Quotes of the Day:
“If a man asks me for my loyalty...I will give him my honesty. If a man asks me for my honesty...I will give him my loyalty!”
- John Boyd
“Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living. We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount.”
- Omar N. Bradley
“But my later experience has taught me two lessons: first, that things are seen plainer after the events have occurred; second, that the most confident critics are generally those who know the least about the matter criticised.”
- Grant, Ulysses S., Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant: All Volumes
1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, JUNE 29 (PUTIN'S WAR)
2. Sweden and Finland Are Joining NATO: A Good Move for the Alliance?
3. Marine Corps unveils information guidance as US rivals spew propaganda
4. The Pentagon's plan for 'responsible AI'
5. It’s Time for NATO to Help the Baltics
6. Analysis | Did Putin inadvertently create a stronger NATO?
7. U.S. Blacklists Five Chinese Firms for Allegedly Helping Russia’s Military
8. Opinion | NATO is united on Ukraine. Good, but plenty could still go wrong.
9. Putin: Russia will respond if NATO sets up infrastructure in Finland, Sweden
10. Nikki Haley’s approach to foreign policy not based on wishful thinking
11. Ukraine lessons take center stage in Marines’ new information warfare plan
12. China’s New Aircraft Carrier Uses Catapult Tech Stolen From US
13. A Trillion-Dollar Defense Budget May be a Bad Investment
14. The Boiling Frog: China’s Rise and the West’s Distraction
15. China’s Disinformation Warriors May Be Coming for Your Company
16. War has been raging in Ukraine for 4 months. What comes next, and when will it end?
17. We need an International Anti-Corruption Court
18. Opinion | Putin wants to terrorize Ukraine into submission. It’s not working.
19. Brainwashed: A New History of Thought Control by Daniel Pick review
1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, JUNE 29 (PUTIN'S WAR)
RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, JUNE 29
Karolina Hird, Frederick W. Kagan, George Barros, and Grace Mappes
June 29, 6 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.
The Ukrainian Resistance Center reported on June 28 that the Kremlin is setting conditions to annex areas of Kherson and Zaporizhia into the Russian Federation under the template of the pre-1917 “Tavriia Gubernia.”[1] The Tavriia (or Tauride) Gubernia was a historical province of the Russian Empire.[2] Under the Tavriia Gubernia scenario, the left bank of Kherson Oblast and part of Zaporizhia Oblast would be directly annexed to the Russian Federation, likely as a single unit.[3] The Ukrainian Resistance Center stated that Russian authorities are preparing for a pseudo-referendum to set conditions for the annexation of the Tavriia Gubernia (as opposed to proxy “people‘s republics“). The Russians are also requiring Ukrainian citizens in southern Ukraine to open bank accounts with Russian state-owned Promsvyazbank.[4] Head of Ukraine’s Kherson Oblast Administration Hennadiy Lahuta reported that Russian forces have locked down civilian traffic in northern Kherson Oblast and are not allowing anyone to enter or exit occupied territory, which may be an additional attempt to control the civilian population in preparation for annexation measures.[5]
Ukrainian sources warned on June 29 that Russian forces may be planning a false flag provocation at the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (NPP) to accuse Ukrainian authorities of mishandling nuclear facilities.[6] Ukrainian nuclear operating enterprise Energoatom stated that Russian occupation authorities are planning to throw unsafe objects into the cooling system at the NPP in order to compromise the plant’s cooling mechanisms.[7] Mayor of Enerhodar Dmytro Orlov added that Russian troops have been kidnapping and torturing employees of the NPP to coerce confessions that employees dropped weapons into the cooling systems to sabotage the plant and blame Ukrainian authorities for paying inadequate attention to the management of the NPP.[8] Russian troops have previously demonstrated irresponsible and dangerous behavior in and around nuclear power plants, firing on nuclear facilities at the Zaporizhzhia NPP in early March and digging into radioactive soil in the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone.[9]
Key Takeaways
- Ukrainian sources reported that Russian authorities may be preparing to annex areas of southern Ukraine as the “Tavriia Gubernia” and that Russian authorities are setting conditions for annexation through preparing referenda in occupied areas.
- Russian forces may be planning a false flag provocation at the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant.
- Russian forces continued offensive operations in and around Lysychansk.
- Russian forces made marginal gains east of Bakhmut along the E40 highway and may seek to prepare for a direct offensive on Bakhmut.
- Russian forces continued offensive operations to advance on Slovyansk from the northwest near the Kharkiv-Donetsk Oblast border.
- Russian forces are continuing to engage in offensive operations north of Kharkiv City, indicating that the Kremlin has territorial ambitions beyond the Donbas that will continue to attrit manpower and equipment, potentially at the cost of offensive power on more critical axes of advance.
- Russian forces continued to reinforce their defensive presence along the Southern Axis.
Click here to enlarge the map.
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)
Click here to enlarge the map.
Click here to enlarge the map.
Russian forces continued offensive operations in and around Lysychansk on June 29. The Ukrainian General Staff stated that Russian forces are attempting to advance on Lysychansk from the Verkhnokamyanka-Vovchoyarivka line, about 5km southwest of Lysychansk.[10] Luhansk Oblast Administration Head Serhiy Haidai noted that two Russian battalion tactical groups (BTGs) are engaged in offensive operations towards Lysychansk, although these BTGs are likely to be substantially under-strength and heavily degraded following protracted conflict around Severodonetsk and Lysychansk.[11] Russian forces are likely advancing within Lysychansk itself and are reportedly fighting in southwestern and southeastern suburbs of the city, as well as on the territory of the industrial zone in the gelatin and rubber plants.[12]
Russian Telegram channel Rybar claimed that Russian forces have crossed the Siverskyi Donets River northwest of Lysychansk and established a bridgehead in Privillya, which indicates that Russian forces may be attempting to complete the seizure of the northwestern apex of the Lysychansk salient.[13] Ukrainian forces may have reduced or abandoned their efforts to hold the western banks of the Siverskyi Donets River north of Lysychansk because Russian forces are already advancing on Lysychansk from the south along the western bank. The Russians likely have also learned to avoid the kinds of tactical errors that allowed Ukrainian artillery to decimate a BTG attempting to cross the river at Bilohorivka on May 15. Russian forces continued assaults on settlements along the T1302 highway near Lysychansk in the area of Spirne, Berestove and Verkhnokamyanka. The Russians have already deprived Ukrainian forces of the ability to use this highway to support their troops in Lysychansk, as ISW previously reported on June 23, and are now likely continuing operations along the highway to complete the encirclement of Lysychansk from the south.[14]
Russian forces continued offensive operations east of Bakhmut and made marginal gains on June 29.[15] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces had ”partial success” in Midna Ruda and Klynove- both within 15km southeast of Bakhmut along the E40 Bakhmut-Slovyansk highway.[16] Russian Telegram channel Rybar additionally claimed that a detachment led by the Wagner Group is advancing within Klynove and fighting in Pokrovske, just north of Klynove.[17] The Ukrainian General Staff stated that Russian forces have moved one BTG to the Bakhmut area, which indicates that Russian forces are likely prioritizing positional battles around Bakhmut and may attempt to capitalize on recent advances southeast of Bakhmut to drive directly on the city along the E40 highway.[18]
Russian forces continued offensive operations northwest of Slovyansk near the Kharkiv-Donetsk Oblast border on June 29.[19] The Ukrainian General Staff stated that Russian forces are fighting around Bohorodychne and Krasnopillya, likely in order to drive southeast on Slovyansk along the E40 highway.[20] The Ukrainian General Staff additionally noted that Russian forces shelled Mykilske—a settlement 15km northwest of Slovyansk that is separated from the E40 highway by a distinctive network of reservoirs that run parallel to the E40 between Dolyna and Slovyansk.[21] Russian forces may be shelling Mykilske to complement offensive operations to the south of Dovhenke (which also lies to the west of this water feature) in order to set conditions for offensive operations towards Slovyansk from the road network west of the reservoirs, in addition to the existing effort to drive down the E40. Russian forces additionally shelled Majaky and Tetyanivka to set conditions to advance on Slovyansk from the west of Lyman.[22]
Supporting Effort #1—Kharkiv City (Russian objective: Defend ground lines of communication (GLOCs) to Izyum and prevent Ukrainian forces from reaching the Russian border)
Click here to enlarge the map.
Continued Russian offensive operations around Kharkiv are expending Russia’s limited offensive combat capability for extremely limited gains. The diversion of Russian offensive combat power to secondary theaters in Ukraine may hasten the culmination of Russian offensive operations in the Donbas. Russian forces continued offensive operations to regain control of settlements north of Kharkiv City on June 29, indicating that the Kremlin still holds territorial ambitions beyond the Donbas. Russian forces conducted an assault on Dementiivka, about 15km directly north of Kharkiv City.[23] Russian Telegram channel Rybar claimed that the assault was successful, but Kharkiv Oblast Administration Head Oleg Synegubov stated that Ukrainian forces repelled the attack.[24] While ISW cannot independently confirm the status of control of Dementiivka, control of individual settlements north of Kharkiv City along the frontline is likely highly contested. Russian forces additionally fought for control of Velyki Prokhody, Tsupivka, Pytomnik, and Ruska Lozova and shelled areas of Kharkiv City and surrounding settlements.[25] Continued battles for control of such settlements to the north of Kharkiv City suggests that while the Kremlin claims to be prioritizing the capture of the Donbas, it also seeks to regain control of Ukrainian territory outside Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts.[26]
Supporting Effort #2—Southern Axis (Objective: Defend Kherson and Zaporizhia Oblasts against Ukrainian counterattacks)
Click here to enlarge the map.
Russian forces continued to focus on defensive operations and took measures to reinforce their grouping along the Southern Axis on June 29.[27] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces deployed one battalion tactical group (BTG) to the Kryvyi Rih direction, likely in order to support operations near the Kherson-Dnipropetrovsk Oblast border in Vysokopillya and Potomkyne.[28] Russian forces conducted ground assaults near the Zaporizhia-Donetsk Oblast border near Vuhledar and reportedly took control of Shevchenko in western Donetsk Oblast.[29] Russian forces conducted artillery and missile strikes against Ukrainian positions and civilian infrastructure in northeastern Zaporizhia Oblast near the Huliapole-Orikhiv line.[30] Russian forces also conducted missile strikes against various areas of Dnipropetrovsk, Odesa, and Mykolaiv Oblasts.[31] The Ukrainian General Staff noted that Russian forces moved an additional S-300VM anti-ballistic missile battery to Mykolaiv Oblast.[32]
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 set conditions to prepare for referenda on the annexation of occupied areas of Ukraine into the Russian Federation. Russian-appointed Kherson Occupation Administration Deputy-Head Kiril Stremousov stated on June 29 that his administration is preparing for a referendum on the accession of Kherson Oblast to Russia.[33] Several Ukrainian sources reported that in order to prepare for such referenda, Russian authorities are escalating efforts to collect personal data of Ukrainian citizens living in occupied areas.[34] Collection of personal information advances Russian occupational objectives beyond preparing for referenda and will allow Russian authorities to consolidate administrative control of occupied areas prior to making political moves to integrate these areas directly into the Russian Federation.
[4] https://sprotyv.mod.gov dot ua/2022/06/28/rosiyany-shantazhem-vydayut-okupaczijni-pasporty-ta-nomerni-znaky-v-melitopoli/
2. Sweden and Finland Are Joining NATO: A Good Move for the Alliance?
Yes.
The buried lede is the comment on US allies in Asia.
Excerpts:
The Western Pacific in particular is a contested zone where U.S. and allied forces envision prosecuting newish strategic concepts like expeditionary advanced base operations, distributed maritime operations, and the like. And while U.S. commanders seldom say the quiet part out loud, they tacitly admit that the allies will fight as the lesser combatant against China’s People’s Liberation Army—at least at the outset of a hot war. They have much to learn.
Admitting Sweden and Finland to NATO brings liabilities with it, notably more real estate to defend against a nearby predator. But in geographic and operational terms, you have to like the notion of enlarging the circle of allies.
On balance, I say . . . welcome home.
Sweden and Finland Are Joining NATO: A Good Move for the Alliance?
The latest news out of Europe has it that Turkey has lifted its objection to Finnish and Swedish membership in NATO, a.k.a. the Atlantic Alliance. NATO makes decisions on the principle of unanimity, meaning the Turkish government could blockade the two new applicants because it claims they’re soft on Kurdish separatism. Evidently, Ankara extracted enough concessions from Helsinki and Stockholm to appease Turkish sentiment.
So to all appearances, their admission to the alliance is a done deal. Let’s look at the cultural, geopolitical, and operational dimensions of adding new Nordic members to NATO’s northern rampart.
First, culture. Human nature being what it is, it often takes a sharp blow to jar individuals and groups out of long-accustomed ways of thinking, feeling, and doing. Few of us relish change. Wittingly or not, Vladimir Putin has shown how you break a cultural logjam overnight, in this case the culture of Finnish and Swedish neutrality. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has done just that—raising the specter of Russian hosts on the march anywhere along the Russian frontier with Western Europe, including, potentially, along Nordic borders.
The prospect of invasion and conquest almost instantly concentrated minds among the Baltic nations. No one wants to be a Russian satrapy.
U.S. Air Force colonel and strategist John Boyd would nod knowingly. Boyd urged fellow fighter pilots—and warriors from all domains—to seize control of the surroundings and change them abruptly and radically around an antagonist. Spring a “fast transient” on the opponent, he advised, and you can disorient him and wrest away tactical, operational, or even strategic advantages. The likelihood of your victory brightens as the opponent flounders trying to make sense of bewildering circumstances.
Trouble is, Putin already unleashed his fast and menacing transient against Ukraine, whose defenders withstood it better than most observers expected. Russian aggression stunned Russia’s neighbors as well, but the fact that the blow fell elsewhere granted Stockholm and Helsinki time to make sense of Europe’s new normal and adapt to it. They used that respite to seek NATO membership to provide for their own defense.
Boyd is right: a fast transient is a powerful strategic implement. But it is no guarantee of success, especially if mishandled.
Second, geopolitics. Admitting Sweden and Finland to the alliance adds seacoast and waters to defend in the Baltic Sea, a waterway that constitutes part of geopolitics maven Nicholas Spykman’s “girdle of marginal seas” washing against the Eurasian periphery. These are expanses any bluewater sea power—the United States, or Great Britain in its imperial heyday—must command in order to radiate military and diplomatic influence into the Eurasian supercontinent. And they are increasingly contested expanses as the likes of China, Russia, and Iran eye their nautical surroundings.
Local hegemons reason that if they can deny U.S. and allied sea and air forces access to this geographic space—or at least raise the price of entry to a dismaying level—they can restrict extraregional influence on Eurasian affairs. They can unravel Spykman’s balancing logic to their own benefit.
Yet their success is far from foreordained. Expanding NATO to encompass all Nordic powers ensconces the alliance in a commanding maritime geographic position. It cramps Russian access to the Baltic Sea—let alone the North Sea, or the Atlantic high seas—from the port of St. Petersburg. In short, Finnish and Swedish accession to NATO will give the Arctic and Baltic a Cold War feel. Except doubly so. Back then the Soviet Union squared off against NATO powers and neutrals friendly to NATO. Now post-Soviet Russia will square off against a unified bloc, including former Soviet republics and neutrals, that pays fealty to the Atlantic Alliance.
NATO’s new map doubtless discomfits Putin & Co.
And the new accessions have implications—albeit less direct—for polar affairs. While Finland and Sweden don’t front on the Arctic Ocean, they are members of the Arctic Council and thus see vital interests in the polar demesne. Admitting them to NATO will divide the council membership between Russia and a bloc of NATO members. Moscow will glare across Arctic waters at a seacoast inhabited entirely by the Western alliance. Here too, symmetrical, one-on-one competition between crudely comparable rivals verges on a foregone conclusion.
To outflank its weakness at sea, Moscow will probably resort to ground, air, and missile power. And indeed it has already threatened to station missiles, perhaps armed with nuclear warheads, along Russia’s frontiers with the new allies. That’s a less-than-subtle warning not to encumber the Russian Navy’s access to the sea.
What does the future hold? We can gaze through a glass darkly, gleaning insights into likely dynamics in Baltic and Arctic affairs, by comparing the geopolitics of these bodies of water to similar semi-enclosed expanses, past and present. For instance, the relatively simple competitive geometry taking shape in northern waters stands in sharp contrast to the Mediterranean Sea, where a multitude of local coastal states, some allied, some not, jostle to protect their interests. Meanwhile powerful outsiders like America and Russia maintain a presence in the middle sea to advance purposes of their own.
This is a multidimensional, multivariate strategic competition.
Or, for that matter, the competitive geometry in northern climes stands in sharp contrast to the embattled South China Sea, where one local titan, China, confronts a host of vastly outmatched neighbors while powerful outsiders like Japan, Australia, and the United States try to help the weak preserve some semblance of balance against the strong and domineering. Juxtaposing geopolitical regions like the Baltic and Arctic against others—the Mediterranean, the Black Sea, the South China Sea, or for that matter the Caribbean Sea—could furnish clues to what the northerly future holds.
NATO should peer through this useful if imperfect spyglass. Study the map—and study naval history.
And third, operations, doctrine, and force design. NATO forces have long operated in company with mariners from Sweden and Finland, sharing best practices in naval warfare. I did so myself while on sea duty, and that has been a distressingly long time ago now. So it’s important not to overstate the benefits of formal alliance membership for the two erstwhile neutrals. These benefits are nonetheless real, and they apply throughout Eurasia’s marginal seas.
Think about it. Nordic navies are accustomed to prowling amid congested and intricate offshore terrain in small yet heavy-hitting craft to make things tough on a stronger adversary like the Russian Navy. They have much to teach. Intimate knowledge of how they conduct business in confined waters, doing more with less, would pay dividends for the U.S. Navy, Marine Corps, Coast Guard, and affiliated joint forces, not to mention allied forces. After all, these are cramped quarters bearing a striking resemblance to potential battlegrounds in the Indo-Pacific.
The Western Pacific in particular is a contested zone where U.S. and allied forces envision prosecuting newish strategic concepts like expeditionary advanced base operations, distributed maritime operations, and the like. And while U.S. commanders seldom say the quiet part out loud, they tacitly admit that the allies will fight as the lesser combatant against China’s People’s Liberation Army—at least at the outset of a hot war. They have much to learn.
Admitting Sweden and Finland to NATO brings liabilities with it, notably more real estate to defend against a nearby predator. But in geographic and operational terms, you have to like the notion of enlarging the circle of allies.
On balance, I say . . . welcome home.
A 1945 Contributing Editor, Dr. James Holmes holds the J. C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the Naval War College and served on the faculty of the University of Georgia School of Public and International Affairs. A former U.S. Navy surface warfare officer, he was the last gunnery officer in history to fire a battleship’s big guns in anger, during the first Gulf War in 1991. He earned the Naval War College Foundation Award in 1994, signifying the top graduate in his class. His books include Red Star over the Pacific, an Atlantic Monthly Best Book of 2010 and a fixture on the Navy Professional Reading List. General James Mattis deems him “troublesome.” The views voiced here are his alone. Holmes also blogs at the Naval Diplomat.
3. Marine Corps unveils information guidance as US rivals spew propaganda
I had an exchange on LinkedIn about this new manual. I am told that it is in synch with the new Joint Pub 3-04, Information in Joint Operations. Also, the rumor I heard was confirmed that the Army non-concurred with the new JP 3-04 - "They wanted to remove Information Environment from the publication as they see it as one environment. They were out-voted and the publication moved forward."
For what it is worth, I spent a week at JSOU a couple of months ago working with the draft JP 3-04 and I found it useful. There is always room for improvement but it moved the ball forward for "operations in the information environment" (OIE) ( incidentally that phrase will replace "information operations" and IO will be stricken from the joint lexicon once JP 3-04 is approved.
Marine Corps unveils information guidance as US rivals spew propaganda
WASHINGTON — The U.S. Marine Corps is seeking to better position itself to combat threats posed by propaganda, inaccurate information and digital influence campaigns waged by world powers such as China and Russia.
To do so, leadership is increasingly emphasizing media literacy among the ranks and underlining the value of verifiable information in day-to-day operations and planning.
“We’ve been complacent in just assuming information is like the air we breathe” and there is no consequence to using it incorrectly, Marine Corps Lt. Gen. Matthew Glavy, the deputy commandant for information, said June 28. “History is telling us, current events are telling us, that approach will not work, either mid-term or long-term.”
The corps on June 29 made public its latest philosophies and frameworks for information and its warfare applications, known as Marine Corps Doctrinal Publication 8, or MCDP 8. It’s one of several MCDPs that outline tactics, techniques and procedures of the corps, the first of which was published more than two decades ago.
The document, with more than 100 pages and speckled with vignettes, from Crimea in 2014 to Midway in 1942, highlights how torrents of information can be deciphered, filtered and effectively used. It also is meant to spark a conversation among Marines and instigate broader change.
“MCDP 1 being the cornerstone of what the Marine Corps talks about when we talk warfighting, MCDP 8 builds on that discussion, certainly focused on information,” Glavy said.
The update arrives at a time when international players are relying on digital subterfuge, disinformation and skirmishes below the threshold of armed conflict to effect change.
And the MCDP 8 recognizes the stage onto which it is thrust, describing competitors and adversaries as predators pouncing on the prey of “worldwide technological and social vulnerabilities” to destabilize “our systems, networks, and partnerships, thereby eroding our trust in each other and our institutions.”
Russia meddled directly in the the 2016 U.S. presidential election, and concerns of a repeat performance return each election season. More recently, the country pumped out reams of disinformation about its February invasion of Ukraine, and China amplified it. The U.S. State Department in May said Beijing routinely boosts Kremlin propaganda in an attempt to rationalize Russian President Vladimir Putin’s belligerence and sway public sentiment.
Chinese authorities also leverage disinformation to spin the country’s takeover of Hong Kong and to exert influence over Taiwan.
In the Middle East, where the U.S. spent decades leaning into counterinsurgency, attempting to root out terrorism, extremists use social media to distribute malicious information, like weaponized coronavirus conspiracies, and share updates about attacks. Groups craft fake news outlets and repeatedly sidestep censors.
The Marine Corps considers the information environment an interconnected, contested space, where military advantages can be won or lost; in a fight, information can be used to spoof or fool, distract or deny. The U.S. expects to face opponents with substantial computer, cyber and surveillance skills, and the proliferation of sensors the world over makes keeping a low profile incredibly difficult.
“We now know that through hyper connectivity and global reach, adversaries can reach into a commander’s area of operations and affect those operations, not only through things like propaganda or disinformation through social media, but more technically and deliberately, aiming to disrupt our ability to command and control forces or project combat power within that area of operations,” said Eric Schaner, a senior information strategy and policy analyst and key contributor to MCDP 8.
“Battlespace awareness in the information environment is crucial, as well as if we think about how we would apply 21st century combined arms, integrated fires, maneuver and information,” he added. “Command and control becomes absolutely vital.”
A new Marine Corps Information Command, or MCIC, was included in a May update to Force Design 2030, Gen. David Berger’s plan to optimize the corps and counter contemporary threats. The command could streamline collaboration and reduce burdens at the headquarters level, accelerating reactions as first moves are made in the information and cyber spaces.
“Information is key to gaining advantage in all domains, whether during kinetic actions on the battlefield or during day-to-day operations in competition,” Berger, the Marine Corps commandant, said in a statement June 29. “It’s especially critical when our Marines need to sense and make sense of the operating environment in support of the joint force or to exploit opportunities and take action against our adversaries.”
The plan directed officials to develop options for the creation of the MCIC, but provided no specific timeline.
Additional publications and guidance about information and how the Marine Corps will use it, Schaner said, are expected in the near future.
Colin Demarest is a reporter at C4ISRNET, where he covers military networks, cyber and IT. Colin previously covered the Department of Energy and its NNSA — namely Cold War cleanup and nuclear weapons development — for a daily newspaper in South Carolina. Colin is also an award-winning photographer.
4. The Pentagon's plan for 'responsible AI'
Who is held accountable when AI acts irresponsibly?
Excerpts:
The strategy, which comes after the Defense Innovation Unit published responsible AI guidelines for commercial companies, also stresses the Defense Department's desire to foster trust among military leaders and service members and AI capabilities.
"The department's desired end state for RAI is trust," the document states. "Without trust, warfighters and leaders will not employ AI effectively and the American people will not support the continued use and adoption of such technology."
The Pentagon's plan for 'responsible AI'
Senior Editor
| June 28, 2022
A 47-page document released this week outlines the Pentagon's plan to incorporate its two-year old ethical AI principles throughout a system's design, development and use.
The Defense Department is rolling out the long-awaited implementation strategy for its responsible artificial intelligence principles.
Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks signed out the Responsible Artificial Intelligence Strategy and Implementation Pathway, which was released June 22.
"It is imperative that we establish a trusted ecosystem that not only enhances our military capabilities but also builds confidence with end-users, warfighters, the American public, and international partners. The Pathway affirms the Department's commitment to acting as a responsible AI-enabled organization," Hicks said in a news release announcing the new pathway.
The 47-page document outlines the Pentagon's plan to incorporate its two-year old ethical AI principles throughout a system's design, development, and use. Each of the six tenets – governance, warfighter trust, product and acquisition, requirements validation, the responsible AI ecosystem, and workforce – includes lines of effort, goals, and estimated timelines.
Responsible AI leads for DOD components are expected to report "exemplary" AI use cases, best practices, failure modes, and risk mitigation strategies to the chief digital and artificial intelligence officer (CDAO) within a year. Additionally, within six months of the plan's approval, those leads would also need to report "any perceived significant barriers" to fulfilling the responsible AI requirements, including those related to infrastructure, hardware and software.
Diane Staheli will lead the implementation effort as the responsible artificial intelligence chief for the CDAO, which replaces the Joint AI Center. Dr. Jane Pinelis will provide executive-level guidance as DOD's chief of AI assurance directorate, which oversees the CDAO's testing and evaluation and responsible AI divisions, the document states.
The strategy, which comes after the Defense Innovation Unit published responsible AI guidelines for commercial companies, also stresses the Defense Department's desire to foster trust among military leaders and service members and AI capabilities.
"The department's desired end state for RAI is trust," the document states. "Without trust, warfighters and leaders will not employ AI effectively and the American people will not support the continued use and adoption of such technology."
5. It’s Time for NATO to Help the Baltics
Excerpts:
Estonia’s Prime Minister last week revealed that a Russian invasion could wipe out Estonia in a weekend. Then, NATO’s response would focus on winning the country back, rather than preventing its conquest. The Baltics ask for a division of NATO troops, between 20,000 and 25,000 soldiers, to be allocated between Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. This week, NATO leaders should grant their request, and should consider forward deploying heavy weapons like artillery and additional aircraft so that they can be quickly manned in the event of a Russian invasion.
There is a precedent: For almost 70 years on the Korean Peninsula, U.S. Army bases between Seoul and the Demilitarized Zone have served a “human tripwire” role, forcing North Korean to think twice before invading from the North.
Recently, Western leaders have worried about escalating conflict with Russia. In reality, Russia should worry about escalating conflict with NATO. The deployment of additional troops and heavy weapons is sure to draw the Kremlin’s wrath in its public statements. But, in reality there is little the Kremlin can do to respond. Europe is weaning itself off Russian oil and natural gas. Moscow’s military is bogged down in eastern Ukraine. Western leaders must rediscover their courage and protect their treaty allies from Moscow’s new expansionism.
It’s Time for NATO to Help the Baltics
Russian hackers have launched cyberattacks against Lithuania for its enforcement of EU sanctions against Kaliningrad.
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg. (PhotoGRAPH by Bernd von Jutrczenka/picture alliance/Getty Images.)
A new flashpoint between NATO and Russia’s new expansionism flared up after Lithuania banned the transit of sanctioned goods from Russia to Kaliningrad, its exclave on the Baltic Sea, as part of the EU’s sanctions regime that took effect on June 17. Russia called Lithuania’s actions “hostile” and threatened “serious” consequences.
Undeterred, Lithuania this weekend blocked an EU motion that would have nullified the restrictions. Vilnius said that the EU must not succumb to Russian pressure and compromise on its sanctions package.
NATO leaders meeting in Madrid this week should back up Lithuania’s move to put Russia on the defensive. As a larger strategy, NATO should follow Lithuania’s lead of pressuring Moscow and calling out Moscow’s empty threats.
The Kremlin has already responded to Lithuania’s restrictions with information warfare and cyber subterfuge. On Monday, a Russian-speaking hacking group known as Killnet claimed responsibility for part of what Lithuania’s Defense Ministry calls an "intense, ongoing" cyberattack against government and private websites.
This cyberattack tracks with Russia’s Ministry of Defense Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova’s warning that Russia’s response would be “not diplomatic, but practical.” Kremlin spokeswoman Dmitry Peskov was similarly critical of the transit restrictions, calling them “illegal.”
But the restrictions are in strict accordance with EU law. Lithuania blocked only the transit of EU-sanctioned goods, like "metals, coal, construction materials, and high-technology products to the Russian sea port." Lithuania’s Foreign Ministry issued a statement Monday saying that “the transit of passengers and non-sanctioned goods to and from the Kaliningrad region through Lithuania continues uninterrupted.”
The Kremlin threats come as Putin is increasingly open about his expansionism. On June 9, in a new justification for Russia’s war on Ukraine, Putin drew an analogy with Peter the Great’s 21-year war with Sweden. He said: “Clearly, it fell to our lot to return and reinforce [ex-Russian lands] as well.” One week later, at the St. Petersburg International Economic Reform, Putin asked the world: “What is the Soviet Union? It is historical Russia.”
Thirty years ago, the Soviet Union disintegrated into Russia and 14 separate countries. Today, in Moscow, Kremlin-friendly media commentators increasingly call these 14 nations, including Ukraine, “quasi-states.” Spoiling for a fight, Putin looks around the map for a quarrel – or a conquest. By keeping Russia on a war footing, Putin justifies his dictatorship, keeping Russia governable with emergency decrees.
Particularly vulnerable is oil-rich Kazakhstan, a nation four times the size of Texas with a large ethnic Russian population along its virtually undefended northern border with Russia. With no NATO ties, Kazakhstan could lose land without provoking a world reaction stronger than a few words of lamentation at the United Nations.
Konstantin Zatulin, a Russia Duma member specializing in ties with the nations of Moscow’s former land empire, warns: Ukraine today, Kazakhstan tomorrow. He told Govorit Moskva radio last week: “[The Kazakhs] know only too well that a number of regions, settlements with a predominantly Russian population, had little to do with what is called Kazakhstan. We are everywhere. In relation to Ukraine, we say: If we have friendship, cooperation and partnership, then no territorial issues are raised. And if not, then everything is possible.
The best response to such inflammatory rhetoric and aggressive moves by the Kremlin is to increase NATO’s forward operating presence in the three Baltic states. NATO’s meeting this week is the perfect opportunity to do that.
Estonia’s Prime Minister last week revealed that a Russian invasion could wipe out Estonia in a weekend. Then, NATO’s response would focus on winning the country back, rather than preventing its conquest. The Baltics ask for a division of NATO troops, between 20,000 and 25,000 soldiers, to be allocated between Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. This week, NATO leaders should grant their request, and should consider forward deploying heavy weapons like artillery and additional aircraft so that they can be quickly manned in the event of a Russian invasion.
There is a precedent: For almost 70 years on the Korean Peninsula, U.S. Army bases between Seoul and the Demilitarized Zone have served a “human tripwire” role, forcing North Korean to think twice before invading from the North.
Recently, Western leaders have worried about escalating conflict with Russia. In reality, Russia should worry about escalating conflict with NATO. The deployment of additional troops and heavy weapons is sure to draw the Kremlin’s wrath in its public statements. But, in reality there is little the Kremlin can do to respond. Europe is weaning itself off Russian oil and natural gas. Moscow’s military is bogged down in eastern Ukraine. Western leaders must rediscover their courage and protect their treaty allies from Moscow’s new expansionism.
James Brooke is a visiting fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies with a focus on Ukraine. Ivana Stradner is an adviser at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
6. Analysis | Did Putin inadvertently create a stronger NATO?
Beware blowback, unintended consequences, and second and third order effects.
But we should not gloat.
Excerpts:
Other problems lie beneath the surface. Pew’s polling suggested drastically divergent views of NATO among the populations of its 30 member states, with a high of 89 percent approval in Poland but a dismal 33 percent in Greece. Even behind the united front on Ukraine, there are differences. France’s Macron angered some of his NATO allies by warning publicly of the risk of humiliating Russia. Further divisions on weapons supplies, sanctions and the potential for Ukraine to join NATO are inevitable.
These divisions could certainly widen, especially if political winds change in member states. Former president Donald Trump, who aides have said discussed pulling the United States out of NATO, said in April that he threatened to abandon the military bloc’s promise of collective security in a conversation with world leaders in 2018.
The focus on Russia could also ultimately distract from other aims. The leaders of Australia, Japan, New Zealand and South Korea attended the Madrid summit as observers, marking the first time that this Transatlantic alliance has brought over some of its trans-Pacific allies, too. A rewritten NATO Strategic Concept directly discussed China — a big change from the last document, which didn’t mention the nation at all.
But while Moscow’s frustrated military campaign in Ukraine has undermined preconceived conception’s about Russian military strength, it may simultaneously suck attention away from the far greater long-term threat in China.
Analysis | Did Putin inadvertently create a stronger NATO?
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Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has resulted in at least one major change to the global order: NATO expansion. In Madrid on Wednesday, leaders of the military bloc’s member states formally decided to invite Sweden and Finland to join NATO after Turkey agreed to drop its opposition.
This is bad news for one person in particular. As NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said Wednesday, Vladimir Putin “wanted less NATO,” and now he’s “getting more NATO on his borders.”
The alliance’s creeping eastern border has been a sticking point for the Russian president for years. While Ukrainian membership was not in the cards anytime soon, Kyiv’s growing relationship with the United States and other NATO powers has been used as a justification for Russia’s decision to invade on Feb. 24.
Now, Ukraine is flush with weapons and other support from NATO member states. And if both Sweden and Finland ascend to membership, the balance of power in Europe has been further tipped against Russia. But while NATO will end up numerically stronger after Russia’s invasion, the war in Ukraine has also brought some of the bloc’s internal contradictions to the surface.
With an enemy to focus on, NATO has a renewed sense of purpose. Just three years ago, French President Emmanuel Macron complained it was facing “brain death.” For years after the Soviet Union collapsed, NATO looked like a military alliance in search of an enemy. As many have recently brought up, Putin and others even suggested bringing Russia into NATO — effectively bringing Moscow into what was founded as an anti-Moscow pact.
There is no doubt after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine which side NATO sees itself on, even if its members are not a direct party to the conflict. Even initial stragglers like Germany have found themselves swept up in support of Ukraine, supplying the country with heavy weaponry despite earlier concerns.
The shift extends beyond the political class, albeit unevenly. A recent Pew poll that looked at 11 NATO member states found that in Britain, Poland, the United States and Belgium, views of NATO had hit record highs. In only two countries, Greece and Italy, views have declined since the war in Ukraine started. Positive views of NATO membership also shot up in both Sweden and Finland before they applied to join.
Swedish attitudes toward #NATO have grown more positive in recent years, and when we polled there this spring attitudes grew more positive over the course of our fieldwork (which started the same day as Russia's invasion of Ukraine) https://t.co/7IRvAnHP87 pic.twitter.com/yycyTHqCRT
— Richard Wike (@RichardWike) June 29, 2022
The war will certainly strengthen NATO. Sweden and Finland both had, to varying degrees, histories of neutrality. Sweden, remarkably, hasn’t fought a war since 1814 and Finland’s policy of “Finlandization” during the Cold War has become a byword for a type of limited sovereignty designed to placate a larger power.
But both nations have long worked to ensure their security and have considerable military strength. Sweden brought back conscription in 2017, winding back a post-Cold War policy that had seen its military downsized. Finland, meanwhile, finalized the purchase of 64 F-35 fighter planes from U.S. company Lockheed Martin early this year, before Russia invaded Ukraine.
In terms of pure geography, if Finland joined NATO it would add another 800 miles to the military alliance’s border with Russia. And NATO member states would control key areas in the Baltic Sea, including Sweden’s Gotland island — not so far across the water from Kaliningrad, Russia’s enclave in Europe.
Even outside of these potential member states, NATO will find itself militarily stronger after the war. President Biden announced a surge of forces toward the bloc’s eastern flank, with U.S. military deployments that included a permanent headquarter in Poland, while Stoltenberg promises to build a new NATO rapid reaction force of 300,000. (Though some leaders were caught off guard by the NATO chief’s mobilization announcement.)
The number of NATO member states that actually spend the target of 2 percent of gross domestic product on defense has significantly increased.
The 'thanks, Putin' effect: In 2014, just 3 NATO countries met the alliance's threshold of spending 2% of GDP on defense. Now that number is up to ~10, and 19 have clear plans to meet it by 2024 pic.twitter.com/hUxOiNBZ02
— Robbie Gramer (@RobbieGramer) June 29, 2022
But even with an enemy, NATO is internally divided. Turkey, close to Russia on several key issues, only agreed to not veto the membership bids of Sweden and Finland late Tuesday. It gained some major concessions for doing so. Ankara is already seeking the extradition of alleged terror suspects — members of Kurdish groups or those linked to exiled Turkish cleric Fethullah Gulen — in return.
It may well get more, too: Politico reported Wednesday that there was also an implicit understanding Turkey may get F-16 fighter jets as a consequence of dropping its opposition.
Other problems lie beneath the surface. Pew’s polling suggested drastically divergent views of NATO among the populations of its 30 member states, with a high of 89 percent approval in Poland but a dismal 33 percent in Greece. Even behind the united front on Ukraine, there are differences. France’s Macron angered some of his NATO allies by warning publicly of the risk of humiliating Russia. Further divisions on weapons supplies, sanctions and the potential for Ukraine to join NATO are inevitable.
These divisions could certainly widen, especially if political winds change in member states. Former president Donald Trump, who aides have said discussed pulling the United States out of NATO, said in April that he threatened to abandon the military bloc’s promise of collective security in a conversation with world leaders in 2018.
The focus on Russia could also ultimately distract from other aims. The leaders of Australia, Japan, New Zealand and South Korea attended the Madrid summit as observers, marking the first time that this Transatlantic alliance has brought over some of its trans-Pacific allies, too. A rewritten NATO Strategic Concept directly discussed China — a big change from the last document, which didn’t mention the nation at all.
But while Moscow’s frustrated military campaign in Ukraine has undermined preconceived conception’s about Russian military strength, it may simultaneously suck attention away from the far greater long-term threat in China.
7. U.S. Blacklists Five Chinese Firms for Allegedly Helping Russia’s Military
U.S. Blacklists Five Chinese Firms for Allegedly Helping Russia’s Military
The five firms were added to an ‘entity list’ that restricts their access to U.S. technology
June 29, 2022 5:30 pm ET
The U.S. Commerce Department added five Chinese companies to an export blacklist for allegedly helping Russia’s military despite U.S. and allied efforts to cut off Russia’s access to technology following its invasion of Ukraine.
Commerce officials said the companies had supplied items to Russian entities of concern before Russia’s Feb. 24 invasion and “continue to contract to supply” sanctioned Russian entities. They didn’t provide details on the technology involved.
The move, effective Tuesday, marks the first time U.S. officials have taken action against Chinese companies for allegedly supporting Russia in the war. It also comes as U.S. officials and others have continued to say that China has generally not sought to help Russia militarily.
What a New Bridge Says About How China Is Helping Russia
What a New Bridge Says About How China Is Helping Russia
Play video: What a New Bridge Says About How China Is Helping Russia
With fireworks and fanfare, China and Russia opened a new bridge for freight traffic that links the two countries. As Russia’s isolation grows following its invasion of Ukraine, China is willing to keep their partnership going but not at any cost. Photo: Amur Region Government/Zuma Press
National security adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters Tuesday that the U.S.’s number-one priority with respect to China when it comes to the war in Ukraine is that China not become militarily supportive of Russia through the provision of equipment. “Number two is that they not engage in wholesale or systematic undermining or evasion of U.S. sanctions,” he said while traveling to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization summit in Madrid.
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“Thus far, we have not seen China act in a way inconsistent with those two principles and certainly not at scale with respect to the economic relationship,” Mr. Sullivan said.
Martin Chorzempa, an analyst with the Peterson Institute for International Economics, said that “export controls against Russia are working—with the help of China.”
A representative from the Chinese Embassy in Washington, D.C., said in response to the Commerce Department’s action: “China’s position on the Ukrainian issue is consistent and clear. We have been playing a constructive role in promoting peace talks and have not provided military assistance to the conflicting parties.”
The five Chinese firms the U.S. added to an “entity list” that restricts their access to U.S. technology are: Connec Electronic Ltd., King Pai Technology Co., Sinno Electronics Co., Winninc Electronic and World Jetta (H.K.) Logistics Ltd.
Commerce officials also called out two Chinese parties that have been on the entity list since 2018 for helping Russian “entities of concern” and allegedly continuing to do so: China Electronics Technology Group Corporation 13th Research Institute (CETC 13) and a subordinate institution.
None of the Chinese entities could immediately be reached for comment.
Alan Estevez, the department’s undersecretary for industry and security, said in a statement that the new listings send “a powerful message to entities and individuals across the globe that if they seek to support Russia, the United States will cut them off as well.”
8. Opinion | NATO is united on Ukraine. Good, but plenty could still go wrong.
Time is not on democracies' side. We have to help Ukraine to victory before we lose interest and the people of democracies demand their leaders to move on.
Opinion | NATO is united on Ukraine. Good, but plenty could still go wrong.
Brussels — NATO solidarity was on display at a summit meeting this week in Madrid. One after another, officials pledged to stay the course and combat Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
But as this war bleeds into summer and civilians continue to perish in horrific rocket attacks, NATO needs to ask how its strategy might fail. We can imagine some of the ways in which a hypothetical “Red Team” analysis might reveal how Ukraine’s allies could squander their current advantages and lose this conflict.
When you look at the scorecard so far, Putin appears to be failing in his war aims. Russian troops are bogged down in a bloody battle of attrition. Ukraine, rather than bowing to Moscow’s hegemony, is joining Europe with candidate status to the European Union. A revitalized NATO is bolstering its eastern and northern flanks, with Sweden and Finland joining the alliance. And Russia is on the way to losing its energy markets in Europe and its access to Western technology.
The West is “sending an unmistakable message” to Putin, President Biden asserted in Madrid on Wednesday. The Pentagon plans to send an Army corps headquarters to Poland; more U.S. troops to the Baltic states and Romania; two more Navy destroyers to Spain; and two more squadrons of F-35 fighters to Britain. “We’re stepping up,” Biden said in announcing the expanded U.S. commitment.
What could go wrong with this picture? Plenty, the Red Team would argue.
The biggest challenge is the battlefield itself. U.S. and British intelligence analysts are forecasting a slow, static campaign in the Donbas region, with the Ukrainians able to contain Russian breakouts with newly arriving multiple-launch rocket systems (MLRS), additional artillery ammunition and more ground-to-air missiles.
But what if the weapons pipeline is slow or inadequate? The Pentagon has been limiting its deliveries of the MLRS — wanting a “proof of concept” — and has provided only a fraction of what the Ukrainians say they need. Deliveries of some other weapons have been slow, too, sources say — with far fewer on the battlefield than the Ukrainians want.
An example is the small but lethal Switchblade drone, which can attack Russian tanks, ships or command centers. The drone comes in two models, with flight time ranges of 15 to 40 minutes. Back in March, the Biden administration announced plans to send Ukraine the first of what would be 400 of the smaller drones, according to a source familiar with the weapons system. But the source said the Pentagon sent just 10 of the larger models. The Ukrainians have requested several thousand more of each version, but there has been no U.S. response, according to this source. The drones are made by AeroVironment.
Political fatigue is another problem for the United States and its NATO allies. The war in Ukraine is relatively popular now, but complaints will surely grow as U.S. gasoline prices remain high, natural gas supplies dwindle in Europe during a cold winter and voters ask why money isn’t being spent on domestic needs.
At a conference here this week linked to the NATO summit, sponsored by the German Marshall Fund (of which I’m a trustee), I heard calls for victory in Ukraine from attendees from Germany, Poland, Latvia, Romania, Greece, Spain, Britain and the United States. They all argued that the fight is worth the sacrifices. But many also worried that it lacked sufficient political support at home.
The leaders of the Group of Seven discussed two of the trickiest problems at their summit in Elmau, Germany, this week — lowering energy prices and easing food shortages caused by the Russian blockade of Ukraine’s Black Sea ports, from which it exports grain. The G-7 leaders have ideas, but few specific plans. These problems can’t wait; the costs could become unbearable for the West.
One way to lose wars is through unwise provocations. Lithuania’s recent decision to block transit to the neighboring Russian enclave of Kaliningrad was meant to enforce E.U. sanctions, but was it sensible? Several European and U.S. officials told me they were dubious, since the move could provoke a Russian counterattack and then a Lithuanian invocation of NATO’s Article 5 mutual-defense pact.
NATO is right to avoid direct attacks on Russia that might lead to catastrophic nuclear escalation. But that doesn’t mean Ukraine shouldn’t fight back against missiles fired from inside Russia. If Putin uses his territory as a sanctuary for launching rockets in an unprovoked, illegal war, the protection of his border dissolves.
If Ukraine can stop Russia on the battlefield, it will have to decide eventually what kind of settlement it wants —since an unconditional surrender by a nuclear-armed Russia is unlikely. But that diplomatic moment is probably a long way off.
This is Ukraine’s war to fight. But NATO needs to plan its strategy as if the alliance’s own credibility and survival were at stake.
9. Putin: Russia will respond if NATO sets up infrastructure in Finland, Sweden
Idle, empty, or credible threat?
Putin: Russia will respond if NATO sets up infrastructure in Finland, Sweden
- Summary
- This content was produced in Russia where the law restricts coverage of Russian military operations in Ukraine.
MOSCOW, June 29 (Reuters) - President Vladimir Putin said on Wednesday that Russia would respond in kind if NATO deployed troops and infrastructure in Finland and Sweden after they join the U.S.-led military alliance.
"With Sweden and Finland, we don't have the problems that we have with Ukraine. They want to join NATO, go ahead," Putin told Russian state television after talks with regional leaders in the central Asian ex-Soviet state of Turkmenistan.
"But they must understand there was no threat before, while now, if military contingents and infrastructure are deployed there, we will have to respond in kind and create the same threats for the territories from which threats towards us are created."
He said it was inevitable that Moscow's relations with Helsinki and Stockholm would sour over their NATO membership.
"Everything was fine between us, but now there might be some tensions, there certainly will," he said. "It's inevitable if there is a threat to us."
Putin made his comment a day after NATO member Turkey lifted its veto over the bid by Finland and Sweden to join the alliance after the three nations agreed to protect each other's security. read more
The move means Helsinki and Stockholm can proceed with their application to join NATO, marking the biggest shift in European security in decades.
Putin added that the objectives of what Moscow calls its "special military operation" in Ukraine remained unchanged, that its goal was to "liberate" eastern Ukraine's Donbas region and create conditions to ensure Russia's security.
He said Russian troops had advanced in Ukraine and that the military intervention was going as planned. There was no need, he said, to set a deadline for an end to the campaign.
Reporting by Reuters Editing by Ron Popeski and Deepa Babington
10. Nikki Haley’s approach to foreign policy not based on wishful thinking
Nikki Haley’s approach to foreign policy not based on wishful thinking
OPINION:
Foreign policy and national security are arcane disciplines, but with experience comes expertise. Or not.
President Biden has been engaged in international affairs throughout his long political career, including eight years as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Bob Gates, who served as secretary of defense in both the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations, wrote in 2014 that Mr. Biden “has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”
The late Charles Krauthammer had already observed that Mr. Biden “holds the American record for [being] wrong on the most issues in foreign affairs ever.” The late Sen. John McCain’s evaluation: “Biden has been consistently wrong on every national security issue that I’ve been involved in in the last 20 years or so.”
Since moving to the White House, Mr. Biden has reinforced those judgments. His foreign policy has been based on wishful thinking — on seeing the world not as it is but as he’d like it to be.
Examples? He turned Afghanistan over to the Taliban — in the most humiliating way imaginable — and then proclaimed mission accomplished. He insisted that Russian President Vladimir Putin, if not provoked but only cautioned about possible economic sanctions, would refrain from armed aggression. He continues to claim that Iran’s rulers will give up their nuclear weapons program in exchange for a fistful of dollars.
Now consider Nikki Haley, the daughter of Indian immigrants, the first minority female governor in American history. She had zero experience in foreign affairs when former President Donald Trump appointed her U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.
But she’s a fast learner who soon proved to be an extraordinarily adept advocate for truth, justice and the American way. Four years ago, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, my think tank, presented her with its Jeane J. Kirkpatrick Statesmanship Award.
Last week, at the Policy Exchange think tank in London, Mrs. Haley gave a speech titled, “Winning the Clash of Civilizations.” She laid out the threats facing America and its allies, explained what’s wrong with the current administration’s response, and outlined how we can — indeed, how we must — defend Western interests and values.
She began by reflecting on “the worst war in Europe since the Second World War.” A “total failure of deterrence” by America and Europe encouraged Mr. Putin to believe that the time was ripe to make Russia a great empire again.
She dismissed as “nonsense,” the view that “NATO expansion prompted Russian aggression.”
“Putin and his cronies are neither dumb nor delusional,” she pointed out. “They knew full well that Ukraine was never on the verge of NATO membership. And they know full well that Russia has nothing to fear from the Baltic countries or Poland.”
Mr. Putin also took note of what Mrs. Haley called “America’s surrender in Afghanistan last summer,” the West’s “failure to effectively challenge the Russian occupation of Crimea in 2014,” the lack of an adequate response to “Russian barbarism in Syria,” and its “use of a chemical weapon right here on British soil in Salisbury in 2018 — same thing. There were a few sanctions and expulsions, but not enough to shake Putin’s resolve.”
The larger lesson: “Appeasement never satisfies the appetites of tyrants. It only makes them want more. Trying to be ‘inoffensive’ only emboldens our enemies.”
The danger Mr. Putin poses, not just to Ukraine but to all Russia’s neighbors and to what remains of the battered American-led international order, is compounded by his burgeoning alliance with China’s ruler, Xi Jinping. A 5,000-word manifesto signed on Feb. 4 states explicitly that, henceforth, their relations are to have “no limits, and no forbidden areas of cooperation.”
As different as they are, neo-imperialist Russia and neo-Maoist China are “united by their fanatical opposition to Western interests and values. And they are increasingly expansionist in their territorial aims.”
Iran’s theocrats, too, have hitched their wagon to Mr. Putin (despite his crimes against Muslims within the Russian Federation) and Mr. Xi (despite his genocide of the Muslims of Xinjiang) because they have their “own ambitions for regional dominance and the destruction of free nations.”
To address these growing threats, Mrs. Haley said, requires “a fundamental shift in how the West approaches our enemies.”
That shift would begin with the recognition that we were wrong to believe that if we were only “nice to Russia and China they would want to be more like us.”
“That is the height of narcissism,” she told her audience. “Along with the Iranians, they are committed to ideologies that are incompatible with our freedom and security.”
Our militaries — especially those of most European nations — are not all they need to be given current realities. It is essential that Europe break its addiction to Russian oil and gas. Disentangling from strategic supply chains anchored in China also should be on our to-do list.
These steps will be insufficient if we don’t “regain our belief that the Western way is worth defending.” The West is not without its faults and failures. No civilization is. No civilization ever has been.
But only the West offers a path to “peace and prosperity. Free speech. Free enterprise. Freedom to choose our own leaders. Freedom from the tyranny of overreaching government. When we place those values up against those of our enemies, there is no contest.”
Mrs. Haley concluded that “in this clash of civilizations, we know how to win. We simply must have the resolve to do it.”
Our leaders, in Washington and other Western capitals, ought to be fostering such resolve. Apparently, they’re not up to the task. It is the responsibility of voters in free nations to recognize that reality and change it.
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11. Ukraine lessons take center stage in Marines’ new information warfare plan
Excerpts:
Marine units risk becoming less resilient, officials said, when they “treat information as an afterthought” in mission planning and execution.
“When we are complacent with understanding the power of information, we will lose, we will lose,” Glavy said. “We see it time and time again: those who are slow on the uptake of messaging, and how important their narrative is … will have problems.”
What this intentional focus on information will look like in training and war-gaming is still being developed; planners emphasized that MCDP-8 is a living document that will change and grow as the information space does.
“We have already been down to all the Marine Corps schools, having this discussion, from Sergeant Glavy to General Glavy, and with others,” Glavy said, “Kind of getting a feel for” Marines’ understanding of information and how they interact with the information and digital media space, across ranks and generations.
“Because, if we miss this from a generational aspect, shame on us.”
Ukraine lessons take center stage in Marines’ new information warfare plan
The Marine Corps wants all troops to treat information as a core function of waging war. And the Russia-Ukraine conflict is providing a heavy underline to its efforts.
And while the Marine Corps has been developing the document for years and realigning units and job specialties to support the information fight since 2017, MCDP-8, as it’s called, can at times seem ripped from the headlines.
Those who had a hand in the document believe the current information-dominant fight in Europe will serve to focus warfighters’ attention on the topic and provide concrete examples of how to use information effectively in battle.
RELATED
The Marine Corps is about to release a document codifying “information” as a warfighting function.
Three vignettes in the 126-page document address the Russia-Ukraine fight. The first, describing Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, spotlights the concept of “reflexive control” of information, seen in Russia’s deployment of unidentified “little green men,” whose existence it denied, rather than a conventional invading force.
“Marines should understand reflexive control as an information-centric theory rooted in manipulating perceptions and the actions taken to create confusion and paralysis or to influence competitor or adversary behaviors,” the publication states.
Lt. Gen. Matthew Glavy, deputy commandant for information, told reporters Wednesday ahead of the document’s rollout that vignettes like this one were the result of direct input from Marine Corps Commandant Gen. David Berger, who instructed planners to include current examples even late in MCDP-8′s development process.
“We engaged with [Berger] often as we wrote this document and as everything unfolded in Ukraine, and really how the information fight played out,” Glavy said. “So those were near real-time updates, as we were going into final editing on the document ― editing, adding and updating, because we thought those lessons were critical. The vignettes mean a lot to our Marines.”
The second Ukraine-focused vignette describes the way the U.S. and allied nations waged “a deliberate information campaign” ahead of Russia’s late February invasion to inform the world about the country’s intentions and how it had amassed military strength.
This effort included senior U.S. officials taking the rare step of going public with information about Russia’s irregular warfare “playbook” and what they believed President Vladimir Putin’s military would do next.
“For example, U.S. officials disclosed intelligence about an expected ‘false flag’ operation and a graphic film that Russia would use to fabricate a justification for invasion,” the document states. “As a result, the information campaign laid the foundation for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to act quickly and with a unified voice against Russia.”
For Marines, the core takeaway is that it is crucial to own the “prevailing narrative,” and the way to do that is to communicate credibly, consistently and intentionally.
“Commanders must train their Marines to conduct themselves in ways that promote a credible narrative about their command and mission, making it as difficult as possible for their adversaries to distort the picture and gain the initiative,” MCDP-8 states. “Commanders must also prioritize the use of official command information through various media to support operations and the larger Marine Corps and higher command narratives.”
The final Ukraine-focused vignette in the document is the one closest to the heart of what Marine Corps leaders want rank-and-file troops to understand about the information space. It’s the concept of resiliency, a word that appears 38 times in the document.
An resilient force, planners say, is one that doesn’t present vulnerabilities for enemies to exploit with disinformation or technical disruptions ― and that is savvy enough to project messages that thwart or confuse the enemy, but reassure friends and allies.
Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has demonstrated that resiliency, MCDP-8 coauthor Eric Schaner, a Marine Corps senior information strategy and policy analyst, told reporters.
After sidestepping Russia’s efforts to deny Ukraine communication with the aid of Elon Musk’s Starlink terminals, Zelenskyy has emerged as a charismatic leader who has amassed support from the international community and fierce resolve from his own people.
His masterful use of digital media and inspirational messaging (a form of information projection) not only rallied people and leaders worldwide, but, most importantly, the will of the Ukrainian people to stand and fight.
“We can leverage that vignette as an illustration to Marines, to help them interpret the environment and see how to tangibly apply the ideas that are communicated within the document,” Schaner said.
Marine units risk becoming less resilient, officials said, when they “treat information as an afterthought” in mission planning and execution.
“When we are complacent with understanding the power of information, we will lose, we will lose,” Glavy said. “We see it time and time again: those who are slow on the uptake of messaging, and how important their narrative is … will have problems.”
What this intentional focus on information will look like in training and war-gaming is still being developed; planners emphasized that MCDP-8 is a living document that will change and grow as the information space does.
“We have already been down to all the Marine Corps schools, having this discussion, from Sergeant Glavy to General Glavy, and with others,” Glavy said, “Kind of getting a feel for” Marines’ understanding of information and how they interact with the information and digital media space, across ranks and generations.
“Because, if we miss this from a generational aspect, shame on us.”
12. China’s New Aircraft Carrier Uses Catapult Tech Stolen From US
From the Epoch Times.
China’s New Aircraft Carrier Uses Catapult Tech Stolen From US
Beijing readies to drive the US from Asia, including with hypersonic missiles
Commentary
China’s newest aircraft carrier and missile defense systems include a qualitative—and stolen—technological leap that brings Beijing closer to driving the United States from Asia.
The new military capabilities offer the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) both a sword against its neighbors and a shield against U.S. strategic forces.
The combined carrier and missile defense technologies put peaceful countries in the region under increased military threat, made all the more real by Vladimir Putin’s aggression in Ukraine and his “no limits” friendship with Xi Jinping.
Over the past few years and in tandem with Russia’s parallel aggression in Europe, Beijing has accelerated its military pressure against the United States, India, Australia, Taiwan, Japan, Vietnam, and the Philippines.
China’s other closest allies—Iran and North Korea—act in a similarly aggressive manner that pulls the United States and its allies in multiple directions at once.
Smaller Asian nations like Cambodia and the Solomon Islands offer Beijing military basing.
Others like Malaysia, Brunei, and Laos try to stay silent and out of the fray, but in their silence and sometimes more, is complicity.
China’s Stolen Military Tech
Beijing’s power in Asia is based on its growing military and economic power, matched with an aggressive pursuit of improved military technology. Yet some mainstream media, including Foreign Policy, The Associated Press, and NPR, downplay the threat or give credence to Beijing’s story that its latest military technological advancements are indigenously produced rather than stolen from the United States and Europe.
China steals up to $600 billion annually in U.S. intellectual property alone—and naval technology is no exception. China’s IP theft allows its navy to gain on the United States so swiftly.
Bloomberg News noted that China’s new carrier technology represents a “watershed moment” in the modernization of the PLA and burnishes Xi’s military credentials ahead of a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leadership conference where he will seek an unprecedented third term as the country’s dictator-in-chief.
The propaganda video about the launch is dedicated to the CCP’s upcoming congress. The video stated, “Offense is our mission,” according to Bloomberg.
The PLA Navy (PLAN) launched the carrier on June 17. While a diesel engine will likely power the ship rather than more advanced nuclear propulsion, it uses the latest electromagnetic aircraft launch system (EMALS), according to Capt. James Fanell (U.S. Navy, Ret.), former director of Intelligence for the U.S. Pacific Fleet.
EMALS was initially developed by the U.S. Navy for its aircraft carriers and was first successfully tested in 2015 on the USS Gerald R. Ford.
The U.S. Navy, the future USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN 78), is seen underway on its own power for the first time in Newport News, Va., on April 8, 2017. (Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Ridge Leoni/U.S. Navy via Getty Images)
While an analyst quoted uncritically by The Associated Press claimed that China’s new carrier technology is entirely China-developed, this is an obvious falsehood, according to Fanell. Consider how long it took the United States to develop the technology and that China jumped a prior technology, steam catapults, entirely.
Beijing’s Military Espionage
The PLAN is rapidly catching up with U.S. military technologies only because it can use cyber, industrial, academic, and other forms of espionage. As a result, the PLAN is keeping pace with the United States technologically and is already ahead in some ways, including its anti-ship missiles and the greater number of its navy ships.
Fanell wrote in an email, “Given the PRC’s [People’s Republic of China] past espionage activities surrounding its first aircraft carrier, there is no question that the PRC has once again stolen EMALS technology from the US Navy. Anyone who suggests otherwise is only providing cover for the PRC’s espionage programs. It would be wise for the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate leaks from [within] the USG [U.S. Government] surrounding this very sensitive program.”
Rick Fisher, a senior fellow at the International Assessment and Strategy Center in the Washington area, wrote in an email, “Academic exchanges with the West provided the basis for China’s electromagnetic launch (EML) development, which is why the democracies must revive the Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls (COCOM) to block such access by China.”
Type 003’s New Tech
The larger size of China’s new carrier, known as the Type 003 or Fujian, will allow it to launch not only fighter jets, but also delivery transport and airborne early warning and control airframes.
The carrier will likely employ two “starboard lifts to move planes to the upper deck,” according to experts cited by the South China Morning Post.
Chinese J-15 fighter jets being launched from the deck of the Liaoning aircraft carrier during military drills in the South China Sea on Jan. 2. 2017. (STR/AFP via Getty Images)
The Type 003 is China’s third carrier, but with the fourth, according to the Post experts, China will likely move to nuclear propulsion systems.
“China aims to have a true blue-water navy by 2035, with a fleet of 6 aircraft carriers,” according to the Post.
Complementary Missile Systems
To avoid getting sunk, modern naval ships require effective anti-missile technology. On June 19, China’s defense ministry claimed to have conducted another ground-based anti-ballistic missile (ABM) test.
The test used a high-speed interceptor to hit a target missile in space, which would have created a large field of debris that threatened other objects in space, including satellites and manned space missions. The PLA has conducted ABM tests since at least 2010, including in cooperation with Russia.
China is also deploying hypersonic missiles that can destroy U.S. carriers. While the United States has researched hypersonic missiles for approximately seven decades, China is ahead of the United States in testing and deployment of such missiles, including because of China’s more advanced wind tunnels.
Beijing claims to be developing artificial intelligence-enabled anti-missile defenses against hypersonic warheads, according to Indian media. If true, such defenses would give its naval ships a shield to blunt next-generation U.S. and allied hypersonic deterrence against its ongoing military aggression against Taiwan, Japan, India, and in the South China Sea.
Nuclear Propulsion
The PLAN already operates submarines that use nuclear propulsion, including both attack and ballistic missile variants. Adapting those propulsion systems for its aircraft carriers should not be too difficult technologically.
China’s failure to do so for the Type 003 carrier, one of the few areas in which the United States still outcompetes China, could be due to any combination of causes: naval engineers may have wanted to decrease the number of technological challenges for the Type 003; Xi may have rushed the carrier to burnish his credentials ahead of the CCP congress, where he seeks an unprecedented third term; or PLA planners might have sped development in an attempt to project immediate military power against Taiwan, India, and in the South China Sea.
While the PLA has traditionally been a land army, its rapidly expanding “blue water” capabilities are meant to project power globally. This is consistent with the CCP’s ambitions of global hegemony, detailed in Rosh Doshi’s book, “The Long Game: China’s Grand Strategy to Displace American Order” (Oxford University Press, 2021).
“China’s new super carrier flattop and improving missile defenses are tools for regional and then global hegemony,” wrote Fisher.
A satellite image shows what appears to be the construction of a third Chinese aircraft carrier at the Jiangnan Shipyard in Shanghai, China, on April 17, 2019. (CSIS/ChinaPower/Maxar Technologies 2019/Handout via Reuters)
“A third and perhaps soon fourth carrier before the end of this decade will serve to overwhelm U.S. naval forces forward deployed in Asia, while improved Chinese missile defenses will blunt the effects of soon to be deployed U.S. theater missile systems,” wrote Fisher.
“China’s third carrier, within two years, will join the first two in intimidation exercises around Taiwan that prepare for a major attack expected this decade,” he predicted.
The new PLAN carrier will join other elements of the PLA in threatening neighbors, including India, against which the PLA is engaged in ongoing territorial aggression.
“India will have to closely watch China’s new aircraft carrier and missile defense systems because these mark a qualitative boost to Chinese naval reach and strike power,” Subir Bhaumik, an India-based military analyst, wrote in an email.
“India has to take [seriously] its maritime diplomacy of developing naval alliances with other Asian nations equally worried over China’s military boost and assertiveness.”
PLA Demonstrates Confidence
Fanell called the Type 003 “another important milestone in the modernization of the PLA Navy’s ‘blue water’ capabilities.”
He noted that skipping from the old ski-ramp flight deck directly to EMALS, without the intermediate step of steam catapults, “underscores the confidence PRC Central Military Commission (CMC) and PLA Navy planners have in the pursuit of Xi’s stated goal of having a ‘world class’ military by 2035.”
Sailors stand on the deck of the new type 055 guided missile destroyer Nanchang of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Navy as it participates in a naval parade to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the founding of China’s PLA Navy in the sea near Qingdao, in eastern China’s Shandong Province on April 23, 2019. (Mark Schiefelbein/AFP via Getty Images)
The PLAN thus demonstrates its “skip echelon” strategy, according to Fanell, to not only catch up to the United States Navy technologically and by skipping intermediate steps, but to rapidly exceed it in tonnage and number of navy ships.
“Just think about it, in the past 10 years the PRC has commissioned three aircraft carriers to just one for the U.S. Navy,” Fanell wrote.
“While the first two PLA Navy aircraft carriers are smaller and less capable than their U.S. Navy counterparts, the fact is there is now 160,000 tons of PLA Navy steel at sea compared to just 100,000 for the U.S. Navy.”
Fanell argued that China’s pursuit of carriers, at a time when the United States is dithering over its own carrier force, shows confidence on the part of Beijing’s military planners.
“While there is a great debate going on within the U.S. Department of Defense and on Capitol Hill regarding the future of aircraft carriers in the face of the PLA’s anti-carrier ballistic missile (ACBM) threat (like the DF-21D and DF-26), the PRC has made it abundantly clear they are not deterred from pursuing a much larger carrier force,” wrote Fanell.
“These PRC military planners are confident their aircraft carriers will fare much better in a war-at-sea against the U.S. Navy, which is relatively underprepared for blue-water naval warfare.”
He pointed out that the PLAN is reaching toward naval superiority with their mix of technologies, including ACBMs.
“U.S. Navy carriers are threatened by PLA Rocket Force’s ACBMs, while PLAN carriers will operate with relative impunity, allowing them to project naval power farther and farther from the Chinese mainland,” Fanell wrote.
“This capability will be useful in a Taiwan invasion scenario where PLAN carriers will operate and launch strikes east of Taiwan, thus complicating U.S. and Taiwan defense strategies.”
Resupply of Taiwan with military materiel, so obviously critical to the Ukraine war effort, would be difficult if China controls not only the Taiwan Strait, but the seas east of Taiwan as well.
The bottom line is that the CCP is using Western technology and money—gained through trade, espionage, and academic interaction with the United States and Europe—to rapidly expand its navy to the point of overtaking and defeating the United States in Asia and ultimately the world. American and European governments must wake up and take action before it is too late.
Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
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Anders Corr has a bachelor's/master's in political science from Yale University (2001) and a doctorate in government from Harvard University (2008). He is a principal at Corr Analytics Inc., publisher of the Journal of Political Risk, and has conducted extensive research in North America, Europe, and Asia. His latest books are “The Concentration of Power: Institutionalization, Hierarchy, and Hegemony” (2021) and “Great Powers, Grand Strategies: the New Game in the South China Sea" (2018).
13. A Trillion-Dollar Defense Budget May be a Bad Investment
A lot of numbers and data but a scathing critique.
Excerpts:
Pentagon leaders should focus on rebuilding the military’s reputation with the taxpayers (and parents of future enlistees) by
- Starting a conversation about how the military can help defend the country’s borders. In the U.S., this is regarded as a civilian, law enforcement function, but it’s time the taxpayers get something back for the money they grant the Pentagon every year, despite the aversion of the brass to this mission.
-
Ending the military’s epidemic of sexual assault, instead of hyping the nuisance of some scattered right-wing extremists in the ranks. Why any parents of a daughter would encourage her to enlist is a mystery, and this issue is the Deathwatch Beetle inside the service.
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Enforcing standards of behavior for senior officers. The Fat Leonard bribery scandal and current investigation of retired General John Allen for improperly lobbing for foreign interests are a signal to military leaders to stop talking about morality and ethics to the troops and start practicing what they preach. Also, a lifetime ban on retired senior officers lobbing for foreign interests will underline where their loyalties lie.
A Trillion-Dollar Defense Budget May be a Bad Investment | Defense.info
The American people are getting a bad return on their defense budget, and it may get worse in the future.
After appropriating about $2.26 trillion for the Afghanistan misadventure, and another $2.21 trillion to destabilize Iraq and deliver it into the hands of Iran, some in the U.S. Congress think the Pentagon’s request for $813 billion for Fiscal Year (FY) 2023 should be increased to $840 billion.
H.R. McMaster, the former White House national security adviser, and other defense hawks, advocate the defense budget be increased to 4.5% of GDP or $1.2 trillion. McMaster justifies the budget increase because American “restraint” is to blame for aggressive moves by Russia and China, which will be news to citizens of the Middle East and Afghanistan who were on the sharp end of U.S. restraint.
Sky-high recommendations like these are, unfortunately, not uncommon.
The report of the 2018 National Defense Strategy Commission, “Providing for the Common Defense,” commission claims “America is very near the point of strategic insolvency,” but overlooked the risk to America’s fiscal solvency caused, paradoxically, by its defenders. The Commission recommended “Congress increase the base defense budget at an average rate of three to five percent above inflation through the Future Years Defense Program (FYDP) and perhaps beyond.”
The Biden administration requested a national defense budget for FY 2023 of $813 billion. (The “national defense budget” funds the Department of Defense (DoD), and selected activities of the Department of Energy, i.e., nuclear weapons, and other federal agencies. The DoD share is $773 billion, $30 billion increase over FY 2022.) The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, advocates a 3%-5% real increase to the budget each year for “preparing the military to meet the threats of the future while fighting the battles of today.”
Where does the defense budget come from?
Well, Congress appropriates money, but where does money come from?
Mostly, the money comes from individuals and businesses, as in payroll taxes and income taxes, or from domestic and overseas lenders via the Treasury securities (government bond) market. The biggest foreign buyers of Treasuries are Japan and China, which lately have reduced their bond holdings, which will increase borrowing costs because reduced demand will require higher interest rates to attract buyers. And higher rates will crowd out other spending, probably in the private sector.
Overseas lenders have financed much of America’s national debt of over $30 trillion and now hold about $7.5 trillion in Treasury securities; American citizens and the American government hold the rest. (The U.S. GDP is over $24 trillion dollars.) If foreign demand for Treasuries is weak, and income tax rates are being cut, the government must offer a higher interest rate to attract buyers, further contributing to the budget deficit and pressure on government spending.
Increased spending to support Ukraine in the war with Russia, on top of the post-9/11 increase in government spending (estimated at $8 trillion), may signal the U.S. will borrow even-greater sums of money when the usual buyers with loanable funds are busy with domestic concerns. So, interest rates will rise because the bond market always says “yes” to The Treasury Department.
The Office of Management and Budget assumes inflation will be 2.3% (yes, really, though the Consumer Price Index was up 8.6% in May), so the official annual budget increases will be 5.3% and 7.3% (before the Pentagon asks Congress for supplemental appropriation money counter inflation.) If the Pentagon is funded at $813 billion for FY2023 by the end of the decade we get:
- $813 billion at 5.3% for 7 years = $1.17 trillion
- $813 billion at 7.3% for 7 years = $1.33 trillion
There is little public support for higher defense spending and support for the proxy war with Russia in Ukraine is slipping. High inflation will make the prospect of more money for the Pentagon, which just lost two wars, a non-starter as many taxpayers coping with unprecedented energy and food prices.
And the Pentagon’s inability to pass a recent financial audit – that was first suggested in 1990 – further weakens its case for more money. And adding Sweden and Finland to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) will double NATO’s border with Russia, and add $8 billion in upfront costs and another $1.5 billion annually, all for the privilege of defending two wealthy countries whose neutrality has served them well.
But just when the military wants an unprecedented haul of cash, its reputation is in free fall.
The Ronald Reagan Institute’s November 2021 survey found that only 45 percent of those polled report “a great deal of trust and confidence in the military” – down 25 points in three years. The Institute adds “Increasing numbers of Americans say they have little or not much confidence in the military, which is up 15 points in the last three years.”
The military isn’t the only public institution suffering a bad reputation, but it is used to basking in public esteem so it may not know how to recover.
The slide from the February 2021 poll – where the military was at 56 percent – may have been exacerbated by the actions of military leaders in the wake of the violent demonstration at the Capitol on January 6th. And the chaotic retreat from Kabul in August 2021 – the first time the American people witnessed a defeat in real-time – probably pushed the poll numbers lower.
A defeat in Afghanistan, commanders prioritizing woke programs over battle skills, an epidemic of sexual assault, and corruption in the senior officer ranks…no wonder the services are in danger of missing their recruiting targets, which will further weaken support for big defense budgets as a family with someone in uniform is more likely to support the Pentagon’s requests.
America’s military leaders may be unreconciled by the ending of the Cold War with the Soviet Union, which wasn’t marked by an epic armored battle à la Kursk, but by Soviet citizens deciding it was over because the planned economy couldn’t deliver decent household appliances.
The brass missed the Big Game and they and their confederates in the policy community may think that a splendid little proxy war with Russia in Ukraine will make the taxpayers forget all about their defeat in Afghanistan and all those wasted lives and dollars.
Unique in the world’s militaries, the Pentagon doesn’t think it is responsible for defending its country’s borders.
Instead of defending America, it defends American interests, which are not viewed overseas as positively as they are in Washington, D.C. green rooms.
The military is an economic enterprise. It relies on a generous budget to not just pay itself, but also the captive defense contractors that build weapons and provide services – and hire former service members.
Besides the Pentagon and Energy Department ($813 billion), there are parts of the intelligence community ($67.1 billion), and the Veterans Administration, which is really just deferred defense spending ($301.4 billion, a 13.3 percent increase above fiscal 2022).
It’s not “Military, Inc.” like in Pakistan or Egypt but the military’s economic interests are often opposed to those of the American people, calling to mind Eric Hoffer: “What starts out here [the U.S.] as a mass movement ends up as a racket, a cult, or a corporation.”
U.S. President Joe Biden and NATO Secretary General have been calling for sacrifice in order to defeat Russia and usher Ukraine into NATO and the European Union (EU). Stoltenberg admits “it could take years…even if the costs are high, not only for military support, also because of rising energy and food prices.”
The U.S. Congress giddily appropriated $54 billion in war aid and economic support to Kyiv, but no one has mentioned the cost to replace all the military equipment being shipped to Ukraine, much of which is at risk of diversion, according to the Organized Crime Index which reports “Ukraine is believed to have one of the largest arms trafficking markets in Europe.
While it has long been a key link in the global arms trade, its role has only intensified since the beginning of the conflict in eastern Ukraine.” In other words, those weapons may soon wind up in Yemen, Libya, and Syria, where they won’t be promoting U.S. interests.
A rapid conclusion of the Russia-Ukraine war will do the American taxpayers a favor, so the U.S. can hand over NATO to the Europeans and focus on Asia. The Russian army has proved less fearsome that NATO imagined (an analytic shortfall that should publicly be addressed by Congress), so Europe should be able to finally defend itself.
NATO was never a real coalition, it was just about the U.S. defending Europe, while the generous Pentagon budget allowed Europe to spend its money on social welfare schemes and industrial protection.
An across the board budget cut, maybe with limited allowances to offset inflation for selected accounts, may get the attention of the E-Ring and motivate some reforms, especially since the Pentagon claims the terrorist group ISIS-K may be able to launch attacks from Afghanistan against the U.S. very soon. Though why these baddies are still standing after two decades of unlimited funding and battlefield authority for the commanders in Afghanistan wasn’t explained.
The Reagan Institute poll reported Americans still want to engage with the world and they recognize that China is the biggest threat to the U.S.
On the other hand, only 42% think the U.S. should be “More engaged and take the lead” (down from 51% in February 2021) which may offer less leeway for military adventures, and a larger role for diplomacy. Worrying for military bosses, only 33% of those polled regard “Military leadership, such as officers and generals” as the best, likely due to the disorganized retreat from Kabul, and the abandonment of billions of dollars of military equipment to the Taliban.
Engagement with the world can be improved if the Congress rebalances funding for diplomacy and the military and security services that was shaped by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the response to terror threats. Monica Duffy Toft argues, “since 9-11, U.S. military intervention abroad has come at an escalating cost to U.S. national, and national security interests.”
More “resources,” that is, money, for the State Department, Commerce Department, and U.S. Trade Representative will help to de-securitize relations with the rest of the world by emphasizing free and fair trade, with explicit direction from the White House that they are the sales team, and that politics without economic considerations is just a hobby.
Another to-do item is to examine the effects America’s willy-nilly sanctions policy has on trade and finance, as seen in the distortion of world supply chains – and the attendant shortages and price jumps – caused by U.S. sanctions on Russia, and whoever else is the villain du jour.
Washington’s eagerness to sanctions anyone and everyone is partly responsible for the BRICS effort to create a new reserve currency which, if successful, will permanently weaken the collar and the United States.
Instead of parroting the Pentagon’s wish for budget increase of 3%-5% above inflation to fund another round of “great power competition,” the Republicans, if they take control of the Congress in November, should hold hearings on how the nation’s financial challenges will affect its strategic choices, and discuss the opportunity costs of the proposed unprecedented defense spending levels, taking the opportunity to remind the military of Bernard Brodie’s maxim, “Strategy wears a dollar sign.”
General Omar Bradley, the famed World War 2 commander observed, “Amateurs talk strategy. Professionals talk logistics.” At a time when the U.S. no longer commands the world’s economy as it did in 1945, America’s commanders must also talk economics so they will understand an enemy that can bring a government to heel, the “bond market vigilantes.”
In future wars, the Pentagon will have to understand the potential impact on the global supply chain and how it will affect its suppliers before the commanders make their recommendations to the President, who will have to consider the supply chain effects on the U.S. and world economy.
The need to minimize shocks to the global economy may shape how the war is fought, that is, to take more battlefield risk, which may go against the grain of the military establishment.
Pentagon leaders should focus on rebuilding the military’s reputation with the taxpayers (and parents of future enlistees) by
- Starting a conversation about how the military can help defend the country’s borders. In the U.S., this is regarded as a civilian, law enforcement function, but it’s time the taxpayers get something back for the money they grant the Pentagon every year, despite the aversion of the brass to this mission.
-
Ending the military’s epidemic of sexual assault, instead of hyping the nuisance of some scattered right-wing extremists in the ranks. Why any parents of a daughter would encourage her to enlist is a mystery, and this issue is the Deathwatch Beetle inside the service.
-
Enforcing standards of behavior for senior officers. The Fat Leonard bribery scandal and current investigation of retired General John Allen for improperly lobbing for foreign interests are a signal to military leaders to stop talking about morality and ethics to the troops and start practicing what they preach. Also, a lifetime ban on retired senior officers lobbing for foreign interests will underline where their loyalties lie.
If the Pentagon was a publicly-traded company, the board of directors would have fired the managers and would themselves be the target of a shareholders’ lawsuit. American taxpayers may not be ready to “pay any price, bear any burden” for an expensive military whose record since 1945 can charitably be described as “inconsistent” and is a greater threat to America’s daughters than America’s enemies.
James Durso (@james_durso) is a regular commentator on foreign policy and national security matters. Mr. Durso served in the U.S. Navy for 20 years and has worked in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq.
14. The Boiling Frog: China’s Rise and the West’s Distraction
A good roll-up of the various threats from China. This could be a complement to Unrestricted Warfare as this list of threats could be considered as operationalizing that book.
A response to this threat is to recognize the strategy, understand it, expose it, and attack it. This article gets at the first three.
Conclusion:
China is waging a silent war against the United States in the business, entertainment, and education sectors. This campaign is difficult to detect, however, as it rests underneath the visible threshold. Hovering under the “just noticeable difference” has its advantages as this allows China to grow, compete, and challenge the United States without evoking a reaction or response. The United States, meanwhile, is plagued with short-term-itis. The nature of international politics is such that there are ample emergencies to satisfy every appetite. This is problematic because the secret to the now-or-later bargain may be the ability to focus for longer periods of time. Unfortunately, this is not a feature of our democratic system. Still, the American voters have the power to reduce political oscillations and take steady aim at a longer-term foreign policy agenda. Exposing and acknowledging the CCP’s under-the-radar strategy is the first step in gaining a strategic perspective. Otherwise, the outlook is poor and the frog will continue boiling.
The Boiling Frog: China’s Rise and the West’s Distraction - Modern War Institute
Editor’s note: This article is part of the series “Compete and Win: Envisioning a Competitive Strategy for the Twenty-First Century.” The series endeavors to present expert commentary on diverse issues surrounding US competitive strategy and irregular warfare with peer and near-peer competitors in the physical, cyber, and information spaces. The series is part of the Competition in Cyberspace Project (C2P), a joint initiative by the Army Cyber Institute and the Modern War Institute. Read all articles in the series here.
Special thanks to series editors Capt. Maggie Smith, PhD, C2P director, and Dr. Barnett S. Koven.
China has enjoyed immense growth in the last two decades, while the United States has been distracted by two wars in the Middle East. Despite the United States’ determined intent to pivot to Asia, it has not done so. The US withdrawal from Iraq in 2011 brought renewed calls for a pivot, but it was not until the 2021 Afghanistan withdrawal that the United States could refocus on the competition between great powers. The Russian invasion of Ukraine, however, has once again put the grand pivot on hold. With the United States distracted, China enjoys the freedom and operating space to silently achieve its aims: becoming a preeminent power in East Asia and a major power on the world stage.
China is steadily increasing its competitiveness as a global leader by executing a silent growth strategy that is steadfast and consistent. It exploits the United States’ role as a global leader that responds to, and remains mired in, crises and conflicts. These take time, resources, and attention away from Chinese activities. Consequently, the United States is the overworked night watchman and, taking clever advantage of these diversions, China has grown formidably, challenging US economic, military, and technological primacy. To counter the threat posed by a rising China, the United States needs to focus on Chinese growth, aggression, and global influence as its top national security priority.
From Most Favored to Most Feared
With the United States continuously preoccupied with hot-button global and domestic issues, China is waging a complex and unrelenting political warfare campaign with subversive and subtle tactics. Termed “gray zone” conflict, China’s activities are far from overt or obvious, and remain wholly below the threshold of armed conflict. Chinese tactics are often informational and economic versus military. And China’s soft power approaches work because the United States maintains a theory of economic interdependence—a belief that states that are economically entwined are less likely to go to war—that the Chinese leverage to target the United States and other democratic states. Americans are notoriously smitten with global interconnectedness and falling global poverty rates, both of which are a liberal theorist’s dream. China uses these concepts of globalization and international cooperation as a Trojan horse to further its economic and political offensive and as a way to ensure its strategic goals go unchallenged.
China’s campaign dates to 1979 when the United States Congress approved China’s most favored nation (MFN) trading status. MFN status created favorable trade terms for China despite its ongoing human rights violations in Tibet. And in 1998, under President Bill Clinton, China was granted permanent MFN status. Shortly after, the United States launched the Global War on Terrorism in a liberal hegemonic strategy in response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Since then, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has silently advanced its strategic interests and elevated China to a position of global power.
In 2010 and 2013, as the United States wrestled with withdrawal from Iraq and a troop surge in Afghanistan, China unveiled its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The massive campaign became the centerpiece of China’s economic and diplomatic foreign policy. Preoccupied with shooting wars, the United States scarcely noticed China’s economic and information warfare that targeted the developing world and systematically began undercutting US influence and foreign assistance efforts. Since 2011, the United States has struggled with to implement its pivot to Asia, first proclaimed by President Barack Obama in an address to the Australian Parliament. Each of the last five US presidential administrations have subsequently attempted to strategically rebalance US national security priorities to Asia and China and failed.
Instead, US priorities have continued to oscillate, owing in part to Chinese surreptitiousness and in part to America’s short attention span. China’s ascension to regional hegemony means avoiding conflict is in its interest. For the United States, it is domestic politics. The first duty of every elected official is to keep the seat of power. Concerned with their own survival, politicians are constantly campaigning. Living on the two-year electoral cycle incentivizes short-term thinking over long-term planning. This internal competition for reelection steers the American people toward sound-bite foreign and national security policy. The CCP, in contrast, faces no such pressure and can therefore think long-term.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is the latest crisis to attract American resources. President Vladimir Putin’s February 24 invasion and the media’s reporting on the conflict quickly thrust the European theater of war to the forefront of America’s consciousness and it has been prioritized over the threat of China. In the Donbas, Clausewitz rules the day. In Beijing, however, it is Sun Tzu. China is subduing America without fighting.
Under the Threshold
China’s objective is to solidify its place as the regional hegemon in Asia and to challenge the United States for global primacy. To achieve these ends, China must grow its economy because, as Mearsheimer reminds us, population plus wealth is the formula required for military power. Simultaneously, China seeks to rebrand its international image and convince the world that the CCP is a responsible, global-minded party. Therefore, the CCP’s tactics are subtle and subversive, bringing to mind the parable of the boiling frog: if you place a frog into a pot of boiling water, it will jump out but, if you place the frog into a pot of cool water and slowly bring the water to a boil, the frog will never notice, slowly cooking to death. The parable describes sensory adaptation—a phenomenon defined as a diminished sensitivity to a stimulus because of constant exposure to it. Drastic changes to an environment are immediately noticeable, but small changes over time are processed and adapted to, creating a new baseline from which to measure change. China’s gradual, salami-slicing tactics play directly into US leaders’ short time horizons and ensure that the American public does not see China as the primary threat demanding immediate and concerted attention until it is too late.
For example, in early May 2022, China sent eighteen warplanes into Taiwan’s air defense identification zone. It followed a fortnight later with thirty-nine aircraft—a record high for 2022. Finally, on the last day of May 2022, yet another incursion, this time by thirty Chinese aircraft. However, sorties involving these numbers of aircraft pale in comparison to the record high set for 2021, when fifty-six aircraft flew into Taiwanese airspace in October of that year. Here, the peak-end rule places focus on the highest number and the last number experienced—fifty-six aircraft is a lot, after all. Yet sensory adaptation is also at work, since these numbers, in isolation from one another, fail to show that an aggregate of 456 Chinese aircraft have flown into the Taiwanese air defense identification zone in 2022—a 50 percent increase from 2021. The frog is the last to know it is boiling.
Pawn Your Title, Keep Your Car
The CCP is also adept at using subversive economic tactics and entices foreign governments and corporate entities into honeypot-like financial deals, promising exquisite wealth with minimal risk. However, even though China’s loans come with no strings attached—unlike US loans that require states to meet certain conditions on human rights, for example—the CCP promises are negotiated in secret sessions with nondisclosure agreements, which makes it difficult to renegotiate the loans’ terms. Through the BRI, China offers economic packages to developing nations, knowing that that short-term gain the deals promise is more appealing than the long-term sacrifice of going without. This is China’s version of Stanford’s marshmallow test—a 1972 study on delayed gratification where children were each offered a choice between one small but immediate reward or two small rewards if they waited for a period of time. Many of the test subject took the immediate reward over waiting for two. Similarly, developing states in need of financial assistance are often tempted by China’s promise of quick funding and infrastructure. But when the state cannot remit, China calls in the debt, absorbing the rights to the land, infrastructure, minerals, or ports.
One victim of China’s loan sharking is Sri Lanka. In 2002, the Sri Lankan government decided to build a new port in Hambantota and needed funding for the project. China initially offered the small nation $1.1 billion in loans and supplied Chinese contractors to carry out the work. In all, a Chinese state-owned bank loaned Sri Lanka $1.3 billion to build its new port, which opened in late 2010 and immediately lost money. Further, Sri Lanka could not make its interest payments on China’s loans. Along with loans taken out for other infrastructure development projects, Sri Lanka is now indebted to China for a total of $8 billion. Unable to pay, Sri Lanka is now facing China’s solution to its debt problem: foreclosure.
In 2014, Sri Lanka allowed China to dock a submarine in the port, causing fierce opposition from India, Sri Lanka’s northern neighbor. This led Sri Lanka to deny China’s second request to dock a submarine in 2017. In July of that year, Sri Lanka struck a deal and sold a 70 percent stake in the port to the state-controlled China Merchants Port Holdings. The deal formally handed over control of the port to China in a ninety-nine-year lease, and prompted India to discuss plans to build an airport in Sri Lanka to counter China’s influence. The tactic is a pattern for China, which “typically finds a local partner, makes that local partner accept investment plans that are detrimental to their country in the long-term, and then uses the debts to either acquire the project altogether or to acquire political leverage in that country.” Thucydides has truly come to Colombo.
The Sri Lankan port-default scheme is just one action in a series of moves that China has made to acquire ports around the globe and assert maritime dominance. China’s port plans are central to the CCP’s geopolitical goals, and will lead to Beijing challenging the United States as the world’s preeminent maritime power. China currently owns over one hundred ports in sixty-three countries, including seven of the world’s ten busiest ports. However, these numbers are just the tip of the iceberg—China has substantial financial interests that fall short of ownership in a far larger number of ports. China’s political warfare is happening everywhere and is a strategy that is employed around the globe—it identifies divisions, buys up politicians, and sets the stage for debt traps, relying on psychological warfare, media warfare, and lawfare to aid in its efforts to control key terrain and assets. The narrative the CCP wants to promote is that “China’s rise is inevitable, [so] you’re better off rising with our boat, rather than trying to cut yourself off and sink on your own.”
Another concerning development is China’s new security agreement with the Solomon Islands, which many view as a continuation of China’s efforts to obtain access to, or build, military bases to project power forward and encircle Taiwan. Beyond the first island chain in the South China Sea, China has been trying to embed itself in other islands, to further squeeze Taiwan from both sides. China’s tactics make strategic sense: by systematically positioning itself to Taiwan’s east and west, China can block resupply and constrain Taiwan’s deployment options in the event of a kinetic conflict. Recently, the Pacific island nation of Kiribati also switched recognition from Taiwan to China. Presently, discussions are ongoing over China’s desire to redevelop an old World War II US military airstrip on Kiribati’s Canton Island for “tourism”—a strategic airstrip that is relatively close to Hawaii. Additional investments in Oman’s Duqm and Pakistan’s Gwadar ports raise concerns that both may ultimately become Chinese naval bases. And, China has already added a naval base in Djibouti and announced in June 2022 its intention to build a second facility in a Cambodian port. The fact that China is collecting its proverbial lily pads through passive economic traps and political warfare instead of brute force means that it happens quietly and without the media attention paid to kinetic conflicts. And no one is stopping it.
The Hollywood Sellout
China is both a large producer and a large consumer. Chinese production centers around low-cost manufacturing and, in 2020, China was the world’s largest exporter of broadcasting equipment ($223 billion), computers ($156 billion), office machine parts, ($86.8 billion), cloth articles ($60.7 billion), and telephones ($51 billion). Conversely, China has the ability to grant or limit foreign access to its billions of consumers, which the CCP uses to its economic and political advantage. Hollywood, for example, is an industry based on viewership and China is a major market for its films. Hollywood studios recognize the economic potential of the Chinese market and have incorporated it into their business model. As a result, the relationship between Hollywood and the CCP has flourished.
In 2008, the CCP sent its propaganda executives to the University of California, Los Angeles to learn the ins and outs of the American entertainment business. Simultaneously, China enrolled foreign exchange students at US universities to better understand how to exploit the American entertainment sector. What the CCP learned is that it could engender Hollywood dependence upon the Chinese market and, therefore, hold leverage over the entertainment industry and influence American culture. Additionally, film production is expensive. A good film can be wildly successful at the box office, but a bad film can lose a lot of money. What China provides is a “surplus above subsistence” market, meaning that by virtue of mass alone, sales in the Chinese market will make up for any quality deterioration in Hollywood product. In short, Hollywood sold its ownership for a few decades of guaranteed revenue for bad films.
Today, China wields immense power over the entertainment industry simply by regulating access to its consumers. For American entertainment companies to maintain access to the Chinese market, they must comply with the content whims of the CCP. When the 1984 Cold War drama Red Dawn was updated in 2012, the script called for a villain change from the Soviets to the Chinese. Prior to release, however, Hollywood transformed the foe from China to North Korea. After an interview in which John Cena called Taiwan a country, the actor famously issued an apology in Mandarin. Marvel’s Tibetan character in Doctor Strange disappeared. The jacket worn by Maverick in the recent Top Gun sequel mysteriously lost its Taiwan flag in a 2019 trailer before, under US audience pressure, it returned in 2022. Immensely popular in Taiwan, China has not yet released the film.
The Way of Confucius
China’s Confucius Institute initiative seeks to enhance “mutual understanding and friendship” between the Chinese people and others around the globe. More than any of the tactics listed above, the Confucius Institute program exemplifies China’s soft power strategy to overturn the international balance of power. In 1987, the Chinese politburo established the National Office for Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language to promote scientific, technological, and cultural exchanges with American and foreign academic institutions, in addition to its economic and trade cooperation efforts. By 2004, Confucius Institutes, a program developed by Chinese Ministry of Education–affiliated Hanban, began appearing on academic campuses. Notably, program funding is shared between the Hanban organization and the host university, with China footing much of the bill.
Initially, the CCP rolled out forty satellite sites—with the second Confucius Institute opening on the campus of the University of Maryland. By 2009, there were ninety Confucius Institutes spread across US universities with a peak of roughly one hundred institutes in 2018. Branches could be found at top American universities, like Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Columbia, Stanford, Michigan, Iowa, and George Washington. As a form of soft power, the Chinese government spends approximately $10 billion a year on its institutes and related programs to “give a good Chinese narrative.” Because the institutes are affiliated with the Chinese Ministry of Education, over time they received increasing skepticism over censorship of content taught, especially related to topics of individual freedoms and democracy. Accordingly, Confucius Institutes “only teach political lessons that unduly favor China.”
Soon after Confucius Institutes in the United States reached their peak numbers in 2018, the US Senate released a report on the program and, at roughly the same time, The Economist ran an article highlighting the state-run program and its cultural influence initiatives. In response, the University of Chicago, Texas A&M, and myriad others shuttered their programs. Nonetheless, over fifty Confucius Institutes remain open and operational on US campuses and additional centers are planned, in many cases due to losses in other revenue streams related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Retired University of Chicago anthropologist Marshall Sahlins reported in his 2014 pamphlet Confucius Institutes: Academic Malware that each Confucius Institute comes with $100,000 in “startup costs.” The host university is also stated to receive five similarly sized annual payments, as well as airfare and salaries for Chinese faculty brought in to teach the curriculum. America is again falling victim to its idealized notions of an economically and culturally interconnected world.
Re-Pivot to the Pivot
China is waging a silent war against the United States in the business, entertainment, and education sectors. This campaign is difficult to detect, however, as it rests underneath the visible threshold. Hovering under the “just noticeable difference” has its advantages as this allows China to grow, compete, and challenge the United States without evoking a reaction or response. The United States, meanwhile, is plagued with short-term-itis. The nature of international politics is such that there are ample emergencies to satisfy every appetite. This is problematic because the secret to the now-or-later bargain may be the ability to focus for longer periods of time. Unfortunately, this is not a feature of our democratic system. Still, the American voters have the power to reduce political oscillations and take steady aim at a longer-term foreign policy agenda. Exposing and acknowledging the CCP’s under-the-radar strategy is the first step in gaining a strategic perspective. Otherwise, the outlook is poor and the frog will continue boiling.
Michael McCormick is an international relations researcher focusing on Russia and China. He currently studies at Bloomsburg University.
Kevin Petit, PhD is on the faculty of the National Intelligence University. He received his PhD in political science from the George Washington University after retiring from the US Army as a lieutenant colonel following twenty-four years of service. His research focuses on gray zone conflict.
The views expressed are those of the authors and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.
Image credit: Airman 1st Class Philip Bryant, US Air Force
15. China’s Disinformation Warriors May Be Coming for Your Company
Note the DOD statement on disinformation this week.
Recognize, understand, expose, and attack the strategy.
China’s Disinformation Warriors May Be Coming for Your Company
A recent attack on a rare-earths processor shows a new facet of information warfare: weaponized NIMBYism.
A Chinese disinformation effort against a Pentagon contractor building a rare-earths plant in Texas may herald a new era of such tactics against Western companies.
On Tuesday, U.S. defense officials said they and “partner nations” were looking into the campaign against Lynas Rare Earths, an Australian company with a $120 million contract to build a separation facility in Texas.
They credited cybersecurity firm Mandiant with discovering the campaign by the DRAGONBRIDGE group, which works to advance the interests of the government of China, or PRC. Mandiant’s report said the group designed social media posts to make it appear that Texas residents were objecting to the new site on environmental grounds. They also took aim at the Biden administration’s recent effort to increase the domestic supply of rare earths minerals.
“While the activity we detail here does not appear to have been particularly effective and received only limited engagement by seemingly real individuals, the campaign’s microtargeting of specific audiences suggest the possibility of using similar means to manipulate public discourse surrounding other U.S. political issues to the PRC’s advantage,” the Mandiant report said.
The campaign wasn’t especially sophisticated. The perpetrators made some simple mistakes like using stock photos for profile images and creating a lot of the accounts at the same time.
But John Hultquist, vice president of Mandiant Threat Intelligence, told Defense One on Wednesday that he expects the group to refine its technique.
“They're still getting their legs under them, dealing with all the complexity of cross-cultural communication,” Hultquist said. “There's still language issues and definitely issues with engagement…But they’re clearly invested.”
China’s international efforts may be nascent, but its government has vast experience making propaganda aimed at domestic consumption. The state employs up to half a million people in social-media messaging, the cybersecurity company Recorded Future estimated in 2019.
Unlike Russia’s high-profile campaigns to influence U.S. politics, China’s efforts are more narrowly focused on economic interests.
“One of the things that's distinct about Chinese activity, compared to some of their peers, is that they're always highly economically focused,” Hultquist said.
That means that while U.S. politicians are learning to deal with disinformation attacks, private companies generally haven’t had to.
“There's a whole new group of targets that probably don't have strong experience dealing with this problem,” he said.
The Lynas Rare Earth case also highlights a unique attack vector: reasonable environmental concerns. In essence, it’s a strategy that weaponizes NIMBYs.
Such attacks will likely proliferate as Chinese and U.S. economic interests continue to diverge, Hultquist said: “As that [decoupling] process gets underway, more industries will find themselves the same sort of strategic situation that rare earth metals are are now.”
16. War has been raging in Ukraine for 4 months. What comes next, and when will it end?
War has been raging in Ukraine for 4 months. What comes next, and when will it end?
Grid’s global team looks at the next stage of the war, and chances for victory for Russia and Ukraine.
Four months into the war in Ukraine, and three months after the Russians announced that they would focus their attacks on the eastern part of the country, the war has become a ferocious battle for the region known as the Donbas. And hopes for a swift victory — or even one that might come in the next several weeks — appear to have vanished for both sides. At various stages of the war, Grid has taken stock of where things stand on the battlefield, potential scenarios for the war’s end and the global impact of the conflict, beyond Ukraine and Russia themselves. In the latest assessment, Global Editor Tom Nagorski spoke with Global Security Reporter Joshua Keating and Deputy Global Editor Nikhil Kumar in a Twitter Spaces event Tuesday.
Hear excerpts from the conversation between Joshua Keating, Nikhil Kumar and Tom Nagorski:
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Tom Nagorski: Josh, to get started, a question or two about what we’ve seen just in the last couple of days: the Ukrainians abandoning a key city, Severodonetsk in the east, after what seemed to be a really nasty battle there. And then renewed Russian airstrikes — including this horrific attack yesterday on a mall, which was quite far from the front lines. Very different developments — what should we take away from these last few days?
Josh Keating: Most of the sustained fighting is happening in the east, and a rather narrow area, mostly in Luhansk, but then moving on to Donetsk, which is the larger region of the Donbas to the south. But while this is happening, there are other developments happening elsewhere in the country, as you mentioned. There continue to be missile strikes throughout Ukraine — this one on the shopping mall was distinguished by just the death toll and what a horrific strike it was. But we have seen regular strikes lately on targets outside the main battle area, even as the war itself has shifted east.
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And there’s also been reports of Ukrainian counterattacks, both in the north, near the city of Kharkiv, and in southern Ukraine, near the city of Kherson, which is one that was taken by Russia rather quickly. So while the main action is happening in this relatively small area, there is fighting happening elsewhere. And you could look at these as setting up for battles down the road, because chances are this phase of the fighting is not the last one we’ll see.
TN: It was in late March that the Kremlin said, “We are pulling our forces away from the capital” and from other places to concentrate on these areas you’ve just been talking about. It’s taken a lot of time and certainly a lot of bloodshed. But from a distance anyway, it does seem that the Russians are slowly but surely achieving their aims. Is that a correct conclusion?
JK: I think that is true for now. The Russian forces were bloodied by those early weeks of the war, from the failed attempt to take Kyiv, so they weren’t really coming into this battle fresh. And they just don’t appear to have the personnel needed for large, rapid territorial gains. This is an artillery-heavy war. The cities that they’ve taken — Severodonetsk most recently — the approach is to use artillery to almost level the place before troops move in. This is a slow, grinding form of warfare, but it is one that works to Russia’s advantage just because of their advantage in materiel and the weapons systems they’re using, and the amount of ammunition and they can bring to the fight.
Right now, most experts you talk to say that they expect the pace of fighting to slow even more in the coming weeks, over the course of the summer, as the two sides are exhausted. I think that we’ll see the lines becoming even more fixed. And then it becomes a kind of race to see whether some of these new weapons systems that the West is rushing into Ukraine can turn the tide of battle and maybe allow Ukraine to mount counter-offensives to retake some of this area? Of course, the problem with that is Ukrainian forces are badly depleted, too. They’ve said they may be losing more than 100 troops a day, so they’re not exactly in prewar condition, either.
TN: We hear almost every day a fresh plea — whether it’s from [Ukrainian] President [Volodymyr] Zelenskyy or one of his top aides — for more weaponry. And then we get repeated pledges that the money and the weaponry are coming. It seems like very little has reached the east, or at least it’s not making a difference yet. What’s the story?
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JK: I’d say it is starting to reach the east. The thing that’s gotten attention lately is what’s called the HIMARS, the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, which is a kind of mobile precision rocket launcher, and those are apparently now being used in the east, according to the Ukrainian military. The problem really is both how long it takes to get this stuff to the front, and it’s also Ukraine’s capacity to absorb it. At the beginning of the war, Ukraine was mostly reliant on Soviet-era artillery systems, and they fire Soviet-grade ammunition. And they went through that pretty quickly. And so a lot of the resupply effort by the U.S. and other countries has been going all over the world, trying to locate Soviet ammunition for these systems, and the supply of that outside Russia has been mostly exhausted.
What’s happening now is they’re asking for NATO systems, and those are starting to be sent. But it’s not just a matter of getting them there. It’s training Ukrainian troops on how to use them. And what people say is even harder is training mechanics on how to maintain them. These are different systems than what the Ukrainian military is used to. That kind of stuff, in a normal military context, can take months. The Ukrainians say they can do it in weeks. But you know, even weeks, in a war like this, is a lifetime. And it’s really kind of a race against time to get this stuff online in time to make a difference in the Donbas.
TN: Nikhil Kumar, you have, among other things, written a piece for Grid under the heading, “Vladimir Putin is not a pariah.” Nikhil, can you explain what you meant by that — and whether you think it still holds true?
Nikhil Kumar: The answer seems almost blindingly obvious if all you’re doing is listening to and reading what’s coming out of, say, the White House, or other capitals in the West. But it becomes very clear when you widen your lens a little, and look beyond to important places like Beijing, like New Delhi, that [Russian President Vladimir] Putin is not quite the pariah that you would initially believe. And that really has to do with the fact that while he and Russia have been subjected to unprecedented sanctions, which have effectively shut Russia out of large parts of the international financial system and affected all parts of its economy, Russia still maintains ties with these other countries, such as China, such as India, and beyond.
And we saw a demonstration of this very recently at the BRICS summit, which was done virtually, hosted by Beijing. And Putin was there, it was his first sort of big multilateral outing, really, since the beginning of the war, albeit virtual, but he was there. And he was there with these other countries — India, China, Brazil, South Africa. And we had the news yesterday from the Kremlin saying that they have accepted an invitation for Vladimir Putin to attend the G-20 later this year in Indonesia. We’ll see if that actually happens.
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But it demonstrates that Putin has not been shut out and not been thrown off the world stage in the way that you might believe if you just heard things that were said in the U.S. and Europe. And it really all comes down to his economic clout. At the end of the day, Putin controls a country, an economy that is extremely resource-rich and is a major player in the global gas market and a major player in the global oil market. It continues to supply oil and gas. In fact, supplies have been stepped up to China in India as Russia goes to them and offers very deep discounts at a time when its war has played a big part in driving up these prices internationally.
Over the last few months, we’ve seen Europe, which is heavily dependent on Russian energy, move more and more to cutting into that dependence. But even that process is happening gradually. And it’s happening gradually because at the end of the day, Russia is just too much a part of the global energy market. So whereas in the financial markets and the financial system, the United States can with its allies shut it out, it can’t do so with as much speed when it comes to the energy market.
And the energy market matters, particularly because war is driving up inflation. And that means that these resources become more expensive. And that matters for all these countries — for China, India and others. India’s Prime Minister [Narendra] Modi doesn’t want prices to rise for his citizens. And his ministers have said again and again, “Look, in this war we empathize with Ukraine, but we have our own interests that we need to look after.”
And so that means that at the end of the day, Putin is not quite the pariah that you would initially believe.
TN: This week, the Indian prime minister was invited to join [President] Joe Biden and his counterparts in the G-7 in Europe. And I would imagine they are trying, among other things, to persuade Prime Minister Modi to stop buying — last I saw, it’s north of a million barrels of discounted Russian oil a day. What leverage does President Biden — or any of the European leaders — have to convince Narendra Modi?
NK: Well, just on the very narrow evidence of what’s happened over the last few months, I think we would have to say, not a great deal. They have made no secret of the fact that they would like India — a country which historically had very close ties with the former Soviet Union, but over the last few decades has moved increasingly into the U.S. column — that they would like it to stand more firmly with the United States and stand against Russia. But India has continued to engage with Russia, and in fact they’ve stepped up their engagement.
Russian oil supplies as a proportion of India’s total oil imports stood at about 1 to 3 percent, something like that, before the war. Russia was never a big player when it came to sending oil to India. It was a big player in the Indian defense industry and remains so, but not so much with oil. But because of these discounts — we have estimates that Russia is selling oil to India and China at a discount of up to 30 percent — India’s dependence on Russian oil has shot up in the last few months. It has overtaken countries like Saudi Arabia, in terms of supplying oil to India.
So India is walking this middle ground. Because I think India increasingly feels that — because the U.S. needs it in South Asia, and indeed in the Indo-Pacific region where they have been trying to counter China’s influence — I think India believes more and more that they can continue to effectively play both sides.
TN: Josh, Nikhil just used the phrase “stand against Russia.” You used the flip side of that, in a piece for Grid, asking the question: How long will the rest of the world “stand with Ukraine”? Tell us a little bit about that. It seems that there are fractures beginning to show in that global alliance — of “stand with Ukraine.”
JK: If you look at French President Emmanuel Macron, he got a lot of criticism a few weeks ago for saying that Russia must not be humiliated, basically saying that it’s time to start working on an off-ramp that gives Putin something that allows him to exit the war. It’s interesting — after this [Russian] strike on the shopping mall yesterday, he struck a different tone. He called it a war crime and said he would support Ukraine as long as necessary to make sure that Russia cannot and should not win. So in some sense, I think the Putin strategy depends on the rest of the world losing interest. I think that the Russian government is counting on the rest of the world moving on.
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But some of these atrocities we see, like this mall attack, make it harder for Western governments to turn away. There are differences in opinion — there’s the European Council on Foreign Relations poll the other day that basically broke European countries into the peace camps and war camps. And Italy, interesting enough, was the most skeptical about supporting the Ukrainian resistance. But I think that what’s more striking is how long the solidarity and support has held up. It’s been much longer than I would have expected based on what we’ve seen after crises involving Russia in the past. The public interest in this — obviously it’s not what it was, because of a host of competing major issues — but the level of public interest that we still see in this war in Ukraine months later, I think we shouldn’t lose sight of how remarkable that is.
TN: Talk about this country a little bit. There’s not much bipartisan support for anything in the United States right now. We all know that. But it does seem, to your point, that politically, at least, and in terms of all the military and financial assistance, the United States right now is still firmly standing with Ukraine, is it not?
JK: I almost wonder if the frustrations the Biden administration is experiencing on other fronts may almost work to Ukraine’s advantage. This is one thing where he does seem to be able to garner bipartisan support. And when he announces another $450 million, there doesn’t seem to be any difficulty in getting millions and billions of dollars in aid for Ukraine, compared to a lot of the other priorities that Biden would like to be able to make progress on.
There is, in the isolationist corners of the Republican Party and in the more anti-war factions of the left, a little more skepticism in Congress. But it’s really at the margins right now. And I suppose we’ll see what happens after the midterms, if Republicans take back control, but I wouldn’t expect to see any major changes on Ukraine policy. It does seem like the support for this is pretty across-the-board, even with the sort of economic costs that some of the sanctions may be imposing.
TN: I mentioned at the outset that Nikhil Kumar has been watching various domino effects caused by the war. And there’s probably nothing nearly so profound as the food crisis that the war has sparked. We saw today that the G-7 has committed more than $4 billion to deal with the consequences of that food crisis. And there was a pledge to work to help free up those Ukrainian food shipments that the Russians have tied down at various ports. There were no specifics given. What would have to happen to get those shipments moving?
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NK: Essentially, the war would have to end. Because as part of the conflict, one of the things that Russia has done is they have blocked shipments in the Black Sea. And they’re not allowing Ukrainian ships to function. They attacked just the other week, they attacked the food warehouse in Odessa, just one of many instances of the Russians doing whatever they can to make sure that a lot of grain that was harvested in Ukraine, and that has been sitting there since last year, that it can’t get out of the country. And they have at the same time been effectively stealing Ukrainian grain. There were satellite images not too long ago showing Russian-flagged ships taking grain from Ukraine to Syria.
And so for the G-7 to really fulfill that commitment to allow shipments to resume, the conflict needs to be brought to an end. That is the key thing that is stopping Ukraine from being able to supply food that it already has in storage facilities to all these other countries around the world.
TN: But if that’s the case, that’s not much of a plan, right, when they say they’re going to work toward helping to free up the shipments by ending the war?
NK: One of the things that people I’ve spoken to have pointed out again and again is that you cannot simply pick up this grain and move it via the land routes — it’s not that simple. For one thing, a lot of the grain is stuck in the east, in areas where there’s a lot of fighting, and it is stuck around these ports. And certainly everybody I’ve spoken to in the last few months, they have all said that what needs to happen is that these shipments need to resume particularly around the Black Sea for this to get better. And of course, the longer this continues, the worse it’ll get for the world.
When it comes to the staples that you mentioned, that’s also about what’s been planted and what will be harvested later in the year. And that’s been interrupted by the war — Ukraine tried its best to have a spring planting season around the country, but we are still anticipating a shortfall there as well.
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TN: Josh, you have written about various endgames in Ukraine, what a victory for Ukrainians might look like, a victory for the Russians, a palace coup in the Kremlin and so forth. If you’re writing a fresh piece tomorrow, with that being the question, where do you land?
JK: I like to put out a lot of possibilities just to cover my bases. But we’re probably not going to have a good idea of that for another couple of months, just because of some of the factors I mentioned earlier. The sanctions that the West has imposed — so far, the Russian economy is weathering them fairly well. But most people don’t expect that to last. The default we saw this week was a sign of things to come; there could be a major contraction later in the year. So that’s something to watch.
Then, once these new weapons systems come online, once the Ukrainians are trained on them, will that be able to make a difference in the battlefield? Will they be able to turn the tide in the Donbas? Will some of these counter-offensives we’re seeing in places like Kherson bear fruit?
I think the important thing to keep in mind is that this is not going to end in the coming days, certainly, probably not in the coming weeks. I think by the fall, we may have a better idea, and we shouldn’t rule out another expansion of Russia’s war aims and other attempts by them to move toward some of the more maximalist goals they had earlier in the fight. But in order to make that happen, I think there’s going to have to be a kind of pause in the next few weeks for both sides to replenish and recover some of their forces. So if I had to guess right now, I would guess we’re going to start to see the pace of the war slow in the coming weeks. And then developments one way or another are going to start to get a little more dramatic as we get into the fall and winter.
Thanks to Lillian Barkley for copy editing this article.
17. We need an International Anti-Corruption Court
Excerpts:
Corruption isn’t inevitable, and it’s not unstoppable.
It does, however, require a collective commitment to the long-term efforts made to establish ambitious anti-corruption solutions at the international level. Only then can we create an effective institution that contributes to securing a more just, rules-based global order.
The need for action has never been more pressing. Democracies have a unique mandate to take action and show that they can deliver on something as essential to their very nature as the rule of law. We all need to stand up.
We need an International Anti-Corruption Court
Politico · by Danilo Türk · June 24, 2022
Taking kleptocracy seriously requires ambitious solutions to deter and punish corrupt leaders enjoying impunity in the countries they rule.
The world needs an impartial rule of law response to corruption, embodied in a new institution: an International Anti-Corruption Court (IACC) | Spencer Platt/Getty Images
By
June 24, 2022 4:02 am
Danilo Türk is the former president of Slovenia and the current president of Club de Madrid. He was recently appointed member of the U.N. Secretary-General’s High-Level Advisory Board.
Corruption isn’t a new phenomenon.
It’s even been argued, at times, that a certain degree of corruption may be inevitable and even healthy for the economic locomotive. In these times of heightened political scrutiny and disillusionment, however, its persistence under all manner of political systems has made it a pressing social problem that needs to be addressed head on.
With a cost to the global economy estimated at around $2.6 trillion a year — or 5 percent of global gross domestic product — corruption comes in many forms, and no country is immune. Thus, adequately meeting the challenge will require the establishment of an international mechanism, one that acknowledges corruption isn’t just a local crime.
Kleptocracy, or the abuse of public power for private gain by a nation’s leaders — stagnates the potential for growth and development and erodes citizens’ trust in democracy, contributing to the disconcerting rise of social polarization, which threatens the foundations of many liberal democracies both old and new.
This plague — which respects neither borders nor laws — can bankrupt nations, governments, communities and people, destroy the environment and undermine our trust in public institutions. It’s a crime that further exacerbates inequality, poverty and social division.
Alas, corruption is also difficult to solve, and in recent decades, most countries haven’t made much progress in this regard. Despite the fact that there are 189 parties — including 181 countries — to the United Nations Convention Against Corruption (UNCAC), which requires laws criminalizing bribery, embezzlement, money laundering and other forms of corrupt conduct, kleptocracy still thrives. And because they control the administration of justice in the countries they rule, kleptocrats enjoy impunity in too many places.
However, thanks to the work of courageous journalists, recent major document leaks like the Pandora Papers, and earlier releases of financial records like the Panama Papers, have highlighted the enormous scale of these crimes. And though this has produced extensive evidence of corrupt transnational schemes, few of the high-level officials exposed by the reporting have faced political consequences — even fewer have faced the prospect of losing their assets and freedom.
Citizens correctly wonder how these crimes can continue to go unpunished, while the middle classes are stagnated and tired of facing the consequences of crisis after crisis.
So far, the impunity and transnational nature of corruption has led to a variety of calls proposing different solutions that could cross borders and enforce laws that other countries can’t — or won’t — enforce themselves.
Along these lines, sanctions are sometimes used against corrupt leaders, and are an important short-term accountability mechanism, but they are only a political response to the problem of grand corruption. To fundamentally alter the calculations of kleptocrats and their professional enablers, the world needs a comprehensive and impartial rule of law response to the problem, which would be embodied in a new international institution — an International Anti-Corruption Court (IACC).
The IACC could be a mechanism filling the crucial gap in the international legal framework for combating corruption and enhancing transparency in governance structures.
The “Pandora Papers” investigation involving some 600 journalists from media including The Washington Post, the BBC and The Guardian is based on a leak of some 11.9 million documents from 14 financial services companies around the world Loic Venance/AFP via Getty Images
Through its agreed mandate, if the country ruled by the kleptocrat is unwilling or unable to prosecute a case itself, the court should have jurisdiction to prosecute the crimes committed by kleptocrats and their transnational networks of collaborators that are already criminalized under the UNCAC.
And as with the International Criminal Court, the IACC should have the authority to prosecute crimes committed by nationals of member countries and nationals of other countries in the territory of a member country. It should be a court of last resort with the capacity to prosecute and imprison kleptocrats and, thus, create opportunities for the democratic process to replace them with honest leaders. The court should also have — in civil as well as criminal cases — the authority to recover, repatriate and repurpose illicit assets for the victims of grand corruption.
Since the declaration calling for the creation of the IACC was first published in June 2021, over 250 luminaries — including 43 former presidents and prime ministers and 32 Nobel Laureates — from more than 75 countries have now signed it, and the governments of Canada and the Netherlands have committed to working with international partners to establish the court. Two successive presidential administrations in Colombia and the newly elected president of Timor-Leste have also endorsed the IACC.
I am acutely aware of, and concerned about, the enormous negative impact of grand corruption on societies, from combating climate change and pandemics to enhancing international peace and security, and the very pillars of democracy. To help remedy its devastating consequences, it’s critical that more countries join the emerging coalition committed to the creation of an IACC.
Recognizing that creating a new international court may be a long-term endeavour, Canada, the Netherlands, Ecuador and other partners will convene a ministerial conference in late 2022 to analyze the gaps in the international legal framework for combating corruption and potential solutions. It will particularly focus on creating a receptive environment for the proposal in the international community.
Corruption isn’t inevitable, and it’s not unstoppable.
It does, however, require a collective commitment to the long-term efforts made to establish ambitious anti-corruption solutions at the international level. Only then can we create an effective institution that contributes to securing a more just, rules-based global order.
The need for action has never been more pressing. Democracies have a unique mandate to take action and show that they can deliver on something as essential to their very nature as the rule of law. We all need to stand up.
18. Opinion | Putin wants to terrorize Ukraine into submission. It’s not working.
Conclusion:
From the Western perspective, there is no alternative but to keep sending far more weaponry and ammunition to Ukraine. There will be no peace until either Russia or Ukraine is defeated — and we had better hope it’s not Ukraine. Russia’s strike on the Kremenchuk shopping mall, using precision weapons to kill the innocent, is a reminder of the stakes involved: The Russians stand for barbarism and despotism, while the Ukrainians fight for democracy and self-determination.
Opinion | Putin wants to terrorize Ukraine into submission. It’s not working.
Western leaders have been gathering in Europe this week for the Group of Seven meeting and the NATO summit, with Ukraine at the top of the agenda. The G-7 leaders reemphasized their “condemnation of Russia’s illegal and unjustifiable war of aggression against Ukraine” and promised to “stand with Ukraine for as long as it takes.”
The Kremlin sent its rejoinder in the form of missile strikes on civilian targets in Kyiv and Kremenchuk. The Kremenchuk strike was particularly deadly: A Russian bomber apparently fired at least one Kh-22 cruise missile at a crowded shopping mall, killing at least 18 civilians and injuring many more. This is a war crime designed to send a message: Russian dictator Vladimir Putin wants to make clear that neither the government in Kyiv nor its allies in the West can protect Ukrainians from his military machine. Putin is trying to break the will of his enemies. It’s not working (in a new poll, 89 percent of Ukrainians rejected sacrificing land for peace), but he has not yet lost hope he can still prevail.
Most likely the Butcher of Bucha calculates that he can eventually take all of the eastern Donbas region, where his forces have been making incremental progress. His military could then shift its focus toward Odessa, Ukraine’s last remaining Black Sea port. If Putin were able to conquer all of eastern and southern Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelensky would be left to govern what would effectively be little more than the medieval principality of Kyiv. Russia is pursuing a crueler version of the Union’s Anaconda Plan designed to batter the Confederacy during the Civil War into starvation and submission.
Putin must be thinking , as winter arrives, western Europeans will decide that having Russian natural gas to heat their homes is more important than the fate of Ukraine. Notwithstanding Russia’s foreign debt default, he can take heart from the fact that, despite Western sanctions, Russian energy revenue are surging. Moscow earned a record $97 billion in energy exports in the first 100 days of the war in Ukraine. With Russia’s Black Sea blockade threatening a famine in Africa and the Middle East, and the Ukrainian economy imploding, the Kremlin has cause to think it can withstand the economic showdown better than its adversaries.
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That’s Putin’s argument for victory. But Zelensky also has a case for optimism. The initial Russian attempt to seize Kyiv, beginning on Feb. 24, badly failed and Russia was sent reeling with heavy losses of men and materiel. In mid-April, Russia withdrew from northern Ukraine and concentrated its forces in the Donbas. Yet more than two months later, Russia has made only “marginal advances” while its army is being “hollowed out.” (The British defense secretary just said that 25,000 Russians have been killed in Ukraine.) On June 24, Ukrainian forces staged a fighting withdrawal from the city of Severodonetsk after making the Russians pay a heavy price for its conquest. The Ukrainians are still hanging onto the nearby city of Lysychansk but might have to evacuate it soon.
If the Russians take Lysychansk, they will be in control of virtually all of Luhansk province, but the Ukrainians will still control roughly half of Donetsk, the other province that makes up the Donbas region. Western military analysts expect that Russia will soon exhaust its offensive capabilities; even a country as large as Russia cannot fire 60,000 artillery shells a day indefinitely. Sooner or later, its stockpile will be depleted.
Ukraine, for its part, is running out of rounds for its old Soviet-era artillery and rocket launchers but it is incorporating new 155mm artillery and rocket launchers from the West. Ukraine just received the first four High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS) from the United States — and there is cause to think these highly precise rocket launchers, with a range of roughly 40 miles, are already making a difference.
Ukraine has reportedly been using the HIMARS and an old Soviet-era ballistic missile system called the Tochka to target Russian ammunition dumps. If the Ukrainians can impede the flow of shells to Russian batteries, they can neutralize Russia’s most effective weapon and go on the counteroffensive in the east — as they are already doing around Kherson in the south.
At the beginning of the war, most observers expected a quick Russian victory. When that didn’t materialize, many expected a quick Russian defeat. That didn’t happen either. Both Russia and Ukraine have displayed greater resilience than their naysayers foresaw. Today, with both sides still thinking they can win, the fighting rages on. But while the war in the east appears deadlocked, a military stalemate can break with shocking rapidity: Witness the Russian collapse on the Eastern Front in 1917 and the German collapse on the Western Front in 1918.
From the Western perspective, there is no alternative but to keep sending far more weaponry and ammunition to Ukraine. There will be no peace until either Russia or Ukraine is defeated — and we had better hope it’s not Ukraine. Russia’s strike on the Kremenchuk shopping mall, using precision weapons to kill the innocent, is a reminder of the stakes involved: The Russians stand for barbarism and despotism, while the Ukrainians fight for democracy and self-determination.
19. Brainwashed: A New History of Thought Control by Daniel Pick review
Conclusion:
It is a warning that Pick believes is as urgent now as it was more than half a century ago. We are all susceptible, he says, to being washers of our own brains, building booming echo chambers in which we hear only voices with whom we already agree. We start mistaking opinion for fact, finding it impossible to imagine that there might be a reality beyond the one we have curated for ourselves. In a passionate concluding section, Pick urges us to make a point of exploring difference and difficulty wherever we encounter it. Only then, depending on what we discover, may we choose either to change our minds or stand our ground.
Brainwashed: A New History of Thought Control by Daniel Pick review
This brilliant exploration of psychological manipulation takes in both Mao’s China and the American dream
At the end of the Korean war in 1953, 21 American former prisoners of war chose to settle in the People’s Republic of China rather than return to the Land of the Free. The US government reacted with astonished horror at the way that these unfortunate dupes had been “brainwashed” – a term adapted by western journalists just three years earlier from the original Chinese – by their jailers. It had entirely missed the point that each man had arrived at a considered, individual, decision about why his life might be nicer under Mao than Eisenhower.
Take Clarence Adams, an African-American soldier who had experienced vicious racism growing up in Tennessee and was in no hurry to return for an encore. Adams chose to settle in Bejing instead, worked as a publisher, married a university professor and enjoyed being called “comrade”. Only after 12 years did he start to feel that the time was right to return with his new family to the country of his birth. Far from being welcomed home as a man who had gone looking for opportunities in the approved American way, the FBI regarded him as somewhere between a psychiatric patient and a political traitor. Yet if anyone had shown evidence of being able to think for himself it was surely Adams.
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In this frankly brilliant book, Daniel Pick sets out to explore why the idea of mind control became such a contested topic during the second half of the 20th century. His skills as a historian and a practising psychoanalyst allow Pick to move beyond a methodology in which human subjects are either reduced to data points or inflated into grand actors. In other words, he shows us Adams as neither a powerless pawn nor a figure of heroic resistance, but rather someone who muddled through the bewildering world as best he could, changing his mind certainly but never giving it away.
One of the reasons the US government was so quick to accuse the communist bloc of brainwashing was a sneaking awareness that it was doing something similar to its own population. By the early 1960s a template of the “American dream” had emerged, consisting of a corporate job for him, a kitchen bristling with mod cons for her, and a college education for their sporty children. Even the dog appeared to have been picked from a mail-order catalogue. In a certain light it’s hard to see how this vacuum-sealed system was any different from life on a collective farm or state-run assembly line.
That is not to suggest that no one dared speak out. Betty Friedan’s 1963 book The Feminine Mystique alerted middle-class women to the fact that they had been duped into a life that was not of their own choosing. Nine years later, Ira Levin satirised the whole domestic-drone trope in his novel The Stepford Wives. In Europe the discourse tended to be pitched higher, with intellectuals including Foucault, Adorno and Marcuse all publishing books that revealed how the west achieved its cultural hegemony by eliminating dissent in ways that could have been taken from Mao’s playbook.
One of those ways, ironically, was the harvesting of insights from psychoanalysis and its associated discipline of psychology. The pioneer here was Edward Bernays, Sigmund Freud’s nephew, who had emigrated with his family to the US at the end of the 19th century and virtually invented the public relations industry between the wars. Using his knowledge of how the human mind worked, Bernays hired himself out to corporate America to help it sell everything from cigarettes to disposable paper cups. Yet before we write him off as brainwasher-in-chief, Daniel Pick wants us to understand what had driven Bernays into the persuading business in the first place.
As a Jew whose extended European family suffered dreadfully under the Nazis, Bernays was painfully aware how cruelty and madness lurk in even the most civilised minds. All it took was for a gifted PR man such as Joseph Goebbels to give a shape and form to these inchoate feelings, and horror could result. Even well-established liberal democracies were clearly not immune to brainwashing, and Bernays worked hard in books such as Propaganda to alert Americans to how their minds could be perverted, poisoned, confused or invaded by bad actors in sharp suits.
It is a warning that Pick believes is as urgent now as it was more than half a century ago. We are all susceptible, he says, to being washers of our own brains, building booming echo chambers in which we hear only voices with whom we already agree. We start mistaking opinion for fact, finding it impossible to imagine that there might be a reality beyond the one we have curated for ourselves. In a passionate concluding section, Pick urges us to make a point of exploring difference and difficulty wherever we encounter it. Only then, depending on what we discover, may we choose either to change our minds or stand our ground.
Brainwashed: A New History of Thought Control by Daniel Pick is published by Profile (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
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
