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Quotes of the Day:
"He who blames others has a long way to go in his journey. He who blames himself is half way there. He who blames no one has arrived."
– Chinese Proverb
“The secret to living healthy and well is to eat half, walk double, laugh triple, and love without measure.”
–Tibetan Proverb
“Truth is not what you want it to be; it is what it is. And you must bend to its power or live a lie.”
– Musashi Miyamoto
1. Navigating Uncertainty: The Intersection of Global Politics, Tech, and Economics
2. Biden-Trump Debate Reveals Sharp Divide in U.S. Foreign Policy Approaches
3. Pattern of Brain Damage Is Pervasive in Navy SEALs Who Died by Suicide
4. Russia Is Not Bluffing
5. How Iran Defied the U.S. to Become an International Power
6. Mikhail Baryshnikov on Leaving Everything Behind
7. How blackouts in Ukraine affect chronically-ill children
8. SBU releases new headcam footage of Snake Island liberation
9. Commentary: The ripples of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s corruption purge
10. The Constitution That Binds Us (Book Review)
11. How Uncle Sam Became an American Icon
12. Vision 2035: Restoring Marine Corps Capabilities to Fight and Win
13. House Approves $2.5 Billion for Junior Enlisted Raises, Which May Be $800 Million Too Little
14. RIMPAC 2024 Kicks Off In Honolulu, Hawaii
15. The US military chases shiny new things and the ranks suffer
16. Do military families really need to move so much?
17. Is America fit to lead the West?
18. Japan and US need to up their game in the Senkakus
19. America’s priority should be chip design leadership
20. Russia wants to confront NATO but dares not fight it on the battlefield – so it’s waging a hybrid war instead
1. Navigating Uncertainty: The Intersection of Global Politics, Tech, and Economics
A very useful weekly summary from "STRATEGY CENTRAL Home of StratBot AI"
The intro is below. Read the entire weekly summary at this link. https://www.strategycentral.io/post/navigating-uncertainty-the-intersection-of-global-politics-tech-and-economics?
Strategy Central continues to evolve and provide some interesting news an analysis with the support of AI.
Navigating Uncertainty: The Intersection of Global Politics, Tech, and Economics
THE STRATEGY & TECH WEEKLY
Summaries and Links to This Week’s Curated Articles
June 24 – 30, 2024
This week’s curated summaries delve into the intricate web of global affairs, highlighting the dominance of the U.S. dollar amidst challenges from emerging payment systems, the pivotal role of Nvidia in buoying U.S. stock markets, and the groundbreaking innovations in 3D printing and AI that are redefining industries. From the disastrous Presidential debate to the geopolitical maneuvers of nations grappling with the ramifications of ongoing conflicts to the economic ramifications of tech-driven market shifts, this comprehensive overview underscores the precarious balance of power and the relentless pace of change. In an era where stability is elusive, understanding these interconnections is crucial for navigating the unpredictable tides of the future.
THE BIG PICTURE
International Political Landscape
Significant tensions and strategic maneuvers mark the international political landscape. "Putin Vows to Make New Nuclear Missiles and Weigh Putting Them Near NATO Nations" by David E. Sanger and Anton Troianovski, published by The New York Times, reports on President Vladimir Putin's declaration to produce new intermediate-range nuclear missiles and hints at deploying them within range of NATO nations. This move, amidst rising tensions with the West, aims to exert pressure and signals a strategic shift in nuclear arms control. Additionally, "How the World Reacted to Biden’s ‘Disastrous’ Debate Performance" by Michael Birnbaum, published by The Washington Post, highlights global concerns following President Joe Biden's faltering debate performance, prompting U.S. rivals to recalibrate their strategies in anticipation of a potential second Trump presidency. This article underscores the significant impact of U.S. domestic politics on international perceptions and diplomatic maneuvers.
Technological Innovations
Technological innovations continue to reshape industries and defense strategies. "NATO Boosts Undersea Cable Infrastructure Fearing Russian Sabotage" by Jack Detsch and Keith Johnson, published by Foreign Policy, discusses NATO's efforts to protect undersea communication and energy cables amid fears of Russian sabotage. This initiative highlights the strategic importance of securing global communication networks against potential disruptions. Meanwhile, “How AI Might Affect Decision-making in a National Security Crisis," by Christopher S. Chivvis and Jennifer Kavanagh, published by Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, explores the potential impacts of AI on national security decision-making processes. The article discusses how AI could both expedite and complicate decision-making, influence groupthink and alter the dynamics of bureaucratic politics. It emphasizes the need for clear AI governance and extensive risk mitigation training.
Economic Developments
Economic developments highlight the volatility and strategic shifts in global markets. "Anti-China Protectionism on Electric Vehicles Could Be a Dead End for West" by Jorge Guajardo, published by Foreign Policy, argues that Western tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles may hinder competitiveness, suggesting that long-term protectionism without strategic investments could lead to economic stagnation. This reflects broader economic and trade challenges between major global players. Additionally, "Supply Chain Latest: China’s Industrial Parks and Warehouses" by Bloomberg News reports on the growing vacancy rates in China's logistics properties, revealing struggles within the e-commerce and manufacturing sectors despite anticipated long-term growth. These economic trends underscore the complexities and challenges in maintaining competitive and resilient supply chains.
Continue at the link: https://www.strategycentral.io/post/navigating-uncertainty-the-intersection-of-global-politics-tech-and-economics?
2. Biden-Trump Debate Reveals Sharp Divide in U.S. Foreign Policy Approaches
I did not want to weigh in on the recent debate. But I thought that this is a useful summary from Strategy Central that helps separate the wheat from the chaff. (a little wheat among a large amount of chaff).
Biden-Trump Debate Reveals Sharp Divide in U.S. Foreign Policy Approaches
https://www.strategycentral.io/post/biden-trump-debate-reveals-sharp-divide-in-u-s-foreign-policy-approaches?postId=5
The recent debate between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump showcased starkly different visions for U.S. foreign policy, with significant implications for international relations. The contrasting approaches, rooted in their respective administrations' core principles, suggest potential shifts in America's role on the global stage depending on the outcome of future elections.
Biden's Foreign Policy
President Biden underscored the importance of rebuilding alliances and re-engaging in multilateral institutions. This approach aligns with the 2022 National Security Strategy (NSS), which emphasizes coalition-building to enhance collective influence and address shared global challenges. Biden stressed that America is strongest when it works with its allies and that rebuilding trust and cooperation is essential for effective international relationships.
Biden highlighted his commitment to promoting democratic values and human rights worldwide, resonating with the NSS's focus on defending democratic principles and countering authoritarian threats. He believes that democracy and human rights are not just American values but universal ones, and that the U.S. has a responsibility to uphold these ideals globally. A key element of Biden's strategy is international cooperation on climate change. He reiterated the NSS's view that environmental challenges are integral to both national and international security. Biden views climate change as an existential threat that requires a united global effort to address for the security and future of the planet.
Trump's Foreign Policy
Former President Trump reaffirmed his "America First" stance, emphasizing national sovereignty and a reduction in U.S. involvement in international agreements. This approach contrasts sharply with Biden's multilateralism and suggests a shift towards a more isolationist foreign policy. Trump focuses on protecting American interests first and foremost, avoiding agreements that do not serve national interests.
Trump focused on renegotiating trade deals to benefit American workers, reflecting a strategic pivot towards economic nationalism. This may lead to strained international relations as the U.S. seeks to prioritize its own economic interests. Trump's emphasis on fair trade over free trade highlights his commitment to ensuring every deal benefits American workers. Trump also stressed the importance of a robust military and strong defense policies, advocating for a more unilateral approach to national security. He believes that a strong military ensures national safety and deters adversaries, and that relying on others for security is not an option.
Strategic Implications
Biden aims to restore U.S. leadership and credibility on the global stage by leveraging alliances and promoting democratic values to address global challenges. He views alliances as America's greatest strength and believes that tackling the world's most pressing issues is more effective through collaboration. Trump's strategy prioritizes American interests, potentially at the expense of international cooperation. This could lead to a more transactional foreign policy that focuses on immediate national gains rather than long-term global partnerships. Trump's approach suggests dealing with the world on American terms, avoiding unfair deals or one-sided agreements.
Expert Opinions
Experts are divided on the long-term impacts of these contrasting strategies. Dr. Samantha Greene, a professor of international relations at Georgetown University, commented that Biden's approach seeks to restore America's traditional role as a global leader and coalition builder, crucial for addressing transnational challenges like climate change and global pandemics.
In contrast, Mark Thompson, a political analyst with the Heritage Foundation, argued that Trump's focus on economic nationalism and military strength resonates with a significant portion of the American electorate who feel left behind by globalization. According to Thompson, it's a pragmatic approach that prioritizes American interests in an increasingly competitive world.
Conclusion
The debate illuminated a clear divergence in foreign policy strategies. Biden advocates for a collaborative approach, while Trump emphasizes a more America-centric strategy. As the U.S. navigates these contrasting visions, the implications for international relations and global stability remain profound. The future direction of U.S. foreign policy will likely hinge on which vision the American public and its leaders choose to embrace in the coming years.
#ForeignPolicy #BidenVsTrump #USPolitics #GlobalLeadership #AmericaFirst #Diplomacy #strategycentral
3. Pattern of Brain Damage Is Pervasive in Navy SEALs Who Died by Suicide
Just think about how much exposure to blasts takes place in training. We must have a huge number of our service members out there who are suffering from this damage.
Excerpts:
The lab found an unusual pattern of damage seen only in people exposed repeatedly to blast waves.
The vast majority of blast exposure for Navy SEALs comes from firing their own weapons, not from enemy action. The damage pattern suggested that years of training intended to make SEALs exceptional was leaving some barely able to function.
Pattern of Brain Damage Is Pervasive in Navy SEALs Who Died by Suicide
By Dave Philipps
The New York Times · by Dave Philipps · June 30, 2024
A military lab found distinctive damage from repeated blast exposure in every brain it tested, but Navy SEAL leaders were kept in the dark about the pattern.
Longtime Navy SEALs like David Metcalf, shown with teammates in a photo from a personal collection, are exposed repeatedly in training to the blasts from detonating explosives and firing weapons.
A military lab found distinctive damage from repeated blast exposure in every brain it tested, but Navy SEAL leaders were kept in the dark about the pattern.
Longtime Navy SEALs like David Metcalf, shown with teammates in a photo from a personal collection, are exposed repeatedly in training to the blasts from detonating explosives and firing weapons. Credit...
Listen to this article · 16:11 min Learn more
By
David Metcalf’s last act in life was an attempt to send a message — that years as a Navy SEAL had left his brain so damaged that he could barely recognize himself.
He died by suicide in his garage in North Carolina in 2019, after nearly 20 years in the Navy. But just before he died, he arranged a stack of books about brain injury by his side, and taped a note to the door that read, in part, “Gaps in memory, failing recognition, mood swings, headaches, impulsiveness, fatigue, anxiety, and paranoia were not who I was, but have become who I am. Each is worsening.”
Then he shot himself in the heart, preserving his brain to be analyzed by a state-of-the-art Defense Department laboratory in Maryland.
The lab found an unusual pattern of damage seen only in people exposed repeatedly to blast waves.
The vast majority of blast exposure for Navy SEALs comes from firing their own weapons, not from enemy action. The damage pattern suggested that years of training intended to make SEALs exceptional was leaving some barely able to function.
Lieutenant Metcalf died by suicide after nearly 20 years in the Navy.Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times
But the message Lieutenant Metcalf sent never got through to the Navy. No one at the lab told the SEAL leadership what the analysis had found, and the leadership never asked.
It was not the first time, or the last. At least a dozen Navy SEALs have died by suicide in the last 10 years, either while in the military or shortly after leaving. A grass-roots effort by grieving families delivered eight of their brains to the lab, an investigation by The New York Times has found. And after careful analysis, researchers discovered blast damage in every single one.
It is a stunning pattern with important implications for how SEALs train and fight. But privacy guidelines at the lab and poor communication in the military bureaucracy kept the test results hidden. Five years after Lieutenant Metcalf’s death, Navy leaders still did not know.
Until The Times told the Navy of the lab’s findings about the SEALs who died by suicide, the Navy had not been informed, the service confirmed in a statement.
A Navy officer close to the SEAL leadership expressed audible shock, and then frustration, when told about the findings by The Times. “That’s the problem,” said the officer, who asked not to be named in order to discuss a sensitive topic. “We are trying to understand this issue, but so often the information never reaches us.”
The lack of communication has led Navy leaders to overlook a potentially critical threat to its elite special operators. When the commander of SEAL Team 1 died by suicide in 2022, SEAL leaders responded by ceasing nearly all operations for a day so the force could learn about suicide prevention. According to four people with knowledge of the commander’s case, his brain was later found to have extensive blast damage, but because the leaders were not told, they never discussed the threat of blast exposure with the force.
A growing number of scientists suggest that troops are getting brain injuries from firing heavy weapons. An old party trick involving a beer bottle explains the physics of what happens when a blast wave hits the brain, and the damage it can cause.
Evidence suggests that the damage may be just as widespread in SEALs who are still alive. A Harvard study, published this spring, scanned the brains of 30 career Special Operators and found altered brain structure and compromised brain function in nearly all of them. The more blast exposure the men had experienced, the more problems they reported with health and quality of life.
That study was funded by Special Operations Command, which has been at the forefront in the military’s effort to understand the issue. In December, the study’s main author briefed the command’s top leaders, including from the Navy SEALs.
“We have a moral obligation to protect the cognitive health and combat effectiveness of our teammates,” Rear Adm. Keith Davids, the commander of Navy Special Warfare, which includes the SEALs, said in a statement. He said the Navy is trying to limit brain injuries “by limiting blast exposure, and is actively participating in medical research designed to enhance understanding in this critical field.”
But without the data on suicides, a key piece of the problem was never discussed at the briefing.
Blows to the Head
Lieutenant Metcalf’s wife, Jamie Metcalf, said in an interview that the note he left when he died was an effort to draw attention to a widespread problem with blast-induced brain injury.Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times
The communication breakdown is part of a broader disconnect in the Defense Department, which spends nearly $1 billion each year on brain injury research, and many billions more to train and equip troops, but does comparatively little to ensure that the latest science on brain injury informs practices in the ranks.
Lieutenant Metcalf’s wife, Jamie Metcalf, said in an interview that she had come to see his death as a an effort to draw attention to a widespread problem.
“He left an intentional message, because he knew things had to change,” she said. When told the information about his brain had not reached the SEAL leadership, she sighed and said, “You’re kidding me.”
Lieutenant Metcalf on his fifth and final deployment.Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times
The military readily acknowledges that traumatic brain injury is the most common injury from recent conflicts. But it is struggling to understand how many of those injuries are inflicted by the shock waves unleashed by troops’ own triggers.
There are signs that the damage can come from a wide array of weapons. Artillery crew members who fired thousands of rounds in combat came home plagued by hallucinations and psychosis. Mortar teams suffered from headaches and deteriorating memory. Reliable soldiers suddenly turned violent and murdered neighbors after years of working around the blasts from tanks and grenades in combat or in training.
Blast waves may kill brain cells without causing any immediately noticeable symptoms, according to Dr. Daniel Daneshvar, chief of brain injury rehabilitation at Harvard Medical School.
“People may be getting injured without even realizing it,” Dr. Daneshvar said. “But over time, it can add up.”
People’s brains can often compensate until injuries accumulate to a critical level, he said; then, “people kind of fall off a cliff.”
Jotting down thoughts in a notebook on his final deployment, Lieutenant Metcalf noticed that his memory and cognition were starting to fade.Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times
In many cases, doctors treating the injured troops give them diagnoses of psychiatric disorders that miss the underlying physical damage. Much of what is categorized as post-traumatic stress disorder may actually be caused by repeated exposure to blasts.
The stories of the SEALs who died by suicide point to a troubling pattern in the elite force.
Their average age was 43. Each had deployed to combat a number of times, but none had been wounded by enemy fire. All had spent years firing a wide arsenal of powerful weapons, jumping from airplanes, blowing open doors with explosives, diving deep underwater and learning to fight hand to hand.
Over the years they had developed the expertise and sharp judgment of seasoned special operators. But late in their careers, the effects of years of repeated blast exposure ate those skills away.
Around the age of 40, nearly all of them started to struggle with insomnia and headaches, memory and coordination problems, depression, confusion and, sometimes, rage.
“The first thing people think is, it must be PTSD, but that never made sense to me — it didn’t fit,” said Jennifer Collins, whose husband, retired Chief Petty Officer David Collins, was a SEAL for 20 years and died in 2014, just over a year after leaving the Navy.
A Late-Career Breakdown
Jennifer Collins keeps a small memorial at home to her husband, Chief Petty Officer David Collins, who died in 2014.Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times
Ms. Collins is the reason that the brains of a high proportion of the SEALs who died by suicide made it to the Defense Department’s lab.
Her husband was in many ways a typical SEAL: smart, confident, easygoing and high-achieving. He deployed to Afghanistan twice and to Iraq three times. When he was not deployed, he was away from home for hundreds of days each year in training.
Combat never seemed to faze Mr. Collins, but near the end of his Navy career, he started to change in subtle ways that Ms. Collins pieced together only in retrospect. He began to avoid social gatherings. He struggled to sleep. He started to make strange, obsessive family schedules and become irritated when they were not followed. Some simple chores, like raking leaves into a tarp, started to confound him. He would step out the door to go to work, realize that he had forgotten his keys, go back inside to get them and then forget why he had returned.
All were signs of brain injury. But at the time, the military generally associated brain injury with big blasts from roadside bombs — something Mr. Collins never experienced. No one was telling the troops that repeated exposure to routine blasts from their own weapons might be a risk.
Mr. Collins’s mental health took a sudden plunge when he was 45. He had left the Navy and started a civilian job teaching troops to operate small drones. One morning, well before the sun was up, he called his wife in a panic from a work trip, saying he had forgotten how to do his job and had not slept in four days.
A framed black and white photo of David Collins, taken in 2013 by his wife.Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times
“He was super anxious, almost paranoid,” Ms. Collins recalled. “He was nothing like my husband.”
When Mr. Collins returned to the couple’s home in Virginia Beach, doctors scanned his brain with magnetic resonance imaging but found nothing abnormal. They eventually gave him a diagnosis of depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder, and prescribed a number of drugs for sleep and mood. They didn’t help.
He then went to a specialty clinic for brain injury but failed to find relief.
Everyday tasks like booking a flight became so arduous that he would puzzle over them for hours. He was sleepless and agitated — scared that his mind was slipping away.
In March 2014, three months after placing the frantic pre-dawn call to his wife, he went to return a few library books, dropped off a tuition check at his son’s kindergarten, and then drove to a secluded side street. He sent a text to his wife saying, “So sorry, baby. I love you all,” and ended his life.
“I knew, with all he had been going through, that the text could only mean one thing,” Ms. Collins said.
When the police came to the house to confirm his death, she was adrift in grief and confusion. But one determined thought floated to the front of her mind.
“I told the police — I was adamant — that I wanted his brain donated to research,” she recalled. “I wanted to try to find some answers.”
Visible Under a Microscope
Thin slices of brain tissue held by the Department of Defense Brain Tissue Repository revealed a pattern of brain damage unique to veterans who were repeatedly exposed to blasts.Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times
In Bethesda, Md., the Defense Department had built a lab in 2012 called the Department of Defense Brain Tissue Repository, whose goal was to gather the brains of deceased veterans to look for clues to the two most widespread injuries of recent wars, PTSD and traumatic brain injury. But two years after opening, the lab faced a fundamental problem: It had no brains to study.
The lab depended on tissue donations from the families of war veterans who had recently died, but few families knew it existed, and the lab’s bylaws barred it from cold-calling grieving families to ask. Brain tissue deteriorates quickly; by the time most families found out about the lab, it was too late.
Ms. Collins’s quick decision meant that her husband’s brain was soon packed in ice and on its way.
That single brain revealed a pattern of damage that the head of the lab, Dr. Daniel Perl, who had spent a career studying neuropathology in civilians, had never seen before. Nearly everywhere that tissues of different density or stiffness met, there was a border of scar tissue — a shoreline of damage that seemed to have been caused by the repeated crash of blast waves.
It was not chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or C.T.E., which is found in football players and other athletes who have been repeatedly hit in the head. It was something new.
The lab’s research team started looking for similar damage in other brains. In civilians’ brains, they did not find it. Nor was it in the brains of veterans who had been exposed to a single powerful explosion like a roadside bomb. But in veterans exposed repeatedly to blasts, they found it again and again.
The team published a landmark study in 2016 reporting the pattern of microscopic damage, which they called interface astroglial scarring.
“For the first time, we could actually see the injury,” Dr. Perl said in an interview. “If you know what the problem is, you can start to design solutions.”
Dr. Perl said privacy rules bar him from discussing specific cases, but members of the families who provided brains to study say the lab found interface astroglial scarring in six of the eight SEALs who died by suicide. The other two SEALs, including Lieutenant Metcalf, had a different type of damage in the same blast-affected areas. Star-shaped helper cells called astrocytes in their brains appeared to have been repeatedly injured and had grown into gargantuan, tangled masses that barely functioned. The lab plans to publish findings on the astrocyte injuries soon.
Recent studies suggest that damage is caused when energy waves surging through the brain bounce off tissue boundaries like an echo, and for a few fractions of a millisecond, create a vacuum that causes nearby liquid in the brain to explode into bubbles of vapor. Those tiny explosions are violent enough to blow brain cells apart in a process known as cavitation.
Dr. Perl shared with Ms. Collins what he had found in her husband’s brain in 2016, and she made it her mission to get more families to donate.
Spreading the Word
“The first thing people think is, it must be PTSD, but that never made sense to me — it didn’t fit,” said Jennifer Collins, whose husband was a SEAL for 20 years and died just over a year after leaving the Navy.Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times
For the next several years, Ms. Collins told anyone who would listen about his case — Navy SEAL leaders, veterans’ groups, gatherings of wives. And when a career SEAL died by suicide, a call from Ms. Collins often soon followed. In 2017, she called the parents of Special Operator First Class Ryan Larkin. A few months later, she sat down with the wife of retired Chief Petty Officer Bill Mulder.
“She had the paperwork in her hand, and said, ‘I think this would be a smart thing to do,’” Mr. Mulder’s wife, Sydney Mulder, recalled in an interview. “I was in a blur, but I didn’t hesitate, and I’m glad I did it.”
Ms. Collins’s influence spread until brain donation became somewhat common for Special Operations troops. But little of what the researchers have learned from those brains made it back to the SEAL team leadership.
Mr. Mulder, like Mr. Collins, had spent a career in the SEALs but had never been wounded. He was an explosives expert in the elite SEAL Team 6, exposed to thousands of blasts in training.
After years of steady service, he went into a steep decline. He couldn’t sleep and was constantly misplacing things. Frustration would send him into a rage. He stewed over negative interactions in his squadron and started drinking before work.
“For all the years I’d known him, he had been such a capable man,” Ms. Mulder said. “He would wake up at six in the morning and get his workout. He was incredibly smart and organized and diligent. And then he just wasn’t.”
After years of trying to get help from doctors who largely overlooked the possibility of brain injury, Mr. Mulder took his own life at age 46.
Jamie Metcalf also noticed a sudden decline in her husband when he returned in 2018 from his fifth deployment. For years, Lieutenant Metcalf had been a high achiever. He was an enlisted SEAL sniper, and taught martial arts to other SEALs. A few years before he died, he decided to pursue a military medical career, became an officer and sailed through the demanding training program for physician assistants.
A uniform that belonged to Lieutenant Metcalf hangs in the home of his wife and son in Naperville, Ill.Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times
But after his final deployment, he was moody, confused and plagued by headaches. He put wet laundry in the dryer on top of dry clothes. One day he emptied out the kitchen cupboards to organize them, then left everything in piles on the counter.
“It was so unlike him — he had always been so organized,” Ms. Metcalf said. “Now I know he was afraid there was something happening in his brain, but at the time, I think he tried to hide it.”
He died a few months later at age 42.
The men who died by suicide represent only a small fraction of the career SEALs with signs of brain injuries after years around blasts.
Several SEAL veterans said in interviews that many of their former teammates are now divorced and grappling with depression, paranoia and substance abuse — all of which can be caused by deteriorating brain function. Desperate calls from suicidal friends are common, they said.
Ms. Metcalf saw how broad the problem was when she read the letter her husband had left about his brain injury symptoms to two of his SEAL friends.
“One of them was crying on my lap, saying, ‘That’s me, that’s me,’” she said. “And the other told me a lot of them have problems, but don’t know what to do.”
If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources.
Dave Philipps writes about war, the military and veterans and covers The Pentagon. More about Dave Philipps
A version of this article appears in print on , Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Navy SEALs Lost to Suicide Share a Pattern of Brain Damage
See more on: Navy Seals, Defense Budget, Navy Seals
The New York Times · by Dave Philipps · June 30, 2024
4. Russia Is Not Bluffing
Another way to write the subtitle is to say that history shows erroneous assumptions are the mother of all screw-ups.
Conclusion:
American policymakers and analysts today should exercise caution in interpreting Russian signals. Far too many are calling on the United States to plow through Russia’s red lines and continue its salami-slice escalation over the Ukraine conflict. It is important to note that there are cases throughout history where a country did not escalate a conflict or crisis after an adversary crossed its red line. With Russia’s enormous arsenal of nuclear weapons, however, it would be a risky gamble for American policymakers to assume that Russia would not eventually escalate. As Carl von Clausewitz observed, “In the whole range of human activities, war most closely resembles a game of cards.” With stakes this high, America should be cautious, lest it lose all its chips.
Russia Is Not Bluffing
History shows that the assumption an opponent is bluffing about its red lines can lead to costly errors.
The National Interest · by Benjamin Giltner · June 29, 2024
As the war in Ukraine continues into its third year of fighting, all parties appear more willing to escalate than to bring it to an end. In his annual “State of the Nation” address, President Vladimir Putin warned NATO nations that they “must, in the end, understand all this truly threatens a conflict with the use of nuclear weapons, and therefore the destruction of civilization,” if they continue to arm Ukraine and consider sending troops. Even as far back as June 2022, Putin warned U.S. officials against sending long-range missiles to Ukraine, stating, “We will strike at those targets which we have not yet been hitting.”
However, American policymakers and analysts seem to think that Putin won’t put his money where his mouth is when it comes to escalation. Adam Kinzinger and Ben Hodges assured readers that Putin is bluffing with his threats of nuclear escalation. NATO’s Secretary General, Jens Stoltenberg, dismissed the likelihood of Western aid to Ukraine leading to Russian retaliation. The Biden administration seems to agree, having recently allowed Ukraine to use U.S. weapons to strike inside Russian territory—a red line the administration previously refused to cross.
In this view, escalation is calculable, and countries tend to bluff with their red lines. This assumption is false. As the famed military and nuclear strategist Bernard Brodie explained, countries usually do not usually bluff when they make threats. In fact, there are multiple cases throughout history that show how this misunderstanding of escalation has led to disastrous results.
Japan’s logic behind its attack on Pearl Harbor is one such example of miscalculating an adversary’s willingness to escalate. At the time, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the architect behind the attack on Pearl Harbor, believed this attack would destroy America’s morale, preventing America from countering Japan’s expansion of power throughout the Pacific. Ultimately, Japanese military thinkers sought to use Pearl Harbor as a way to shock the United States into a negotiated settlement with Japan. Of course, these expectations were way off the mark. The attack on Pearl Harbor instead brought America into World War II.
The Korean War provides another example of the costs of policymakers and military leaders ignoring red lines. In 1950, General Douglas MacArthur, the leader of the United Nations Command, pushed American-led forces up the Korean peninsula in a stunning counterattack against the North Korean military. In his book, The Korean War, Max Hastings details how MacArthur insisted on using American forces to achieve a complete victory against the North Koreans. This meant driving all the way up the Korean peninsula to the Yalu River—the geographic border between Korea and China. However, Chinese officials made it clear to American and UN officials that they should not push their forces past the river. American intelligence reports also showed that PLA military forces were mobilizing in the regions adjacent to the Yalu River. Still, MacArthur insisted that the Chinese would not enter this war. MacArthur’s assessment proved wrong, with Chinese forces pouring into Korea in October 1950, marking one of the turning points in the Korean War.
Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev’s decision to send nuclear missiles to Cuba in 1962 is another example. On September 13, 1962, U.S. President John F. Kennedy warned the Soviet Union against turning Cuba into “an offensive military base of significant capacity.” However, Khrushchev called Kennedy’s “bluff” and decided to send medium-range nuclear missiles to the island. He viewed Kennedy as a weak leader and predicted that his administration would not do anything to counter this maneuver. While these missiles did not change the nuclear balance between the Soviet Union and the United States, in the eyes of the Kennedy administration, they threatened the credibility of America’s resolve. What followed from Khruschev’s missteps was the Cuban Missile Crisis—a tense thirteen-day period where two nuclear superpowers brought the world to the brink of nuclear Armageddon. Thankfully, the crossing of this red line did not result in military action, though we came far too close.
The moral of this story: it is difficult to tell if a country is bluffing. Case after case, the negative consequences of leaders downplaying the credibility of red lines are evident. Leaders of countries view credibility as an important factor in statecraft, especially when it comes to the concept of deterrence. As the economist Thomas Schelling wrote, the effectiveness of deterrence depends on “the power to hurt.” He continues with an even more telling point: “Unhappily, the power to hurt is often communicated by some performance of it.” In other words, deterrence only works if the other side believes that the other will do what they say. If red lines aren’t taken seriously, a country will act upon its threats to demonstrate its credibility.
American policymakers and analysts today should exercise caution in interpreting Russian signals. Far too many are calling on the United States to plow through Russia’s red lines and continue its salami-slice escalation over the Ukraine conflict. It is important to note that there are cases throughout history where a country did not escalate a conflict or crisis after an adversary crossed its red line. With Russia’s enormous arsenal of nuclear weapons, however, it would be a risky gamble for American policymakers to assume that Russia would not eventually escalate. As Carl von Clausewitz observed, “In the whole range of human activities, war most closely resembles a game of cards.” With stakes this high, America should be cautious, lest it lose all its chips.
Benjamin Giltner is a DC-based foreign policy analyst with a Master’s in International Affairs from the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University.
Image: Shutterstock.com.
The National Interest · by Benjamin Giltner · June 29, 2024
5. How Iran Defied the U.S. to Become an International Power
How Iran Defied the U.S. to Become an International Power
Despite decades of Western pressure, Tehran poses a greater threat to U.S. interests thanks to its ties to Russia and China
https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/iran-international-influence-defies-america-d2c0f698?mod=hp_lead_pos8
By Sune Engel RasmussenFollow and Laurence NormanFollow
Updated June 30, 2024 12:01 am ET
The winner of Iran’s presidential election will inherit domestic discord and an economy battered by sanctions, but also a strength: Tehran has more sway on the international stage than in decades.
Iran, under Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s leadership, thwarted decades of U.S. pressure and emerged from years of isolation largely by aligning itself with Russia and China, giving up on integration with the West and throwing in its lot with two major powers just as they amped up confrontation with Washington. Iran’s economy remains battered by U.S. sanctions, but oil sales to China and weapons deals with Russia have offered financial and diplomatic lifelines.
It also effectively exploited decades of U.S. mistakes in the Middle East and big swings in White House policy toward the region between one administration and the next.
Today, Tehran poses a greater threat to American allies and interests in the Middle East than at any point since the Islamic Republic was founded in 1979.
Iran’s military footprint reaches wider and deeper than ever. Iranian-backed armed groups have hit Saudi oil facilities with missiles and paralyzed global shipping in the Red Sea. They have dominated politics in Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen and Syria, and launched the most devastating strike on Israel in decades, when Hamas attacked in October. Iran launched its first direct military attack from its soil on Israel in April. It has also orchestrated attacks on opponents in Europe and beyond, Western officials say.
The consequences—drones for Russia in Ukraine, the threat from Iran-backed militias, Tehran’s recent expansion of its nuclear program—will remain pressing issues regardless of who wins the second round of the Iranian election on July 5 or the U.S. election in November.
“In many respects, Iran is stronger, more influential, more dangerous, more threatening than it was 45 years ago,” said Suzanne Maloney, director of the foreign-policy program at the Brookings Institution, who advised Democratic and Republican administrations on Iran policy.
Iranian women queue to vote at a polling station in Tehran. PHOTO: MAJID ASGARIPOUR/REUTERS
Iran’s foreign-policy choices have come at a great cost at home for Iran. Its economy lags far behind the growth and living standards of its Gulf Arab rivals Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. The Islamic regime has lost much of the public support that brought it to power, with numerous protests prompting brutal crackdowns.
“The regime has lost legitimacy, and I don’t think they have a good solution for that problem,” said Eric Brewer, a former National Security Council director for counter-proliferation. “Every time Khamenei has had a choice to open it up…he’s clamped down further.”
Iran’s growing strength marks a failure for the West. Since Jimmy Carter was president, finding an effective strategy to contain Iran has been the great white whale of Western foreign-policy makers.
The West’s go-to policy tool, sanctions, is no longer effective at isolating Tehran internationally. Iran has responded by deepening an axis with Russia and China, complicating diplomacy with Tehran even more, analysts say. Outside the Middle East, Iran’s drone industry has helped Russia’s war in Ukraine.
Western sanctions have cost Iran billions of dollars, “but what was the objective?” said Seyed Hossein Mousavian, a former longtime Iranian foreign-policy official, now a research scholar at Princeton University. “Iran is more influential in the region than ever…China has captured the Iranian economy and Iran has moved closer to Russia.”
For more than two decades, Western policy on Iran has vacillated. American presidents repeatedly shifted the balance between diplomacy and force, outreach and attempted isolation.
Case in point: When the U.S. invaded Afghanistan in 2001, Washington sought from Iran and received military assistance and intelligence to help topple the Taliban. Months later, President Bush labeled Iran part of an “Axis of Evil,” along with Iraq and North Korea—a reversal that Iranians saw as a threatening insult.
An Iranian-backed militia group chanted slogans in Tikrit, Iraq, in 2015. PHOTO: KHALID MOHAMMED/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Iranians protested after a woman died in the custody of the Islamic Republic’s “morality police,” in 2022. PHOTO: WANA NEWS AGENCY/REUTERS
Iran, meanwhile, has for decades followed a consistent long-term strategy, which it calls “forward defense,” deterring attacks by enemies while building out a network of loyal militias.
U.S. policy has at times unintentionally contributed to Iran’s strength. The 2003 toppling of Saddam Hussein removed a sworn enemy from Iran’s borders. Washington’s failure to stabilize postwar Iraq bolstered Tehran’s influence.
After the U.S. ousted the Taliban in 2001, American power in the Middle East was formidable. A few months after the Bush administration invaded Iraq in 2003, citing Saddam’s alleged development of weapons of mass destruction, Tehran largely halted its secret work building atomic weapons, according to U.S. officials. It also began what proved to be 20 years of international negotiations on its nuclear program.
Yet the invasion of Iraq began a reversal of American fortunes that still benefits Iran. Its influence through politics and militias has only grown. The protracted U.S. occupation of Iraq, during which close to 4,500 U.S. soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians were killed, turned the American public against lengthy wars in the region.
Iran is still short of its goal of pushing the U.S. out of a region that hosts thousands of American troops and an array of alliances, with both Israel and Arab nations. Washington remains the pre-eminent power broker in the Middle East. But in Russia and China, Iran now has two heavyweight allies that also have ambitions of turning back American influence across the world.
A U.S. Marine watched as a statue of Iraq’s President Saddam Hussein was toppled in central Baghdad in April 2003. PHOTO: GORAN TOMASEVIC/REUTERS
U.S. airstrikes hit Taliban positions in Kunduz province, Afghanistan, in 2001. PHOTO: IVAN SEKRETAREV/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Iran has built regional strength while staying clear of red lines that could trigger direct American military action. The consistency was possible because matters of national security—including the nuclear program and military strategy—are determined not by Iran’s president but by unelected bodies, primarily the supreme leader’s office and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which has grown increasingly powerful.
Tehran’s long-term planning is also evident in its domestic efforts to defend the clerical rule against its own people. For the past five years, a secretive unit under the Revolutionary Guard, known as the Baqiatallah Headquarters, has spearheaded the regime’s efforts to push back against secularism and what it sees as corrosive Western influence, according to a new report by researchers at United Against Nuclear Iran, a U.S.-based advocacy group.
The unit, headed by a former Revolutionary Guard commander, imposes Islamic dress codes and engineers elections, among other tasks. It aims to mobilize its own religious civil society of four million loyal young Iranians as a way to implement the ideological and cultural policies of the clerical leadership, bypassing the bureaucracy of the elected government, according to the researchers, drawing on original material from the Revolutionary Guard.
Inside Iran, policy isn’t monolithic. Divisions have long split moderates who favor engagement with the West and hard-liners who believe Iran is best placed in an alliance with Russia and China. The debate has resurfaced during the presidential election, which will now be contested by reformist candidate Masoud Pezeshkian and hard-liner Saeed Jalili after neither gained a majority in the first round of voting with low turnout. The election is being held after the death of President Ebrahim Raisi in a helicopter crash last month.
Hundreds of Thousands Gather as Iran Buries Late President Raisi
Hundreds of Thousands Gather as Iran Buries Late President Raisi
Play video: Hundreds of Thousands Gather as Iran Buries Late President Raisi
Iranians across the country mourned the death of late President Ebrahim Raisi. The funeral processions gave Iran a chance to show national unity after mass antigovernment protests in 2022. Photo: Maryam Rahmanian/WSJ
Iran’s nuclear program illustrates how adept Tehran has been at exploiting wavering U.S. policy.
The Obama administration saw a solution to the nuclear issue as necessary to reduce U.S. involvement in the Middle East after more than a decade of war. In 2015, Iran and six world powers, including the U.S., Russia and China, agreed to a landmark deal to impose strict restrictions on Iran’s nuclear work for at least 10 years. In exchange, Tehran won relief from international sanctions the U.S. had campaigned for in previous years.
Ukrainian forces survey the site of a Russian strike that used an Iranian-made drone. PHOTO: DMYTRO SMOLIENKO/ZUMA PRESS
A group of soldiers killed in Iraq were returned to the U.S. in April 2004. PHOTO: TAMI SILICIO/ZUMA PRESS
Supporters saw it as a vindication of their dual policy of pressure and engagement. They hoped it would lead to long-term containment of Iran’s nuclear program and easing of tensions in the region.
Opponents believed the agreement allowed Iran to wait 10 years and resume work on nuclear weapons with most international sanctions gone. Some criticized the deal for not addressing Iran’s regional military activities.
Meanwhile, Iran’s regional footprint grew. Iranian support helped Syrian President Bashar al-Assad survive the Arab Spring and a civil war. Iran gained deeper influence in Syria and established a land corridor leading from Tehran to Syria’s Mediterranean coast via Iraq, which it used to transport weapons and personnel. It positioned allied militias near Israel’s border in Syria and Lebanon.
In Syria, Iran also forged a partnership with Russia, which came to Assad’s aid in 2015. The relationship grew with war in Ukraine, where Iran supplies Russia with drones.
Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and military officials at an exhibition. PHOTO: IRANIAN SUPREME LEADER’S OFFICE/ZUMA PRESS
President Obama saw the nuclear deal with Iran as necessary to reduce U.S. involvement in the Middle East. PHOTO: POOL NEW/REUTERS
Iranian-backed militias became politically dominant in Lebanon, Iraq and Yemen, where the Houthi rebels in 2014 took control of the capital, San’a. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates—important regional security partners for Washington—became enmeshed in the Yemen war.
Israel, where the government perceived the threat from Iran to be growing, didn’t follow through on threats to attack Iran’s nuclear sites. The Obama administration, Israel’s government and some Gulf Arab states were in open dispute over U.S. Middle East policy.
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“I think we were overly preoccupied with the nuclear issue and not enough on regional issues,” said Robert Einhorn, a former senior State Department official and architect of the Iran nuclear deal in the Obama administration. Einhorn said President Obama was right to keep Iran’s regional influence separate from the nuclear talks and push back hard against Iran’s destabilizing regional activities outside those negotiations.
“The problem is he didn’t follow through on that,” Einhorn said.
In 2018, President Trump withdrew from the nuclear deal and imposed a “maximum pressure” sanctions policy on Iran that punished foreign firms doing business with the country and largely killed off reviving European trade with Iran.
Despite renewed economic hardship, Iran refused to be coerced into new talks. President Biden made a revival of the nuclear deal a top foreign-policy goal, but renewed talks collapsed in August 2022 when Tehran walked away from a deal.
Iran has since rebuilt its nuclear program, going much further than it had at the time of the 2015 nuclear deal and effectively reaching the threshold of developing a weapon—something it says it isn’t trying to do.
Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, arriving Friday to cast his vote in Tehran. PHOTO: SOBHAN FARAJVAN/ZUMA PRESS
Write to Sune Engel Rasmussen at sune.rasmussen@wsj.com and Laurence Norman at laurence.norman@wsj.com
6. Mikhail Baryshnikov on Leaving Everything Behind
Mikhail Baryshnikov on Leaving Everything Behind
The New York Times · by Javier C. Hernández · June 28, 2024
Fifty years ago, Baryshnikov defected from the Soviet Union. He discusses that day, the war in Ukraine and the challenges facing Russian artists today.
Listen to this article · 9:26 min Learn more
“It was the start of a new life,” Mikhail Baryshnikov says of the night in 1974 that he dodged K.G.B. agents in Toronto as he rushed to meet Canadian and American friends in a getaway car.Credit...Erik Tanner for The New York Times
By
June 28, 2024
On the night of June 29, 1974, after a performance with a touring Bolshoi Ballet troupe in downtown Toronto, Mikhail Baryshnikov made his way out a stage door, past a throng of fans and began to run.
Baryshnikov, then 26 and already one of ballet’s brightest stars, had made the momentous decision to defect from the Soviet Union and build a career in the West. On that rainy night, he had to evade K.G.B. agents — and audience members seeking autographs — as he rushed to meet a group of Canadian and American friends waiting in a car a few blocks away.
“That car took me to the free world,” Baryshnikov, 76, recalled in a recent interview. “It was the start of a new life.”
His cloak-and-dagger escape helped to make him a cultural celebrity. “Soviet Dancer in Canada Defects on Bolshoi Tour,” The New York Times declared on its front page.
But the focus on his decision to leave the Soviet Union has sometimes made Baryshnikov uneasy. He said he does not like how the term “defector” sounds in English, conjuring an image of a traitor who has committed high treason.
“I’m not a defector — I’m a selector,” he said. “That was my choice. I selected this life.”
Baryshnikov was born in Soviet-ruled Riga, Latvia, and moved to Leningrad, now St. Petersburg, in 1964, when he was 16, to study with the renowned teacher Alexander Pushkin. When he was 19, he joined the Kirov Ballet, now known as the Mariinsky, and quickly became a star on the Russian ballet scene.
“I really wanted to be an artist and my main concern was my dance,” he said about defecting. “I was 26. That’s middle age for a classical dancer. I wanted to learn from Western choreographers.”Credit...Erik Tanner for The New York Times
After his defection, he moved to New York and joined American Ballet Theater (which he later ran as artistic director) and then New York City Ballet. The pre-eminent male dancer of the 1970s and ’80s, his star power helped elevate ballet in popular culture. He has worked as an actor, appearing onstage and in several films, including “The Turning Point,” as well as the television series “Sex and the City.” And in 2005, he founded the Baryshnikov Arts Center in Manhattan, which presents dance, music and other programming.
In recent years, Baryshnikov, who has American and Latvian citizenship, has become more vocal about politics. He has criticized former President Donald J. Trump, likening him to the “dangerous totalitarian opportunists” of his youth. He has also spoken out against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, accusing Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, of creating a “world of fear.” He is a founder of True Russia, a foundation to support Ukrainian refugees.
In an interview, Baryshnikov reflected on the 50th anniversary of his defection; the father he left behind in the Soviet Union (his mother died when he was 12); the pain he feels over the Ukrainian war; and the challenges facing Russian artists today. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.
What memories do you have of that June day in Toronto?
I remember feeling a sense of comfort and security after seeing some very friendly faces in the getaway car. But I also felt fear that it might turn out another way — that at any second, it could fall apart and become like a bad police movie. I was beginning a new life, something totally unknown, and it was my decision and my responsibility. It was time for me to grow up.
You have described your defection as artistic, not political, saying you wanted more creative freedom and the chance to more frequently work abroad, which the Soviet authorities would not permit.
Of course it was a political decision, from a distance. But I really wanted to be an artist and my main concern was my dance. I was 26. That’s middle age for a classical dancer. I wanted to learn from Western choreographers. Time was running out.
Back then you said: “What I have done is called a crime in Russia. But my life is my art, and I realized it would be a greater crime to destroy that.”
Did I say it that eloquently? I don’t believe it. Maybe somebody corrected it with the proper grammar. But I still agree with that. I realized early on that I’m a capable dancer — that’s what I could do, and that’s about it.
You worried that your defection might endanger your father, who was a military officer in Riga and taught military topography at the air force academy.
I knew the K.G.B. services would be interviewing him and asking him if he was involved, and if he would write me a letter or something. He did nothing. I must say, “Thank you, Papa. Thank you for not bending over.” He refused to send me a letter, asking me to please come back.
On forging a new identity in the West: “When you don’t have authority over you, you start to have crazy ideas about yourself: ‘Oh, I’m like Tarzan in the jungle now.’”Credit...Erik Tanner for The New York Times
Did you ever communicate with him again?
I sent him two or three letters saying, “Don’t worry about me, I’m fine, I hope everybody’s healthy at home.” He never responded. And then he passed away quite soon after, in 1980.
You began studying dance at 7, and enrolled at the Riga School of Choreography, the state ballet academy, a few years later. What did your parents think of your dancing?
They were amused that at 10 or 11 years old I belonged to some kind of professional school. But my father always said, “You’ll have to go to a real school and study arithmetic and literature, and get good marks.” I was a really bad student. He said, “If you won’t succeed in a real school, I’ll send you to military school, like Suvorov, and they will straighten you up.” He was bluffing of course. I was already deeply, deeply, deeply in love with theater. I was in love with the atmosphere — the idea that I belonged to this big beautiful circus.
Did you feel you had to forge a new identity when you came to the West?
I felt an enormous sense of freedom. When you don’t have authority over you, you start to have crazy ideas about yourself: “Oh, I’m like Tarzan in the jungle now.” But it was enough. I told myself: “You have to be a grown-up man already. You have to do something serious.” I knew I could dance and I already had some repertoire in my luggage.
Are you still dancing?
Dancing is maybe a loud word, but theater directors sometimes ask, “Are you comfortable if I ask you to move?” I say absolutely. I welcome that. But I don’t miss being onstage in a dancer’s costume.
You have avoided politics for much of your career, but you’ve recently weighed in on a variety of issues, including the war in Ukraine. Why speak up now?
Ukraine is a different story. Ukraine is our friend. I danced Ukrainian dances, listened to Ukrainian music and singers. I know Ukrainian ballets like “The Forest Song,” and I have performed in Kyiv. I am a pacifist and an antifascist, that is for sure. And that’s why I’m on this side of the war.
You were born eight years after Latvia was forcibly annexed to the Soviet Union; your father was one of the Russian workers sent there to teach. How does your experience growing up there affect how you see this war?
I spent the first 16 years of my life in Soviet Latvia, and I know the other side of the coin. I was the son of an occupier. I knew that experience of living under the occupation. The Russians treated it like their territory and their land, and they said the Latvian language is garbage.
I don’t want Putin and his army to enter Riga. Finally Latvia has real independence, and they’re doing pretty good. My mother is buried there. I feel when I’m coming to Riga, I’m coming back to my home.
You wrote an open letter to Putin in 2022, saying he had created a “world of fear.”
He’s a true imperialist with a totally bizarre sense of power. Yes, he speaks with the tongue of my mother, the same way she spoke. But he does not represent the true Russia.
How have you changed since leaving the Soviet Union 50 years ago?
I am a very lucky person. I don’t really know. I want to compose a nice kind of sentence. But it’s not exactly the time for nice sentences, when a person like Aleksei Navalny was sent to prison and destroyed for his honest life.
Would you ever go back to Russia?
No, I don’t think so.
Why not?
The idea never even comes to my mind. I have no answer for you.
I imagine you sometimes think or dream about your time there.
Of course. Occasionally I speak Russian, and quite often I read Russian literature. This is the language of my mother. She was a really simple woman from Kstovo, near the Volga River. I learned my first Russian words from her. I remember her voice, the specific Volga region kind of music. Her sounds. Her “o.” Her vowels.
Some Russian artists, like the Bolshoi Ballet star Olga Smirnova, who is now at the Dutch National Ballet, have left Russia because of the war.
I saw her dance in New York and met her after the show. She’s a wonderful dancer, a lovely woman, and very, very, very brave. It’s a big change to go to the Netherlands after being a principal soloist at the Bolshoi. And yet she was in great shape and showed great pride to perform with a company that adopted her. I am rooting for her.
Are you surprised to see artists once again leaving Russia because of concerns about politics and repression?
There is a word in Russian that refers to refugees and people who run: bezhentsy. This applies to people who are running from the bullets, from the bombs, in this war. There are some Russians — dancers and maybe athletes — who run more gracefully than others. In my very small way, I am trying to support them. In the end, we all run from somebody.
Javier C. Hernández reports on classical music, opera and dance in New York City and beyond. More about Javier C. Hernández
A version of this article appears in print on , Section C, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Reflecting on a Choice For Artistic Freedom
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The New York Times · by Javier C. Hernández · June 28, 2024
7. How blackouts in Ukraine affect chronically-ill children
Excerpt:
Editor’s Note: Empathy and authoritarianism can’t mix.
How blackouts in Ukraine affect chronically-ill children
https://www.counteroffensive.news/p/how-blackouts-in-ukraine-affect-chronically?utm
Some need power for machines to help them breathe, others need specialty medication. We profiled a family that had to flee Ukraine to take care of their child with cystic fibrosis.
OLEH TYMOSHENKO AND TIM MAK
JUN 30, 2024
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She knew it from her instincts as a mother: once her child began coughing this dry, deep, bronchial sound — they had to risk their lives to escape.
In the first days of the full-scale invasion in 2022, Viktoriia’s town in the Kherson region was occupied by Russians.
For two and a half months, she and her seven-year-old son Yevhen, whose lungs are affected by cystic fibrosis – a genetic disease that impairs lung capacity due to the accumulation of mucus – stayed in the wet and cold basement of their house.
Viktoriia Petrova and her son Yevhen, who has cystic fibrosis, at their home in Oleshky, Kherson Oblast, Ukraine.
When the invasion began, Russian troops destroyed the farms on the outskirts of their town. So Viktoriia and her family were forced to rely on some vegetables, canned foods, and some bread made from grain originally intended for cattle.
Most importantly they lacked access to medicine for Yevhen.
Lost in much of the coverage of this war is the experience of chronically-ill children like him who would simply not survive to adulthood without specialized, and often expensive, treatment.
In addition to financial problems, the full-scale Russian invasion has brought new challenges to the daily lives of sick children in Ukraine, including shelling, life-threatening electrical blackouts, and a decrease in the number of specialized medical facilities.
Natalia Samonenko shows the examination room for patients with rare diseases at the Okhmatdyt Children's Clinic on June 24, 2024 in Kyiv, Ukraine.
At the beginning of the full-scale invasion, foreign partners began to accept sick children for treatment, but over more than two years of war, international assistance has waned.
"In general, there are fewer patients in Ukraine, but in our hospital we have more, because many children from other regions have started to get the treatment in Kyiv," said Lina Telko, deputy head of the oncology department at the Kyiv Children's Clinic Okhmatdyt. "In Kherson we lost a department, in Mykolaiv they are sending children to safer regions, Zaporizhzhia is also constantly under fire."
Lina also explained that women doctors are more involved in pediatric specialties, so there is a shortage of doctors now, as many of them went abroad at the beginning of the full-scale invasion.
Moreover, there is a shortage of junior medical staff, such as nurses, because while many of them study and gain experience in Ukraine, a large number ultimately decide that there will be better conditions for work abroad.
This shortage is exacerbated by the fact that many of the most highly-qualified specialists have become medics or doctors on the front lines, Nataliia Samonenko added.
Department of pediatric oncology at at the Okhmatdyt Children's Clinic on June 24, 2024 in Kyiv, Ukraine.
Meanwhile, patients are afraid to move from city to city because of the constant shelling, even in a relatively safe place like Kyiv, Natalia said.
"Patients have become afraid to travel because they are afraid of the shelling itself, they are afraid of the danger itself, the military danger," she said.
Blackouts have posed new challenges too. Some patients need artificial lung ventilation, which is impossible without special devices that require electrical power. So now these families not only have to think about how to afford such a device, but also how to get their hands on expensive power banks during a time of war.
Yevhen's condition is one of the rare genetic diseases that occur less frequently than five cases per 10,000 people. There are between 6,000 and 8,000 of these sorts of diseases, and in total there are more patients in the world with these diseases than cancer and AIDS patients combined.
In Ukraine, there are 1.8 million such patients, according to the National Health Service.
Lina Telko poses for a portrait at the Okhmatdyt Children's Clinic on June 24, 2024 in Kyiv, Ukraine.
When Yevhen was born in 2014, Viktoriia and her husband Oleh were living in Crimea, and the birth of the child almost coincided with the illegal Russian referendum on the annexation of Crimea.
Viktoriia took a stand for her country. But it had costs.
"I voted in favor of Ukraine in the referendum. Our youngest child had just been born, and my employer, who had connections in the mayor's office, gave us two hours to leave quickly," said Viktoriia.
Since Yevhen was just born, many of his documents, were stored in government departments in Crimea, and there was no time to get them. After moving to the Kherson region, he was diagnosed only after he turned one year old, after showing intestinal and breathing problems.
Having finally received her child's diagnosis, Viktoriia faced serious problems even before the full-scale invasion. The state provided only a few basic medications for cystic fibrosis: for the disease itself, some antibiotics, as well as a drug for the liver.
"There were often interruptions in the supply of medicines. We had to buy vitamins ourselves, and from time to time we had to skip doses because it was difficult to provide everything at our own expense," said Viktoriia. "In Ukraine, we didn't have proper physiotherapy, and I had to learn how to do drainage massage for my child myself; and before that, we used to hire a paid masseur."
Yevhen's illness weakened his immune system, so a year before the full-scale invasion, he got bacterial infection that further worsened his symptoms.
The sky full of smoke from explosions over the Viktoriia’s house on February 24, 2022 in Oleshky, Kherson Oblast, Ukraine
Sitting in the basement during the 2022 Russian offensive caused a deterioration of the child's condition.
He developed a severe cough, which led to vomiting; along with a fever, and shortness of breath, Viktoriia explained. A car with volunteers who tried to deliver medicines to them was shot at by Russians.
After that, in April 2022, Viktoriia and her husband decided to get out of Kherson by any means necessary, even though fierce fighting was going on everywhere around them.
"We drove 80 kilometers for almost 14 hours. There were many checkpoints. The most terrible checkpoint was in Snihurivka itself, because there were many of their artillery in the fields," said Viktoriia. "The Russians gathered almost 2,000 cars in a column, put us near this checkpoint, and started an artillery battle when they gathered us all because they knew that Ukraine would not hit back."
After Viktoriia and her family left the Kherson region, they decided to move abroad, to Germany, where it took a year for Yevhen to recover from the severe cough he had developed while hiding from the explosions in the basement.
Viktoriia's eldest son Daniil, husband Oleh, and youngest son Yevhen preparing for the New Year on December 29, 2023 in Blieskastel, Saarland, Germany
Even though there are advantages to living in peaceful Germany, Viktoriia does not feel completely comfortable there.
"After all this stress, my child came to school and received a little bullying," she said. "There was a boy older than him who taught Russian curses to the Germans. And they were running around during recess and insulting him. This caused even more stress for [Yevhen]. He began to tear things up, run home, cry, throw tantrums, and throw books around."
Therefore, Viktoriia had to go to school with her son for a year and a half until an adult assistant, who now accompanies Yevhen during his studies, began to do this.
Viktoriia and her family are planning to return to Ukraine, although she doesn't know when this will happen.
"We think about it all the time,” Viktoriia explained. “Because I can't really settle down here. I still don't feel like a human here.”
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NEWS OF THE DAY
Good morning to readers; Kyiv remains in Ukrainian hands.
UKRAINE HOLDS BREATH AS FRANCE VOTES: French President Emmanuel Macron called snap parliamentary elections, which are underway today. The far-right National Rally party, led by Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella, leads the polling, according to the BBC.
Turnout is expected to be high as the occupants of the French National Assembly's 577 seats are decided, although final results are not expected until after a runoff election is held next Sunday.
The results could have profound effects on Ukraine’s path to the EU, and the possibility of future aid.
OSCE DECLARES RUSSIAN ACTIONS 'GENOCIDE': The Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe declared that Russian aggression since 2014 has constituted a "genocide" of the Ukrainian people. It also called for the liberation of Crimea, the prosecution of war crimes, the use of frozen Russian assets for Ukraine's benefit, and a ban on Russian natural gas for the EU, reports Ukrainian Pravda.
RESURGENCE OF RUSSIAN SPIES: Russia's intelligence services are working more actively than at any time since WWII, reports The Times. Russia’s spies have been accused of launching murder plots and political destabilization operations across Europe. Russia has been jamming GPS signals across the southern Baltic, for example, and has been accused of surveilling a Polish airport for a possible Zelenskyy assassination as he passed through.
PRO-PUTIN RUSSIAN COMPANIES HACKED: Ukrainian activists, joining with the Ukrainian military, have carried out a series of cyberattacks on Russian companies who support the invasion, according to the Ukrainian ministry of defense. They targeted a Russian software developer working with the army, a military navigation equipment supplier, and a series of internet providers.
UKRAINE DE-MINERS CLEAR AREA THE SIZE OF BELGIUM: 30,000 square km of area has been declared safe from mines by the Ukrainian corps of de-miners, which is made up of some 5,000 specialists. Mines have killed nearly 300 civilians since the start of the full-scale invasion, reports the Kyiv Independent.
Today’s Dog of War is this pup who may be suffering from a bit of separation anxiety as it waits for its owner near a baker in the Podil neighborhood of Kyiv.
Stay safe out there.
Best,
Tim
8. SBU releases new headcam footage of Snake Island liberation
Video at the link: https://kyivindependent.com/sbu-releases-new-headcam-footage-of-snake-island-liberation/
SBU releases new headcam footage of Snake Island liberation
kyivindependent.com · by Chris York · June 30, 2024
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The Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) has released new footage of the liberation of Snake Island on June 30 to mark two years since Russian troops were forced to retreat from the strategic Black Sea outpost.
In a post on Telegram, the agency described the "unique and extremely important operation" conducted by Ukrainian soldiers including members of the SBU.
"It consisted of several stages and was of strategic importance because since then the gradual displacement of the enemy from the Black Sea began," it wrote.
The footage begins with an aerial view of an airstrike on the island before Ukrainian troops land by helicopter and engage Russian forces.
Since the liberation of Snake Island on June 30, 2022, Ukraine has had huge success at diminishing the presence and firepower of Russia's Black Sea Fleet, destroying or putting out of service around a third of its vessels.
Snake Island, located 35 kilometers from the mainland of Odesa Oblast, was captured by Russian forces at the onset of the full-scale invasion due to its strategic importance.
On Feb. 24, 2022, two Russian warships attacked the island and told the Ukrainian border guards to surrender.
One of the Ukrainian border guards famously responded, "Russian warship, go f*ck yourself," a phrase which became a symbol of Ukrainian resistance.
Occupying Snake Island effectively allowed Russian forces to launch a blockade of Odesa's Black Sea ports and direct missile attacks against Ukraine until April 14, 2022, when Ukraine successfully sunk the Mosvka, the flagship of Russia's Black Sea Fleet.
Russian forces withdrew from Snake Island later that June. Their retreat led to establishment of the U.N. and Turkey brokered Black Sea Grain Initiative, which resumed grain and other agricultural exports to the rest of the world.
Russia's Defense Ministry called the withdrawal "a gesture of goodwill" rather than a defeat, adding troops "had completed their mission" and were withdrawing to demonstrate Russia's willingness to allow for grain exports from Ukraine's Black Sea ports.
Andriy Yermak, head of President Volodymyr Zelensky's office, slammed the statement as "complete fake," adding that Russian troops were pushed out of the outpost as a result of a "remarkable" operation conducted by Ukraine's Armed Forces.
Kremlin claims ‘provocations’ from US drones over Black Sea, prepares potential response
The Russian Defense Ministry said U.S. drones were being used to conduct reconnaissance and find targets for “high-precision weapons supplied to the Armed Forces of Ukraine by Western states.
The Kyiv IndependentChris York
kyivindependent.com · by Chris York · June 30, 2024
9. Commentary: The ripples of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s corruption purge
Excerpts:
To succeed in the long run, China’s anti-corruption efforts must upend the incentive structure that makes corruption tempting to local officials.
Economically, this means boosting public sector wages to reduce the need for predatory extraction. In 2015, the government announced a plan to increase the salaries of civil servants by an average of 60 per cent over the next few years.
However, the implementation of this plan has been uneven across different regions and sectors.
The shift towards a more market-driven system must also be accelerated, creating a level playing field for private enterprises. Politically, it requires external audits of deals between businesses and officials, who should be exposed to greater channels of public scrutiny.
As China’s economy matures, the returns on crony capitalism will diminish, while the costs, both economic and social, will mount.
Eventually, the party will have to confront the hard truth: Fighting corruption is not just about catching crooks, but about changing entrenched systems that breed them.
Commentary: The ripples of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s corruption purge
Two more Chinese military leaders have fallen to President Xi Jinping’s corruption purge. While such dramatic expulsions grab headlines, nabbing individual bad apples does little to address systemic issues that enable corruption in the first place, says Ashton Ng from the University of Cambridge.
https://www.channelnewsasia.com/commentary/china-xi-jinping-corruption-crackdown-officials-defence-ministers-military-4434406
Ashton Ng
29 Jun 2024 06:00AM
(Updated: 29 Jun 2024 03:13PM)
SINGAPORE: Corruption in China continues to make headlines as President Xi Jinping’s crackdown claims its latest victims.
On Thursday (Jun 27), former defence ministers Li Shangfu and Wei Fenghe were expelled from China's Communist Party for accepting large sums in bribes, among other crimes. Mr Li had been abruptly dismissed in October last year.
These announcements come just a week after Mr Xi vowed to crack down on corruption in the military and told top People's Liberation Army (PLA) brass to eradicate conditions that breed corruption.
In a crucial political work conference with military officials at an old revolutionary base on Jun 19, Mr Xi warned of deep-seated problems, stressing the need for political loyalty.
Since last year, 11 PLA generals have been removed from the national legislative body. The PLA's Rocket Force, which controls China's nuclear and conventional missiles, also underwent a surprise reshuffle.
Mr Xi has made fighting corruption a signature priority of his administration since taking power in 2012.
File photos of former Chinese defence ministers Li Shangfu and Wei Fenghe. (Photos: AFP/Russian Defence Ministry, Reuters/Caroline Chia)
The sheer scale and duration of Mr Xi’s crackdown are unprecedented in the Communist Party’s 100-year history. According to local reports, Chinese authorities investigated a staggering 4.39 million cases and punished some 4.7 million individuals between 2013 and 2022.
The campaign has netted not only low-ranking “flies”, but also high-ranking “tigers” like former Politburo Standing Committee member Zhou Yongkang, now imprisoned for life, and ex-vice minister of public security Sun Lijun, who received a suspended death sentence.
Last year, former foreign minister Qin Gang was fired abruptly under unexplained circumstances.
In May, China sentenced to death a former senior banker at one of the country's largest state-controlled asset management firms for accepting more than 1.1 billion yuan (US$151 million) in bribes. There are also multiple ongoing investigations across the healthcare sector, including several party secretaries.
More recently, on Jun 21, news broke that China’s deputy propaganda chief Zhang Jianchun has been placed under investigation for suspected corruption.
For a public weary of official graft, Mr Xi’s corruption fight is much needed for a cleaner and more accountable government.
Yet, such prominent anti-corruption drives have repeatedly failed to eradicate corruption, despite being vigorously promoted since the 1980s. Each time, corruption resurfaces years later in more sophisticated forms.
FLIES AND TIGERS
In the early years of reform, the most common types of graft were petty bribery and embezzlement by low-level officials. Think of the factory manager stealing inventory, or the local bureaucrat extorting fees from hapless villagers.
As China’s political system evolved, local officials were evaluated on the performance of their economic performance.
The more prosperous the local economy, the more leaders could collect massive benefits. This motivated some officials to strike lucrative deals with entrepreneurs, spurring corruption alongside development.
If left unchecked, corruption corrodes public trust and jeopardises the Communist Party’s legitimacy. Many of the officials now being targeted as “fugitives” were once hailed as competent leaders who delivered impressive economic growth in their jurisdictions.
Earlier this year, China launched a new round of a special operation called Sky Net, aimed at hunting down corrupt officials who have fled overseas. The operation takes its name from a Chinese proverb: Heaven’s net has wide meshes, but nothing escapes from it.
Since its launch in 2015, Sky Net has become a centrepiece of Mr Xi’s anti-corruption crusade. Through collaborating with foreign governments and international law enforcement agencies, China repatriated 140 party members and government officials in 2023 alone, recovering 2.91 billion yuan in stolen assets.
By targeting individuals no longer within China’s jurisdiction, Sky Net avoids prosecuting powerful figures still within the system. This allows the Communist Party to appear tough on corruption without confronting vested interests.
But nabbing individual bad apples does little to address the systemic issues that enable graft in the first place.
China's corruption problem is closely tied to the state's role in the economy, which gives officials substantial influence over key resources such as land, loans and licenses. This can tempt officials to sell favours to businesspeople or collude with state-owned enterprises to stifle private sector competitors.
These problems are compounded by the cultural norm of guanxi (personal connections), which emphasises cultivating relationships with those in power in order to get ahead.
GLOBAL PHENOMENON, CHINESE CHARACTERISTICS
China is not an outlier when it comes to corruption. The United Nations estimates that corruption across the world drains more than 5 per cent of the global gross domestic product. Of the approximately US$13 trillion in global public spending, up to 25 per cent is lost to corruption, it said.
While corruption is a global phenomenon, Mr Xi’s abrupt purges of top-level officials have raised questions about the stability of China’s governance.
As Associate Professor Alfred Wu, an expert on Chinese politics from the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, said in a media report: “Xi claimed that China's governance model could become an alternative to the US-dominant world order, but when they keep removing top-level officials abruptly, which country would like to learn this from China?”
Moreover, China has signalled to the world that its anti-corruption campaign has gone truly global.
In 2023, two former executives of state-owned China Railway Tunnel Group were imprisoned and fined in a high-profile Chinese court case for bribing Singaporean official Henry Foo Yung Thye, a former Land Transport Authority deputy group director. It marked the first time China had convicted its citizens for bribing a foreign official.
To succeed in the long run, China’s anti-corruption efforts must upend the incentive structure that makes corruption tempting to local officials.
Economically, this means boosting public sector wages to reduce the need for predatory extraction. In 2015, the government announced a plan to increase the salaries of civil servants by an average of 60 per cent over the next few years.
However, the implementation of this plan has been uneven across different regions and sectors.
The shift towards a more market-driven system must also be accelerated, creating a level playing field for private enterprises. Politically, it requires external audits of deals between businesses and officials, who should be exposed to greater channels of public scrutiny.
As China’s economy matures, the returns on crony capitalism will diminish, while the costs, both economic and social, will mount.
Eventually, the party will have to confront the hard truth: Fighting corruption is not just about catching crooks, but about changing entrenched systems that breed them.
Dr Ashton Ng is Kuok Family-Lee Kuan Yew Scholar in Chinese History at the University of Cambridge and Young NUS Fellow at the National University of Singapore.
Source: CNA/yh(aj)
10. The Constitution That Binds Us (Book Review)
A Yin Yang conclusion:
In its first sentence, American Covenant promises that it is a “hopeful” book. And it is: The book distills the Framers’ wise and subtle constitutional vision, and it convincingly shows that America would be a better-governed and more unified country if our politicians, judges, and presidents embraced it. But they haven’t.
In that way, at least for the pessimist, there’s an unavoidably discouraging side to American Covenant. Thoughtful arguments, persuasively presented, prevail all too rarely. Still, if any book might break through, it is Yuval Levin’s.
The Constitution That Binds Us
Yuval Levin’s ‘American Covenant’ envisions a constitutional revival. Could our leaders embrace it?
thedispatch.com · by Ben Rolsma · June 29, 2024
America is hopelessly polarized and dysfunctional, and the Constitution is to blame—at least that’s what generations of progressive critics have argued. The onerous amendment process, the first-past-the-post elections, the unrepresentative Senate, the counter-majoritarian Supreme Court, and the idiosyncratic Electoral College are all, in their own pernicious ways, crippling our political life and driving us apart.
Not so, insists Yuval Levin in his timely and persuasive new book, American Covenant. In his telling, the Constitution is not failing us; we are failing the Constitution. The exasperating eccentricities and endless veto points in our national charter are frustrating if your goal is a swift, complete political victory. But the Founders didn’t set up the Constitution for parliamentary-style majoritarian triumph. Instead, by design, the Constitution forces compromise and bargaining. It’s not just a legal and institutional framework; it’s also what Levin calls “a framework for union and for solidarity” that, if reclaimed, can help unify our fractured politics.
American Covenant’s approach is methodical. After a few framing chapters, Levin walks through the Constitution’s institutional components: federalism, the three branches of government, and political parties. (He notes that party politics were not part of the Founders’ vision, but that parties nonetheless came to be an invaluable part of the country’s political structure.) These chapters each follow a pattern: a description of how the Founders designed things to work and how that furthered unity; a fall from grace as we neglected that design; and finally, a few specific prescriptions.
For example, consider the chapter on Congress. Levin explains that although the Founders saw Congress as the chief branch of government, they also worried that the legislature could advance majoritarian tyranny. So, they created strong and independent executive and judicial departments and split the legislature into the House and the Senate. The more representative House forces people with divergent political views “to deal with one another and so build some common ground.” Meanwhile, the Senate preserves “the regional balance of our national politics” and therefore compels geographically broader compromises. The institutional heart of Congress is, then, not empowering majorities, but making it impossible to do anything without compromise.
Yet Congress’ accommodation-forcing structures have long drawn criticism—including from Woodrow Wilson, a recurrent villain of American Covenant. Wilson dismissed Congress as ineffective, writing that the “more power is divided, the more irresponsible it becomes.” Better to empower democratic majorities and the experts who can facilitate their will, he thought. The constitutional structure of Congress did not change in response to this progressive critique, but our political culture did. Democrats and Republicans alike now take power and try to jam through partisan measures, only to see the opposite party win in the next cycle and attempt to reverse those changes in an equally partisan fashion. This partisan, majoritarian politics is what Wilson wanted, Levin suggests—but Wilsonian politics runs counter to the ideals of our Madisonian Constitution.
Levin proposes a few ways to reform our political culture to match the Constitution’s requirements for cross-partisan settlement. House and Senate rules should change to give Congressional committees more power to advance legislation, and party leaders less. Committees should have more private work sessions outside the eye of the television cameras that turn every Congressional hearing into an agitprop studio. Most dramatically, the House should be bigger—to the tune of 150 new members.
Levin’s prescriptions are convincing enough: If adopted, we would surely be a more unified, functional country. But there is a tension at the heart of American Covenant.
In a 2013 article for the University of Chicago Law Review, professors Eric Posner and Adrian Vermeule observed that much writing about constitutional law suffers from what they dubbed the “inside-outside fallacy.” Many an article will, on the one hand, adopt an external, diagnostic perspective on some political problem, critiquing and condemning the choices and motivations of actors within the political system. But then, when it is time to describe reforms, the article slips into an inside-the-system perspective and supplies proposals that rely on those very same actors to adopt a public-spirited outlook.
American Covenant often has just this structure. Levin laments the growth of administrative agencies and the tendency of presidents to use that agency power to unilaterally “legislate” when Congress declines to do so. He also worries that presidents are “treating the office as a stage for mass performance” rather than as a sober institution. In a divided time, presidents can no longer “speak on behalf of a unified public,” and so instead speak “for their particular partisans,” using the office “to intensify our divisions.”
Yet several suggestions for presidential reform would need to be implemented by the very presidents who are stoking divisions. Levin proposes a White House-led initiative to require greater clarity from regulatory agencies about the statutory authorizations for their actions. He also writes that presidents should “pull back their rhetoric and reground their self-understanding in the character of the executive’s work.” But it’s not clear why partisan pot-stirrers or pen-and-phone administrators would be interested in such changes.
To be fair, Levin does argue that improving the presidency begins not with the president but with a revitalized Congress. And yet, with Congress, the “inside-outside” tension remains. On one hand, “Congress is weak, simply put, because its members want it to be weak.” On the other, reforms like rejuvenating committees or expanding the size of the House depend on exactly those self-interested members to act for the good of the institution as a whole.
Could the courts save us? Levin seems to think they could help, but it is here that the inside-outside tension becomes most acute. For decades, judicial conservatives, recognizing the dangers of self-assured lawyers with lifetime appointments, pursued a project of judicial restraint. As the late Justice Antonin Scalia wrote decades ago, “the main danger” of constitutional interpretation “is that the judges will mistake their own predilections for the law.” Levin embraces this project, insisting on a “renewed judicial republicanism” that prioritizes “the work of the legislature over the substantive preferences of judges.” He also worries about the conservatives who are having second thoughts about judicial restraint, especially now that the Supreme Court has a Republican-appointed majority.
Still, for someone who worries about past judicial activism, Levin has remarkable faith in the judges of the future. Judges should recognize that Congress, not the Supreme Court, is at the center of our constitutional structure. But courts should also, Levin argues, be heavy-handed in policing that constitutional structure, perhaps by requiring that Congress be clearer in its delegations to the executive branch and by insisting that independent agencies like the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Trade Commission be more accountable to the president.
On this theory, Congress would have no option but to be revitalized, since it would no longer be able to pass its responsibilities off to the labyrinthine federal bureaucracy. Yet this is an empirical claim about how legislatures respond to judicial decisions—one that runs into some contrary evidence. Consider, for example, one study that examined states whose courts aggressively police delegations to state agencies. It found that when state courts invalidated laws for delegating too broadly, this often had little effect on the behavior of the state legislature—and could even be counterproductive, with some legislatures responding by writing vaguer, rather than more precise statutes.
More fundamentally, why would judges, with all the self-aggrandizing institutional incentives that infuriated conservatives in the past, become selfless guardians of the constitutional order today? If Congress is supreme, why not defer to Congress’ judgments about constitutional structure, including about controversial questions like broad delegations or independent agencies? It’s not like it’s easy to tell whether judges are getting things right. As Levin concedes in his understated way, “in the hardest cases, which tend to matter the most,” the Constitution’s original meaning may suffer from “a lack of clarity.” Inside-outside dilemmas like this are common in American Covenant: The book’s proposed reforms, while often meritorious, usually depend on the buy-in or support of the very people least likely to adopt the reforms—or most likely to misuse the power.
A more actionable book might have focused on proposals where the institutions charged with restoring the constitutional order had incentives that aligned with the suggested reforms. Perhaps, for example, the states—so often jealous of their political and parochial interests—should be the ones taking the lead. Maybe discordant state action on issues where Congress has failed to respond to contemporary challenges can force the kind of national compromises that Levin hopes for. (In a chaotic way, one might see something like this as happening now, with California embracing tough climate policies or Texas freelancing on immigration law.) But finding those workable alternatives is hard, and Levin deserves ample credit for charting a possible path forward, even if it is an unlikely one.
In its first sentence, American Covenant promises that it is a “hopeful” book. And it is: The book distills the Framers’ wise and subtle constitutional vision, and it convincingly shows that America would be a better-governed and more unified country if our politicians, judges, and presidents embraced it. But they haven’t.
In that way, at least for the pessimist, there’s an unavoidably discouraging side to American Covenant. Thoughtful arguments, persuasively presented, prevail all too rarely. Still, if any book might break through, it is Yuval Levin’s.
thedispatch.com · by Ben Rolsma · June 29, 2024
11. How Uncle Sam Became an American Icon
How Uncle Sam Became an American Icon
The figure’s appearance and message have changed over the last 200 years, but he remains an instantly recognizable national symbol.
https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/history/how-uncle-sam-became-an-american-icon-d68fe56a?mod=hp_listc_pos2
By Stuart Halpern
Updated June 29, 2024 12:02 am ET
As millions of Americans celebrate our nation’s independence on July 4, many no doubt will lament the choice between a septuagenarian and an octogenarian in the upcoming election. Perhaps they can find some comfort in the fact that our oldest elder statesman, Uncle Sam, will continue to hold office long after both Biden and Trump.
Legend has it that the personified figure of the United States was based on Samuel Willson, a merchant and meatpacker born outside Boston in 1766. During the War of 1812, Willson provided barrels of meat to American troops, stamped “U.S.” The story goes that when a soldier asked what the letters stood for, he was told, “Uncle Sam Willson. It is he who is feeding the army.” Historian Alton Ketchum writes that Willson really was an avuncular type: “an atmosphere of jocularity seems to have pervaded Samuel Willson’s operations wherever he went. Part of this can be traced to Uncle Sam himself, who according to the testimony of his relatives and friends, would go to considerable length to make a good joke.”
But the discovery of a journal kept by Isaac Mayo, a teenage Navy midshipman, shows that the nickname Uncle Sam predated Willson. On March 24, 1810, Mayo wrote that when he embarked on the USS Wasp, “[the] first and second day out [I was] most deadly seasick, oh could I have got on shore in the hight [sic] of it, I swear that uncle Sam, as they call him, would certainly forever have lost the services of at least one sailor.”
The political cartoon ‘Uncle Sam in Danger,’ from 1832, is one of the earliest artistic depictions of the character. PHOTO: AMERICAN ANTIQUARIAN SOCIETY
Regardless of its origins, “Uncle Sam” stuck. One of the first artistic depictions of the character was in a political cartoon published in 1832 during the debate over President Andrew Jackson’s attack on the Bank of the United States. In the anonymous engraving, titled “Uncle Sam in Danger,” the character is round-faced and clean-shaven, wearing a star-and-striped gown and liberty cap. Over time, as the historian David Hackett Fischer has shown, the dressing gown was replaced by a swallow-tail coat, and the liberty cap turned into a beaver hat. Germany was a “fatherland” and Russians spoke of “Mother Russia,” Fischer notes, but “the American republic is unique in its idea of the nation-state as a kindly old uncle, to whom Americans feel attached but not dependent.”
An army of identical Sams in the Civil War-era lithograph “Yankee Volunteers Marching into Dixie” (1862). PHOTO: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
During the Civil War, Uncle Sam symbolized the Union. An 1862 lithograph, “Yankee Volunteers Marching into Dixie,” depicts an entire army of identical Sams, clean-shaven and smiling as they march assuredly towards victory. Around the same time, other artists began depicting Uncle Sam as a tall, lanky figure with a beard, like Abraham Lincoln. The president and the mythical figure became so closely identified that a reporter in Charleston, S.C., described how, upon hearing of the president’s assassination, a bereaved Black woman wrung her hands and wailed that “Uncle Sam” had been killed.
Sam, of course, outlived Lincoln. Perhaps the best-known image of Uncle Sam was made by illustrator James Montgomery Flagg for Leslie’s Weekly magazine in 1916, a year before America entered World War I. “What are YOU doing for Preparedness?” the stern-faced poster demanded. Once the U.S. entered the war, the text was changed to “I want YOU for the U.S. Army.” Though the beard remained, Sam now resembled not Lincoln but Lord Kitchener, who had conquered Sudan on behalf of the British Empire, and whose portrait appeared on recruitment ads throughout the U.K. Dropping the kindly characteristics of Uncle Abe, this iteration of Uncle Sam was suited to a mighty military. Four million posters with Flagg’s image were distributed in the U.S. during the war, fixing his Uncle Sam in the national imagination.
Four million copies of the iconic Uncle Sam recruiting poster were distributed during World War I. PHOTO: JAMES MONTGOMERY FLAGG/LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
During World War II, Uncle Sam swapped his high hat for a G.I. helmet. On factory posters, he urged workers to be efficient and warned against spreading rumors. A version aimed at farmers asked them to “get ready for the census taker,” who would be asking about crops, livestock and tractors.
In the 21st century, Uncle Sam shows no sign of disappearing. The name is still common shorthand for the U.S. government, with recent headlines declaring “AI is Uncle Sam’s new secret weapon to fight fraud” and “Forget Silicon Valley. Class of 2024 wants to work for Uncle Sam.” Whatever happens in the presidential election this November, Uncle Sam will be there to offer a comforting shoulder, a sense of purpose and, hopefully, a good joke.
Rabbi Stuart Halpern is senior adviser to the provost and deputy director of the Straus Center at Yeshiva University.
Appeared in the June 29, 2024, print edition as 'How Uncle Sam Became An American Icon'.
12. Vision 2035: Restoring Marine Corps Capabilities to Fight and Win
The retired Colonels (and one BG) weigh in.
Conclusion:
The time to start is now. The Congress, the Department of Defense, and the American people will applaud the Marines for having the foresight and moral courage to change course to better meet the growing and diverse number of national security threats facing the nation.
Vision 2035: Restoring Marine Corps Capabilities to Fight and Win
By Jerry McAbee & Stephen Baird , Michael Marletto , Timothy Wells
June 29, 2024
https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2024/06/29/vision_2035_restoring_marine_corps_capabilities_to_fight_and_win_1041235.html
U.S. Marines with the Maritime Raid Force, 13th Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU) and U.S. Sailors steer their craft from the well deck of the ship before disappearing into the darkness as they execute a night time sea-to-land operation utilizing combat rubber raiding crafts (CRRC) to exit the ship during an exercise being conducted as as part of the Composite Training Unit Exercise (COMPTUEX), aboard the USS Boxer, Oct. 21, 2015. COMPTUEX provides the MEU ARG the opportunity to integrate naval training while also allowing focused, mission-specific training and evaluation for the Marines and their Navy counter parts. (U.S. Marine Corps photo by Cpl. Briauna Birl/UNRELEASED)
The United States Marine Corps’ capability to respond quickly and effectively to a full range of worldwide crises and contingencies is at its lowest ebb in more than 50 years. Why? The adoption of a transformation strategy called Force Design 2030 - - since renamed Force Design.
The Marines require a better and more effective operating concept to guide the development of capabilities needed to deter, respond, and if necessary, defeat the growing number of state and nonstate actors threatening America’s global interests. In response to this need, a group of distinguished retired Marines articulated a framework for restoring Marine Corps capabilities to quickly deploy anywhere, fight any foe, and win. This framework, Vision 2035, emphatically repudiates the underlying tenets of Force Design and calls for the restoration of offensive operations and combined arms capabilities to enable global response across the spectrum of conflict.
Vision 2035 provides the starting point for developing an operating concept to transform the Marine Corps back to its rightful role as the nation’s premier expeditionary force-in-readiness: a 9-1-1 force that is ready, relevant, and capable to persist forward and respond decisively anywhere in the world. The Marines know how to move from a vision to a concept. They have done it many times before. Consider the following.
Coming out of Vietnam, the Marines knew they needed to replace “the institutional and operational dysfunction of the Vietnam experience” with a more modern approach to warfighting. Commencing in the late 70s, the Marines began discussing and debating a new concept, which came to be called Maneuver Warfare. The philosophical underpinnings of this new concept were argued, contested, and revised in the schoolhouses at Quantico, on the pages of the Marine Corps Gazette, in seminars and group discussions throughout the Marine Corps, and in field exercises and wargames. The senior leadership encouraged the discourse, often participating directly in it. The results of this Corps-wide intellectual effort were codified as Marine Corps doctrine in the 1989 publication of Fleet Marine Force Manual 1 (FMFM 1), Warfighting. Maneuver Warfare has stood the test of time and remains Marine Corps doctrine today.
As early as 1948, the Marines recognized the limitations of traditional amphibious operations in the era of nuclear weapons. This and the growing sophistication of mines and precision weapons spurred discussion and debate about new concepts for amphibious operations. Here again, new ideas were encouraged and openly discussed in the schoolhouses, the Gazette, and throughout the Marine Corps. The Marine Corps gradually embraced the concept of Over-the-Horizon (greater than 25 miles offshore) Amphibious Operations, which was officially approved in 1991 after unofficial acceptance years earlier.
Many Marines believed that Over-the-Horizon operations did not go far enough. They advocated “adapting the traditions of maneuver warfare, not merely to amphibious operations, but to all aspects of warfare in, and around coastal areas.” After much discussion and debate, the Over-the-Horizon concept was updated. In 1996, the 31st Commandant approved a new capstone operating concept for the Marine Corps - - Operational Maneuver From the Sea (OMFTS). OMFTS (which was expanded and reinforced by Expeditionary Force 21 in 2014) drove Marine Corps innovation and guided the development of Marine Corps capabilities until it was replaced by Force Design in 2020.
Military innovation and transformation are the products of the marriage of formal and informal processes. The Marine Corps’ formal process is the combat development process, managed by the Marine Corps Combat Development Command in Quantico, Va. The informal process is Corps-wide discussion and debate that helps frame and refine the concepts. The informal process is transparent, inclusive, and encouraged by leaders at all levels. In the words, of 29th Commandant, General Alfred Mason Gray, “if an idea can’t stand up to our own scrutiny, there must be something wrong with it.”
As previously stated, the Marines know how to move from a vision to a clearly articulated and comprehensive operating concept, if they are allowed to do so. To reclaim the Corps congressionally mandated role as the nation’s “shock troops… most ready when the nation is least ready,” the senior leadership needs to:
-
Acknowledge the shortcomings of Force Design and commit to developing a more relevant operating concept - - better suited to respond to worldwide threats and contingencies across the full spectrum of conflict. Force Design was implemented to specifically counter China’s People’s Liberation Army Navy in the South China Sea. The divestment of expeditionary and combined arms capabilities mandated by Force Design have reduced the Marine Corps’ capacity and capability - - and relevance - - to meet existing and emerging threats in other strategic regions of the word, such as: the Baltic Sea; NATO’s northern flank; the Arctic; the Red Sea, Gulf of Aden and Persian Gulf; and the Indian Ocean. A 2023 analysis from the Center for Strategic and International Studies assessed that U.S. strategic bombers and submarines would be the most effective platforms for launching anti-ship missiles against Chinese ships; that the utility of small, land-based missile batteries in contested areas would be marginal. In today’s increasingly volatile world, the United States can no longer afford to focus its Marine Corps on a single mission already effectively performed by other elements of the Joint Force. As long as the senior leadership continues to advocate “full steam ahead” with Force Design in congressional testimony and in other official documents, such as the 39th Commandant’s FragOrder 1-24, no one inside the Marine Corps will be willing to step forward with an alternative concept.
- Encourage transparent discussion and debate inside and outside the Marine Corps and in the pages of the Marine Corps Gazette on an alternative concept. The Commandant should lead the effort by ensuring the Quantico schoolhouses invite those with different views to speak with the faculty and students. Many Marines remember the often painful, but insightful role that outside observer and critic Bill Lind played in the debates and development of Maneuver Warfare. Likewise, leaders at all levels should inspire active-duty Marines of all ranks to voice their concerns about Force Design and the supporting concepts and propose alternatives. Retired Marines who speak out should be listened to instead of discredited as “old men who are out of touch.” And the Gazette, which has previously refused to publish some controversial articles that did not follow the “party line” by embracing Force Design, should actively solicit articles and opinion pieces with alternative views.
- Return control of all elements of the combat development process - - doctrine, force structure, training and education, equipment, and facilities and support - - to a single commander (Commanding General, Combat Development Command). The Corps’ once highly effective and well-respected combat development process has been recently divided between two separate commands, neither of which have the authority and responsibility for the entire process.
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Use Vision 2035 to begin the process of developing a forward looking, relevant operating concept to replace Force Design, which was essentially developed outside the combat development process by a small group of officers behind closed doors. The new concept can then be vetted through a truly integrated combat development process to determine and ultimately field the capabilities needed to meet the global security challenges of the 21st-Century.
The time to start is now. The Congress, the Department of Defense, and the American people will applaud the Marines for having the foresight and moral courage to change course to better meet the growing and diverse number of national security threats facing the nation.
Brigadier General Jerry McAbee (USMC, ret.) is a career artillery officer. He served as the Chief of Staff for the Marine Corps Combat Development Command. His last assignment was Deputy Commander United States Marine Corps Forces Central Command during Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom.
Colonel Stephen (Steve) Baird (USMC, ret.) is a career artillery officer. He served as the Chief of Staff for the 1st Marine Division followed by his last assignment as the Chief of Staff for U.S Marine Corps Forces Command during Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom.
Colonel Michael (Mike) Marletto (USMC, ret.) is a career artillery officer. He served a wide variety of operational assignments, including command of a direct support artillery battalion, command of an artillery regiment (11th Marines) during the attack to Baghdad, and Assistant Chief of Staff G-3 Operations for I Marine Expeditionary Force (Forward) in Iraq.
Colonel Timothy (Tim) Wells (USMC, ret.) is a career infantry officer. He served as G-3 Operations for United States Marine Corps Forces Central Command during Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom. His last assignment was Commanding Officer, Marine Corps Mountain Warfare Training Center.
13. House Approves $2.5 Billion for Junior Enlisted Raises, Which May Be $800 Million Too Little
Will the troops ever see this? I hope so but I am not optimistic.
House Approves $2.5 Billion for Junior Enlisted Raises, Which May Be $800 Million Too Little
military.com · by Rebecca Kheel · June 28, 2024
A Pentagon spending bill that includes $2.5 billion to pay for a major hike in junior enlisted troops' salaries has passed the House, but the White House is contending that amount falls short of what would actually be needed to cover the raises.
The House approved its version of the fiscal 2025 Defense Department appropriations bill on Friday in a 217-198 largely party-line vote.
The bill will almost certainly be overhauled before it becomes law since it includes a number of conservative policy riders opposed by the Democratic-controlled Senate and White House that would roll back Pentagon policies on abortion, LGBTQ+ troops and diversity.
As written now, the bill includes funding intended to pay for a proposal in Congress' separate annual defense policy bill that would significantly boost junior enlisted troop pay next year.
"There's no greater responsibility than supporting our service members and their families, which is why the bill includes a 4.5% pay raise for all military personnel, plus $2.5 billion toward an additional 15% pay raise for junior enlisted service members," Rep. Ken Calvert, R-Calif., chairman of the House Appropriations Committee's defense subpanel, said in a statement Friday.
Under the House's version of the National Defense Authorization Act, or NDAA, which the chamber approved earlier this month, E-1s through E-4s would get a 15% raise on top of the 4.5% increase all service members are on track to get, for a total 19.5% pay raise for junior troops.
When the House debated its NDAA earlier this month, the White House came out in "strong" opposition to the plan for a junior enlisted pay hike, arguing the proposal is too costly and premature amid the Biden administration's ongoing review of military compensation.
A White House statement released this week about the Pentagon appropriations bill did not explicitly repeat the words "strongly opposes" about the junior enlisted raises, but it reiterated the administration's concerns with the plan.
Among the issues the White House highlighted in its statement this week is that, while the appropriations bill includes $2.5 billion to pay for the raises, the administration projects that the raises would cost about $3.3 billion next year -- an $800 million shortfall that the Pentagon would have to pay for by dipping into funding intended for other purposes.
"The administration appreciates and shares the [House Appropriations Committee's] concern for the needs of the most junior enlisted members," the statement said. But "the administration is concerned with the trade-offs that would be required to [cover the raises] within other parts of DoD."
The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that the House's proposed junior enlisted raise would cost $24.4 billion from 2025 though 2029, but it did not break down how much it could cost just for next year.
In Friday's vote on the appropriations bill, five Democrats -- Reps. Don Davis of North Carolina; Jared Golden of Maine; Vicente Gonzalez of Texas; Mary Peltola of Alaska; and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington -- crossed party lines to support the legislation. Meanwhile, Rep. Matt Rosendale, R-Mont., who has been unsuccessfully trying to ban the Pentagon from covering in vitro fertilization for service members struggling with infertility, was the lone Republican to vote against the bill.
With the White House opposition and the Senate taking a less dramatic approach to junior enlisted raises, the outlook for junior enlisted personnel getting a 19.5% raise next year is murky.
The Senate has not yet released its fiscal 2025 Pentagon appropriations bill, but the version of the NDAA advanced earlier this month by the Senate Armed Services Committee would give E-1s through E-3s just a 5.5% raise.
After the House approved its NDAA earlier this month, Rep. Don Bacon, R-Neb., who chaired a bipartisan panel that studied military quality-of-life issues that recommended giving low-ranking troops a massive raise, said he expects the junior enlisted raise that becomes law will be a compromise between the House and Senate proposals.
"What the Senate's doing is not adequate to help get our junior enlisted out of the poverty level," Bacon told reporters on a press call earlier this month. "If you don't take care of your people first, our military is going to fail. And we can't let that happen."
military.com · by Rebecca Kheel · June 28, 2024
14. RIMPAC 2024 Kicks Off In Honolulu, Hawaii
How many Chinese ships are shadowing this?
RIMPAC 2024 Kicks Off In Honolulu, Hawaii - Naval News
navalnews.com · by Carter Johnston · June 28, 2024
Exercise Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) 2024 has officially begun in Hawai’i, bringing 29 partner nations and 25,000 personnel, making this year’s RIMPAC in the largest iteration to date by number of countries involved. Over the next month, from June 27th to August 1st, participants will embark on exercises that cover all the bases of the maritime domain, from disaster response to multi-axis carrier defense.
RIMPAC 2024 Combined Task Force Commander Vice Admiral John Wade opened the day answering questions and beginning the formal ceremony that kicked off this year’s iteration of RIMPAC.
Vice Adm. John Wade, Commander, U.S. 3rd Fleet and Exercise Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) 2024 Combined Task Force Commander, answers questions during the opening press conference for RIMPAC 2024 held at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, Hawaii, June 27. U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Sarah C. Eaton
Partner nations have been arriving in Hawai’i by sea and air over the past few weeks, building up the scores of aircraft, ships, and submarines in the days before RIMPAC. Notable participants this year include a French Aquitaine-class FREMM Frigate Bretagne (D655), Royal Netherlands Navy’s De Zeven Provinciën-class air defense frigate HNLMS Tromp (F803), the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson (CVN-70) with its F-35C Lightning II Advanced Air Wing, and a South Korean Sejong the Great-class ROKS Yulgok Yi I (DDG-992), among dozens of other ships and submarines participating.
Participating nations in this year’s iteration of RIMPAC are Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Denmark, Ecuador, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Israel, Italy, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Peru, Republic of Korea, Philippines, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Tonga and the United Kingdom.
Royal Netherlands Navy frigate HNLMS Tromp (F803) arrives at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam for Exercise Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) 2024 as US Air Force F-22A Raptors fly overhead, Jun. 26. (U.S. Navy Photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Sarah C. Eaton)
The RIMPAC 2024 Docket
While a full list of events is not public, the U.S. Navy has confirmed that this year’s RIMPAC will feature the largest humanitarian aid and disaster response to date.
This year’s RIMPAC will host its largest humanitarian aid and disaster relief exercise with eight countries, five ships, five landing craft, five aircraft, multiple land forces, and over 2,500 total participants including the statewide Hawaii Healthcare Emergency Management exercise. The exercise control and scenario development are supported by subject matter experts from the Center for Excellence in Disaster Management, Pacific Disaster Center, USAID’s Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance, and Singapore’s Changi Regional Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief Coordination Centre.
U.S. Navy Pacific Fleet Press Statement
Customary to RIMPAC, a SINKEX is also planned for mid-July featuring ex-USS Tarawa (LHA-1), an amphibious assault ship that served in the United States Navy from 1976 to 2009. Tarawa was stricken from the naval registry on April 30, 2024. More SINKEX events may be planned, but their details are not currently available to the public.
Former USS Tarawa (LHA-1) was towed to Ford Island two weeks ago to stripped down and prepped for RIMPAC 2024 and to be used as a “live target” off the cost of Oahu this year. Check on her @MarcoNaron @navyboy68 @TrompZrms @Crew_ZrMs_Tromp !! pic.twitter.com/3C8Ivh4wKK
— Stiofán Sopelza (@sopelza) June 9, 2024
Other at-sea activities include anti-submarine warfare, multi-ship surface warfare, multinational amphibious landings, and multi-axis defense of the carrier strike group against live forces.
navalnews.com · by Carter Johnston · June 28, 2024
15. The US military chases shiny new things and the ranks suffer
From the Quincy Institute's Responsible Statecraft.
With his criticism the former Captain reminds me of me when I was a Captain. :-)
I did not realize it was the Osprey that ushered in all these other "novelty" programs.
The US military chases shiny new things and the ranks suffer
We were told the Osprey, LCS, and F-35 were cutting edge, but they turned out to be boondoggles and deathtraps
ANALYSIS | MILITARY INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX
DAN GRAZIER
JUN 27, 2024
Twenty young Americans have died in a series of V-22 Osprey crashes over the past two years. Since the revolutionary tilt-rotor aircraft began flying in 1989, 57 Ospreys have suffered significant accidents killing a total of 62 service members and injuring another 93.
The House Oversight Committee (notably not the Armed Services Committee) held a hearing on June 12 to listen to testimony about the program’s safety concerns. Members were told the Osprey would continue to fly for short trips in spite of a known faulty part while engineers try to devise a permanent fix.
It is easy to fixate on Osprey crashes when they happen because, as a transport aircraft, they can kill a lot of people in a single instant. What has been overlooked is what the Osprey represents in a larger pattern of DoD acquisition failures.
In many respects, the Osprey led the way in a trend towards ever-increasing complex weapons programs. Instead of iterating on the tried-and-true CH-46 Sea Knight helicopter program it was meant to replace, Marine Corps leaders fully invested themselves on an untested and underdeveloped program based on entirely new and more complex technology.
The Osprey’s mission is straightforward. It is supposed to move people and things from one place to another. The Marine Corps had been doing that successfully with helicopters for decades. Rather than building another helicopter, service leaders decided to build a revolutionary aircraft that can take off and land like a helicopter but fly like a fixed-wing airplane. That may look good on paper, but the concept has come with a steep cost.
The Osprey is much more expensive than a comparable helicopter. Adjusted for inflation, the cost of a CH-46 helicopter is approximately $17 million compared to the $84 million for the Osprey that replaced it. That is a heavy premium for an aircraft that today is only allowed to fly no more than 30 minutes from a suitable airfield.
This has had a significant follow-on effect. Navy leaders had plans to retire the last 15 C2 Greyhound fixed-wing transport aircraft, but those plans have been put on hold due to the Osprey program’s flight restrictions. The Navy had to press them back into service to resupply ships again because the Ospreys couldn’t do the job. In the end we built a more costly and complex system that is not ready or even able to do the jobs of the cheaper and more reliable aircraft it was meant to replace.
Following the trail blazed by the Osprey, the other services have repeated the same fundamental mistake repeatedly with their own excessively complex programs. Navy leaders hobbled the fleet by spending nearly two decades trying to get the Littoral Combat Ship program to work. Rather than operating a fleet of 55 highly capable futuristic small surface combatant ships, the Navy ended up with a fleet of 35 ships that were faulty, undergunned and mostly unable to leave their home ports, and several of those have already been mothballed.
The Navy had an even bigger failure with the Zumwalt-class destroyer. Leaders planned on a fleet of 32 ships designed to bombard targets on shore with a specialized cannon to support amphibious landings. The design included a vast array of new technologies including new radar, sonar, and an all-electric propulsion system. Developing the new technologies took longer than expected, which increased the total cost of the program. To offset the budget overruns, leaders cut the planned fleet size down to three ships. This ultimately led to the failure of the revolutionary gun program, the whole purpose of the ship itself being scrapped, as the cost for manufacturing specialized rounds for the ships at scale skyrocketed for a fleet of three versus a fleet of 32.
The Army spent at least $8 billion between 2003 and 2009 to develop a family of armored vehicles in a program called the Future Combat Systems. Rather than pursuing individual replacements for vehicles like the Abrams tank and the Bradley Fighting Vehicle, Army leaders decided to pursue a single, highly networked family of specialized combat and support vehicles on a common chassis. It was an ambitious project that the RAND Corporation later criticized for its “overreliance on assumptions” that the defense industry would be able to develop all the envisioned revolutionary technologies.
As it turned out, the defense industry failed to deliver and the program was shelved with very little to show for the effort and considerable expense. Evidence of just how poorly conceived the Future Combat Systems effort was can be found in the estimated total costs for the program. Army leaders initially claimed the Future Combat Systems would cost $91.4 billion. Within three years, that figure had increased to $163.7 billion.
And then there’s the heavy-weight champion of poorly conceived futuristic weapons: the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. The F-35 was billed as a multi-role aircraft designed to meet the needs of three different services and those of multiple partner nations. But the idea of a one-size-fits-all aircraft has been tried in the past with poor results. The Pentagon tried it with the F-111 in the 1960s and then had to scramble to build the F-14, F-15, F-16, and A-10 to make up for the capability shortfalls. Pentagon leaders compounded the multi-role difficulties by trying to incorporate every conceivable technology into the F-35 design. This created a level of complexity that has prevented the F-35 from being an effective part of the fleet, let alone in any of its promised specialized roles.
As you can see, this is not a new problem, and space here does not permit a full listing of all the Pentagon’s acquisition failures over the past three decades. But there are very real consequences to poorly conceived weapon programs. The Navy is retiring ships faster than they can be replaced. The Air Force has less than half the number of fighter aircraft today than it did in 1990.
While the services have been shedding force structure, the American people have watched as more and more of their money goes to the Pentagon every year. The proposed defense budget for 2025 will be nearly 50% higher than what it was in 2000. What’s even worse is that even though most of these big-ticket weapons and vehicles are vastly more expensive and delivered on average three years late, they don’t work like they are supposed to. Many have abysmal readiness rates. The F-35 fleet has a full mission capable rate of only 30%. That means that the world’s most expensive weapons system is only ready to do its job less than a third of the time.
In many ways the Osprey program ushered in the era of excessively complex novelty weapons. As long as this trend continues, the services will continue to demand more money to pay for acquisition boondoggles that won’t work properly and gradually degrade the effectiveness of the U.S. military.
Dan Grazier
Dan Grazier is a senior fellow and program director at the Stimson Center. He is a former Marine Corps captain who served tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. His assignments in uniform included tours with 2nd Tank Battalion in Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, and 1st Tank Battalion in Twentynine Palms, California.
The views expressed by authors on Responsible Statecraft do not necessarily reflect those of the Quincy Institute or its associates.
16. Do military families really need to move so much?
The better question to ask is does the military personnel management system really need families to move so much?
Unfortunately I think that it does require moves due to upward mobility/rank opportunities/professional development as well as readiness, training, professional military education, etc.
A home based regimental system is nice if we want to have 40-50 year old Privates and Corporals and Lieutenants and Captains because they have no opportunity to advance until someone above them dies.
Do military families really need to move so much?
militarytimes.com · by Karen Jowers · June 27, 2024
Moving to a new base every few years is among the most taxing requirements military families face. But is all that effort to uproot really necessary?
A new report from a leading advocacy group argues it’s time to give the pace of those moves, known as permanent changes of station, a fresh look.
“We’re seeing PCS as being a big moment that puts people in a situation of vulnerability,” Shannon Razsadin, chief executive officer of the Military Family Advisory Network, told Military Times on Tuesday.
The group’s 2023 Military Family Support Programming Survey, released Wednesday, explored some of the perennial challenges that burden military families. The 109-page report questioned whether changing the frequent shuffle between bases — which military officials argue is necessary to meet operational requirements and fill empty jobs — could affect recurring issues related to financial stability, such as military spouse unemployment, and other concerns such as children’s education.
“Is there a capacity to expand telework to provide more stability?” the report asked. “There is an opportunity to explore the cost savings of less frequent moves, not just for military families, but also for taxpayers.”
The survey drilled into some of the second- and third-order effects of frequent moves, when people struggle with everything from the amount of time spent in temporary lodging to security deposits, extra rent and unreimbursed expenses.
“These things are adding up. When you move every two to three years, and layer on top of that potential gaps in employment, you have this ‘aha’ moment where it’s not surprising that people are having a hard time getting ahead,” Razsadin said.
More than half of the survey’s respondents made a PCS move in the previous two years, the advocacy group said. Those who did were more likely to report poor family well-being than those who hadn’t moved, at 25.7% and 20.3%, respectively, according to the survey.
About 4 in 10 respondents who PCSed in the past two years reported low or very low food security; around half reported it was “difficult or very difficult” to find a place to live.
The MFAN survey, conducted online from Oct. 2 to Dec. 10, 2023, sought to hear from current and former members of the military community. Of the 10,149 participants, 39% said they were active duty spouses, 19% were veterans, and 11% were active duty troops. Seventy-six percent of respondents identified themselves or their spouse as enlisted, whether active duty, retiree or veteran.
The survey isn’t a scientific poll because researchers did not verify the identity of respondents, or conduct a random sample, for instance. The 2023 report is the survey’s fifth iteration since it began in 2014.
Researchers measured family well-being using the Family Health Scale, a research tool of 10 questions that measure factors like relationships, health care, lifestyle, financial health and housing.
Other findings related to PCS moves include:
- Most respondents reported spending between $500 to $1,000 out of pocket on moving expenses that aren’t reimbursed by the military.
- 53% of active duty military family respondents say they are paying more than $251 out of pocket each month for rent/mortgage or utilities.
- 43% said the reimbursement process took one to two months after they moved.
- 29% reported staying in temporary lodging between 11 to 30 nights during their PCS move; another 21% reported staying in temporary lodging between 31 to 60 nights.
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56% of respondents said their household goods were lost or damaged during their most recent move, including retirees and veterans. 70% filed a claim. “Respondents who filed a claim most commonly experienced a financial loss between $500 and $1,000 above the reimbursement for their claim,” according to the report.
- 46% of respondents said moving has the greatest impact on children and their education, social life, and adjustment to a new location. “It takes a great deal of work to support the children before, during and after a move. The ripple effect is large and long lasting,” said one active duty sailor who responded to the survey.
- 38% said that moving affects the entire family’s mental health and well-being, “oftentimes causing stress, sadness, depression, anxiety, loneliness, and even adjustment disorder,” according to the report.
- 30% cited the effects of PCS moves on military spouse employment; 36% of unemployed active duty spouses shared stories of challenges with frequent moves.
- 11% of respondents cited moving or PCS as a barrier to saving money.
- 30% of respondents said they had difficulty establishing mental health care in a new location.
“The journey of a military family like yours or mine comes with sacrifices,” said Christine Grady, wife of Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Christopher Grady, during an event Wednesday announcing the results of the survey. “It comes with great rewards.”
Overall, military family well-being has declined since the last MFAN survey in 2021. In the past two years, those reporting poor family well-being increased from 14% in 2021 to 26.5% in 2023. Those who described their well-being as “excellent” fell from 41.3% in 2021 to 27.9% in 2023.
Enlisted families with children — one of the largest groups in the survey — were less likely to report excellent well-being, at 20%.
Razsadin said one of the more disheartening results is the uptick in loneliness reported among military and veteran families, which rose by 5 percentage points to 59% in 2023.
“I found it surprising,” she said. “The last time we fielded the survey was in 2021, in the pandemic. We have to figure out how we can create meaningful connections with people.”
Among the bright spots in the findings, said Gabby L’Esperance, MFAN’s insights director, was the increase in usage of mental health support. Nearly 60% of respondents sought out mental health services in the previous two years, up from 46% in 2021.
Survey results showed that families with poor or moderate well-being were less likely to recommend military life to others, as were enlisted families, veteran families, respondents with children under 18, and those who joined military life in the last 10 years.
Nearly 58% of those surveyed in 2023 would recommend a military career, a 5-percentage-point drop since 2021. Those who recommend military life to others has fallen steadily since 2019, when it stood at 74.5%.
Many said they would recommend military life with a healthy dose of caution, or as short-term service instead of a career.
The advocacy group warned that failing families can have wider repercussions for retention and recruitment — and in turn, military readiness — than on those households alone.
“Ensuring families can thrive in service isn’t just the right thing to do,” the report said. “There are long-term consequences if they don’t.”
About Karen Jowers
Karen has covered military families, quality of life and consumer issues for Military Times for more than 30 years, and is co-author of a chapter on media coverage of military families in the book "A Battle Plan for Supporting Military Families." She previously worked for newspapers in Guam, Norfolk, Jacksonville, Fla., and Athens, Ga.
17. Is America fit to lead the West?
Will foreign policy and national security impact the election?
Excerpts:
Foreign policy rarely plays a significant role in a US presidential election. Domestic issues, the economy, money in the pocket, jobs, immigration, these are what voters are most concerned about. But this time, it could be different.
...
The clashes on foreign policy throughout the debate revealed nothing new from either Biden or Trump, but the contrast in presentation was so marked, even when Trump was making highly dubious claims, that it undermined Biden’s insistence that he had been a strong and dependable leader of the alliance.
This is the lingering impression that will be left in American voters’ minds which is why foreign policy, normally much lower down the average person’s priority list, could make a difference when they make their decision in the election on 5 November.
Is America fit to lead the West?
The Spectator · by Michael Evans · June 29, 2024
Foreign policy rarely plays a significant role in a US presidential election. Domestic issues, the economy, money in the pocket, jobs, immigration, these are what voters are most concerned about. But this time, it could be different.
The first TV debate between President Biden and Donald Trump seemed focused on one thing: is Biden the man to trust to lead the western alliance for another four-year term? Or, as Trump insinuated, is he so weakened and fragile that none of the adversarial leaders in the world have any respect for him, let alone fear him?
For America’s allies, Biden’s lacklustre performance will have caused considerable anxiety
Fear, it seems, is the former president’s trump card. As he told Biden and voters in the debate, Vladimir Putin would never have dared invade Ukraine, had he been president. Nor would Hamas have committed the atrocity against Israel on 7 October last year, if he had been in the White House.
While his claim is unprovable, it has become one of Trump’s favourite mantras and in a debate where Biden stumbled and faltered and struggled to compete with his political rival’s foreign policy boasts, the impression left in people’s minds seemed incontrovertible: Trump is the tough leader who gets things done.
In reality, there are a lot of grey areas. While he didn’t put it across with sufficient clarity or robustness, Biden’s great achievement in office was to corral 50 nations into an alliance to provide western backbone for Ukraine’s fight against Russia.
The US, on Biden’s watch, has delivered $175 billion in military assistance to Ukraine since the Russian invasion in February, 2022, and, if he wins a second term in the White House, he has promised to support the Ukrainians for as long as it takes to bring the war to an end to Kyiv’s satisfaction.
While Biden described this as a noble and necessary endeavour to prevent Putin from winning in Ukraine and moving on to seize territory elsewhere in the region, such as Poland, he has to persuade sceptical voters that this remains the only way forward when his rival for the White House has promised – and did so again in the debate – to bring the war in Ukraine to a close on his first day.
Trump didn’t explain how he would achieve this, but he didn’t have to because what he is offering probably sounds a lot more attractive to a hardworking, low-earning American voter than a forever war in a country a long way away which is costing taxpayers billions and billions of dollars.
Trump had no easy answer to ending the war in Gaza, but he and Biden at least appeared to share some common ground: they both vowed always to support Israel, but Trump said he wanted the Israeli military to destroy Hamas at all costs, while Biden has become increasingly concerned about the methods used to achieve that objective.
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For America’s allies, Biden’s lacklustre performance will have caused considerable anxiety. They will be anticipating another Trump presidency with a mixture of alarm and trepidation. He was not an easy man to get along with and gave the impression that he was dismissive of many of the leaders he confronted.
Biden, on the other hand, has been viewed as a president willing to listen. No one in the alliance fears Biden. Many fear Trump and what he stands for.
Biden accused Trump of planning to destroy Nato. He reminded viewers of Trump’s throwaway remark when he invited Russia to do ‘whatever the hell they want’ to Nato members who failed to meet their defence commitments. In fact, more than 70 per cent of Nato allies are now on track to spend the obligatory 2.5 per cent of GDP on defence.
Trump made no pledges about backing Nato. With the alliance to hold its 75th anniversary summit in Washington next month, allied leaders will be wondering whether it will be Biden’s swansong.
The clashes on foreign policy throughout the debate revealed nothing new from either Biden or Trump, but the contrast in presentation was so marked, even when Trump was making highly dubious claims, that it undermined Biden’s insistence that he had been a strong and dependable leader of the alliance.
This is the lingering impression that will be left in American voters’ minds which is why foreign policy, normally much lower down the average person’s priority list, could make a difference when they make their decision in the election on 5 November.
Michael Evans
Michael Evans was defence editor at the Times for 12 years. He still writes regularly about defence and security for the paper. He wrote a memoir called First with the News.
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The Spectator · by Michael Evans · June 29, 2024
18. Japan and US need to up their game in the Senkakus
Excerpts:
And as part of a “Senkakus strategy,” both Tokyo and Washington should coordinate on applying economic and financial pressure and technology export restrictions on China.
Applying pressure from these directions is better than just trying to match whatever ships, boats, or aircraft China puts into the area around the Senkakus. China has the numbers to play that game better.
So make Beijing play another “game” as well that applies real pressure where it hurts – the economy.
And to make it hurt even more, expose the immense overseas wealth of the Chinese Communist Party’s top officials.
One thing is for certain: China has said it intends to take the Senkakus. (That’s for starters, since it has also claimed the rest of the Ryukyu Islands.) And one should take Xi Jinping at his word and respond accordingly.
Beijing is not going to give up unless presented with a solid, unyielding Japanese and American defense.
There is no deal to be cut.
Japan and US need to up their game in the Senkakus - Asia Times
US and Japan should make Ryukyu and Senkaku islands defense a joint affair, weaponize foreign investment power
asiatimes.com · by Grant Newsham · June 29, 2024
When the People’s Republic of China wants something, it is persistent and pushes to get what it wants. And it’s willing to use force if necessary. Japan knows the feeling, when it comes to the disputed Senkaku Islands at the southern end of the Ryukyu chain. They are closer to Shanghai than to Tokyo. The PRC says the islands – which it calls Diaoyu – are its own.
Map: Wikipedia
Given the PRC’s increasingly violent behavior as it seeks to control Philippine maritime territory, it is worth taking stock of the Senkaku situation.
Swarming and ‘osmosis’
China, which says its claim goes back to the 14th century, fully intends to take the Senkakus – when the time is right. For the last 15 years, the Chinese have been gradually expanding their naval presence in terms of frequency, location and numbers and types of ships and boats involved.
We’ve seen China Coast Guard, People’s Armed Forces Maritime Militia, “regular” fishing vessels and other Chinese government agency ships, with the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN, or Chinese Navy) lurking close by. Even Chinese aircraft have intruded into Japanese airspace around the Senkakus.
It will be more things in more places and more often – and more frequently in Japan’s territorial waters. In other words, within 12 miles of the Senkaku Islands. At some point Japan will find it simply doesn’t have the ships and resources to contain Chinese incursions.
China will have taken the Senkakus by “osmosis” rather than by storm.
A Japan Coast Guard patrol vessel closely shadows a China Coast Guard ship (right), maintaining tight surveillance and protecting a Japanese research vessel off the Senkaku Islands on April 27, 2024, at 8:29 AM. Photo: © Sankei / Naoki Otake
Several times over the past decade the Chinese have “flooded the zone” with fishing boats. To include a couple hundred or more boats around the Senkakus – backed up by China Coast Guard ships. And with the Chinese Navy over the horizon.
Beijing was demonstrating that whenever it wants it can assert “administrative control” over the Senkakus. And there is nothing the overmatched Japan Coast Guard can do about it. The treaty, and specifically US obligations to defend Japan, only applies to areas under Japanese “administrative control.”
One envisions a scenario whereby China makes a political decision and swarms the area with ships and boats. It puts people ashore on the Senkakus, and warns the Japanese to stand clear or “it’s war.”
A Chinese Coast Guard ship uses water cannons on Philippine Navy-operated M/L Kalayaan supply boat as it approaches the Second Thomas Shoal, locally known as Ayungin Shoal, in the disputed South China Sea on Sunday December 10, 2023. Photo: Handout / Philippine Coast Guard
China treads carefully
Japan can defend itself better than the Philippines. It has a strong Coast Guard and navy – athough
- Chinese ship numbers now outmatch the Japanese by far;
- the numbers gap is expanding; and
-
the newer China Coast Guard boats are as big as destroyers and built for fighting, while Japan Coast Guard ships are neither.
But Japan can also use its foreign investment in China as a weapon. Cutting off Japanese investment, business activity and technology exports to China would harm the PRC.
The Philippines has no similar leverage.
Thus one understands the relatively less aggressive Chinese approach (for now) around the Senkakus. That is, compared with what it’s doing in Philippine waters – even if the end objectives are the same.
The Chinese would like nothing more than for the Japanese to fire a shot – just one shot – at a Chinese vessel. Then they could claim to be the aggrieved party and step up their presence and behave even more aggressively. That would include shooting at the Japanese and landing on the islands, saying, “We had no choice.”
A China Coast Guard ship intrudes into Japanese territorial waters, approaching within approximately one kilometer of Uotsuri Island, Ishigaki City, Okinawa, on the morning of April 27. Photo: © Sankei / Naoki Otake
Moving beyond 15 years of ‘patience’
Japan prides itself on not having “taken the bait.” Instead, it responds professionally and firmly in challenging all Chinese intrusions. This gets tiring as Japan has kept it up for almost 15 years now.
Will the Japanese use armed force at some point ー rather than just shadowing and blocking Chinese ships and ordering them to leave Japanese territory? Maybe.
But one suspects that by the time Tokyo decides to do so it will be too late. By then, they’ll face a fait accompli with the Chinese (and the PLAN) parked right offshore of the islands in large numbers and refusing to move. Meanwhile, a landing party occupies the islands. And Beijing threatens all-out war – to include nukes.
How to keep this from happening
The US and the Japanese need to make defense of the Ryukyus and the Senkakus a joint affair, qith US Navy ships and US aircraft operating together with Japanese forces and coast guard on a regular basis.
And eject any Chinese ships that come into territorial waters around the Senkakus.
This would be far more effective than the regular US pronouncements that the defense treaty applies to the Senkakus.
We’ve seen how well such pronouncements work in the case of the Philippines. And they haven’t restrained the Chinese behavior around the Senkakus so much.
From Beijing’s perspective, bullying the Japanese is one thing – and they enjoy doing it. But bullying the Japanese when US forces are present is another thing.
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The risk equation is very different in the latter case, assuming the Americans have the nerve to take on the Chinese.
Add economic pressure
And as part of a “Senkakus strategy,” both Tokyo and Washington should coordinate on applying economic and financial pressure and technology export restrictions on China.
Applying pressure from these directions is better than just trying to match whatever ships, boats, or aircraft China puts into the area around the Senkakus. China has the numbers to play that game better.
So make Beijing play another “game” as well that applies real pressure where it hurts – the economy.
And to make it hurt even more, expose the immense overseas wealth of the Chinese Communist Party’s top officials.
One thing is for certain: China has said it intends to take the Senkakus. (That’s for starters, since it has also claimed the rest of the Ryukyu Islands.) And one should take Xi Jinping at his word and respond accordingly.
Beijing is not going to give up unless presented with a solid, unyielding Japanese and American defense.
There is no deal to be cut.
Grant Newsham is a retired US Marine officer and former US diplomat. He is the author of the book When China Attacks: A Warning To America.
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asiatimes.com · by Grant Newsham · June 29, 2024
19. America’s priority should be chip design leadership
Excerpts:
Following Moore’s Law, as economic chip densities increased over time, the value of the technology was demonstrated by researchers in image analysis. Early applications were in computer game devices used in video games. But the breakthrough to big applications in AI came when the CEO of Nvidia, Jensen Huang, saw the AI applications of the Nvidia products and decided the company’s future by concentrating all of its efforts on AI applications while exiting other applications. Today, the company has an effective monopoly in processing chips for AI with soaring global sales that exceed a run rate of $100 billion annually.
A key underlying factor drove this success. Not US government directives but the creative work of thousands of talented technologists working in teams to realize new concepts into valuable products. This underlying success factor must be supported and encouraged to continue to maintain essential leadership in the chip technology world.
America’s priority should be chip design leadership - Asia Times
The key to the value creation process – sophisticated high-end product innovation – remains largely in the US
asiatimes.com · by Henry Kressel · June 28, 2024
Chips are the key economic and military enablers of the industrial world. South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol recently described chip technology leadership as paramount to a country’s economic survival (Wall Street Journal, June 5, 2024). The impact on military matters is overwhelming. As David Goldman and I wrote in the the Wall Street Journal on December 23, 2018: “Silicon, not Steel, will win the Next War.”
In that spirit, hundreds of billions of dollars are being allocated from national funds to develop the industry in countries including China, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea and the US. In the US, the CHIPS Act allocated $50 billion to support manufacturing investments. These large amounts committed must be viewed in the context of the cost of a state-of-the-art, full-scale factory – between $20 billion and $30 billion. And such plants become obsolete in a few years. Staying at the cutting edge of chip manufacturing technology is a major national undertaking.
As the original developer of the industry, the US is facing major new competition. The first priority in the US should be to maintain leadership in innovative product design because that leadership impacts economic growth and the US still leads the world in this regard.
While the industry developed in the US, much of the manufacturing and packaging of chips has moved overseas. However, the key to the value creation process – sophisticated high-end product innovation – remains largely in the US. Well over 50% of the leading-edge chips are designed in the US and marketed and supported by US-based corporations. This is the case because of the large design technology base in the US, consisting of many companies focused on design, a large academic community of designers, continued support from DARPA and other federal agencies, and the continuing availability of venture capital funding for new innovative design companies.
With active programs of acquisitions, young companies with promising products are acquired by larger companies providing the resources to expand rapidly. Hence, US-designed high-performance chips continue to lead the world industry the Americans’ diversity and ability to rapidly move concepts into major commercial products.
The recent history of Nvidia is a great example of how innovative chip design moved a new US chip design company into becoming one of the three most valuable companies in the world (at about three trillion dollars) on the basis of its unique AI-enabling technology. The new technological concept behind AI is the use of “neural networks” (massive parallel data processing) computing chips that mimic the way the human brain manages data. The idea was well known in scientific circles for many years but applying it to real problems was uneconomical because it required a very large amount of chip processing capacity.
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Following Moore’s Law, as economic chip densities increased over time, the value of the technology was demonstrated by researchers in image analysis. Early applications were in computer game devices used in video games. But the breakthrough to big applications in AI came when the CEO of Nvidia, Jensen Huang, saw the AI applications of the Nvidia products and decided the company’s future by concentrating all of its efforts on AI applications while exiting other applications. Today, the company has an effective monopoly in processing chips for AI with soaring global sales that exceed a run rate of $100 billion annually.
A key underlying factor drove this success. Not US government directives but the creative work of thousands of talented technologists working in teams to realize new concepts into valuable products. This underlying success factor must be supported and encouraged to continue to maintain essential leadership in the chip technology world.
Henry Kressel Ph.D is a technologist with many pioneering contributions in electronic devices, an author, an ustrial executive and a long-term private equity investor.
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asiatimes.com · by Henry Kressel · June 28, 2024
20. Russia wants to confront NATO but dares not fight it on the battlefield – so it’s waging a hybrid war instead
Here is what the Russians wrote some years ago. How much of this are we seeing in action?
As a result, it follows that the main guidelines for developing Russian military capabilities by 2020 are:
i. From direct destruction to direct influence;
ii. from direct annihilation of the opponent to its inner decay;
iii. from a war with weapons and technology to a culture war;
iv. from a war with conventional forces to specially prepared forces and commercial irregular groupings;
v. from the traditional (3D) battleground to information/psychological warfare and war of perceptions;
vi. from direct clash to contactless war;
vii. from a superficial and compartmented war to a total war, including the enemy’s internal side and base;
viii. from war in the physical environment to a war in the human consciousness and in cyberspace;
ix. from symmetric to asymmetric warfare by a combination of political, economic, information, technological, and ecological campaigns;
x. From war in a defined period of time to a state of permanent war as the natural condition in national life.
•Thus, the Russian view of modern warfare is based on the idea that the main battlespace is the mind and, as a result, new-generation wars are to be dominated by information and psychological warfare, in order to achieve superiority in troops and weapons control, morally and psychologically depressing the enemy’s armed forces personnel and civil population. The main objective is to reduce the necessity for deploying hard military power to the minimum necessary, making the opponent’s military and civil population support the attacker to the detriment of their own government and country. It is interesting to note the notion of permanent war, since it denotes a permanent enemy. In the current geopolitical structure, the clear enemy is Western civilization, its values, culture, political system, and ideology.
http://www.naa.mil.lv/~/media/NAA/AZPC/Publikacijas/PP%2002-2014.ashx
Russia wants to confront NATO but dares not fight it on the battlefield – so it’s waging a hybrid war instead | CNN
CNN · by Ivana Kottasová · June 30, 2024
Polish authorities said Russia appears to be behind a large fire that consumed a shopping center in Warsaw.
Dariusz Borowicz/Agencja Wyborcza.pl/Reuters
CNN —
When someone tried – and failed – to burn down a bus garage in Prague earlier this month, the unsuccessful arson attack didn’t draw much attention. Until, that is, Czech Prime Minister Petr Fiala revealed it was “very likely” that Moscow was behind it.
The accusation prompted alarm among security officials and governments because several similar incidents have occurred across Europe in recent months. The Museum of Occupation in Riga was targeted in an arson attack in February. A London warehouse burnt down in March and a shopping center in Warsaw went up in flames in May. Police in Germany arrested several people suspected of planning explosions and arson attacks in April, and French authorities launched an anti-terror investigation after detaining a suspected bomb-maker who was injured in a botched explosion earlier this month.
Multiple hacking attacks and spying incidents have been reported in different European countries. As the same time, the European Union has accused Russia and Belarus of weaponizing migration by pushing asylum seekers from third countries to its borders. There have also been several suspicious attacks against individuals: a Russian defector was found shot dead in Spain and an opposition figure exiled in Lithuania was brutally attacked with a hammer.
The seemingly random attacks have one thing in common: according to local officials, they are all linked to Russia. And while they might look minor in isolation, taken together these incidents amount to what security experts say is Russia’s hybrid war on the West.
“We are threatened by something which is not a full-fledged military attack, which are these hybrid threats … everything from meddling in our political processes, (undermining) the trust in our political institutions, disinformation, cyber-attacks (…) and sabotage actions against critical infrastructure,” NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said during an event in Canada last week.
Rod Thornton, a senior lecturer in defense studies at King’s College London, said there’s been a pattern of attacks linked back to Russia. “There has definitely been an increase over the last few months in these particular types of operations. It is something that the Russians are ramping up,” Thornton said.
Photo illustration by CNN/Getty Images
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Moscow has not claimed responsibility for any of the attacks and has not responded to CNN’s request for comment, but Russian President Vladimir Putin has made it clear he sees the war in Ukraine as part of a broader conflict with NATO and that his regime views the government in Kyiv as a mere proxy of the West. And with every increase of Western aid to Ukraine – whether through new weapons deliveries, or the imposition of new sanctions on Russia – the Kremlin has stepped up its saber-rattling.
Thornton said Russia was resorting to a campaign of sabotage as an alternative to a full-on war with NATO, which would be disastrous for Russia.
“It’s long been a part of Russian military doctrine to try and avoid trying to face NATO on a battlefield, because they know they would lose to NATO forces,” he said. “What they are doing is undertaking activities which are below the threshold of armed conflict, so they are not inciting an Article 5 response from NATO,” he added.
Article 5 is the cornerstone principle that an attack on one member of NATO is an attack on all members. It’s only been invoked once – after the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States by al Qaeda.
Thornton said that by deliberately keeping the attacks below the threshold of armed conflict, Russia is hoping to sow more divisions within NATO because there is no clear blueprint on how to act.
“NATO only works when all member states of NATO act in unison. It’s no good if the US, the UK, maybe France say, let’s do this against Russia, and if the other countries say, well, you know, we don’t want to do that, we need to wait on this.”
Nicole Wolkov, a Russia researcher at the US-based Institute for the Study of War, said Russia’s main goal now is to disrupt the flows of Western military aid to Ukraine.
“These hybrid operations are part of Russia’s war effort to weaken Western resolve to support Ukraine and undermine unity within the West,” she said, warning that in the long term, Russia might be gearing up for a more direct confrontation.
“Russia is, and has been since before the war, conducting these hybrid operations against NATO, the West, the EU, in tandem with its attempts to improve its conventional military abilities for a potential future conflict with NATO,” she told CNN.
Years in the making
Russia-watchers say Moscow has been beefing up its hybrid war units for years. The most obvious sign of this, they say, was the promotion of a notorious spy commander, Andrei Averyanov, into the top ranks of the GRU in 2020.
Averyanov allegedly oversaw the 2018 Novichok nerve agent poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury in England, and the 2014 blast in an ammunition depot in the Czech Republic that killed two people. Now the deputy head of the GRU, he is wanted in the Czech Republic over his role in the blast in the town of Vrbetice. Russia has repeatedly denied its involvement in both events.
“He was previously the head of 29155 unit, which is known for its participation in the Salisbury attack, they attempted to organize that coup d’etat in Montenegro, they had operations to destabilize Moldova and Macedonia,” said Oleksandr Danylyuk, an associate fellow at Royal United Services Institute, a UK defense and security think tank, and a former Ukrainian defense and foreign intelligence official.
“His promotion and the creation of a new Special Activity Division that has new powers to recruit their own assets … it’s a very strong indicator that Russia is trying to expand its capabilities,” he added.
Czech Police said that the suspected arsonist in the recent bus station incident was a 26-year-old foreigner who had only arrived in the Czech Republic five days earlier. Fiala, the prime minister, alleged the man was paid for his actions.
The amateurish nature of the Prague attack – the perpetrator did not manage to cause any significant damage and was caught – fits the pattern.
“At the moment, most of these people are just proxies that are paid by the GRU, they aren’t trained to do these types of operations, they might be seen as a testing mechanism conducted by the Russians to see where the weaknesses of Western critical national infrastructure are,” said Danylyuk.
BERLIN, GERMANY - MARCH 07: Police officers work on their desks in the situation room at the Ministry of Interior during the current GETEX joint exercises between German police and military on March 7, 2017 in Berlin, Germany. GETEX, short for the Joint Terrorism Defense Exercise, is taking place across Germany to simulate the joint operations capabilities between German law enforcement agencies and the Bundeswehr, Germany's armed forces, in battling larger-scale terror threats. (Photo by Thomas Trutschel/Photothek via Getty Images)
Thomas Trutschel/Photothek/Getty Images/FILE
Related article German man accused of spying for Russia
Five people have been charged in connection with the arson attack in London – four of them were in their early 20s and at least one was accused of being paid for the attack. The office of the German Federal Public Prosecutor said the people who were arrested on suspicion of planning arson attacks and explosions on behalf of Russia were “in contact” with Russian security officials, rather than being spies themselves. In Poland, a man arrested for spying and planning Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s assassination was also a local citizen.
Danylyuk said the Russian security apparatus doesn’t shy away from using criminals to do its dirty work, tapping into its links with international organized crime.
“What is actually super dangerous and disturbing is that they are using these networks, plus a lot of potentially violent organizations, radical groups, far-right groups, far-left groups,” he said.
Cybercrime and disinformation
Most of the attacks uncovered so far have been relatively minor, suggesting that Russia’s goal isn’t as much about inflicting the biggest possible damage as scaring the local population.
“The aim is to break the will of the citizens and to break the support for Ukraine. If you were living peacefully in your country and suddenly you have a series of terrorist attacks, and this is all attributed to your country supporting Ukraine, that puts pressure on your support for Ukraine,” said Olga Lautman, a security researcher who specializes in the intersection of organized crime and intelligence operations in Russia.
Many of the attacks are accompanied by a disinformation campaign designed to deflect the blame from Russia, researchers say.
That’s very much what happened in the aftermath of the failed arson attack in Prague, according to research from Czech Elves, a group of volunteer activists who monitor, analyze and fight disinformation campaigns that appear on the Czech internet.
The group said that disinformation campaigns it monitored tried to trivialize the attacks and discredit the Czech government. One narrative sought to portray the accusation by Fiala that Russia was behind the arson as an attempt to distract from the government’s poor showing in the European Parliament election. Others mocked the facts, saying the attack affected “only” a few buses.
A file photo shows investigators at the scene of the poisoning of Russian ex-spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury, England.
Frank Augstein/AP
“You have these terrorist attacks and at the same time disinformation operations are blaming the politicians in charge, saying this is why Germany or Poland or the United States should not be involved in supporting Ukraine, because this is not their war,” Lautman said.
The disinformation campaigns appear to go hand-in-hand with cyberattacks. Multiple countries across Europe have suffered major hacks in recent months. Authorities in Finland and Estonia said the GPS signal was being jammed regularly, causing disruptions to flights.
Multiple French government departments suffered what the French described as “a massive cyberattack” in February and, earlier this month, a blood-testing laboratory servicing multiple hospitals in England became a target of a ransomware attack.
Yet Thornton said these incidents are likely just the beginning.
“What Russian cyber operatives are doing now is testing weaknesses within cyber security systems, planting malware, finding out where and how to attack without doing it now,” he said. “They’ll wait for the big day when they need them.”
Underestimating Russia
NATO has for months been warning about Russia’s unconventional attacks on the West, saying Moscow is using espionage, cyber-attacks, electoral interference, disinformation and sabotage trying to destabilize the bloc and weaken its resolve to help Ukraine.
But until recently, European leaders were reluctant to point a finger directly at the Kremlin. According to Lautman, Moscow has become emboldened over recent years, because it has rarely been held accountable.
The US and some European countries imposed limited sanctions on Russia over its actions in Ukraine in 2014. However, it wasn’t until Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 that the West really flexed its sanctions muscle against Russia.
Lautman, who is a non-resident senior fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis, said the complacency towards Russian attacks goes back to at least the 2006 killing of Alexander Litvinenko in London. The former Russian agent turned Kremlin critic was poisoned by a rare radioactive isotope, polonium-210, in what the European Court of Human Rights said was a state-sponsored attack by Russia. The Kremlin has always denied the accusation.
Undated handout file photo issued by the Metropolitan Police of Alexander Petrov (left) and Ruslan Boshirov. The CPS issued European Arrest Warrants for the extradition of the two Russian Nationals in connection with the Novichok poisoning attack on Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia. A third Russian spy faces charges of attempted murder over the Salisbury Novichok poisonings. Issue date: Tuesday September 21, 2021.
Metropolitan Police/PA
Related article Russian suspects in Salisbury poisoning linked to blast in Czech Republic
“They got away with it. Everyone knew it was Russia. I mean, the [alleged] assassin Andrei Lugovoi was promoted and put into the Duma,” Lautman said, adding: “And with Skripal, I will never forget (Prime Minister) Theresa May giving Russia an ultimatum to provide answers. And they delivered another dead body within 48 hours – Nikolai Glushkov.”
Glushkov, a Putin critic, was living in the UK after being granted political asylum. He was found dead in his home in London a week after the Salisbury poisoning. A spokesperson for the Metropolitan Police told CNN that a post-mortem found that he had been strangled and that a murder investigation led by detectives from the Met’s Counter Terrorism Command continues. No arrests have been made and no motive established.
Thornton said that NATO was reluctant to blame the Skripal poisoning directly on Putin and the Russian state because of the risk of escalation and pushing Russia into being a “complete adversary.”
“(They) would kind of said maybe it was a rogue GRU operation, was Putin really behind it? There was an element of ‘let’s not go too far, because we don’t want to lose Putin completely,’” he said.
“Now that’s completely off the table,” he added.
While many of the more high-profile attacks – the Litvinenko and Skripal poisonings, for example – are thought to have been approved or even ordered directly by Putin, the desire to hurt the West cuts through the Russian political establishment, analysts say.
The people known as siloviki — Russia’s most powerful men (they are almost exclusively men) who rose to power through the ranks of the Soviet and Russian security services – see the relationship between the West and Russia as a zero-sum game. Russia can only be strong if the West and NATO are weak.
“Russia has always been antagonistic towards the West,” Thornton said. “It goes way back to tsarist times, the idea of the West being a threat, that the West wants to do Russia down, to make Russia a smaller state, a weak state … so whoever you put in power in the Kremlin, there’s still going to be this mindset that the West is in essence the enemy.”
Lautman agreed, adding that the current establishment’s hatred towards the West stems partly from the events following the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, when Russia had to be bailed out by the West after its economy collapsed.
The idea that Russia’s aggression will end with the eventual demise of Putin is the West’s “biggest mistake,” she said, predicting successive leaders will continue to see the West as an enemy until the country gives up the idea of Russian imperialism – which won’t happen easily.
“And Europe, and the whole international community who wants global stability, they need to understand that Russia is at war with us and that they will continue escalating unless we start acting.”
CNN · by Ivana Kottasová · June 30, 2024
De Oppresso Liber,
David Maxwell
Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy
Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation
Editor, Small Wars Journal
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
Phone: 202-573-8647
email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com
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