Quotes of the Day:

“You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you.”

– Eric Hoffer

"Remember that to change your mind and to accept correction are free acts." 

– Marcus Aurelius

"Attitude is more important than the past, than education, than money, than circumstances, than what people do or say. It is more important than appearance, giftedness, or skill."

– Charles R. Swindoll

1.  Reflections on America’s Military Recruiting Crisis: A View from the Edge

2. Perspectives Apart: Unveiling the Indo-Pacific Understanding of Irregular Warfare

3. THE SLAUGHTER AND THE SPRING

4. Focus on Russia and China threat rather than terrorists, MI5 told

5. THE MAN BEHIND OPERATION OVERLORD

6. A GOP Hawk Tries to Reassure a World on Edge About Trump

7. AI and the Art of War in Ukraine

8. Israel–Hamas War (Iran) Update, June 3, 2024

9. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, June 3, 2024

10. Unleashing innovation: The case for a drone operator branch in the US Army

11. China's defense minister hammers away on Taiwan, says peaceful unification chances 'eroded'

12. NATO to unveil Ukraine security package as ‘bridge’ to membership

13. The Dalai Lama Is Landing in the Middle of the 2024 Election

14. Pentagon looks beyond primes for cheaper drones

15. 'I feel really good' about election security, former NSA chief says

16. Trump Joins TikTok and Calls It ‘An Honor.’ As President He Once Tried to Ban the App

17. China: Closing Off Memory of Tiananmen Massacre

18. Secret Cyber Wars: Why States Are Increasingly Turning to Economic Espionage and How Cyber Proxies Play a Key Role

19. The Dangerous Myth of Deglobalization

20. News site editor’s ties to Iran, Russia show misinformation’s complexity

21. Opinion | How do we want America to be? By William McRaven

1. Reflections on America’s Military Recruiting Crisis: A View from the Edge

A very thought provoking essay that is not the usual critique of the recruiting crisis.

Mon, 06/03/2024 - 2:21pm

Reflections on America’s Military Recruiting Crisis: A View from the Edge

By al Dhobaba

https://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/reflections-americas-military-recruiting-crisis-view-edge

I spent the penultimate week of May in Connecticut, celebrating my nephew's graduation from the U.S. Coast Guard Academy. As I participated in the traditional fanfare, I found myself reflecting on the military's ongoing struggle to recruit enough young people to keep the mandated ranks full. In a 2022 social media post, an anonymous Army recruiter wrote:

"I'd like to summarize recruiting in the Summer of 2022. Today we approached a man in a full duck costume flipping a car wash sign in 96-degree heat. We offered him $35k and a job. He told us to fuck off. I think I am going to get a cheap bottle of liquor, find a park bench and contemplate life."

Save for the Marine Corps, force strength risks falling short of the capacity required to perform critical missions in the service of America's strategic goals. The Pentagon has conjured up a variety of excuses for the on-going shortfall, and implemented measures – particularly aimed at boosting retention – to address the crisis.

Normally, my inclination would be to write in a neutral fashion, omitting myself from the narrative. However, in this case, I think my own experience is actually demonstrative of the root causes of this predicament. Please, indulge me.

I joined my university's Naval ROTC unit in 2000, a member of the last pre-9/11 class to do so. While I excelled at several aspects of the program – pistol marksmanship, recruiting, funeral detail – I consistently struggled with physical fitness, and with STEM subjects like calculus and naval engineering. In early 2002, I voluntarily disenrolled from the program, but likely cut myself off by only a few months, as I was unlikely to achieve advanced standing in the NROTC system's non-scholarship College Program. To be clear: I can point to others whose decisions didn't do me any favors, but ultimately, at nineteen years of age, I failed to do everything in my power to succeed.

By a fluke of timing, I continued with the Naval Science coursework, eventually completing both the Navy and Marine Corps sequences – enough credits to qualify for a second major in most other academic disciplines. As I remained a marginal presence on the unit's periphery, I watched as peers who were clearly less qualified than me managed to get commissioned, alongside peers whom I still consider to be superheroes. The primary difference between me and them? They didn't struggle to run. The message I ascertained was consistent: grades mattered, but not as much as PT scores. More on that to come.

Late in my undergraduate years, still focused on a career in service to America's national security, I set my sights on the intelligence community. My avenue of approach was a series of federal contracting jobs. Initially, I leveraged my Marine Corps coursework, and learned the art of guerrilla warfare as a terrorist role-player at the Army's National Training Center at Fort Irwin. Next, I put my liberal arts skills to work as a technical writer on the Information Assurance team at a combatant command headquarters, learning the fundamentals of cyber security in the process. After a brief transfer to a project support team, I deployed to the Middle East as a DoD maintenance facility's physical security manager and anti-terrorism advisor, just in time for the Arab Spring’s outbreak. After that point, DoD opportunities got scarce – understandably, going primarily to veterans returning from the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq – and my final contracting gigs were back in the cyber security compliance infrastructure of the Department of State and another federal agency. In addition to all of that work experience, I took a sabbatical to complete a master's degree in international relations at a prestigious foreign university, graduating summa cum laude. Despite what I still consider to be an impressive pedigree, countless applications to the various intelligence agencies went largely unanswered, and a few call-backs never panned out.

Now, do you remember that trouble I had with running during my early days as an NROTC midshipman? In early 2017, shortly before leaving contracting, I found myself in a Northern Virginia emergency room with extensive blood clotting in my power body. A CT scan produced an unexpected discovery: the rare circulatory abnormality that had been responsible for my perpetual failure to sustain even a casual running pace. Yes, I could have trained harder, but it never would have yielded a passing run time. My failing had been physical, not one of character. That revelation lifted a colossal burden from my conscience, and gave me a more realistic pathway to improving my health and fitness.

Later that year, I moved home and got married, indefinitely suspending my unfulfilled dream of serving my country in a uniformed or intelligence capacity. Somewhat ironically, I've settled into a stable, if demanding, management position in cyber security – in essence, the civilian trade that my adjunct service to my country taught me – at the same alma mater where I washed out of Naval ROTC more than two decades earlier. In lieu of G.I. Bill benefits, I used my deployment pay to fund that overseas master's degree, graduating debt free. To a surprising degree, my contracting career played out conspicuously similar to the careers of many of my ROTC peers.

Having married in our mid-thirties, our household is child-free, substituting a high-maintenance canine breed for the pitter-patter of little human feet. My job is demanding, but not so much that I couldn’t justify one weekend per month and a two week block once or twice per annum. At forty-two years old, on paper, I may be an awful candidate for the active duty ranks, but I don't think I'm out of line to believe that I'm damn near perfect for plenty of Reserve or National Guard roles. A brief overview:

1) The military is all about leadership, and I've successfully led a variety of teams, ranging from a crew of Iraqi role players, to a team of twelve security contractors augmented by forty TCN guards, to my current team of five student workers. My leadership style would make me a lousy infantry NCO, but otherwise solid for any of the other military occupations that I'd otherwise be suited to.

2) As noted, I earned a master's degree in international relations – Strategic Studies, specifically – from a 500-year-old European university that's not a DoD degree mill. (Yes, I said it.) Additionally, I've published multiple articles on global security matters. My Muslim friends tell me that I know more about Islam than they do, and my friends from the Middle East tell me that I know more about Middle Eastern affairs than most Arabs.

3) I speak what I like to refer to as "enough Arabic to get myself into trouble." (In truth, it's helped me to get out of some jams, break some ice, and de-escalate some tense situations over the years.) I suspect that my skills would improve considerably with the sort of sustained study and practice that the military could facilitate.

4) I hold multiple DoD and industry certifications in physical and cyber security, and anti-terrorism. That's in addition to my two decades of work experience in security, to include that tour in CENTCOM. My Naval Science minor would also absolve me of the standard requirement to attend Navy Officer Candidates School.

5) I previously held a clearance, and have kept myself eligible to be cleared again: no criminal or arrest records, no questionable foreign contacts, a clean credit history, and – despite my home state's laissez-faire laws governing narcotics – no instances of illicit drug use.

6) I'm never going to score a passing run time, but I can pretty well swim until you tell me to stop, ruck adequately, and push-ups and sit-ups have never been much of an issue. With a few months to train, I suspect I could even do some pull-ups. At any rate, I held an O-4 billet overseas without incident. Standards may be important, but as they say, “There’s a waiver for everything.” Oh, yeah: I am vaccinated, and I am not tattooed.

7) Perhaps most important of all: if given the chance, I'd actually care about the opportunity to serve. I'd be motivated to succeed, and seasoned sufficiently to ensure that I'd overcome the challenges that often disrupt the careers of younger troops.

So, why don't I seek out a recruiter? Presumably, nearly two decades of diverse and demanding security work would qualify me for some role in either traditional or cyber security, though my carefully curated knowledge of the Islamic world might suggest a role in intelligence or foreign area work. A long-time friend who's now a retention NCO for the Army Reserve, and who's familiar with my situation, recently encouraged me to apply for a direct commissioning program under the 38G MOS. Why haven't I jumped at it? For the same reasons, I suspect, that many people half my age find themselves increasingly reticent to speak with their local recruiter.

It's become cliché to accuse the current generation of being soft, unwilling to sacrifice, constantly staring at screens. Indeed, the current generation of young people do seem to experience life in a fundamentally different manner than have recent generations. However, whether one does or doesn't agree with them, the recent willingness of students at America's elite universities to jeopardize their futures and occupy encampments in solidarity with Gazans demonstrates both a desire to stand up for a cause, and a willingness to suffer for its advancement. This yearning among young people is timeless, and aptly expressed by U2 in a lyric to their 1991 song, Acrobat: "And I'd join the movement, if there was one I could believe in."

So, why aren't the cause of freedom, the pursuit of justice, and the defense of democracy sufficient motivators anymore? Examples of authority figures and "influencers" denigrating America specifically, and Western values more generally, are manifold. In fact, one need look no further back than the 2020 election, when both major candidates' campaign slogans – "Make America Great Again" and "Build Back Better" – seized upon the prevailing opinion that America was off track. While the conservative movement isn't blameless in this regard, they deserve some credit for defending values that many Americans still consider to be timeless. Progressives, however – the so-called "party of change" – continually work to advance their agenda by claiming that the best of these values are mere idealism, and mostly used as a sort of jingoistic cover for every exploitative ill under the sun.

Thus, the President, the leading opposition candidate, and the down-ballot candidates on either side are constantly harping about a broken system in which everyone is either a victim with a stake in taking the system down, or an oppressor who should feel ashamed for persecuting their neighbors. These omnipresent narratives about how badly broken the system is are not only short-sighted, but do little to inspire high school seniors to sign up to defend that system.

Of course, for many recruits, the inducements – and deterrents – to enlistment are more practical than they are overtly patriotic. In these cases, potential recruits may be willing to tolerate typical deprivations, but may draw the line when they learn from peers or through social media, how ridiculous some such deprivations actually are. Examples of these petty, and often arbitrary restrictions or directives – known to prior generations as "chickenshit" – range widely. In one example, a circa 2015 article lamented the decline of enlisted clubs, an ostensible extension of zero tolerance policies toward excessive alcohol consumption that can end careers. Extrapolating this beyond the enlisted club issue to account for a variety of similar issues, one commentator summarized the situation thusly: "One guy shat his pants, and now the entire Army has to wear diapers." A 2021 memoir by a controversial former officer (whose name I’ll omit) recounted a litany of petty restrictions that he witnessed being enforced at Bagram Air Base, concluding each example with the observation, "because someone lacked moral courage" – the moral courage to acknowledge that these restrictions were ridiculous, and should have been curtailed. After hearing similar stories from their friends and peers, otherwise competent young people would be stupid not to ask themselves, "All things being equal, why would I join an organization that treats me like a child?"

Unfortunately, the "chickenshit" perpetrated by overzealous junior officers and mid-level NCO's often pales in comparison to enterprise-wide mismanagement, and a prevailing sense that senior military leaders are either too incompetent or indifferent to manage programs and resources effectively, or else simply devoid of compassion for junior personnel. Examples include, but certainly aren’t limited to: ongoing mold problems in barracks and family housing; a perpetual lack of job opportunities or credential reciprocity for military spouses; poor resourcing for service members' children, particularly those with special needs; and a Defense Travel System that draws universal scorn for its failure to function effectively.

One of the most public examples of this trend took place in late April of 2022, when Master Chief Petty Officer of the Navy Russell Smith visited the aircraft carrier USS George Washington in its Norfolk drydock. Master Chief Smith's visit followed an extended refit period, the harsh conditions of which contributed to a precipitous decline in crew morale and multiple suspected suicides. Chief among sailors' complaints was that they were forced to live aboard ship, an active construction zone, preventing them from sleeping and curtailing other opportunities for rest and regeneration. Master Chief Smith's response was to direct sailors to "manage their expectations," and to quip, "What you're not doing is sleeping in a foxhole like a Marine might be doing." Whether accurate or not, Master Chief Smith's comments signaled Navy leadership's lack of interest in sailors' basic welfare, and his comments were excoriated in Navy-focused social media groups. While the Navy ultimately developed adjustments to the working conditions aboard the "GW," Smith's comments spoke louder than these remedial measures.

Of course, one would be hard-pressed to claim that any of the other service branches, save perhaps for the Air Force, are substantially more compassionate toward their personnel.

So, what about those who ignore the partisan tropes, petty restrictions, and indifferent leaders, and choose to volunteer anyway? Any and all who wear the uniform can foresee the possibility of death, grievous bodily injury, or traumatic stress. They can expect to spend years of their lives away from loved ones, enduring harsh environmental conditions, and living within a system that often seems senseless or arbitrary. Those who do so deserve a reasonable assurance that competent leaders will apply their sacrifices responsibly, in service to some greater purpose.

Unfortunately, Washington continually fails service personnel in this regard, too. Perhaps the greatest single example of this in recent memory was the incredible accomplishment of a twenty-year-long campaign in Afghanistan that eventually replaced the Taliban with the Taliban, not to mention a withdrawal operation that seemed to have been planned by one of those chickens whose defecation on a particular area of a numbered mat is used to select raffle winners. America's on-again/off-again engagements in Iraq and Syria would also top that list, as would an ongoing program – albeit indirect – to support an ill-defined campaign to defend Ukraine from Russian aggression. The list could go on, and on, and on.

Some grace may be due to policy-makers, as reconciling multiple portfolios of competing foreign and domestic policies can't be easy. Unfortunately, this problem has grown so severe that Defense Secretary Mattis describes Washington as a "strategy-free zone." This strategic fecklessness serves as a deterrent to recruiting, but also to retention: no shortage of outgoing troops, when asked why they left the military in recent years, said that after the fiasco in Afghanistan, they just couldn’t do it anymore. Washington's ongoing failure to establish and maintain a consistent set of values against which to align America's foreign policy objectives, coupled with a failure to communicate or adhere to those objectives, can only discourage the sort of confidence that convinces young people to subordinate themselves to the direct authority of elected and appointed officials.

So, how can these issues be fixed?

First, the chickenshit: make curtailing it both a top-down, and bottom-up, initiative throughout the military. Diagnosing the problems should be fairly straightforward: bring in some consultants, aged around twenty-five, embed them with platoons in eight or ten locations, and ask them to identify anything that strikes them as bizarre or juvenile. Reflective belts required while driving a vehicle? Mark it down. Wallets carried in troops' socks to avoid the appearance of using pockets for their intended purposes? Mark it down. Some practices might be retained for serving an actual military purpose, but others could be discontinued almost immediately. As a young midshipman, our Assistant Marine Officer Instructor repeatedly stated that he subscribed to a "reasonable man's theory." Although he'd probably still terrify me if we were to meet today, he was never unfair with me or any of my peers, and his "reasonable man's theory" went a long way. It's time for a revisitation of this concept throughout the military.

Similarly – and particularly in a difficult recruiting environment, but even during those bear market staffing gluts – civilian service secretaries and uniformed branch chiefs must foster a philosophy that balances discipline and mission focus with compassion and common sense. Any senior leader who makes the sort of comments that Master Chief Smith made in 2022, whether they wear stars or chevrons, should be either counseled or dismissed outright. By extension, service leaders should expect personnel to continue voting with their feet if such headaches as DTS and poor opportunities for spousal employment aren’t addressed effectively. Fix these issues, or expect the joint force to remain under-staffed.

As one might expect, shortcomings among America's elected officials are more difficult to cure. To date, service leaders' testimony to Congress and advice to various Presidents about the long-term negative impacts of budgetary uncertainty on readiness has fallen on deaf ears. Similarly, telling the Democratic National Committee chair, the Senate Majority Leader, and the House Minority Leader that their party's narrative of denigrating their homeland hamstrings recruiting would likely drift into lead balloon territory. So, too, would be the admonition to any given President to focus less on the next election, and more on America's actual enduring interests. Of course, the degree to which the current generation of flag and general officers have been conditioned to think tactically, vice strategically, poses still another great challenge. In these cases, one might optimistically characterize the proverbial glass not as "completely empty," but rather, "poised to be refilled."

Finally, as no crisis should be allowed to go to waste, there's no better time than the occasion of this recruiting crisis to address another opportunity: fixing the Defense Department's antiquated talent management system. This was discussed at length by Tim Kane in his 2012 book, Bleeding Talent, and has been mooted more recently with regard to recruiting experienced cyber security talent. However, the Pentagon remains reticent to make substantial adjustments.

Presently, the Navy offers direct commissioning options for chaplains, specific types of engineers, human resources, attorneys, doctors, public affairs, and supply – a relatively narrow swath of Navy officer designators. The Army offers these, plus a handful of additional options – cyber, logistics, acquisitions, and space. The Army's direct commissioning programs website claims that "the National Defense Authorization Act of 2019 (NDAA 2019) gave the military services the authorization to direct commission officers up to the rank of Colonel," which leads one to question how many direct commissions the services are actually taking on, and whether the ensuing pay grades accurately reflect the qualifications of aspirants. Additionally, the aforementioned 18G direct commissioning program (which tops out at O-4) purports to take up to 2.5 years from submission of an application packet, to assignment to an Army Reserve unit – presumably, other direct commissioning programs share this slow timeline.

It's 2024, and there's a recruiting crisis on. If someone graduates from high school, spends eight years working at a Jiffy Lube, and wants to parlay their position as shift manager into an enlistment, capping them at E-4 does the DoD a disservice, and insults the potential recruit outright. So, too, is the situation for veterans of the private sector who possess valuable technical and leadership experience that would otherwise qualify them for commissioning programs. There’s no better time than now for an overhaul.

If the recruiting crisis is to be mitigated and trends reversed, senior leaders must recognize these non-economic reasons why so few young people currently consider military service to be a realistic option for their medium- or long-term futures. Clearly, the DoD can, and must, do better. Whether that happens will be a matter of choice. As for me, I doubt that I'll be hearing from any recruiters any time soon… But, if any would care to try their luck, I suspect that I'm not that difficult to find.

About the Author(s)

Al Dhobaba (“The Fly”) is the pseudonym of a freelance foreign policy analyst and military historian. Having trained as a naval officer, a congenital medical condition prevented him from commissioning, leading him to pursue an ongoing career as a security practitioner. His professional experience includes providing force protection training for deploying soldiers, managing physical security at a DoD activity in the USCENTCOM theater, and advising federal, state, and private sector organizations on information security management. He holds a bachelor’s degree in History and a master’s degree in International Relations.

2. Perspectives Apart: Unveiling the Indo-Pacific Understanding of Irregular Warfare

Sometimes I just have to chuckle. After spending nearly my entire career since the 1980s in the 1st Special Forces Group and associated organizations in the Asia Pacific, we could hardly get anyone from the "irregular warfare" or SOF community to take the Asia Pacific region seriously (as we used to call it before we changed the name to the INDOPACIFIC) - first during the Cold War it was Europe and then from the first Gulf War on it was the Middle East.. Maybe that is what did it – we changed the name so now everyone can focus on it! Seriously, it is good to see some respect for the region these days but I just hope it is not for the wrong reasons.

After reading this article and conclusion I just wonder how we were even able to conduct irregular warfare operations in the Asia Pacific with our Philippine counterparts and others such as the Thais, or Indonesians, or Australians etc.

The differences in the findings between the first IWC study in this series on Europe and those in the second study on the Indo-Pacific region display a high degree of variation on the conceptualization of IW, the perception of IW related threats, and how the IW is taught in professional military education among different regions. However, the outcomes of this “Conceptualization of Irregular Warfare in the Indo-Pacific Region” study and the takeaways from the accompanying workshop reveal that this theme is not only true in a cross-regional sense, but it is also necessary to understand how individual constituent countries conceptualize IW, assess IW-related threats, and teach IW-related concepts. Without even a regional understanding, effective international cooperation on IW—which is critical for interoperability and competency in the space—is difficult, if not impossible. The IWC’s research series on regional conceptualizations of IW is a key initial step to facilitating this type of cooperation and is necessary to and ensure that U.S. regional leadership on the issue is well-informed, thoughtful, and efficient.

I hope these thinkers do not violate one of our 8 points of irregular warfare:

Understand the indigenous way of war and adapt to it.   Do not force the US way of war upon indigenous forces if it is counter to their history, customs, traditions, and abilities.

https://maxoki161.blogspot.com/2018/07/eight-points-of-special-warfare.html

Do we really want to make our friends, partners, and allies just like us? Can we? Must we all adopt the Pentagon's way of irregular warfare in order to be interoperable. Or do we just need to have understanding as my good friend Frank Hoffman would say.

·      Frank Hoffman's Principle of Understanding. I am a supporter of Dr. Frank Hoffman’s idea that we need a new principle of war called understanding.  Although that seems like a no-brainer – as far back as Sun Tzu we have been told that we must know our enemies and know ourselves to be victorious.   We all know we need to understand war and warfare, the conditions that give rise to conflict, and the politics that lead to and end conflict.  Yet even though the need for understanding is so obvious that we think we do not need to even mention it, it is surprising how so many of our failures can be traced to our lack of understanding.  SOF, through its various assessment capabilities and engagement with indigenous populations can make a key contribution to understanding. https://maxoki161.blogspot.com/2018/07/eight-points-of-special-warfare.html

June 3, 2024

Perspectives Apart: Unveiling the Indo-Pacific Understanding of Irregular Warfare

https://irregularwarfarecenter.org/publications/insights/perspectives-apart-unveiling-the-indo-pacific-understanding-of-irregular-warfare/

Sandor Fabian

IWC Chair of Engagement (Contractor, Morgan 6)

Gabrielle Kennedy

IWC Analyst (Contractor, Valens Global)

Download a PDF of this publication by clicking the icon.

The turn toward strategic competition, due to the increase in conflict outside the bounds of conventional war, has also pivoted security researchers and practitioners toward the idea of irregular warfare (IW). Though IW has been practiced and written on for centuries, the term is not conceptualized in similar fashion across the world—or even across the organizations constituting the U.S. government. Though a globally uniform idea of IW is not likely, and perhaps not even desirable, due to regional and historical differences in conflict experience, it is still critical for the Department of Defense (DoD) to understand how allies and partners conceptualize IW in order to engage them effectively. The Irregular Warfare Center (IWC) has worked to fill this gap with a series of regionally focused studies and follow-on workshops on the conceptualization of IW. The first study in the series focused on the European conceptualization of IW through engaging with PME institutions in the region. The second study followed the same methodology but turned to the Indo-Pacific region. The results of the second study show that, like Europe, countries in the Indo-Pacific conceptualize IW differently, requiring a nuanced understanding of these regional conceptualizations to engage partners and allies in the region effectively.

AN UPDATED VIEW OF THE PENTAGON’S TAKE ON IRREGULAR WARFARE

The criticality of competency in IW to the U.S. Department of Defense was laid out most recently in Joint Publication 1 Volume 1 Joint Warfighting (JP 1 Vol 1), published on 27 August 2023. JP 1 Vol 1 describes IW as:

A form of warfare where states and non-state actors campaign to assure or coerce states or other groups through indirect, non-attributable, or asymmetric activities, either as the primary approach or in concert with conventional warfare. The term “irregular” highlights the character of this form of warfare, which seeks to create dilemmas and increase risk and costs to adversaries to achieve a position of advantage. IW may employ the threat or use of organized armed violence for purposes other than physical domination over an adversary. States and non-state actors may conduct IW when they cannot achieve their strategic objectives by nonmilitary activities or conventional warfare.

Though the U.S. defense community took a step toward providing a consensus definition of IW for its own joint forces, it is difficult to provide an all-encompassing definition that incorporates all aspects of IW and completely addresses challenges for allies and partners.

Other official characterizations of IW by the Department of Defense include:

• US DOD Directive 3000.07– “A violent struggle among state and nonstate actors for legitimacy and influence over the relevant population(s)”
• The 2020 Irregular Warfare Annex to the 2018 National Defense Strategy– “A struggle among state and nonstate actors to influence populations and affect legitimacy. IW favors indirect and asymmetric approaches, though it may employ the full range of military and other capabilities, in order to erode an adversary’s power, influence, and will.”
• US Army Field Manual 3-0– “The overt, clandestine, and covert employment of military and nonmilitary capabilities across multiple domains by state and nonstate actors through methods other than military domination of an adversary, either as the primary approach or in concert with conventional warfare.”

Though progress has clearly been made in terms of the U.S. DoD conceptualization of IW, the United States can capitalize on opportunities to build competency in the IW domain by understanding IW perspectives of allies and partners. To do this, the DoD must not only rely on its own conceptualization of IW, but it also must accept how its partners and allies conceptualize the activity given their respective regional histories, geographies, and geopolitical situations. The IWC, as the central mechanism for developing the DoD’s IW knowledge and advancing the Department’s understanding of IW concepts and doctrine, is working to bridge these gaps and achieve this level of understanding.

IWC CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE CONCEPTUALIZATION OF IW

Working to address this gap on regional conceptualizations of IW, IWC wrote the second installment of its the series on the Indo-Pacific conceptualization of IW. Like the first iteration in the series on Europe, the IWC study on the Indo-Pacific conceptualization of IW focused on key private military education (PME) institutions in the region. In this, IWC utilized a multi-step research approach that first asked representatives of these target PME institutions to provide answers to a questionnaire on 1) institutional thinking surrounding the conceptualization of IW; 2) the perception of IW-related threats; and 3) the target institution’s teaching and publishing on IW. After this first round of questionnaires, representatives participated in an informal interview where questions similar to those on the questionnaire were posed, allowing researchers from IWC to seek clarification on points made in answers to the questionnaire and allowing participants of the study to further expand on their answers.

At the culmination of the study, participants presented on their institutional or national conceptualization of IW at an IWC-hosted workshop that culminated in a roundtable, allowing attendees a chance to ask participants of the study to elaborate on topics that came up in the briefings delivered at the workshop or in the study itself. Participating institutions included the Indian Manohar Parikkar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (MP-IDSA), the Sri Lankan General Sir John Kotelawala Defence University (KDU), the Singaporean S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies at the Nanyang Technological University (RSIS), the Operations Research Center of the Philippine Army (ORCPA), the Malaysian National Defence University (UPNM), the Australian University of New South Wales (UNSW), and the Australian Defence College.

SHARED WORDS BUT NOT MEANINGS

Unlike the study on the European conceptualization of IW, the research in service to the Indo-Pacific conceptualization finds that all institutions surveyed utilize the term IW while some European institutions used the NATO-preferred term “hybrid threats.” Though this might seem to portray an image of a greater degree of consistency among the Indo-Pacific institutions than was seen in the European institutions, this is not the case. Most of the Indo-Pacific institutions were at different points in their thought process regarding IW, with some institutions not having a specific definition of IW. Additionally, the institutional acceptance of ongoing evolution in the definition of IW varied widely. An example of this dichotomy is the dynamic nature of IW and the need for a definition to reflect this, as noted by UPNM, while RSIS utilized a more static and concrete definition of IW.

The definitions offered by the Indo-Pacific institutions surveyed were much farther from the U.S. conceptualization of IW than those offered by the European institutions featured in the first iteration of this research series. However, the University of New South Wales utilizes a definition most closely resembling a U.S. conceptualization of IW. The primary driver of this difference from more Western conceptualization of IW was a common thread through the answers of all Indo-Pacific institutions surveyed: their association between terrorism and insurgency with IW due to the region’s significant history of experience with these challenges. This focus also bled into other ideas that make up the institutions’ conceptualization of IW, making domestic security a primary IW-related concern and violence a necessary condition for IW. Additionally, this line of thinking impacts the institutions’ tendency to recognize IW as being exclusively employed by non-state actors. However, most institutions agreed that states can employ the practice through proxies, which has been especially true in recent conflicts.

DIFFERENCES IN THREAT PERCEPTIONS

The legacy of the region’s experiences with terrorism and insurgency was also visible in how the institutions surveyed ranked IW-related threats. Most of the threats discussed in both the questionnaire responses and interviews were focused heavily on domestic threats or threats that a U.S. audience would associate with criminal activity best addressed through a law enforcement paradigm. Examples included the manipulation of migration flows, a threat considered highly significant to India; the problems posed by drug and arms trafficking, which were echoed across the board; and the danger of terrorist attacks, which was also mentioned by all participants. Terrorism was not only mentioned by all participants in the study, but it was also a salient topic in the accompanying workshop, displaying the impact of the Indo-Pacific’s experiences with counterterrorism and counterinsurgency on regional conceptualizations and rankings of IW-related threats.

Though all participants noted that state actors cannot employ IW on their own, China was by far the most mentioned state actor related to sponsorship of such activities. This is likely due to the proximity of this adversary to participant nations, reinforcing that geography plays a role in IW conceptualization—a key takeaway from the study on Europe that geography plays a role in IW conceptualization. Though China was frequently mentioned as an IW actor by proxy, participants of the INDOPACOM IW Conceptualization workshop discussed the complex relationships these nations have with Beijing. One particular interaction that exemplified this complexity occurred when a participant asked a presenter how the target country’s population perceives Chinese activities deemed nefarious and within the spectrum of irregular warfare as defined by the United States. The presenter responded by citing examples of Chinese loans that the country will almost assuredly default on, which are often characterized by Western audiences as “debt trap diplomacy.” In the presenter’s view, this is a case of incompetence on the part of the target country’s government and not the fault of the Chinese lender, which shocked many audience members. This answer exemplifies the commonly repeated theme that many Indo-Pacific states resent the need to choose between the United States and China as partners, which was also a principle repeated throughout both the study and the accompanying workshop. This frustration is one key subplot in understanding the differences between how the United States and its Indo-Pacific partners view and assess IW-related threats.

THE ABSENCE OF STANDARD IW EDUCATION

Like the results attained on the study questions related to the institutions’ conceptualizations of IW and perceptions of IW-related threats, the study’s questions that tease out how target institutions teach IW- related concepts revealed that there is not a unified approach throughout the Indo-Pacific. Institutions surveyed are at varying levels of dedication to teaching IW-related content, with many of them not having any curricula specifically dedicated to the issue. UNSW is the sole exception, offering a formal master’s degree in IW. In the rest of the cases, IW is taught at varying levels of education as part of other courses, with an example being UPNM embedding IW-related topics into its broader strategic studies curriculum. Unlike the European institutions surveyed in the first iteration of this series, which tended to focus on IW- related education at the theoretical level, it was far more common for the Indo-Pacific institutions surveyed to focus their IW education on both theory and practice at all education levels including the tactical level. As an additional point of distinction with European institutions, the Indo-Pacific institutions did not mention a linkage between the study of IW-related concepts and special operations forces (SOF). This is likely because the Indo-Pacific institutions surveyed tended to address their IW-related education and published work more broadly towards internal stakeholders, their associated government officials and defense sectors writ large, and foreign partners, rather than SOF audiences in particular.

BUILDING EFFICIENT COOPERATION THROUGH GREATER UNDERSTANDING

The differences in the findings between the first IWC study in this series on Europe and those in the second study on the Indo-Pacific region display a high degree of variation on the conceptualization of IW, the perception of IW related threats, and how the IW is taught in professional military education among different regions. However, the outcomes of this “Conceptualization of Irregular Warfare in the Indo-Pacific Region” study and the takeaways from the accompanying workshop reveal that this theme is not only true in a cross-regional sense, but it is also necessary to understand how individual constituent countries conceptualize IW, assess IW-related threats, and teach IW-related concepts. Without even a regional understanding, effective international cooperation on IW—which is critical for interoperability and competency in the space—is difficult, if not impossible. The IWC’s research series on regional conceptualizations of IW is a key initial step to facilitating this type of cooperation and is necessary to and ensure that U.S. regional leadership on the issue is well-informed, thoughtful, and efficient.

3. THE SLAUGHTER AND THE SPRING

A powerful immigrant story from someone I am proud to call a friend.

Conclusion:

Aren’t most if not all the answers to life’s greatest mysteries simple questions? A child knows as much, as did Rabbi Hillel in the first century BCE, who is reputed to have asked: “If I am not for me, who will be for me? And when I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, then when?” The effective protection of individual liberty, far from excluding empathy, presupposes it. Over the millennia, Jews have paid dearly for this insight. But they exemplify the human condition. “Because the Jewish struggle for freedom is always launched against political despotism,” explains Wisse, now a distinguished fellow at the Tikvah Fund, “it benefits everyone else who truly clings to freedom.” Don’t be fooled by words: the liberal idea is no mere ism. It is a way of life, and hope, and compassion. Against slaughter there must be spring. 

THE SLAUGHTER AND THE SPRING

Dr. Juliana Geran Pilon

June 3, 2024

• https://docemetproductions.com/the-slaughter-and-the-spring/

None of us slept on the way over from Paris. And not just because of the menacing rumblings of the wabbly propeller (actually, not bad for 1962) that could keep awake the deaf, let alone a bunch of Jewish immigrants praying they would be spared forty years in the wilderness – most didn’t have that much time left. The majority were from Romania, though others hailed from as far as Morocco, and who knows where else. But all of us, all night, did what Jews do best: worry. 

It was the usual Semitic sort of worry, a mixture of hope and fear. Above all, hope: that in this fancy New World, which none of us had ever seen, we might be treated like everyone else, as equals. Fear too: that we would indeed be so treated, despite having next to no assets besides ill-fitting clothes. Our skills were largely obsolete, and most of us could speak no English. Well, so be it; no whining, get with the program.  

Sure, we were equal before God. That much we didn’t doubt; we were Jews after all, even if our identity came mostly by osmosis, as much culturally imbibed as visceral. But we had heard that we really would be equally treated by laws that applied to everyone, at least theoretically. OK, maybe; but what about in practice? Would this island-continent prove, in the end, as forbidding to us as a desert? We didn’t even have a Moses to assure us that, God willing, it will all work out. Besides, even if God willed it, it was now up to us, which wasn’t all that comforting. Anyway, who’s worried about forty years when you don’t even have forty cents. 

Perhaps if we had glimpsed that Statue of Liberty everyone talked about, the Deity of Diaspora, we might have felt a little better. Unfortunately, it was hard to spot from an airplane, especially above the clouds. In any event, could we have believed her promise, inscribed on the plaque at her feet, that all her homeless, tempest-tossed children would be truly welcome? Ragged as we were?  

Maybe it would have helped to know that its words had been penned by a young poet, Emma Lazarus, who had also been Jewish, indeed descended from the very first group of Hebrews to settle where we had landed, albeit three centuries earlier, in 1654. They had been fleeing from Brazil, where they had settled after expulsion from Portugal and, earlier still, from Spain (as it happens, alongside my father’s ancestors – who had headed East instead). Those twenty-three peripatetic descendants of Jacob, who had wavered off course into New rather than Old Amsterdam (toward which they had been headed), were eventually, if reluctantly, allowed to stay. A mere two centuries or so later, their Emma would become a famous poet! So, if they, equally destitute, had survived and even thrived, why shouldn’t we? 

Our plane was approaching Manhattan, revealing a surreal skyline against the sunniest June day we had ever seen before or, I daresay, since. Were we awake, alive, sane? Could those obelisk-shaped objects be real buildings, or were we hallucinating? The rumbling grew to an apocalyptic roar, the huge rip of unfolding wheels announcing the jolt of descent – heart-stopping, had our hearts not already stopped, in mid-breath. We remembered to exhale, then emerged, dazed, into the light, a burning bush in the pit of our stomachs. Was it the heartburn of being reborn, absent an umbilical cord?  

Reborn we had to be. And so, we proved to be, my little family, indeed with astonishing rapidity. It didn’t have to take forty years to get used to not being a slave if you had never really been one. Because thanks to my parents’ good sense, we had somehow kept our wits about ourselves during all those years under communism.  

Though clearly risky if it had been discovered or even suspected, it hadn’t been that hard to see through the clumsy attempts by the mandarins of the Communist Party to camouflage their naked overfed bellies. Their ill-fitting ideological suits ready-made in Moscow, one-size-fits-all, were too obviously transparent. But even the stupidest little girl knew to keep her trap shut: there was no point in pointing out the imperial nudity so patently manifest. That had been her nursery school lesson number one. (Also, numbers two and three.)  

The little girl wasn’t so stupid as not to notice how her parents used the never-read newspapers only as toilet paper, nor how they listened intently to a barely audible radio broadcast after they thought her asleep. And how they would tell their friends jokes in a whisper, believing she couldn’t overhear. True, she didn’t get the punchline; but she knew better than to ask questions when there would be no answers. 

More puzzling was grandma’s Friday night ritual of candle lighting. As she draped her always-neatly combed hair in a gossamer-thin scarf, and whispered some mysterious incantation while circling lovingly above the lights, why did tears fall softly on her face? Was this her way of asking questions? Maybe it was her way of getting answers. 

Until the answers stopped. A few months after we had arrived in America in June, the children she had not seen in four decades would make it clear it was far too late for her. Then her tears merely accompanied her kaddish: for the relatives sent to Auschwitz who were never mentioned, and for the severely paralyzed adult son for whom she had cared for over three decades, who had died in Paris on our way over from Romania. Before long, she would melt into the darkness that long ago claimed all the dreams she barely dared to have.  

The Mother of Exiles, as Emma Lazarus called the secular goddess of Liberty, couldn’t keep the promise she made to all those who washed up on its shores. In truth, it wasn’t really a promise so much as a nod to go ahead and wash up. In my grandmother’s case, the tide had already receded by the time she reached us in America, a few weeks after our own arrival; we scooped her up as best we could, but her wings had been torn long ago, even if she didn’t know it then. She died a few short years after arriving in the United States, a shadow of herself.  

As for the rest of us, we had to be ready as soon as we could, to exercise our newfound “liberty.” Whatever that meant; we didn’t really know. The main problem with growing up under communism is that you can never take words at face value but must read between lines, and you couldn’t be sure you got it right, since the official lexicon had to be translated by unorthodox, underground, mostly silent methods. To cite but a few examples: 

Democracy: everyone must vote. Not-voting, abstaining, and write-ins are treasonous, subject to unimpeachable and (obviously!) unappealable discretion.  

Dictatorship of the proletariat: dictatorship. 

Equality: inequality.  

Equality: nonexistent except under socialism/communism/people’s democracy. 

Peaceful coexistence: voluntary disarming of non-Communist regimes so militarily superior Communist countries would have an easy time of it when liberating their lucky inhabitants. 

Liberation: Communist takeover. 

Cosmopolitan: Jewish.  

Trotskyite: Jewish.  

Jewish: a nationality; not a religion.  

Religion: under socialism/communism, none. 

Religion: opium of the people. 

Fascist: anti-Communist.  

Racist: anti-Communist.  

Capitalist: anti-Communist. 

Truth: what the Party says it is.  

Falsehood: what the Party doesn’t want to be said.  

Enemy of the people: whoever party leaders want to get rid of.  

Trial: a spectacle to fool Communist sympathizers in the West into imagining that not all the accused are already known to be guilty.  

Trial by jury: a strictly Western charade. 

Communist economics: an oxymoron.  

I did know that words are no laughing matter. They can do much more than turn reality on its head – they can change flesh to ashes. Slippery things, words, if you look at them closely. Take allegories with their deceptive simplicity. For example, when the Mother of Exiles beckons all those “yearning to breathe free,” who is she addressing? The nearly choking who want to breathe anything, or merely those looking for cleaner air? Some of the former may have only the vaguest idea what oxygen is, let alone how much of it they needed. We weren’t quite in that situation, but close enough. And what is she promising? At least she might not turn us away – which is more than Europe’s Jews could say when the alternative was crematoria. What did seem clear to me was that the yearning itself is a powerful enough impulse for human beings to risk almost everything.  

Not knowing what would await us, our little delegation of freedom-seekers had modest goals: we wanted to live anew, join the near-mythical country that seemed willing to give us a chance, and we would gladly do our best to justify the privilege. We implicitly pledged to link our various histories, habits, and hopes with those of people we would soon call neighbors and compatriots. We would thus effectively become the latest adoptees of the American family, themselves descendants of the self-orphaned.  

It was easy for us to be part of a people who had declared the God-given right to liberty as self-evident in what they called a Declaration of Independence. That parchment, signed by men who risked being hanged for treason on its account, represented a covenant (in Hebrew, brit) with the Creator, whose protection in turn was conditioned on their own rightful actions. It was, one might say, in our biblically conditioned bones.  

But oh, there was so much we didn’t know. We didn’t realize, for example, to what extent America’s Founders had indeed been informed by the Hebrew Bible. Considering themselves to have been chosen to be free, they were determined to keep that freedom, believing themselves to have been entrusted with a sacred responsibility. The Declaration of Independence, either preempted or later echoed by the state constitutions, was ultimately enshrined in the nation’s birth certificate, the U.S. Constitution. Which turned out to be both very short and remarkably easy to read even two centuries later. America considered itself at the outset to be a creedal nation in the biblical tradition, with the potential to attempt once again to respect all humans as equally unequal.  

That creed, unfortunately, is increasingly under attack. Alongside an increasingly vocal and virulent anti-Americanism the academy and the media, antisemitism has risen as well, hardly by coincidence. Disguised as anti-Zionism, it has found resonance among Jews themselves; so, what should we expect from the surrounding culture? Having first landed in this country a lifetime ago – ten decades, to be exact – I am appalled to see many of my friends giving up on America, afraid of escalating antisemitism. I share Harvard Professor emerita Ruth Wisse’s dismay, as well as her admission that  

[e]verything about the upsurge of anti-Jewish politics in the United States troubles me: the role of universities, media, and cultural elites in abetting anti-Zionism, the successor and incorporator of anti-Semitism; the organization of grievance brigades against the allegedly privileged Jews; the ease with which the Arab and Islamist war against the Jewish people has found a home on the left; the electability of known anti-Semites to government; the lone shooters who choose Jews for their targets; the underreported street attacks on visible Jews; and the timidity and stupidity of some American Jewish spokesmen in response to all this aggression. 

And then comes the clincher: “It wasn’t the escalation of anti-Jewish activity that surprised me, but the idea that it’s therefore time for Jews to give up on America altogether.” Not only isn’t it time but it would be deeply immoral, given how much we owe this amazing nation. But even more profoundly, it would amount to betraying our very essence as a liberal community. Yes, liberal. Not in the mutated, mendacious sense in which it has been used for nearly a century, but the original, biblical sense: that we are all created equal in God’s image. We owe it to ourselves. 

Rabbi Meir Soloveichik perfectly captures the role of Jews in helping “to make the case for the exceptional nature of this country for which Jews have always been grateful. The welcome that Jews received in America from the very beginning highlighted America’s uniqueness, how its Founders revered the Hebraic tradition, and fused Lockean ideas with the covenantal thought they found in the Hebrew Bible, forging a worldview that saw Americans as endowed with individual rights but also bound in common destiny.” It is at bottom common sense – still the best defense against cant, lies, and attacks on simple faith in the goodness of creation.  

Aren’t most if not all the answers to life’s greatest mysteries simple questions? A child knows as much, as did Rabbi Hillel in the first century BCE, who is reputed to have asked: “If I am not for me, who will be for me? And when I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, then when?” The effective protection of individual liberty, far from excluding empathy, presupposes it. Over the millennia, Jews have paid dearly for this insight. But they exemplify the human condition. “Because the Jewish struggle for freedom is always launched against political despotism,” explains Wisse, now a distinguished fellow at the Tikvah Fund, “it benefits everyone else who truly clings to freedom.” Don’t be fooled by words: the liberal idea is no mere ism. It is a way of life, and hope, and compassion. Against slaughter there must be spring. 

Dr. Juliana Geran Pilon is a Senior Fellow at the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization. Her books include The Utopian Conceit and the War on Freedom, The Art of Peace: Engaging a Complex World, Soulmates: Resurrecting Eve, Why America is Such a Hard Sell: Beyond Pride and Prejudice, The Bloody Flag: Post-Communist Nationalism in Eastern Europe — Spotlight on Romania, Notes From the Other Side of Night, and three anthologies. She has published over two hundred articles and reviews on international affairs, human rights, literature, and philosophy, and has made frequent appearances on radio and television. 

4. Focus on Russia and China threat rather than terrorists, MI5 told

Unrestricted warfare.

Excerpts:

Intelligence sources said that Chinese agents are active in academia, among both students and lecturers, in business and even the arts.

In some cases, those gathering information may not be aware that they are being exploited for intelligence reasons by the Chinese state.

The head of MI5 said last year that 20,000 Britons had been approached by Chinese state actors on LinkedIn in the hope of stealing industrial or technological secrets.

...

Col Philip Ingram, a former Army intelligence officer added: “Quantifying the number of Chinese intelligence sources in the UK is impossible.

“Article 7 of China’s national intelligence law states that all Chinese organisations and citizens should ‘support, assist and cooperate’ with Chinese intelligence efforts, meaning every citizen could be used overtly or without their knowledge by the Chinese state to gather information.

“The UK is a significant target for China given its political position in the UN, financial position in global economics, reputation for global research and technology and military position as a nuclear power with a global military reach.

“It will be running significant espionage operating from the Chinese embassy but many other operations will be run remotely from China exploiting opportunities online.

“There will be many unwitting agents of the Chinese state in business, academia or government departments across the country.”

Focus on Russia and China threat rather than terrorists, MI5 told

Yahoo · by Sean RaymentJune 1, 2024 at 11:26 AM·5 min read4Link Copied

MI5 has been ordered to “refocus” its efforts on targeting spies rather than terrorists following a major recruitment drive by Russia, China and Iran, The Telegraph can reveal.

Russia’s war in Ukraine, the growing number of Chinese agents operating in the UK and the use of organised criminals by Iran have shifted the security service’s main targets significantly.

While domestic and international terrorism remain a priority for MI5, more resources are now being pushed towards Russian, Chinese and Iranian counter-espionage operations, government sources have said.

MI5 has been asked by ministers to “refocus a lot of their efforts on the espionage threat, particularly the state threat from China, Russia and more recently Iran as well”, a senior government source said.

They insisted that “counter-terrorism has not been deprioritised but this has been prioritised alongside it”, adding that “their workload has definitely shifted in that direction”.

The source pointed out that in the wake of the 2018 Salisbury Novichok attack, Russia “lost a large chunk of their intelligence officers overnight” and has since been trying to recruit new assets to plug the gaps.

Britain expelled 23 Russian spies as part of its “full and robust response” to the poisoning of former double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia.

Vladimir Putin met Xi Jinping in May. It is feared Russian and Chinese espionage in the UK is escalating - Sergei Bobylev via AP

The source went on to explain that Britain’s support for Ukraine in the war against Russia has also led to increased spying activity.

“The more you step out, the more you find yourself in their crosshairs,” they said.

In May, it emerged that Russia was recruiting violent Right-wing extremists to conduct sabotage attacks in Europe and the UK, fuelling concerns among intelligence chiefs.

The Telegraph also understands that the number of Chinese agents employed in intelligence gathering in the UK is now regarded as “unquantifiable”.

Intelligence sources said that Chinese agents are active in academia, among both students and lecturers, in business and even the arts.

In some cases, those gathering information may not be aware that they are being exploited for intelligence reasons by the Chinese state.

The head of MI5 said last year that 20,000 Britons had been approached by Chinese state actors on LinkedIn in the hope of stealing industrial or technological secrets.

Ken McCallum, MI5 director-general, faces a level of espionage threat not seen for 50 years - MI5/PA

Ken McCallum, MI5 director-general, said industrial espionage was happening at “real scale”, and he estimated that 10,000 UK businesses were at risk, particularly in industries where China was trying to get ahead such as artificial intelligence, quantum computing or synthetic biology.

A second government source told National Security News: “MI5 has limited resources so resources have to be prioritised. The terrorist threat level remains ‘substantial’ which means an attack is likely but in reality the challenges currently posed by China and Russia are more pressing.”

The source added that as many as 20 Chinese embassy officials in the UK were likely to be operating as spies.

“But the numbers of agents, civilians who have been recruited by the Chinese intelligence services may run into the hundreds of thousands,” he added.

“There are probably people in the UK who have no idea that they are supplying intelligence to the Chinese government. These may be Chinese nationals working or studying in the UK or British citizens.”

Iran is also believed to be using organised crime gangs to conduct intimidation operations and plot assassinations in the UK.

Last year, Mr McCallum warned that Iranian-backed terror attacks in the UK were more likely in the wake of the war in Israel.

The current national terror threat level is “substantial”, meaning security officials believe an attack is likely. It was lowered from “severe” in 2022, when officials believed an attack was “highly likely” following a spate of high-profile incidents across the UK.

Mr McCallum is expected to address the growing espionage threat posed by so-called hostile states and non-state actors publicly later this year, highlighting that the espionage threats posed by Russia, China and Iran have rarely been greater in the last 50 years.

Last month, Parliament’s joint committee on the national security strategy warned that Britain “must be prepared for the possibility of foreign interference” by China, Russia and Iran during the general election.

‘UK significant target for China’

Col Philip Ingram, a former Army intelligence officer added: “Quantifying the number of Chinese intelligence sources in the UK is impossible.

“Article 7 of China’s national intelligence law states that all Chinese organisations and citizens should ‘support, assist and cooperate’ with Chinese intelligence efforts, meaning every citizen could be used overtly or without their knowledge by the Chinese state to gather information.

“The UK is a significant target for China given its political position in the UN, financial position in global economics, reputation for global research and technology and military position as a nuclear power with a global military reach.

“It will be running significant espionage operating from the Chinese embassy but many other operations will be run remotely from China exploiting opportunities online.

“There will be many unwitting agents of the Chinese state in business, academia or government departments across the country.”

Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 3 months with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.

Yahoo · by Sean RaymentJune 1, 2024 at 11:26 AM·5 min read4Link Copied

5. THE MAN BEHIND OPERATION OVERLORD

From Strategy Central with an imagined letter from 1945 looking back on D-Day. Fascinating. 

THE MAN BEHIND OPERATION OVERLORD

On The 80th Anniversary of D-Day, We Look At The Man Who Made The Plan

https://www.strategycentral.io/post/the-man-behind-operation-overlord?postId=f7619744-8377-4439-bd8c-f3c9f5491421&utm

LIEUTENANT-GENERAL FREDERICK E. MORGAN:

When Frederick Morgan was appointed COSSAC (Chief of Staff to the Supreme Allied Commander), in the spring of 1943, there was no approved plan for a cross-Channel attack or commander. There was no agreement about when the re-entry into the Continent would occur. The Western Allies were in the midst of a great debate about the strategy or strategies to defeat Nazi Germany. Lieutenant General Morgan's primary task was to create a plan that the inter-allied Combined Chiefs of Staff would approve.

To gain that authorization, Morgan had to decide where the attack was to take place, address the need for improvised shelters for the transport ships until a port could be captured, and create all the structures necessary for a multi-national force that would liberate countries, not occupy them, and convince his superiors that it could be done with the limited forces they were willing to provide.

Morgan offered vital contributions to developing the OVERLORD plan. His leadership was surprisingly fearless, problem-solving unorthodox, and his willingness to disregard or modify orders he thought wrong was very surprising. By constantly taking the initiative to move the discussions forward, Morgan secured the needed political approval of a concept for the Normandy landings that Generals Montgomery and Eisenhower would modify into the D-Day operational plan.

DEVELOPING OPERATION OVERLORD

The complexities of organizing an amphibious assault on such an unprecedented scale are hard to comprehend. Morgan's efforts to coordinate the multifaceted aspects of the invasion—ranging from deception strategies to detailed logistics to the synchronization of land, sea, and air forces—are breathtaking in scope and depth. The establishment of COSSAC was a response to the need for a unified planning body, and Morgan's leadership was crucial in navigating the political and military intricacies of the Allied coalition.

Morgan and his team developed many drafts and different plans, reflecting the evolving nature of the strategy as they responded to intelligence reports and the dynamic situation in Europe. The meticulous planning process included creating detailed deception plans, such as Operation Bodyguard, which aimed to mislead the Germans about the invasion's true landing sites and timing. These efforts were essential in securing the element of surprise and reducing German resistance during the initial landings.

Morgan's interactions with key Allied leaders, including General Eisenhower and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, showcase the diplomatic skill required to manage and align the differing priorities and perspectives within the Allied command. His ability to present a cohesive and convincing plan ultimately led to the operation's approval and the subsequent detailed planning by SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force) under Eisenhower's command.

WHAT DO YOU SAY TO YOUR BOSS?

Imagine being the man in charge of developing Operation Overlord.  Something so massive is hard to conceive. Understanding the requirements alone would take an exceptional mind, but to have the political savvy to navigate the titanic egos of the generals and politicians required a general of exceptional skill.  Lieutenant-General Frederick E. Morgan embodied so much of what is expected of general officers and British gentlemen of the day.

To plan something of such importance and magnitude would be an awesome responsibility, so what did Morgan think of what was accomplished using his ideas? If he could write a letter to the Supreme Allied Commander, Eisenhower, what would he say about what they accomplished?  Eighty years after their great gamble began in Normandy and ended in Berlin, it’s worth considering how the father of the plan would explain the victory to his boss.

The following is an imagined letter from Morgan to Eisenhower that attempts to capture the success and challenges that started long before forces landed on that French beach:

DECLASSIFIED 1 MAY 1965

1 May 1945

Lieutenant-General Frederick E. Morgan

Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force

General Dwight D. Eisenhower

Supreme Commander, Allied Expeditionary Force

Office of the Supreme Commander

Dear Ike,

As we stand on the cusp of victory, I felt it pertinent to reflect on the colossal endeavour that has been Operation Overlord, from its inception to the present day. In particular, I wish to outline what has worked well and where we faced notable challenges, providing a comprehensive view of our strategies and their outcomes.

The conception of Operation Overlord was a monumental task, necessitating meticulous planning and coordination on an unprecedented scale. The primary success lay in our ability to bring together a diverse coalition of forces, each contributing their unique strengths to the overall mission. The initial deception strategies, codenamed Operation Bodyguard, were remarkably effective in misleading the enemy about the true location and timing of the invasion. The use of fictitious armies and misleading radio traffic played a crucial role in convincing the German High Command that the Pas de Calais was our target, rather than Normandy.

The fortitude of our troops during the D-Day landings on 6 June 1944, particularly at Utah and Gold beaches, exemplified the best of Allied cooperation and bravery. The airborne operations preceding the landings, involving the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions, were instrumental in securing key bridges and disrupting enemy communications. This ensured that our beach landings could proceed with reduced opposition, despite the formidable defences of the Atlantic Wall.

Furthermore, the establishment of a secure beachhead in Normandy was critical. The Mulberry harbours, although one was severely damaged by a storm, provided indispensable logistical support. The rapid construction of these artificial ports enabled us to sustain the flow of troops, vehicles, and supplies, ensuring the momentum of our advance. The PLUTO (Pipeline Under the Ocean) project, which supplied fuel from Britain to France, was another logistical triumph, facilitating our mobile operations as we pushed inland.

The air superiority achieved by our forces also played a crucial role in isolating the battlefield and crippling German reinforcements. The strategic bombing campaign against key infrastructure and transportation hubs severely hindered the enemy’s ability to mount effective counterattacks. The tireless efforts of our naval forces in maintaining control of the Channel and providing bombardment support were equally vital.

However, not all aspects were without significant hurdles. The delays in the initial breakout from the bocage country of Normandy tested our resolve and highlighted the challenges of fighting in such treacherous terrain. The dense hedgerows provided natural defensive positions for the enemy, necessitating a slow and methodical advance. The Battle of Caen, intended to be a swift capture, turned into a prolonged and costly engagement, demonstrating the fierce resistance and tactical ingenuity of the German forces.

Our subsequent operations to encircle and liberate Paris were fraught with logistical complexities and required constant adaptation to changing circumstances on the ground. Operation Cobra, the breakout from Normandy, marked a turning point, enabling us to exploit the weakened German defences and advance rapidly across France. The liberation of Paris in August 1944 was a significant morale boost, yet it also underscored the challenges of managing liberated territories and coordinating with various resistance groups.

As we progressed further into the heart of Germany, the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944 was a stark reminder of the enemy's resilience. The surprise counteroffensive required immediate and decisive action, showcasing our ability to rapidly reorganise and repel the assault, ultimately turning a potential crisis into a defining moment of Allied solidarity and strength. The bitter winter conditions and the tenacity of the German forces made this one of the most challenging battles of the campaign.

The final push across the Rhine and into Germany was a testament to the relentless drive and coordination of our forces. The swift advances made by Patton's Third Army and Montgomery's 21st Army Group encapsulated the success of our combined arms strategy. Despite the logistical challenges and the determined resistance faced in the Ruhr Pocket, the encirclement and eventual surrender of German forces marked the effective end of organized resistance. The capture of key cities such as Aachen and the subsequent crossing of the Rhine at Remagen were pivotal moments that demonstrated the effectiveness of our strategic planning and execution.

In closing, Operation Overlord's success can be attributed to our unwavering commitment to a unified command structure, meticulous planning, and the extraordinary bravery of our troops. The lessons learned from our setbacks have only strengthened our resolve and adaptability. As we prepare for this conflict's final stages, I am confident that our shared vision and relentless pursuit of victory will soon bring about the desired peace in Europe.

Yours sincerely,

Frederick E. Morgan 

Lieutenant-General 

Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force

DECLASSIFIED 1 MAY 1965

6. A GOP Hawk Tries to Reassure a World on Edge About Trump

We cannot want it more than them. And one of our strategic weaknesses is that we fail to recognize this pehenomoane (that we do want it more than them) until it is too late.

Although this is written from the perspective of irregular warfare it applies to supporting allies in general.

5.  Ensure US and indigenous interests are sufficiently aligned.  If indigenous and US interests are not sufficiently aligned the mission will fail.  If the US has stronger interest than the indigenous force we can create an “assistance paradox” - if indigenous forces believe the US mission is "no fail” and the US forces will not allow them to fail; therefore, they do not need to try too hard.  They may very well benefit from long term US aid and support which may be their objective for accepting support in the first place.

https://maxoki161.blogspot.com/2018/07/eight-points-of-special-warfare.html

Excerpts:

Sipping an IPA in the rooftop lounge of his swanky Taipei hotel, Sullivan pushed back against the isolationism of some in today’s GOP. “Some of my colleagues are like, ‘We can let Ukraine go, but we’re going to be really strong in the Taiwan Strait,’” he said. “Here’s the deal. The world doesn’t work that way. Deterrence is not divisible.”

In meetings with Taiwan’s senior political, military and legislative leadership, Sullivan pressed repeatedly for assurances that the island would rise up in its own defense if attacked. “Are they capable, like Ukraine?” is how he describes his primary question. “Do they have the ability to fight? Do they have the will? Or are they Afghanistan?”

A GOP Hawk Tries to Reassure a World on Edge About Trump

In Taipei and Singapore, Sen. Dan Sullivan looks to quell foreign leaders’ fears that the U.S. won’t stand by allies if Trump wins

https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/a-gop-hawk-tries-to-reassure-a-world-on-edge-about-trump-54775091?mod=djem10point

By Molly Ball

Follow

Updated June 3, 2024 12:04 am ET

TAIPEI—Sen. Dan Sullivan stood beside the newly elected Taiwanese vice president in an orchid-draped room of the island’s presidential palace, making a promise that wasn’t wholly within his power to keep.

“This is the message our bipartisan delegation wants to send to the people of Taiwan: You can count on the United States of America,” said the silver-haired Alaska Republican, a recently retired Marine.

Sullivan and three Democratic senators made the trip last week to be among the first to meet with the island’s newly elected administration. The Chinese government, which views Taiwan as a renegade province, responded to the inauguration of President Lai Ching-te with military drills simulating a blockade of the 100-mile-wide strait that separates Taiwan from the mainland. China’s Embassy in Washington accused the lawmakers of “interfering in China’s internal affairs” and “undermining China-U.S. relations and cross-Strait peace and stability.”

But if the senators’ trip was aimed at demonstrating America’s steadfast commitment at a uniquely challenging time, such assurances may ring hollow against the backdrop of a U.S. election that has the world on edge. The prospect of former President Donald Trump’s return to the White House has Washington diplomats chattering and foreign leaders on tenterhooks. The unpredictable ex-president has sent mixed signals about some of America’s most pressing foreign-policy challenges, including hinting that the U.S. might not defend Taiwan if China attacks the island.

Dan Sullivan meeting with Taiwan’s President Lai Ching-te in Taipei, in a photo released by Taiwan’s presidential office. PHOTO: TAIWAN PRESIDENTIAL OFFICE/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

“Widespread, profound, grave concern,” is how Sen. Chris Coons (D., Del.), a member of the bipartisan delegation and top foreign-policy adviser to President Biden, describes the mood among American allies. “Every head of state I’ve met this year, the election is the only thing they want to talk about.”

The concern was palpable as the delegation continued from Taiwan to Singapore, where the senators attended the annual Shangri-La Dialogue national-security conference. Delegates buzzed about the Trump-Biden race between meetings on regional issues, knowing that the outcome of their November contest will have a profound effect on an unsteady world. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin met with his Chinese counterpart, Adm. Dong Jun, who later gave a fiery speech to the conference promising that “anyone who dares separate Taiwan from China will only end in self-destruction.” 

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin speaking with his Chinese counterpart, Adm. Dong Jun, in Singapore. PHOTO: ORE HUIYING/BLOOMBERG NEWS

The conference delegates assembled in Singapore were more concerned with regional security issues than the work of a Manhattan jury, which caused barely a ripple. The news of Trump’s conviction on 34 felony counts broke at 4 a.m. Friday in Singapore, where the senators had a packed schedule of meetings with foreign heads of state and defense officials.

Caught in the middle of these political and geopolitical currents is Sullivan, a leading voice in his party on national security who has sought to maintain the GOP’s traditional Reaganite posture in the face of his party’s rising isolationism.

But he is also a loyal Republican: Responding to the verdict, Sullivan issued a blistering statement calling it a “gross abuse of our justice system” and comparing it to a Soviet show trial. “The conviction of a former president—the leading candidate for the White House—just months before the election sets a dangerous precedent and pushes our great nation even further into banana republic territory,” he said. On the other hand, some critics argue that Trump’s attacks on the justice system could erode the U.S. reputation as a stronghold for democracy around the world.

Donald Trump’s conviction was a ‘gross abuse of our justice system,’ Dan Sullivan said. PHOTO: JUSTIN LANE/PRESS POOL

Reassuring Taiwan

Uncertainty over America’s future course is urgent in Taiwan, where “yi mei lun,” a phrase that roughly translates as “U.S. skepticism,” has become a commonplace staple of political discourse. From the whiplash of the Trump administration to recent American actions in Afghanistan, Ukraine and Israel, questions abound about whether the U.S. can be trusted to stand with its friends around the world.

“Allies are worried about being thrown under the bus,” said Bonnie Glaser, managing director of the Indo-Pacific Program at the German Marshall Fund. “Europe is worried that the United States will abandon Ukraine and that Russia will win the war. Taiwan has the same fear.”

Asked about Taiwan in a Fox News interview last year, Trump wouldn’t commit to protecting the island from a hypothetical Chinese invasion, saying that making such a promise would “put me in a very bad negotiating position.” Trump’s administration was marked by divisions and infighting on China, as the president vacillated between tough talk and tariffs on the one hand and attempted dealmaking and admiration for Xi Jinping’s authoritarian control on the other, culminating in Trump’s seesaw response to the China-originated Covid-19 pandemic.

Trump’s equivocation in the Fox interview prompted fears that he might seek to use the island as a bargaining chip. A former top official on China in the first Trump administration said such fears weren’t wholly unfounded. “I think it’s pretty obvious that he’s less concerned about Taiwan as an issue in and of itself,” the official said. “But he also knows that this is a point of deep contention with Beijing, and he’s not in the mood to give Beijing wins.” The official added that Trump blames Xi and the pandemic for his loss of the 2020 election.

Trump’s seeming indifference to the fate of Taiwan’s democracy is a far cry from the views of Sullivan, a protégé of the late Sen. John McCain (R., Ariz.). As a young Marine officer, Sullivan was deployed to the region during the Third Taiwan Strait Crisis of 1996, when the administration of then-President Bill Clinton sent ships to the area in response to Chinese missile tests. Today, Sullivan carries copies of a glossy pamphlet titled “Why Taiwan Matters” to hand out to everyone he meets, and has given a speech with the same title dozens of times. The island, he argues, is “the 21st Century’s West Berlin,” and a Chinese takeover of it “would deeply and adversely affect concrete American national security and economic interests.”

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin met in Singapore last week with a bipartisan group of senators, including Dan Sullivan. PHOTO: CHAD MCNEELEY/DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE/ZUMA PRESS

Sullivan has written a bill, the STAND With Taiwan Act, that would create a trigger imposing devastating economic sanctions on China if it invades Taiwan—a measure he says would bolster deterrence. Speaking before the senators went into a closed-door meeting with Taiwan’s President Lai, the leader of the U.S. delegation, Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D., Ill.), said for the first time that she would back the legislation, giving it bipartisan support.

In the Senate, Sullivan has become a leading voice on national security, particularly related to Asia. (His home state’s largest city, Anchorage, is closer to Tokyo than it is to Washington.) It was Sullivan who originally proposed adding billions for Taiwan to the military funding supplemental that also included aid to Ukraine and Israel, according to multiple Senate sources. Biden signed the $95 billion legislation in April after months of delay prompted by conflict between traditional GOP defense hawks and the “America First” school loyal to Trump. Republicans were largely united behind the Taiwan and Israel components of the bill, but many opposed further aid to Ukraine, now in its third year of bloody resistance to Russian invasion.

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell said Sullivan’s “dogged determination played a huge role in delivering the supplemental, especially in securing resources for our Asian partners.”

Sipping an IPA in the rooftop lounge of his swanky Taipei hotel, Sullivan pushed back against the isolationism of some in today’s GOP. “Some of my colleagues are like, ‘We can let Ukraine go, but we’re going to be really strong in the Taiwan Strait,’” he said. “Here’s the deal. The world doesn’t work that way. Deterrence is not divisible.”

In meetings with Taiwan’s senior political, military and legislative leadership, Sullivan pressed repeatedly for assurances that the island would rise up in its own defense if attacked. “Are they capable, like Ukraine?” is how he describes his primary question. “Do they have the ability to fight? Do they have the will? Or are they Afghanistan?”

Dan Sullivan conferring with John McCain, at right, in 2016. PHOTO: WIN MCNAMEE/GETTY IMAGES

A McCain protégé

A Harvard-educated lawyer, Sullivan worked for the National Security Council and in the State Department during the George W. Bush presidency. McCain, the feisty, hawkish Arizona maverick, took Sullivan under his wing soon after the Alaskan arrived in the Senate in 2015, seeing in his military and national-security background a potential kindred spirit. “He plopped himself down in my Senate office and forcefully declared he was going to be my mentor,” is how Sullivan describes it.

McCain and Sullivan traveled the world together, frequently attending the Shangri-La Dialogue as well as its European analogue, the annual Munich Security Conference. McCain also named Sullivan to the board of the Naval Academy. As he lay dying in 2018, McCain summoned Sullivan to his Arizona ranch and asked him to serve as chairman of the International Republican Institute, a nonprofit that promotes freedom and democracy around the world. McCain had chaired the institute for 25 years.

Sullivan is a staunch conservative, but Democrats generally view him as serious and an honest broker. “Sometimes he says things that make me cringe,” said Duckworth, an Army veteran who lost both legs while piloting a helicopter in Iraq in 2004. “Our politics are not generally similar.” But the two have frequently worked together in the Senate, where they serve together on the Armed Services Committee.

“I’ve always been able to come to him for advice, and he’s supported me on some tough votes in committee, and I’ve repaid the favor,” she said. “I think there is an ingrained bipartisanship between the two of us from that shared military background, and an understanding of the strategic importance of Taiwan.”

McCain famously feuded with Trump—one of his dying wishes was that the then-president not be invited to his funeral. Sullivan has managed to stay in Trump’s good graces. He spoke with Trump regularly during his presidency and worked closely with his administration on energy initiatives important to his home state. He remains close to Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and sometime aide. (He also maintains good relations with Austin and with the Biden administration, which recently banned Russian seafood imports partly at Sullivan’s behest.)

Articulating his worldview, Sullivan could hardly sound more different than Trump, who disdained multilateralism, snubbed traditional allies, praised dictators and spoke of foreign relations in transactional terms. Sullivan prefers to emphasize America’s “commitment to liberty and freedom,” which he sees as an important national-security asset. 

“Xi Jinping and Putin, their greatest weakness is that they fear their own people,” he said in an interview in Singapore, nursing another IPA as diplomats and security officials stopped by to pay their respects. “Everybody talks about how China poses a great threat to Taiwan, which of course it does, but Taiwan also poses a big threat to [China]. It challenges the central premise of the [Chinese Communist Party’s] ruling ethos—that one man in power for life, crushing dissent, can tell China what’s good for 1.4 billion people.”

A large screen in Beijing shows news footage of recent military drills around Taiwan. PHOTO: TINGSHU WANG/REUTERS

Asked whether Trump shares his commitment to those ideals, Sullivan squirms slightly but answers in the affirmative. “Maybe the rhetoric wasn’t so great, but let’s just look at the actions,” he said. Trump’s foreign policy, he argued, has “been way underrated,” accomplishing a much-needed reorientation of the U.S.-China relationship, making progress toward Middle East peace, boosting military spending and taking tougher action against Russia than his Democratic predecessor. 

Meanwhile, on Biden’s watch, he argues, the U.S. has projected weakness, from the botched Afghanistan pullout (a policy initiated by Trump) to the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. Many Republicans’ opposition to the military-spending bill, Sullivan says, had more to do with what he said was the Biden administration’s partisan and equivocal approach to those conflicts than with a desire to abandon American commitments abroad.

Many American allies worry that if Trump is elected again, he would pull the U.S. out of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and abandon Ukraine. Sullivan says he doesn’t lose any sleep over either prospect. He isn’t angling for a cabinet role, he says, and has no ambitions for higher office. If Trump wins another term, he is poised to be a significant voice on foreign policy in the Senate and in the president’s ear.

“Hopefully we’re having an impact—a bipartisan group of senators telling our counterparts that the United States is in it for the long haul,” he said. The response from his foreign counterparts, Sullivan says, is that they appreciate that—and they want to make sure it continues.

Joyu Wang contributed to this article.

Write to Molly Ball at molly.ball@wsj.com

7. AI and the Art of War in Ukraine

Excerpts:

A visit to the battlefields north of Kharkiv revealed one consequence of the evolving state of the art of war. Increasingly one hears soldiers speak of “dead zones” between the opposing forces. Drones, which can now pursue individual soldiers through trenches, make it difficult for either side to conduct operations within 2 or 3 miles of the opposing battle line. For now, this may make new offensive operations on the scale of last summer’s ill-fated Ukrainian counteroffensive impossible. As soon as next year, “drone swarms” could create more formidable killing zones between armies, making offensive operations even more challenging.

Land and air warfare are rapidly changing, with both Ukrainians and Russians constantly updating technology. Along the battlefront, soldiers and engineers are introducing innovations large and small that can make old weapons systems obsolete overnight. As the Russians deploy new forms of jamming techniques or equip their drones and missiles with new stealth capabilities, the Ukrainians must match them and, where possible, out-compete.

AI and the Art of War in Ukraine

Both sides are using revolutionary means to wage battles on land and in the air.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/ai-and-the-art-of-war-in-ukraine-18995d3c?mod=latest_headlines

By Walter Russell Mead

Follow

June 3, 2024 5:11 pm ET

Rescuers remove rubble at a block of flats damaged by a Russian missile attack in Kharkiv, Ukraine, May 31. PHOTO: VYACHESLAV MADIYEVSKYY/ZUMA PRESS

Kharkiv, Ukraine

This wasn’t the easiest time to visit Ukraine’s second-largest city. The local power grid and infrastructure were taking serious hits as missiles and glide bombs struck the city from nearby Russian territory. “Double tap” attacks, by which Russians strike a civilian target and wait for first responders to rush to the scene before launching a second strike, were becoming more common. I watched rescue workers dig through the wreckage of a big-box hardware store searching for body fragments to identify in a nearby forensic lab. After a second attack, I spoke with stunned office and factory workers waiting to have their injuries treated in a local hospital ward. As bulldozers tore up fields north of the city so workers could prepare trenches against possible Russian advances, Kharkiv was experiencing its tensest days since Moscow’s first assault fell short in 2022.

Things should improve. Russian advances have slowed as reinforcements bolster Ukraine’s defense farther north. With the flow of air-defense weapons resuming, and Western countries easing restrictions on Ukraine’s use of defensive weapons against immediate cross-border targets, there is reason to hope the city’s residents can soon live with more security and less fear.

But the fighting isn’t stopping, and the Washington policy establishment needs to think harder about the largest, ugliest and most dangerous land war in Europe since World War II. From a tactical and geopolitical perspective, Vladimir Putin’s war is changing the global balance of power in ways that the U.S. can’t afford to neglect.

Some of the news is encouraging. American and Taiwanese military planners can take heart from Ukraine’s success in bottling up Russia’s Black Sea fleet. It turns out that the new era of naval warfare favors the defensive party. Russia hasn’t been able to use its superior fleet to deliver land forces on Ukraine’s coast or even to block Ukraine’s commerce. Strategists in Beijing will note that it’s significantly harder to move invading armies across open water than before the Ukrainians humbled Russia’s fleet.

A visit to the battlefields north of Kharkiv revealed one consequence of the evolving state of the art of war. Increasingly one hears soldiers speak of “dead zones” between the opposing forces. Drones, which can now pursue individual soldiers through trenches, make it difficult for either side to conduct operations within 2 or 3 miles of the opposing battle line. For now, this may make new offensive operations on the scale of last summer’s ill-fated Ukrainian counteroffensive impossible. As soon as next year, “drone swarms” could create more formidable killing zones between armies, making offensive operations even more challenging.

Land and air warfare are rapidly changing, with both Ukrainians and Russians constantly updating technology. Along the battlefront, soldiers and engineers are introducing innovations large and small that can make old weapons systems obsolete overnight. As the Russians deploy new forms of jamming techniques or equip their drones and missiles with new stealth capabilities, the Ukrainians must match them and, where possible, out-compete.

With increasingly sophisticated weapons routing more-detailed performance information back to manufacturers, the tempo of weapons redesign and production is accelerating beyond anything seen in past wars. Ukraine is building a new kind of military-industrial complex, in which decentralized teams of hackers and tinkerers in small to medium-size firms continuously reimagine and re-engineer the tools of war. I visited camouflaged workshops where, among other things, I saw Ukrainian engineers converting children’s toys into land drones that could place mines before oncoming tanks. Something as simple as a swivel-mounted platform for a gun turret may receive dozens of software and hardware upgrades based on real-time information from the battlefield.

Past wars have seen cycles of tech competition, but this is the first peer-to-peer war fought in the age of artificial intelligence. Just as the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s saw the development of the tactics and techniques that shaped World War II, Ukraine today is witnessing the birth of a new kind of conflict. The combination of real-time feedback from continuously monitored weapons with the data-handling and design capabilities of flexible, highly trained and motivated battle engineers is introducing a new dynamic of military tech competition.

Weapons that were irresistible a few weeks ago can be easily neutralized today. New threats appear overnight. The Pentagon and the American defense industry need to keep up. The old ways of doing business will soon be obsolete

1:40

Paused

0:02

/

5:11

TAP FOR SOUND

Speaking at the 2024 AFA Warfare Symposium, Gen. James Hecker described what the U.S. has learned from unmanned aerial vehicles—or UAVs—in Ukraine, and how they will change warfare. Images: AFP/Getty Images/U.S. Air Force via AP Composite: Mark Kelly

Copyright ©2024 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

Appeared in the June 4, 2024, print edition as 'AI and the Art of War in Ukraine'.

8. Israel–Hamas War (Iran) Update, June 3, 2024

Israel–Hamas War (Iran) Update, June 3, 2024

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/iran-update-june-3-2024

Key Takeaways:

• Iranian Presidential Elections: Hardliners overwhelmingly dominate the candidate pool for the upcoming Iranian presidential election. Current Parliament Speaker and former IRGC Air Force commander Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf and close Khamenei aide Vahid Haghanian both registered for the election between June 1 and 3.
• Ceasefire Negotiations: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Israel will not agree to a permanent ceasefire until Israel achieves its war objectives. Hamas may reject the agreement if the agreement fails to secure Hamas’ maximalist objectives, which include a permanent ceasefire.
• Post-War Gaza Strip: Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said on June 2 that Israel is assessing an alternative governing authority to Hamas in the Gaza Strip. Hamas will violently resist and undermine alternative governing authorities that do not include it.
• West Bank: Palestinian fighters continue to seek to attack Israeli towns from the West Bank.
• Northern Israel: An Israeli Army Radio correspondent reported on June 3 that the IDF faces challenges intercepting drones targeting northern Israel. Other military forces, including the US Army, have also encountered challenges combatting Iranian-made drones in the Middle East.
• Yemen: The Houthis likely launched a ballistic missile from the Red Sea targeting Israel on June 3. The IDF’s Arrow ballistic missile defense system intercepted the Houthi missile.

9. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, June 3, 2024

Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, June 3, 2024

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-june-3-2024

Key Takeaways:

• Ukrainian forces struck a Russian S-300/400 air defense battery in Belgorod Oblast likely with HIMARS on June 1 or 2.
• The People's Republic of China (PRC) and Russia are reportedly in disagreement about economic issues such as the proposed Power of Siberia 2 (PS-2) pipeline despite publicly portraying themselves as diplomatically aligned.
• Putin also reportedly asked Xi in May 2024 to "snub" the upcoming Ukrainian peace conference in Switzerland amid continued Russian efforts to discredit and otherwise undermine the peace conference.
• Russian forces continue to abuse Ukrainian prisoners of war (POWs) in violation of the Geneva Convention on POWs.
• Russian military and political leadership continues to pursue increased military, political, and economic cooperation with several African states.
• The Russian military is reportedly forcibly sending Russian servicemembers who refused to fight to the front in Ukraine from Russia instead of standing trial for their refusal to participate in combat.
• Georgian Parliament Speaker Shalva Papuashvili signed the Russian-style "foreign agents" bill into law on June 3 amid continued protests.
• Ukrainian forces recently advanced within Vovchansk and Russian forces recently advanced near Lyptsi, Avdiivka, and Velyka Novoslika and in western Zaporizhia Oblast.
• The family members of mobilized Russian personnel continue to protest for the demobilization of their relatives.

10. Unleashing innovation: The case for a drone operator branch in the US Army

Excerpts:

Additionally, if General George is correct and everyone “owns” drones, then what we may have is a tragedy of the commons, where everyone consumes this critical common resource, yet no specific branch or formation wants to pay for it.

The case for a drone operator branch in the Army is therefore several-fold. First, it will encourage specialization and expertise. Drone technology has evolved rapidly, and its applications extend beyond reconnaissance. From precision strikes to logistics support, drones are force multipliers. A dedicated branch would allow operators to specialize, develop expertise, and innovate in this critical class of systems.

Next, like any new innovation, agility and adaptability will be crucial. A separate branch would streamline decision-making and bypass the parochial interests of the other branches who could be threatened by the innovation. Drone operators could respond swiftly to emerging threats, unencumbered by bureaucratic hurdles.

Oftentimes it’s old organizations that resist and sabotage the new. The military is no different, as its existing branches can stifle creativity amid their competition between each other for scarce resources and existing programs of record. The Army created the Cyber branch in 2014, the Special Forces branch in 1987, and the Aviation branch in 1983 for precisely these reasons. Congress also established the Space Force to get around these same problems. Simply put, it’s hard to get promoted in an existing branch if you are advocating to create different capabilities that will render it obsolete.

Third, this represents a monumental cultural shift, similar to the adoption of aviation and armor by the Army following World War I. Establishing a drone operator branch sends a clear message: innovation matters. It encourages a culture of experimentation, risk-taking, and continuous improvement.

Lastly, and no less important, a drone branch would provide the Army with legislative cover and protection from other long-standing and entrenched bureaucracies who may want to take over and marginalize all flying drone programs down the road.

Unleashing innovation: The case for a drone operator branch in the US Army - Breaking Defense

In this op-ed, John Ferrari explains why, despite the Army's reservations, a new drone corps could be good for innovation.

breakingdefense.com · by John Ferrari · June 3, 2024

Military intelligence Soldiers with the 25th Infantry Division train on the One World Terrain drone and mapping system on February 4, 2021 at Schofield Barracks, Hawaii. (US Army photo by Staff Sgt. Thomas Calvert)

The idea of creating a drone corps within the US Army has been floating around for several months, but got a burst of energy when it was inserted into the most recent draft of the House’s defense policy bill. Below, retired Army Maj. Gen. John Ferrari argues moving forward with its creation would be a good thing.

In the recently-passed House Armed Services Committee draft of the National Defense Authorization Act, members supported the creation of a new branch in the US Army, one specifically dedicated to drones. According to congressional language, this new Drone Corps would be responsible for projects, programs, and activities dealing with small and medium unmanned aircraft, systems that support these aircraft, and counter-UAS systems among other duties.

It’s seemingly a play on how Ukraine, the test case for how drones can be used on the battlefield, has created its own drone force. But the Army, in typical fashion, quickly batted away the idea by arguing that specialization in drones might not be warranted at this time.

According to Undersecretary of the Army Gabe Camarillo, “operating and defending against the drone threat” is a challenge faced by “all formations at multiple echelons.” He believes that a singular drone branch could disrupt ongoing distributed efforts and hinder the pace of weapons acquisition. This perspective highlights the tension between innovation and practicality within the military.

Similarly, in testimony before the Senate Armed Service Committee, the Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George stated that he does not believe it should be a separate branch and drones should instead be embedded and “resident in every formation, at every echelon.”

Despite the Army’s reservations, Congress has it right. With this proposal, Congress is recognizing that technology alone often isn’t responsible for military innovation. Instead, it’s a combination of technology and organizational change that causes innovation, exactly what this new Drone Corps would provide.

Couple this with the idea of creative destruction, and a strong case can be made for the establishment of a Drone Corps. And despite its usual bureaucratic reservations, the Army should get on board. The establishment of a dedicated drone branch within the US Army could very well be the key to innovation by unleashing competition between the otherwise monopolistic and entrenched branches.

In the civilian world, creative destruction, the process by which new technologies and ideas replace outdated ones, drives progress. Companies that fail to adapt are left behind, while those that embrace change thrive. Think of how the rise of e-commerce disrupted traditional retail or how smartphones revolutionized communication. In this dynamic environment, innovation is not just encouraged; it’s essential for survival. It’s why Amazon is worth trillions and Sears is bankrupt. The new and more efficient drive out the entrenched and risk averse.

Contrast this with the military. While the armed forces have a rich history of technological advancements, from the longbow to the tank, innovation often faces roadblocks. Why? Entrenched interests play a significant part. Bureaucracy, risk aversion, and the fear of disrupting established norms can stifle creativity.

Additionally, if General George is correct and everyone “owns” drones, then what we may have is a tragedy of the commons, where everyone consumes this critical common resource, yet no specific branch or formation wants to pay for it.

The case for a drone operator branch in the Army is therefore several-fold. First, it will encourage specialization and expertise. Drone technology has evolved rapidly, and its applications extend beyond reconnaissance. From precision strikes to logistics support, drones are force multipliers. A dedicated branch would allow operators to specialize, develop expertise, and innovate in this critical class of systems.

Next, like any new innovation, agility and adaptability will be crucial. A separate branch would streamline decision-making and bypass the parochial interests of the other branches who could be threatened by the innovation. Drone operators could respond swiftly to emerging threats, unencumbered by bureaucratic hurdles.

Oftentimes it’s old organizations that resist and sabotage the new. The military is no different, as its existing branches can stifle creativity amid their competition between each other for scarce resources and existing programs of record. The Army created the Cyber branch in 2014, the Special Forces branch in 1987, and the Aviation branch in 1983 for precisely these reasons. Congress also established the Space Force to get around these same problems. Simply put, it’s hard to get promoted in an existing branch if you are advocating to create different capabilities that will render it obsolete.

Third, this represents a monumental cultural shift, similar to the adoption of aviation and armor by the Army following World War I. Establishing a drone operator branch sends a clear message: innovation matters. It encourages a culture of experimentation, risk-taking, and continuous improvement.

Lastly, and no less important, a drone branch would provide the Army with legislative cover and protection from other long-standing and entrenched bureaucracies who may want to take over and marginalize all flying drone programs down the road.

It is time to break the mold. Creating a drone operator branch would acknowledge that warfare is changing, and the US Army must adapt. By learning from history and from the forces of creative destruction in the civilian sector, this new branch can overcome entrenched interests and foster innovation. The Army should seize this opportunity to embrace the future rather than being held hostage by the past.

Retired US Army Maj. Gen. John G. Ferrari is a senior nonresident fellow at AEI. Ferrari previously served as a director of program analysis and evaluation for the service.

breakingdefense.com · by John Ferrari · June 3, 2024

11. China's defense minister hammers away on Taiwan, says peaceful unification chances 'eroded'

Excerpts:

Bonnie Glaser, a top China expert at the German Marshall Fund, said Dong’s presentation was “an embarrassment” for China, calling it “a little amateurish.” Asked about new policies, she pointed to the admiral’s statement that the chances for peaceful unification have been “eroded” and said the largely negative message of his speech signaled “a new level of confrontation.”

Dong’s speech came a day after he met with US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, who told him that China should not “use Taiwan’s political transition — part of a normal, routine democratic process — as a pretext for coercive measures.”

Ironically, after saying that the United Nation’s powers should be strengthened, Dong went on to say that UN Convention on the Law of the Sea ruling on the South China Sea was wrong and accused the United States of “trying to use UNCLOS to violate other nations sovereignty.” Using interesting language, he added that “every year they commit freedom of navigation operations against many countries in the South China Sea. We are all victims of this behavior. If this is freedom of navigation, then I don’t understand what rules mean any more,” Dong said.

He compared the behavior of the Philippines in defending its Exclusive Economic Zone to the conduct of a criminal who bumps your car from behind and then tries to “blackmail” you.

“I think this is not even morally right and China’s law enforcement actions are very restrained,” he said about China’s use of water cannons and ramming Philippine ships. “Our tolerance for deliberate provocations will be limited.”

China's defense minister hammers away on Taiwan, says peaceful unification chances 'eroded' - Breaking Defense

"Anyone who dares to separate Taiwan from China will only end up in self-destruction," Adm. Dong Jun, China's defense minister, said here in remarks liberally sprinkled with aggressive imagery and threats.

breakingdefense.com · by Colin Clark · June 2, 2024

China’s Defence Minister Dong Jun speaks during the 21st Shangri-La Dialogue summit at the Shangri-La Hotel in Singapore on June 2, 2024. (Photo by NHAC NGUYEN/AFP via Getty Images)

SHANGRI LA DIALOGUE — In a rambling, repetitive address in his first international appearance, the Chinese defense minister told the world that the chances for a peaceful reunification with Taiwan have been “eroded” in the face of what he called the “fanatical statements” by the new Taiwanese president.

“Anyone who dares to separate Taiwan from China will only end up in self-destruction,” Adm. Dong Jun said here in remarks liberally sprinkled with aggressive imagery and threats. “Those fanatical separatist statements have revealed their betrayal of the Chinese nation and their ancestors, and will be nailed to the pillar of shame in history.”

The “fanatical statements” was apparently in refence to the inauguration speech by Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te, in which he called on China “to cease their political and military intimidation against Taiwan” and told his own people to defend themselves against the “many threats and attempts of infiltration from China.”

Since Lai took office, China has deployed dozens of ships and flown aircraft inside Taiwan’s Air Defense Identification Zone, clearly practising an armed blockade and perhaps demonstrating some of the moves it might make in the event of an invasion.

“As a defense minister, to be very honest with you, we are prepared for all kinds of extreme situations that may happen for Taiwan independence, and we are very confident in our ability to deter Taiwan independence,” Dong said.

“That was the most consistently intimidating speech we’ve heard from China at a Shangri-La Dialogue,” professor Rory Medcalf, head of the National Security College at Australian National University, wrote in a tweet. “Defence Minister Dong Jun warned of ‘resolute’ military action against Taiwan’s ‘fanatical’ forces. Then said ‘there is a limit to our restraint’ against the Philippines.”

Dong pressed China’s case about Taiwan for so long during the Q&A part of the address that the moderator, Bastian Giegerich, CEO of the sponsoring International Institute for Strategic Studies, was compelled to interrupt and note that he’d been speaking for 10 minutes and could he address some other questions. Dong, a former naval commander who was appointed in late December after his predecessor, Li Shangfu, was abruptly removed from office, basically ignored the interruption and repeated much of what he’d already said about the island state.

A few hours after Dong’s speech, Singapore’s Defense Minister Ng Eng Hen made a characteristically humorous — but gently biting — observation about it: “He would have gone on for half-an-hour about Taiwan if you’d let him.”

Bonnie Glaser, a top China expert at the German Marshall Fund, said Dong’s presentation was “an embarrassment” for China, calling it “a little amateurish.” Asked about new policies, she pointed to the admiral’s statement that the chances for peaceful unification have been “eroded” and said the largely negative message of his speech signaled “a new level of confrontation.”

Dong’s speech came a day after he met with US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, who told him that China should not “use Taiwan’s political transition — part of a normal, routine democratic process — as a pretext for coercive measures.”

Ironically, after saying that the United Nation’s powers should be strengthened, Dong went on to say that UN Convention on the Law of the Sea ruling on the South China Sea was wrong and accused the United States of “trying to use UNCLOS to violate other nations sovereignty.” Using interesting language, he added that “every year they commit freedom of navigation operations against many countries in the South China Sea. We are all victims of this behavior. If this is freedom of navigation, then I don’t understand what rules mean any more,” Dong said.

He compared the behavior of the Philippines in defending its Exclusive Economic Zone to the conduct of a criminal who bumps your car from behind and then tries to “blackmail” you.

“I think this is not even morally right and China’s law enforcement actions are very restrained,” he said about China’s use of water cannons and ramming Philippine ships. “Our tolerance for deliberate provocations will be limited.”

breakingdefense.com · by Colin Clark · June 2, 2024

11. China's defense minister hammers away on Taiwan, says peaceful unification chances 'eroded'

We could have peaceful unification immediately. All the PRC has to do is change its name to West Taiwan.

​

Excerpts:

Bonnie Glaser, a top China expert at the German Marshall Fund, said Dong’s presentation was “an embarrassment” for China, calling it “a little amateurish.” Asked about new policies, she pointed to the admiral’s statement that the chances for peaceful unification have been “eroded” and said the largely negative message of his speech signaled “a new level of confrontation.”

Dong’s speech came a day after he met with US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, who told him that China should not “use Taiwan’s political transition — part of a normal, routine democratic process — as a pretext for coercive measures.”

Ironically, after saying that the United Nation’s powers should be strengthened, Dong went on to say that UN Convention on the Law of the Sea ruling on the South China Sea was wrong and accused the United States of “trying to use UNCLOS to violate other nations sovereignty.” Using interesting language, he added that “every year they commit freedom of navigation operations against many countries in the South China Sea. We are all victims of this behavior. If this is freedom of navigation, then I don’t understand what rules mean any more,” Dong said.

He compared the behavior of the Philippines in defending its Exclusive Economic Zone to the conduct of a criminal who bumps your car from behind and then tries to “blackmail” you.

“I think this is not even morally right and China’s law enforcement actions are very restrained,” he said about China’s use of water cannons and ramming Philippine ships. “Our tolerance for deliberate provocations will be limited.”

China's defense minister hammers away on Taiwan, says peaceful unification chances 'eroded' - Breaking Defense

"Anyone who dares to separate Taiwan from China will only end up in self-destruction," Adm. Dong Jun, China's defense minister, said here in remarks liberally sprinkled with aggressive imagery and threats.

breakingdefense.com · by Colin Clark · June 2, 2024

China’s Defence Minister Dong Jun speaks during the 21st Shangri-La Dialogue summit at the Shangri-La Hotel in Singapore on June 2, 2024. (Photo by NHAC NGUYEN/AFP via Getty Images)

SHANGRI LA DIALOGUE — In a rambling, repetitive address in his first international appearance, the Chinese defense minister told the world that the chances for a peaceful reunification with Taiwan have been “eroded” in the face of what he called the “fanatical statements” by the new Taiwanese president.

“Anyone who dares to separate Taiwan from China will only end up in self-destruction,” Adm. Dong Jun said here in remarks liberally sprinkled with aggressive imagery and threats. “Those fanatical separatist statements have revealed their betrayal of the Chinese nation and their ancestors, and will be nailed to the pillar of shame in history.”

The “fanatical statements” was apparently in refence to the inauguration speech by Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te, in which he called on China “to cease their political and military intimidation against Taiwan” and told his own people to defend themselves against the “many threats and attempts of infiltration from China.”

Since Lai took office, China has deployed dozens of ships and flown aircraft inside Taiwan’s Air Defense Identification Zone, clearly practising an armed blockade and perhaps demonstrating some of the moves it might make in the event of an invasion.

“As a defense minister, to be very honest with you, we are prepared for all kinds of extreme situations that may happen for Taiwan independence, and we are very confident in our ability to deter Taiwan independence,” Dong said.

“That was the most consistently intimidating speech we’ve heard from China at a Shangri-La Dialogue,” professor Rory Medcalf, head of the National Security College at Australian National University, wrote in a tweet. “Defence Minister Dong Jun warned of ‘resolute’ military action against Taiwan’s ‘fanatical’ forces. Then said ‘there is a limit to our restraint’ against the Philippines.”

Dong pressed China’s case about Taiwan for so long during the Q&A part of the address that the moderator, Bastian Giegerich, CEO of the sponsoring International Institute for Strategic Studies, was compelled to interrupt and note that he’d been speaking for 10 minutes and could he address some other questions. Dong, a former naval commander who was appointed in late December after his predecessor, Li Shangfu, was abruptly removed from office, basically ignored the interruption and repeated much of what he’d already said about the island state.

A few hours after Dong’s speech, Singapore’s Defense Minister Ng Eng Hen made a characteristically humorous — but gently biting — observation about it: “He would have gone on for half-an-hour about Taiwan if you’d let him.”

Bonnie Glaser, a top China expert at the German Marshall Fund, said Dong’s presentation was “an embarrassment” for China, calling it “a little amateurish.” Asked about new policies, she pointed to the admiral’s statement that the chances for peaceful unification have been “eroded” and said the largely negative message of his speech signaled “a new level of confrontation.”

Dong’s speech came a day after he met with US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, who told him that China should not “use Taiwan’s political transition — part of a normal, routine democratic process — as a pretext for coercive measures.”

Ironically, after saying that the United Nation’s powers should be strengthened, Dong went on to say that UN Convention on the Law of the Sea ruling on the South China Sea was wrong and accused the United States of “trying to use UNCLOS to violate other nations sovereignty.” Using interesting language, he added that “every year they commit freedom of navigation operations against many countries in the South China Sea. We are all victims of this behavior. If this is freedom of navigation, then I don’t understand what rules mean any more,” Dong said.

He compared the behavior of the Philippines in defending its Exclusive Economic Zone to the conduct of a criminal who bumps your car from behind and then tries to “blackmail” you.

“I think this is not even morally right and China’s law enforcement actions are very restrained,” he said about China’s use of water cannons and ramming Philippine ships. “Our tolerance for deliberate provocations will be limited.”

breakingdefense.com · by Colin Clark · June 2, 2024

12. NATO to unveil Ukraine security package as ‘bridge’ to membership

Uh Oh. Is this sticking it in Putin's eye?

NATO to unveil Ukraine security package as ‘bridge’ to membership

Defense News · by Bryant Harris · June 3, 2024

NATO plans to offer Ukraine a security package when the alliance convenes its annual summit this summer in Washington, though it’s expected to stop short of accepting the nation’s long-standing request for membership amid Russia’s invasion.

In addition to unveiling the package in July, an estimated 32 countries are finalizing a series of bilateral agreements to support Ukraine ahead of the summit, with 13 finalized so far, according to Julianne Smith, the U.S. ambassador to NATO.

“Allies will be putting forward a whole package of deliverables that will serve as a bridge to their membership inside the alliance,” Smith said at a Defense Writers Group roundtable on Monday. “Part of the package will be the language we use to describe Ukraine’s membership aspirations in the declaration itself.”

“Part of it will be an institutionalization of some of the bilateral support that’s currently being provided [to] Ukraine, and tucking it under NATO command. Part of it will be working to identify new resources for our friends in Ukraine, and ensuring that we send a signal to Moscow that the NATO alliance isn’t going anywhere,” Smith added.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy asked for fast-tracked accession into the alliance shortly after Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022 — a request NATO rebuffed at last year’s summit in Lithuania. Instead, NATO offered Ukraine a multiyear assistance package meant to bolster its defenses and help it transition away from Soviet-era equipment.

Ukrainian entry into NATO would allow Kyiv to invoke the alliance’s collective defense clause, potentially triggering a broader regional conflict with Russia. U.S. President Joe Biden said last year that the war with Russia would have to end before Ukraine enters the alliance.

Still, during an April visit to Kyiv, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg vowed that “Ukraine will become a member of NATO.”

“The work we are undertaking now puts you on an irreversible path towards NATO membership, so that when the time is right, Ukraine can become a NATO member straightaway,” Stoltenberg said.

Some defense companies from the NATO bloc have expressed interest in co-producing certain military capabilities like unmanned systems. The U.S. in May announced a $2 billion Foreign Military Financing package largely geared toward helping Ukraine grow its defense-industrial base.

“This is coming from, in large part, European or Canadian or American companies that are looking at co-production opportunities,” Smith told Defense News.

Regional plans

Smith noted the July summit, which marks NATO’s 75th anniversary, will also focus on the regional defense and deterrence plans for northern, central and southern Europe, which the alliance formally agreed to during last year’s summit.

“It’s going to mean a major shift across the alliance in how countries invest, procure, work together to implement and execute those regional plans,” the diplomat said.

The plans are partially aimed at guiding NATO members when they make military procurement decisions to ensure they’re buying the right capabilities. For instance, a country could be responsible for three core tasks within a regional plan and would be expected to make procurement decisions accordingly.

“It’s ultimately up to them on how to spend the resources, but they have to answer to the regional plans,” Smith said.

She argued that the regional plans will also help reassure defense manufacturers that NATO intends to keep procuring larger amounts of ammunition and other materiel over the long term, encouraging them to ramp up production.

“It’s not a signed contract, but helping them see what the requirements will be across the alliance that’s tagged to these regional plans will certainly assure them that the demand signals will not just be over the next 12 months, but the demand signals to industry will be for the better part of a decade,” she said.

The summit will also focus on burden-sharing. Smith expects that slightly more than 20 countries will spend at least 2% of their respective gross domestic product on defense — a goal set by the alliance.

“We have to make sure that we keep pushing and get every member of the alliance to lay out a plan to get to the 2% within the next few years,” Smith said. “And I think 99% of the allies have a plan in place.”

About Bryant Harris

Bryant Harris is the Congress reporter for Defense News. He has covered U.S. foreign policy, national security, international affairs and politics in Washington since 2014. He has also written for Foreign Policy, Al-Monitor, Al Jazeera English and IPS News.

13. The Dalai Lama Is Landing in the Middle of the 2024 Election

As an aside for historical trivia buffs: "Found The Dalai Lama's Patek Philippe, Gifted By FDR Via An OSS Officer Who Was The Grandson Of Leo Tolstoy (Seriously)"

https://www.hodinkee.com/articles/the-dalai-lamas-patek-philippe-gifted-by-fdr-via-an-oss-officer-who-was-the-grandson-of-leo-tolstoy-seriously

​I am sure President Biden would like this circle of history, from FDR to him.

​Excerpts:

Two months ago, I visited Dharamsala with, among others, Arthur Brooks, the Atlantic columnist and frequent writing collaborator of the Dalai Lama’s. We both experienced a religious leader who, though hobbled by knee pain and slowed by age, was still lucid and eloquent on the great subjects of freedom and happiness. I called Arthur today to ask him what he makes of this news.

“In a contentious election year, it’s good to remind Americans of our core values as a people, and among those values are religious freedom and standing up for the dignity of all people around the world,” he said. “His Holiness the Dalai Lama, as we saw in Dharamsala in April, still has the ability to remind people around the world of what is good and true. For a Tibetan monk, he has an uncanny gift for bringing out the best of what it means to be a person and an American. This is an opportunity that President Biden cannot and should not miss.”

The Dalai Lama Is Landing in the Middle of the 2024 Election

And Joe Biden should welcome him.

By Jeffrey Goldberg

The Atlantic · by Jeffrey Goldberg · June 3, 2024

In early September of 2020, Joe Biden, then the Democratic nominee for president, promised to put values—values held in contempt, he argued, by the man he would go on to defeat—at the center of American foreign policy. To act on his promise, he said, he would do something Donald Trump had neglected to do. “I’ll meet with His Holiness the Dalai Lama,” Biden said.

For American presidents, meeting the 14th Dalai Lama can bring tension and discord, because Communist Party leaders in Beijing consider Tibet to be a part of China. They consider any recognition of the Dalai Lama—a Mandela-level icon, a symbol of Tibet’s will to survive, and also (by the way) a living Buddha, a bodhisattva, to his millions of followers—a terrible insult to Chinese sensitivities. (To be fair, Chinese leaders are omnidirectionally offended, by supporters of Taiwanese independence and Hong Kong democracy; by Christians and Uyghurs and Mongols; and by anyone else who threatens their Middle Kingdom sense of imperial entitlement.)

More than three years into his term, Biden has not made good on his promise, though he has a plausible excuse: The Dalai Lama is 88 years old and in declining health, and he seldom leaves his home in exile in Dharamsala, in the Himalayan foothills of India. But the Dalai Lama’s age now provides a path for Biden to keep his promise: The bodhisattva has bad knees and has decided, after much procrastination, to come to New York this summer to investigate the possibility of replacement.

A visit by Biden to the Dalai Lama’s hospital—or an after-surgery invitation to the White House—would signal continuing American concern over the oppression of Tibet and Tibetans, as well as support for one of the most heroic and pacific humanitarian leaders of our age. Such a visit would also have the benefit of signaling to the Chinese government that a U.S. president makes decisions independent of Chinese Communist feelings. (American CEOs are particularly feeble at signaling such independence.) A call on the Dalai Lama couldn’t possibly hurt Biden’s standing among voters, especially considering the Dalai Lama’s previous lack of interest in meeting with Trump when he was president. Five years ago, when I visited the Dalai Lama at his monastery in Manali, he told me that he did not look favorably on Trump’s jingoistic “America First” rhetoric. “Everyone first,” he said, laughing. “A much better idea.”

The exact timing of his trip to the United States—his first in seven years—has not yet been decided, but it will follow another event of some significance: a visit later this month to Dharamsala by Representative Nancy Pelosi, the former speaker of the House, and a congressional delegation. Pelosi has championed the Tibetan cause for decades, and, to her credit, she is loathed by Beijing for her comprehensive criticism of China’s human-rights record. In one of Pelosi’s earliest meetings with the Dalai Lama, she was so ferocious in her criticism of China’s human-rights abuses that the Dalai Lama said, impishly, “Now let us all pray so that we could rid Nancy of her negative attitudes.” (Pelosi’s trip has not yet been announced, and her spokesperson declined to comment, citing security concerns; news of the Dalai Lama’s proposed visit this summer was confirmed to me by sources involved in planning the trip.)

The reemergence of the Dalai Lama into American politics in the months preceding the 2024 presidential election is good news for the unfortunate Tibetan cause, constantly steamrollered as it is by the raw deployment of Chinese power. In Dharamsala, the seat of the Tibetan government in exile, fear is ever present that the Dalai Lama’s eventual demise will make even more marginal the cause of Tibetan cultural and political independence. (As is implied by his status as the 14th Dalai Lama, the discovery of a 15th Dalai Lama is likely, though he will be reincarnated, according to Tibetan Buddhist tradition, as a small child, not as someone ready for international diplomacy. And the Chinese government has its own plan to identify and elevate a quisling lama.)

Two months ago, I visited Dharamsala with, among others, Arthur Brooks, the Atlantic columnist and frequent writing collaborator of the Dalai Lama’s. We both experienced a religious leader who, though hobbled by knee pain and slowed by age, was still lucid and eloquent on the great subjects of freedom and happiness. I called Arthur today to ask him what he makes of this news.

“In a contentious election year, it’s good to remind Americans of our core values as a people, and among those values are religious freedom and standing up for the dignity of all people around the world,” he said. “His Holiness the Dalai Lama, as we saw in Dharamsala in April, still has the ability to remind people around the world of what is good and true. For a Tibetan monk, he has an uncanny gift for bringing out the best of what it means to be a person and an American. This is an opportunity that President Biden cannot and should not miss.”

The Atlantic · by Jeffrey Goldberg · June 3, 2024

14. Pentagon looks beyond primes for cheaper drones

Dowe want a nice Cadillac or a lot of Volkswagens?

Pentagon looks beyond primes for cheaper drones

The Air Force and DIU say non-traditional contractors offer “the best chance” for inexpensive mass production.

BY AUDREY DECKER

STAFF WRITER

JUNE 3, 2024 03:59 PM ET

defenseone.com · by Audrey Decker

The Pentagon has picked four non-traditional defense contractors to develop drones that can be produced en masse and “on-call,” acknowledging that industry giants might not be up to providing the relatively inexpensive uncrewed systems that are looming larger in modern war.

The companies—Anduril Industries, Integrated Solutions for Systems, Leidos Dynetics, and Zone 5 Technologies—beat out more than 100 other applicants to develop an “enterprise test vehicle” that can be built quickly and cheaply, according to today’s announcement from the Defense Innovation Unit and the Air Force Armament Directorate.

“While the Armament Directorate remains committed to our highly-capable legacy products, we have become convinced that widening the aperture to include more non-traditional aerospace companies offers the best chance at accomplishing our cost-per-unit goals, project timeline, and production quantity goals,” Cassie Johnson, the armament directorate’s ETV program manager, said in the release.

The open-architecture drone is to fly at least 500 nautical miles, deliver a kinetic payload, and use commercially-available subsystems, according to a solicitation DIU released in September.

The Pentagon’s current way of building drones is slowed down by “exquisite components” and “labor-intensive manufacturing processes,” DIU said.

“Vendors are incorporating commercial off-the-shelf components wherever possible to mitigate supply chain bottlenecks and to keep costs low. Vendors will also leverage modern design for manufacturing approaches, ensuring air vehicles are not over-engineered for their intended mission, minimize use of expensive materials, and enable on-call high-rate production that is not possible with more exquisite counterparts,” today’s announcement said.

The companies will start test flights later this summer and fall, according to DIU. After flight demos, the program will pick at least one prototype “to continue development toward a production variant capable of rapidly scalable manufacture."

The drone could eventually be a candidate for the Pentagon’s Replicator program, which aims to produce thousands of low-cost drones. While details on Replicator have been scarce, Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks said last month that the first Replicator drones have already been delivered to the Indo-Pacific region. DIU deferred questions on how the ETV program is linked to Replicator to OSD officials, who did not respond in time for publication.

In a statement, Jason Levin, senior vice president of Anduril’s air dominance & strike division said, “We look forward to working with our partners at DIU and the Air Force Armament Directorate to deliver a highly-producible, modular, affordable, and capable Enterprise Test Vehicle that will serve as the baseline architecture for large-scale production of next-generation airborne platforms.”

Leidos Dynetics said their ETV technology is the “perfect merger of our strike systems expertise, as exemplified by the modular, affordable and network-enabled GBU-69 Small Glide Munition, and our recent experience developing the air-launched, and air-recovered, X-61 Gremlins UAS,” Mark Miller, senior vice president for missile and aviation systems, said in a statement.

Integrated Solutions for Systems and Zone 5 Technologies did not respond in time for publication.

At least one of the defense primes has publicly acknowledged that it won’t compete to build low-cost, non-survivable drones. After Northrop Grumman, Boeing, and Lockheed Martin lost the Air Force’s contract to build robot wingman, Northrop CEO Kathy Warden said in an earnings call that the company is “not looking to compete in [the] more commoditized part of the market that’s very low cost and not-survivable systems. That's just not our business model, and we know that. So we'll remain disciplined in where we invest in the pieces of the market that we pursue, but we think that what we provide is still highly relevant.”

defenseone.com · by Audrey Decker

15. 'I feel really good' about election security, former NSA chief says

The most important thing we can do in the US now is for US government officials as well as officials of both parties to work to ensure that the American people have confidence in our election processes. Because our adversaries want to ensure we don't have confidence so we can undermine our elections system ourselves. Everytime someone denigrates our election process, our adversaries grin and check off a box that says they have duped another American into supporting their subversion campaign.

'I feel really good' about election security, former NSA chief says

defenseone.com · by Lauren C. Williams

Paul Nakasone, shown testifying to Congress in January, retired the following month. Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images

Paul Nakasone says the intelligence community has everything it needs to fight election interference.

|

June 3, 2024 03:36 PM ET

Two months after retiring as head of the National Security Agency and Cyber Command, Gen. Paul Nakasone is confident that the U.S. intelligence community and private sector have everything they need to detect and respond to possible U.S. election interference attempts this November.

“I feel really good,” said Nakasone, speaking to a group of reporters in a Saturday night media briefing ahead of an event held by the Intelligence and National Security Alliance honoring his service. He is set to spearhead a new defense institute at Vanderbilt University in the coming months.

Nakasone cited avenues like the Cybersecurity Collaboration Center — an NSA entity that shares threat intel between private sector cyber firms working for the defense industrial base — as a testament to the capabilities available for U.S. election defenses. The CCC has some 1,000 industry partners as of March.

“I know the template [the intelligence community] is using,” he said. “We’re going to know the threat better than they know themselves. We’re going to take all the information that we need, and we’re going to share it with both DHS and the FBI. And we’re going to take action when we see adversaries outside the United States trying to either influence or interfere in our election,” he added.

Officials, lawmakers and researchers have voiced increasing worries that AI tools could greatly enhance the spread of election misinformation or support disinformation efforts aimed at undermining the electoral process as November approaches. But Nakasone said he hasn’t seen ways in which adversaries have mastered using AI systems to a point where it’s become dangerous.

“There hasn’t been something that really shows me in another election in another country where [AI] has been utilized to a degree that says, ‘Oh, my goodness, that’s concerning,’” he said.

Foreign adversaries have already been found deploying fake social media personas that have engaged with real-life users in an attempt to assess U.S. domestic issues and learn what political themes divide voters. Such machine-generated materials have already worked their way into elections around the world, but have yet to fully turn the tide of election outcomes.

But those AI capabilities will evolve over time, he said, pointing out synthetic media campaigns that continue to make headlines. “[It’s] disinformation. I think this is really the piece that we have to always be looking at. How do we detect it? How do we ensure that we can shine a light on it? How do we ensure that if this comes up that we can say this is not real?”

While still in service, Nakasone testified before a House panel in January that he believed the November election will be “the most secure” to date.

16. Trump Joins TikTok and Calls It ‘An Honor.’ As President He Once Tried to Ban the App

I have nothing to say.

Trump Joins TikTok and Calls It ‘An Honor.’ As President He Once Tried to Ban the App

thediplomat.com · by Jill Colvin, Will Weissert, and Meg Kinnard

Democratic President Joe Biden signed legislation in April that could ban TikTok in the U.S., even as his campaign joined in February and has tried to work with influencers.

By

June 04, 2024

Credit: Depositphotos

Donald Trump has joined the popular video-sharing app TikTok, a platform he once tried to ban while in the White House. He posted from a UFC fight two days after he became the first former president and presumptive major party nominee in U.S. history to be found guilty on felony charges.

“It’s an honor,” Trump said in the TikTok video, which features footage of him waving to fans and posing for selfies at the Ultimate Fighting Championship fight in Newark, New Jersey, on Saturday night. The video ends with Trump telling the camera: “That was a good walk-on, right?”

By Sunday morning, Trump had amassed more than 1.1 million followers on the platform and the post had garnered more than 1 million likes and 24 million views.

“We will leave no front undefended and this represents the continued outreach to a younger audience consuming pro-Trump and anti-Biden content,” Trump spokesman Steven Cheung said in a statement about the campaign’s decision to join the platform.

“There’s no place better than a UFC event to launch President Trump’s TikTok, where he received a hero’s welcome and thousands of fans cheered him on,” he added.

Democratic President Joe Biden signed legislation in April that could ban TikTok in the U.S., even as his campaign joined in February and has tried to work with influencers.

Trump received an enthusiastic welcome at the fight at Newark’s Prudential Center, where the crowd broke into chants of “We love Trump!” and another insulting Biden with an expletive.

It was Trump’s first public outing since a jury in New York found him guilty Thursday on 34 charges of falsifying business records as part of a scheme to illegally influence the 2016 election by covering up hush money payments made to a porn actor who claimed she and Trump had sex. Trump has maintained he did nothing wrong and plans to appeal the verdict. He will be sentenced on July 11.

Throughout his campaign, Trump has used appearances at UFC fights to project an image of strength and to try to appeal to potential voters who may not closely follow politics or engage with traditional news sources. It’s also part of a broader effort to connect with young people and minority voters, particularly Latino and Black men.

TikTok, owned by Beijing-based ByteDance, is another opportunity to reach those potential voters. The platform has about 170 million users in the U.S., most of whom skew younger — a demographic that is especially hard for campaigns to reach because they shun television.

As president, Trump tried to ban TikTok through an executive order that said “the spread in the United States of mobile applications developed and owned” by Chinese companies was a national security threat. The courts blocked the action after TikTok sued.

Both the FBI and the Federal Communications Commission have warned that ByteDance could share user data such as browsing history, location and biometric identifiers with China’s government. TikTok said it has never done that and would not, if asked.

The platform was a hot topic of debate during the 2024 GOP primary campaign, with most candidates shunning its use. Many, including former Vice President Mike Pence, called for TikTok to be banned in the U.S. due to its connections with China

Trump said earlier this year that he still believes TikTok posed a national security risk, but was opposed to banning it because that would help its rival, Facebook, which he continues to criticize over his 2020 election loss to Biden.

“Frankly, there are a lot of people on TikTok that love it. There are a lot of young kids on TikTok who will go crazy without it,” Trump told CNBC.

The legislation signed by Biden gives ByteDance nine months to sell the company, with a possible additional three months if a sale is in progress. If it doesn’t, TikTok will be banned. Biden barred the app on most government devices in December 2022.

His reelection campaign nonetheless uses the app, which it joined the night of the Super Bowl in February. Aides argue that in an increasingly fragmented modern media environment, the campaign must get its message out to voters via as many platforms as possible, including TikTok as well as WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube.

Biden’s “bidenhq” account currently has more than 330,000 followers and 4.5 million likes.

Trump’s appearance at Saturday’s fight came after he had sat down for an interview with Fox News Channel’s “Fox & Friends Weekend” that aired Sunday.

In that appearance, Trump said he was “OK” with the prospect of potential jail time or house arrest, saying it was “the way it is.”’

But he again suggested the public might not accept such a punishment for a former president now running to return to the White House.

“I don’t know that the public would stand it, you know. I’m not sure the public would stand for it,” he said. “I think it would be tough for the public to take. You know, at a certain point there’s a breaking point.”

Trump, as he has throughout the trial, maintained his innocence, saying he “did absolutely nothing wrong.”

He was asked how his wife, former first lady Melania Trump, has taken the news.

“She’s fine. But I think it’s very hard for her. I mean, she’s fine. But, you know, she has to read all this crap,” he said.

She did not appear with Trump in court at any point during his seven-week trial.

Authors

Guest Author

Jill Colvin, Will Weissert, and Meg Kinnard

Jill Colvin, Will Weissert, and Meg Kinnard reported for the Associated Press.

Colvin reported from Annapolis, Maryland, Weissert from Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, and Kinnard from Chapin, South Carolina.

View Profile

thediplomat.com · by Jill Colvin, Will Weissert, and Meg Kinnard

17. China: Closing Off Memory of Tiananmen Massacre

Compare these brave Chinese students 35 years ago to those on American campuses protesting in support of Hamas today.

China: Closing Off Memory of Tiananmen Massacre

35 Years On, Commemorators Imprisoned, Victims’ Families Denied Redress

hrw.org · June 2, 2024

Click to expand Image

Thousands of pro-democracy demonstrators protest in front of the Gate of Heavenly Peace in Tiananmen Square, Beijing, China, May 17, 1989. © 1989 Sadayuki Mikami/AP Photo

(New York) – The Chinese government is further suppressing any discussion and commemoration of the 1989 Tiananmen Massacre, Human Rights Watch said today. Leading up to the 35th anniversary of the Tiananmen Massacre on June 4, 2024, Chinese authorities have again preempted commemorations.

The government has imprisoned those in China and Hong Kong who have sought to honor the memory of the victims, while refusing to acknowledge responsibility for the mass killings or provide redress for victims and their families.

“The Chinese government is seeking to erase memory of the Tiananmen Massacre throughout China and in Hong Kong,” said Maya Wang, acting China director at Human Rights Watch. “But 35 years on, the government has been unable to extinguish the flames of remembrance for those risking all to promote respect for democracy and human rights in China.”

On April 3, Xu Guang (徐光), a 1989 student leader, was sentenced to four years in prison for “picking quarrels and provoking trouble” after he demanded that the Chinese government acknowledge the Tiananmen Massacre and held a sign calling for redress at a local police station in May 2022. Xu was reportedly tortured, shackled, and mistreated while in detention.

Tiananmen Mothers, a group of relatives of victims of the 1989 massacre, reported that one of their founders, Zhan Xianling, is under surveillance with guards outside her home. Other activists connected to the 1989 democracy movement including Pu Zhiqiang, a human rights lawyer who had been a student representative at Tiananmen, and Ji Feng, a student leader in Guizhou, are similarly under tightened police surveillance or taken away from their homes.

On May 28 and 29, Hong Kong police arrested seven people, including the already detained lawyer-activist Chow Hang-tung (鄒幸彤), and her 65-year-old mother, for alleged “seditious” posts regarding an “upcoming sensitive date.” Chow was one of the organizers of Hong Kong’s annual Tiananmen vigil with the now-disbanded Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China. These were the first arrests under the city’s recently adopted Safeguarding National Security Ordinance, known as “Article 23,” which punishes peaceful speech and civil society activism with heavy prison sentences.

In January, Hong Kong’s Court of Final Appeal overturned Chow’s acquittal. She had been acquitted of the charge of “inciting others to take part in an unauthorized assembly” in December 2022. The United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention has determined that Chow’s arrest and detention were arbitrary and has called for her immediate and unconditional release.

Chow and two other members of the Hong Kong Alliance also face potential life sentences on charges of “inciting subversion” under Hong Kong’s draconian National Security Law and are awaiting a trial date.

In November 2023, Hong Kong authorities did not renew the work visa of a Canadian-Chinese history professor, Rowena He. The Chinese University of Hong Kong subsequently fired her. She is the author of Tiananmen Exiles: Voices of the Struggle for Democracy in China, which the authorities removed from Hong Kong public libraries in May 2023.

The Chinese government has long ignored domestic and international calls for justice for the Tiananmen Massacre. Some of the sanctions that the European Union and United States imposed at the time have over the years been weakened or evaded. The lack of a sustained and coordinated international response to the Tiananmen Massacre and ensuing crackdown has contributed to Beijing’s increasingly brazen human rights violations.

These include crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims in Xinjiang, the imposition of two national security laws in Hong Kong that have suppressed the city’s long-protected freedoms, deepening repression in Tibet, and the persecution of human rights defenders throughout the country.

The Chinese government’s largely unchecked and expanding abuses across its borders, including its role in the abduction of Chinese activists living abroad, its exports of surveillance systems, and its efforts to undermine UN human rights mechanisms, all increasingly threaten human rights globally.

The Tiananmen Massacre was precipitated by the peaceful gatherings of students, workers, and others in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square and other Chinese cities in April 1989, calling for freedom of expression, accountability, and an end to corruption. The government responded to the intensifying protests in late May 1989 by declaring martial law.

On June 3 and 4, People’s Liberation Army soldiers fired upon and killed untold numbers of peaceful protesters and bystanders. In Beijing, some citizens attacked army convoys and burned vehicles in response to the military’s violence.

Following the killings, the government carried out a nationwide crackdown and arrested thousands of people on “counter-revolution” and other criminal charges, including arson and disrupting social order.

The government has never accepted responsibility for the massacre or held any officials legally accountable for the killings. It has been unwilling to investigate the events or release data on those who were killed, injured, forcibly disappeared, or imprisoned. Tiananmen Mothers documented the details of 202 people who were killed during the suppression of the movement in Beijing and other cities.

On the 35th anniversary of the Tiananmen Massacre, the Chinese government should take the following steps:

• Respect the rights to freedom of expression, association, and peaceful assembly, and cease the harassment and arbitrary detention of those who challenge the official account of the Tiananmen Massacre;
• Meet with and apologize to members of the Tiananmen Mothers, publish the names of all who died or were wrongfully imprisoned, and appropriately compensate the victims’ families;
• Permit an independent public inquiry into the Tiananmen Massacre and its aftermath, and promptly publish the findings and conclusions;
• Allow without conditions the return of Chinese citizens who were exiled due to their connections to the events of 1989; and
• Investigate all government and military officials who planned or ordered the unlawful use of lethal force against demonstrators and appropriately prosecute them.

Foreign governments should renew efforts to hold the Chinese government accountable by supporting the June 2020 call by 50 UN human rights experts urging the UN Human Rights Council to establish an independent UN mandate to monitor and report on human rights violations in China. They should also publicly mark the 35th anniversary, including in their embassies and consulates and online accounts in China, and press the Chinese government for accountability on this date.

“The international community should not give Beijing a pass for failing to address the Tiananmen Massacre atrocities or its continuing persecution of those keeping the memory of the massacre alive,” Wang said. “Foreign governments should seize this opportunity of the 35th anniversary and renew their commitments to take strong, coordinated, and principled actions against China’s worsening rights record.”

hrw.org · June 2, 2024

18. Secret Cyber Wars: Why States Are Increasingly Turning to Economic Espionage and How Cyber Proxies Play a Key Role

Conclusion:

As technological advancements reshape the contours of international relations, understanding the strategic calculations that drive states to engage in cyber economic espionage and to use proxies is increasingly crucial. This is important not only to secure states’ economic interests but also to preserve international peace and stability in an increasingly interconnected world.

Secret Cyber Wars: Why States Are Increasingly Turning to Economic Espionage and How Cyber Proxies Play a Key Role - Irregular Warfare Initiative

irregularwarfare.org · by William Akoto · June 4, 2024

Editor’s note: This article is part of Project Proxies and Partners, which explores the promises and pitfalls of security cooperation in war, at peace, and in between. We invite you to contribute to the discussion, explore the difficult questions, and help influence the future of proxies and partners. Please contact us if you would like to propose an article, podcast, or event.

In September 2001, operatives for Procter & Gamble were caught diving in dumpsters outside a Unilever facility in Chicago in search of documents and other discarded items containing confidential information about Unilever’s hair care products business. To avoid litigation and the negative publicity that often accompanies such disputes, the companies quietly reached a negotiated settlement where Procter & Gamble agreed to not use any of the information obtained. This early example illustrates the ongoing vulnerability companies face regarding data security. In today’s corporate environment where digital data storage is the norm, companies now have to be wary of not only paper documents but also discarded storage devices like hard drives, USBs, and even old office equipment that might store digital data.

Companies also have to worry about the increasing trend of nation-state-backed hackers trying to infiltrate corporate networks. This is part of a worrying shift in state-sponsored espionage from traditional intelligence gathering primarily targeted toward military and political secrets to the targeting of information held by private firms and other commercial enterprises that perform research and produce innovation critical to national economic growth and prosperity. Perpetrators often aim to use this information to leapfrog rivals’ technological advancements and to gain a competitive edge in the global marketplace. This is emblematic of modern interstate conflict, where the lines between economic, military, and political rivalry are blurred.

In this article, I aim to highlight the rising tendency of states to engage in cyber economic espionage and how cyber proxies—hackers for hire—are playing an increasingly central role in these efforts. Two brief examples illustrate this trend.

In 2017, APT10—a Chinese state-sponsored cyber proxy group believed to be linked to China’s Ministry of State Security—conducted a massive espionage operation dubbed Operation Cloud Hopper. This group is an example of what are known as Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) groups—hackers that engage in prolonged and targeted cyber campaigns against specific entities such as government agencies, companies, or other strategically important targets to steal information, disrupt operations, or spy on activities. In the Cloud Hopper operation, the group targeted managed service providers (MSPs)—companies that manage IT services for multiple businesses. The techniques used included spear-phishing to gain initial access, followed by the deployment of various malware tools to establish persistence and facilitate the exploration and extraction of valuable data.

The operation, distinctive in its scale and focus on commercial secrets rather than traditional military or political intelligence, was global, affecting countries across Asia, Europe, and North America. It spanned a wide range of industries including technology, telecommunications, and pharmaceutical companies. Targeting such a diverse array of industries highlights the strategic nature of the campaign and its aim to gain economic advantages through the theft of trade secrets and other sensitive corporate information.

The SolarWinds hack, identified in late 2020, is another significant incident that, although primarily seen as an intelligence-gathering operation, had substantial implications for economic espionage. This sophisticated attack involved the insertion of malicious code into the software updates of SolarWinds’ Orion platform, a widely used network management tool. Believed to be conducted by Russian intelligence services, this campaign compromised the systems of numerous US government agencies, top enterprises, and technology firms, allowing the attackers to spy on business activities and potentially steal valuable corporate and technology secrets. The breach not only exposed vast amounts of sensitive information but also revealed vulnerabilities in the software supply chain.

The Strategic Use of Cyber Proxies

These high-profile incidents raise important questions about why states choose to use proxy hackers for such operations. Academic researchers who have wrestled with this question suggest that states often use cyber proxies because it allows them to leverage specialized skills, expertise, tools, and capabilities that the proxies have but which might be missing from state intelligence agencies or are prohibitively expensive to develop in-house. The activities of cyber proxies tend to fall in the gray areas of international law and politics, which makes them very appealing to states that want to reap the benefits of the proxy’s activities while avoiding responsibility if the activities are discovered.

For instance, despite suspicions and probable cause, the lack of concrete, publicly-disclosed evidence explicitly linking China and Russia to the Cloud Hopper and SolarWinds operations respectively allowed them to deny involvement, thereby avoiding international sanctions, retaliatory cyberattacks, and other diplomatic consequences. Even when criminal indictments are issued for cyber espionage operations, they typically target individual hackers or the organizations directly involved, rather than the states that sponsor them. This separation enables the state sponsors to maintain a façade of non-involvement and continue their cyber operations under the veil of secrecy.

Proxies also serve another very important function: they can help states hide their true cyber capabilities from their adversaries. Even if state intelligence agencies have the necessary tools, capabilities, and personnel to successfully execute a cyber operation, it might still be beneficial to use cyber proxies so that adversaries do not become aware of these capabilities.

This is an important benefit for states that wish to maintain strategic ambiguity in cyberspace as norms in the cyber realm continue to develop. For example, Fancy Bear—a cyber proxy affiliated with Russian military intelligence (GRU) that uses sophisticated tactics and techniques—has been concretely linked to the hacking of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) during the 2016 US presidential election. However, direct attribution to the GRU remains circumstantial rather than definitive. This potentially allows the GRU to mask its true cyber capabilities.

How States Manage Their Cyber Proxies

States employ a variety of models in their relations with their cyber proxies. For example, the United States uses nontraditional cyber proxies such as defense contractors and security companies like Lockheed Martin and BAE Systems, whose software products, personnel, and services are often employed in the infiltration, degradation, or destruction of adversary computer systems. It maintains a close relationship with these proxies, allowing for strict oversight and control over their targeting choices and operational techniques. Conversely, countries like Iran and Syria tend to maintain more operational distance from their proxies, offering material and ideological backing in exchange for the proxies’ commitment to targeting designated firms, political foes, and other entities.

Russia maintains an even larger separation from its proxies, often refraining from direct guidance and allowing them free rein regarding targets and methods. In many cases, the only link between the proxy and Russian authorities is that they willingly turn a blind eye to the activities of the proxy despite having the capacity to crack down. This raises the intriguing possibility that some of these hacker groups may be acting as proxies of the Russian state without even being aware of it.

Putin and senior Kremlin officials frequently express admiration for these “patriotic” hackers while denying any knowledge of their activities. Putin has asserted that “Hackers are free people, like artists … ” so if they are patriotically minded will “ … do what they see as their part to fight Russia’s enemies.” In this way, the Russian government can deny knowledge of these proxies while reaping the benefits of their activities without admitting the involvement of government agencies.

Traditional Intelligence vs Economic Espionage

Regardless of whether states use government agents or proxy hackers for cyber operations, the logic that once guided traditional espionage—where information flowed from those who had it to those who needed it—does not appear to apply when it comes to economic espionage. In a recently published research paper, I show that contrary to earlier beliefs, countries with similar economic structures and technological capabilities are more likely to engage in economic espionage against each other (as opposed to those with dissimilar structures and capabilities). The reason? The stolen information is more applicable and immediately beneficial to the perpetrator. For example, it is of little use to steal technology to manufacture solar panels if you do not have factories and a technically capable workforce that can profitably leverage that information.

By focusing on rivals with similar economic structures and technological capabilities, perpetrators can refine their competitive strategies and enhance their own industrial and technological bases. Importantly, this strategy is less about filling gaps in knowledge and more about advancing in an already closely contested field. This dynamic has a profound policy implication for the likely future of interstate conflict: as states continue to develop and closely guard their technological innovations, the arena of interstate rivalry is likely to shift increasingly towards more covert forms of conflict.

This evolution suggests that except in a few instances, traditional forms of diplomacy and military confrontation may give way to an irregular warfare landscape where subterfuge and indirect aggression increasingly become the norm. In particular, states with similar economic and technological capabilities will increasingly find themselves not only competitors in the global marketplace but also clandestine rivals in a continuous struggle for technological supremacy. This scenario necessitates a reevaluation of national security strategies to prioritize cybersecurity and intelligence in anticipation of these less overt, but equally impactful forms of conflict.

In addition, diplomatic relations will likely become more complicated, as states may publicly adhere to norms of peaceful coexistence and cooperation while privately engaging in aggressive cyber operations. This combination of open cooperation with covert aggressive cyber tactics can strain international trust and cooperation, potentially leading to a more fragmented international system where states are increasingly wary of their counterparts’ intentions.

Confronting Economic Espionage and the Use of Cyber Proxies

If the United States is to respond effectively to the emerging risk posed by the use of state-sponsored cyber proxies, it needs a better understanding of how to mitigate their use and activities. In a research paper, I gathered new data on over 100 hacker groups around the world and their state sponsors to examine which accountability mechanisms are effective in mitigating the use of cyber proxies. My research indicates that the use of proxies is rare in states that have robust domestic accountability mechanisms. This is particularly true in countries where citizens can hold their elected leaders accountable for actions carried out by cyber proxies through vertical accountability mechanisms such as elections and other democratic practices. In contrast, trying to curb the use of cyber proxies using horizontal accountability mechanisms such as congressional and regulatory oversight bodies is significantly less effective.

These insights have important policy implications aimed at addressing the issue of cyber proxies. Firstly, they suggest that pressure from citizens and civil society organizations could be effective in reducing reliance on cyber proxies in countries where vertical accountability structures are effective. One practical way to implement this is to increase the number of attributions of cyber operations to proxies and their state sponsors. The act of attributing cyber attacks to state sponsors, even when the evidence is not concrete, could prompt pressure from citizens and civil society groups for governments to desist from such operations, potentially deterring future attacks.

Additionally, my findings imply that reliance on policies that predominantly aim to combat the use of cyber proxies through regulatory and other state oversight mechanisms are ineffective. For instance, despite numerous international agreements aimed at curbing state-sponsored cyber activities like the 2015 agreement between the United States and China to refrain from cyber-enabled theft of intellectual property for commercial advantages, activities attributed to Chinese state-sponsored actors have continued unabated.

With regard to economic espionage, my research holds important lessons for US national cybersecurity policy. For example, the current US National Cyber Strategy emphasizes building a resilient cyber infrastructure, deterring adversaries, and promoting American prosperity by fostering a secure cyberspace that supports US national interests and economic growth. While the strategy recognizes the importance of international cooperation, it primarily focuses on deterring adversarial actions through strength. It does not sufficiently capitalize on the important finding that the primary economic espionage threats are likely to come from nations with similar technological advancements and economic profiles. This includes perennial rivals China and Russia but also allies like France, Germany, and Britain. Given the tendency for similar economies to target each other in economic espionage activities, the US could refine its strategy by fostering deeper, more targeted intelligence-sharing partnerships with countries that are at similar levels of technological and economic development.

As technological advancements reshape the contours of international relations, understanding the strategic calculations that drive states to engage in cyber economic espionage and to use proxies is increasingly crucial. This is important not only to secure states’ economic interests but also to preserve international peace and stability in an increasingly interconnected world.

William Akoto is an Assistant Professor of Global Security in the Department of Foreign Policy & Global Security at American University’s School of International Service. His research is primarily focused on examining how states leverage cyber and other emerging technologies in the pursuit of national security objectives. Details of his past, current, and forthcoming research projects are available on his website at www.willakoto.com.

The views expressed are those of the author(s) and do not reflect the official position of the Irregular Warfare Initiative, Princeton University’s Empirical Studies of Conflict Project, the Modern War Institute at West Point, or the United States Government.

Main image: Cyber-warfare specialist (U.S. Air Force photo by J.M. Eddins Jr via DVIDS)

If you value reading the Irregular Warfare Initiative, please consider supporting our work. And for the best gear, check out the IWI store for mugs, coasters, apparel, and other items.

19. The Dangerous Myth of Deglobalization

Conclusion:

Deglobalization offers analysts a simple story to tell about changes to the global economy. But the reality is more complex: put plainly, it is impossible for a global economy characterized by a large U.S. deficit on one side and a large Chinese surplus on the other to truly fragment. The world needs to have a healthy debate about the drawbacks and benefits of economic integration. But that debate must start from a frank acknowledgment that many characteristics of the contemporary global economy still push toward more, not less, integration, and that addressing these ​factors will have real costs.

The Dangerous Myth of Deglobalization

Misperceptions of the Global Economy Are Driving Bad Policies

By Brad Setser

June 4, 2024

Foreign Affairs · by Brad Setser · June 4, 2024

A consensus is emerging that the world is cleaving into blocs—not only geopolitically but economically, too. In 2020, the economist Douglas Irwin wrote that “the COVID-19 pandemic is driving the world economy to retreat from global economic integration.” In the years since, how to manage this purported deglobalization has been a consistent theme at World Economic Forum meetings; in May, an Economist cover depicted a map of the world physically fracturing into competing economic blocs. The associated story presumed that deglobalization is a long-term certainty, arguing that it is becoming “visible in the economic data, as investors reprice assets and redirect capital in a less integrated world.” Last week, a Bloomberg columnist piled on, concluding that “global trade and finance are fragmenting into rival and increasingly hostile blocs, one centered on China and extending into the global South and another around the United States and other Western countries.”

But there is a problem with the assumption that deglobalization is a fact on the ground: the data does not fully back it up. As evidence of continuing deglobalization, observers often cite phenomena such as the United States’ reluctance to establish new free-trade deals, the debilitation of the dispute-settlement system overseen by the World Trade Organization (WTO), the proliferation of new national measures restricting trade, and declines in both short- and long-term capital flows from their past peaks. The COVID-19 pandemic certainly did reveal that economic interdependence carries risks, and the efforts Russia has made since 2022 to use its natural gas pipelines to influence the G-7’s response to its invasion of Ukraine—as well as the many sanctions the G-7 has imposed to try to weaken Russia’s economy—have highlighted the vulnerabilities that can arise when countries trade across geopolitical divides. But a closer look at economic data shows that even though governments have increasingly adopted policies aimed at strengthening their own resilience, the world economy is still evolving to become more, not less, globalized in key ways—and more dependent on Chinese supply in particular.

Global trade surged during the pandemic, and the world’s trade with China accelerated rather than slowed. A pandemic-era shift toward goods and away from services partly accounts for the acceleration. But the growth in trade with China also reflects the fact that China is simply producing things—high-tech exports such as electric vehicles, wind turbines, solar panels, and vital electronic and battery components—at a price point few can match. Between 2019 and 2023, China’s manufacturing surplus rose by about a percentage point of global GDP; it is now far larger than the surpluses run by Germany and Japan, the world’s other manufacturing powerhouses.

There is also less to the fall in capital flows than meets the eye. The decline in foreign direct investment (FDI) after 2016, for example, largely resulted from specific changes in tax regulations that led to a big reduction in the use of special-purpose vehicles in Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and a few other key European tax centers. And that tax simplification has not blunted one of the less savory forms of globalization: trade and financial flows that appear to serve only as a vehicle for multinational tax avoidance.

The now pervasive misperception of the world’s economy has consequences. Policymakers’ efforts to defend globalization by equating more global trade flows with increased efficiency tend to ignore the ways reality is more complex: for example, even those pursuing a healthy form of globalization will need to work to reduce multinational corporations’ tax avoidance. More fundamentally, if observers downplay the extent to which the world’s economies are still integrated, they will underestimate the cost of actions that would fracture the world economy, such as launching a conflict over Taiwan or a unilateral U.S. retreat from trade. World leaders must take steps to increase their economies’ resilience, but they must first understand those steps’ true costs.

TRADING UP

The idea that the world’s economy is deglobalizing took hold after the 2016 election of U.S. President Donald Trump. In his rhetoric, Trump repudiated the post–World War II bipartisan consensus around the value of free trade. And he also made some genuine policy shifts: pulling out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement to tighten the rules of origin for the trade of automobiles, and introducing tariffs on roughly three-fifths of the trade between the United States and China.

But globalization has deep roots by now, and such bilateral trade policies did little to change its fundamental trajectory. New trade deals and tariff programs always get a lot of ink. In reality, the changes in tariff rates in modern free-trade deals tend to be small, as most tariffs are already low or zero. Countries lacking preferential access to the U.S. market can still do incredibly well with the WTO’s standard trade terms. In fact, U.S. imports from Southeast Asia have soared in the past half-dozen years. The Southeast Asian members of the TPP increased their exports to the United States much more rapidly after Trump withdrew from the TPP than they had been able to before.

Any serious discussion of what drives trade must extend beyond tariffs and trade deals. The value of currencies also factors into trade flows, as do worldwide patterns of saving and investment. The dollar has remained strong since the United States withdrew from the TPP, and American consumers have not hesitated to buy foreign goods, helping drive the growth in U.S. imports.

Chinese exports to the United States are down since the 2018 introduction of the Trump tariffs, as are China’s reported holdings of U.S. Treasury and government-backed agency bonds. But those indicators are poor measures of these two economies’ true interconnection. When considering the impact of the United States’ much-ballyhooed bilateral tariffs on Chinese products, it is important to look beyond U.S. data showing a fall in direct imports from China and pay more attention to data from China itself. Surprisingly, those data reveal a much smaller decline in direct trade with the United States and a steep rise in Chinese exports to countries that are now exporting more to the United States. Careful studies of the impact of the Trump tariffs by the Bank of International Settlements and the economist Caroline Freund have found that the most important effect of bilateral tariffs was to lengthen supply chains, not to shrink overall global trade or to reduce the United States’ fundamental reliance on Chinese-sourced critical inputs. More Chinese parts now head to Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam—and to a more modest degree, Mexico—for final assembly. The underlying dependence on China is less visible, but no less substantial.

In fact, since the introduction of the Trump tariffs, China’s economy has become only more central to world trade. The data points here are often overlooked by American and European commentators, but they are unambiguous. Over the five years between the end of 2018 and the end of 2023, China’s exports of manufactured goods increased by 40 percent, from $2.5 trillion to $3.5 trillion, much more than the roughly 15 percent increase between 2013 and 2018.

Although China’s ratio of exports to GDP fell in the years following the global financial crisis, exports have once again become a crucial driver of Chinese growth. After discounting imports of parts, China’s exports of manufactured goods increased from around 11 percent of GDP before the pandemic to 14 percent of GDP in 2022. Predictions that this increase would turn out to be a one-off pandemic-related surge have not been borne out: although export growth slowed in 2023 as consumer spending diminished worldwide, it has now recovered, with export volumes growing by over ten percent in the first part quarter of 2024. China’s manufacturing surplus has increased even more dramatically, rising from a low of around six percent of China’s GDP in 2018 to a stunning 10 percent in 2023.

China’s post-pandemic export boom undermines the argument that the world’s economy is deglobalizing. For all of China’s economic weaknesses, it can still produce goods at a scale that no other country can match. After the end of a property boom that lasted more than a decade, China responded to weakening internal demand by investing more in the production of manufactured goods for export. Consider the trajectory in one prominent sector: automobiles.

Historically, China was not a major auto exporter. But as domestic automobile demand trended downward, China went from being a net importer of automobiles to the world’s largest exporter of them in just three years. This export wave is not about to weaken: China can produce at least twice as many internal combustion cars as it needs to meet shrinking domestic demand, and the country’s leading electric car manufacturer, BYD, is doubling its production capacity to ramp up exports. It is hard to think of a more potent symbol of China’s steadily growing integration with the global economy than the enormous fleet of car carriers BYD now has on order from Chinese shipyards.

DODGE BALL

U.S. policymakers are rightly concerned that the world has become too reliant on China for supply, particularly with respect to clean energy and green technology. In a mid-May speech, Lael Brainard, the director of the U.S. National Economic Council, put it well: “China’s industrial capacity and its exports in certain sectors are now so large that they can undermine the viability of investments in the U.S. and other countries. … Markets need reliable demand signals and fair competition for the best firms and technologies to be able to innovate and invest in clean energy and other sectors. The Chinese government has made clear that China’s massive investments in electric vehicles, solar panels, and batteries are an intentional strategy to effectively capture these sectors.”

Chinese policymakers should be equally worried that their country’s economy has become too dependent on the world for demand. But they do not appear to be. Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s policy of supporting “new productive forces,” together with his perhaps surprising resistance to “welfarism,” has yielded an unbalanced domestic economy that increasingly must externalize its internal distortions. China’s surplus in manufacturing has risen as much relative to world GDP in the last few years as it did during the first China shock following the country’s accession to the WTO, when a surge in Chinese exports and a sharp rise in China’s manufacturing surplus displaced workers across the world’s advanced economies. As a share of the world’s GDP, China’s manufacturing surplus now substantially exceeds any other country’s recorded surplus since the end of World War II.

China’s need to grow through exports, however, is not the only explanation for globalization’s surprising resilience. Another is corporate tax avoidance. Changes in the way pharmaceutical companies behave are illuminating: U.S. pharmaceutical firms now often sell the rights to profit from promising new drugs to subsidiaries located in low-tax jurisdictions. These drugs are manufactured abroad and then sold at a high price in the United States. As a result, the major U.S. pharmaceutical companies—and other multinationals—now report earning almost all their profits abroad and pay little or no domestic corporate income tax. This particular form of globalization extends beyond the pharma industry: American multinationals now often produce abroad in order to book large profits in offshore tax havens.

The low-tax haven of Ireland, and not China or India, is now by far the largest exporter of pharmaceuticals to the United States: in 2023, the United States imported twice as many pharmaceutical products from Ireland as it did from Canada, China, India, and Mexico combined. The trend extends well beyond pharmaceuticals. Ireland is also the biggest global market for the export of U.S. research-and-development services. The Cayman Islands and the British Virgin Islands are the biggest export markets for U.S. financial services, and Bermuda is the United States’ main international supplier of insurance services. A 2017 International Monetary Fund study showed that the resilience of FDI flows in the wake of the 2008–09 global financial crisis can largely be credited to a steady rise in FDI flows through centers of corporate tax avoidance.

In 2015, the members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development agreed to change their tax regulations to try to make it harder for companies to locate their profits in zero-tax jurisdictions. But these changes, which were implemented at the end of 2020, have not curbed tax-avoidance-driven globalization. Following a tax strategy pioneered by Apple, a number of major U.S. companies directed their Irish subsidiaries to buy their affected subsidiaries in zero-tax jurisdictions, effectively “Ireland-shoring” their intellectual property while simultaneously generating large depreciation allowances that lower their effective tax rates in Ireland.

These moves have made corporate tax avoidance more visible because Ireland is the only center of tax avoidance that follows Europe’s rigorous standards for the disclosure of economic and balance-of-payments data. Consequently, it is easy to track how foreign multinationals’ profits in Ireland have soared from around 40 billion dollars per year ten years ago to over 180 billion dollars per year today and now constitute roughly 70 percent of Ireland’s real domestic economy. Even more important, these profits represent over one percent of the eurozone’s GDP and close to three-quarters of a percent of the United States’ GDP. The resulting loss of U.S. tax revenue is far larger than most analyses capture, because corporations have no incentive to highlight just how little tax they actually pay in the United States.

RISK REVERSAL

Why does it matter if many people, including political leaders and influential commentators, misunderstand the trajectory of contemporary globalization and overstate the impact of a decline in political support for further economic integration? First, if policymakers focus discussion on the costs of deglobalization, they risk overlooking the many unhealthy forms of globalization that still exist and persist relatively undisturbed. China’s role in middle America’s deindustrialization is now widely acknowledged. But the role that the U.S. corporate tax code plays in that deindustrialization is not. Allowing American corporations to continue to use tax-avoidance strategies that transfer profits and production out of the United States is unhealthy for the global economy, even if it boosts measures of U.S. trade and foreign investment. If, instead, the U.S. Congress changed the tax laws to raise the global minimum tax and made it harder to shift intellectual property created in the United States to low-tax jurisdictions, U.S. pharmaceutical companies would likely shift the production of their most profitable drugs out of locations such as Ireland and Singapore and back to the United States.

Those who worry about deglobalization also often assume that all forms of economic integration are healthy. But they are not: the surge in cross-border bank flows before the global financial crisis, for example, reflected an unhealthy level of leverage and risk in the world’s big banks. Today, too, an excessive amount of the world’s FDI flows merely reflect tax avoidance, not productive economic activity.

There is also an opposing risk: that if policymakers do not acknowledge the degree to which globalization persists, they will grossly underestimate the shocks that would stem from a fuller decoupling of Chinese and U.S. trade. Even with the rise in U.S. tariffs on China, the world’s economy is still deeply integrated. If anything, China has become more central to global trade since Trump imposed his tariffs, and U.S.-Chinese interdependence has been masked, not severed. For instance, China could not have achieved its current $800 billion trade surplus in goods if the United States did not have a large trade deficit. That deficit is no longer financed by the direct purchase of U.S. bonds by China’s central bank. But it is still indirectly financed by China, in the form of the large stockpiles of dollars that Chinese exporters now hold offshore. The way China surplus’s remains the mirror image of the U.S. deficit is just one of the many, complex forms in which the U.S. and Chinese economies continue to rely on one another, even as the ties become harder to see in top-line economic data.

The role that the U.S. corporate tax code plays in globalization often goes unacknowledged.

Some deglobalization here could, in fact, also be healthy. If China relied less on global demand to make up for its internal weaknesses, that would put less pressure on its trading partners’ manufacturing sectors as well as reduce the overdependence of the United States, most European countries, and other democracies on China for critical inputs. But right now, the strong pressures on China to solve its domestic economic problems by increasing exports are likely to keep driving the world toward deeper, more unbalanced economic integration. The United States is trying to resist this pressure in the realm of electric vehicles, at a cost to U.S. consumers. As Chinese electric-vehicle firms go global, however, it is not clear that the United States can successfully insulate its own electric-vehicle industry simply by imposing tariffs on bilateral trade. Avoiding interdependence with China would likely require bigger policy shifts—and a greater willingness to pay for the costs of regionally rather than globally integrated supply chains.

Historically, the trade in automobiles has always been more regional than global; preserving that trading pattern in the face of a growing Chinese supply will require more restrictions on trade. But those sectoral restrictions can only limit the development of new forms of integration; they cannot reverse globalization writ large. The biggest economic challenge China now poses to G-7 policymakers is how to limit the dislocations that flow from China’s increasingly export- and manufacturing-dependent economy. Discussions about deglobalization miss the point.

For the United States in the near future, any true decoupling from the Chinese economy would be costly—far more costly than the past few years’ superficial decoupling. An easy, and relatively cheap, way for the United States to avoid bilateral tariffs is to import parts from Vietnam that China has shipped there for final assembly. It would be much harder to engineer Chinese parts out of U.S. supply chains entirely. And it would be equally difficult for China to restructure its economy so it relies more on internal demand.

Deglobalization offers analysts a simple story to tell about changes to the global economy. But the reality is more complex: put plainly, it is impossible for a global economy characterized by a large U.S. deficit on one side and a large Chinese surplus on the other to truly fragment. The world needs to have a healthy debate about the drawbacks and benefits of economic integration. But that debate must start from a frank acknowledgment that many characteristics of the contemporary global economy still push toward more, not less, integration, and that addressing these ​factors will have real costs.

• BRAD SETSER is the Whitney Shepardson Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Foreign Affairs · by Brad Setser · June 4, 2024

20. News site editor’s ties to Iran, Russia show misinformation’s complexity

Ideology or money? What drives these people?

News site editor’s ties to Iran, Russia show misinformation’s complexity

Experts say an overlap in funding underscores concern that the spread of falsehoods and propaganda online is entering a more complicated stage as the November election draws closer.

By Joseph Menn

June 2, 2024 at 9:05 a.m. EDT

The Washington Post · by Joseph Menn · June 2, 2024

correction

A previous version of this article incorrectly said that leaders of the online news site Grayzone had received payments from Iranian media, according to recently unearthed documents. The documents show that only one of the site’s editors received such payments. The article has been corrected.

A top editor at an online news site aimed at Americans who has worked extensively for Russia’s Sputnik also has taken money from Iranian government-owned media, according to newly unearthed documents — a sign of how widening geopolitical alliances are making it harder to identify and trace foreign influence operations.

Hacked emails and other documents from the Iranian government-funded Press TV show payments of thousands of dollars to Wyatt Reed, a writer who is now a Washington-based editor for the online publication Grayzone. In addition, the site’s founder, Max Blumenthal, regularly appears on Russian television and once accepted a trip to Moscow for a celebration of Russian state-controlled video network RT that featured Vladimir Putin.

Misinformation experts say the overlap in funding underscores concern that the spread of falsehoods and propaganda online is entering a more complicated stage as the November election draws closer.

“What you are reporting is, I think, the most practical example of that convergence we’ve seen, where you have someone who has deep ties to Iranian state media working for an organization that we also know is a destination for narrative laundering from Russia,” said Emerson Brooking, co-director of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Lab.

The Press TV files, much of them in Persian, were released on Telegram in 2022 by a self-proclaimed hacktivist group called Black Reward, but the files received little attention then. An activist disinformation researcher, Neal Rauhauser, converted them into a searchable format and provided them to The Washington Post.

The files appear to show that the Iranian broadcaster paid Reed for occasional contributions to its programming in 2020 and 2021 while he was working as a correspondent for Russia’s Sputnik news outlet. Reed had nine bylines in Grayzone in 2019 and 2020, followed by a gap of 2½ years. He has had 24 more Grayzone bylines since mid-2023, when he was identified as managing editor.

Grayzone posts content on the web, X and YouTube and has been highly critical of Iran’s regional enemy Israel, as well as its supporters in the United States.

Reed did not respond to repeated requests for comment. Blumenthal, Grayzone’s editor in chief, did not answer emails seeking comment. After this article appeared, Reed tweeted that he had publicly posted about some of his work for Press TV, while Blumenthal tweeted that “Reed reported for Press TV in 2020, three years before he joined us at The Grayzone.”

The First Amendment guarantees free speech rights even for Americans believed to be spreading foreign propaganda. But current and former intelligence officials say Americans’ tolerance for information paid for by foreign actors has made disinformation one of the most critical threats to U.S. democracy. Foreign support for ostensibly independent publications gives other countries deniability for disinformation as well as protection from internet platforms’ labeling the output as coming from state-sponsored outlets.

Reed is not the only Grayzone author to have worked for Russian outlets. Grayzone contributor and London journalist Mohamed Elmaazi wrote full-time for Sputnik between 2019 and 2021, he says on his LinkedIn profile. Regular Grayzone freelancer Jeremy Loffredo was full-time at RT in the same years, according to his LinkedIn. Neither responded to requests for comment.

The payments to Reed documented in the hacked Press TV documents came before last year, when the Iranian outlet was singled out for U.S. sanctions that went beyond the general ban on imports from and exports to Iran that was set by presidential executive order in 1995. But Press TV’s parent, state-owned Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting, was specially sanctioned in 2013, which attorneys said automatically barred transactions with subsidiaries without special permission.

Attorneys who deal regularly with Iran sanctions issues said U.S. journalists who were paid by sanctioned Iranian media entities could be in legal jeopardy unless they were granted waivers by the U.S. Treasury Department. The United States has granted some limited exceptions for state media employees sent to cover events in the country.

“If you are exporting your services to an Iranian company, the answer is yes,” sanctions attorney Ali Herischi said in response to a question about potential liability. “Every Iranian entity is sanctioned, and if there are specific sanctions, you definitely need a license.”

Working for Sputnik theoretically might be covered by the Foreign Agent Registration Act, which generally requires anyone working as the “agent” of a “foreign principal” to register with the Justice Department if they intend to influence officials or “the American public regarding U.S. domestic or foreign policy or the political or public interests of a foreign government or foreign political party.”

But the statute’s application to people working as journalists is unclear, with rare examples of attempted enforcement. Since 2017, the Justice Department has required RT itself and some of its U.S. business partners to register. Some top editors have also registered under FARA.

Beyond writing hundreds of articles for Sputnik, Reed went to occupied Ukraine as an international observer of the widely condemned, post-invasion referendums on whether residents wanted their territories to be annexed by Russia. He was quoted by Russian government news service Tass as saying: “Everything I’ve seen so far has been very transparent, very open.”

While there is no evidence that Iran and Russia discussed their payments to Reed or others, the combination makes it harder to say which country is pushing for or rewarding any particular narrative.

Russia has in the past paid freelancers who did not know where their salary was coming from. It is increasingly common for social media influencers to boost government-backed themes and content, as well as being boosted themselves for doing so.

The Australian Strategic Policy Institute said recently that Russia and China probably had coordinated ahead of a March election in the Solomon Islands to spread misinformation in their official social accounts about a nonexistent U.S. plot for regime change, and in 2021 Russian and Chinese officials agreed to cooperate on a slew of media ventures, according to emails hacked from a Russian broadcaster in 2022. The initiative was led by Russia’s Ministry of Digital Development, Communication and Mass Media and China’s National Radio and Television Administration.

Since then, Chinese channels have quoted Russian officials and often adopted Russia’s view of the Ukraine war. Chinese accounts even amplified false claims about U.S. bioweapons research in Ukraine, which helped China point to possible American origins for covid-19.

“Many foreign governments collectively view the West, and the U.S. in particular, as a shared adversary,” said Darren Linvill, a misinformation scholar at Clemson University. “They share not only goals, but also tactics with one another. Parallel agendas shared by some non-Western governments makes attribution of responsibility for some disinformation more difficult than it would otherwise be.”

Grayzone does not disclose its financial backing. Little-known among most segments of the population, it has hundreds of thousands of followers on YouTube and X, and its stories sometimes ricochet among both the far left and far right. X owner Elon Musk has helped that, corresponding on his platform last year with Grayzone personality Aaron Maté when Maté accused the investigative website Bellingcat of being a NATO front and said the White House had squelched talk of a negotiated settlement in Ukraine.

Grayzone founder and editor Blumenthal appears on RT and attended the same 2015 Moscow gala dinner for it that Michael Flynn famously joined. More recently, he promoted the false theory that Russia’s bombing of a theater full of refugees in Mariupol in 2022 was carried out by Ukraine’s forces.

Describing itself as an independent investigative news site, Grayzone has endured in part because it defies easy categorization. Many of its articles strike a leftist tone, and its coverage has been positive toward Russia, Syria, and other authoritarian states.

Like many sources suspected of misinformation and propaganda, Grayzone mixes falsehoods and misleading insinuation with truth. But it is unusual in that some of its leaders have worked in traditional journalism and that it produces some material incorporating significant research.

One such story devoted thousands of words to allege widespread Israeli attacks against its own citizens on Oct. 7 while saying that Hamas treated hostages well and used “clever” tactics. That article by Blumenthal distorted the material from sources it cited, Israelis complained, conflating separate incidents to make it seem that troops repeatedly fired indiscriminately at Israelis near Hamas targets.

Blumenthal previously contributed articles to the New York Times and Los Angeles Times. He is the son of Sidney Blumenthal, a journalist who became an adviser to Bill and Hillary Clinton. Maté previously worked at Al Jazeera.

Reed’s LinkedIn page says he served as a Sputnik correspondent in Washington from 2019 until June 2023, without listing any other journalism experience. He has been identified as managing editor on Grayzone’s website since July.

Press TV was added to the U.S. Treasury’s list of Specially Designated Nationals in September, when officials said that the government outlet “has broadcast scores of forced confessions and derogatory programs about Iranian activists, in many cases broadcasting forced confessions before detainee trials. Press TV has also been used by Iranian intelligence services to recruit sensitive assets, including U.S. persons.”

Reed’s money had to be routed through third parties even though they preceded the Press TV sanctions because banking restrictions on transactions with Iran were already in place, the hacked emails show.

In multiple exchanges during 2021, Reed told Press TV’s finance department to send his payments via another man, Gamal Hassanein, though he provided his own account number at a bank in Ruther Glen, Va. Records refer to payments to Reed of $3,600, $1,690, and 210 euros, now worth about $225. Hassanein did not respond to an email from The Post.

The Press TV website identifies Reed as “its correspondent in the U.S.” His contributions include a commentary on Donald Trump’s false claims of major election fraud in December 2020, an interview with a Press TV anchor about protests against police brutality in April 2021, and a two-minute video segment about past U.S. support for the Iranian opposition group Mujahedin-e-Khalq in July 2021.

Reed more recently reported from Russia-occupied Donetsk, in eastern Ukraine, where he said that “poor Zelensky” was worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Variations of that claim have been repeated for years by Russian-aligned media, but the supposed yachts and mansions attributed to Zelensky belong to other people.

At Grayzone, Reed’s work includes a March story with Blumenthal attacking celebrity chef José Andrés for trying to feed Palestinians in Gaza via a jetty made with rubble that the authors said would include “genocidal biomatter.”

The Washington Post · by Joseph Menn · June 2, 2024

​21. Opinion | How do we want America to be? By William McRaven

Opinion | How do we want America to be?

We have the opportunity to continue to be viewed as exceptional.

By William McRaven

June 3, 2024 at 5:41 p.m. EDT

The Washington Post · by William McRaven · June 3, 2024

William H. McRaven is a retired Navy admiral.

My mother was a member of the Greatest Generation. Born in 1921, she was raised on a small farm in East Texas. She went to church every Sunday. Her family struggled through the Great Depression. Her brother went off to fight World War II in the Pacific, and she found lasting love with a fighter pilot from that war.

She believed in American Exceptionalism — not in the power of our military or the strength of our economy, but in the values that shaped the nation. She often told me stories of great acts of courage, sacrifice and integrity, stories rooted in American history. Stories that would frame my understanding of our national character.

She loved the story of John Adams, who despite withering criticism defended the British soldiers who shot and killed several rioting civilians during the Boston Massacre in 1770. She praised the jurors who found the soldiers — who had been harassed and assaulted by the crowd — not guilty of murder charges. She extolled their fairness as essential to the American character.

Then there was Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, who treated a defeated Robert E. Lee with grace and compassion at Appomattox; Gen. Douglas MacArthur, who worked to rebuild Japanese society during the post-World War II occupation of Japan; Secretary of State George C. Marshall and his plan to reconstruct a devastated postwar Europe; the Berlin Airlift; and many other examples of the American character.

Growing up in the segregated South, my mother was not naive about our nation’s faults, but she always believed in our better angels. She believed that America was exceptional because there was goodness in our hearts, goodness that transcended our hatreds, goodness that brought us together in the worst of times, goodness that showed the world that despite our internal strife and political divisions we could rise above it all and be the best version of ourselves. This was what made America exceptional.

Now, a former president has been convicted by a jury in New York, and we have a choice to make. We can show the world that we are still exceptional and continue to lead the international community with integrity and pride, or we can prolong the onslaught of crassness, vulgarity, pettiness and righteous indignation and descend into national mediocrity, where there is nothing of value worth emulating.

I have been a vocal critic of the former president, but I took no joy in seeing him found guilty. He was the president of the United States. My president. Whether I liked him or not, he had been elected by the people, the American people — your neighbors, your colleagues, your friends and your family. If we are going to continue to be viewed as exceptional, then it is time for both sides to lay down their rhetorical arms and find a way to rise above.

On the left, stop the gloating, the ugly memes, the public rants, the late-night roastings and the political vitriol. On the right, respect the legal verdict, support the jurors, fly your flag with honor and find a way to bridge the political divide. There are thoughtful, reasonable, genuinely good men and women on both sides. Let them speak for America.

Abraham Lincoln once said, “My dream is of a place and a time where America will once again be seen as the last best hope of Earth.” It is up to us — all of us — to decide whether this is that place and time. Whether this is where we stand together and show the world that we can rise above, that we are exceptional, that my mother was right — that our goodness can transcend our hatreds and bring us together even in the most challenging of times.

The Washington Post · by William McRaven · June 3, 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