Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:


1. "We'll start the war from right here."
--Brigadier General Theodore Roosevelt Jr., son of the former president, who landed with his troops in the wrong place on Utah Beach


2. "If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt, it is mine alone."
--General Dwight Eisenhower, future president, in a draft of remarks he'd made in case the invasion was a failure


3. "Hitler made only one big mistake when he built his Atlantic Wall. He forgot to put a roof on it."
--World War II U.S. paratrooper aphorism


To remember the contributions of our great OSS on D-Day, before and after, please watch this 15 minute video: Operation Overlord: OSS and the Battle for France (80th) https://vimeo.com/922968344/b1184cee9c


We should reflect on General Eisenhower's message to the force for D-Day:




1. D-Day 80th anniversary: A look at the paratrooper mission in Normandy

2. “The Rule of LGOPs” (Little Groups of Paratroopers) (applied)

3. SENATOR WICKER UNVEILS MAJOR DEFENSE INVESTMENT PLAN

4. Inside the Navy’s slick effort to find workers to build submarines

5. Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III Concludes Tenth Visit to the Indo-Pacific

6. Now Is the Worst Time to Abandon NATO

7. Biden’s Foreign-Policy Problem Is Incompetence

8. Evolve or Die: Army Special Operations Integration as a Catalyst for Necessary Change

9. Don't expect an Indo-Pacific NATO anytime soon

10. What the West Can Learn From Singapore

11. Airman Earned an Air Force Cross. His Name Remains Secret.

12. Is There a Revolution in Military Affairs in Ukraine?

13. Xi Calls for More University Exchanges With US to Boost Ties

14. Hamas Has Reinvented Underground Warfare

15. War Books: Inside Ike’s Mind on D-Day

16. D-Day's Bodyguard of Lies: Intelligence and Deception in Normandy

17. Opinion | The Pentagon is learning how to change at the speed of war

18. Inconvenient Alliances: How Hamas Killed Progressivism

19. Russia’s Mercenary-Industrial Complex in Africa

20. US Defense Secretary Austin’s chief of staff to step down this summer

21. The US needs more China hands

22. Kenya's Mission in Haiti Opens New Chapter for U.S. Security Strategy

23. 494. “Sixth Domain” – Private Sector Involvement in Future Conflicts

24. How to Lead an Army of Digital Sleuths in the Age of AI

25. ‘We Are the World Power.’ How Joe Biden Leads

26. Why the ancient philosophy of stoicism is having a modern revival





1. D-Day 80th anniversary: A look at the paratrooper mission in Normandy


D-Day 80th anniversary: A look at the paratrooper mission in Normandy

whittierdailynews.com · by Kurt Snibbe · June 5, 2024

Nearly 160,000 Allied troops landed on D-Day, made up of major forces from the U.S., the United Kingdom, Canada and 12 other Allied nations. Some 23,400 airborne troops landed in Normandy from 822 aircraft and gliders. It was the largest amphibious invasion and the largest paratrooper assault in history.

The U.S. 82nd Infantry Division was redesignated and the 101st was activated Aug. 15, 1942, as the Army’s first airborne divisions. The 11th, 13th and 17th Airborne Divisions were activated by 1943.

The mission

The paratroopers were assigned what was probably the most difficult task of the initial operation – a night jump behind enemy lines five hours before the coastal landings.

The 82nd and 101st were dropped to protect the invasion zone’s western extremity and to facilitate the Utah Beach landing force’s movement into the Cotentin Peninsula. The British and Canadian attacks also accomplished their primary goal of securing the left flank of the invasion force.

The paratroopers were badly scattered. Low clouds and fog over the peninsula made navigation difficult, and even trained pathfinders had trouble locating and marking the desired drop zones.

Despite the adverse conditions and antiaircraft fire, most of the transports and gliders reached their designated areas. Those who came down outside their intended drop zones tended to confuse the enemy.


Big dummies

One of the least-known episodes of the Allied invasion was the use of straw-filled and inflatable rubber dummy parachutists for deception and diversion. They were fitted with explosive devices fused to detonate near the ground, which gave the illusion of gunfire to confuse German defenders. Thousands of dummies were dropped at night in the area of Marigny, France. They were successful in diverting the German 915th Infantry Regiment toward the fake drop zone.

Carry that load

Paratroopers wore specialized jump suits with large pockets to carry extra rations, ammunition or grenades. The paratrooper helmet had a modified liner with forked straps to secure the chin cup.

Since airborne troops had to fight with what they could carry or what could be airdropped to them, each paratrooper jumped with an average of 70 pounds of equipment.

The T-5 parachute assembly, was the type used by most U.S. Army paratroopers during World War II. When the paratrooper jumped from an aircraft, the static line pulled the cover from the backpack and released the parachute. Americans were the only airborne forces to use reserve parachutes in World War II. Paratroopers carried a length of rope to lower themselves in case they landed in a tree.

Most paratroopers carried the standard M1 Garand rifle. For the drop, paratroopers carried their disassembled rifles in quilted cloth containers called Griswold bags.

Words to remember

“If die we must, we ask that we die as men would die, without complaining, without pleading and safe in the feeling that we have done our best for what we believed was right.”

Lt. Col. Robert L. Wolverton, 29, praying with his 750 troops of the 3rd Battalion, 506th Parachute Infanty Regiment of the 101st Airborne Division before taking part in the drop.

Hours later, Wolverton was killed by German machine gun fire as he hung tangled in a tree in an orchard outside of St. Come-du-Mont.


Sources: “Spearheading D-Day,” by Jonathan Gawne; Britain at War Magazine; Time magazine; “World War II: The Definitive History,” published by Dorling Kindersley; the National WWII Museum; U.S. Navy; the Naval History & Heritage Command; The U.S. Air Force Museum; The U.S. Army; The Associated Press

Former Focus Page editor Charles Apple contributed to this graphic.

whittierdailynews.com · by Kurt Snibbe · June 5, 2024



2. “The Rule of LGOPs” (Little Groups of Paratroopers) (applied)


You might not think such an article would include SECDEF McNamara and the General Accountability Office (GAO).

“The Rule of LGOPs” (Little Groups of Paratroopers) John Marke © 2015 (rev of 2011)

John Marke / July 1, 2015

On this the 71st anniversary of the World War II D-Day invasion it is only fitting to remind ourselves that rarely do things go as planned in battle.

The 18th century military strategist Carl Von Clausewitz called it the “fog of war.” It must have been pretty foggy on the night of June 5th and morning of June 6th 1944 off the coast of Normandy. In the predawn hours Airborne troopers were dropped all over the field of battle, few hitting the “drop zone” as planned…

The Rule of LGOPs

“After the demise of the best Airborne plan, a most terrifying effect occurs on the battlefield. This effect is known as the Rule of LGOPs. This is, in its purest form, small groups of 19- year old American Paratroopers. They are well-trained, armed-to-the-teeth and lack serious adult supervision. They collectively remember the Commander’s intent as “March to the sound of the guns and kill anyone who is not dressed like you…” …or something like that. Happily they go about the day’s work…

The Rule of LGOPs is instructive:

– They shared a common vision

– The vision was simple, easy to understand, and unambiguous

– They were trained to improvise and take the initiative

– They need to be told what to do; not how to do it.

To be sure, I am not denigrating planning. Whether that structured thought effort is military, homeland security, or risk assessment, which I include as a type of planning. But anticipation must go hand in glove with adaptability.

The Rule of LGOPs is, of course, a metaphor for resilience. All Armies, by the way, believe their soldiers are the best, the bravest, the most noble. But not all are the most resilient or adaptable. That was true of the German Army in Normandy, which ironically was commanded by Field Marshall Erwin Rommel. Rommel earned the nickname “The Desert Fox” for being a master of maneuver warfare. The irony, of course, is that “The Fox” was now charged with defending the European Coastline from Spain’s northern border to Norway.Rommel, the master of the blitz maneuver was locked into a static, defensive position.



Rommel faced a terrible quandary: how to defend over 5,300 kilometers of coastline? The quandary is not unlike that faced by a Homeland Security. How to defend an almost infinite number of potential targets? Think about this in terms of risk and investment. What is the threat, where and how am I vulnerable, and what is the consequence of an attack being launched at a particular place in this landscape?

Let’s stretch a bit and compare two theories of risk: Auditor v. LGOP

Both the Auditor and the LGOP are creatures of their respective environments and assumptions, i.e. their “world views.” While I appreciate that most points-of-view are “relative,” for sake of argument let me give the following biased impressions:

The Auditor, for the most part, deals with an orderly and predictable world. They deal with rules, regulations, processes, protocols, and procedures. They deal primarily with man-made systems. The title “Father of Accounting” is generally accorded to the Franciscan Friar Luca Pacioli (pronounced pot-CHEE-oh-lee) who, in 1494, codified methods used by merchants in Venice that served as the world’s only accounting textbook until well into the 16th century. Remarkably sophisticated, if not a tad compulsive, he described the accounting cycle we know today and also suggested that a person should not go to sleep at night until the debits equaled the credits.


Now, accounting is not the same as auditing, although they are inexorably bound in mainstream commerce and governance, i.e. determining the financial health of a publicly traded company or the efficient use of resources in government.

The paradigm of today’s Enterprise Risk Management, the GAO, auditing in general (and its governing board the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board or PCAOB)  is a product of professional education at the university level, shared accounting standards, certifications, governing bodies, etc. Technically there is a difference between ERM and Audit. But let me put it this way: they share so much professional DNA that, were they actual families, their offspring‟s would not be allowed to marry. And this is important….they share the same epistemic outlook.

The LGOPs – The LGOP is a first responder. Paratrooper, Marine, Ranger, SEAL, Air Commando, Special Forces, Fire Fighter, Paramedic, Police Officer, ICE, Coast Guard. I probably missed your group, but you know who you are. They are also the steelworkers who showed up at World Trade and started rescue and recovery operations….nobody told them to do that.

Today, more than even before, LGOPs operate in the fog of battle, and they also know a guy named Mr. Murphy – that if it can go wrong it will go wrong.

The LGOP will (usually, but not always) do what you tell them.

More importantly they will do what you haven’t even thought of….and do it well. They know the world is uncertain, life is a craps shoot. They improvise, take the initiative, and like the paratroopers riding the horses pictured below, “they didn’t get the memo.”

I would never talk to paratroopers about “epistemology;” but I sure would ask their bosses. If you commit people to war, to danger, to risk… then your “world view” and all your underlying assumptions better hold water. This, by the way, is the whole point of this paper, and I will return to this theme a bit later.

OKAY, what’s YOUR epistemology?

Now, I didn’t take a poll of auditors, but actions speak louder than words. If this is true, then auditors are solidly grounded in the epistemology of Newtonian physics. This is a mechanical view of the world….think “clock.” The clock is the sum of its parts. It can be reduced to its components (called reductionism) and its operation is both knowable and “determined.” The world is largely linear, i.e. moves from point “A” to point “B” and 2+2 = 4. What you get out is proportional to what you put in. This is the world of the engineer, the auditor, the accountant, the time-and-motion expert (we once called them efficiency experts), of Fredrick Taylor, Frank & Lillian Gilbreth.

A competing view to the Newtonian could be termed Quantum. Two tenets of this field deal with the indeterminacy in nature (see Heisenberg‟s Principal of Uncertainty), and the inability to prove a system while operating within that system, (see Gödel‟s Incompleteness Theory). It gets back to what do we know for sure, and how can we measure it – the theory of knowledge or epistemology.

From a systems perspective, the revolution in physics and epistemology of the early 20th century leads us to the concept that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and sometimes is it also different than the sum of its parts. Ultimately the science of complexity and complex adaptive systems (CAS) finds its intellectual roots in the theories of Heisenberg, Einstein, Schrödinger (and his quantum cat) and Gödel.

This is a whole different way of thinking – a different paradigm – with different assumptions about what is knowable and how it is knowable. The world we live in is, more often than not, a non- linear world. Very simply, 2+2 may be greater than.

Think of Per Bak’s sand hill experiments in “How Nature Works” (Springer, New York, 1996). When is criticality reached? The last grain of sand creates a non-linear reaction, i.e. a tiny grain of sand causes the whole pile to collapse or to “flip” from one stable state to another. Think about the straw that broke the camel’s back. Biologists, like C.S. Holling, think about resilience in terms of criticality, i.e. you reach the tipping point when the ecosystem “flips” into another state.

Some of theorists have gone so far as to say that the closer you get to measure the phenomena, the more error you induce by your presence, i.e. Heisenberg’s Uncertainty. The social scientist Karl Weick does a beautiful job of describing this in his seminal work The Social Psychology of Organizing (Weick, 1997). And back to Kurt Gödel, “Can we ever formulate a mathematical system that could contain the proofs of all its own truths?” With all apologies to Gödel, “the truth of a system must come from outside the system…very simplified: it’s like a wife asking her husband, “Are you having an affair?”

The physics of Newton is not wrong; we need it and use it every day. The intellectual tenets of auditors are not wrong. We need their methodologies to carry out even the most basic of commerce. However, neither is inappropriate for problems characterized by high levels of complexity and uncertainty. Our responsibility is to make sure the incorrect paradigm doesn’t dominate and do more harm than good. For example…

Robert McNamara was Secretary of Defense under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson during the Vietnam War. He was the first non-Ford family member to run the Ford Motor Company. As the press was fond of saying, he was one of the “Wiz Kids” of the Kennedy Administration.


He was what we would today call a “quant” or numbers man. He introduced an efficiency-based brand of “systems analysis” called Planning Programming, & Budgeting. His staff focused on qualities that could be quantified. He demanded cost justification as part of the budget process in the Defense Department. Money is power in Washington, and McNamara ensured his power as an administrator under this rubric.


According to McNamara, quantification lifts up and preserves those aspects of a phenomenon which can most easily be controlled and communicated to other specialists. Further, it imposes order on hazy thinking by banishing unique attributes from consideration and re-configuring what is difficult or obscure such that it fits the standardized model.

In short, anything but measurable, quantifiable outcomes were irrelevant. Further, there was an economically rational linkage between inputs (e.g. soldiers, weapons systems) of war and the outputs (e.g. dead VC). McNamara thought he could predict the probability of and timing of victory based on the numbers of US troops in Vietnam. He was wrong.

               Success         Inconclusive    Collapse 

For the year 1966:.27.1For the year 1967:.4.45.15For the year 1968:.5.3.2

McNamara even went to far as to develop models predicting the probability of various outcomes by year, i.e. success, inconclusive, and collapse (here meaning the collapse of the South Vietnamese government). Truth was equated with that which could be counted. As a result, the options most reducible to quantification became the ones that received the most attention in Vietnam.

Is there an institutional memory for foul-ups? Perhaps not. Much of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s perspective (at times called a fetish for numbers) can be traced back to McNamara. Obviously this perspective was much in favor with auditors, who also live and breathe by the numbers. It has also been entrenched into the current risk management philosophy of the GAO or Governmental Accountability Office.

The GAO (first called the Government Accounting Office) was started in 1921 under President Warren G. Harding. According to its history, “…the GAO was created because federal financial management was in disarray after World War I. Wartime spending had driven up the national debt, and Congress saw that it needed more information and better control over expenditures. The GAO is independent of the executive branch and has a broad mandate to investigate how federal dollars are spent.”


The GAO is staffed by honest, patriotic, hardworking people. The “whiz kids” were also honest, patriotic, and hardworking people. But remember what I said earlier: If you commit people to war, to danger, to risk… then your “world view” and all your underlying assumptions better hold water.

Using the calculus of cost-benefit in war (McNamara) or demanding probabilistic risk assessment in homeland security (GAO) is an invitation to disaster.

There are alternatives that better deal with the complexities of war and terrorism. We need to move those to the forefront of our risk management efforts. We owe it to the future and to the past…


Click the following for “Blood Upon The Risers” and a tribute to the American Paratrooper.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KonxiEQ8oM

The Author:

John Marke was originally trained in systems theory he now focuses on transnational risk. His goal is to develop more realistic risk assessment and mitigation methodologies than those held over from “the best and brightest.” Call me. I stay up late.

A note of historic importance: the author (known then as “Charlie 13 or C-013) completed jump school(some years ago) with the 44th Co. Airborne, Ft. Benning, Ga.

He can be reached at ctc8098@gmail.com or 636-458-1917.


3. SENATOR WICKER UNVEILS MAJOR DEFENSE INVESTMENT PLAN


I am a little late on this as it has been reported on over the past few days.


Compare this plan with Thomas Mahnken's Foreign Affairs article: A Three-Theater Defense Strategy  https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/theater-defense-war-asia-europe-middle-east


SENATOR WICKER UNVEILS MAJOR DEFENSE INVESTMENT PLAN

MAY 29, 2024

https://www.wicker.senate.gov/2024/5/senator-wicker-unveils-major-defense-investment-plan


WASHINGTON – U.S. Senator Roger Wicker, R-Miss., the highest-ranking Republican on the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee, released a significant defense investment plan to rebuild the U.S. military and defense industrial base for a generation.

The emerging Axis of Aggressors is undermining U.S. interests across the globe and our current defense investment does not meet the moment. Our defense industrial base is underfunded and unprepared for the wars of today, tomorrow, and the foreseeable future. 

In recent years, Senator Wicker has advanced major legislative efforts to enhance our military preparedness. He has also issued warnings to highlight the crisis in American defense planning and offered solutions for what we should do next. This blueprint released today builds on these recommendations by laying out how the United States could further invest in a national defense renewal that puts us on a wartime footing immediately.

Senator Wicker’s analysis concludes that to meet the current and emerging global threats, the annual defense budget needs to grow to five percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) over time. This proposal, Senator Wicker notes in the report, is both consistent with historical defense spending during periods of great power rivalry, as well as crucial to maintaining a technical edge over adversaries in multiple theaters. It is also in response to recent expert findings that the Chinese Communist Party spends more than the United States on defense.

Titled “21st Century Peace Through Strength: A Generational Investment in the U.S. Military”, Senator Wicker’s report provides exact recommendations about where the Department of Defense, the executive branch, and Congress need to work together to accelerate the development of new capabilities and build up existing ones. These recommendations encompass a wide array of platforms, domains, and strategic concepts across more than 20 focus areas.

Read the executive summary of “21st Century Peace Through Strength” here.

In 2023, Senator Wicker took to the U.S. Senate floor and spoke in committee hearings repeatedly to discuss the worsening state of deterrence for our Navynuclear forces, in the Indo-Pacificin Africa and in Europe. In recent years, Senator Wicker has published a series of national op-eds outlining challenges with submarine productionforce planninggrowing cooperation between adversaries, and strategic force development. Common among all of these efforts was one central theme: The defense industrial base is not where it needs to be.

Listed below are some of the key recommendations of the report in each major area. Read the report in full here.

Rebuilding the Arsenal of Democracy

  • Eliminate munitions purchases below maximum production rate unless munitions are above Total Munitions Requirement levels
  • Pursue alternative munitions production lines to increase short-term capacity
  • Create requirements for Foreign Military Sales/Presidential Drawdown Authority stockpile reserves
  • Fortify the munitions supplier base with special attention to energetics and component manufacturers

Proliferating Integrated Air and Missile Defense

  • Field Guam Defense System as soon as possible
  • Reverse decision to cancel SM-3 Block IB interceptor
  • Surge capacity in existing U.S. production lines while exploring optionality in other systems like NASAMS, FrankenSAM, and others
  • Revise and refit lower-altitude air defense to counter UAS across the services

Raising the Alarm on Contested Logistics

  • Establish biennial contested logistics exercises for TRANSCOM
  • Vastly expand prepositioning program in Pacific theater, including multiple regional contingency stockpiles
  • Drastically expand purchases of Navy, Army, and contracted sealift
  • Create crash-program for reloading vertical launch at sea
  • Fund new experimentation in innovative tactical-level logistics capabilities

Defense Production Act

  • Execute on $5.2 billion backlog of DPA projects, including a comprehensive munitions program and additional work on microelectronics, castings and forgings, and biomanufacturing
  • Reform DPA to focus on defense industrial base, update/improve authorities, and expand workforce

INDOPACOM & USFK Hardening

  • Use Secretary of Defense bishop’s fund technique to prioritize posture-related initiatives in the Western Pacific
  • Modernize INDOPACOM command-and-control and improve interoperability with key allies and partners

Surging Support for Taiwan and the Philippines, Work with South Korea & Japan

  • Accelerate military modernization, including the procurement and employment of asymmetric capabilities for Taiwan and the Philippines
  • Consider new nuclear-sharing agreements in the Indo-Pacific and re-deployment of U.S. tactical nuclear weapons in the Korean Peninsula 

Strengthening U.S. Capability in Europe

  • Permanently base an Armored Brigade Combat Team in Poland
  • Increase rotational deployments for U.S. forces in Eastern Europe

Empower CENTCOM Partners

  • Loosen constraints on partner nations in the Gulf for Foreign Military Sales to boost their military capabilities
  • Field true counter-drone network at U.S. operating locations; integrate allies and partners into U.S. command-and-control network

New Vectors of Competition in AFRICOM & SOUTHCOM

  • Aggressively pursue U.S. private capital partnerships to blunt Chinese and Russian influence in the respective regions
  • Maintain vital security assistance and training programs with partner countries

Reviving Homeland Defense

  • Complete modernization of Cold War-era air defense radar network and build counter-UAS defenses at key U.S. defense sites
  • Budget for border deployments and expand Joint Task Force North (JTF-N) 

Restoring U.S. Navy Supremacy, Fleet Readiness

  • Get industrial base on a footing to deliver a 355-ship fleet
  • Strengthen shipyard capacity to get submarine industrial base to three attack submarines per year
  • Create large-scale industrial base program for surface combatant industrial base
  • Establish preliminary design for guided missile patrol coastal craft; lock in multi-year procurement for amphibious warships
  • Accelerate unmanned underwater vessels and unmanned surface vessels procurement

Correcting the U.S. Air Force ‘Death Spiral’

  • Reverse retirement of F-15E and F-22 fighters; purchase at least 340 more fighter aircraft in next 5 years
  • Accelerate B-21 bomber and E-2D Hawkeye production
  • Expand requirements for the Collaborative Combat Aircraft program

Accelerate U.S. Army Transformation

  • Adopt lessons from war in Ukraine and field new air defense and counter-UAS units
  • Accelerate frontline capability development for the Western Pacific with long-range munitions and command-and-control upgrades
  • Lighten traditional maneuver forces for variety of contingencies

Finalize U.S. Marine Corps Force Design 2030 Success

  • Accelerate competition of Force Design 2030
  • Encourage major USMC investments in sophisticated contested logistics

Counter Chinese “Strategic Breakout” in Space with U.S. Space Force

  • Accelerate fielding of layered, networked satellite architecture across capability areas
  • Harden ground stations and underlying infrastructure
  • Procure at scale classified programs in development

Modernize Cyber Command & Special Operations Command

  • Improve hiring authorities, enhance S&T budget for CYBERCOM
  • Reverse manpower and budget cuts to Special Operations Forces and energize modernization of SOF capabilities for great power competition

Comprehensive Support for Nuclear Modernization, Air & Missile Defense

  • Declare the revitalization of nuclear forces as a “national priority” to marshal whole-of-government support for modernizing and adapting U.S. nuclear forces to meet rapidly growing strategic threats
  • Restart comprehensive domestic uranium enrichment to enable AUKUS and nuclear force sustainment

Modernize Defense Infrastructure

  • Prioritize real growth in military construction and maintenance portfolio to secure upgrades for hangars, ports, barracks, and working spaces
  • Widely adopt 5G at defense installations for data processing efficiency

Establish Fundamental Defense Workforce and Innovation Reforms

  • Improve the DoD civilian workforce by emphasizing rapid hiring, competitive compensation, individual performance, and accountability
  • Shift innovation and acquisition infrastructure to time-based approach
  • Create dedicated financial strategies to support mid-sized defense innovators

 

Permalink: https://www.wicker.senate.gov/2024/5/senator-wicker-unveils-major-defense-investment-plan




4. Inside the Navy’s slick effort to find workers to build submarines





David Ragan rounds Turn 4 in the NASCAR Cup Series Daytona 500 on February 19, 2024, at Daytona International Speedway in Daytona Beach, Florida. JEFF ROBINSON/ICON SPORTSWIRE VIA GETTY IMAGES


Inside the Navy’s slick effort to find workers to build submarines

The BuildSubmarines ad blitz is part of an innovative campaign to shore up one particular aspect of the industrial base.

https://www.defenseone.com/business/2024/06/inside-navys-slick-effort-find-workers-build-submarines/397147/?oref=defense_one_breaking_nl&utm


BY LAUREN C. WILLIAMS

SENIOR EDITOR

  • JUNE 5, 2024 07:12 PM ET



The U.S. Navy, along with its shipbuilders and their thousands of specialty suppliers, need more than 100,000 workers to help build attack and ballistic missile submarines over the coming decade. That’s according to BuildSubmarines.com, whose ubiquitous ads you may have seen during reality TV shows, on NASCAR hoods, at WNBA games, and amid Major League Baseball broadcasts. But what is that website and who runs it?

BuildSubmarines.com is the public face of an innovative, multi-organization effort to woo American workers to join a crucial part of the defense industrial workforce. The hub is BlueForge Alliance, a not-for-profit organization founded in November 2022 with a Navy contract and a mandate to gin up a new generation of shipbuilders. 

“Our nation depends on the American manufacturer,” Rob Gorham, the company’s co-founder and -CEO said in a 2023 press release. “BlueForge Alliance is committed to ensuring that American manufacturing is primed to support national security priorities, and to engaging and partnering with the industrial base in unprecedented ways to ensure our responsibility to our Navy and nation.” 

Last year, the organization launched the BuildSubmarines.com website as part of its “We Build Giants” ad blitz that targeted high school graduates, troops leaving the service, trade workers looking for something new, and other job seekers. In September, the company added a BuildSubmarines.com career portal powered by recruiting site ZipRecruiter. The site has since amassed more than 3 million visits and 147,000 clicks to apply for jobs, said Katherine Dames, who leads BlueForge Alliance’s workforce division.

“For individuals who already have the skills and experience in welding, machining, electrical, additive manufacturing, or engineering, we can connect them to immediate openings across the country through BuildSubmarines.com,” Dames said. “For individuals who think manufacturing might be the career for them, we can connect them to high-quality training—sometimes at no cost to the individual.”


One such program is the two-year-old Accelerated Training in Defense Manufacturing initiative run by an agency of the Virginia state government. It provides workers with nearly four months of training—for free!—and enables them to leave with a certification in additive manufacturing, CNC machining, non-destructive testing, quality control inspection/metrology, or welding.

“It's completely funded by the U.S. Navy, it is tuition-free for accepted students, and the housing is no cost,” said Debbie Fuchs, strategic communications and marketing manager for the state’s Institute For Advanced Learning And Research. “It's a really intense process…basically going to school from 8 [a.m.] to 5 [p.m.] every day, Monday through Friday for 16 weeks.”

“Specifically, the Navy is working to train people and place them in the submarine industrial base and those manufacturing jobs. So the big national campaign is ‘build submarines’,” Fuchs said.

Since 2021, the Danville-based program has graduated 472 students, with 60 percent placed in submarine and defense industrial base jobs, according to IALR’s website.

That’s just a fraction of what’s needed, but it’s a start. BuildSubmarines.com exists to “bring an awareness of people getting back into skilled manufacturing trades, or building submarines. And so we're just one of the training centers that again, can help people to get into these manufacturing traits to build submarines,” Fuchs said.

A 'sensible notion'

Navy officials did not answer questions about the origins of this innovative approach and how much money they are pouring into it.

But the idea that a branch of the U.S. military would fund an aggressive effort to help a key industrial segment find and develop workers is logical, one expert said.

“It’s a very sensible notion of building up the workforce, training workers for skilled jobs. And you've seen that across many different industries, different times. And so it's doable, and it's sensible. The question is time, of course. It takes, really, years to take someone off the street and turn them into a skilled welder, which is one of those critical skills you need for submarines. And you have to get enough people interested in, frankly, blue-collar jobs that are a little dirty and a little uncomfortable, but pay well,” said Mark Cancian, senior adviser for the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ security program. 

“And the Navy needs it, because the Navy wants to expand submarine production. I mean, it's basically unable to even produce what it's been funded to produce, and wants to expand it. Now, what's been funded is two Virginia-class submarines a year plus one Columbia-class ballistic missile submarine. They can't even build that. And many people want to go to one ballistic missile submarine and three Virginias. So to do that, you have to expand the workforce. And there are other elements of the supply chains you have to expand also. But workforce has been one of the major constraints.”

Indeed, the shipbuilding industrial base is “still losing more people than is healthy on a year-by-year basis,” Nickolas Guertin, the Navy’s acquisition chief, told lawmakers on April 17.

“We need to get into a better place so we can understand how to interact fluidly, flexibly, and efficiently with industry so we do a better job of building these ships,” Guertin said. “These welders, pipefitters, electricians, pipefitters, they are vital to our ability to provide the resources the Navy and Marine Corps are going to use to defend the nation. We need to stop thinking of them as fungible and think of them as strategic assets.”

Building up the workforce is key to the Navy’s 30-year plan to grow to 387 subs and ships, but the problem is hardly confined to the future. In April, for example, Naval Sea Systems Command chief Vice Adm. James Downey said the difficulties in hiring and retaining workers at Fincantieri Marinette Marine’s busy Wisconsin shipyard were contributing to the three-year delay of the $22 billion program guided missile frigate program.

A growing problem

The problem has been building for years—and then came the pandemic, said one industry leader.

“There was already a challenge in the manufacturing workforce, and we were gonna have to ramp labor to meet the demand. COVID accelerated that. What we didn't expect is inflation,” said Christopher Kastner, CEO of Huntington Ingalls Industries. 

That inflation, coupled with rising minimum wages, shrank the pay gap between entry-level shipbuilders and what someone could make working retail, he said. And it’s hard getting workers to choose a career in manufacturing.

“It's challenging, tough work. And the cost to switch for them is very simple. And that's where we have high attrition rates,” Kastner told reporters at a media lunch in April. “So we're working very hard with the Navy and with our local communities to try to get programs in place that make it positive for someone to become a shipbuilder in the community.”

In March, Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro returned from a tour of Japanese and South Korean shipyards with strong words for U.S. contractors.

“For those companies that are having problems in retention, damn it, take better care of your people,” Del Toro said, as reported by USNI News. “If they can’t find housing in your local communities, well, then work with the governments to build housing in the local communities to get about it. That’s what problem-solvers do.”

Kastner said the company is already working to meet people where they are. 

“We need to provide more flexibility for shipbuilders, when they come in. Historically, it had been a very binary arrangement: ‘come to work or you're gonna get fired’, right? So we provide much more flexibility for shipbuilders now,” including time off at the beginning of the process while new workers acclimate to the job, he said. “We used to just train them and send them out to a crew. Now, we train them, we bring their foreman into the training center and we put them out as a team.” 

HII is also recruiting outside immediate areas around shipyards and using data analytics to determine which areas are more successful and targeted incentives. 

“We actually just started a pilot program down in Mississippi, where if you stay and your attendance is good, and you're consistent for this and add no work violations, we're going to increase your pay by a certain amount over that time period. We're paying machinists more in Newport News, [Virginia], in some places where it's critical to get the job done. So we're doing targeted incentives in various areas that we have critical needs,” Kastner said. “We have Chick-fil-A at Ingalls…So we are having to meet the new employee where they're at versus just assuming they're going to come in with two years of training and metal shop at high school and wanting to get right to work in the shipyard.”

BlueForge Alliance and its partners have their work cut out for them. But if their template works, other parts of the Pentagon and defense industry might come knocking. Already, the company has a much smaller contract to help build up a 3D-printing industry on Guam.

For now, the focus is on public outreach “to attract Americans into well-paying careers in submarine manufacturing,” Dames said.


5. Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III Concludes Tenth Visit to the Indo-Pacific


Overcoming the tyranny of distance in INDOPACOM.



RELEASE

IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III Concludes Tenth Visit to the Indo-Pacific

https://www.defense.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/3797033/secretary-of-defense-lloyd-j-austin-iii-concludes-tenth-visit-to-the-indo-pacif/

June 5, 2024 |   

Pentagon Press Secretary Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder provided the following release:

Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III concluded his tenth official visit to the Indo-Pacific region today. During his trip, Secretary Austin met in Singapore with Prime Minister Lawrence Wong and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, counterparts from across the Indo-Pacific region, and other senior officials; delivered plenary remarks at the 2024 Shangri-La Dialogue; and met with Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Manet and other senior Cambodian officials in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

Secretary Austin's Engagements on Friday, May 31

Secretary Austin met separately with Singapore Prime Minister Lawrence Wong and Defense Minister Ng Eng Hen, where they reaffirmed the longstanding defense partnership between the United States and Singapore. Before their bilateral meeting, Secretary Austin and Minister Ng witnessed the signing of a new Memorandum of Understanding between the U.S. Defense Innovation Unit and the Singapore Ministry of Defence.

Secretary Austin also met with People's Republic of China (PRC) Minister of National Defense Admiral Dong Jun to discuss regional and global security issues, U.S.-PRC defense relations, and the importance of open lines of military-to-military communication.

Secretary Austin's Engagements on Saturday, June 1

During plenary remarks delivered at the 2024 Shangri-La Dialogue, Secretary Austin marked the Indo-Pacific region's "new convergence" of likeminded allies and partners who share a vision for a free and open region. "Likeminded countries across this region have deepened our ties—and delivered real-world results for the people of the Indo-Pacific," he said. In his remarks, Secretary Austin also welcomed the U.S. endorsement of a new multilateral Statement of Principles for Indo-Pacific Defense Industrial Base Collaboration.

Secretary Austin also met bilaterally with counterparts from countries across the Indo-Pacific, including Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Defence Richard Marles from Australia, President-elect and Minister of Defense Prabowo Subianto from Indonesia, Minister of Defense Mohamad Khalad from Malaysia, Secretary of National Defense Gilberto Teodoro from the Philippines, and Minister of Defense Sutin Khlangsaeng from Thailand.

Secretary Austin's Engagements on Sunday, June 2

Secretary Austin, Japanese Minister of Defense Kihara Minoru and Republic of Korea (ROK) Minister of Defense Shin Won-sik convened a Trilateral Ministerial Meeting (TMM) to discuss new initiatives to strengthen and institutionalize trilateral security cooperation to contribute to peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula, in the Indo-Pacific region, and beyond—including the first iteration of the new, multi-domain trilateral exercise, FREEDOM EDGE, this summer.

Secretary Austin also met together with counterparts and other senior defense leaders from Southeast Asia to discuss how the United States and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) are advancing regional peace and stability together.

On the margins of the Shangri-La Dialogue, Secretary Austin also met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to reiterate unwavering U.S. support for Ukraine in the face of Russian aggression.

Secretary Austin's Engagements on Tuesday, June 4

Following the Shangri-La Dialogue, Secretary Austin traveled to Phnom Penh to meet with senior Cambodian officials. While there, he met separately with Prime Minister Hun Manet, Minister of National Defence Tea Seiha, and President of the Senate Hun Sen. In their meetings, the officials discussed opportunities to strengthen the U.S.-Cambodia bilateral defense relationship in support of regional peace and security.

Secretary Austin's tenth trip to the Indo-Pacific came at a time when the Department of Defense is doing more than ever to strengthen U.S. relationships with allies and partners to advance regional peace, stability, and deterrence.


6. Now Is the Worst Time to Abandon NATO


Excerpts:


Just as NATO was formed after the shock of World War II and in the early years of the Cold War, Europe’s Zeitenwendeis a result of a devastating war in Ukraine and a broader geopolitical realignment of democratic and authoritarian countries. 
It’s difficult to overstate how dramatic the Zeitenwende was for Germany, given its postwar history of neutrality. However, Scholz described this shift as “both a challenge and an opportunity.” Now that Germany and other NATO allies have shed the post-Cold War illusion that great power conflict is a relic of Europe’s past, they’re committed to strengthening the alliance by making necessary and long-neglected investments in their militaries. This isn’t just a turning point for Germany—it’s a turning point for global security. The democratic world is finally awake to the deadly threats it faces from great authoritarian powers like Russia and China, and it’s difficult to imagine countries like Germany slipping into their old complacency for a very long time.
This is why it would be catastrophic for the United States to pull back from NATO at the very moment when its allies have demonstrated a real willingness to assume more of the burden in confronting the greatest threats to global security and stability. 
...
The war in Ukraine has demonstrated beyond any doubt that the world has moved into a new and more dangerous era of great power competition. And Scholz is right—NATO allies have a historic opportunity to revivify the institution and prove that the democratic world won’t surrender to authoritarian aggression. American voters can either elect a president who will build on this momentum, support a fellow democracy under siege, and maintain the United States’ commitment to NATO—or a president who will abandon our allies and embolden our enemies. 
While Germany and other European democracies faced a historic decision when the war began, American voters will have the course of history in their hands this November. Just as the United States helped to forge the security architecture of the postwar world in the rubble of Europe and with the Soviet threat looming, Americans have a chance to reinforce this architecture for the challenges of the twenty-first century.



Now Is the Worst Time to Abandon NATO

After decades of over-reliance on the Untied States, European NATO members are finally investing more in their defense. But American politics still threaten the alliance’s future.

https://www.thebulwark.com/p/now-worst-time-abandon-nato-trump-biden?utm


MATT JOHNSON

JUN 05, 2024


U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken speaks to the media after the informal meeting of NATO ministers of foreign affairs in Prague in May 2024. (Photo by Tomas Tkacik/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

FOR THE UNITED STATES, NATO has always presented a paradox. Hastings Ismay, the first secretary general of NATO, famously quipped that the alliance’s purpose was to “keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.” More specifically, the United States joined the major powers of Western Europe together in an unprecedented military and political alliance for three reasons: so they wouldn’t follow foreign policies inimical to America’s interests, so they wouldn’t go to war against each other for the third time in a century, and so they wouldn’t be overrun by the Soviet Union. Since the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty in 1949, the paradox has been that the United States wants its NATO allies to support their own defense, but without freelancing too much on their defense policy, or being so capable of defending themselves that they start to menace each other.

But times change, and the likelihood of war in Western Europe—even if the United States’ NATO partners build much stronger militaries—has been substantially reduced. For the past quarter century, the main problem in transatlantic relations has been that Europe wasn’t supporting itself and was too reliant on the United States for protection. Every president of the twenty-first century has encouraged the European members of NATO to spend more on defense. Now, thanks to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, NATO is more focused and united than it has been since the Cold War and European defense outlays are increasing dramatically. Yet the United States, on the cusp of achieving its decades-old goal for NATO, may be about to ruin it.


THE MOST IMPORTANT AND LONGEST-LASTING peacetime military alliance in history was formed and expanded during a period of rapidly escalating tensions between the world’s two superpowers. The North Atlantic Treaty was signed just four months before the first Soviet nuclear test and fourteen months after the Soviet-backed coup in Czechoslovakia. In the early 1950s, when NATO took on the joint military command structure it retains today, the United States was fighting a proxy war with the USSR in Korea, and the countries of Western Europe were increasingly anxious about Soviet aggression and influence.

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Less than five years ago, French President Emmanuel Macron said, “What we are currently experiencing is the brain death of NATO.” After Brexit and Donald Trump’s presidency, Macron argued that it was time for Europe to establish “military sovereignty,” which would make the continent less dependent on the United States for security. He said Europe was on the “edge of a precipice” and risked losing “control of our destiny” if it didn’t start thinking of itself as an independent geopolitical power. When asked about the effectiveness of Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, which states that NATO allies will defend a member under attack, Macron said: “I don’t know . . . what will Article 5 mean tomorrow?” He continued: “I’d argue that we should reassess the reality of what NATO is in the light of the commitment of the United States.”

Macron had good reasons for worrying that the United States was “turning its back on us.” During the 2016 campaign, Trump repeatedly described NATO as “obsolete.” This belief was dangerous enough before the invasion of Ukraine, but it now poses a grave and immediate threat to European security—especially given Trump’s chances of recapturing the White House. Trump has repeatedly expressed hostility toward NATO, attacking members for what he regards as insufficient financial contributions and insisting that the United States was “owed . . . vast sums” by allies like Germany. For months after taking office, Trump declined to affirm Article 5, and he has long insisted that the United States should only defend allies that pay their “fair share.” In a 2018 interview with Tucker Carlson, Trump wondered why the United States should defend a small country like Montenegro, which joined NATO in 2017. Officials who served in the Trump administration say he seriously considered withdrawing from NATO altogether.

In a particularly alarming indicator of what a second Trump term would look like, Trump recently said he would “encourage” the Russians to “do whatever the hell they want” to NATO members that don’t spend what he regards as a sufficient amount on defense. (The White House described Trump’s comments as “appalling and unhinged.” He is “making it clear that he will abandon our NATO allies,” Biden said.)

European Council President Charles Michel has condemned Trump’s “reckless statements” about NATO and concluded that his hostility to the alliance demonstrates that Europe must “develop its strategic autonomy and invest in its defense.” German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier observed that Trump’s comments “help Russia,” while Polish Defense Minister Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz said, “No election campaign is an excuse for playing with the security of the alliance.” NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg agreed, “Any suggestion that allies will not defend each other undermines all of our security, including that of the U.S.” One EU official recently complained: “We cannot flip a coin about our security every four years depending on this or that election, namely the U.S. presidential election.” 


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IT’S NO WONDER THAT EUROPEAN leaders are yet again discussing the need for security arrangements independent of the United States. For three-quarters of a century, the United States’ commitment to NATO was never in question. Now Trump has introduced doubt where there was once certainty, and it will take a long time to undo the damage he has caused. If American voters fail to keep Trump from returning to the Oval Office, the damage he’ll inflict in his second term will be irrevocable.

After four years of Trump, President Biden attempted to solidify America’s commitment to the alliance. Even before the war, Biden was focused on repairing the United States’ relationship with its European allies, and he observed that the robust support for Ukraine proves that NATO is “more united than ever.” Beyond providing direct support for Ukraine, Washington has increased aid to neighboring countries through loan guarantees and investments that will help allies replace military stockpiles that are being depleted by the war. The United States also sent tens of thousands of troops eastward to countries like Poland and Romania. 

Yet despite Biden’s statements and actions, the American commitment to NATO could suddenly unravel if Trump takes office next year. Today, Trump’s desire to abandon NATO is stronger than ever. He insists, “We have to finish the process we began under my administration of fundamentally reevaluating NATO’s purpose and NATO’s mission.” One of Trump’s top national security advisers recently suggested that NATO should be a “tiered alliance,” in which members that pay up earn protection and those that don’t are cast aside. Trump’s former national security advisor, John Bolton, believes his “goal here is not to strengthen NATO, it’s to lay the groundwork to get out.”

At the end of 2023, Congress passed a bill which would theoretically prevent the president from unilaterally abandoning NATO. But presidents have withdrawn from many treaties over the years—George W. Bush exited the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002, while Trump pulled out of the Open Skies Treaty with Russia in 2020. Lawsuits to prevent treaty withdrawals have been rebuffed by the courts, and any attempt to override Trump if he decides to leave NATO would likely spark a lengthy legal battle.

In the meantime, the cessation of American support for NATO would inflict a potentially mortal blow on the alliance. While Article 5 states that an attack on a single member constitutes an attack on all, there’s no mechanism in place that forces countries to come to the defense of a besieged ally. The commitment is ultimately not legal but political.

Decades of ironclad American commitments have made it clear that the United States would defend its allies in the event of an attack. This is why Biden frequently reiterates that the United States will “defend every inch of NATO territory.” The moment the president declares that this commitment no longer exists, NATO allies that have long relied on the United States would be exposed like never before. Vladimir Putin could take this opportunity to test NATO’s resolve by attacking a small member state like one of the Baltic countries and daring the rest of the alliance to countenance a direct military confrontation with Russia. If NATO were to back down in this scenario, deterrence would collapse.


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NATO WAS CREATED IN AN ERA of great power conflict. While it briefly seemed like this era had come to an end in the years following the Cold War, this illusion has been cracking for many years—and it finally shattered with the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine. Germany is one of the countries that was most invested in this illusion—successive German governments were convinced that the maintenance of close economic ties with Russia would reduce the likelihood of conflict and increase stability. Meanwhile, Germany tried to outsource its national defense.

Those days are over. In his Zeitenwende (“turning point”) speech on February 22, 2022, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz pledged that Germany would “defend every square meter of NATO territory together with our allies.” He called for a “major national undertaking” to “invest much more in the security of our country.” He announced troop deployments to Eastern Europe and a 100 billion-euro national defense fund. It wouldn’t be long before Germany was sending heavy armor, artillery, and other weapons to Ukraine. Scholz also acknowledged the role of institutions like NATO in maintaining peace and stability in Europe, and recommitted Germany to the principle of multilateralism: 

If we want the last thirty years to be more than a historical exception, then we must do everything we can to maintain the cohesion of the European Union, the strength of NATO, to forge even closer relations with our friends, our partners and all those who share our convictions worldwide.

Now would be the worst possible time for the United States to withdraw from NATO and desert Ukraine—which Trump also intends to do. Although just 11 NATO members hit the 2 percent spending target last year, 18 are projected to do so in 2024—including Germany, which will reach the target for the first time. From Germany’s Zeitenwende to Poland doubling its defense spending (to 4 percent of GDP, which is more than the United States) over just a few years, the European commitment to NATO is strengthening. While the United States has given more total aid to Ukraine than any other country, especially in the form of weapons and munitions, many European countries have given far more as a percentage of GDP.

“Without security, everything else is nothing,” wrote Scholz in the Economist last month, emphasizing the need to “strengthen the European pillar of NATO” and counter the growing threat of Russian aggression. To illustrate “how far Europe has come” since World War II, Scholz contrasted the training exercises German armor recently conducted near Pabradė, Lithuania with the moment “Adolf Hitler’s Wehrmacht marched into Lithuania 83 years ago. . . . This time, German troops came in peace, to defend freedom and to deter an imperialist aggressor together with their Lithuanian allies.”

After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Germany altered its constitution to drastically increase defense spending to hit the NATO target of 2 percent of GDP this year. “Our goal,” Scholz writes, “is to turn the Bundeswehr into Europe’s strongest conventional force.” This is a critical part of Germany’s Zeitenwende. There are no more illusions in Berlin about how economic interdependence with Russia will lead to security and stability. Scholz still emphasizes diplomacy, but he says Germany can no longer be “naive” about “talking simply for the sake of talking.” The threats to European security haven’t been clearer since the Cold War, and leaders like Scholz and Macron are preparing their countries—and the rest of the continent—to confront these threats.

Scholz offered some much-needed historical perspective in his essay. There was a time in living memory when German rearmament was a harbinger of world war. Now Germany’s European and American allies are eager to see Berlin drastically expand its military and take a lead role in confronting Russia. When Scholz says he wants to turn the “Bundeswehr into Europe’s strongest conventional force,” his American and European allies feel relief, not fear. We have entered an era in which the idea of war in Western Europe (between, say, Germany and France) is unthinkable. NATO was created to secure peace in Europe—an ambition that would have been difficult to fathom in the ruins of World War II—and it has succeeded beyond what its founders could have imagined.

Just as NATO was formed after the shock of World War II and in the early years of the Cold War, Europe’s Zeitenwendeis a result of a devastating war in Ukraine and a broader geopolitical realignment of democratic and authoritarian countries. 

It’s difficult to overstate how dramatic the Zeitenwende was for Germany, given its postwar history of neutrality. However, Scholz described this shift as “both a challenge and an opportunity.” Now that Germany and other NATO allies have shed the post-Cold War illusion that great power conflict is a relic of Europe’s past, they’re committed to strengthening the alliance by making necessary and long-neglected investments in their militaries. This isn’t just a turning point for Germany—it’s a turning point for global security. The democratic world is finally awake to the deadly threats it faces from great authoritarian powers like Russia and China, and it’s difficult to imagine countries like Germany slipping into their old complacency for a very long time.

This is why it would be catastrophic for the United States to pull back from NATO at the very moment when its allies have demonstrated a real willingness to assume more of the burden in confronting the greatest threats to global security and stability. 

Consider the effect Trump’s reelection would have on NATO’s newest members, Finland and Sweden, which would immediately confront the possibility that the alliance they joined to guard against Russian aggression was on the verge of dissolution. Imagine the reaction in the Baltic states, which would suddenly face an existential threat if Trump returns to the White House. While European defense spending is on the right trajectory, there’s no replacement for the United States’ military might. Beyond the sheer amount of resources the United States is able to provide, it also spurs other allies to increase their own contributions—such as when Germany only agreed to provide Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine when the United States sent its own M1 Abrams tanks. 

The war in Ukraine has demonstrated beyond any doubt that the world has moved into a new and more dangerous era of great power competition. And Scholz is right—NATO allies have a historic opportunity to revivify the institution and prove that the democratic world won’t surrender to authoritarian aggression. American voters can either elect a president who will build on this momentum, support a fellow democracy under siege, and maintain the United States’ commitment to NATO—or a president who will abandon our allies and embolden our enemies. 

While Germany and other European democracies faced a historic decision when the war began, American voters will have the course of history in their hands this November. Just as the United States helped to forge the security architecture of the postwar world in the rubble of Europe and with the Soviet threat looming, Americans have a chance to reinforce this architecture for the challenges of the twenty-first century.



7. Biden’s Foreign-Policy Problem Is Incompetence


The title is somewhat misleading. It is bigger than Biden though he is now the man in the arena.


This is an indictment against any and all of us who have, and have had, a hand in national security - those in uniform and not.


Excerpt:


If the main institutions charged with conducting America’s foreign relations—the National Security Council; the departments of state, defense, treasury, and commerce; the intelligence services; and various congressional committees—are not very competent, all the will in the world will not convince others to take our advice and follow our lead. The Berlin airlift in 1948 was a clear signal of Western resolve, for example, but it would have backfired if the United States and its partners had been unable to pull off a complicated logistical effort successfully. Building a superfluous pier in the Mediterranean and having it fall apart about 9 days later sends a rather different message.
Unfortunately, there is ample reason to question whether America’s foreign-policy institutions can fulfill the lofty global role that U.S. leaders have taken on. The list of dismal performances keeps getting longer: a Middle East “peace process” we were told would yield a two-state solution but which has produced today’s “one-state reality” instead; an avoidable and clumsily waged war over Kosovo in 1999, which included the accidental bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade; the policy errors and intelligence failures that enabled the Sept. 11 attacks; the disastrous decision to invade Iraq in 2003; the 2008 financial crisis; a series of scandals and collisions at sea involving the U.S. Navy; a bloated defense procurement process that can’t pass an audit and buys aircraft that are rarely ready for action; the failure to anticipate where open-ended NATO enlargement would eventually lead; the vain hope that economic sanctions would quickly crash Russia’s economy; or the cheerleading that overlooked the abundant signs that Ukraine’s summer 2023 counteroffensive was doomed to fail. If I tossed in the failed interventions in Afghanistan and Libya, you’d accuse me of piling on, and I haven’t said a word about the clown asylum that the U.S. House of Representatives has become.
...


Fixing America’s error-prone foreign-policy machinery will take a long time, and I sometimes wonder if it is even possible. That’s one reason why I favor a more restrained foreign policy, one that keeps the United States engaged in the world but reduces the number of issues, problems, and commitments that Washington feels obligated to solve. If the United States tried to do fewer things, our foreign-policy apparatus might be up to the task. The failure rate would be lower than it is today, and we’d have more resources to devote to problems here at home. I suspect some key countries around the world would be delighted if the United States had a less ambitious but more competent foreign policy, which would make our remaining commitments more credible. Sounds like a win-win to me.


Biden’s Foreign-Policy Problem Is Incompetence

The U.S. military’s collapsed pier in Gaza is symbolic of a much bigger issue.


Walt-Steve-foreign-policy-columnist20Stephen M. Walt

By Stephen M. Walt, a columnist at Foreign Policy and the Robert and Renée Belfer professor of international relations at Harvard University.

Foreign Policy · by Stephen M. Walt

  • U.S. Foreign Policy
  • United States
  • Stephen M. Walt

June 4, 2024, 2:24 AM

As the New York Mets compiled a record of 40 wins and 120 losses during their comically inept inaugural season, manager Casey Stengel famously lamented: “Can’t anyone here play this game?” I thought of Stengel’s remark when I learned that the temporary pier the United States had built to bring relief aid into Gaza had collapsed. It was an apt metaphor for the Biden administration’s handling of the whole Gaza conflict, as critics on social media were quick to point out. Constructing the pier was essentially an expensive PR stunt undertaken because U.S. officials were unwilling to force Israel to open the border crossings and allow sufficient relief aid for civilians facing a man-made humanitarian catastrophe. This largely symbolic effort managed to deliver about 60 truckloads of aid before rough seas damaged the structure and aid deliveries were suspended. Repairs are now underway and will reportedly take at least a week, and the cost of the whole operation is already hundreds of millions of dollars and rising.

As the New York Mets compiled a record of 40 wins and 120 losses during their comically inept inaugural season, manager Casey Stengel famously lamented: “Can’t anyone here play this game?” I thought of Stengel’s remark when I learned that the temporary pier the United States had built to bring relief aid into Gaza had collapsed. It was an apt metaphor for the Biden administration’s handling of the whole Gaza conflict, as critics on social media were quick to point out. Constructing the pier was essentially an expensive PR stunt undertaken because U.S. officials were unwilling to force Israel to open the border crossings and allow sufficient relief aid for civilians facing a man-made humanitarian catastrophe. This largely symbolic effort managed to deliver about 60 truckloads of aid before rough seas damaged the structure and aid deliveries were suspended. Repairs are now underway and will reportedly take at least a week, and the cost of the whole operation is already hundreds of millions of dollars and rising.

One might see this sorry episode as just a small part of a larger tragedy, but I think it raises larger questions about American ambitions and pretentions. Foreign-policy experts in the United States obsess about preserving “credibility,” largely to justify spending vast resources on conflicts and commitments that are of minor strategic importance. In the 1960s and 70s, U.S. leaders understood that South Vietnam was a minor power of little intrinsic strategic value, yet they insisted that withdrawing short of victory would cast doubt on America’s staying power, undermine its credibility, and encourage allies around the world to realign toward the communist bloc. None of these gloomy forecasts came to pass, of course, but the same simplistic arguments get recycled whenever the United States finds itself in an unwinnable war for minor stakes.

Those who fetishize credibility typically assume all that is needed is sufficient resolve. They believe the United States can achieve whatever goals it sets if it just tries hard enough; in their minds, victory is just a matter of staying the course. But seeing credibility and influence solely as a matter of will overlooks another key ingredient, one that is arguably more important. That key ingredient is competence.

If the main institutions charged with conducting America’s foreign relations—the National Security Council; the departments of state, defense, treasury, and commerce; the intelligence services; and various congressional committees—are not very competent, all the will in the world will not convince others to take our advice and follow our lead. The Berlin airlift in 1948 was a clear signal of Western resolve, for example, but it would have backfired if the United States and its partners had been unable to pull off a complicated logistical effort successfully. Building a superfluous pier in the Mediterranean and having it fall apart about 9 days later sends a rather different message.

Unfortunately, there is ample reason to question whether America’s foreign-policy institutions can fulfill the lofty global role that U.S. leaders have taken on. The list of dismal performances keeps getting longer: a Middle East “peace process” we were told would yield a two-state solution but which has produced today’s “one-state reality” instead; an avoidable and clumsily waged war over Kosovo in 1999, which included the accidental bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade; the policy errors and intelligence failures that enabled the Sept. 11 attacks; the disastrous decision to invade Iraq in 2003; the 2008 financial crisis; a series of scandals and collisions at sea involving the U.S. Navy; a bloated defense procurement process that can’t pass an audit and buys aircraft that are rarely ready for action; the failure to anticipate where open-ended NATO enlargement would eventually lead; the vain hope that economic sanctions would quickly crash Russia’s economy; or the cheerleading that overlooked the abundant signs that Ukraine’s summer 2023 counteroffensive was doomed to fail. If I tossed in the failed interventions in Afghanistan and Libya, you’d accuse me of piling on, and I haven’t said a word about the clown asylum that the U.S. House of Representatives has become.

I take no pleasure in reciting this troubling litany, and I’m aware that Washington has gotten some important things right on occasion. The Clinton administration helped avert a major war in South Asia during the 1999 Kargil crisis; the Bush administration’s PEPFAR program was by all accounts a major humanitarian success; the Obama administration backed the local forces that toppled the Islamic State’s short-lived “caliphate”; and the Biden administration coordinated the initial response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine effectively. U.S. intelligence failed to anticipate Russia’s seizure of Crimea in 2014, but it correctly foresaw what Russian President Vladimir Putin was preparing in 2022.

So I’m not suggesting the U.S. government fails at everything.

But the overall record is disappointing, and I’ve devoted years (and one whole book) trying to figure out why this is so. I suspect part of the problem is America’s unusual combination of power and impunity: Because it is simultaneously very powerful and unusually secure, its leaders can do all sorts of dumb things and let other states suffer most of the consequences. There’s also the Blob’s tendency to assume that the whole world will fall apart if the United States is not actively trying to manage dozens of problems around the world, which invariably leads Washington to take on more responsibilities than it can handle. An overstuffed agenda makes it harder to set priorities and impossible to give every problem the attention it deserves. The inevitable result is that many things get done badly or not at all.

To make matters worse, presidents value loyalty more than they value competence, and the foreign-policy establishment is averse to holding error-prone members accountable. The results are experts who fail upward and purveyors of bankrupt ideas who can always find some think tank or media outlet willing to recycle their discredited nostrums. Senior officials rarely resign on principle (although mid-level officials sometimes do), because doing so makes it less likely that they’ll get a plum appointment in some future administration. After all, what leader wants a senior aide who might embarrass them by standing up for what they think is right? There’s also the massive turnover that occurs every time the White House changes hands, bringing in a flock of new appointees who must first await Senate confirmation and then try to figure out what to do. This situation is akin to Apple or GM haphazardly replacing its senior management team every four years and expecting the company to work smoothly. This might not be a problem if the United States had a modest set of foreign-policy goals, but instead Washington is trying to manage the whole world with an ever-changing apparatus of short-timers, not to mention any number of unqualified amateurs.

I know: I’m not being fair to the thousands of dedicated government employees who show up every day and do their best for the country—those who fill official “dissent channels” with complaints when their superiors go off the rails. Entrenched bureaucratic interests can create problems of their own, but in this case the fish is rotting mostly from the head. All of which leaves the United States with a foreign-policy apparatus that is better at proclaiming lofty ideals than at setting realistic goals, let alone achieving them.

But if you think reelecting Donald Trump is going to solve this problem, think again. Trump’s first term was an endless parade of foreign-policy missteps that didn’t make the United States more secure or prosperous but did manage to squander the respect and good will that his predecessor had enjoyed in much of the world. His poorly implemented trade wars cost the United States hundreds of thousands of jobs and failed to achieve its stated purpose (reducing the U.S. trade deficit). Trump tore up agreements that he never understood and burned through four national security advisors, two secretaries of defense, two secretaries of state, and an unprecedented number of White House staffers in a single term. Revealingly, some of his former senior aides are among his most prominent critics today.

And let’s not forget that this is the president whose business career was riddled with fraud, endless litigation, and repeated bankruptcies; who thought sunlight and bleach might cure COVID; who rewarded North Korea’s Kim Jong Un with a one-on-one summit meeting and got bupkis for it; and who inadvertently leaked classified information during a White House visit with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and then-Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. Trump’s views on foreign policy may have been a refreshing break from inside-the-Beltway orthodoxy, but his most consequential actions—leaving the Paris climate accord, tearing up the Iran nuclear deal, and withdrawing from the Trans-Pacific Partnership—did immediate and lasting damage to important U.S. interests. And, oh yes, he also tried to overturn the 2020 election and has spoken of terminating parts of the Constitution if he gets a second chance in the Oval Office. Anyone who thinks a second Trump term will produce a more successful U.S. foreign policy either hasn’t been paying attention or has simply forgotten what an incompetent leader Trump was.

Fixing America’s error-prone foreign-policy machinery will take a long time, and I sometimes wonder if it is even possible. That’s one reason why I favor a more restrained foreign policy, one that keeps the United States engaged in the world but reduces the number of issues, problems, and commitments that Washington feels obligated to solve. If the United States tried to do fewer things, our foreign-policy apparatus might be up to the task. The failure rate would be lower than it is today, and we’d have more resources to devote to problems here at home. I suspect some key countries around the world would be delighted if the United States had a less ambitious but more competent foreign policy, which would make our remaining commitments more credible. Sounds like a win-win to me.

Foreign Policy · by Stephen M. Walt


8. Evolve or Die: Army Special Operations Integration as a Catalyst for Necessary Change


Excerpts:


The 1st Special Forces Command’s integration policy transcends mere consolidation of special operations units; it aims to enhance overall operational effectiveness. It stresses the importance of each component, including psychological operations, in contributing meaningfully to mission success. Integration presents a pivotal moment for the psychological operations branch to redefine its role within the special operations community. By embracing modernization and seamless integration, psychological operations can reaffirm its significance within the Army special operations enterprise and enhance its effectiveness and prominence in irregular warfare. The time for evolution is now, and through strategic adaptation, psychological operations can emerge stronger and more indispensable than ever.
A substantial investment in integrating psychological operations into Special Forces, including resources and personnel, isn’t just a choice—it’s a strategic imperative. With its status as the largest near-peer rival and the richest challenger the United States has ever faced, China’s growth demands a concentrated effort due to the scarcity of both resources and time. Both China and Russia have strategically integrated modern information warfare into their military strategies, reshaping engagement protocols. As competition intensifies, the ability to discern and counter rival narratives in the information sphere will significantly impact global outcomes.
For the United States, the crucial question is how best to adapt and seize the initiative in information warfare from adversaries. Integration offers a pragmatic response to evolving threats, ensuring a strategic advantage against advanced information warfare strategies employed by formidable opponents.




Evolve or Die: Army Special Operations Integration as a Catalyst for Necessary Change - Modern War Institute

mwi.westpoint.edu · by Eric Hoelscher, Siamak Tundra Naficy · June 5, 2024

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One of the most fundamental truths is that for any entity to thrive, it must be well suited to its surroundings. Should its environment change, an organism’s continued survival and reproduction is dependent on its ability to adapt in stride with these changes. Many species rewrite the rules of engagement to survive within a rapidly changing world, while the ones that don’t risk extinction. Facing the consequences of human overfishing and habitat degradation, orcas, for example, have ingeniously adapted their hunting techniques to the new environment. They now target great white sharks using swarm tactics and an uncanny knowledge of shark biology to stun their peer competitors. They have also developed other new tactics like sending waves onto icebergs, washing sea lions off the ice and into the ocean for an easier meal. In a critical period of crashing food populations in dynamic ecosystems, these maritime geniuses teach us an important lesson—you don’t assert your spot in the food chain by resisting necessary change.

In the wild, it’s evolve or die. For human organizations, it’s no different—a fundamental reality that underpins recent Department of Defense–directed force structure cuts and the implementation of 1st Special Forces Command’s integration policy. This integration policy—which will subordinate regionally aligned psychological operations and civil affairs battalions to Special Forces groups with the same regional focus—seeks to better match the command’s force structure with the shifting demands of contemporary warfare to ensure it remains agile, adaptive, and, most importantly, effective in the information domain. This has sparked ongoing debates with some information professionals viewing these developments as a threat to the importance and long-term survival of US Army psychological operations. But this interpretation misunderstands the dynamics at play: integration is an opportunity for Army psychological operations to evolve toward a stronger position within the broader special operations enterprise. The proposed cuts and integration efforts aren’t harbingers of decline, but rather potential catalysts for necessary adaptation and advancement. Instead of perceiving integration as a threat to its autonomy or identity, the Army’s psychological operations professionals should see this as an opportunity to enhance the branch’s effectiveness and subsequently increase its prominence in irregular warfare.

The Army’s special operations enterprise must evolve or die in order to be relevant in a future fight. This integration policy is a vital step in that evolution, one that will make the entire enterprise more cohesive while also enabling psychological operations forces to reestablish themselves as central pillars within the special operations bag of tricks. To do this, we emphasize three key points. First, unity of command—a long-standing principle of war—is essential for effective operations, especially against near-peer adversaries; the conditions of the modern battlefield require that Army special operations forces optimize their structure in accordance with this principle. Second, special operations forces operate on a merit-based system focused on mission success and effectiveness; to assert its merit and demonstrate its potential outsize impact in strategic competition, the psychological operations branch must modernize its abilities. Lastly, it is imperative that Special Forces commanders more actively engage in information warfare, but an ability to do so is predicated on successful implementation of the first two points.

Collectively, these adaptations would enable each of the Army’s special warfare tools (Special Forces, psychological operations, and civil affairs) to more seamlessly integrate their distinct contributions in alignment with the objectives set by the joint force commander. Importantly, this requires transcending lingering divisive narratives that promote tribalism within the special operations branches and impede their collective advantage.

Why Integration? Unit of Command/Unity of Effort

For years, Army special operations leaders have searched for ways to enhance the interoperability and cohesion of its Special Forces, civil affairs, and psychological operations units. They tried softer measures, such as directing combined training events or synchronizing deployment cycles, but partial measures only produce partial results. The integration policy is the most recent attempt to solve this issue. A comparatively full-strength measure, the policy assigned Special Forces groups operational control over their regionally aligned civil affairs and psychological operations battalions. Coupled with recent cuts to historically vacant Army psychological operations billets—driven by a service-wide process known as Total Army Analysis—implementation of the integration policy has spurned significant criticism.

recent War On the Rocks contribution summarizes various critics’ opinions well; however, it, and other articles, mischaracterize decisions regarding Army force structure cuts and therefore misdiagnose issues related to the integration of psychological operations and Special Forces. Conversely, one of this article’s authors, an active duty Special Forces officer with over eighteen years of experience, brings firsthand knowledge of the policy’s development. In his view, the integration policy is not, as critics suggest, about “psychological operations and civil affairs’ continued relegation in the special operations hierarchy.” Instead, the policy is founded on a profound understanding of the potency and significance of psychological operations in irregular warfare.

A pivotal first step in realizing this vision is ensuring unity of command—a principle of war—which enables unity of effort. Integration is essential to military operations, making the cohesive coordination and alignment of all specialized units under the 1st Special Forces Command umbrella crucial. The objective is to achieve seamless unity of command and effort, ensuring that each component, including psychological operations and civil affairs, plays a significant and indispensable role. This approach recognizes the unique capabilities that psychological operations and civil affairs bring to the table and underscores their importance in mission success.

While all military functions are valuable, maneuver commands serve as operational nuclei across all echelons. They take many forms, but often look like joint and combined arms elements, such as company teams, special operations task forces, combatant commands, or even interagency elements. Maneuver commands bear the critical responsibility of prioritizing objectives, allocating resources, and assuming primary operational risk.

Maneuver commanders, including Special Forces officers, are trained early on to integrate and synchronize functions beyond single specialties to achieve unified objectives within their designated areas of operation. Joint force and theater special operations commanders expect Special Forces commanders at all levels to integrate enablers and adjacent functions to achieve theater objectives, regardless of formal or informal command-and-control relationships.

By contrast, supporting or enabling elements, like psychological operations units, are expected to integrate their plans, activities, and operations within the supported commander’s objectives. While some information professionals may resist the term enabler, psychological operations units function similarly to artillery, aviation, or engineers. These units are organized, trained, equipped, and employed, as Army doctrine describes, to “provide unique capabilities in support of both Army special operations maneuver units [and] conventional forces.”

Neglecting the pivotal role of maneuver commanders leads to disjointed operations and inefficiency. Criticsmeme lords, and bloggers often portray psychological operations as perpetual victims of Special Forces and special mission unit commanders. They insinuate the existence of a secret agenda aimed at undermining the psychological operations branch and denying it rightful prominence. These critics propagate a zero-sum mentality, suggesting that any funding, resources, or power accrued by Special Forces inherently detracts from psychological operations or civil affairs. At best, these narratives are unproductive; at worst, they foster division and undermine morale. Admittedly, these critics echo the sentiments of many psychological operations professionals.

We maintain a straightforward perspective—the special operations enterprise functions as a meritocracy, assessing organizations based on their effectiveness and contributions to mission success. We urge PSYOP professionals to question whether they are truly delivering the capabilities that the SOF enterprise requires. Integrating more cohesively within the enterprise offers improved opportunities for innovation and the subsequent cultivation of only the most impactful information capabilities; it also allows psychological operations units to demonstrate their unique capabilities and showcase their contributions to mission success. In turn, this will enable the psychological operations branch to address core issues—from understaffing and underresourcing to any perceived lack of organizational influence.

Embracing Modernization: Adapting, not Dying

In today’s resource-constrained environment, psychological operations must embrace change and modernize to excel. Joint and Army special operations leaders increasingly expect psychological operations to integrate a broader spectrum of US information-related capabilities beyond traditional functions. This includes leveraging artificial intelligence and machine learning for enhanced sentiment analysis, messaging development, and decision-making processes to attain information advantages at scale.

There’s a growing demand for influence forces capable of precisely targeting key adversary decision-makers and cognitive nodes, rather than broadcasting messages broadly in hopes of achieving desired effects. Realizing this targeted approach requires dedicated intelligence resources and collaboration with joint and interagency partners, such as US Cyber Command.

Leaders also seek dynamic information forces capable of near-real-time engagement with the information environment, but current approval frameworks hinder this capability.

Realizing several Army special operations priorities is crucial for cultivating these essential capabilities. This includes the full establishment of the Information Warfare Center, deliberate development of advanced psychological operations training courses at the future PSYWAR School at Fort Liberty, and the implementation of the recently unveiled integration framework. We believe these adaptations could enhance psychological operations’ utility to maneuver commanders and elevate the branch’s organizational standing within the Army and the joint force.

Furthermore, earlier and more frequent integration with Special Forces maneuver units can foster greater cultural assimilation and enhance psychological operations’ perceived effectiveness. Over the long term, such effective adaptations can lead to improved opportunities for career advancement, recognition, and resource allocation within the Army special operations community.

How Special Forces Commanders Can Help

The success of integration relies on mutual collaboration, an area where Special Forces commanders play a critical role in several key ways. Firstly, at all levels, they must deliberately integrate psychological operations and civil affairs into their routine systems and processes. Overcoming the obstacle of geographical separation between many psychological operations battalions and the Special Forces groups they’re aligned with becomes imperative. Special Forces units must actively engage psychological operations commanders and staffs in their battle rhythms—weekly meetings, operational planning events, and staff dialogue.

Secondly, Special Forces commanders must clearly communicate their expectations regarding the role and objectives of psychological operations within their collective activities. This involves identifying gaps in influence capability or areas where psychological operations support can have a significant impact. Simply instructing them to just do psychological operations things is insufficient. Special Forces commanders must move beyond vague directives and provide specific guidance on how psychological operations can contribute to achieving mission success. Over time, the collective body of Special Forces commanders must refine and adapt their understanding of psychological operations’ capabilities to facilitate more purposeful integration.

Lastly, at the headquarters level, US Army Special Operations Command must develop a comprehensive force presentation model that outlines how theater special operations commands can effectively employ all Army special operations functions under a unified Army special operations commander. This plan should also include strategies to enhance the use of portions battalion and brigade psychological operations and civil affairs headquarters. While critical in psychological operations doctrine, these components typically remain undeployed, except in times of conflict.

Better integrating psychological operations into the Army special operations framework offers an opportunity to address pressing challenges while boosting the effectiveness of both psychological operations and Special Forces units. Integration promotes a deeper understanding of capabilities and constraints, fostering greater interoperability and synchronization. This enables both forces to evolve together to meet the demands of modern warfare.


The 1st Special Forces Command’s integration policy transcends mere consolidation of special operations units; it aims to enhance overall operational effectiveness. It stresses the importance of each component, including psychological operations, in contributing meaningfully to mission success. Integration presents a pivotal moment for the psychological operations branch to redefine its role within the special operations community. By embracing modernization and seamless integration, psychological operations can reaffirm its significance within the Army special operations enterprise and enhance its effectiveness and prominence in irregular warfare. The time for evolution is now, and through strategic adaptation, psychological operations can emerge stronger and more indispensable than ever.

A substantial investment in integrating psychological operations into Special Forces, including resources and personnel, isn’t just a choice—it’s a strategic imperative. With its status as the largest near-peer rival and the richest challenger the United States has ever faced, China’s growth demands a concentrated effort due to the scarcity of both resources and time. Both China and Russia have strategically integrated modern information warfare into their military strategies, reshaping engagement protocols. As competition intensifies, the ability to discern and counter rival narratives in the information sphere will significantly impact global outcomes.

For the United States, the crucial question is how best to adapt and seize the initiative in information warfare from adversaries. Integration offers a pragmatic response to evolving threats, ensuring a strategic advantage against advanced information warfare strategies employed by formidable opponents.

Lieutenant Colonel Eric Hoelscher is an Army Special Forces officer with significant special operations experience in the Middle East. He is the program officer at the Naval Postgraduate School’s Defense Analysis Department in Monterey, California and holds a master’s degree from the same program. He most recently served as the G35 director at 1st Special Forces Command (Airborne), where he led the team responsible for global force management and development of the command’s strategic operating guidance.

Dr. Siamak Tundra Naficy is a senior lecturer at the Naval Postgraduate School’s Department of Defense Analysis. An anthropologist with an interdisciplinary approach to social, biological, psychological, and cultural issues, his interests range from the anthropological approach to conflict theory to wicked problems, sacred values, cognitive science, and animal behavior.

The views expressed are those of the authors and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense, or of any organization the authors are affiliated with, including the Department of the Navy and the Naval Postgraduate School.

Image credit: Cynthia McIntyre, US Army

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mwi.westpoint.edu · by Eric Hoelscher, Siamak Tundra Naficy · June 5, 2024


9. Don't expect an Indo-Pacific NATO anytime soon


As an aside there are a few national security terms that are trotted out regularly:


A "new" NATO
A "new" Marshall Plan
A "new" containment policy
A Cold War 2.0


Are these terms appropriate and applicable or are they only useful at certain times and in certain conditions or even georgrpahic locations. Does their use stifle our intellectual rigor and the creative and ctitical thinking neceessary to recgonize and understand problems and develop policies and stragey?


Of course I am guilty as well as I regularly recommend that we conduct a superior form of political warfare which was coined by George Kennan in 1948. But I will stand by my use of the concept because it is timeless (in my estimation).



Don't expect an Indo-Pacific NATO anytime soon - Asia Times


China’s aggression is sparking new talk of an Asian NATO but region’s history is littered with failed collective security efforts 

asiatimes.com · by Connor Fiddler · June 5, 2024

Tensions between the US and China are heating up as a top Chinese general has again accused the US of trying to form an “Asia-Pacific NATO.”

At the Shangri-La Dialogue talk shop held last weekend in Singapore, US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin defended the US strategy, emphasizing cooperation with Indo-Pacific allies like Japan and Australia to boost regional security.

This friction underscores the growing divide, with China criticizing the US for promoting division while the US argues it’s responding to China’s aggressive actions, including harassment of the Philippines in the South China Sea and ramped-up military maneuvers around Taiwan.

This development is part of a broader US strategy to bolster regional security through “minilateral” partnerships, such as the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, AUKUS and several budding trilateral agreements. Australia, Japan, the Philippines and US defense chiefs met in May, giving rise to talk of a new “Squad” partnership.

While these initiatives have sparked discussions about the possibility of forming an Indo-Pacific NATO, the complexities and historical challenges suggest that pursuing an Indo-Pacific Treaty Organization won’t likely happen anytime soon.

Failed collective efforts

During the early Cold War, several efforts to create a collective security agreement in the Pacific similar to NATO failed. Since the end of World War II, there have been three serious attempts to form an Indo-Pacific NATO, namely the Pacific Pact, Pacific Ocean Pact and Southeast Asian Treaty Organization (SEATO).

The first attempt was made by South Korea, Taiwan and the Philippines in 1949. Abandonment fears were rife in Seoul, Taipei and Manila as aid to Taiwan slowed and US troops left the Korean Peninsula. Washington rejected the pact primarily due to its concerns about being entrapped by Taiwan and South Korea.

The next try came soon after the Korean War broke out, though it was an American proposal at that time. President Harry Truman brought in John Foster Dulles to build a Pacific Ocean Pact. However, Canberra, Wellington, Tokyo and Manila all expressed hostility to the new effort. Washington quickly pivoted and negotiated a series of bilateral defense treaties, creating the hub and spokes system.

The closest the Pacific has come to a NATO-esque organization was SEATO, another creation of John Foster Dulles, the Secretary of State from 1953 to 1959. SEATO only included two Southeast Asian nations, Thailand and the Philippines, and the organization faced impediments from the beginning.

In particular, it lacked a credible NATO-like Article 5 collective security guarantee and a standing military command structure. Ultimately, SEATO was the wrong tool for the communist threat they faced at the time.

Each new iteration of a Pacific NATO failed for unique reasons but the underlying causes remained consistent. The Pacific partners were dispersed over hundreds of miles with varied histories, cultures, political institutions and threats.

While Pacific nations feared Chinese, Soviet and North Korean aggression, American military might was then dominant, negating the need for collective defense. Despite wanting some form of collective defense, policymakers failed to resolve the underlying issues, resulting in successive failures.

Now, commentators are once again speculating about the formation of an Indo-Pacific NATO, or an Indo-Pacific Treaty Organization. It makes sense that some would want to pool together resources and establish a collective defense organization.

Although China’s aggression and North Korean instigations have brought American partners closer together, the creation of an Indo-Pacific Treaty Organization is still hindered by considerable barriers.

Those include conflicting foreign policy approaches. Since the Cold War, India has proudly pioneered a non-alignment strategy. Indian Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar has specifically said that India will not officially align with the US in a formal Indo-Pacific Treaty Organization bloc.

South Korea also has an unsuitable strategy approach for a collective security organization. Seoul’s national security apparatus is almost entirely geared toward deterring and winning a war against North Korea.

President Yoon Suk Yeol has prioritized strengthening US relationsHowever, South Korea continues to prioritize committing resources against the North Korean threat and would likely be hesitant to divert them to support a regional collective defense organization.

Australia is also looking to expand cooperation with the US but would be hesitant to over-commit resources to a collective Indo-Pacific Treaty Organization. While Australian strategy notes that it has an interest in deterring North Korean aggression, it is unclear if Canberra would be willing to commit to defending South Korea from a North Korean invasion.

Australia’s embrace of AUKUS and participation in other regional security initiatives indicates that Canberra is willing to be more active in deterring threats but significantly AUKUS is not a warfighting agreement.

India, South Korea and Australia are undoubtedly moving closer to the US, mainly due to Chinese provocations. However, that shift does not mean that they will be willing to commit to a NATO-like structure.

The second barrier to creating an Indo-Pacific Treaty Organization is the deep economic integration Indo-Pacific partners have with China. By the 1980s, European nations only conducted 4% of their trade with the Soviet Union. The economic cost of balancing against the Soviet Union was thus low.

China, on the other hand, is now the largest trading partner for most of the potential treaty organization members, including South Korea, Japan, Australia and New Zealand. And Beijing has consistently shown a willingness to use economic coercion to affect its neighbors’ policies.

In 2017, China drastically limited Korean goods and services when South Korea agreed to host a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) antimissile battery from the US. In 2020, after Australian officials called for an investigation into China’s role in the original spread of Covid-19, Beijing retaliated with stiff tariffs on certain Australian exports.

Beijing is clearly anxious about neighboring countries coalescing against it in a collective defense arrangement and any official movement toward an Indo-Pacific Treaty Organization will likely result in Chinese economic retaliation.

Domestic attitudes are also an impediment to forming an Indo-Pacific Treaty Organization. If an Indo-Pacific Treaty Organization were to form, one of the most urgent scenarios to prepare for would be a conflict over Taiwan. Even if Taiwan were not an Indo-Pacific Treaty Organization member, partner states would likely get dragged in to a China fight.

But polling consistently shows that Indo-Pacific populations are against going to war with China over Taiwan. If China invaded Taiwan, 34% of South Koreans would support military assistance, 11% of Japanese would support its Self Defense Forces using force with the US and 56% of Australians say their country should remain neutral.

To be sure, domestic attitudes can shift with events. A Chinese missile attack on Taipei might shift national opinions about their nation’s involvement in an armed conflict with China.

However, prevailing domestic attitudes across most of the region are not conducive to forming an Indo-Pacific Treaty Organization. Concerns about getting entangled in a war over Taiwan will prevent political leadership from pursuing a NATO-like structure.

Collective action, not collective defense

While an Indo-Pacific Treaty Organization may not coalesce anytime soon, Washington and its partners should still focus on expanding, maturing and institutionalizing new minilateral security networks. Rather than pursuing collective defense, policymakers should embrace collective action.

Leader summits are essential because they signal to bureaucracies that the defense arrangements are a priority for the respective administrations and give leaders an opportunity to explain why these alignments are important to national interests.

It has been a year since Quad leaders met for a summit and one is still not scheduled. Moreover, a large majority of South Koreans support building their own nuclear arsenal, largely due to a lack of trust in Washington’s extended deterrence.

Biden, Kishida, and Yoon must meet again in August to demonstrate solidarity but also to find ways to reassure the South Korean public of American commitments.

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To support the mission, the White House should prioritize hiring now Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell’s replacement to fill the role of Indo-Pacific Coordinator at the National Security Council.

A senior inter-agency official coordinating US policy directly with allies and partners is critical to energizing trilateral progress. Leaders must maintain the momentum they have fought for these past years despite it being an election year in multiple partner countries.

Additionally, policymakers should focus on legislating the infrastructure needed to support collective action in the Indo-Pacific. Shipbuilding is the perfect model. AUKUS is an ambitious plan but it fails if the US does not have sufficient shipbuilding infrastructure.

Congress passing the presidential supplemental, which allocated $3.3 billion to US shipbuilding, helps ensure that AUKUS collective action survives.

Washington should take the same approach with Tomahawk missiles. The long-range cruise missiles are a critical tool in the American arsenal and increasingly crucial for partners like JapanAustralia and the United Kingdom.

Procurement of the guided munition has stagnated significantly over the years, leaving a dilapidated manufacturing process and only around 4,000 missiles. War games show that the United States would run out of long-range missiles in less than a week if war broke out with China.

Washington should thus invest funds specific to addressing munition infrastructure to boost manufacturing of arms critical for a potential Indo-Pacific conflict.

While the formation of an Indo-Pacific NATO is still unlikely due to various strategic, geopolitical and economic barriers, the focus should remain on strengthening and institutionalizing existing minilateral alliances.

By fostering collective action through sustained high-level engagement and strategic investments, the Indo-Pacific region can achieve enhanced security and stability without the need for a formal treaty organization.

Connor Fiddler is the Associate Deputy Director for the Asia Program at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He is the author of the Hub-and-Spokes on Substack, analyzing US military cooperation with Asian allies. Connor is also a Rising Expert with the Young Professionals in Foreign Policy and a Young Leader with the Pacific Forum. Follow him on X at @Connor_Fiddler.

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asiatimes.com · by Connor Fiddler · June 5, 2024



10. What the West Can Learn From Singapore



The grass is always greener on the other side (in a city state).


But I cannot accept Professor Allison's question here (I do not think he recommends this but as he notes in the penultimate and final paragraphs he is trying to be provocative). I will stick to the free speech we cherish because without it I do not think we will get better governance. We are Americans and not Singaporeans.


Americans and Britons cherish freedom of speech, the press, assembly, and the related basket of liberal rights. But if given a choice, would they accept limits on some of these rights to enjoy the high standards of governance that their Singaporean counterparts are accustomed to? Do they care more about the freedom to speak their minds and support an opposition party, or what Singaporean businessperson Calvin Cheng has described as the freedom to walk safely “in the wee hours in the morning, to be able to leave one’s door open and not fear being burgled” and “knowing our children can go to school without fear of drugs, or being mowed down by some insane person with a gun”?


To put it more provocatively, consider an extreme hypothetical. Imagine that instead of choosing between U.S. presidential candidates Joe Biden and Donald Trump or the Conservative and Labour parties, citizens in the United States and Britain were offered the chance to vote for an alternative. This alternative would be to subcontract their country’s governance for the next four years to Singapore’s ruling party. In 2028, citizens would have a chance to vote again between giving that party four more years in power or returning to their current systems, in which they choose between the candidates presented by the two parties.


It’s a radical and obviously unrealistic possibility. But reflecting on the question and the possible benefits of such an arrangement should help us think more clearly about what’s required to make government work.



What the West Can Learn From Singapore

Data shows that in key areas, Singapore is better at governing than the U.S. and Britain.

JUNE 5, 2024, 4:33 PM

By Graham Allison, a professor of government at the Harvard Kennedy School.


Foreign Policy · by Graham Allison

  • Economics
  • United States
  • Southeast Asia

When asked whether the U.S. government works, most Americans say no. According to recent polling by Ipsos, more than two-thirds of adults in the United States think the country is going in the wrong direction. Gallup reports that only 26 percent have confidence in major U.S. institutions, such as the presidency, the Supreme Court, and Congress. Nearly half of Americans aged 18 to 25 say that they believe either that democracy or dictatorship “makes no difference” or that “dictatorship could be good in certain circumstances.” As a recent Economist cover story put it: “After victory in the Cold War, the American model seemed unassailable. A generation on, Americans themselves are losing confidence in it.”

When asked whether the U.S. government works, most Americans say no. According to recent polling by Ipsos, more than two-thirds of adults in the United States think the country is going in the wrong direction. Gallup reports that only 26 percent have confidence in major U.S. institutions, such as the presidency, the Supreme Court, and Congress. Nearly half of Americans aged 18 to 25 say that they believe either that democracy or dictatorship “makes no difference” or that “dictatorship could be good in certain circumstances.” As a recent Economist cover story put it: “After victory in the Cold War, the American model seemed unassailable. A generation on, Americans themselves are losing confidence in it.”

Most Singaporeans have a very different outlook on their government, a managed political system that has elections but nonetheless facilitates the dominance of one party, the People’s Action Party. According to a Pew Research Center report, three-quarters of Singaporeans are satisfied with how democracy is working in their country. Moreover, 80 percent think their country is heading in the right direction—the highest number in any of the 29 countries surveyed in the May Ipsos poll.

In 2024, both the United States and Singapore are facing one of the most challenging tests of any system of government: the transfer of power from one leader to the next. Textbooks on government identify this as an arena in which democratic systems have the greatest advantage over authoritarian or managed alternatives. Yet, as this year shows, that isn’t always the case.

Lawrence Wong smiles and shakes hands with Lee Hsien Loong, a slightly older man, who also smiles. Both men wear black suits with subtly patterned ties.

Wong shakes hands with former Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong during Wong’s swearing-in ceremony in Singapore on May 15.Edgar Su/AFP via Getty Images

In May, as then-Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong passed the baton to his chosen successor, Lawrence Wong, Singaporeans almost unanimously applauded the orderly, peaceful transition. In contrast, Americans’ sense of gloom is growing as they approach a presidential election in which voters will have to choose between two candidates who claim that the other’s victory would mean the end of U.S. democracy. According to an April Reuters/Ipsos poll, two-thirds of U.S. voters believe that neither candidate should be running.

These comparisons invite the question: Is Singapore simply better at governing than other countries?

To answer this, consider the following three Report Cards, which use data from international organizations to assess Singapore alongside two countries holding major elections this year: the United States and Britain. Each report card grades the countries on how well they have fulfilled the requirements that Singapore’s founder and first prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew—the father of Lee Hsien Loong—believed were the function of government: to “improve the standard of living for the majority of its people, plus enabling the maximum of personal freedoms compatible with the freedoms of others in society.”

The first Report Card considers citizens’ well-being, which we’ve assessed based on categories for which there is ample data, such as income, health, safety, and sense of security.

The second Report Card covers what the World Bank calls “governance,” or a government’s effectiveness in facing issues, making policy choices, executing policy, and preventing corruption.

The third Report Card, which considers both individual rights and citizens’ satisfaction with their government, is more difficult to interpret. It includes the judgments made both by international organizations and by polls that gauge how citizens feel about their democracy.

It’s worth reflecting on nine takeaways related to these Report Cards. First, Lee Hsien Loong left to his successor a population that is now wealthier than Americans—and almost twice as wealthy as their former British colonial overlords. When he took office in 2004, the so-called Singapore miracle had already happened: Singapore’s economy had soared since the 1960s, taking the country from poverty to having a GDP per capita that was approximately three-quarters of that of the United States, where many analysts thought it would remain. Yet 20 years later, Singapore’s GDP per capita is more than 4 percent higher than that in the United States: $88,500 compared with $85,000.

Second, while rapid economic growth often produces greater income disparity, over the past two decades, Singapore has reduced inequality significantly—from 0.47 to 0.37 (as measured by the Gini coefficient, a measure by which 0 equals complete equality and 1 represents complete inequality)—while the United States has remained around 0.47. (For comparison, China’s Gini coefficient is 0.46, and the country with the highest level of inequality is South Africa, with 0.63.)

Third, Singaporeans are generally healthier and live longer than their counterparts in the United States and Britain. Just 20 years ago, life expectancy in all three countries was approximately the same. Today, the life expectancy in Singapore is longer (84 years) than that in the United States (76 years) and Britain (80 years). Singapore’s infant mortality has fallen from 27 deaths per 1,000 births in 1965, to 4 in 2004, to 1.8 today—considerably lower than both other countries. Furthermore, 93 percent of Singaporeans express satisfaction with their health care system in contrast to 75 percent of Americans and 77 percent of Britons.

Health workers wearing surgical masks, hair nets, goggles, and plastic protective covers over their clothing take nasal swab test samples at a COVID-19 testing clinic in a room with bright green walls and yellow columns.

Health workers take nasal swab test samples from essential workers to detect COVID-19 in Singapore on June 10, 2020.Roslan RahmanAFP via Getty Images

Fourth, Singapore was clearly best prepared for a major public health crisis. Because the COVID-19 pandemic struck all countries at around the same time, it provided a clear test of their response systems. On a per capita basis, around 10 Americans or Britons have died from COVID-19 for every one of their counterparts in Singapore.

Fifth, while approximately one-third of Singaporeans, Americans, and Britons graduate from university, students in Singapore tend to be academically ahead of their peers in the other two countries. In 2022, 41 percent of Singaporean high schoolers scored as “top performers” on mathematics tests among the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries, compared with just 7 percent of Americans and 11 percent of Britons. In 2009, Singapore ranked second in international math scores, behind China; today, Singapore is first, far ahead of China and every other country, while the United States is 34th, and the United Kingdom is 14th.

Sixth, Singapore surpasses both the United States and United Kingdom when it comes to ensuring rule of law and control of corruption, according to the World Bank’s Worldwide Governance Indicators. This aligns with OECD data, which shows that Singapore ranks first among OECD countries in citizens’ confidence in their judicial system (89 percent) and in overall satisfaction with their government (93 percent).

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New Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (C) smiles next to President Tharman Shanmugaratnam (R) during the swearing-in ceremony at the Istana in Singapore.New Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (C) smiles next to President Tharman Shanmugaratnam (R) during the swearing-in ceremony at the Istana in Singapore.

Singapore’s New Prime Minister Is Already Worried

A long-ruling party sees vulnerability as key to its own security and power.

Staff at the KL Fertility Centre demonstrate the egg freezing procedure for members of the media in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, on May 11. A growing number of women in Singapore are traveling overseas to clinics such as this one to freeze their eggs.Staff at the KL Fertility Centre demonstrate the egg freezing procedure for members of the media in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, on May 11. A growing number of women in Singapore are traveling overseas to clinics such as this one to freeze their eggs.

Why Does the Singaporean Government Care About Egg Freezing?

The city-state’s ban on the procedure is making its demographic problems worse.

Seventh, Singapore is one of the most stable countries in the world: The World Bank ranks it in the 97th percentile of countries for “political stability and absence of violence/terrorism,” up from the 85th percentile two decades ago. The United States, by comparison, is only in the 45th percentile, and the United Kingdom is in the 62nd.

Eighth, multinational corporations generally consider Singapore’s political and legal environment to be the best in the world for doing business. On the World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Index, Singapore has moved up from No. 5 in 2004 to No. 1 today, having passed the United States in 2019. In the Economist Intelligence Unit’s annual ranking of countries in which to do business, Singapore has held the No. 1 spot for the past 16 years; the United States typically ranks third, while the United Kingdom is not even among the top 10.

Finally—and this complicates the picture—Singaporeans have much less freedom to exercise their political rights. According to Humans Right Watch, Singapore’s “political environment remains overwhelmingly repressive.” Freedom House classifies Singapore as only “partly free,” with a score of 48 out of 100, while the World Bank places Singapore in only the 44th percentile of all the world’s countries for voice and accountability, which “captures perceptions of the extent to which a country’s citizens are able to participate in selecting their government, as well as freedom of expression, freedom of association, and a free media.” These figures are significantly higher—sometimes twice as high—in the United States and Britain.

A crowd of people cheer and wave Singapore flags, many of them also wearing the red and white colors of the flag.

People wave the flags during the National Day Parade at the Padang, a field in downtown Singapore, on Aug. 9, 2015.Suhaimi Abdullah/Getty Images

Despite this, polls find that most Singaporeans are satisfied with their version of democracy. Yet even Singaporeans who disagree with international critics of their regime recognize the need to create more space for domestic debate. As Wong, the new prime minister, put it recently: A majority would “like to see more opposition voices in parliament. So the opposition presence in parliament is here to stay.”

The contrast between Singapore’s ranking on the first two Report Cards and the third takes us back to the question: What is government for? From a Western perspective, the possibility that a more autocratic state could govern more effectively than a more open democracy seems almost unthinkable. History offers few examples of benevolent dictatorships that delivered the goods—or stayed benevolent for long. But in the case of Singapore, brute facts are hard to ignore.

Americans and Britons cherish freedom of speech, the press, assembly, and the related basket of liberal rights. But if given a choice, would they accept limits on some of these rights to enjoy the high standards of governance that their Singaporean counterparts are accustomed to? Do they care more about the freedom to speak their minds and support an opposition party, or what Singaporean businessperson Calvin Cheng has described as the freedom to walk safely “in the wee hours in the morning, to be able to leave one’s door open and not fear being burgled” and “knowing our children can go to school without fear of drugs, or being mowed down by some insane person with a gun”?

To put it more provocatively, consider an extreme hypothetical. Imagine that instead of choosing between U.S. presidential candidates Joe Biden and Donald Trump or the Conservative and Labour parties, citizens in the United States and Britain were offered the chance to vote for an alternative. This alternative would be to subcontract their country’s governance for the next four years to Singapore’s ruling party. In 2028, citizens would have a chance to vote again between giving that party four more years in power or returning to their current systems, in which they choose between the candidates presented by the two parties.

It’s a radical and obviously unrealistic possibility. But reflecting on the question and the possible benefits of such an arrangement should help us think more clearly about what’s required to make government work.

Foreign Policy · by Graham Allison


11. Airman Earned an Air Force Cross. His Name Remains Secret.


Another great American.


Airman Earned an Air Force Cross. His Name Remains Secret.

The Air Force Cross is second only to the Medal of Honor, and is awarded for extraordinary heroism in the face of danger. U.S. Air Force photo/Airman 1st Class Ryan Conroy

airandspaceforces.com · by Greg Hadley · June 4, 2024

June 4, 2024 | By Greg Hadley

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An Air Force combat controller was awarded the Air Force Cross—the second-highest decoration for valor in combat behind the Medal of Honor—for actions during a fierce battle in Syria in 2018. His identity, however, remains a well-kept secret.

The Airman, a member of the 24th Special Tactics Squadron, was awarded the medal in September 2020, but the Air Force didn’t disclose it until it answered Washington Post reporter Kyle Rempfer’s Freedom of Information Act request seeking the citation and order. An Air Force spokeswoman confirmed the citation to Air & Space Forces Magazine and said the combat controller’s identity was redacted under a FOIA exemption covering personnel in overseas, sensitive, or routinely deployable units.


Rempfer wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter, May 31 that his FOIA request was related to the Battle of Khasham, which took place Feb. 7-8, 2018, near Dewr Az Zewr, Syria, the time and place included in the Airman’s citation.

“On this date, [redacted] exposed himself to artillery, rocket, and mortar bombardment, and direct fire from main battle tanks, rocket-propelled grenades, and heavy automatic weapons during the hasty defense of a United States Special Operations Forces operating location,” the citation reads. “His actions prevented an isolated force of American and coalition personnel from being overrun by a professionally trained and technically proficient combined-arms enemy assault comprised of main battle tanks, armored personnel carriers, heavy artillery tubes, and a battalion of infantry soldiers.”

At the time, U.S. officials said their troops faced an “unprovoked attack” by forces associated with the regime of leader Bashar al-Assad. U.S. forces have been in Syria since 2014 as part of Operation Inherent Resolve, its defeat-ISIS mission, and were embedded with the Syrian Democratic Forces, who oppose al-Assad in the Syrian civil war.

U.S. troops watched for about a week as “pro-regime” forces built up a battalion-sized force complete with artillery, tanks, and mortars near their position, officials said. The forces fired up to 30 artillery and tank rounds on the SDF and U.S. position, prompting a response by U.S. aircraft, including F-22s and MQ-9s, as well as artillery on the ground.

Air Force combat controllers deploy with special operations units into combat or hostile environments and help direct aircraft and provide command and control. According to a subsequent New York Times report based on interviews and documents, USAF combat controllers helped direct B-52 bombers where to strike, helping stop an intense barrage of tank fire, artillery, and mortar rounds.


A 321st Special Tactics Squadron combat controller gears up before the start of an austere landing training exercise at Nowe Miasto, Poland, July 20, 2015. U.S. Air Force photo by Airman 1st Class Luke Kitterman/Released

The Air Force Cross citation notes that the Airman showed “extraordinary heroism, superb airmanship, and aggressiveness in the face of the enemy.”

Despite being significantly outnumbered, U.S. forces suffered no casualties in the battle.

There have been conflicting subsequent reports as to whether members of Russian private military companies were part of the formation that attacked U.S. forces. Officials have said they maintained deconfliction lines with the Russian military before and during the battle.

Since the Global War on Terror began in 2001, the Air Force has only announced the awards of 11 Air Force Cross medals, the latest in 2017. The service has had only one Medal of Honor recipient in that time—Master. Sgt. John A. Chapman, also a combat controller in the 24th Special Tactics Squadron.

Air

Awards

airandspaceforces.com · by Greg Hadley · June 4, 2024



12. Is There a Revolution in Military Affairs in Ukraine?


"Something's happening here. What it is ain't exactly clear." (yet)


Is there an RMA in Ukraine?


Or does every new capability, technology, or tactic just seem "revolutionary?" And of course can we really know if it is revolutionary we can look back on its history to determine that?


Excerpts:


In concluding this assessment, one final aspect of RMAs bears highlighting: the role of historical understanding in military institutions that are transforming. As Murray has written, “no revolution has ever involved a leap into the future without a lifeline to past military concepts and capabilities—particularly the recent past. Those military organizations that have created successful RMAs have tied development of the revolutions to a realistic understanding of the past.”
Military organisations never have a ‘blank sheet’ for the innovation, adaptation and transformations that result in RMAs. Organisations that hope to radically change their capacity, and significantly improve their military effectiveness, must understand to elements of their own culture, traditions, people and historical context that can enable change rather than obstruct it.
While my assessment is that there is not yet an RMA occurring in Ukraine, there are elements of the war that might lead us to conclude that the foundations for one are being laid. As such, I look forward to reassessing this issue in the future. RMAs are generally most apparent in retrospect and not while they are underway.


Is There a Revolution in Military Affairs in Ukraine?

An assessment of military revolutions, revolutions in military affairs and the influence of the war in Ukraine

https://mickryan.substack.com/p/is-there-a-revolution-in-military?utm


MICK RYAN

JUN 05, 2024

∙ PAID


Image: @DefenceU on Twitter / X

The war in Ukraine has seen the birth of multiple innovations that have aided both the Ukrainians and Russians in the conduct of their military operations since February 2022. The topic of the ongoing adaptation battle – at the tactical and strategic levels – is one that I have returned to throughout the conflict.

Periodically since 2022, a related question has been posed: is the war in Ukraine a new revolution in military affairs (RMA)? The question was posed in an article for The Hill in July 2022, and in several more recent publications that have largely centered on the use of drones in the war possibly as driving a revolution in military affairs.

Despite the importance of this topic, the issue of whether the war in Ukraine is beginning of a new revolution in military affairs remains understudied. This needs to be redressed because studying Ukraine through the lens of RMA allows for identifying appropriate innovations for investment in military institutions, improving the incentives for innovation in the military and in military procurement systems, and for developing the new doctrines, organisations and training regimes that provide the foundation for absorbing new technologies.

But before assessing whether the war in Ukraine is driving a new RMA, some clarification of terminology is required.

What is an RMA?


Since the 1990s, the study of RMAs has proceeded through various pulses and pauses. Perhaps the high point was the 1990s and early 2000s as the United States and other nations undertook detailed explorations of past revolutions in military affairs in order to inform their development of future-oriented military force structures.

While the topic of military technical revolutions was studied by the Soviets in the 1970s, the genesis of this late 20th century exploration of strategic military innovation in the West was the interest of the Director of Net Assessments, Andrew Marshall, who wrote that:

In late 1990 or perhaps early 1991, shortly after Andrew Krepinevich had joined the office, that I asked him to undertake an assessment to decide still more clearly if we really believed that the Soviet theorists were correct in their belief that technological developments would lead to major changes in warfare.

Seminal works by scholars such as Williamson Murray, Allan Millett, Colin Gray and Andrew Krepinevich followed over the following decade. These publications provided further clarity about the concept of RMAs and explored many examples of where these events had occurred throughout history.

Perhaps the most important early publication was an article by Williamson Murray, called “Thinking About Revolutions in Military Affairs” in Joint Forces Quarterly in Summer 1997. In this piece, Murray offered a definition for RMAs, but importantly, he offered a framework of the differentiated between first, Military Revolutions, and second, Revolutions in Military Affairs. In this article (which he reinforced in the 2001 book, The Dynamics of Military Revolution, 1300-2050), Murray defined Military Revolutions (of which he identified only four) as historical events that fundamentally changed the nature of warfare. As Murray writes,

Such "military revolutions" recast the nature of society and the state as well as of military organizations. By so doing they altered the capacity of states to project military power and allowed the military to kill people and break more effectively.

On the other hand, RMAs were a more limited phenomenon requiring the aggregation of different tactical, organizational, doctrinal, and technological innovations to construct a new conceptual paradigm in military affairs. Indeed, it is the conceptual element rather than the technological aspects that is fundamental. As Murray notes, “the record further suggests that the crucial element in most RMAs is conceptual in nature.” We will return to this particular point in the discussion of whether Ukraine is an RMA.

In concluding this short examination of military revolutions and revolutions in military affairs, it is worth noting their relationship to each other. Murray uses the metaphor of earthquakes to do so.

If a military revolution is an earthquake, then RMAs are the pre-shocks and aftershocks that accompany the earthquake. Therefore, if World War I was the key military revolution of the 20th century, as Murray argues, then the birth of mechanized, combined arms warfare, aerial combat, strategic bombing, and carrier warfare are some of the RMAs that emerged from the Great War’s seismic shock on society, technology, and military organisations.

Image: @DefenceU and 24th Mech Brigade

Ukraine, Russia and Military Innovation


The 28 months since Russia’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine has seen a plethora of publications that explore innovation in the war. While the majority of works examine the application of uncrewed systems in the aerial and maritime environments, other adaptations explored have included digitized command and control, the application of different sensor systems, long range strike regimes, electronic warfare as well as changes in tactics and strategy.

Over the past two years, I have focussed on three systems which, together, probably comprise a transformative trinity in this war. These are:

Democratised and Digitised Command and Control. Software-defined warfare, as some have begun to describe it, or algorithmic warfare, has assumed a fundamental role in military decision-making during the war. While both sides have undertaken efforts to streamline their command and control, the Ukrainians have demonstrated a more profound grasp of the potential applications of digitising their battlefield command and control systems, as well as systems that support air defence and other strategic concerns. Vitally, the Ukrainians have democratised access to these systems. The Ukrainian approach, which is accompanied with geofencing data and continuously updated security protocols, has resulted in a different paradigm for battlefield command and control.

The Meshed Civil-Military Sensor Net. This is the ‘meshing’ of the full range of military and civilian sources, collected through many different sensing systems, to produce a more robust and coherent understanding of the operating environment. It is not only the sensors and sources in this mesh that provided enhanced visibility of the battlespace. There has also been recent growth in the civil intelligence analysis that uses the data collected by these networks.

The Autonomous and Counter-Autonomy Complex. The most ubiquitous elements of this complex are the drones used by tactical forces to seek out the enemy. The information gathered is the used to either call in artillery or missile strikes, or to use the drones themselves as attack systems by dropping munitions or as ‘kamikaze’ drones. They have been responsible for drastically reducing the time between detection and destruction in tactical activities in all three wars, as well as enhancing the chances of surprise.

Loitering munitions are another component of this complex and are a unique form of UAV which carries a warhead and that is able to ‘loiter’ in an area before finding a target and diving into it. The final element of this autonomy-counter autonomy complex is countering autonomous systems. The Ukrainians and Russians have been sprinting to improve their ability to intercept, capture, and destroy drones, as well as trace the location of drone operations centres and attack them.

Whether one agrees with this construct for how the war in Ukraine is transforming military operations, or alternative frameworks for tactical and strategic military innovation, there is some evidence for this war driving a rethink of force structure and equipment in military institutions well beyond this Eastern European theatre of war. Countries such as the US, UK, Japan, Taiwan and China have been observing the war, reassessing their force structure and procurement priorities, and investing in new technologies that have proven themselves during the war, particularly those that lie within the three elements of the transformative trinity described above.

But, even with this level of influence being exerted by the war, is a nascent military revolution or RMA emerging? What assessments might be made on the basis of this question?

One assessment is that there is no evidence at this stage of a military revolution. If we refer back to the definition for a military revolution, the wholesale and irreversible changes in societies that fundamentally shift the character of warfare, it is clear that such a revolution have not manifested as a result of the war. It is possible that, if there is a major escalation of the war to a more general conflagration involving all of Europe, such a military revolution could take place. But there is no evidence for one at this point.

A related assessment is that there are some glimmerings of a potential RMA, which is the more limited form of the two revolutionary forms. The past two years have seen significant changes in the kinds of technologies applied by the Ukrainian and Russian military institutions. These have seen an increase in the level of visibility over battlefield affairs and a streamlining of the respective kill-webs of the belligerents.

But the war in Ukraine cannot (yet) be described as driving a fully fledged RMA. There are three reasons for this.

First, there is little evidence of the significant conceptual reform that is the sine qua non of historical RMA. Recall that Murray describes how, “the crucial element in most RMAs is conceptual in nature.”

The 2023 Ukrainian counteroffensive offers an insight into this issue. While shortfalls in training and collective planning and execution also contributed to the lack of Ukrainian success, it was quickly made clear that trying to use existing combined arms doctrine in an era of ubiquitous drones and streamlined kill-chains was not going to work. By the same token, Russia with all its advantages in manpower and firepower has not been able to achieve tactical or operational breakthroughs against a severely weakened Ukrainian ground force.

The defence is now overwhelming in the ascendant. Neither side has developed the novel, new-era warfighting concepts – for air or land operations - that permit survivable, sustainable and successful offensive operations. Until they do, at best any RMA can be described as nascent.

Second, the innovations being witnessed in Ukraine are yet to lead to fundamental shifts in the organisations, equipment and doctrines of military institutions beyond the theatre. While many nations are experimenting with some of the emergent technologies of the war, there is no evidence of large-scale shifts away from expensive and exquisite equipment sets, current warfighting doctrines or historical organisational philosophies.

Third and finally, external observers are not really seeing enough of the war and its conduct – from the battlefield through to strategic planning and command – to have enough evidence to make a substantive judgement about an RMA. Few see more than just a small part of the war. Previous explorations of historical RMA have had access to an array of resources from archival and other sources to inform judgements about whether or not certain events did indeed compromise an RMA. We are not yet at the point where scholars and analysts have sufficient data to do the same level of research and analysis for the ongoing events in Ukraine.

Is an RMA Pending?


In the final assessment, it is fairly conclusive that there is no ongoing military revolution in Ukraine. All of the markers for such a profound historical event are missing, notwithstanding some of the changes to society and technology that have occurred in Ukraine and Russia during the war. To return to Murray’s metaphor, there has not been an earthquake. But there have been some pre-shocks.

Therefore, the case for an RMA is slightly stronger but not yet conclusive. There have been technological innovations, and some procedural adaptations, that are changing some aspects of war on the land and in the air. But these are yet to deliver the significant strategic advantages that one might expect from the evidence of historical RMAs. For an RMA to manifest, there will need to be further developments in technology, as well as new concepts and different organisational constructs. We are not at that point (yet).

In concluding this assessment, one final aspect of RMAs bears highlighting: the role of historical understanding in military institutions that are transforming. As Murray has written, “no revolution has ever involved a leap into the future without a lifeline to past military concepts and capabilities—particularly the recent past. Those military organizations that have created successful RMAs have tied development of the revolutions to a realistic understanding of the past.”

Military organisations never have a ‘blank sheet’ for the innovation, adaptation and transformations that result in RMAs. Organisations that hope to radically change their capacity, and significantly improve their military effectiveness, must understand to elements of their own culture, traditions, people and historical context that can enable change rather than obstruct it.

While my assessment is that there is not yet an RMA occurring in Ukraine, there are elements of the war that might lead us to conclude that the foundations for one are being laid. As such, I look forward to reassessing this issue in the future. RMAs are generally most apparent in retrospect and not while they are underway.

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13. Xi Calls for More University Exchanges With US to Boost Ties



​Or perhaps Xi's inside voice is saying he calls for more university exchanges with the US to boost SPIES. (apologies - I could not resist trying to make a pun from the headline).



Xi Calls for More University Exchanges With US to Boost Ties

By Bloomberg News

June 6, 2024 at 1:18 AM EDT

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-06-06/china-s-xi-calls-for-more-education-exchanges-with-the-us?sref=hhjZtX76


China’s President Xi Jinping has called for more exchanges between Chinese and American universities to boost mutual understanding, according to the official Xinhua News Agency.

Xi said education exchanges will help build ties with the US, adding that he hopes higher-education institutions could strengthen cooperation to cultivate “youth ambassadors” who understand both countries, Xinhua reported Thursday.

He made the remarks in a letter replying to Lamont O. Repollet, president of Kean University in New Jersey, the report said. The Chinese leader supported the establishment of Wenzhou-Kean University in Zhejiang when he was the province’s party chief in 2006.

Xi announced a plan to welcome 50,000 American students to China over the next five years during his trip to San Francisco in November, when he met with his US counterpart President Joe Biden.

Read More: Biden-Xi Meeting Delivers Small Wins and Promises of Better Ties

— With assistance from John Liu and Jing Li




14. Hamas Has Reinvented Underground Warfare



At least a recognition of north Korea and tunnels.


Excerpt:


But in Gaza, many of the tunnels exposed by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) resemble underground structures found in Iran and North Korea in terms of their size, depth, and method of construction.



But on specific mention of the assistance provided by north Korea to Hamas (and Hezbollah, and Syria, and Iran and others).


No mention of the 5,000 underground facilities in north Korea.


No mention of the north Korean concept of "tunnel living" when they put the nKPA on alert and move troops and civilians to tunnels in preparation for war.


No mention of the north Korean use of tunnels for deception and that we got duped into "inspecting" an empty tunnel during the Perry Policy review in 1999.


Yes, my bias is showing through.



Hamas Has Reinvented Underground Warfare

The Group’s Gaza Tunnels Will Inspire Others

By Daphné Richemond-Barak

June 6, 2024

Foreign Affairs · by Daphné Richemond-Barak · June 6, 2024

When Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, it dragged Israel into one of the worst underground wars ever. By now it is abundantly clear that the scale of Hamas’s subterranean complex is unprecedented and that the use of tunnels has contributed to casualties among civilians and soldiers. More consequentially, by sustaining underground operations over months, Hamas has delayed an Israeli victory, causing unimaginable diplomatic and political costs along the way.

In terms of tunnel warfare, the only war that compares is World War I, where countless British and German soldiers died trying to expose, mine, and dig tunnels. No other use of tunnels in warfare comes close—neither the entrenchment of Osama bin Laden in the mountains of Afghanistan that enabled him to evade U.S. forces and plan attacks undetected; nor that of al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb in Mali, where tunnels were used in launching attacks from nearly impregnable underground hideouts; nor that of the Islamic State (also known as ISIS), which used tunnels to conduct attacks on U.S.-led multinational forces in Iraq and Syria. Hamas’s use of tunnels is so advanced that it more closely resembles how states use underground structures to protect command-and-control centers than what is typical for nonstate actors.

Hamas’s buildup of below-ground capabilities has shaken Israel’s assessment of subterranean threats. Israel never imagined becoming embroiled in an underground war of such proportions. If anything, Israel had been focused on eliminating the Hamas tunnels that cross into Israeli territory. The war in the Gaza Strip will likely spur the development of new doctrine and new methods to deal with this unique type of war. Hamas’s tunnel system has no doubt caught the attention of other militaries and nonstate actors, all of which are noting how effective they have been for Hamas’s survival in Gaza.

Now that Hamas has overcome most of the hurdles inherent to underground warfare—communication, navigation, low oxygen levels, and claustrophobia, among others—there is every reason to believe that the tactic will continue to spread. Hamas’s innovative use of the underground has redefined the strategic value of the surface, altered military encounters, and transformed the use human shields.

OUT OF REACH

Surviving underground for long periods is no small feat, as the hundreds of Ukrainian fighters who lived in the tunnels beneath the Azovstal steel plant during a Russian onslaught on Mariupol in 2022 could report. Those forces quickly ran out of food and drinking water. They lacked the most basic sanitary and medical arrangements, not to mention internet connection and the ability to maintain communication with the outside world. In Gaza, none of this has been an issue for Hamas. The people living and fighting in the Azovstal tunnels could not survive for more than two months underground, but Hamas has maintained a subterranean military presence for almost eight months. Hamas owes this record-breaking performance to a long maze of underground passageways spanning Gaza that includes fully outfitted kitchens, furnished command rooms, sophisticated data centers, tiled bathrooms, fenced detention cells, and designated work areas.

Hamas seems unfettered by geological constraints, engineering and planning difficulties, or the fear of survivability. The group has had plenty of time to sharpen its skills, experiment, and improve; decades of digging at the Egyptian border, inside Gaza, and into Israeli territory certainly helped. A tunnel exposed near the border crossing between Gaza and Israel, known as the Erez crossing, was almost 10 feet wide and 164 feet deep. It was dug using civilian boring equipment, a first for Hamas.

Even the best digging skills, however, do not prepare fighters for prolonged stays underground. The conditions are harsh, oxygen is scarce, and communication with the outside world is limited. Hamas has shown that years of training and careful planning can help overcome these hurdles. Hamas’s tunnels include sleeping quarters, meeting rooms, and other underground structures, equipped with ventilation, electricity, toilets and washrooms, plumbing, and primitive yet effective communication networks. As the infrastructure improved, the downsides of living in and operating from the underground diminished. Massive stocks of fuel, food, and water inside the tunnels made it possible to live and conduct military operations underground. Extensive underground weapon-production facilities ensured that weapon supply and distribution would continue uninterrupted.

Israel underestimated the strategic ramifications of tunnel warfare.

Tunnel users everywhere are known to exit tunnels to restock, breathe fresh air, and communicate with the outside world, but Hamas leadership has barely been seen above ground. In April, reports surfaced that Hamas’s chief in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, had visited his forces aboveground, but only briefly. It is not clear how often Hamas fighters have exited the tunnels to resupply or recuperate. What is clear, however, is that Hamas has been able to direct military operations without interruption. Though it has suffered blows—particularly when Israeli strikes interrupt its communication systems—it has generally been able to ensure the continuation of the chain of command from its underground military base.

Hamas’s use of underground structures is more akin to how states, rather than nonstate actors, have traditionally used the underground. States rely on underground structures to house permanent and hard-to-reach bunkers capable of serving as command-and-control centers in times of crisis. These deeply buried facilities can host leaders, sustain weapon-production infrastructure, and ensure the continuation of the chain of command in an emergency. Canada, China, Iran, Israel, Russia, and the United States are known to possess these types of deeply buried facilities. They are larger, better equipped, more reinforced, and deeper than tunnels. Iran’s nuclear facilities are dug more than 300 feet into the ground (whereas most tunnels do not reach beyond 200 feet) and, as a result, are beyond the reach of even the most powerful weapons.

By contrast, terrorist groups have used tunnels mainly to shield themselves from surveillance technology and operate undetected. These rudimentary tunnels are used to hide and carry out surprise attacks. But in Gaza, many of the tunnels exposed by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) resemble underground structures found in Iran and North Korea in terms of their size, depth, and method of construction. Their cemented arched ceiling has become a signature trait, with cement also used to build larger tunnel shafts. Compared with Hamas’s earlier tunnels, those dug in Egypt and Gaza in the late 1990s and even up to the 2010s, the engineering has significantly improved. Tunnels are now less prone to collapse, well lit, and much more livable.

Hamas has also increased its reliance on tunnels as part of its strategy, namely how it uses tunnels. It sees tunnel warfare as a long-term, strategic investment designed to ensure the survivability of its chain of command in war, not merely a tactic to counter Israel’s intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities. Militaries cannot fight tactical tunnels as they fight strategic subterranean threats. Bunker-buster bombs, for example, will not be sufficient to destroy such deeper and robust structures. A shift toward a more strategic use of tunnels reflects a focus on survivability rather than underground combat.

WAIT-A-MOLE

The tunnels have shaped the operations in Gaza in countless ways—compromising the likelihood of a swift Israeli victory, slowing down the pace of operations, making the rescue of hostages more difficult, placing civilians in harm’s way, and complicating the military and political environments for Israel. But one aspect is often overlooked, and it bears consequences for future wars: Hamas’s subterranean strategy has diminished the importance of the surface.

Israeli journalist Ron Ben-Yishai has aptly described this new type of fighting as “a war carried out on two different levels.” In the initial stages of the war, the IDF sought to gain control of the surface to expose and eventually enter Hamas’s tunnels. But as its operation progressed, attention shifted to the passageways to and from the subsurface. The surface became just a conduit to reach underground tunnels and structures and ceased to be the focus of the fighting.

Enemy encounters and ground maneuvers changed as a result. Underground warfare is known to render the enemy invisible and out of reach. It is aptly and commonly described as a Whack-A-Mole game, where the enemy pops out of the ground in an endless hide-and-seek competition. In Gaza, however, the enemy disappeared almost entirely, swallowed into its immense subterranean complex. Whack-A-Mole became Wait-A-Mole. And since even waiting did not produce results, the Israeli military has had to use all sorts of subterfuges to extract Hamas fighters from underground.

This is not to say that Hamas fighters never emerge. They have fired deadly antitank missiles at Israeli troops and carried out other types of ambushes. But the way Hamas is operating shows that its use of tunnels has redefined not just the subterranean environment but also the value of and the nature of land combat. Encounters with the other side are less frequent, and like the tunnels themselves, they are difficult to detect. For example, invisible booby-traps near tunnel shafts indicate the presence of the enemy, but there is no enemy in sight, and when tunnels are finally penetrated, the enemy has moved to a different part of the tunnel network. The discovery of empty tunnels below the Al-Shifa hospital illustrates this vividly. In this environment, encounters do not occur naturally: they must be orchestrated.

If subterranean warfare has displaced land warfare in Gaza, it could happen elsewhere. Militaries must consider how to deal with the dwindling role of the surface when the enemy shifts from a tactical to a strategic use of the underground. The surface will continue to be relevant in war—at a minimum—in allowing access and control over underground structures and as the eventual location of most encounters. But these developments suggest that subterranean warfare might be best framed as a separate domain of war rather than as a mere subset of land warfare.

THE LIMITS OF TECHNOLOGY

Fighting in Gaza has also shown that advances in antitunnel technology have failed to deter groups such as Hamas from resorting to tunnel warfare. Israel arguably possesses the world’s most advanced antitunnel technology. Advanced detection and neutralization techniques were deployed to counter the threat of Hezbollah’s tunnels into Israel in 2018. Israel also trained special units in tunnel warfare, built subterranean training facilities, developed subterranean sensors to protect its borders, and mastered the difficult task of mapping tunnels by using drones. Between Operation Protective Edge in 2014, Israel’s last war in Gaza, and Hamas’s October 7 attack, the IDF significantly improved its capabilities in subterranean warfare, with a focus on training, equipment, and detection.

But Israel’s superior technology and advanced training did not discourage Hamas from investing significant time and human resources into building tunnels. At the same time, advances in technology led Israel to believe that it had quashed Hamas’s underground pursuits, even though the opposite was true. To put it in simple terms: as the technology improved, the digging intensified. Israel underestimated the strategic ramifications of tunnel warfare—a low-tech threat—when used on a grand scale and overestimated the ability of technology to counter it. It focused on the tactical aspects and on the cross-border tunnels, leaving Hamas free to develop subterranean capabilities of unprecedented proportions.

Making sense of this paradox is a key lesson from this war. Technology and military superiority cannot on their own stop the tunnel trend. Technology has failed both to deter subterranean threats and to counter them. Hamas is keenly aware that even the most sophisticated technology available will not be sufficient to counter such underground capabilities and therefore has deep confidence in the tactic. Hamas knew that its extensive tunnel network in Gaza would slow Israel’s response, diminish Israel’s competitive advantage, protect Hamas’s top leaders in Gaza, and inflict heavy civilian casualties. Low-tech warfare has paid off in Gaza, and it is a success that will boost tunnel warfare everywhere.

HUMAN SHIELDS 2.0

Hamas’s use of Israelis and foreign civilians as human shields is a significant and concerning innovation of the ongoing Gaza war. As is well known, Hamas took hundreds of hostages as part of its massive October 7 attack on Israel, many of whom are still being held in Gaza. These people are commonly referred to as hostages, but the reality is more complex than the word “hostage” suggests.

Hamas has innovated, first, by bringing innocent civilians inside the tunnels as human shields and, second, by using civilians from Israel and other countries as human shields—rather than Palestinian civilians. In contemporary warfare, human shielding refers to the act of placing civilians—typically one’s own civilians—in and around military targets with the aim of immunizing such targets from attack. The tactic, which is prohibited under international law, has sadly flourished in the context of urban warfare. Many terrorist groups, including Hamas in general and in the context of underground warfare in particular, have found it beneficial to hide behind their civilian population: Western militaries call off strikes when the harm expected to be caused to civilians becomes excessive to the military advantage anticipated from the strike. Placing civilians inside tunnels has had the intended effect of complicating rescue efforts, constraining military operations, and immunizing key military assets of Hamas. This use of hostages is a return to a classic yet prohibited tactic of war of using prisoners of war for force protection. During the American Civil War, both sides used prisoners as human shields, and the Germans used British prisoners of war as human shields during World War II.

The civilians taken captive and held incommunicado by Hamas are both hostages and human shields. This innovation in hostage-taking has enabled Hamas to maximize political and military aims far beyond its declared objective of obtaining the release of Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails. The taking of hostages has torn Israeli society apart and has led to the Israeli government conditioning victory upon unattainable and irreconcilable objectives. It has given Hamas power at the negotiating table and caused Israel’s allies to request concessions in return for the release of the hostages. It has also facilitated Hamas’s ruthless psychological war. Militaries must take note of these innovative uses of the underground, which can bring states to the brink of operational and political paralysis, so that they can anticipate how underground tactics might be used in future wars by their adversaries.

  • DAPHNÉ RICHEMOND-BARAK is an Assistant Professor at the Lauder School of Government, Diplomacy, and Strategy at Reichman University in Israel and is affiliated with the Modern War Institute and the Lieber Institute for Law and Land Warfare at West Point.

Foreign Affairs · by Daphné Richemond-Barak · June 6, 2024



15. War Books: Inside Ike’s Mind on D-Day


A useful list.


War Books: Inside Ike’s Mind on D-Day - Modern War Institute

mwi.westpoint.edu · by M. L. Cavanaugh · June 6, 2024

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Editor’s note: Welcome to another installment of our War Books series! The premise is simple and straightforward. We ask an expert on a particular topic to recommend five books on that topic and tell us what sets each one apart. War Books is a resource for MWI readers who want to learn more about important subjects related to modern war and are looking for books to add to their reading lists.

Today is the eightieth anniversary of the D-Day invasion during World War II. To mark the occasion, we asked retired Lieutenant Colonel ML Cavanaugh to contribute this edition of War Books. He earned his PhD from the University of Reading (UK), where his research on supreme command examines Dwight D. Eisenhower, the overall commander of the D-Day invasion and the Allied war effort in Europe, as a case study. We gave him the following prompt: What would you recommend for readers to better understand Eisenhower and the leadership lessons from his World War II experience as supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force?

At Ease: Stories I Tell to Friends, by Dwight D. Eisenhower

I was a cadet when I fell for Ike. It was during CTLT (cadet troop leader training, on-the-job training for soon-to-be second lieutenants) at Fort Riley, Kansas, in the summer of 2000. I had a day off. I drove a little over a half hour to Abilene—the location of the Eisenhower Presidential Library. At the end of my tour, I picked up a copy of At Ease: Stories I Tell to Friends, and I was hooked. His writing draws you in, sits you down, commands your ears and mind. You just know this guy was a general and president. I read the book under a red lens in the field and brought it home with a cover of mud. I still remember that book, decades later. It was my gateway drug to Ike, and it may be for you too.

Personal papers of George C. Marshall and personal papers of Dwight D. Eisenhower

Time passes, as it does, and in 2013 I took on a PhD dissertation. So what topic did I pick? Supreme military command, and remembering my affinity for Ike, I studied his thought process in command. It was hard work. Hard work. I remember sitting for hours in the West Point Library, just me in an empty corner, trying to live up to Robert Caro’s advice to “turn every page.” (I just may have.) Now and again, I struck gold—like a particular exchange between Marshall and Eisenhower. The issue was over where to drop the airborne component of the Normandy landings (a.k.a. Operation Overlord).

Here’s a selection from Marshall’s memo, “To Dwight D. Eisenhower, February 10, 1944,” in volume four of his personal papers:

My dear Eisenhower: Up to the present time I have not felt that we have properly exploited air power as regards its combination with ground troops. We have lacked planes, of course, in which to transport men and supplies, but our most serious deficiency I think has been a lack in conception. Our procedure has been a piecemeal proposition with each commander grabbing at a piece to assist his particular phase of the operation, very much as they did with tanks and as they tried to do with the airplane itself. It is my opinion that we now possess the means to give a proper application to this phase of air power in a combined operation.


I might say that it was my determination in the event I went to England to do this, even to the extent that should the British be in opposition I would carry it out exclusively with American troops. I am not mentioning this as pressure on you but merely to give you the idea of my own conclusions in the matter.

As he had originally been the top contender to command the invasion, Marshall’s thoughts on the subject likely carried heavy significance for Eisenhower. Marshall felt so strongly on the matter that he assigned three officers from his personal staff to study the issue, who generated three options for the use of airborne troops at Normandy. Of the three, Marshall preferred “Plan C,” which, he described:

Establishes an air-head in keeping with my ideas on the subject, one that can be quickly established and developed to great strength in forty-eight hours. The area generally south of Evreux [200 kilometers inland from Normandy and 100 kilometers to Paris] has been selected because of four excellent airfields.


This plan appeals to be me because I feel that it is a true vertical envelopment and would create such a strategic threat to the Germans that it would call for a major revision of their defensive plans. It should be a complete surprise, an invaluable asset of any such plan. It would directly threaten the crossings of the Seine as well as the city of Paris. It should serve as a rallying point for considerable elements of the French underground.


In effect, we would be opening another front in France and your build-up would be tremendously increased in rapidity. The trouble with this plan is that we have never done anything like this before, and frankly, that reaction makes me tired. Therefore I should like you to give these young men an opportunity to present the matter to you personally before your Staff tears it to ribbons. Please believe that, as usual, I do not want to embarrass you with undue pressure. I merely wish to be certain that you have viewed this possibility on a definite planning basis.

Marshall’s vision for airborne drops was to send them two-thirds of the way to Paris. US Army Air Forces commander General Hap Arnold concurred with Marshall on this plan to threaten Paris. However, on both counts of the proposal, the objective and placement, Eisenhower disagreed and considered the option ill-advised. Nine days after Marshall’s memorandum was signed, Eisenhower responded with polite, yet firm, disagreement. (“[Entry] 1558, February 19, 1944, To George Catlett Marshall, Secret,” in volume three of Eisenhower’s personal papers):

My initial reaction to the specific proposal is that I agree thoroughly with the conception but disagree with the timing. Mass in vertical envelopments is sound—but since this kind of an enveloping force is immobile on the ground, the collaborating force must be strategically and tactically mobile. So the time for mass vertical envelopment is after the beach-head has been gained and a striking force built up. . . .


As I see it, the first requisite is for the Expeditionary Force to gain a firm and solid footing on the Continent and to secure at least one really good sheltered harbor. . . .


[T]he initial crisis of the Campaign will be the struggle to break through beach defenses, exploit quickly to include a port and be solidly based for further operations. To meet this first tactical crisis I intend to devote everything that can be profitably used, including airborne troops. . . .


The second consideration that enters my thinking on this problem is expressed in the very first sentence of your letter, in the phrase ‘air power as regards its combination with ground troops.’ . . .


Whatever the conditions in other Theaters of War, the one here that we must never forget is the enemy’s highly efficient facilities for concentration of ground troops at any particular point. This is especially true in the whole of France and in the Low Countries. Our bombers will delay movement, but I cannot conceive of enough air power to prohibit movement on the network of roads throughout northwest France. . . . We must arrange all our operations so that no significant part of our forces can be isolated and defeated in detail. . . .


An airborne landing carried out at too great a distance from other forces which will also be immobile for some time, will result in a much worse situation. . . .


All of the above factors tend to compel the visualization of airborne operations as an immediate tactical rather than a long-range strategical adjunct of landing operations.

This reveals Eisenhower’s judgment in operation. His priority was to gain a solid foothold in Europe. He determined that Marshall’s advice would result in immobile, isolated targets for German mobile reserves. The airborne troops in this operation were to be used in support of, and not as a separately independent effort from, the landings in Normandy.

And just like that, buried in a dusty couple books—we get a glimpse into a supreme commander’s decision in action.

Crusade in Europe, by Dwight D. Eisenhower

On May 30, 1944, Operation Overlord’s air component commander, a well-respected British air chief marshal, told Eisenhower the airborne drops wouldn’t work and that he expected an estimated 70 percent casualties. The drops would be combat ineffective. Eisenhower thanked his British subordinate for the frank assessment and thought very hard on the matter. His contemporaneous war diary notes on the subject later became the basis for his postwar memoir, Crusade in Europe:

[The] old question of the wisdom of the airborne operation into the Cherbourg peninsula was not yet fully settled in Air Chief Marshal [Trafford] Leigh-Mallory’s mind. Later, on May 30, he came to me to protest once more against what he termed the “futile slaughter” of two fine divisions. He believed that the combination of unsuitable landing grounds and anticipated resistance was too great a hazard to overcome. This dangerous combination was not present in the area on the left where the British airborne division would be dropped and casualties there were not expected to be abnormally severe, but he estimated that among the American outfits we would suffer some seventy per cent losses and glider strength and at least fifty per cent in paratroop strength before the airborne troops could land. Consequently the divisions would have no remaining tactical power and the attack would not only result in the sacrifice of many thousand men but would be helpless to effect the outcome of the general assault.


Leigh-Mallory was, of course, earnestly sincere. He was noted for personal courage and was merely giving me, as was his duty, his frank convictions. . . .


It would be difficult to conceive of a more soul-racking problem. If my technical expert was correct, then the planned operation was worse than stubborn folly, because even at the enormous cost predicted we would not gain the principal object of the drop. Moreover, if he was right, it appeared that the attack on Utah Beach was probably hopeless, and this meant that the whole operation suddenly acquired a degree of risk, even foolhardiness, that presaged a gigantic failure, possibly Allied defeat in Europe.


To protect him in case his advice was disregarded, I instructed the air commander to put his recommendations in a letter and informed him he would have my answer in a few hours. I took the problem to no one else. Professional advice and counsel could do no more.


I went to my tent alone and sat down to think. Over and over I reviewed each step, somewhat in the sequence set down here, but more thoroughly and exhaustively. I realized, of course, that if I deliberately disregarded the advice of my technical expert on the subject, and his predictions should prove accurate, then I would carry to my grave the unbearable burden of a conscience justly accusing me of the stupid, blind sacrifice of thousands of the flower of our youth. Outweighing any personal burden, however, was the possibility that if he were right the effect of the disaster would be far more than local: it would be likely to spread to the entire force.


Nevertheless, my review of the matter finally narrowed the critical points to these:


If I should cancel the airborne operation, then I had either to cancel the attack on Utah Beach or I would condemn the assaulting forces there to even greater probability of disaster than was predicted for the airborne divisions. If I should cancel the Utah attack I would so badly disarrange elaborate plans as to diminish chances for success elsewhere and to make later maintenances perhaps impossible. Moreover, in long and calm consideration of the whole great scheme we had agreed that the Utah attack was an essential factor in prospects for success. To abandon it really meant to abandon a plan in which I had held explicit confidence for more than two years.


Finally, Leigh-Mallory’s estimate was just an estimate, nothing more, and our experience in Sicily and Italy did not, by any means, support his degree of pessimism. Bradley, with Ridgway and other airborne commanders, had always supported me and the staff in the matter, and I was encouraged to persist in the belief that Leigh-Mallory was wrong!


I telephoned him that the attack would go as planned and that I would confirm this at once in writing.

In the end, though the drops were scattered, they provided successful support to the invasion. Eisenhower later said the airborne casualty figures were about eight percent. He also recorded that when the beachhead was secure, Leigh-Mallory “was the first to call me to voice his delight and to express his regret the he had found it necessary to add to my personal burdens during the final tense days before D-day.”

“In Case of Failure” note, by Dwight D. Eisenhower

Many will recall the invasion’s never-used failure note, jotted in the hours approaching D-Day. The fact that he wrote it is typically where that basic knowledge ends. But what’s far more impressive is Eisenhower’s self-edit. He intentionally crossed out passive lines in favor of active voice. The first draft read, “The troops have been withdrawn,” which, after his edit, became, “I have withdrawn the troops.” He was willing to take full personal responsibility for failure if it ever came to pass (“If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone”). He stretched his own neck across the guillotine.

“Victory Message,” by Dwight D. Eisenhower

He was ready to lose, but still—when the war was over and the mission complete, Eisenhower chose not to gloat or dwell on the victory. After the formal surrender was signed, his chief of staff recalled,

The staff prepared various drafts of a victory message appropriate to the historic event. I tried one myself and, like all my associates, groped for resounding phrases as fitting accolades to the Great Crusade and indicative of our dedication to the great task just completed. General Eisenhower rejected them all, with thanks but without other comment, and wrote his own. It read: “The mission of this Allied force was fulfilled at 0241 local time, May 7, 1945.”

Guildhall Address, delivered by Dwight D. Eisenhower in London, June 12, 1945

This one makes you tear up. You can listen to it as well, if you prefer, as it was recorded for posterity. When you read this, remember, Eisenhower wrote this himself. He agonized over it. It’s hard to fathom that quality of thought in a general, but then again, this guy was far, far more than just any general. Read below and see what I mean.

Humility must always be the portion of any man who receives acclaim earned in the blood of his followers and the sacrifices of his friends. Conceivably a commander may have been professionally superior. He may have given everything of his heart and mind to meet the spiritual and physical needs of his comrades. He may have written a chapter that will glow forever in the pages of military history.


Still, even such a man—if he existed—would sadly face the facts that his honors cannot hide in his memories the crosses marking the resting places of the dead. They cannot soothe the anguish of the widow, or the orphan, whose husband or father will not return.

ML Cavanaugh, PhD, is a retired Army strategist, cofounded the Modern War Institute at West Point. Follow him on Twitter: @MLCavanaugh.

The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.

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mwi.westpoint.edu · by M. L. Cavanaugh · June 6, 2024



16. D-Day's Bodyguard of Lies: Intelligence and Deception in Normandy


Wise words here:

D-Day stands as a stark reminder of the cost of traditional warfare and the importance of avoiding it whenever possible. As the US inevitably ramps up its industrial capability to prepare for total warfare with China, it should also pay equal attention to the range of irregular capabilities—from espionage and intelligence to information warfare and cyberoperations—that will better prepare it to deceive and avoid being deceived by the enemy. As Seth Jones writes in Three Dangerous Men, “Chinese military strategy generally aims to avoid a conventional war. China’s goal is to weaken and surpass the United States without fighting.”
US success in the coming years will not be defined by victories in conventional military battles with China, Russia, or any other adversary but by avoiding such confrontations through cunning, creativity, and deception.


D-Day's Bodyguard of Lies: Intelligence and Deception in Normandy - Irregular Warfare Initiative

irregularwarfare.org · by Jacob Ware, Sam Rosenberg · June 6, 2024

The heroes who stormed the beaches of Normandy on June 6, 1944, eighty years ago today, faced a rainstorm of gunfire as they disembarked from their landing crafts. Over 4,000 lost their lives in the initial landings, which nevertheless succeeded in establishing an Allied beachhead in Adolf Hitler’s Atlantic Wall.

The toll could have been even worse had safer passage not been ensured by a secretive army of spies and decoys that, beginning in 1943, wove an elaborate deception to convince their Axis adversaries that the landing would be later and further north. In the words of Winston Churchill, the front-line soldiers were protected by a “Bodyguard of Lies” that carefully protected the true location and intentions of the landings at five beaches in Normandy.

The D-Day deception operation stands as a powerful example of the essential blend of irregular warfare methods with conventional tactics. As we witness brutal combat in Ukraine and anticipate potential future conflict in the Indo-Pacific, the lessons from June 1944 are more pertinent than ever. Integrating tactical and strategic deception to support traditional warfare, involving civilians alongside the military, and the critical importance of avoiding large-scale conventional war due to its immense costs are lessons that continue to resonate today.

The D-Day Deception

As the Second World War approached its turning point, an inevitable Allied assault on occupied Europe, Allied leaders gathered at Tehran to devise their strategy. The odds appeared against them: despite Germany’s forces being spread thin across 2,600 kilometers of Atlantic coastline, the Axis held a force advantage, outmanning the landing force in France by an estimated 60 divisions to 37. Cunning and misdirection would need to complement the brute force of men and armor that would be hurled against Hitler’s European fortress. In the words of Jon Latimer, “Deception would play a crucial role in producing a ratio of forces necessary for Allied victory in the battle of the build-up and permitting a break-out.”

Operation Bodyguard was established in 1943 as the overall deception strategy to mislead the German High Command about the timing and location of the inevitable Allied invasion of Europe. Under this overarching plan, the main thrust was Operation Fortitude, which was itself divided into two smaller campaigns: Fortitude North, which would feint at Norway, and Fortitude South, which promised an attack at the Pas-de-Calais in northern France. Fortitude combined both physical deception and signals intelligence to construct the ruse. For example, the Allies invented out of thin air the United States First Army Group, commanded by General Patton, and mustered the paper command in southeast England, supporting the idea that the invasion would strike directly across the English Channel at Calais. Dummy inflatable military hardware was spread across the area, hoping to attract spy planes, while the infamous Ghost Army created fake shoulder patches to accompany and announce the arrival of the phantom units.

The deception was furthered by British intelligence’s exemplary Double Cross system, masterfully recounted in Ben MacIntyre’s Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies. By 1944, British counterintelligence confidently believed it controlled every German spy in the United Kingdom. Fortitude put this network of double agents to work, steadily feeding handlers in Berlin a diet of false reports that contributed to incorrect beliefs about the Allied order of battle. In one case, double agents “Mutt” and “Jeff” transmitted false reports about a fictitious British Army amassing in Scotland to join the Soviets in an invasion of Norway. The trick worked, with Hitler sending one of his divisions to Scandinavia just weeks before D-Day. The intelligence network was so extensive that stories still emerge today—like the women codebreakers stationed at the US Foreign Service Institute, who stole Japanese diplomatic messages describing German defenses on the French coast, further contributing to the deception’s success.

The deception plans were joint operations involving multiple branches of the Allies’ armed forces. Operation Glimmer, Taxable, and Big Drum formed the naval component of Operation Bodyguard. Like Fortitude South and the Double Cross system, these efforts aimed to deceive the German forces about the invasion beaches in France. Small fleets, equipped with radar-reflecting balloons and devices simulating large convoys, maneuvered off Cap d’Antifer and Pas-de-Calais to create the illusion of impending naval assaults northeast of Normandy. Confused by the feint, the Germans in Calais reported an invasion fleet and even sent airplanes to investigate.

Civilians also played a significant role in Allied deception and intelligence operations. By 1944, the French Resistance numbered an estimated 500,000 members in many different groups, most of whom came under the umbrella of the French Forces of the Interior (FFI). Operating in small groups called Maquis, resistance fighters engaged in sabotage, targeting Nazi supply routes and reinforcements. The FFI’s intelligence-gathering efforts also provided the Allies with invaluable information about German troop movements and fortifications, directly supporting the impending landings. In one case, as recounted in Cornelius Ryan’s classic The Longest Day, an FFI sector chief identified an artillery piece sited for Utah Beach and managed to transmit a message to London about the potential threat. On the morning of D-Day, he was overjoyed when an Allied destroyer arrived off the coast and blasted the artillery piece with a precise bombardment. “They got the message!” he cried.

The Maquis’ coordinated closely with Allied strategy. On June 5, the BBC broadcasted coded messages to alert the French Resistance about the imminent invasion, setting off plans to sabotage railways (the Green Plan), main roads (the Tortoise Plan), and telecommunication networks (the Purple Plan), along with launching guerilla attacks against German troops. More than 90 three-man Jedburgh teams, comprising American, British, and Free French operatives, parachuted into France on the night of June 5/6 to facilitate this coordination on the ground. In June and July, the “Jeds” helped disrupt German communications in Normandy. By August, teams worked with the British Special Air Service in Brittany, orchestrating guerrilla attacks and providing intelligence that hastened the Allied advance. These Jedburgh teams, the forerunners of modern special operations forces, provided leadership, training, and communications support, amplifying the impact of the Resistance’s efforts.

Once the invasion began, the Allies relied on tactical deception to further confuse the German defenders. As part of Operation Titanic, another subcomponent of Operation Bodyguard, the British Royal Air Force and Special Air Service dropped hundreds of dummy parachutists far from the actual landing areas in Normandy. Known as “Ruperts” to the British and “Oscars” to the Americans, these decoys were equipped with noise makers and explosives to simulate an actual airborne assault. British commandos even jumped with some of the dummies and played recordings of gunfire and men shouting to sell the ruse further. The plan had the intended effect, with the Germans sending a division reserve away from Omaha and Gold beaches and the 101st drop zones to search for the suspected paratroopers. When members of the German 7th Army discovered the dummies, General Hans Speidel ordered a decreased level of alert for his soldiers, leaving them less prepared for the actual invasion.

Perhaps the most challenging—and, in turn, impressive—aspect was that the deception could not end when the invasion began. It had to continue, convincing the enemy the true invasion was, in fact, a feint and the initial (deceptive) intelligence remained accurate. Three days after the invasion, Spaniard Juan Pujol García (Agent Garbo) transmitted to his handlers that most companies had stayed behind in England, expanding upon the lie that the main thrust of the assault would cross the Strait of Dover and hit Calais. The Ultra intercepts, made possible by the codebreakers at Bletchley Park breaking the Enigma code, offered invaluable proof that the Germans continued to believe the Fortitude ruse instead of the catastrophic and physical evidence that the invasion was already underway. It would take seven weeks for the German High Command to redeploy resources from Calais to Normandy. By then, the Allied beachhead was secure. Germany’s delay was the ultimate success of Operation Bodyguard. If the element of surprise is essential in war, then the ability to maintain and even extend the element of surprise is perhaps the most impressive triumph.

Although debates endure about the importance of Bodyguard and Fortitude, largely over skepticism that the inflatable hardware was ever actually seen and insistence that German espionage incompetence was the ultimate culprit, there is little doubt that the deception at least contributed to the tremendous success of the D-Day landings. In the immediate aftermath of Fortitude, the German High Command awarded (Double) Agent Garbo the Iron Cross for his efforts. If nothing else, as Lt. Jason Carminati writes, “Although the Nazi regime had unique institutions that contributed to the operation’s success, the Allies’ planning and execution of various deception techniques were more impactful to the success at Normandy because German weaknesses were discovered and exploited.”

Deception Today and Tomorrow

Deception, of course, remains an integral part of warfare, deployed by both friends and foes. During the first months of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, echoing the Rupert dolls of World War II, Ukrainian defenders employed mannequins from local stores to confuse Russian forces. Drone footage captured Russians wasting valuable artillery on a trench system manned only by these decoys. As the war progressed, Kyiv expanded its deception efforts, with civilian companies like Inflatech and Metinvest creating realistic decoys of Ukrainian weapons and vehicles, complete with multispectral signatures, causing further Russian munitions to be squandered on fake targets.

When preparing for the initial counteroffensive in Kharkiv in September 2022, Kyiv aimed to convince its adversaries that the counteroffensive would target Kherson in the south. Using media leaks, encouraging popular resistance as “shaping” operations, and amassing troops in the south, Ukrainian military planners succeeded in drawing Russian forces to defend Kherson, leaving the Kharkiv salient largely unprotected. The eventual offensive shattered Russian lines, liberating some 12,000 square kilometers, including the strategic crossroads at Izium. (Impressively, Ukrainian forces also liberated Kherson two months later.)

In contrast, the failed Ukrainian offensive in the summer of 2023 highlighted the challenges of deception. The Ukrainian military failed to mislead Moscow about their intention to penetrate Russian lines protecting Melitopol and the Azov coast. Despite shaping operations along the Russian defensive line, particularly in Bakhmut, the Ukrainian government’s insistence in early June that “Plans love silence” and warnings against rumors did not materially weaken the entrenched Russian defenses.

Just as the French Resistance played a central role in the success of D-Day through deception and intelligence operations, Ukrainian citizens have become crucial to their country’s current conflict. Early in the war, the Territorial Defense Forces, made up of citizen volunteers, were instrumental in repelling the initial Russian assault on Kyiv. As the war progressed, Ukrainian civilians took on various wartime responsibilities, from raising funds for the Ministry of Defense to crowdsourcing military gear and weapons to developing targeting and intelligence for the armed forces. Remarkably, the Ukrainian government even launched an app, Diia, allowing citizens to report on Russian troop movements and defenses directly.

Deception can also be deployed at the strategic level and is often weaponized by non-state actors. Just four months before Hamas’s October 7 Einsatzgruppen-like thunder run across the Gaza border, a former Knesset member had written that Hamas and Israel enjoyed a “strategic détente” and that “Hamas doesn’t seem to be eager to change the existing equation in order to challenge Israel.” Hamas’s strategic deception contributed to the total failure of the Israel Defense Forces to protect the borderlands near the Gaza strip—they were unable to access many of the kibbutzim until hours after the initial attack. After the fact, deception can reveal not just cunning and secrecy on the part of the deceiver but also complacency and ineptitude among the deceived.

However, the lessons for modern warfare might apply even more strongly to strategic competition. As the US escalates its saber-rattling with China, it fences with an enemy that makes deception a core concept of its strategy, using tactics such as decoy targets and disguising military equipment as civilian vehicles to mislead adversaries and protect assets. Beijing even employs local militia forces to provide camouflage support for important potential targets. And yet, ironically, “American dominance in conventional warfare has contributed to perceptions that deception is unnecessary, or is a technique for weaker powers,” as Fabian Villalobos and Scott Savitz observe. “But successful deception activities enhance force protection, preserve combat power, and add complexity for the adversary—facts that are often underappreciated.”

D-Day stands as a stark reminder of the cost of traditional warfare and the importance of avoiding it whenever possible. As the US inevitably ramps up its industrial capability to prepare for total warfare with China, it should also pay equal attention to the range of irregular capabilities—from espionage and intelligence to information warfare and cyberoperations—that will better prepare it to deceive and avoid being deceived by the enemy. As Seth Jones writes in Three Dangerous Men, “Chinese military strategy generally aims to avoid a conventional war. China’s goal is to weaken and surpass the United States without fighting.”

US success in the coming years will not be defined by victories in conventional military battles with China, Russia, or any other adversary but by avoiding such confrontations through cunning, creativity, and deception.

Jacob Ware is a research fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and an adjunct professor at Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service and DeSales University. He is also a visiting fellow at the University of Oslo’s Center for Research on Extremism, and the co-deputy editorial director of the Irregular Warfare Initiative. With Bruce Hoffman, he is the co-author of God, Guns, and Sedition: Far-Right Terrorism in America.

Sam Rosenberg is an Army Strategist preparing for an assignment to US Army Europe and Africa in Wiesbaden, Germany, and the co-deputy editorial director of the Irregular Warfare Initiative. Commissioned as an infantry officer in 2006 from West Point, Sam has served in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Eastern Europe. He holds a master’s degree in Security Studies from Georgetown University and a PhD in Public Policy from the University of Texas at Austin.

Views expressed in this article solely reflect those of the author 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: Generals Dwight D. Eisenhower and Omar Bradley talk with a young member of the French resistance in the American sector during the liberation of Lower Normandy in the summer of 1944. (Photo via Picryl.com)

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17. Opinion | The Pentagon is learning how to change at the speed of war


 I would think Mr. ignatius would recall the history of the military industrial congressional complex and know that President Eisenhower wrote that in a draft his farewell address but then removed "congressional" before he delivered it.


Excerpt:


But for reformers, there’s finally a flicker of good news. Change advocates, including Hendrix and Brose, told me that the iron triangle that supports legacy systems — which Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) described as the “defense-industrial-congressional complex” — might finally be giving way to common sense. Every military service, in nearly every combatant command, is experimenting with uncrewed, autonomous systems for land, air, sea and undersea combat.


Opinion | The Pentagon is learning how to change at the speed of war

The dynamic Ukraine battlespace has provided a needed jolt to a system that has long been too slow to change.


By David Ignatius

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June 4, 2024 at 2:47 p.m. EDT

The Washington Post · by David Ignatius · June 4, 2024

For several decades, military reformers such as retired Navy Capt. Jerry Hendrix have pleaded with the Pentagon to stop buying wildly expensive but vulnerable aircraft carriers and fighter jets and instead focus on getting vast numbers of cheap drones. But nobody seemed to listen.

Buy Fords, Not Ferraris” was the title of Hendrix’s iconoclastic 2009 polemic for inexpensive survivable systems. Aircraft carriers, he wrote, “have become too expensive to operate, and too vulnerable to be risked in anything other than an unhostile environment.” Similar arguments applied to exquisite systems beloved by all the services.

Hendrix became so eager for change that he argued the Navy needed a skunk works to reinvent itself for the 21st century. He proposed using Lake Michigan, away from prying Chinese eyes, to create an “Area 52” experimentation site for autonomous naval systems. He imagined it as a Navy version of the Air Force and CIA’s famous Area 51 test site in Nevada.

But an addiction is hard to quit — especially one that benefits so many congressional districts around the country. So the military sailed on, spending ever more money on vulnerable platforms that would probably survive only for minutes in a war with China. Christian Brose, another Pentagon reformer who now works for start-up Anduril Industries, put it bluntly in a recent article for the Hoover Institution: “The US defense enterprise … is systematically broken.”

But for reformers, there’s finally a flicker of good news. Change advocates, including Hendrix and Brose, told me that the iron triangle that supports legacy systems — which Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) described as the “defense-industrial-congressional complex” — might finally be giving way to common sense. Every military service, in nearly every combatant command, is experimenting with uncrewed, autonomous systems for land, air, sea and undersea combat.

“A new consensus is emerging that we must make major changes,” Brose wrote in September. He quoted Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who argued: “If we don’t change — if we fail to adapt — we risk losing … a high-end fight.”

What’s finally driving change is the brutal lesson of the war in Ukraine. This is a drone and satellite war: Russian and Ukrainian tanks are almost defenseless against attacks from drones overhead; Russia’s huge Navy has lost control of the Black Sea because of Ukrainian naval drones; satellites can feed precise targeting information to kill anything that algorithms designate as a weapon.

But there’s a catch: The Ukraine battlefield is a blizzard of electronic warfare. So systems must be truly autonomous, able to operate without GPS or other external guidance, as I described in a recent account from Kyiv of technology developed by the software company Palantir. In makeshift weapons factories in Kyiv, and in defense labs around the United States, designers are creating systems with artificial intelligence at “the edge,” embedded in the weapons themselves, so they don’t have to depend on jammable signals from space.

Leading the campaign for Pentagon reform is Kathleen Hicks, deputy secretary of defense. In August, she announced the “Replicator Initiative,” which aimed to transfer the tech lessons of Ukraine for the potential battle areas of the Indo-Pacific. She wanted cheap drones for use in land, sea and air — and quickly. The goal, Hicks said, was to field “autonomous systems at [a] scale of multiple thousands, in multiple domains, within the next 18 to 24 months.”

That was unimaginably fast for the Pentagon. But Hicks said in a January speech that in its first five months, Replicator had achieved what normally takes the Pentagon two to three years. “If you’re not sure what is more mind-blowing — how fast we did it, or how long it normally takes — I don’t blame you,” Hicks said. “Honestly, the length of our normal process should blow your mind.”

Hicks told me last week that the key to Replicator was “transforming internal processes.” One big goal was to leap over what a generation of reformers have called the “valley of death” — the long gap between development of prototype weapons and procurement and deployment at scale. “Bureaucracies need to be shown that new ways of doing things are possible. That’s what we’re doing,” she messaged me. The first Replicator drone systems were delivered to warfighters last month.

Replicator is a striking example of Pentagon reform, but there are others. Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall announced in March 2023 an innovative plan called “Collaborative Combat Aircraft” to team uncrewed jets with ones piloted by humans. The Air Force plans to buy at least 1,000 of these uncrewed jets and have them in the air by the end of the decade. In mock dogfights between human pilots and AI computers, the machines nearly always win, Kendall told me several years ago.

Now, the Navy, too, is finally embracing change. Task forces are deploying uncrewed vessels in the Persian Gulf, Mediterranean and Caribbean. The Navy last month announced a new squadron of what it hopes will be hundreds of unmanned surface vessels, known as Global Autonomous Reconnaissance Craft. The squadron’s informal name is “Hell Hounds.”

Four big uncrewed Navy vessels completed in January a five-month deployment to Hawaii, Guam, Micronesia, Australia and other destinations. Because the Pacific is such a complex and hostile environment, a robust naval drone program will need its own “robotic systems command,” with an authorities like those that created the nuclear navy, retired Vice Adm. Dave Lewis told me. As senior vice president for maritime activities at Leidos, he helped support the uncrewed four-ship flotilla that sailed the Pacific.

The Pentagon has managed for half a century to keep radical change from breaching its five walls. Carriers, bombers, tanks and fighter jets were built to last forever, and in a cozy world without peer competitors, it seemed that they could. But now, Hicks said, we’re in an era in which the Pentagon needs “deliberate discomfort” and “collaborative disruption.” It’s a revolution that’s long overdue.

The Washington Post · by David Ignatius · June 4, 2024



18. Inconvenient Alliances: How Hamas Killed Progressivism


From a student at UC Davis. Why was this not published in a major US media outlet?


Excerpt:


The aftermath of October 7th revealed that the hatred I experienced at my university is not unique. Higher education, while more radical, mirrors the outside world. The antisemitism and disregard for basic principles of human rights when it comes to Israelis might start on college campuses but can spread throughout society. I see this hate everywhere. Unless progressives worldwide undergo a fundamental shift that includes Jewish and Israeli voices, I will never call myself a progressive again.


Inconvenient Alliances: How Hamas Killed Progressivism - Algemeiner.com

algemeiner.com · by The Algemeiner · June 5, 2024

Pro-Hamas activists gather in Washington Square Park for a rally following a protest march held in response to an NYPD sweep of an anti-Israel encampment at New York University in Manhattan, May 3, 2024. Photo: Matthew Rodier/Sipa USA via Reuters Connect

I once considered myself a progressive, but the word has lost its meaning. From college students to United Nations officials, “progressives” are compromising their values to support Hamas, a terror group that murdered over 1,200 Israelis and took approximately 240 hostages on October 7th.

The “progressive” movement, which began in the late 19th century, has long defended the rights of women and minorities. It is a movement that I aligned with during my college years, while also connecting with my Jewish and Israeli identity. I never thought, however, that I would be forced to choose between the two. Disillusionment set in as progressive friends and colleagues spoke negatively about Jews and Israel. Mentioning my national origin often barred me from conversations, and I was ostracized in classes, particularly in political science courses. Being proud of my identity caused me to face slurs, constant demonization, and a number of illogical accusations.

I was accused of doxxing students, being responsible for civilian deaths in Gaza, and committing a number of crimes simply for being an Israeli Jew. I was told I couldn’t be a proud Israeli and a progressive simultaneously. Why should I have to compromise my identity to maintain friendships in progressive and academic spaces? How could antisemitism exist so pervasively on the left when it claims to oppose all discrimination? These are questions I still continue to ask myself.

The final blow to my trust in my peers came on October 7th. Hamas’ genocidal rampage in southern Israel included sexual violence, with numerous eyewitness accounts describing women with broken pelvises from repetitive rapes and autopsies finding considerable evidence of brutal sexual assaults of Israeli victims. A Position Paper published by Physicians For Human Rights Israel describes these horrific sexual crimes against innocent Israelis in agonizing detail.

Even The New York Times reported on the sexual brutality committed by Hamas terrorists, despite being accused of holding an anti-Israel bias. Yet, progressives’ responses were disturbingly inadequate.

In Canada, an open letter by city councilor Susan Kim and provincial parliament member Sarah Jama dismissed accusations of rape by Hamas as misinformation. This letter was endorsed by the head of the University of Alberta Sexual Assault Center. After facing significant backlash, Jama doubled down, blaming the “Zionist lobby” for pressuring the Canadian government into reprimanding her.

At the United Nations, it took eight weeks for an official condemnation of Hamas’ rapes to be released by UN Women. Sarah Douglas, Deputy Chief of Peace and Security at UN Women, has endorsed 153 tweets attacking Israel and Zionists, and attended UN meetings with pro-Palestine posters, violating UN neutrality guidelines. Suffice it to say that a key leader in the UN’s initiative to uplift women is actively working against the very women she is charged with uplifting.

The traditionally progressive Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, particularly its Chicago chapter, has also faced criticism for endorsing terrorism. Mere hours after the release of the first October 7th footage, BLM Chicago posted a tweet with a hang-glider image, referencing Hamas terrorists who used hang-gliders to attack and kill hundreds of partygoers at the Nova Music Festival. This blatant support for a violent attack on innocent civilians by an organization that has committed itself to the fight for equality is shocking, especially considering the fact that Hamas has held Avera Mengistu, a mentally ill Ethiopian-Israeli man, in captivity since 2014.

On college campuses, the situation is dire. Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) at UC Davis, the university I attend, justified the October 7th attack and glorified the attackers. Their rallies have featured slogans like “We don’t want no Jewish state” — which is a call for the eradication of Israel — and “Globalize the Intifada,” which calls for the violence of the intifadas to be repeated against Jewish communities worldwide. Professors also joined in; Jemma Decristo, a university faculty member, tweeted threatening messages against “Zionist journalists.” Another professor stated that “all Israeli residents are legitimate targets,” actively calling for violence against his own Israeli students and colleagues. After UC Davis students began an encampment mimicking those already established on other campuses, several professors reportedly required classes to attend the space, or have given extra credit for doing so, despite the fact that many Jewish and Israeli students are extremely uncomfortable with its messaging.

The aftermath of October 7th revealed that the hatred I experienced at my university is not unique. Higher education, while more radical, mirrors the outside world. The antisemitism and disregard for basic principles of human rights when it comes to Israelis might start on college campuses but can spread throughout society. I see this hate everywhere. Unless progressives worldwide undergo a fundamental shift that includes Jewish and Israeli voices, I will never call myself a progressive again.

Gabriel Gaysinsky is a student at the University of California, Davis, majoring in International Relations and Middle Eastern/South Asian Studies. He is a 2023-2024 CAMERA Fellow, executive board member of Aggies For Israel, and is an active student leader within his university’s Jewish community. Originally from Haifa, Israel, Gabriel hopes to utilize his experience and knowledge to pursue interfaith dialogue and peaceful solutions in Israel/Palestine.

algemeiner.com · by The Algemeiner · June 5, 2024



​19. Russia’s Mercenary-Industrial Complex in Africa


Excerpts:

More recently, President Joseph Biden’s decision to designate Kenya a “major non-NATO ally” has been chock full of talking points about the deepening economic partnership that the designation brings. Meanwhile, the 2023 U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit focused on building economic capacity, governance partnerships, and promoting public health, while providing opportunities for new entrepreneurial connections across the Atlantic. Making good on these promises and expanding investment across the continent are key steps in building stronger relationships with African states, while also effectively countering Russia.
Still, it is hard to ignore the trajectory of insecurity in places like the Sahel, so abandoning military tools altogether would be imprudent. But recent Western counter-terrorism approaches in Africa lacked clear goals and buy-in from relevant partners. This can be addressed in clear-cut and well-tailored national and international strategies to tackle terrorist threats in the Sahel that include buy-in from African militaries, but it must include a broader approach that supports African societies’ efforts to build strong and enduring civil and political infrastructure.
The harsh reality is that Russia thrives on and benefits from perpetual insecurity in multiple ways and shows no signs of slowing down. It is easy to deflect and merely suggest that Moscow is just an opportunist and that the allure of partnering with Russia will fade. But a reactive approach and strategic complacency are what contributed to Moscow’s fortune in the Sahel and beyond. The United States must reflect, ask tough questions, and take action. While today’s problems in the Sahel may appear monumental, they can get much worse very quickly — and it won’t be Moscow volunteering to pick up the pieces.




Russia’s Mercenary-Industrial Complex in Africa - War on the Rocks

CHRISTOPHER FAULKNER AND RAPHAEL PARENS

warontherocks.com · by Christopher Faulkner · June 6, 2024

Attara, Dakka Sebbe, Nienanpela, Dioura, and Ouro Fer — these five Malian towns saw elders murdered, civilians tortured, and property looted by the Wagner Group in January and February of 2024. And they are not isolated cases. Across the Sahel, the Wagner Group and the Africa Corps perpetrate massacres, rape, torture, and arbitrary imprisonment, all in the name of counter-terrorism and regime protection. Security cooperation with Russia’s newest mercenary invention is a recipe for trouble for new partner states and their populations. Deals with Russian private military companies exacerbate the terrorist threat in the Sahel and further erode any semblance of civil-military norms, however fleeting they may have been.

Moscow’s offerings — a concoction of private military companies, cheap weapons, and regime protection — are laying the groundwork for enduring insecurity that will only benefit Russia in the long run. Besides creating a demand and dependency for Russian boots on the ground, Moscow’s mercenary diplomacy creates new opportunities and new markets for Russia’s broader defense industrial base. They lay the foundation for Russia’s weapons industry, an industry that has dwindled in the lead-up to and since the invasion of Ukraine. Whether supplying Africa Corps or selling/donating defense articles to African clients, Moscow’s military-industrial base stands to benefit from enduring insecurity in Africa and beyond.

Over the past several months, the United States has been forced out of a long-standing security mission in Niger, while the status of American troops in Chad remains an open question. As Nathan Powell recently argued in these pages, Washington has certainly made its share of mistakes in dealing with its African partners. Niger’s prime minister suggested as much in a recent interview.

But Russia has also played a savvy game, selling itself as an important security partner ready to capitalize on Washington’s real, or perceived, shortcomings. African leaders see more viable, and arguably more pragmatic, security alternatives today than in years past. And new military juntas have been more emboldened to gamble on new partners rather than stick with the status quo. Russia has also exploited anti-French sentiment, alongside America’s real and perceived ties to France. Democratic values and norms are easily linked to neocolonialism and capitalism by the Kremlin’s disinformation cyber army. Russia’s opportunism and exploitation of the fractures in relations between the West and several African states build legitimacy for Moscow despite Russian mercenaries’ mixed record.

Against that backdrop, Washington should be prepared to implement a patient and multifaceted response. U.S. policymakers should not abandon military support altogether, but they should recognize that military tools are only a piece of the strategic solution. Isolating juntas and lecturing Africans on their security partners only play into Moscow’s hands. Instead, Washington should also recognize that in the near and mid-term, learning to coexist with Moscow and Beijing is a necessity. In doing so, however, the United States must prove to African governments that Washington is a worthy and reliable partner — the partner of choice across all sectors from security to economic. At the same time, Washington should continue to expose Russian private military companies as chaotic enforcers of insecurity, emphasizing Moscow’s underwhelming investment on the continent, enhancing diplomatic engagement, and delivering on promises of economic investment.

However, the United States should remember that this approach will take time to work. Moscow’s ability to use mercenaries as a preferred tool to capitalize on democratic retrenchment took years to come to fruition, and Washington should have no delusions about the time it will take to regain popular trust in this region.

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The False Promise of Security

Russia sees strategic value in Africa. While states like China have dangled infrastructure aid and debt relief packages to cultivate relationships across the continent, Moscow has pulled the security lever, signing dozens of security cooperation agreements with African governments over the past decade. While it too has tried to use debt relief and grain donations as diplomatic tools, Moscow’s preferred approach for its African engagements has come in the form of private military companies like the Wagner Group. Their deployment across several African states since at least 2017, however, is far from an antidote for insecurity.

Rather than rectifying underlying security challenges, Russian mercenaries thrive on chaos, adopting violent approaches to counter-terrorism while insulating dictators as part of their advertised “regime survival package.” Even when ushering in some semblance of security, Moscow’s mercenary diplomacy is ill equipped to offer durable solutions. Instead, these so-called mercenaries serve at the Kremlin’s behest, as both a geopolitical tool and an instrument incentivized to maintain some degree of insecurity — keeping regime insiders safe even if civilians are not.

For Moscow, insecurity is good for business. It equates not only to durable contracts, but also to more of them, this time for the Kremlin’s Wagner replacement, the Africa Corps. Although international observers, local opposition parties, and even some soldiers may eventually question the reliance on Russian contractors, the political elite are unlikely to break off relations in the near term as long as their positions are secure. This dynamic creates fractured states and furthers the cycle of violence between national militaries, terrorist groups, and civilians. One needs to look no further than Wagner’s current deployments to see the serious flaws in their counter-insurgency practices, which are replete with atrocities — over 500 civilians killed in the town of Moura, Mali, by Wagner and Malian armed forces; indiscriminate executions at the al-Takwa mosque in Bambari, Central African Republic; or the murder of disabled civilians in Ippy, Bodol, and Grimari, Central African Republic.

For the military juntas dealing with the Kremlin, this is a catch-22. On the surface, the Kremlin’s promises of security assistance are desirable for regimes concerned as much with their own survival as they are with systemic insecurity. Though it is difficult to decouple regime security from state security, these military dictatorships are highly focused on real or perceived short-term security gains that can help them market their legitimacy, even at the expense of long-term stability. The reality is that Russian contractors are merely window-dressing for Moscow’s true aspirations to create lasting demand for Russian security assistance by perpetuating conflict. And despite its anti-colonial rhetoric, the Kremlin’s approach to security partnerships is riddled with resource exploitation. If client states lack budgetary resources to settle the bill, Russian private military companies are happy to accept resource concessions as an alternative method of payment.

Russia’s Financial Gains

Such insecurity simultaneously ensures a durable, even growing, market for Russia’s broader defense industrial base, which has dramatically atrophied since its invasion of Ukraine. For Russia, it’s a win-win proposition — not only providing an opportunity to foster dependency on Russian mercenaries, but also giving Moscow reliable markets for Russian weapons — all while sticking it to the West.

Capitalizing on insecurity and ensuring it persists also give Russia a method for sanction-busting. By turning rubles into dollars or West or Central African francs through weapons sales and mercenary contracts, the Kremlin can unfreeze its assets and provide a release valve for its economy. While Yevgeny Prigozhin was likely doing this for his own gain, a Russian state-backed organization like Africa Corps can flip this process into state profit, even if the logistics of doing so are complicated.

Historically, Russia has accounted for a significant percentage of international arms transfers to Africa. Until its invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Moscow’s arms exports to the continent were more than those from China and the United States combined. While much of that business was concentrated in four countries (Algeria, Angola, Egypt, and Sudan), the Kremlin sees a burgeoning market across the Sahel and sub-Saharan Africa where weapons shipments are as much a diplomatic win as they are a monetary one. That is to say that traditional returns on investment may be measured in dollars made, but for Moscow, return on investment is as much about securing diplomatic support, allies at the U.N., and geopolitical influence as it is about profit.

Russia’s ongoing war against Ukraine has directly impacted its ability to maintain its status in arms markets and fulfill its arms export commitments. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, it ceded its position as the world’s second largest arms exporter to France in 2021 and 2022. Researchers expect that trend to continue in the near term, especially for advanced weapons systems such as fighter aircraft and surface-to-surface missiles that major Russian clients like India may rely on. However, Moscow is also a leader in lower-end weapons systems, such as assault rifles, carbines, pistols, and light machine guns, systems that its cadre of current African clients demand and that any future ones are likely to welcome. It dominated the market in sub-Saharan Africa and only recently lost its position to China. While it has struggled to increase its capacity to produce advanced weapons, it has been able to refurbish and churn out lower-end weapons. Russian analysts have termed this approach “military-industrial fast food,” which can be used to “quickly and effectively saturate the armed forces” of a client state.

While small arms are the fast food of the military-industrial market, Russia will eventually wish to reclaim market share in more advanced weapons systems. One clear gap in the market today is helicopters. The war in Ukraine has halted Russian and Ukrainian activities in the market, including Ukrainian sales by Motor Sich to Russia and both Russian and Ukrainian ventures with Airbus S.A.S. Ukraine and Russia were key actors in international helicopter sales before the war, driving down international supply. Meanwhile, the United States and NATO partners are buying or sending any available helicopters to Ukraine. This trend includes purchases from Ecuador, a declined offer in Colombia, deliveries from Slovakia, and donations from Argentina. Countries across Africa are already feeling the effects of limited supplies, with Benin’s Mi-171 attack helicopter order halted by sanctions on Russia, driving concern around the country’s counter-terrorism campaigns.

By establishing a reliance on Russia for security assistance and light weapons sales, the Kremlin could also seek to establish a dependence on Russian-built systems to support Russian-led counter-terror and coup-proofing operations. Indeed, Wagner forces have proven less capable in operating non-Russian helicopters, including French SA 341/342 Gazelles, so it may benefit all involved to rely on Russian systems.

Russian mercenary groups can ultimately help grease the wheels for Kremlin weapons sales, especially in the Sahel where the United States is in retreat. Moscow’s approach, strategic or otherwise, will undoubtedly aim to capitalize on its various private military company partnerships across Africa today to ensure Moscow’s weapons producers have a robust network of clients tomorrow. As soldiers engage with the Africa Corps and learn Russian tactics and approaches, they will become increasingly familiar with, and reliant on, Russian weapons systems. This gives the Kremlin a clear avenue for the resurgence and proliferation of its weapons exports across Africa.

Wagner Group cut its teeth on natural resource exploitation deals in exchange for security, often utilizing heavy equipment deliveries as key incentives in fomenting partnerships. In Mali, Wagner’s deployment coincided with the arrival of Mi-171 attack helicopters, while in the Central African Republic and Sudan, it was accompanied by Ural 43200 heavy trucks. Future deals with Wagner’s replacement may see weapons and equipment shipments exchanged for oil, gold, diamonds, copper, cobalt, or even wood. Such exchanges already help Russia evade international sanctions, and cracking down on illicit trade across these sectors has proven difficult.

For its part, and despite challenges associated with replenishing its own weapons cache, Russia is keen on reclaiming its position in the arms export market, particularly as it funds Russian research and development including the Su-75 “Checkmate” —a fifth-generation fighter aircraft designed to compete with the American F-35. Economist Andrey Belousov’s recent appointment as minister of defense confirms this approach. Belousov favors budget increases for the military and is likely to encourage investment in this sector. While Ukraine is, and will remain, the priority, Moscow will gladly utilize such an injection across its defense sector to flood its African engagements with lower-end weapons systems. Whether sold or donated, this serves the Kremlin’s interests.

It is important to note that a desire to reclaim status in the arms export market and the ability to do so are distinct. While the Kremlin may value its historic position as a major arms exporter, the jury is still out on whether it can return to its glory days. For its war in Ukraine, Moscow has had to adapt to survive, relying on a confluence of factors to keep production of essential weapons systems going, from diversification in purchasing patterns to reliance on Soviet-era stockpiles. Countries like China, Iran, and North Korea have helped Moscow weather its defense production challenges. All this is to say, the Kremlin has been resourceful in defense production and has even found some recent success, reportedly producing artillery munitions at a pace nearly three times that of the United States and Europe. These munitions, of course, are for an ongoing war and are different from weapons systems that would be in demand by African clients, but this illustrates Moscow’s ability to turn the gears on weapons production.

In the mid- to long term, Russia can readjust its wartime economy from Ukraine to reprioritize toward international demand, including more expensive systems like attack helicopters. Given dual use of these systems by Ukrainian and Russian armies, Russia is unlikely to see the reputational risk costs associated with other systems.

A Western Response

Washington finds itself in a difficult position and the near-term forecast is concerning, especially as Russia’s Africa Corps has expanded to Burkina Faso and now Niger. Russia’s approach to deploying private military companies as a method to maintain insecurity, encourage and inflict human rights abuses, and actively battle civil society benefits the Kremlin through multiple channels. Where mercenaries go, weapons will follow. The scheme facilitates Russia’s revisionist efforts, forcing a Cold War redux that will leave the West cleaning up the pieces.

Countering Russian mercenaries and weapons flows remains a difficult proposition, particularly given host countries’ decisions to partner with Moscow instead of Washington. Washington will need to do better in convincing past and future African partners that Russia’s prescribed solutions to their security challenges are shortsighted at best. That may be difficult with Washington’s loss of legitimacy in the eyes of some states and Russia’s diplomatic full-court press, but Moscow has no penchant for long-term economic investment or interest in governance support that could genuinely help client states improve the prospects for long-term security. The United States needs to convincingly tell that story.

At a minimum, Russia’s brash decision to invade Ukraine and the subsequent knock-on effect of its inability to export certain defense articles or provide servicing on some defense articles are a clear signal of the Kremlin’s unreliability. Washington should also emphasize the limited economic and development investment Moscow has made on the continent. Accounting for less than 1 percent of all foreign direct investment in Africa, Russia has shown it has minimal interest in investing in Africa outside of security, and by all indications, it has no plans to adjust course. Where it has invested, it has done so to the benefit of Russia almost exclusively. Amplifying messaging on the narrow scope of Russia’s economic investment in Africa gives African leaders more accurate information and supports their agency in weighing the pros and cons of working with Moscow.

Efforts to expose Russia’s nefarious intentions in Africa are already under way, as illustrated by the State Department’s Global Engagement Center tracking of Russian disinformation. But packaging this in ways that reaches appropriate audiences has room for improvement and growth. The United States can amplify its messaging with local media, including local and independent journalists as well as through social media. The Russians have found success through such media strategies, and Washington should recognize the value of African voices for legitimacy building. While Russia uses lies and propaganda to advance its interest, the United States can find value in encouraging transparent reporting, supporting local journalists, and continuing to invest in digital information literacy. The latter is currently part of the Digital Transformation with Africa initiative, which was launched in 2022 and institutionalized with the Africa Digital Policy Council. In only its second year, the initiative has seen significant progress, with hundreds of millions of dollars in pledges and much attention focused on digital infrastructure projects. It is critical that as digital infrastructure investment continues to increase, sufficient support is given to institute programs focused on information literacy and combatting disinformation.

Additionally, Washington should consider “rebalanc[ing] the 3Ds,” defense, democracy, and diplomacy. In many ways, and despite U.S. Africa Command commander Gen. Michael Langley’s reflection that the command “plays a supporting role to interagency efforts,” there is a perception that the United States overemphasizes its military investment and engagement at the expense of diplomatic engagement. This is largely based on assumptions related to resourcing differences between the Department of Defense, the Department of State, and other government agencies, along with the fact that the United States has spent billions on counter-terrorism in Africa over the past two decades. But an over-militarized approach, or the perception of it, does little to differentiate it from the Kremlin’s proposition. And while the military instrument of national power is a key feature of U.S. foreign policy in Africa, it is far from the most significant — or at least, it should be.

Likewise, lectures on democracy have proven to be an Achilles’ heel for U.S. foreign policy in Africa, particularly in some recent high-level diplomatic kerfuffles. Democracy promotion on its surface is not inherently negative, but U.S. strategy must be consistent. If America values pragmatism — that is, working with undemocratic regimes — over consistency in responding to undemocratic trends, that may be a fair proposition, but it is necessary to reflect on how that message is then received by others and what that then entails for future messaging and relationships.

Last, and most important, is diplomacy (and development). Washington can and should have an advantage in this space even as Moscow and Beijing continue to deepen relations with African countries. As one analyst recently noted, African countries don’t have a problem with maintaining “a security partner in Washington, a development partner in Beijing, and a trade partner in Moscow … that’s a win-win-win.” Washington has to reflect on this and recognize that it is far from the only game in town. Rhetorically, the United States already acknowledges this reality, but developing a tolerance for coexisting in this dynamic environment and a strategy where the United States evolves into the preferred partner is critical. Though imperfect, the U.S.-E.U. infrastructure investment in Angola to revitalize the Lobito corridor has shifted Luanda away from Beijing and Moscow.

More recently, President Joseph Biden’s decision to designate Kenya a “major non-NATO ally” has been chock full of talking points about the deepening economic partnership that the designation brings. Meanwhile, the 2023 U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit focused on building economic capacity, governance partnerships, and promoting public health, while providing opportunities for new entrepreneurial connections across the Atlantic. Making good on these promises and expanding investment across the continent are key steps in building stronger relationships with African states, while also effectively countering Russia.

Still, it is hard to ignore the trajectory of insecurity in places like the Sahel, so abandoning military tools altogether would be imprudent. But recent Western counter-terrorism approaches in Africa lacked clear goals and buy-in from relevant partners. This can be addressed in clear-cut and well-tailored national and international strategies to tackle terrorist threats in the Sahel that include buy-in from African militaries, but it must include a broader approach that supports African societies’ efforts to build strong and enduring civil and political infrastructure.

The harsh reality is that Russia thrives on and benefits from perpetual insecurity in multiple ways and shows no signs of slowing down. It is easy to deflect and merely suggest that Moscow is just an opportunist and that the allure of partnering with Russia will fade. But a reactive approach and strategic complacency are what contributed to Moscow’s fortune in the Sahel and beyond. The United States must reflect, ask tough questions, and take action. While today’s problems in the Sahel may appear monumental, they can get much worse very quickly — and it won’t be Moscow volunteering to pick up the pieces.

Become a Member

Christopher Faulkner is an assistant professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College.

Raphael Parens is a Templeton fellow in the Eurasia and Africa programs at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He studies African conflict, Russian military policy, and paramilitary groups.

The views expressed are the authors’ own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the U.S. Naval War College, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.”

Image: Callie West

Commentary

warontherocks.com · by Christopher Faulkner · June 6, 2024



20. US Defense Secretary Austin’s chief of staff to step down this summer





US Defense Secretary Austin’s chief of staff to step down this summer

Defense News · by Noah Robertson · June 5, 2024


PARIS — Kelly Magsamen, who has served as chief of staff to U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin his entire tenure, will step down at the end of June.

Austin announced the change in a statement, crediting her for “every initiative I have launched to defend our nation,” which includes work in the three areas of the world that now consume the Pentagon’s attention: the Indo-Pacific region, Europe and the Middle East.

Magsamen’s last week has been an illustration of that split. She joined Austin for the Shangri-La Dialogue, Asia’s largest defense conference, where he met with world leaders and in particular China’s new defense minister. Then she joined him for trips to Cambodia — where she sat beside him in meetings with the country’s leadership — and Paris, where Austin is staying during the 80th anniversary ceremony of D-Day.

Another defining part of her time in office was when Austin was hospitalized earlier this year after complications from a surgery to treat prostate cancer. Magsamen did not inform others in the Pentagon nor the U.S. government — including the president. The Pentagon has since explained the delay by saying she was also sick, and Austin took the blame for the delay, sitting for a grilling in front of the House Armed Services Committee in February.

A review of the incident ordered by Austin recommended protocol changes but didn’t result in staff discipline.

Magsamen has worked across Washington’s national security institutions, including previous stints at the State Department and the National Security Council.

“Kelly’s leadership, counsel, and selfless service made our nation safer, made the lives of our people better and more rewarding, and rendered the heavy burden of this office of mine a good bit lighter,” Austin said in the statement.

Pentagon spokeswoman Sabrina Singh didn’t say where Magsamen is headed, only that the chief of staff is “taking time off before she pursues other opportunities.”

Caroline Zier, Kelly’s deputy, will serve as acting chief of staff after Magsamen steps down, according to Maj. Gen. Patrick Ryder, the department’s press secretary.

About Noah Robertson

Noah Robertson is the Pentagon reporter at Defense News. He previously covered national security for the Christian Science Monitor. He holds a bachelor’s degree in English and government from the College of William & Mary in his hometown of Williamsburg, Virginia.


21. The US needs more China hands


There is no substitute for immersion. Of the three books highlighted below, the only one I read was James Lilley's China Hands. An excellent read.




The US needs more China hands - Asia Times

Knowing the language is fundamental to competing and it’s much easier to master if you live in the country

asiatimes.com · by Urban C. Lehner · June 5, 2024

In 1929 the US Navy sent a group of intelligence officers to Japan for three years to study the language. In retrospect, it was a far-sighted move.

Fluent in Japanese, two of those officers would go on to play a critical role at a critical moment in World War II. Having partly broken Japan’s military code, they were able to give the Navy’s Pacific commander, Admiral Chester Nimitz, advance warning of the June 1942 Japanese attack on Midway Island. The resulting US victory at the Battle of Midway was a turning point in the war.

The moral of the story: Knowing a country’s language is fundamental to competing with it. And it’s much easier to master a language if you live in the country and are constantly hearing and speaking it.

That moral remains relevant today. The current competitor – hopefully not on the battlefield but certainly in technology, economics and diplomacy – is China. It’s especially relevant because, unfortunately, the Chinese seem to have learned this lesson better than we have.


There are only 800 Americans studying in China. That’s up a tick from the pandemic, when there were 500, but down from the 2011-12 school-year peak of around 15,000. There are 300,000 Chinese studying in the US.

Of course, many Americans are studying Chinese at universities in the US. But to perfect and retain the language, they need to use it every day. They need time in China.

Study-abroad and other people-to-people exchange programs are often touted as promoting mutual understanding and avoiding war. It’s harder to demonize another people when you’ve gotten to know some of them personally, the theory goes.

Learning a foreign language and culture is also a big plus when competing with a foreign country, militarily and otherwise.

Militaries everywhere have long done what the US Navy did in 1929. Isoroku Yamamoto, the admiral who planned the Pearl Harbor attack, had studied at Harvard and served at the Japanese embassy in Washington. His sneak attack battle plan drew on his knowledge of America.

Japan’s only hope, Yamamoto thought, was a knockout punch; in a long war, America’s industrial might would prevail.

Some historians regard Pearl Harbor as a tactical triumph but a strategic blunder. Arguably, though, it was Japan’s best chance. Had the US aircraft carriers been in port at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Yamamoto’s plan might have worked. By the time the US Navy rebuilt, Japan could have taken Australia, Midway, even Hawaii and parts of Alaska.


We can be reasonably confident that our generals, admirals and spymasters know they need China specialists. They’ve undoubtedly trained some themselves, just as the US Navy did in 1929. But it’s a safe bet they could use more.

And the competition between the two countries isn’t just – or at the moment even primarily – military. The US needs more China hands in a wide variety of fields, from business to agriculture, from journalism to academia.

Then there’s science. China has become a scientific research powerhouse and many of its scientists publish their papers in Chinese. Scientifically trained Americans who can read the language are likely to be in increasing demand.

And no, software translation programs aren’t an adequate substitute for fluent human beings. A machine can translate words, but when a human learns a country’s language she learns its culture. That deep understanding of the country is critical.


As important as it is for more Americans to study in China, convincing them to go won’t be easy.

For one thing, China’s “exit bans” have prevented some foreigners from leaving the country. The US State Department currently urges Americans to “reconsider travel to Mainland China due to the arbitrary enforcement of local laws, including in relation to exit bans, and the risk of wrongful detentions.”

China’s President Xi Jinping says he wants to welcome 50,000 American students over the next five years. To make that happen, China will have to assure Americans they will be free to leave.


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Another hurdle: Some American businesses are pulling out of China. Young Americans contemplating a career doing business with China may fear there will be fewer opportunities in the years ahead.

And then there’s the unfortunate reality that China’s propaganda purveyors have been working overtime to influence American politics. Most of the Chinese-supported Confucius Institutes on American campuses were shut down after Washington raised questions about what, besides language, they were teaching. The same suspicions could be directed at studying in China.

Yes, the US and China have a tense relationship. But that’s all the more reason for more Americans to master Chinese. The ancient Chinese general Sun Tzu put it best. “Know thy enemy,” he advised.

Former longtime Wall Street Journal Asia correspondent and editor Urban Lehner is editor emeritus of DTN/The Progressive Farmer.

This article, originally published on June 3 by the latter news organization and now republished by Asia Times with permission, is © Copyright 2024 DTN/The Progressive Farmer. All rights reserved. Follow Urban Lehner on X @urbanize

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asiatimes.com · by Urban C. Lehner · June 5, 2024



22. Kenya's Mission in Haiti Opens New Chapter for U.S. Security Strategy




Kenya's Mission in Haiti Opens New Chapter for U.S. Security Strategy

Newsweek ·  · June 4, 2024


Published Jun 04, 2024 at 2:34 PM EDTBy Mohammed Soliman

Director, Middle East Institute


President Joe Biden recently hosted Kenyan President William Ruto for a state visit at the White House. The administration has held such events for leaders from only six other countries: France, South Korea, Australia, India, and Japan—all crucial allies and partners for the U.S. as it navigates intense competition with major powers like Russia and China. Ruto is the first African head of state to be honored with a state visit since 2008, when then-president George W. Bush welcomed Ghana's former president, John Kufuor.

Kenya's growing importance to Washington was further underscored by the country's designation as a major non-NATO ally during the visit. This move positions Nairobi as the United States' closest ally in sub-Saharan Africa. Washington's heightened focus on Nairobi stems from Kenya's historic deployment of 1,000 police officers to Haiti. This U.S.-backed, Kenya-led mission marks a first: an African nation deploying forces for a security mission in the Western Hemisphere. Kenya's deployment to Haiti could signal a new chapter in U.S. security strategy, where partner nations take the lead in certain missions, freeing up U.S. resources for other regions—chief among them, the Indo-Pacific.

Following the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse in 2021, Haiti has been gripped by political instability and escalating gang violence. Gangs control a significant portion of the capital, Port-au-Prince, and their activities have displaced thousands and disrupted daily life. Haiti has also seen a revolving door of prime ministers amidst the surge in gang violence. In response to a Haitian request, the UN Security Council approved the Multinational Security Support Mission in October 2023. Led by Kenya, the mission aims to assist the Haitian National Police in combating gang violence, restoring security, and creating conditions for democratic elections. The mission is granted temporary executive policing authority, including arrest and detention powers, with additional contributions expected from the Bahamas, Jamaica, Guyana, Barbados, Antigua and Barbuda, Bangladesh, Benin, and Chad.

Kenya's upcoming deployment to Haiti builds on the growing strength and trust in the U.S.-Kenya partnership, forged through counterterrorism efforts in Africa against al-Shabab. Kenya's expanding security role extends beyond counterterrorism, as evidenced by Nairobi's participation in the Ukraine Defense Contact Group and a Red Sea task force. Washington places a high value on the Haiti mission. By entrusting Kenya, a proven partner in sub-Saharan Africa, with a leading role in stabilizing the Western Hemisphere, the U.S. signals a new chapter in managing global security situations.


WASHINGTON, DC - MAY 23: U.S. President Joe Biden and Kenyan President William Ruto hold a joint press conference in the East Room at the White House on May 23, 2024 in Washington, DC. Biden... WASHINGTON, DC - MAY 23: U.S. President Joe Biden and Kenyan President William Ruto hold a joint press conference in the East Room at the White House on May 23, 2024 in Washington, DC. Biden welcomed Ruto for a state visit including a bilateral meeting, a joint press conference and a state dinner. Ruto’s visit is the first official state visit to the White House by a leader from an African country since 2008. Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

If successful, the Kenyan mission in Haiti could represent a turning point for American power. If it effectively curbs gang violence and stabilizes Haiti, the Kenyan mission could establish a model for the way Washington thinks about similar conflicts and provide a blueprint for future interventions. Kenya's experience battling al-Shabab and other insurgencies makes it a valuable asset for a police mission in the Western Hemisphere. This mission serves U.S. interests by stabilizing Haiti, which has impacted neighboring countries. Importantly, it avoids direct U.S. intervention, a move that often sparks accusations of American colonialism in the hemisphere and around the world. Disillusionment with America's "forever wars" has significantly reduced the public's appetite for deploying troops around the globe. Furthermore, Washington doesn't have the same resources to deploy multiple security and military missions around the world to offer security as a public good—an inherited and self-proclaimed feature of American global hegemony.

The Kenyan deployment in Haiti presents a strategic opportunity. By leveraging this model, Washington can enlist other capable allies with a surplus of military resources. This approach fills security vacuums around the globe where direct U.S. troop commitment is untenable. Envision Egypt assuming a stabilizing role in Sudan, Morocco in West Africa, or Arab partners in Libya and Gaza. American power in this era of great-power competition hinges on strategic ingenuity. The outdated post-World War playbook no longer applies in a world teeming with new aspirants, regional powers, and those harboring grievances from the past. The success of the Kenyan mission in Haiti hinges on unwavering U.S. support. Washington must provide a robust package encompassing material aid, intelligence sharing, logistical coordination, and resolute political backing. Washington, the ultimate offshore balancer, can empower regional actors like Kenya, orchestrating a strategic shift from a boots-on-the-ground presence to material support. Doing so bolsters friendly militaries, equipping them to shoulder a greater share of the global security burden.

Mohammed Soliman is a director at the Middle East Institute, a member of McLarty Associates, and a visiting fellow at Third Way. On X: @ThisIsSoliman

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.



23. 494. “Sixth Domain” – Private Sector Involvement in Future Conflicts



JUNE 6, 2024 BY USER

494. “Sixth Domain” – Private Sector Involvement in Future Conflicts

https://madsciblog.tradoc.army.mil/494-sixth-domain-private-sector-involvement-in-future-conflicts/

[Editor’s Note:  Regular readers of the Mad Scientist Laboratory are already familiar with the five domains associated with contemporary combat operations — land, sea, air, space, and cyberspace. When Russia launched its “Special Military Operation” into Ukraine in February 2022, the world watched as the Ukrainian Armed Forces absorbed and withstood the amassed might of the Russian Ground, Airborne, Naval, and Aerospace Forces arrayed against it. One integral aspect of Ukraine’s valiant defense was the role the private sector played in providing corroborative intelligence via space imagery, effective cyber security, and resilient Command and Control networks.

The Atlantic Council Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security coined a new sobriquet — the “sixth domain” — to capture the private sectors’ contributions in contemporary combat operations. Today’s post by the U.S. Army War College’s Team Sullivan’s Travels member LTC Kristine M. Hinds assesses the importance of the sixth domain to future conflicts — especially in supporting coalition partners in geographically separated locations — Read on!]

Executive Summary

Private sector companies are highly likely (71-85%) to play a significant role in the success of future conflicts by 2027 and will require inclusion and consideration in war planning and preparation by friendly forces (Note: The Kesselman List of Estimative Words legend may be found at the conclusion of this blog post, above the disclaimer statement). This is due to private company involvement and support in cyber-defense, advanced imagery, and communication that will increase the ability to support partners and allies from geographically separated locations. Despite the lack of policies and procedures for applying private sector products and services, the United States and Western allies rely on the private sector for future success.

Discussion

The Russia-Ukraine War demonstrates the importance of private-sector companies during conflict. The Atlantic Council Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security labeled the private sector and their sphere of activities as a “sixth domain” for consideration in future war planning. Private sector companies provided significant capabilities such as cybersecurity, information technology, advanced imagery, and increased communication that enabled the Ukrainian continued defense. With the rapid and continued advancements in technology, Russia’s heightened frequency of cyber-attacks during the invasion resulted in minimal disruption. Ukraine’s cyber defense capabilities were successful due to the involvement of international private sector companies and partners for the “collective defense” of Ukraine. American tech companies Palo Alto and Microsoft contributed to safeguarding data and protecting Ukrainian networks by setting up firewalls, protecting critical infrastructure, and safeguarding Ukrainian data through migrating data to foreign servers. The British Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) sponsored a program enabling Ukrainian agencies to access the services of commercial companies. This arrangement paved the way for the British government to use commercial cybersecurity capabilities when required.

The continued impact by and requirement for private sector cybersecurity involvement will continue to increase through 2030. Cybersecurity is one of the fastest-growing professions and is projected to grow by 35 percent by 2031. Private-sector salaries are 20-35 percent higher than public sector, drawing a larger pool of talent. To compete and succeed in the cyber domain in 2030 and beyond, militaries will need to leverage the private-sector’s expansive talent and technology base. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) already recognizes the need for stronger integration with the private sector, as outlined in NATO 2030, through harnessing civilian innovation and engaging with academia.

Several tech companies provided other capabilities to Ukraine, such as satellite imagery and communication equipment. Amazon and Google assisted in migrating critical Ukrainian data to distributed cloud servers and providing technical support. Maxar Technologies provided satellite imagery at the onset of the invasion, showing a 64-kilometer Russian convoy headed to Kyiv. They continued to provide imagery disproving Russian claims and depicting the extent of damage across Ukraine. Other companies, such as Scale AI, provided images, free of cost, of recently bombed buildings and cities, allowing for accurate humanitarian and medical response to impacted areas. The commercial satellite imagery industry provides greater integration with allies and partners as these images are unclassified and can be freely shared. 2027 and beyond will require greater cooperation with partners and a variety of available information in a contested space domain. Private sector imagery will likely become critical during future conflicts to enhance flexibility, information sharing, and rapid decision-making.

Maxar satellite image of the southern end of a large Russian convoy near Antonov Airport near Kyiv, Ukraine, February 28,2022. Fox News

The private sector, labeled the sixth domain, requires consideration and inclusion in warfighting plans in preparation for the U.S. and its allies to succeed in future conflicts. Private involvement is not without concern or issue. Without regulation, private companies make decisions that directly impact the outcome of a conflict. SpaceX, responsible for providing Starlink to the Ukrainians, denied satellite internet service to prevent a Ukrainian drone from attacking a Russian naval fleet. This decision demonstrated the power of one individual — Elon Musk in this case — in directing the course of a specific engagement during a conflict. Private companies may continue to make decisions that shift the direction of a conflict as they fit their requirements or beliefs. Conversely, any over-regulation or government involvement may deter private-sector involvement altogether. To harness the private sector influence in 2027 and beyond, militaries must prepare for their involvement and include the impacts of the sixth domain in all planning.

Analytic Confidence

The analytic confidence for this estimate is high. Sources were very reliable and tended to corroborate one another. There was adequate time, but the analyst worked alone and did not use a structured method. Given the extended time horizon of this estimate, this report is sensitive to emerging information. To mitigate the identified limitations, advanced artificial intelligence platforms, like Perplexity and Bard, aided in open-source content research and editorial support.

If you enjoyed today’s post, check out Team Sullivan’s Travels‘ Future Dynamics of Warfare: Everyone is a Player, Everything is a Target, along with their associated Final Report from which today’s post was excerpted.

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this blog post do not necessarily reflect those of the U.S. Department of Defense, Department of the Army, Army Futures Command (AFC), or Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC).





​24. How to Lead an Army of Digital Sleuths in the Age of AI


Excerpts:

I found a quote online from one of your former employees in which he says, “Data is the great equalizer between an individual and the state.” But surely, at some point, governments and intelligence agencies will find ways to hide their own data better?
Russia tried to do that. After we did the first investigation of the poisoners [of Sergei Skripal, a former Russian intelligence officer, in England], we got copies of their GRU documents. The next time we tried that, they’d removed the photos from the documents of GRU officers. But that just told us they were GRU officers. When we posted about that, the photos returned, but they were of different people. They’d replaced a photo of a man with a photo of a woman. So … they’re not smart.
But they’re bound to get smarter?
Maybe. The thing is, these are doors. One door closes, we just go through the 10,000 other open doors. It’s never the end of the investigation. We just need to take another route.



BY SAMANTH SUBRAMANIAN

BACKCHANNEL

JUN 6, 2024 3:00 AM

How to Lead an Army of Digital Sleuths in the Age of AI

Eliot Higgins and his 28,000 forensic foot soldiers at Bellingcat have kept a miraculous nose for truth—and a sharp sense of its limits—in Gaza, Ukraine, and everywhere else atrocities hide online.

Wired · by Samanth Subramanian · June 6, 2024

Ten years ago, Eliot Higgins could eat room service meals at a hotel without fear of being poisoned. He hadn’t yet been declared a foreign agent by Russia; in fact, he wasn’t even a blip on the radar of security agencies in that country or anywhere else. He was just a British guy with an unfulfilling admin job who’d been blogging under the pen name Brown Moses—after a Frank Zappa song—and was in the process of turning his blog into a full-fledged website. He was an open source intelligence analyst avant la lettre, poring over social media photos and videos and other online jetsam to investigate wartime atrocities in Libya and Syria.

In its disorganized way, the internet supplied him with so much evidence that he was beating UN investigators to their conclusions. So he figured he’d go pro. He called his website Bellingcat, after the fable of the mice that hit on a way to tell when their predator was approaching. He would be the mouse that belled the cat.

Today, Bellingcat is the world’s foremost open source intelligence agency. From his home in the UK, Higgins oversees a staff of nearly 40 employees who have used an evolving set of online forensic techniques to investigate everything from the 2014 shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over Ukraine to a 2020 dognapping to the various plots to kill Russian dissident Alexei Navalny.

Bellingcat operates as an NGO headquartered in the Netherlands but is in demand everywhere: Its staffers train newsrooms and conduct workshops; they unearth war crimes; their forensic evidence is increasingly part of court trials. When I met Higgins one Saturday in April, in a pub near his house, he’d just been to the Netherlands to collect an award honoring Bellingcat’s contributions to free speech—and was soon headed back to collect another, for peace and human rights.

Bellingcat’s trajectory tells a scathing story about the nature of truth in the 21st century. When Higgins began blogging as Brown Moses, he had no illusions about the malignancies of the internet. But along with journalists all over the world, he has discovered that the court of public opinion is broken. Hard facts have been devalued; online, everyone can present, and believe in, their own narratives, even if they’re mere tissues of lies. Along with trying to find the truth, Higgins has also been searching for places where the truth has any kind of currency and respect—where it can work as it should, empowering the weak and holding the guilty accountable.

The year ahead may be the biggest of Bellingcat’s life. In addition to tracking conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza, its analysts are being flooded with falsified artifacts from elections in the US, the UK, India, and dozens of other countries. As if that weren’t enough, there’s also the specter of artificial intelligence: still too primitive to fool Bellingcat’s experts but increasingly good enough to fool everyone else. Higgins worries that governments, social media platforms, and tech companies aren’t worrying enough and that they’ll take the danger seriously only when “there’s been a big incident where AI-generated imagery causes real harm”—in other words, when it’s too late.

WIRED: You now preside over the world’s largest open source, citizen-

run intelligence agency. A decade ago, when you switched from your blog to the Bellingcat website, what path did you see this taking?

ELIOT HIGGINS: At that point, I was still trying to figure out exactly how I could turn this into a proper job. I’d been blogging for a couple of years. But I had children, and it was getting more important to earn a living. When I launched Bellingcat, the goal was to have a space where people could come publish their own stuff. Because at that point, I had several people who’d asked to publish on my blog. I needed a better-looking website. I also wanted a place where people could come together. But that was the extent of my strategy. There was no grand plan beyond that. It was all, “What’s happening next week?”

Well, I launched on July 14, and then three days later MH17 was shot down. The way the community formed around MH17, it was really a massive catalyst for open source investigation—in terms of the growth of the community, the work we did developing techniques, the profile that gave it. Today our Discord server has more than 28,000 members. People can come and discuss stuff they think might be worth investigating, and we’re publishing articles based off the work of the community.

The world is never boring these days. What has it been like at Bellingcat since October 7, for example?

We’ve hired more people. We’re bringing in more editors. We’ve shifted people from other projects. We’ve already got one person who’s specifically working on archiving footage. But what’s different is that you don’t get the same kind of footage that we’ve gotten from, say, Ukraine or Syria. There’s actually a lot less coming from the ground.

Because of internet blackouts?

Yeah, and a lot of the stuff we find is actually from Israeli soldiers who’re misbehaving and doing stuff that I would say are definitely violations of international laws. But that’s coming on their social media accounts—they post it themselves.

Another issue is: Because of the lack of electricity there, you actually get a lot of stuff happening at night that you can’t really see in the videos. Like the convoy attack that Israel had the drone footage of—there’s lots of footage of that, but it’s just all at night and it’s pitch-black. But there was a good piece of analysis I saw recently where they used the audio and could actually start establishing what weapons were being used. Just the sound itself makes it very distinct …

Like audio signatures of missiles?

Yeah, and it’s not just being able to identify the type of weapon: When you fire something, you can hear the sound of the bullet going by but also the sound the barrel makes—and you can use that to measure how far away the shot came from. When the Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh was killed in 2022, we had the footage where she was shot. And the shot came from the direction of positions occupied by Israeli forces. [Months after the shooting, the Israel Defense Forces announced that there was “a high possibility” that the journalist was killed by one of its soldiers.]

Are there things you haven’t seen before, coming from this conflict?

It’s certainly the first time I’ve seen AI-generated content being used as an excuse to ignore real content. When a lot of people think about AI, they think, “Oh, it’s going to fool people into believing stuff that’s not true.” But what it’s really doing is giving people permission to not believe stuff that is true. Because they can say, “Oh, that’s an AI-generated image. AI can generate anything now: video, audio, the entire war zone re-created.” They will use it as an excuse. It’s just easy for them to say.

And then they can stay in their own information silo …

Yeah, just scrolling through your feed, you can dismiss stuff easily. It reinforces your own beliefs. Because Israel-Palestine has been such an issue for so long, there is a huge audience already primed to be emotionally engaged. So you see grifters churn out misattributed imagery or AI-generated content. The quality of that discourse is really low. It means that if you’re looking for real accountability, it’s hard.

You have this entirely transparent process, where you put all your evidence and investigations online so anyone can double-check it. But it’s a feature of the world we live in that people who’re convinced of certain things will just remain convinced in the face of all the facts. Does the inability to change minds frustrate you?

I’ve gotten used to it, unfortunately. That’s why we’re moving toward legal accountability and how to use open source evidence for that. We have a team that’s just working on that. You can have the truth, but the truth is not valuable without accountability.

What do you mean by legal accountability?

Well, you have people on the ground capturing evidence of war crimes. How do you actually take that from YouTube to a courtroom? No one has actually gone to court and said, “Here’s a load of open source evidence the court has to consider.” So we’ve been doing mock trials using evidence from investigating Saudi air strikes in Yemen.

A lot of our work is educating people: Lawyers in general don’t know much about open source investigation. They need the education to understand how investigators work, what they’re looking for—and what is bad analysis.

Because there’s more and more bad analysis with open source evidence. Do you know Nexta TV? They’re this Belarusian media organization, and they did a series of tweets after the attack on the concert in Moscow. They said there’s a lot of people in this scene wearing blue jumpers. They could be FSB agents [members of Russia’s Federal Security Service]. But where’s the proof they’re FSB agents in the first place? That was terrible analysis, and it went viral and convinced people there was something going on. If you can draw colored boxes around something and say you’re doing open source investigation, some people will believe you.

There are elections this year in the US and in the UK and in India. Are you preparing to deal with these three big election events as you deal with Ukraine and Gaza?

There’s only so much we can do to prepare, because I think the scale of disinformation and AI-generated imagery will be quite significant. If you look at what’s happened already in the US with the primaries, you’ve already got fake robocalls; the DeSantis campaign used AI-generated imagery of Trump and Dr. Fauci hugging each other. So that line has already been crossed. These tools are available to ordinary members of the public as well, not just political agents.

Which makes it much worse.

Yeah, because it’s not what the campaigns decide to do, it’s what their supporters decide to do.

Photograph: Michael Fung

Given this flood of AI-generated imagery, are you wary of Bellingcat turning into just a fact-checker rather than doing these much deeper investigations where you build a case?

It’s like the Kate Middleton thing that happened recently. I really tried not to join the conversation. I thought: This is really stupid discourse. But then you start seeing, like, TikTok videos that were saying, “Oh, the color’s being photoshopped” or whatever, and they have millions and millions and millions of views. So you kind of feel: Yeah, I have to say something. It’s actually a good reflection of how disinformation starts and spreads, and the dynamics.

I will not lie. I was fascinated too, for the span of a week.

That’s why it was prime territory for disinformation! I’ve dealt with lots of communities who believe in conspiracy theories. None of them generally believe they’re conspiracy theorists. They believe they’re truth seekers fighting against some source of authority that is betraying us all. They’ve come to understand that a source of authority cannot be trusted, because of their personal experiences.

I love a phrase you used for this once: that people who believe in conspiracy theories have previously suffered some kind of “traumatic moral injury.”

I use the example of Covid. A lot of people who were driving Covid disinformation were people in the alternative health community who’ve often had bad experiences with medical professionals. Like they’ve had a treatment go wrong, or they’ve lost a loved one, or they’ve been mistreated. And some of that is legitimate. Some of that is real trauma.

Now, they found like-minded people, and within that community you have people who are anti-vaxxers. When Covid came along, suddenly those voices became a lot louder within those communities. And the distrust people had in medical professionals was kind of reinforced. It’s about feeding their anxiety—and they’re being fed every single day, every time they scroll through their groups.

In an era when AI images are going to proliferate, wouldn’t you rather that people have this heightened spidey sense about the world, where they’re alert? That they’re too skeptical rather than too trusting?

I’d argue against the frame of that question. If you have people’s spidey sense tingling all the time, they’ll just distrust everything. We’ve seen this with Israel and Gaza. A lot of people are really at that point where they do care about what’s happening, but it’s so confusing that they cannot stand to be part of this anymore. You’re losing people in the center of the conversation. This is a real threat to a democratic society where you can have a debate, right?

Is this AI-generated stuff at a stage of sophistication where even your team has to struggle to distinguish it?

Well, we explore the network of information around an image. Through the verification process, we’re looking at lots of points of data. The first thing is geo-location; you’ve got to prove where something was taken. You’re also looking at things like the shadows, for example, to tell the time of day; if you know the position of the camera, you’ve basically got a sundial. You also have metadata within the picture itself. Then images are shared online. Someone posts it on their social media page, so you look at who that person is following. They may know people in the same location who’ve seen the same incident.

You can do all that with AI-generated imagery. Like the Pentagon AI image that caused a slight dip in the stock market. [In May 2023, a picture surfaced online showing a huge plume of smoke on the US Department of Defense’s lawn.] You’d expect to see multiple sources very quickly about an incident like that. People wouldn’t miss it. But there was only one source. The picture was clearly fake.

My concern is that someone will eventually figure that out, that you’ll get a coordinated social media campaign where you have bot networks and fake news websites that have been around for a long time, kind of building a narrative. If someone were clever enough to say, “OK, let’s create a whole range of fake content” and then deliver it through these sites at the same time that claims an incident has happened somewhere, they’d create enough of a gap of confusion for an impact on the stock market, for panic to happen, for real news organizations to accidentally pick it up and make the situation much worse.

So how do we even begin to fix this?

Social media companies need to have the responsibility—like, legislatively—to have AI detection and flagging as part of the posting process. Not just as something that’s a fact-check layer, because that’s not going to matter at all. I don’t think a voluntary system is going to work. There need to be consequences for not doing it. I think my worry is that we’re only going to figure this out when something really terrible has happened.

“What happens to a lot of people is they have this kind of compulsive witnessing, where they’re like, ‘I have to witness this thing.’ Because, in history, people have turned their backs, right?”

Do you still do a lot of investigative work yourself now?

No. If I’ve got a gap in my day to do a quick geolocation or something like that, I’ll do it. I’m involved with a lot of the work we do on our production company side of things, so that’s keeping me busy. I do a lot around PR and comms.

Is that easy for you? Somewhere you’d said that when you were younger, you were slightly socially anxious?

I was cripplingly socially anxious. I’ve had to beat it out of me. When I first started doing this, I had loads of anxiety, really serious levels. The idea of speaking on stage was terrifying to me. The first time I did a big event on stage was at a 2013 Google Ideas summit. I don’t remember anything about that. Just dripping with anxiety. But doing this again and again, about something I really care about, has helped balance that out.

How do you spend your spare time online? What do you do on holiday?

I’ve removed Twitter from my phone, because that was one of the worst things. Arguing with people …

You don’t do that anymore, I noticed. You used to do it a lot, and in such good faith.

It was kind of like testing my own knowledge. If someone can come up to me and say, “Oh, you’re wrong because of this,” and I can’t argue against that, then I’m the one in the wrong. It used to be worthwhile having those debates, even if they were arguing in bad faith. But it got to the point where the mythology around Bellingcat that existed in these echo chambers became crystallized. When someone now says, “Oh, Bellingcat is the CIA,” it’s always the same nonsense.

OK, you’re not arguing as much. What else are you doing?

I use AI a lot for my own entertainment. Do you know Suno AI, or Udio? These are music-creation tools—and in the past six months they’ve taken huge, huge leaps.

Oh, Suno. It’s the Hindi word for “listen.”

Yeah. Have you used these at all?

No.

I’ll show you. I have a SoundCloud where I upload my music. You can put in style prompts. You can also put in custom lyrics.

This is how the founder of Bellingcat spends his spare time.

Yeah. I like it especially when the AI generator really gets weird, goes completely off the rails. I write loads of songs about things like filter bubbles online and stuff. If you can condense an idea into a lyrical form, I find that helps process it into a simpler form to explain it to people in articles and books.

When you’re giving these prompts, are you giving them influences or are you just giving them genres?

Oh, I’ve got a whole process for this now! It used to be that I’d say, “OK, let’s do an ambient song.” But then I was thinking: How do I get the exact sound of certain bands? Because you can’t put in “Make a Beastie Boys song.” It won’t let you prompt it that way; they’re clearly trying to avoid getting sued. But I go to ChatGPT and explain the scenario: I’m giving prompts for a music-generation program that requires style tags and types of music, so what are the style tags for, like, Kraftwerk? It will break down styles into separate tags, and you can take those tags and put them back in.

I’ve read elsewhere that you call any yearning for a time before the internet “cyber-miserabilism,” which is a great phrase. But it’s also true that all of us remember our minds being calmer before we started scrolling through feeds.

You’re continually wired now. What really worries me is how this is traumatizing people. We had this a lot with Ukraine in 2022, when there were so many people engaged with the content stream. Those people were saying, “I just feel horrible all the time.” We didn’t realize we were traumatizing ourselves. We’re seeing the same issue with Israel and Gaza and people streaming through this imagery that’s just reinforcing the hate they have for the other side.

In the early days of Bellingcat, you were being exposed to videos like that on a daily basis, very often including footage of dead bodies. How do you protect yourself from what you’re seeing?

For me, it felt like there was a point to it, because I had success through seeing all this stuff. It’s the powerlessness that is often part of the traumatic response. But you can learn to disassociate from that.

Can you though?

I just think I got very good at compartmentalizing stuff. It’s so, so important for this work. With MH17, I was looking at the wreckage of the site. There was a big, high-resolution photo, and I was going through it looking at the details of the shrapnel holes, and there was a doll in the wreckage, and my daughter had been given the exact same doll by her aunt when she was born. What happens then is you have a subconscious engagement with it. And you have to stop at that point. Trying to push through it is a really bad idea.

When I was looking at the victims of the 2013 sarin attacks in Syria, for example, we were trying to identify the symptoms. And one of the symptoms is the constriction of pupils. So I had to look at the eyes of these dead people to find enough screenshots to establish their cause of death. That was upsetting in itself. But then you go online, and you have all these idiots saying: “Oh, it’s fake. No one really died. The babies are acting.” That is traumatic.

What happens to a lot of people is they have this kind of compulsive witnessing, where you’re like, “I have to witness this thing.” Because, in history, people have turned their backs, right? So I have to witness this, so that these people’s suffering is being acknowledged. It’s an illusionary way of getting power back from the situation, because it really doesn’t change anything. All you’ve done is traumatized yourself.

I understand Bellingcat offers psychological support so anyone on staff can get free therapy. Do people use that counseling facility a lot?

Oh yeah, absolutely. It’s not just about the content we face but also the reaction from governments that we have to deal with. Which can be, as you know, quite aggressive.

I did wonder about that. I’ve read that you don’t eat room service meals anymore, and I wanted to know what else you do or don’t do. And also, what changed when Bellingcat was declared a foreign agent by Russia in 2021?

We have a security team, we have a lot of reviews around cybersecurity. We have a lot of discussions about our physical security. We have staff retreats, where consultants come talk to us about, like, “Here’s what to do if you’re being followed.” Fun stuff like that. Being declared undesirable and a foreign agent—in one sense, it’s a badge of honor. It’s also a problem, because we try to be transparent about who funds us, but if we’re a foreign agent and have donations from people who’re linked to Russia, that will put them at risk. We’ve had to stop publishing some of our donors’ names, which we’re not fans of. But they need to be protected.

Photograph: Michael Fung

What about this meeting, for instance? How did you know whether to agree to have a cup of coffee with me? What did you do?

Well, some research. First of all, I made sure to know what you look like. There’s been incidents where people have had meetings with journalists, who suddenly start asking very weird questions. They’ll start saying, “Oh, Israel are pretty awful, aren’t they?” And then you wonder, “What’s going on here?” I know people who’ve had Skype calls, and suddenly their call is on Iranian state media, selectively edited.

I found a quote online from one of your former employees in which he says, “Data is the great equalizer between an individual and the state.” But surely, at some point, governments and intelligence agencies will find ways to hide their own data better?

Russia tried to do that. After we did the first investigation of the poisoners [of Sergei Skripal, a former Russian intelligence officer, in England], we got copies of their GRU documents. The next time we tried that, they’d removed the photos from the documents of GRU officers. But that just told us they were GRU officers. When we posted about that, the photos returned, but they were of different people. They’d replaced a photo of a man with a photo of a woman. So … they’re not smart.

But they’re bound to get smarter?

Maybe. The thing is, these are doors. One door closes, we just go through the 10,000 other open doors. It’s never the end of the investigation. We just need to take another route.

Let us know what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor at

Wired · by Samanth Subramanian · June 6, 2024


25. ‘We Are the World Power.’ How Joe Biden Leads





‘We Are the World Power.’ How Joe Biden Leads

TIME · by Massimo Calabresi / Washington

You can read the transcript of the interview here and the fact-check here.

Joe Biden makes his way through the West Wing telling stories. In the Cabinet Room, with sun pouring through French doors from the Rose Garden outside, he remembers the first time he sat around the long mahogany table, its high-backed leather chairs ordered by seniority. It was more than 50 years ago, Biden says, and Richard Nixon told National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger to brief the 30-year-old first-term Delaware Senator on the still secret timing of the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam. Walking slowly through the halls, the President unspools anecdotes about heads of state: Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Emmanuel Macron. In the Oval Office, he talks about his childhood home in Scranton, Pa., and the 2008 phone call from Barack Obama asking Biden to be his running mate.

Biden recounts these memories over the course of more than 90 minutes on a warm spring day, speaking in a quiet, sometimes scattershot way. The impression he gives is one of advancing age and broad experience, of a man who has lived history. Biden leads the U.S. as the American century is fading into an uncertain future, a changing world of threats, opportunities, and power shifts. At 81, he holds fast to a vision that has reigned since World War II, in which a rich and powerful America leads an alliance of democracies to safeguard the globe from tyranny.

On June 6, Biden will travel to Normandy, France, to memorialize an event that has served for eight decades as a focal point of this vision. He will arrive as the 12th—and certainly the last—American President who was alive on that day in 1944, when 73,000 American troops led the largest amphibious invasion in human history, accelerating Nazi Germany’s defeat and Europe’s liberation. For generations, D-Day has been a hallowed anniversary. The President says commemorating it is as much about the future as the past. “We’re playing [that role] even more,” Biden says. “We are the world power.”

Whether this view of America’s role in the world will outlast Biden’s presidency is an open question. Voters face a clear choice this November. Biden calls America’s democratic values the “grounding wire of our global power” and its alliances “our greatest asset.” His presumptive opponent, former President Donald Trump, called for withdrawing American forces in Europe and Asia and has promised, most recently in his April 12 interview with TIME, to cut loose even our closest allies if they don’t do as he tells them. By his own account, Trump sees all countries as unreliable, the relations between them transactional. That sentiment has spread throughout a Republican Party that once championed America’s values abroad. J.D. Vance, the Ohio Senator in contention to become Trump’s Vice President, tells TIME that the D-Day story has become a sepia-toned distraction. “The foreign policy establishment is obsessed with World War II historical analogies,” says Vance, “and everything is some fairy tale they tell themselves from the 1930s and 1940s.”

Photograph by Philip Montgomery for TIME

During his 40 months in office, events have tested Biden’s vision of American world leadership. Alliances haven’t been enough to win a new European war in Ukraine. U.S. power and leverage haven’t prevented a humanitarian catastrophe in the Middle East, marked by alleged war crimes. Putin is trying to assemble an axis of autocrats from Tehran to Beijing. In China, the U.S. faces an adversary potentially its equal in economic and military power that is intent on tearing down the American global order. President Xi has told his military to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027, U.S. officials say, raising the possibility of a dark analogue to Normandy in Asia. Biden doesn’t rule out sending troops to defend Taiwan if China attacked, saying, “It would depend on the circumstances.”

Biden’s record in facing these tests is more than just nostalgic talk. He has added two powerful European militaries to NATO, and will soon announce the doubling of the number of countries in the Atlantic alliance that are paying more than the target 2% of their GDP toward defense, the White House says. His Administration has worked to prevent the war in Gaza from igniting a broader regional conflict. He brokered the first trilateral summit with long-distrustful regional partners South Korea and Japan, and coaxed the Philippines to move away from Beijing’s orbit and accept four new U.S. military bases. He has rallied European and Asian countries to curtail China’s economic sway. “We have put together the strongest alliance in the history of the world,” Biden says, so that “we are able to move in a way that recognizes how much the world has changed and still lead.”

But American Presidents must earn a mandate from their fellow citizens, and it’s far from clear that Biden can. In surveys, large majorities say that he is too old to lead. As he walked TIME through the West Wing and sat for a 35-minute interview on May 28, the President, with his stiff gait, muffled voice, and fitful syntax, cut a striking contrast with the intense, loquacious figure who served as Senator and Vice President. Biden bristles at the suggestion that he is aging out of his job. Asked whether he could handle its rigors though the end of a second term, when he will be 86, he shot back, “I can do it better than anybody you know.” Age aside, Biden’s handling of foreign affairs gets poor marks from voters, and not just for the bungled withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan or the ongoing war in Gaza. While 65% of Americans still believe that the U.S. should take a leading or major role in the world, that number is down 14 points from 2003 and is at its lowest level since Gallup began polling the issue two years earlier.

Biden, who is the most experienced foreign policy President in a generation, believes that role is in America’s interest. “When we strengthen our alliances, we amplify our power as well as our ability to disrupt threats before they can reach our shores,” he said soon after taking office. To judge the merit of Biden’s plan to sustain American world leadership, voters can look to his record: what he has accomplished, where he has fallen short, and how he intends to build on his work in a second term.

Biden speaks at a wreath-laying ceremony on Memorial DayKen Cedeno—Reuters

Around 3 p.m. on Dec. 13, 2021, the White House Situation Room put through a call from Biden to his Finnish counterpart, Sauli Niinisto. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was still more than two months away, and Finland, with its 830-mile border with Russia and tense history with Moscow, had long declined to join NATO. Less than a quarter of Finns supported entering the alliance at the time. But Biden had decided, aides say, that if Russia invaded, the West’s response should be not just to defend NATO, but to strengthen it.

On March 4, days after the invasion, Biden met with the newly enthusiastic Niinisto in the Oval Office. Together they called Swedish Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson, who had resisted joining the alliance, to try to persuade her. After both countries applied for membership in May 2022, Biden turned to getting the rest of NATO to accept them. In June, he called Turkey’s leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan from Air Force One on the way to a summit in Madrid, in hopes of getting Erdogan’s support for expanding the alliance. Dangling a one-on-one meeting, Biden said of Turkey’s long-sought access to America’s F-16 fighter jets, “Let’s find a way to get that done,” according to the White House. By March 2024, Sweden and Finland were in. “Everybody thought, including you guys, thought I was crazy,” Biden says. “Guess what? I did it.”

The accession of Finland and Sweden was part of Biden’s broader efforts to respond to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine by rallying the free world. Starting in October 2021, Biden held a series of meetings with European and NATO leaders, discussing postinvasion support for Ukraine, including military assistance, sanctions, diplomacy, and economic support. Biden also brought Asian allies into the effort. South Korea and Japan have imposed sanctions on Russia and its arms suppliers. The result, Biden advisers say, is a strengthened alliance of shared democratic values worldwide. “He has connected Europe and Asia in a way no previous President has,” says National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan.

Biden with President Zelensky in the Oval Office on Sept. 21, 2023Jim Watspn—AFP/Getty Images

Others view all the investment in Ukraine as a distraction from the bigger challenge America faces in East Asia. “Who doesn’t think that $200 billion spent in Europe would’ve been incredibly useful in the Pacific?” says Elbridge Colby, a former Trump Administration Pentagon official and lead architect of the 2018 National Defense Strategy. “Great nations fail,” says Lieut. General Keith Kellogg, Trump’s former National Security Adviser, when “you fix somebody else’s potholes instead of fixing your potholes.”

Biden says he remains committed to Ukrainian victory. Asked about the war’s endgame, Biden says, “Peace looks like making sure Russia never, never, never, never occupies Ukraine.” But last year’s Ukrainian counteroffensive was a failure. Russia recently has made its largest advances since the opening months of the invasion. Alliance building may have reached its limit, along with Americans’ appetite for funding a war of attrition. Biden’s allies in Kyiv complain he has been too cautious, giving Ukraine enough weapons to survive the war but not to win it. “It’s not a decisive stance,” says a senior official in President Volodymyr Zelensky’s government. “It’s not the way to victory.”

On balance, however, even longtime critics are impressed with Biden’s efforts in Ukraine. Former Defense Secretary and CIA director Robert Gates wrote in 2014 that Biden had “been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national-security issue over the past four decades.” But on May 19, Gates said that Biden’s response to Russia’s invasion has gone a long way toward repairing the damage of the disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal. “He gained a lot of credibility with the speed with which he assembled the coalition of partner countries, allies, and friends before, during, and after the Russian invasion of Ukraine,” Gates told CBS’s Face the Nation.

Biden says his response has been part of a broader deterrence strategy. “If we ever let Ukraine go down, mark my words, you’ll see Poland go, and you’ll see all those nations along the actual border of Russia [fall],” he tells TIME. But in other theaters, the high-minded Normandy vision has given way to a different kind of diplomacy.

Halfway through our interview, Biden responds to a question about America’s relationship with Saudi Arabia by saying that the U.S. has two kinds of alliances: “There are values-based, and there are practical-based.” During the campaign, Biden had sworn to make Saudi Arabia a “pariah.” One of his first moves in office was to cut off certain arms supplies over the kingdom’s war in Yemen, which has displaced 4.5 million people and killed 377,000, including 11,000 children, according to the U.N. Soon after, the de facto Saudi ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, known as MBS, met with China’s Foreign Minister and proposed greater cooperation on nuclear energy and security with Beijing, already the kingdom’s largest economic partner.

The Biden Administration quietly pivoted. A new “great game” was afoot, with the world dividing between competing Chinese and American spheres of influence. For all Biden’s efforts to stimulate a green transition, Saudi Arabia was still providing much of the world’s energy. Moreover, the Saudis had expressed willingness during the Trump presidency to normalize relations with Israel, which would tilt the regional balance of power against Iran and in the U.S.’s favor. On Sept. 27, 2021, Sullivan traveled to Saudi Arabia with instructions from Biden to explore the possibility of a peace deal between the kingdom and Israel.

Biden himself traveled to Saudi Arabia in July 2022, bucking a flurry of criticism for meeting with MBS, who has led a widespread crackdown on clerics, academics, and human-rights advocates critical of his regime, according to Human Rights Watch, and who the U.S. says ordered the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi. But the visit helped stabilize relations. Over the course of the next year, it began to look as if Biden’s moral climb down with MBS had brought the Saudis back on the U.S. side, and restarted a possible bargain with Israel. The outlines of that deal, Biden now says, were “overwhelmingly in our interest.”

Hamas, the terrorist group that controls Gaza, was determined not to allow it. Days after its Oct. 7 attack against Israel, which killed some 1,200 people, Hamas spokesman Ghazi Hamad told TIME, “We planned for this because Israel thinks it can make peace with anyone, it can make normalization with any country, it can oppress the Palestinians, so we decided to shock the Israelis in order to wake up others.” Eight Americans were among the estimated 240 taken hostage in the massacre. The Biden Administration has sought to secure their release, but it is not clear how many of the American hostages have survived; three reportedly have been killed. “We believe there are those that are still alive,” Biden tells TIME. “I met with all the families. But we don’t have final proof on exactly who’s alive.”

Biden with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, center, in Tel Aviv on Cct. 18, 2023Brendan Smialowski—AFP/Getty Images

Biden’s reaction to Oct. 7 was to provide rock-solid support to Israel. Within a week he had deployed two aircraft carriers to the region. Quietly, he tried to rally Egypt and Saudi Arabia to resist expansion of the conflict into a war between Israel and Iran. Biden’s “practical-based” alliance building appeared to pay off on April 13, when Iran responded to an Israeli attack on a satellite diplomatic office by launching more than 300 missiles and drones in its first-ever direct attack on Israel. The Saudis and Jordanians reportedly provided intelligence assistance and opened their airspace to U.S. and other jets. With Israel leading the way, the ad hoc alliance managed to shoot down all but four of the projectiles, with no fatalities. More important, the episode helped avert a region-wide war.

But Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has upped the cost of Biden’s commitment to Israel at every turn. Nearly eight months after the conflict started, the death toll in Gaza, according to the local Hamas-led Ministry of Health, has climbed to more than 36,000 people, including an unknown number of Hamas fighters. More than 1.7 million have been displaced by Israeli attacks that have destroyed much of the enclave. On May 20, the prosecutor for the International Criminal Court requested a war-crimes indictment for Netanyahu, his Defense Minister, and three leaders of Hamas. Four days later, in a largely symbolic move, the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to halt operations in Gaza. Human Rights Watch says Israel has “imposed collective punishments on the civilian population, deprived the civilian population of objects indispensable to its survival, and used starvation of civilians as a weapon of war.”

Asked if Israeli forces have committed war crimes in Gaza, Biden says, “It’s uncertain.” From the start, the Administration knew Israel was pushing the limits of legal warfare, the Washington Post and others have reported. The conflict is driving a wedge between the U.S. and its allies. On May 31, Biden laid out a phased cease-fire plan that would end the war and secure the release of hostages. He has continued to pursue the complicated regional deal with Saudi Arabia. Some close to Biden say the only holdout to the broader pact is Netanyahu. The President declines to say as much, but when asked by TIME if Netanyahu is prolonging the war for his own political reasons, Biden admits, “There is every reason for people to draw that conclusion.”

As aides try to bring the interview to a close, Biden turns to China. Hawks say Beijing is in a sprint to match American economic and military production. By some measures, it is catching up on GDP and defense manufacturing, and already has a larger navy. But Biden takes a bullish view of the competition with the rising Asian power. “Everybody talks about how, how strong China is and how powerful they are,” Biden says. “You’ve got an economy that’s on the brink there. The idea that their economy is booming, give me a break.” That doesn’t mean they can’t pose a threat. Asked if China is using AI or other means to meddle in the upcoming U.S. election, Biden says someone is, but declines to say who. Pressed, he adds, “I think China would have an interest in meddling.”

What Biden describes as China’s economic weakness could make confrontation more, not less, likely—another argument, as he sees it, for expanding America’s alliances in East Asia. And in that arena, the President has pursued a mix of “values-based” and “practical” approaches.

Biden boards Air Force One in Boston on May 21Leah Millis—Reuters

Biden was on Air Force One on his way to a fundraiser in Illinois on May 11, 2022, when the results of the Philippine presidential elections were announced, showing that Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. had won. Biden “had the instinct to just pick up the phone and said, ‘Hey, let’s get together soon and start building a relationship,’” Sullivan says. It was a long shot. Marcos has a pending $2 billion judgment against him in a U.S. court relating to his parents’ human-rights record during their more than 20-year dictatorship, which ended in 1986. The Philippines are now rated “partly free” by Freedom House, and the outgoing President, Rodrigo Duterte, had courted China even as Beijing claimed nearby islands and territorial waters. Marcos had sent cold signals to the U.S. during his campaign.

Biden’s call was the first Marcos had received from a foreign leader. As U.S. officials followed up, they briefed the new President on the parallels between Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and Xi’s declared goals in the South China Sea. Biden dispatched Vice President Kamala Harris and his Secretaries of State and Defense to woo Marcos. Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman made clear Marcos had diplomatic immunity and would be welcome in the U.S. Less than a year after Biden’s congratulatory call, Marcos made a visit to the White House. More significantly, he approved the opening of four additional U.S. military bases in the Philippines. In April and May, the two countries engaged in their largest military exercises together, simulating an effort to repulse an amphibious landing. “The President got engaged early in a very personal way,” says Sullivan, “and then kind of showed both respect for him and a vision for where the relationship would go.”

Biden has pursued this brand of personal realpolitik across Asia. He elevated the communist autocracy in Vietnam to the highest diplomatic status, comprehensive strategic partner, and has moved to embrace the increasingly repressive regime of Narendra Modi in India. He has tried to boost the “Quad” alliance with India, Japan, and Australia, upgrading it from a meeting of Foreign Ministers to one of heads of state. In April 2023, Biden convened a Camp David summit with the South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida. Overcoming long-fraught relations between Seoul and Tokyo, the three countries criticized China’s behavior in the South China Sea and declared “a hinge point of history, when geopolitical competition, the climate crisis, Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, and nuclear provocations test us.”

Critics say the problem is too much friend making and not enough deterrence. The U.K. recently said China may be preparing to provide lethal aid to Russia, a move that Biden said in March 2022 would put Xi “in significant jeopardy” of harsh U.S. sanctions. “The single biggest problem with the Biden team is their failure to grasp what it takes to achieve effective deterrence against aggressors,” says Matt Pottinger, who was Deputy National Security Adviser under Trump. “They failed against the Taliban, then Putin, and then Iran and its proxies. And now Beijing is making moves that could prove fateful for the world.” Former Trump official Colby says Biden’s diplomatic work is a weak substitute for the one thing that can deter China’s rise. “These high-profile photo ops,” says Colby, “are not a substitute for raw military power.” He points to recent statements by senior U.S. military officials that China is outpacing the U.S. on missile- and shipbuilding, and war games showing the U.S. losing badly in a contest over Taiwan, and says the U.S. should put all its efforts into defending the “first island chain” of Japan, Taiwan, and the Philippines.

Biden believes that withdrawing from Europe and the Middle East to focus on East Asia would backfire, aides say. If America abandons its allies elsewhere, they argue, its Asian allies will abandon it, in turn. The U.S. needs European and Middle Eastern countries to increase its economic and military advantages over China. And ultimately, failing to confront instability now—in Ukraine, Gaza or elsewhere—will only make doing so later a more costly distraction from the competition with Beijing.

Back in the Cabinet Room after the interview, the sun is lower, and Biden has more stories. He turns to a sideboard with a commendation from the Kosovo government to his son Beau Biden, who died of cancer nine years ago. The President relates with evident pride his son’s work supporting its judicial system. A mention of diplomat Richard Holbrooke, who brokered the Dayton accords for the Balkans, elicits a story about Afghanistan and an argument Biden had with Holbrooke over the search for peace there.

On a matching sideboard on the other side of the door, the President opens an album with travel pictures, launching a series of anecdotes about the Popes he has known, including John Paul II and Benedict, whom Biden calls “the Rottweiler.” Recounting an exchange with one over abortion, he casts an eye toward the cracked door to the Oval Office and asks an aide, “Are they in there?” Turning back to his visitors, he says, “Let me show you one more picture.”

This avuncular politicking remains a Biden trademark, one that has helped with allies overseas but failed to unite Americans at home, as Biden pledged when running for President. Not that he has stopped trying. Biden ultimately persuaded Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson to move a roughly $95 billion supplemental aid package for Ukraine, the Middle East, and Taiwan. To build support for his Middle East peace package, he has worked both sides of the aisle. On Nov. 8, 2023, Biden sat for two hours in the windowless Roosevelt Room with a bipartisan group of nine Senators who had just returned from the region, asking for impressions from the trip and moderating a conversation between them, Sullivan, and Middle East coordinator Brett McGurk. At the end, he pulled Democratic Senator Chris Coons and Republican Senator Lindsey Graham into the Oval Office for separate 10-minute conversations about next steps in the effort, says Coons.

Philip Montgomery for TIME

Biden may be right that despite the partisanship, a consensus exists for a values-based, pragmatic role for America in the world. His challenge is to get Americans to focus on that rather than on other issues driven by foreign affairs, like inflation or immigration. Biden denies that his expansion of Trump’s trade war with China will increase prices, and says his only regret about lifting Trump’s anti-immigration measures is that he didn’t do it sooner. His goal in a second term, he says, is “to finish what he started.”

At stake is the direction of the world for the coming century. At Normandy, Biden will make the case for what historian Hal Brands says is “the 80-year tradition of internationalism that has been quite good for America and the world.” The alternative, says Brands, would be a “more vicious and chaotic” world where Americans ultimately would be less safe, prosperous, and free, but only after everyone else suffered first.

Wrapping up his conversation with TIME, Biden offers cookies from a tray in the outer Oval. “They’re homemade,” he says. Turning to leave, he offers a final salutation: “Keep the faith.” But then he pauses and turns back, as the phrase triggers one last story. It’s about a relative who had his own response to that admonition. And here Biden taps one of his visitors on the chest and says, “Spread the faith.”

—With reporting by Simon Shuster/Kyiv; Leslie Dickstein, Simmone Shah, and Julia Zorthian/New York; and Melissa August, Brian Bennett, Vera Bergengruen, Eric Cortellessa, and Sam Jacobs/Washington

TIME · by Massimo Calabresi / Washington

26. Why the ancient philosophy of stoicism is having a modern revival


I find Stoic philosophy/thinking useful.


The best part of this episode is at the end from Professor Nancy Sherman, one of the world's experts on Stoic philosophy, so I will excerpt it upfront.


Excerpt:


CHAKRABARTI: Professor Sherman that holds a lot of sway with me. My father used to always say that one of the goals was to free yourself from attachment. And that didn't mean necessarily mean go live in a cave, but that free yourself from attachment so that you can actually operate in complete, being completely present in the world.
And that came from his Buddhist practice. What do you think about that?
SHERMAN: Oh, there's certainly overlaps, whatever the cross fertilization was in the ancient world. Stoics are certainly interested, as Margaret was saying, in retraining your emotions so that you don't have the same sticky acquisitive approach mechanisms or panicky aversion avoidance mechanism.
So you're trying to let go a little bit of the unruly passions, and train more, train calmer ones, but there are a few critical differences. I've practiced Buddhist meditation in my life, and there's a sense in which you really empty your mind and try to quiet it. And that's part of the idea of the selflessness.
And as you read the meditative practices of the ancients, they really were into, if not God punishing you, the self punishes. Seneca can be quite hard on himself. At the end of the day, you are the judge before yourself. What'd you do wrong? Did you scream at someone? Did you think you should be sitting at the dais when they put you in the back of the room at a sub table? Yeah. And I do remember this when Carl Reiner died his good friend Steve Martin, just prior to that, his good friend Steve Martin said am I, is it too late? He said, no, I'm just up here, going through my litany of failures.
It's that sort of self-examination that can be overly critical. And so there's a sense in which the self's improvement is really what the ancient world has always been about. And the idea of letting go of the ego is a much more eastern notion, even though there's definitely similarities, and permanence is a Buddhist notion.
Whereas the stoics think less about impermanence and more about, Have you done everything you can? And then it's time to let go.
CHAKRABARTI: Those are important distinctions. I see what you're talking about here. And I just want to give Professor Graver a chance to jump in.
GRAVER: I would echo some of that.
It's certainly true that there are some commonalities with Buddhist practice. The idea of self-knowledge, the idea of rethinking your desires, the idea of correcting your own attitudes, but also this Buddhist ideal of tranquility. And of having an ideal version of human existence to aspire to.
These things are also part of ancient Stoicism. Maybe not from coming from the same place, but getting to a place that for many people today will feel quite similar. And I think I would just add that for ancient Stoics, and maybe also for some modern Stoics, that this is experienced as liberation. As a kind of freedom.
SHERMAN: It is a freedom. Can I just add one thing?
CHAKRABARTI: Yes. Yeah. And then I have one last quick question. But we only have a minute now. You got 10 seconds and I'm going to give you that last question.
SHERMAN: Equanimity. Yes. But one thing that's often missing in these accounts is changing the social structure and not just your attitude to it.
And that I find really problematic, even ancient and modern. Social structure matters.
CHAKRABARTI: So I want to sneak this last one in here. We've just got under 60 seconds left. But what, one of the things that fascinates me about this is not some, is not just how many Americans these days are finding stoicism attractive, but all the principles both of you talked about are actually the opposite of what we teach young children today in school.
You're laughing because, right? It's true. Like the centrality of feeling, like being safe in all circumstances. About if you're hurt, it doesn't matter what the intention of the other person was about the facts are feelings. This is a completely different way of thinking. Professor Sherman, I'm going to give you the last 10 seconds here.
Should we be teaching stoicism in schools instead?
SHERMAN: I don't actually think so. I actually think being able to feel is critically important and not just changing how you feel and reducing the impact of others. I would say having resilience, he thought of as a social structure. And so that idea of Marcus, if you see yourself cut off from others, that's what we make of ourselves.
And we cut ourselves off from the community, having a supportive community. And the ways in which we support through understanding is really the way to strengthen. And I think that's an enlightened view of Stoicism that we need to teach our children, if through the Stoic texts or not.



Why the ancient philosophy of stoicism is having a modern revival

wbur.org · by Hilary McQuilkin

The Greco-Roman philosophy of stoicism is having a moment. Through wisdom, temperance, courage and justice you can create a virtuous, well-lived life.

But have modern-day stoics got it right?

Today, On Point: Why the ancient philosophy of stoicism is having a modern revival.

Guests

Margaret Graver, professor in classics at Dartmouth College.

Nancy Sherman, professor of philosophy at Georgetown University.

Also Featured

Ryan Holiday, author, businessman and podcaster.

Ryan Mulkowsky, former pastor, current hospice chaplain and bereavement coordinator, mental health therapist.

John Knighton, co-founder of the Redwood Stoa.

Transcript

Part I

(MONTAGE)

We start in the Middle East. Hamas has launched the biggest attack on Israel in years.

2023 will go down as the hottest year on record.

We have to act.

Southern California is under its first ever tropical storm watch.

First Republic is now the third major bank to fail since March.

Flames and plumes of smoke lit up the sky in East Ohio after a train derailed.

The deadliest earthquake that Morocco has suffered in more than 100 years.

The number of people killed in earthquakes in Turkey and Syria has risen to nearly 50,000.

Palestinians are dying in the tens of thousands, but we'll continue to say it is us who are not a glitching humanity.

Another mass shooting in this country. 10 people are dead.

In Mississippi, in Louisville, Kentucky.

In an elementary school in Nashville.

In no way in the world y'all are trying to ban TikTok and y'all haven't even flinched at changing the good news.

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: The bad news, the catastrophes, the never ending rush of history bowling over us all.

It's too much, too overwhelming. It just makes you want to 'Ah!'

RYAN HOLIDAY: There's a great quote from Flaubert that I think about. He says, there was this moment, he says, between Cicero and Marcus Aurelius, he said, when the gods had died out, but Christ had not yet come, he said that man stood alone in the universe.

CHAKRABARTI: This is Ryan Holiday. He says that time of humanism healing a loss of faith, neatly bookended by the ancient Greeks and Romans, is captured by one thing. The practice of stoicism.

HOLIDAY: To me, the essence of Stoic philosophy, what I feel like I can't repeat enough times, is this idea that we don't control what happens, we control how we respond to what happens.

And the idea is that the Stoic responds always with courage, self discipline, justice, and wisdom. So that's what we're doing. And that's what I find myself saying in all these different mediums. And what you find when you pick up Marcus Aurelius, or Seneca, or Epictetus, or Cleanthes, or Zeno, or any of the ancients who wrote about this stuff, is some version of that repeated over and over again in all the different ways and contexts that a person can encounter it.

CHAKRABARTI: Holiday is a best-selling author and podcaster, whose millions of adherents follow his interpretations of Stoic philosophy.

HOLIDAY [ONLINE VIDEO]: Your opinions are your problem. Epictetus says, look, when you're offended, you have to realize that it takes two to tango. He says, we are complicit in the taking of offense. You don't have to have an opinion about this.

You don't have to take it personally. You can think the best of it. You can ignore it.

HOLIDAY: So I was in college and I got introduced to Marcus Aurelius's meditations. Someone recommended that I read the Stoics and I was sitting at the table in my college apartment, and it's just this magical book. You're reading the private thoughts of the most powerful man in the world, who's talking to himself about how to be a better person, how to manage his temper, how to think about his habits, what his obligations as a human being are.

CHAKRABARTI: That's quite a remarkable revelation for a young person. The mighty Marcus Aurelius, Emperor of Rome, a man who controlled a sizable portion of the known human world at the time. Even he needed a guiding philosophy to allow sane passage through the world, a Caligula he was not.

HOLIDAY: What I was interested in is the same reason that a lot of young men and young women, but professionals and ambitious people are attracted to stoicism.

At first, it's about what it can do for you, how to help you manage your emotions, good habits, good practices. How to exist in a world of frustrating, obnoxious, annoying people.

Questions to ask yourself every single day from the Stoics. What is the worst case scenario? That's the exercise of premeditatio malorum, planning in advance for adversity.

And then Seneca also says, you should ask yourself at the end of each day, where did I fall short? Where did I improve? And where can I do better?

CHAKRABARTI: Now, stoicism, today, does find some of its biggest fans amongst the Silicon Valley set, or Broicism, as Holiday jokes. But if it were just that, just tech bros trying to optimize their emotional regulation for maximum efficiency, then stoicism's modern resurgent really wouldn't be worth note.

But millions of people, from all walks of life, in fact, are turning to stoicism. Men and women, white collar and blue, people of all ages, seeking something to help find direction and peace.

HOLIDAY: We've seen a collapse in trust in so many different institutions, schools don't teach the humanities the way they once did, and people have turned away from the church.

And so philosophy as a guide to the good life, how to be a good person and how to flourish as a person. I think takes on a new residence and a new urgency in a world of similar sort of decline. And then also, as you said, turbulence and dysfunction.

CHAKRABARTI: But in the grand tradition of American self-reliance and self regard. It can seem like the modern day practice of stoicism is pretty self-absorbed. All about me, all about what the ancient Greeks and Romans can do for me and my inability to cope. But holiday says no. That's not what it's about at all. He says, in fact, what people don't realize when they pick up his books, podcasts, or online posts, is that stoicism makes people better for themselves.

And for the societies they live in.

HOLIDAY: And so I think this idea of stoicism opening you up and making you better, as opposed to hardening you and making you more disinterested, is a sort of a secret part of the stoic trajectory that a lot of people who maybe are reacting against how popular it is online or the sort of quotification of it, are missing.

That's the point. What draws you in is all these things it can do for you, but if you're doing it right, it opens you up and it gives you a sort of a moral compass with which to judge your own behavior and to operate in a world where many people are not. But it's working on you as you are working with those ideas and hopefully making you better as you go.

HOLIDAY [ONLINE POST]: You're going to die. You could die tomorrow, you could die the day after tomorrow, but it is a certainty you are going to die. You could leave life right now. Marcus Aurelius says, let that determine what you do and say and think.

CHAKRABARTI: That last bit there was from one of Ryan Holiday's online posts. Holiday is a best selling author of books such as The Daily Stoic, The Obstacle is the Way, Discipline is Destiny, Courage is Calling, and The Lives of the Stoics.

So what is it about this ancient Greco-Roman practice that is finding so many followers today? I have to say, when we said we were going to do a show about stoicism, we heard from a whole heck of a lot of you. So joining me now in the studio is Margaret Graver. She's a professor of classics at Dartmouth College and author of Seneca: The Literary Philosopher, amongst other books.

Professor Graver, welcome to you.

MARGARET GRAVER: Hi.

CHAKRABARTI: Also with us today is Nancy Sherman. She's a philosophy professor at Georgetown University and author of Stoic Wisdom: Ancient Lessons from Modern Resilience, and Afterwar: Healing the Moral Wounds of Our Soldiers. Professor Sherman, welcome to you.

NANCY SHERMAN: Hi. Nice to be here, Meghna.

CHAKRABARTI: It's great to have you both with us because I have been captivated by how often I see amongst, for example, some of the YouTubers I follow, that they are quite dedicated to this idea of stoicism. And Professor Graver, let's start with a little bit of the history. Because we mentioned some names, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, et cetera.

How far back in time and where would we go to first pinpoint the rise or the flourishing of stoicism?

GRAVER: Sure, Meghna. So what we're talking about is a system of philosophy that originated in Athens in the 3rd century BCE. We speak of the Stoics rather than of any single name. Because there were really three founders of ancient stoicism.

Interestingly, none of them was an Athenian. So Zeno of Citium was from Cyprus. His pupil, Cleanthes of Assos, was from Asia Minor, what we think of as Turkey. And then the third and maybe the most brilliant of these three powerful thinkers was Chrysippus of Soli, also from Asia Minor. Then those three, although they did write voluminously, we only have snippets of their work.

Most of what we can read now of stoicism was from later authors, from the Roman, Cicero, was not a Stoic, but was very knowledgeable about stoicism, wrote a lot about it. And then especially the figures that Ryan Holiday mentioned, Seneca, a century later than Cicero, Epictetus, several generations later, and then Marcus Aurelius in the third century.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So we're going to talk about all of them more in just a moment, but let's jump back and forth here, while we learn about the ancient history. So Professor Sherman. You heard Ryan Holiday say that that he thinks the human experience now, in a certain sense, it does reflect the human experience that gave rise to stoicism in Ancient Greek and then flourishing in Ancient Rome.

What's your take on that?

SHERMAN: Certainly. Thanks very much. First of all. We certainly feel that we're in cataclysmic times with climate change, wars, partisan divides of the like that we've never seen. And, of course, the huge equity differences, income differences that create the resentments and the grievances and the sense of not getting the work you want and the like, so I think there's certainly some resonating with it. That said, a lot of the people that initially got interested didn't have those problems. That is by initially, the popular appeal, they were tech bros who felt that they had to dream big and contain their egos a bit as they dreamt big.

That's how Tim Ferriss once put it, the author of Four Day Week, that it was a way to monitor yourself a little bit. If your dreams got a bit too grandiose. And I think that still is some of it, but there's definitely the idea of wanting to have a religion that's secular. Where it doesn't require tithing, belonging to this synagogue, mosque, church, and all the buy up that comes with it.

In this case, you just tune in to your favorite podcasts, read a little bit of Seneca in the morning, or Marcus Aurelius in the morning.

Part II

CHAKRABARTI: As I said a little earlier, when we told you On Point listeners last week that we were going to do this show, we heard from a ton of folks.

So for example, here's Sophie Magon in Michigan.

SOPHIE MAGON: A lot of times now the younger generation has unlimited access to news and horrifying things all the time. And so learning how to process those things in a way that doesn't affect your mental health in such a negative way, like turning on the internet and seeing all these deaths and things and just being able to process them and appreciate them and feel them, but not have it overtake your life.

I feel like it's a really strong point of stoicism nowadays.

CHAKRABARTI: So that's Sophie in Michigan, and this is Nick Forbes, who called us from Salt Lake City, Utah, and he shared with us how his parents were divorced when he was very young. He found himself struggling with his Mormon religion. After that, he fell into drugs and alcohol in college.

NICK FORBES: And then the founding principles behind stoicism encourage self-control, and that really helped me in my journey of sobriety. And in a world where everyone is striving to be identical to each other, be different. That's the main takeaway that I got was, you know what, you are different, and that's okay.

That's an incredibly uplifting thing.

CHAKRABARTI: That's Nick from Salt Lake City, Utah. I'm joined today by Nancy Sherman and Margaret Graver. And Professor Graver, like I said, I want to bounce back and forth between the ancients and today. And you hear in those calls, and also in how I even introduced the show, this idea that stoicism is about self-control, self-moderation.

Is that how the ancient Greeks that you had mentioned first thought about and wrote about stoicism, or was it completely different in the Greek context?

GRAVER: I wouldn't say completely different. I would say that the practices you speak of and the strategies for gaining control of your life were a part of ancient stoicism.

But it's important to realize for someone like me, that we are talking about a philosophy here. Whether these are thinkers who are deeply analytical, and the ethical orientation that we hear so much about from Ryan Holiday and others, was only one branch element of a system that also included, for starters, logic.

These are the people who invented propositional logic. Cosmology and physics, that's their terminology. We would say, perhaps natural science. So you have Greek philosophers, as many people know, who talked about atoms and void. That's not the Stoic approach. They're much more interested in energy, movement, events, which they sum up in a concept of what they call designing fire. The energy that pervades the universe and gives rise to all events. These people are also fatalists. And then that also involves a theology. The designing fire is, hello, also God, a philosophical theology here.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, I was going to say, it's a philosophical thought, it's not necessarily a religious one.

GRAVER: The comparisons to religion, they are helpful in a way but then there is this thought through as part of a philosophical system.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so actually the idea of that designing fire or being concerned with the energy that makes the universe actually seems very scientific to me. Energy being the only thing that cannot be created or destroyed, mostly, of all the factors that we know that make up the universe.

But was the development, centuries long development of stoicism, in response to something in ancient Greece or not? Was it just one of the ways in which the Greeks were thinking about and exploring the world?

GRAVER: It's probably helpful to think about stoicism in response to its not so very distant predecessors, Plato and Aristotle, but were both very important predecessors for stoicism and a tradition that goes back to Socrates of what is now called virtue ethics.

Stoics take up those strands that you find in Plato's depictions of Socrates, for instance, and make it into a tighter and more coherent and rigorous system, grounded in the idea that the human being is essentially a rational creature. Not to say that we always behave sensibly, but that our feelings and our behaviors arise from our beliefs.

Beliefs about value and beliefs about the world, and that we can self-correct. So if we are shown that we are mistaken about something, we have the impulse to correct our thinking. When we change our beliefs, we also change the way we feel about things and also the way that we act.

And that's just a design feature of the human species, so I spoke of designing fire, you have a providential deity who is designing the world, and this is how we, the kind of creature we are, is designed.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay.

GRAVER: Central fact about us.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, quick question, and then, and Professor Sherman, I promise I'll come back to you. When speaking, when focusing so much about a particular way of thinking, I sometimes find on this show that I get, I forget about the broader context. So just to place stoicism in the overall expanse of Greek thought, was it practiced by a lot of Greeks? Was it a fringe thing? How can we understand its influence on ancient Greek society?

GRAVER: To the extent that ancient Greek society did have intellectual activity, discussion, and philosophy as an important part of it, I'm not saying for everyone, but for people who could read, that portion of the population that could read, or had the luxury of doing this, would have been seen, was seen as a dominant philosophy for approximately five centuries, from the third century right through to the second century CE and beyond.

So these were the primary inheritors of the tradition of Plato and Aristotle.

CHAKRABARTI: I see. Okay. Fascinating. So Professor Sherman now let's move a little bit into the Roman period. The Romans did adopt a lot of what the Greeks created. But how do you see stoicism playing out amongst or playing out in ancient Rome?

SHERMAN: So let me just speak to that and also back up a tiny bit. They are. Very much, historics are very much practicing a philosophy that had deeper roots. As Margaret mentioned, Margaret Graver mentioned the Socratic background and Platonic background, but also Aristotle. And one of the critical pieces that Aristotle lays down is not just that we're rational animals, but our self-sufficiency is relational.

It's not alone that we survive and thrive and flourish. It's with each other in families and cities and in the greater community. And that often gets missed, even in the Roman practice, where it is very much about calming yourself, as Holiday said, at the end of the day, and it's yourself.

It's seeing how you can improve, how you can progress, yes, with virtue and virtue ethics, but very much a sort of a self-optimization, you might say. But that misses another strand that really was dominant in Aristotle, and there are strands of it even in the Roman Stoics. Marcus, who's writing his Meditations on the Battlefield, eight years of horrific, of campaigning along the Danube where he's probably sick with the Antonine Plague.

And he says, if you've ever seen a hand or a foot or a leg severed off from the rest of the trunk, that's what we make of ourselves when we cut ourselves off from each other. And they have this idea that we're in a commonwealth.

... The idea is you're a citizen of the universe, a citizen of the world, and you are connected, and so that would have been a part of Roman practice as well, but it's meshed with the idea that you are a self-critic, bring yourself, you know, before the court of opinion, in a sense, at the end of the day, Seneca says when it's quiet, his wife is asleep.

He's thinking about his failures during the day. And I often think it's very much a bit of self-flagellation or castigation. It's not very common to go through a litany of failures. But it is very much about how you improve. But there's also this sense, as I say, this strand, you see it in this quote from Marcus on the battlefield, he must have been thinking of a cadre and how we need each other to fight.

But also, Heracles, a lesser-known Roman during the Roman period, says, imagine a person at the center, and then all the concentric circles outwards. Your job is to zealously transfer the outer circle into the inner. To connect. And you can only zealously transfer if you have a sort of imagination that helps you appreciate the sense of the other in your own world.

And so I think that often gets missed in the worry about the upheavals of our personal lives.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. Can I just jump in here?

SHERMAN: Stabilize.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. Can I just jump in here for a quick second? Because Marcus Aurelius in particular fascinates me from the little I know about him. And in total transparency here, whenever I hear the name of that famed ancient Roman, honestly, the movie Gladiator is the first thing that comes to mind. When Russell Crowe's character of Maximus goes into the tent during one of the great wars that you were talking about, Professor Sherman, and there is Richard Harris's Marcus Aurelius just writing as this devastation is going on around him.

But as I said at the top of the show, and I'll ask both of you this, he was an emperor of Rome. If there was anyone who had power to make change in the environment around him, it was someone like that. But yet he is one of the most famed philosophers or at least writers of stoicism, which, I'm just looking at some quotes from him online.

'External things are not the problem. It's your assessment of them, which you can erase right now.' And then he says, 'Think of the life you have lived until now as over and as a dead man, see what's left as a bonus and live it according to nature.' Can you tell me a little bit more about Marcus Aurelius and his relationship or why he was Such a stoic?

SHERMAN: This would have been his philosophy. It was taught then, and he viewed Epictetus as an inspiration of sorts, an enslaved person. Epictetus, we know, was enslaved around the time of Nero. But learned philosophy and started lecturing on it and had pithy witticisms that would appeal then and appeal now to the public and Marcus presumably came across them.

There's also the sense, he's got to be able to make it in 8 years of horrific war. He is presumably very sick. The fact that he commands enormous power doesn't mean that he's not aware of the dangers of the power. And also, how he is beholden to others for his success, whether or not he thanks in the acknowledgments to his book, you might say, at the beginning of the book or the end.

We probably think it wasn't where it appears in the beginning, but he thanks his grandmother. He thanks his mother. And he thanks, my favorite is the grammarian who wasn't, who didn't get angry at his howlers, when he misspoke. So he has a sense of humility. And I think he's trying to practice humility, despite his power and the abuses of power.

And of course, the dangers of death out there, he's dying, and he's got to make it back to Rome, and his brothers died. So these are hard times. There's no doubt that he needs to toughen it up a bit.

CHAKRABARTI: Let me, the idea of the Marcus rule is needing to tough it up. It really sticks with me. But Professor Graver, I know you want to jump. You want to jump in here.

GRAVER: Just to say that anyone who has ever held a leadership position knows that things don't always go the way you want them to. Marcus, as a leader, amazing leader of a world community, is in the same position. You can try, but you're not guaranteed of success. That person needs a coping strategy, just as much as anyone else, maybe even more.

I want to go back to something that Nancy emphasized, and I would also emphasize, which is the social dimension of stoicism. I had stressed that the human being is by design and inherently and essentially a rational creature. By the same token, a social creature. Even when we're babies or very young children, love to figure things out for themselves.

That's the rational nature beginning to manifest itself. But also, even a baby smiles at their caregiver more than at some random person. That's the beginnings of community right there. So Marcus, as a leader of the community, has a responsibility grounded in that design feature of the human, to work for the beautiful community.

It's not just the good self. It's the good community or the ideal community that one is striving to achieve. That's the responsibility, and that is pursued vigorously, energetically, at the same time, recognizing that not everything we try to achieve is going to be achieved.

CHAKRABARTI: That is such a good point, because, again, to emphasize that the responsibility to community was a overt and active part of stoic practice, right?

And it just gets me thinking to what Ryan Holiday said earlier, that maybe that's not the first thing these days that pulls folks into learning about stoicism, right? It's the effect on the self. He insists though, that it can be then, to use a terrible ancient pun. That could be the Trojan horse. (LAUGHS)

I'm sorry, I couldn't resist! That then gets people to think about society a little bit more. Oh my god, they're going to take me off the air right now for terrible ancient puns. But you know what? We have to we have to take a quick break here. When we come back, I want to, again, place us firmly into how this ancient philosophy is really finding a lot of resonance with people today.

Part III

CHAKRABARTI: I want to just continue to reflect the resonance that Stoicism had amongst or has amongst many of our own listeners.

This is Diane Allison from Spokane, Washington.

DIANE ALLISON: I practice the stoic principle of the fact that I have control over my mind, but not outside events. By, oh, you can control how you feel about others. You can control how you treat others. And I guess that's stoical, instead of complaining that people are all evil and unpleasant, you conclude that people are pretty nice and they do treat you pretty nice when you treat them nicely.

CHAKRABARTI: And here's Christian Boyd from Waukesha, Wisconsin, who says he's a quasi-practicing Stoic. He's a Presbyterian clergy person and says despite what people think, Christianity and Stoicism can exist together.

CHRISTIAN BOYD: And I think a lot of people may be turning to Stoicism today because it is, it doesn't have as much cultural baggage to it, especially in the American context where religion has become overwhelmingly heavy and divisive.

So stoicism seems to be a lot cleaner, philosophical approach to organizing your life.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so there's Christian Boyd saying Christianity and stoicism can exist together. On the other hand, Joel Karen from Salt Lake City, Utah, he grew up in the Mormon church and eventually decided to leave his faith.

JOEL KAREN: Stoicism encourages me to be the person I had hoped to be as a Christian. But without the all-seeing eye of God threatening to punish me if I disobey his word. As a practicing Stoic, I get to be honest, kind, ethical, moral, helpful, benevolent, and all those things. Because I choose to, not because God commanded me to. Stoicism works for me very well. I'm a much better person outside of religion as a stoic than I ever was inside religion as a believer.

CHAKRABARTI: So a couple of On Point listeners there reflecting what you Professor Sherman had said earlier about it's not just a way of being, but a system of belief that seems to be really attractive to a lot of Americans now.

With that thought in mind, I'd like to introduce you to one more. This fellow.

RYAN MULKOWSKY: My name is Ryan Mulkowsky. I live just outside of Atlanta, Georgia. And currently I work as a hospice chaplain and bereavement coordinator, and I also work as a mental health therapist.

CHAKRABARTI: Back in 2021, Ryan wrote a blog post whose title was Stoicism Saved My Life, and we wanted to know more.

MULKOWSKY: I was raised fairly religious, Christian. Very conservative evangelical for a long time, and I was actually conservative evangelical pastor for a long time and then started just moving through the world and started interacting with people. I was kept in a very in a small bubble and didn't really have a lot of friends that thought differently than me or look differently than me or anything like that.

And when I became an adult and I started exploring what did life look like outside of my little bubble? It created a lot of questions and questions created a lot of doubts for me. And for me, it was a really slow process. It wasn't like overnight, I decided, okay, I'm not going to be a Christian anymore.

CHAKRABARTI: Ryan had been questioning his faith for years, but he says it wasn't until about 2019 that he decided he needed to move on from Christianity.

MULKOWSKY: Leaving that behind and everything that went with that. Was just really hard, I wasn't just leaving a job. I was leaving a community. I was leaving friends.

My entire academic career was built on that. So when I left that, it was, I felt completely lost. And didn't know what I was going to do with my life and I came across stoicism also, in part, because I got therapy and as my therapist was working with me, supporting me and trying to find, discover for myself, how am I going to change?

How am I going to move through these situations? I realized that cognitive behavioral therapy, which is a very popular form of therapy, actually has its roots in stoic philosophy.

CHAKRABARTI: And then the pandemic hit. Ryan worked in hospice and found those years to be incredibly trying. He says it was during the pandemic when he really leaned into Stoicism as a guiding philosophy for his daily life.

Now, a few years on, he says he's lucky that his parents and in laws continue to love and support him, even if not totally understanding why he left Christianity. He says he still remembers the night when he told his wife.

MULKOWSKY: It was a hard conversation. We talked for hours that night. I still remember it to this day, sitting in the living room.

I remember exactly where I sat, where she sat. I remember what was shared. I remember the tears in her eyes. I remember the tears in my eyes. It was a very difficult conversation. We talked for hours that night after the kids were asleep and everything. But she was so supportive. She just came up and gave me a hug and a kiss and she said, I love you no matter what.

And we'll navigate what is it like for me to have a faith and you not to have a faith? And what does that look like for our kids? We don't have to figure that out today. It was just her showing her love and devotion to me, meant the world to me.

CHAKRABARTI: That's Ryan Mulkowsky. He's a hospice chaplain, bereavement coordinator, and mental health therapist just outside of Atlanta, Georgia.

And Professor Graver, we wanted to actually feature a lot of those voices because many people, when they called us, they talked about either trying to find a way for Stoicism to fit into their current system of belief, most of the voices you heard there were Christian, or as Professor Sherman said, it seemed to be a better way of being than their current organized religion.

Why do you think that might be?

GRAVER: I think I'm not eager to talk about comparisons of stoicism with religious systems. I think we might want to go back to what I see as the core of pretty much everyone you've heard from, which is the idea of having a coping strategy for difficult modern world with a lot of stuff coming at us all at once.

The idea of being able to claim the self, and in particular to gain some measure of control over our emotional responses. So this is indeed part of ancient stoicism. I stressed earlier in the show that the core of ancient stoic ethics is about the essentially rational nature of the human being, but that doesn't mean that we always behave in a sensible way, far from it.

What it does mean is that both our behaviors and our feelings arise from things that we believe and the ways that we reason and put together our beliefs. It's important that the emotional response is also very carefully analyzed in the ancient texts. Emotions, the way you feel, the boiling up of anger, the clutch of fear, these things are also behaviors.

And arise from our rational mind in the same way as our actions and beliefs do. It's true that they don't always feel like something that is under our control. Chrysippus had the wonderful analogy to a runner heading downhill. In the moment when you're running, you can't necessarily stop. But it doesn't mean that running is not something that you chose to do.

So we need to give ourselves a little time in the moment of strong emotion. But afterwards, with some discussion, some reading, some working with other people, we can rethink those beliefs that are grounding our emotions and the values in particular. And make a difference for ourselves going forward.

CHAKRABARTI: For the way both of you described what the practice of stoicism allows a person to do, in a sense I really feel for a lot of the callers who said, I was a lifelong Christian, but there wasn't, something wasn't working for me. Because, as actually one of our listeners said, it's still a religion that externalizes a powerful deity, right?

And your practice is in trying to be in line with that external deity, but I think they found much more promise in the sort of, like you said, the internal practice of changing oneself. Now, that brings me to a point which I've been dying to get to, all throughout this conversation. We're really focused on the Greeks and Romans, because we're talking about Stoicism, but every single thing both of you have described sounds like it actually has an even more ancient history to me, and I'm thinking of ancient eastern philosophies, particularly Buddhism, if you ask me.

But we did get a caller, we got a caller who pointed out exactly this. This is Zubin Billimoria from Los Angeles.

ZUBIN BILLIMORIA: When one focuses internally on oneself and one's own internal development and searching for the purpose in life, it automatically ends up that the external world surroundings around you, immediate surroundings around you, would not matter as much and you stay dissociated from the life around you.

Taking it just as it is, watching it like a movie and saying, this is what this is, and there is nothing that I could have done that would have changed this moment. And if there was, I learned a lesson from it and move on. I don't think, honestly, there's anything new that stoicism has brought to the table, unless one could say that it was probably an idea that has now been repackaged by westerners, for the Western world. And that's what makes it suddenly seem so much more interesting.

CHAKRABARTI: Professor Sherman that holds a lot of sway with me. My father used to always say that one of the goals was to free yourself from attachment. And that didn't mean necessarily mean go live in a cave, but that free yourself from attachment so that you can actually operate in complete, being completely present in the world.

And that came from his Buddhist practice. What do you think about that?

SHERMAN: Oh, there's certainly overlaps, whatever the cross fertilization was in the ancient world. Stoics are certainly interested, as Margaret was saying, in retraining your emotions so that you don't have the same sticky acquisitive approach mechanisms or panicky aversion avoidance mechanism.

So you're trying to let go a little bit of the unruly passions, and train more, train calmer ones, but there are a few critical differences. I've practiced Buddhist meditation in my life, and there's a sense in which you really empty your mind and try to quiet it. And that's part of the idea of the selflessness.

And as you read the meditative practices of the ancients, they really were into, if not God punishing you, the self punishes. Seneca can be quite hard on himself. At the end of the day, you are the judge before yourself. What'd you do wrong? Did you scream at someone? Did you think you should be sitting at the dais when they put you in the back of the room at a sub table? Yeah. And I do remember this when Carl Reiner died his good friend Steve Martin, just prior to that, his good friend Steve Martin said am I, is it too late? He said, no, I'm just up here, going through my litany of failures.

It's that sort of self-examination that can be overly critical. And so there's a sense in which the self's improvement is really what the ancient world has always been about. And the idea of letting go of the ego is a much more eastern notion, even though there's definitely similarities, and permanence is a Buddhist notion.

Whereas the stoics think less about impermanence and more about, Have you done everything you can? And then it's time to let go.

CHAKRABARTI: Those are important distinctions. I see what you're talking about here. And I just want to give Professor Graver a chance to jump in.

GRAVER: I would echo some of that.

It's certainly true that there are some commonalities with Buddhist practice. The idea of self-knowledge, the idea of rethinking your desires, the idea of correcting your own attitudes, but also this Buddhist ideal of tranquility. And of having an ideal version of human existence to aspire to.

These things are also part of ancient Stoicism. Maybe not from coming from the same place, but getting to a place that for many people today will feel quite similar. And I think I would just add that for ancient Stoics, and maybe also for some modern Stoics, that this is experienced as liberation. As a kind of freedom.

SHERMAN: It is a freedom. Can I just add one thing?

CHAKRABARTI: Yes. Yeah. And then I have one last quick question. But we only have a minute now. You got 10 seconds and I'm going to give you that last question.

SHERMAN: Equanimity. Yes. But one thing that's often missing in these accounts is changing the social structure and not just your attitude to it.

And that I find really problematic, even ancient and modern. Social structure matters.

CHAKRABARTI: So I want to sneak this last one in here. We've just got under 60 seconds left. But what, one of the things that fascinates me about this is not some, is not just how many Americans these days are finding stoicism attractive, but all the principles both of you talked about are actually the opposite of what we teach young children today in school.

You're laughing because, right? It's true. Like the centrality of feeling, like being safe in all circumstances. About if you're hurt, it doesn't matter what the intention of the other person was about the facts are feelings. This is a completely different way of thinking. Professor Sherman, I'm going to give you the last 10 seconds here.

Should we be teaching stoicism in schools instead?

SHERMAN: I don't actually think so. I actually think being able to feel is critically important and not just changing how you feel and reducing the impact of others. I would say having resilience, he thought of as a social structure. And so that idea of Marcus, if you see yourself cut off from others, that's what we make of ourselves.

And we cut ourselves off from the community, having a supportive community. And the ways in which we support through understanding is really the way to strengthen. And I think that's an enlightened view of Stoicism that we need to teach our children, if through the Stoic texts or not.

wbur.org · by Hilary McQuilkin


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


De Oppresso Liber,
David Maxwell
Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy
Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation
Editor, Small Wars Journal
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161


If you do not read anything else in the 2017 National Security Strategy read this on page 14:

"A democracy is only as resilient as its people. An informed and engaged citizenry is the fundamental requirement for a free and resilient nation. For generations, our society has protected free press, free speech, and free thought. Today, actors such as Russia are using information tools in an attempt to undermine the legitimacy of democracies. Adversaries target media, political processes, financial networks, and personal data. The American public and private sectors must recognize this and work together to defend our way of life. No external threat can be allowed to shake our shared commitment to our values, undermine our system of government, or divide our Nation."
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