)
1925
Footage from a Juneteenth celebration in Beaumont, Tex. (Beinecke Library/Yale University)
2008
Members of the Hearne High School marching band take part in a Juneteenth parade in Austin. (Jay Janner/Austin American-Statesman/AP)
“I hated slavery, always, and the desire for freedom only needed a favorable breeze, to fan it into a blaze, at any moment. ... I longed to have a future — a future with hope in it.”— Frederick Douglass, “My Bondage and My Freedom,” 1855
But why celebrate nationally something that happened in a single state? Why not Dec. 18, the day in 1865 the 13th Amendment was proclaimed and the last enslaved people in the United States were freed? Or Jan. 1, the day in 1863 that Lincoln made his momentous proclamation, setting a course for the nation from which it could not retreat?
Why Juneteenth? Not only because “all the major currents of American history flow through Texas” — as Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Annette Gordon-Reed writes in her new book, “On Juneteenth” — but also because, as Black Texans moved across the country, they brought their day of jubilation with them. And embracing that moment has become a fitting way to mark the end of a war fought to preserve slavery.
At the start of the Civil War, these states still had legalized slavery. Most joined the Confederacy. Some were border states that remained loyal to the Union. In New Jersey, a gradual abolition law passed in 1804 — so gradual that the 1860 U.S. Census counted 18 people as “slaves.” The state government called them “apprentices for life.”
Congress abolished slavery in the District of Columbia on April 16, 1862. Nine months later, on Jan. 1, 1863, Lincoln declared enslaved people in the Confederacy forever free — though slavery remained in effect on the ground. States loyal to the Union were exempt, as were Union-controlled parts of Louisiana, Virginia and Tennessee, but many enslaved people in those areas escaped to effective freedom as early as May 1861 in places such as Fort Monroe, Va.
Enforcement of the Emancipation Proclamation generally followed battle lines, encompassing all of the Confederacy except Texas by the end of the war. Four states abolished slavery by state action before the end of the war: Maryland (Nov. 1, 1864), Missouri (Jan. 11, 1865), the new state of West Virginia (effective Feb. 3, 1865) and Tennessee (Feb. 22, 1865).
On June 19, 1865, in Galveston, Tex., Granger issued General Order No. 3, freeing all enslaved people in Texas, in accordance with the Emancipation Proclamation issued two and a half years earlier.
The 13th Amendment banning slavery was officially proclaimed on Dec. 18, 1865, after enough states had ratified it on Dec. 6. By then, the only enslaved people waiting to be freed were in Delaware, Kentucky and New Jersey.
1993
Attendees at a Juneteenth celebration in Atlanta. (Atlanta Journal-Constitution/AP)
1989
A young attendee waves as the Juneteenth parade passes by in Denver. (Denver Post/Getty Images)
2020
Demonstrators march on Juneteenth in New York’s Central Park. (Andrew Kelly/Reuters)
1900
Boys at a June 19 gathering in Austin. (Austin History Center/Austin Public Library)
2005
Youths wait to perform in a talent show during Juneteenth celebrations in Burlington, Iowa. (Scott Morgan/Hawk Eye)
2018
Young Juneteenth paraders in Flint, Mich. (Jake May/Flint Journal/AP)
1900
A band marks Juneteenth in Austin. (Austin History Center/Austin Public Library)
2020
A protester marching in D.C. on Juneteenth during a rally calling for police defunding. (Toni L. Sandys/The Washington Post)
“When I found I had crossed that line, I looked at my hands to see if I was the same person. There was such a glory over everything; the sun came like gold through the trees, and over the fields, and I felt like I was in Heaven.”— Harriet Tubman, on crossing into free Pennsylvania, as told to Sarah Hopkins Bradford, “Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman,” 1869
Editor’s picks
(Evan Vucci/AP)
There was no one moment when freedom came to the enslaved in America. When President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, the clouds did not part, the sun did not shine beams of freedom, and the shackles of slavery locked for nearly 250 years did not magically fall away. The truth is so much more complicated. Read more
(Austin History Center/Austin Public Library)
Juneteenth has its roots in the long-awaited moment of emancipation in Texas, where more than 250,000 enslaved Black people received news on June 19, 1865 — more than two years after President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation — that they were free. Read more
(Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post)
To commemorate April 16, the District every year celebrates Emancipation Day, when the city’s enslaved men, women and children were freed — nearly eight months before Lincoln issued his famous Emancipation Proclamation. The District would become the only jurisdiction in the United States to compensate enslavers for freeing people. Read more
(Julie Bennett for The Washington Post)
After the Civil War, Henrietta Wood made history by pursuing an audacious lawsuit against the man who had kidnapped her back into slavery. Yet the story of Wood’s quest for justice and the resulting victory was lost to her own descendants, including Danielle Blackman. Read more
(Austin History Center/Austin Public Library)
The vote was a cliffhanger, and in the end, 375 absentee ballots cast by soldiers made the difference. Thus did the voters of Maryland narrowly adopt a new constitution in 1864 that, uniquely among border states still in the Union, freed tens of thousands of enslaved men, women and children. Read more
(Katherine Frey/The Washington Post)
Slavery unexpectedly connected the Kings and the Beckers. Both families have embraced the opportunity to learn about each other’s past with more clarity, despite layers of discomfort and awkwardness. “Having taught high school social studies and having spent my life in education,” John B. King Jr. said, “I thought about how illustrative this experience is of our need to do a better job of teaching in this country about the history of African Americans and the institution of slavery.” Read more
Gen. Gordon Granger delivered an order in Galveston, Tex., that emancipated 250,000 enslaved people on June 19, 1865. Granger’s clarifying words on the value of Black life in America distinguishes Juneteenth as emancipation day. But our ability to live up to that ideal as a nation is best measured in the days, weeks, and years that followed.
(Cooper Neill for The Washington Post)
The battle to approve a historical marker in Sherman echoes the controversial push in Texas and conservative legislatures to limit the teaching of racism in public schools. In 1930, George Hughes was lynched by a White mob that burned down the county courthouse and attacked the town’s Black business district. Read more
(John Minchillo/AP)
Historian Annette Gordon-Reed grew up celebrating Juneteenth with her family and community in Texas. While the holiday started in the Lone Star state in 1866, it has grown in scope and prominence with celebrations across the country. Listen to Post Reports
About this story
Audio source: City Channel 4 - Iowa City
Map sources: Washington Post reporting, “Freedom’s Delay: America’s Struggle for Emancipation, 1776–1865” by Allen Carden and “The Ragged Road to Abolition: Slavery and Freedom in New Jersey, 1775-1865” by James J. Gigantino II.
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
