Quotes of the Day:
Leaders' statements have meaning and impact:
"The defensive perimeter runs from the Ryukyus to the Philippine Islands. Our relations, our defensive relations with the Philippines are contained in agreements between us. Those agreements are being loyally carried out and will be loyally carried out. Both peoples have learned by bitter experience the vital connections between our mutual defense requirements."
-Secretary of State Dean Acheson, 12 January 1950.
(Note: Acheson outlined the US defensive perimeter in the Pacific as running from the Ryukyu Islands to the Philippines, notably excluding Korea from this perimeter. This speech was interpreted by some as giving a "green light" for North Korea to invade South Korea, since Korea was not included in the stated US defensive perimeter. While not definitively "giving a green light," Acheson's omission of Korea from the defensive perimeter outlined in his January 1950 speech was a factor that influenced the flawed calculations leading to the North Korean invasion and start of the Korean War)
'I hate wars and violence, but if they come I don't see why we women should just wave our men a proud goodbye and then knit them balaclavas.'"
– Nancy Wake, Special Operations Executive (SOE)
"A war is not won if the defeated enemy has not been turned into a friend."
– Eric Hoffer
1. Operations Order: OVERLORD
2. How Israel Pulled Off a High-Risk Hostage Rescue
3. Despite Biden’s urging, cease-fire deal shows no progress
4. Legacy of America’s past battles looms over Israel-Gaza crisis
5. Things Worth Remembering: Why Forgiveness Matters (Hannah Arendt)
6. Chechen man was killed near US military base — what happened?
7. Why Deploying Western Special Forces to Ukraine may Help Prevent Global Conflicts
8. Why Russia Is Happy at War
9. 82nd Airborne paratroopers cut down a 101st flag from an iconic bar on D-Day
10. This Is What It Looks Like When AI Eats the World
11. D-Day, 80 years later, contains lessons for defending Taiwan
12. Chinese media pushes 'Philippines as aggressor’ narrative before viral Marcos deepfake
13. 'New Containment' Strategy Is Doomed To Fail
1. Operations Order: OVERLORD
Please go to the link to read this four page OPORD (yes I am sure only nerds like me like to read OPORDs)
As Strategy Central (Home of Stratbot AI) says this is a model of simplicity for modern planners.
https://www.strategycentral.io/post/operations-order-overlord?postId=297ca226-5b23-4761-bbd4-e14f00ffe689&utm
Operations Order: OVERLORD
They Certainly Don't Make Like This Anymore
For the largest seabourne invasion of a continent in history, four pages of the Operations Order are sufficient to know and understand the plan. If you have not read it, you must. It's simplicity should be a model for modern planners and operations officers.
2. How Israel Pulled Off a High-Risk Hostage Rescue
How Israel Pulled Off a High-Risk Hostage Rescue
Noon raid sparks joy in Israel, fury in Gaza; ‘We have the diamonds in our hands’
https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/how-israel-pulled-off-a-high-risk-hostage-rescue-f2008e41?mod=hp_lead_pos1
By Marcus WalkerFollow and Dov LieberFollow
June 8, 2024 4:02 pm ET
TEL AVIV—The searing midday sun afforded the Israeli commandos the element of surprise.
It was an unusual tactic, and risky. The fear, Israeli military officials said, was that Hamas guards would kill the four hostages as soon as they detected the specialist Israeli counterterrorism teams approaching. But if they could pull it off, it would give Israel a big psychological boost in a war that has been turning into a quagmire while steadily isolating the country from the rest of the world.
At 11:25 a.m. local time on Saturday, the Israeli military’s Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi was watching the situation from a command center of the Shin Bet security agency and gave the order to go.
The Israeli teams overwhelmed the captors hunkered down in two apartment blocks in Nuseirat, in the center of the Gaza Strip, Israel’s military later said. The teams came under fire as they left the buildings, leading to a street battle before the soldiers extracted the four hostages via helicopters on the beach.
One Israeli officer was fatally wounded. The Israeli military said about 100 Palestinians were killed or wounded, including Hamas militants and civilians caught in the crossfire.
Palestinians carry a body following an Israeli raid in central Gaza on Saturday. PHOTO: AHMAD SALEM/BLOOMBERG NEWS
Hamas, which seized over 240 hostages in the Oct. 7 attack on southern Israel that triggered the war, called Saturday’s Israeli operation “brutal and barbaric.” It said 210 Palestinians were killed and 400 wounded, without specifying the number that were combatants.
Saturday’s rescue was a rare moment of national joy in Israel in the midst of a deep national crisis. In Tel Aviv, beachgoers cheered when a lifeguard reported the rescue on the PA system. Some television anchors broke into tears as they announced the news.
For Palestinian civilians sheltering from the eight-month war in Gaza, it was another day of airstrikes, death and mourning. Residents in Nuseirat described it as one of the worst days of the war, saying they didn’t know what was happening as bombs rained down. Some also voiced anger at Hamas for holding hostages in residential buildings, endangering the whole area.
The site of an Israeli airstrike in Nuseirat, in central Gaza, on Saturday. PHOTO: RAMADAN ABED/REUTERS
Before Saturday, Israeli military actions had saved only three hostages held in Gaza by Hamas or other militants. Often, Israeli forces have had intelligence on hostages’ whereabouts but the location made it too difficult to bring them out alive, according to military officials.
Acting when the captors least expected it—in broad daylight—provided an advantage that justified the risk, said the Israeli military’s chief spokesman, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari.
Gaza City
Mediterranean Sea
Nuseirat
Camp
ISRAEL
GAZA STRIP
Rafah
Detail
WEST
BANK
EGYPT
2 miles
ISR.
2 km
He described an elaborate operation that he compared with Israel’s most famous hostage rescue—the 1976 raid at the Entebbe airport in Uganda, when Israeli special forces saved dozens of hostages taken by Palestinian hijackers.
For months, a small team of U.S. military personnel has been helping the Israeli search for hostages, using drones. Before Saturday’s raid, 120 people taken on Oct. 7 remained captive in Gaza; many are believed to have died.
In May, Israel located the female hostage Noa Argamani in a low-rise apartment block in Nuseirat, central Gaza, and three male hostages in another building about 200 yards away: Almog Meir Jan, Andrei Kozlov and Shlomi Ziv.The Gazan families residing in the apartments were present there, together with the Hamas captors and their prisoners, Hagari said.
Raiding only one building would alert captors at the other location, so the Israelis decided to raid both buildings simultaneously, he said.
The Israeli police’s counterterrorist unit, Yamam, trained for the raid on models of the two buildings, Hagari said. The unit reached central Gaza from Israel, he said, and denied rumors that it had arrived via the U.S.-built pier designed for aid delivery.
Hagari declined to say whether the officers were disguised as Palestinian civilians, a tactic that Israeli special forces have previously used.
Once the order to proceed was given, the Israeli air force struck a preplanned list of Hamas targets in Nuseirat, creating cover for the rescue raid. Ground forces from Israel’s paratroopers division stood ready to support the operation.
Smoke and debris rises after Israeli airstrikes on the Nuseirat refugee camp in Gaza. Video: Associated Press
The Yamam commandos reached the apartment entrances undetected, the families of the hostages told Israeli TV later.
One Yamam team stormed the first-floor apartment where Argamani was held and took the captors by surprise, according to the military.
On the third floor of the other building, a gunfight with the guards broke out. The Yamam squad leader, Arnon Zamora, was hit and later died of his wounds.
But the hostages were alive. “We have the diamonds in our hands,” the commandos radioed to the command center.
A rescued hostage, Andrei Kozlov, disembarked with Israeli soldiers from a military helicopter at Sheba Medical Center after his rescue on Saturday. PHOTO: GIDEON MARKOWICZ/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
Leaving the buildings, the teams came under fire from Hamas fighters armed with rocket-propelled grenades, Hagari said. He accused Hamas of deliberately firing at the Israelis from streets full of civilians.
Israeli airstrikes and ground forces hit the militants. The many dead likely included both fighters and bystanders.
Video footage shared by the military showed a CH-53 Sea Stallion helicopter loading soldiers and hostages before whisking them off the beach. Tears and relief awaited them in Israel. In Gaza, more anger and smoldering rubble.
Aftermath of Israeli airstrikes in the Nuseirat refugee camp. Video: Associated Press
Abeer Ayyoub and Gordon Lubold contributed to this article.
Write to Marcus Walker at Marcus.Walker@wsj.com and Dov Lieber at dov.lieber@wsj.com
Corrections & Amplifications
Video footage shared by the military showed a CH-53 Sea Stallion helicopter loading soldiers and hostages. An earlier version of this article incorrectly named the helicopter model as a CH-35 Sea Stallion. (Corrected on June 8)
3. Despite Biden’s urging, cease-fire deal shows no progress
So did we expect Israel not to mount a rescue operation?
Despite Biden’s urging, cease-fire deal shows no progress
Rescue operation may diminish prospects for U.S.-backed plan to release remaining hostages in Gaza, flood humanitarian aid, permanently stop the fighting and withdraw Israeli troops.
By Karen DeYoung and Susannah George
June 8, 2024 at 6:02 p.m. EDT
The Washington Post · by Karen DeYoung · June 8, 2024
More than a week after President Biden declared a “decisive moment” in the eight-month Israel-Gaza war and beseeched both sides to quickly approve a U.S.-backed cease-fire deal, there is dwindling evidence that either has bought what he is selling.
Despite Biden’s personal and very public urging, his dispatch of senior administration officials to the region, the drafting of a new United Nations Security Council resolution and the marshaling of allies to join in a chorus of approval, neither Israel nor Hamas appear to have budged on their wide divergence over the proposed road map to permanently end the war in Gaza.
Israel’s successful rescue of four hostages early Saturday, while welcomed, may further complicate administration efforts, bolstering Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s insistence on a full military victory and release of all remaining Hamas-held hostages before Israel’s guns are silenced.
Many dozens, if not hundreds, of Palestinian civilians were killed during the rescue operation near a refugee camp in central Gaza, according to hospital reports. Israel reported that one Israeli soldier died from wounds incurred during the mission.
Talks over the cease-fire proposal are still ongoing in Doha, the Qatari capital, although the most senior officials from the mediating countries — the United States, Qatar and Egypt — have gone home, including CIA Director William J. Burns. Secretary of State Antony Blinken will launch his latest tour of Israel and Arab capitals in the region Sunday.
There is little doubt among the mediators that the rescue operation will jolt the negotiations, but perhaps in a direction none of them want.
On Saturday, Biden, on a state visit to France, congratulated Israel but tied the operation to the diplomatic efforts, saying, “we won’t stop working until all the hostages come home and a cease-fire is reached.”
White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan also sought to draw attention back to the negotiations. “The hostage release and cease-fire deal that is now on the table would secure the release of all the remaining hostages together with security assurances for Israel and relief for the innocent civilians in Gaza,” he said in a statement.
But in Israel, while relatives of some of the rescued hostages urged Netanyahu to seize the moment to make a deal that envisioned the return of around 100 remaining Hamas captives, a jubilant prime minister made no reference to the proposal in remarks addressed to the Israel Defense Forces. “You once again proved that Israel does not surrender to terrorism. … We are obligated to do the same in the future,” he said, referring to the military operation. “We will not rest until we complete our mission and return all of our hostages home.”
For its part, Hamas said in a statement released on its Telegram channel that reports of U.S. assistance in the raid “proves once again the complicit role of the American administration, its full participation in the war crimes committed in the Gaza Strip, [and] the lies of its declared positions on the humanitarian situation.”
Days after the Gaza war began in October, the Pentagon acknowledged that a “small number” of U.S. military personnel at the embassy in Jerusalem were assisting the Israeli government through planning and intelligence support as part of its hostage-recovery efforts. Eight Israeli-Americans are believed to be among those still held in Gaza, including the remains of three who are believed dead.
Overhead surveillance, communications intercepts and other intelligence information about the potential location of hostages, including for this operation, have been provided, according to people familiar with the matter, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive issues. U.S. intelligence analysts also are helping Israeli officials map out the extensive network of tunnels that Hamas has built beneath Gaza, contributing powerful analytic technologies that fuse fragments of information, according to officials with knowledge of the work.
Video circulating on social media, said to be taken at the time of the raid, showed Israeli helicopters operating near the pier built by the U.S. military to deliver humanitarian aid to Gazan civilians. The IDF controls the beach surrounding the landing area.
A U.S. official, responding to questions, said the pier was for humanitarian use only and “was not used in the operation to rescue hostages today in Gaza. An area south of the facility was used to safely return the hostages to Israel. Any such claim to the contrary is false.” The official spoke on the condition of anonymity under rules set by the administration.
As the United States prepared to submit a new resolution supporting the cease-fire plan for a vote in the U.N. Security Council early next week, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas on Saturday called for an emergency council session to denounce the “bloody massacre by Israeli security forces” of Palestinian civilians during the raid, according to WAFA, the official authority news agency.
Many in the region and beyond see the stalemate over a broader deal that would end the war and set the terms for the “day after” as yet another indication, after months of trying for an agreement, of waning U.S. power, and point to the dissonance between its ongoing support for Israel and efforts to stop the fighting and promote humanitarian assistance.
“We really thought that if there was one last hope to have a cease-fire in Gaza, this would be it,” Abdulkhaleq Abdulla, a prominent analyst from the United Arab Emirates and senior fellow with the Middle East Initiative at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center, said of the proposal. “But I think we are now finding out it is dead on arrival. … This administration has not faced up to Netanyahu — they have the power, but can’t do it,” he said.
Senior administration officials sharply reject that assessment, noting that they have long spoken candidly to Netanyahu in private, and increasingly in public, about what they believe is his losing strategy for long-term peace for Israel. Biden has already suspended one shipment of U.S. weapons to Israel and pledged to withhold more if the continued destruction of Gaza and deprivation of civilians does not abate.
“The basic plan all along, one of the reasons why the administration has pulled punches with Israel and maintained a passive-aggressive policy with the Netanyahu government, despite tremendous anger and frustration,” has been its “belief that the only way you’re going to end up with any pathway out of this is through an Israel-Hamas agreement,” said Aaron David Miller, a former Middle East negotiator through several administrations and current senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
“The problem is that in order to cut a deal,” Miller said, “you need significant urgency on the part of Israel and Hamas. And the only party that is in a hurry is the administration.”
U.S. officials still insist that underlying pressures on both sides will eventually lead them to a deal, and that once Hamas agrees, Israel will ultimately accede.
Biden’s public detailing of the U.S.-backed deal, made in a White House address on May 31, was designed to put both sides on the spot. Israel, he said, had authored the proposal, with the first of three phases to include a six-week cease-fire, withdrawal of Israeli troops from heavily populated areas of Gaza, the freeing of all women, elderly and children held hostage and a surge in humanitarian aid to the starving enclave.
Negotiations over a second phase would start immediately and the initial, temporary cease-fire would continue — as long as neither side violated its terms — until an agreement was reached on a “permanent” cessation of hostilities, complete Israeli withdrawal and the release of all remaining hostages, including members of the Israeli military.
The sweetener for Hamas was the explicit reference to a permanent cease-fire and Israeli withdrawal, effectively ending the war without the total destruction of the group that Netanyahu has vowed. “They want to be sure after the first phase that the Israelis will not attack … once they give the hostages back,” said a former Egyptian official with knowledge of the negotiations, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive subject.
While Netanyahu acknowledged Israel’s war cabinet had “authorized” the proposal, he has never said unequivocally that he supports it. Under pressure from right-wing extremists in his coalition, where political infighting threatens to topple his government, he has rejected an automatic “transition” between phases one and two and recommitted Israel to the complete destruction of Hamas.
Miller, at the Carnegie Endowment, suggested that Netanyahu now has even more reason for delay with the Israeli Knesset due to recess for the summer on July 25 — the day after he is due to address the U.S. Congress — making him “more or less secure, probably through the fall.”
“You don’t have to have too much imagination to see that Bibi,” as Netanyahu is widely known, “is buying time and hoping that somehow Trump will win the [U.S.] election and there will be less pressure on him to do anything,” Miller said.
There has barely been discussion of the third phase, during which the administration hopes Arab and other governments will help provide security and funding for rebuilding Gaza under a Palestinian leadership that will lead to a separate state that Netanyahu has also rejected.
As the cease-fire negotiations drag on, other initiatives have fizzled. Biden last week sent a senior delegation, headed by National Security Council Middle East director Terry Wolff, to Cairo to negotiate the reopening of the Rafah crossing between Egypt and Israel. Israel has occupied the crossing, the portal through which most humanitarian aid to southern Gaza has passed, since it launched its Rafah operation early last month. Egypt has refused to allow aid to pass through until Palestinians again control the Gaza side of the border.
Any agreement on the Rafah crossing, the Egyptian official said, is dependent on a cease-fire agreement.
Failure to reach that agreement has also undermined the position of the United States as a mediator in related regional issues. Negotiations between Saudi Arabia and the United States over a stepped-up defense relationship and normalization of Saudi-Israeli relations “is ready to be signed the moment this war is over,” Abdulla, the Emirati analyst, said.
“But Saudi Arabia cannot sign this while there is a war in Gaza,” he said.
George reported from Dubai. Claire Parker in Cairo, Lior Soroka in Tel Aviv, Cleve R. Wootson Jr. in Paris, and Ellen Nakashima and Missy Ryan in Washington contributed to this report.
The Washington Post · by Karen DeYoung · June 8, 2024
4. Legacy of America’s past battles looms over Israel-Gaza crisis
Mainstream media continues to cite gaza casualty reports. Is the Syria/ISIS conflict vs Gaza/Hamas conflict a comparison sound?
Is a "casualty cutoff" a sound procedure?
But this comment is very important. I interpret it as the categorical imperative: Do the right thing because it is the right thing to do:
Votel said. “It’s not flashy, but it goes back to this idea of tone about how we do things, and [saying], ‘If it doesn’t look right, then don’t do it.’”
Excerpts:
“I hear Western politicians shaking their fists at Israel, and I wonder if they have an understanding of how their own forces have fought,” said Chris Woods, founder of the watchdog group Airwars. “It’s far easier to point at others than take a proper look at your own actions.”
Brown, in an interview at the Pentagon, said he has repeatedly urged Israel to exercise greater restraint, though he acknowledged possessing limited insight about its procedures for balancing military advantage and civilian harm.
For Brown and other leaders, navigating the Gaza conflict is one of their most challenging assignments: Israel, surrounded by historical adversaries, is the United States’ closest ally in the Middle East, and President Biden has staked his political future on defending the Jewish state. At the same time, debate has intensified over U.S. military aid to Israel, which critics allege has enabled the carnage and, potentially, Israeli war crimes.
Asked if Israel was failing to uphold U.S. principles, Brown gave a careful response.
“Not everybody can follow our example,” he said. “But we hold ourselves to a standard, and … those that we work with, we want to help them achieve those same standards to the best of their abilities.”
....
While Brown acknowledged having a broad understanding of Israel’s process for mitigating civilian casualties, when pressed he said he lacked information about whether Israeli forces use a casualty cutoff, as the U.S. military does, or how they approach proportionality. And like other U.S. officials, he pointed out Hamas’s practice of embedding in schools and other protected sites.
Retired Gen. Joseph Votel, who led U.S. Central Command when Brown served as the deputy commander there, said he wonders about the tone set by leaders in Israel, where early in the war Defense Minister Yoav Gallant cited the battle against “human animals,” and some members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet continue to urge the “complete destruction” of Gaza.
U.S. leaders, at the outset of the Islamic State war, telegraphed the importance of keeping noncombatants safe, Votel said. He recalled flying in a B-52 bomber over Syria and observing how pilots felt empowered to call off a planned strike if they detected something amiss.
“That’s the kind of thing that C.Q. put in place,” Votel said. “It’s not flashy, but it goes back to this idea of tone about how we do things, and [saying], ‘If it doesn’t look right, then don’t do it.’”
Legacy of America’s past battles looms over Israel-Gaza crisis
The Pentagon’s top general held key roles during the ISIS war, when U.S. precautions failed to prevent extensive civilian deaths. Will the lessons of that fight make a difference now?
By Missy Ryan
June 8, 2024 at 7:00 a.m. EDT
The Washington Post · by Missy Ryan · June 8, 2024
When Charles Q. Brown Jr. took command of U.S. air forces in the Middle East, the campaign against the Islamic State was moving slowly. It was 2015, and millions of people remained trapped in the militant group’s brutal grip as U.S. and partner forces struggled to chip away at its vast pseudo-state.
Brown, then a three-star general, thought it was time to refocus away from the war’s front lines, where scattered airstrikes were picking off only small numbers of militants. Instead, he wanted to prioritize targets deep within the caliphate, where oil sales and taxation fueled the extremists’ reign.
“If you want us to be more effective, here’s what we’ve got to be able to do,” he recalled telling the Army general commanding the campaign.
Military commanders saw the shift as a turning point, one that led to the liberation of the Islamic State’s twin capitals, Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in neighboring Syria. Yet it also coincided with a push by U.S. and partner forces into crowded cities, resulting in a soaring number of civilian deaths and revealing a stark reality about the limitations of precision weapons and military safeguards.
Now, as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — the nation’s highest-ranking military officer — Brown is a key figure guiding America’s support of Israel as it battles Hamas militants in Gaza, where eight months of war have wrought staggering destruction and exposed deep divisions between the two longtime allies over Israel’s overwhelming use of force. Palestinian authorities say at least 36,000 people, most of them civilians, have died since Hamas’s bloody Oct. 7 attacks in Israel ignited the violence. More than 1 million others face famine.
Those tensions were visible again in recent days after an Israeli strike killed dozens of people sheltering in a Gaza school.
Like President Biden’s defense secretary, retired Army Gen. Lloyd Austin, Brown brings to the moment an extensive record overseeing counterinsurgent wars in environments similar to Gaza. Those experiences have both familiarized the men — the Pentagon’s top two leaders — with the challenges inherent to urban combat and informed the Biden administration’s dissatisfaction with Israel’s handling of its war.
Brown and other top officials have cited American operations in places like Mosul, where they believe the United States held itself to a higher standard than Israel is using in Gaza, as they voice frustration with Israel. But while the death toll of the U.S.-led campaign against the Islamic State was smaller relative to Gaza, experts say the Pentagon was dogged by some of the same problems, including a failure to acknowledge civilian deaths when they occurred.
“I hear Western politicians shaking their fists at Israel, and I wonder if they have an understanding of how their own forces have fought,” said Chris Woods, founder of the watchdog group Airwars. “It’s far easier to point at others than take a proper look at your own actions.”
Brown, in an interview at the Pentagon, said he has repeatedly urged Israel to exercise greater restraint, though he acknowledged possessing limited insight about its procedures for balancing military advantage and civilian harm.
For Brown and other leaders, navigating the Gaza conflict is one of their most challenging assignments: Israel, surrounded by historical adversaries, is the United States’ closest ally in the Middle East, and President Biden has staked his political future on defending the Jewish state. At the same time, debate has intensified over U.S. military aid to Israel, which critics allege has enabled the carnage and, potentially, Israeli war crimes.
Asked if Israel was failing to uphold U.S. principles, Brown gave a careful response.
“Not everybody can follow our example,” he said. “But we hold ourselves to a standard, and … those that we work with, we want to help them achieve those same standards to the best of their abilities.”
Dismantling ISIS
In 2014, after the Islamic State surged out of Syria and seized a third of Iraq, President Barack Obama directed the Pentagon to dismantle the group’s so-called caliphate — a mission that faced immediate obstacles.
Iraqi forces, which Washington was helping to rebuild following an embarrassing collapse, encountered punishing opposition as they attempted to liberate the smaller cities of Ramadi and Baiji. Ideally, U.S. airstrikes would have helped weaken the enemy before Iraqi units plunged in, using what military officials call “shaping” operations. That had yet to happen.
“It was a knife fight,” said Sean MacFarland, the Army general then commanding the war. “It was eyeball to eyeball, and there was no shaping, no deep fight, no attrition of enemy forces out of contact whatsoever.”
MacFarland said Brown, a former F-16 pilot who goes by C.Q., suggested they rebalance the air campaign, which then consisted mostly of attacks responding to skirmishes involving partner forces and small numbers of militants. Instead, the coalition could target arms factories, banks or oil rigs, whose destruction would do more to erode the Islamic State’s power.
That shift was one of the consequential changes during Brown’s tenure overseeing the Islamic State campaign. Another was a gradual loosening of regulations governing coalition strikes, which military officials said was needed to kill more militants but which many experts believe contributed to a spiraling death toll during its final battles.
When the war against the Islamic State erupted, the Obama administration already was under pressure to rein in the civilian toll generated by America’s ongoing counterterrorism wars, by then more than a decade old. In 2015, Obama publicly apologized after a drone strike killed an American held hostage by al-Qaeda in Pakistan. In 2016, the White House issued an order committing to exceed civilian-protection requirements set out in the laws of war.
Against the Islamic State, the administration initially granted only a handful of high-ranking ground commanders the ability to authorize airstrikes, and set to zero the number of civilian casualties a strike could be expected to generate without seeking higher approval.
While ground commanders said they shared the goal of minimizing civilian harm, they chafed at restrictions imposed by higher headquarters, rules they believed would make it harder to defeat the militants.
Brown, MacFarland and others thought that without embracing greater risk in the air campaign, the coalition would be unable to take out key Islamic State infrastructure.
Eventually, after repeated appeals, military leaders eased those constraints. Suddenly, an array of new targets was fair game.
Take extra precautions
By early 2016, all airdropped arms used against the Islamic State relied on guidance technology, Brown said at the time. He called it “the most precise air campaign in history.”
To minimize unintended harm, U.S. pilots dropped bombs with lower yields and employed delayed fuses. Throughout the war, the coalition struck hospitals and mosques a handful of times.
Brown supported the changes, but he said the loosening of rules in the Islamic State war required military commanders to take extra precautions to mitigate tragedy, as he has urged Israel to do.
“Our goal still was to get to zero” civilian casualties on any given strike, he said.
Brown also cited the importance in urban battles such as in Gaza of moving civilians out of harm’s way, which the coalition did with mixed success before the battle for Mosul in 2016-2017. In some cases, those residents were able to flee and reach United Nations refugee camps. In others, Iraqi authorities urged residents to stay put, or militants prevented them from leaving. When the coalition turned to Raqqa, tens of thousands of residents were trapped as militants made their final stand.
“When you get into an urban environment … it’s a bit more challenging, but you still try to take every effort,” Brown added.
‘We weren’t perfect’
Nevertheless, the peril facing remaining residents skyrocketed. According to Airwars, at least 1,300 civilians probably died in Mosul because of coalition actions in the city, and at least 1,600 in Raqqa.
Overall, Airwars found that coalition strikes probably killed at least 8,000 civilians over nine years, far more than the roughly 1,300 acknowledged by the Pentagon. Experts said mistaking civilians for legitimate targets and other intelligence problems, like elsewhere, were primary drivers of civilian deaths.
Most military officials saw the bloodshed as a lamentable inevitability when battling an enemy that wove itself into the populace and used civilians as human shields, as Israel has accused Hamas of doing.
Scott Efflandt, who spent hundreds of hours watching drone footage when he led a strike cell during the Mosul operation, said he saw militants holding babies above their heads as they dashed between buildings, knowing coalition aircraft were unlikely to fire. He recalled the aftermath of one botched strike in Mosul, when U.S. forces hit a building where roughly 100 civilians were sheltering, hidden from view. All died.
“It just weighs on your soul when you’re done, but what are you going to do?” Efflandt said. “There’s no perfect solution for this.”
Those experiences, and the public pressure they generated, led to new steps to prevent such loss of life. In 2017, the Pentagon commissioned a study to scrutinize its track record on civilian casualties. A plan to embed new practices across the military was approved in 2022.
Woods, of Airwars, said the United States had done far more to acknowledge harm and institutionalize lessons learned than its coalition partners had. Britain, he noted, has acknowledged just one civilian death in the Islamic State campaign.
For Brown, the experience underscored the importance of preventing conflict to begin with.
“We want to be so good at what we do that our adversaries never want to go to conflict with the United States,” he said. “But if they do, we’re going to have capability to take out the enemy, but we’re also going to have the capability to protect the civilians. We’ve got to be able to do both.”
‘How we do things’
When Brown received a call before dawn on Oct. 7 alerting him of the Hamas assault in Israel, he had been Joint Chiefs chairman for a week.
Washington’s message was clear: The United States would back Israel’s response to the attacks, in which Hamas killed 1,200 people and took more than 250 hostages.
But officials soon grew dismayed as they watched the humanitarian crisis and death toll mount, quickly surpassing the scale of the Islamic State war.
Through the Gaza war’s first seven months, Airwars has identified more than 4,500 attacks that it suspects are responsible for civilian death or injury, though work to verify those figures is ongoing. The group identified about 3,000 incidents for the entire Islamic State campaign.
According to an analysis by Larry Lewis of CNA, a research firm, Israel as of late February appeared to have killed an average of 54 civilians per 100 attacks. The ratio in Raqqa, by comparison, was 1.7 civilian deaths per 100 attacks based on Pentagon casualty estimates, or seven deaths based on Airwars data.
While a recent administration report found that it was “reasonable to assess” that Israel has violated global laws using U.S. weapons, Biden’s reaction has fallen far short of critics’ demands; he has paused just one shipment of large bombs as he urges Israel to forgo a full-scale offensive in the southern city of Rafah.
The response “has entirely failed to live up to — and actually undermined — the civilian protection efforts the U.S. has made in recent years,” said Annie Shiel, U.S. policy director of the Center for Civilians in Conflict, calling on the Pentagon to “unequivocally reject Israel’s conduct.”
U.S. defense officials say that Israel briefed them on the precautions its forces take to minimize civilian harm — including legal reviews, proportionality tests and, when possible, advance warning to those in danger — and that Israel’s system resembles their own. Why those safeguards have not prevented the staggering loss of life is unclear, they say.
While Brown acknowledged having a broad understanding of Israel’s process for mitigating civilian casualties, when pressed he said he lacked information about whether Israeli forces use a casualty cutoff, as the U.S. military does, or how they approach proportionality. And like other U.S. officials, he pointed out Hamas’s practice of embedding in schools and other protected sites.
Retired Gen. Joseph Votel, who led U.S. Central Command when Brown served as the deputy commander there, said he wonders about the tone set by leaders in Israel, where early in the war Defense Minister Yoav Gallant cited the battle against “human animals,” and some members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet continue to urge the “complete destruction” of Gaza.
U.S. leaders, at the outset of the Islamic State war, telegraphed the importance of keeping noncombatants safe, Votel said. He recalled flying in a B-52 bomber over Syria and observing how pilots felt empowered to call off a planned strike if they detected something amiss.
“That’s the kind of thing that C.Q. put in place,” Votel said. “It’s not flashy, but it goes back to this idea of tone about how we do things, and [saying], ‘If it doesn’t look right, then don’t do it.’”
The Washington Post · by Missy Ryan · June 8, 2024
5. Things Worth Remembering: Why Forgiveness Matters (Hannah Arendt)
For reflection on a Sunday afternoon:
Hannah Arendt in 1949. (Photo by Fred Stein Archive/Archive Photos/Getty Images)
Things Worth Remembering: Why Forgiveness Matters
https://www.thefp.com/p/things-worth-remembering-why-forgiveness
In a 1964 speech, Hannah Arendt argued that unburdening ourselves from the past is what allows us—and others—to experience freedom.
By Douglas Murray
June 9, 2024
Welcome to Douglas Murray’s column, Things Worth Remembering, in which he presents great speeches from famous orators we should commit to heart. To listen to Douglas read from Hannah Arendt’s 1964 speech at the University of Chicago, scroll to the end of this piece.
This week, I want to turn to a speech about forgiveness and why forgiveness is so important when it comes to freedom—the freedom of both the forgiver and the forgiven.
Some speeches are memorable because of their rhetorical power. Others stick with you because of the depth of their insights. Sometimes that comes with the feeling “I know that to be true.” Sometimes it’s more like “I’m going to need to think about that.”
When I first read this magnificent talk given by Hannah Arendt, I felt both.
Arendt is the political philosopher best known for her monumental 1951 work The Origins of Totalitarianism. Her speech took place on November 10, 1964 at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago. The title of the conference she spoke at—“Christianity and Economic Man: Moral Decisions in an Affluent Society”—and that of the lecture she delivered—“Labor, Work, Action”—were not encouraging. Certainly, they lacked the wit of William F. Buckley or the emotional force of James Baldwin. But none of that matters here, because of the content of the speech itself.
In recent years, Arendt has been the subject of a number of high-profile biopics and documentaries—most notably, the well-received 2012 film Hannah Arendt, from the German director Margarethe von Trotta. The film centers around Arendt’s trip to Jerusalem to report on the 1961 trial of Holocaust mastermind Adolf Eichmann for The New Yorker. But a great deal of the buzz around Arendt amounts to high-level gossip. See, for example, Arendt-Heidegger: A Love Story, a 2018 off-Broadway play about her affair with the philosopher Martin Heidegger.
The affair, of course, is well known. Arendt, after all, came from a secular German Jewish home that was to the political left, and Heidegger, as one of the great existentialist thinkers of the twentieth century, would become the most prominent intellectual to rally behind the Nazi regime. On top of that, she was 18 and his student, and he was 36 and married. And on top of that, as their love letters would make abundantly clear, their relationship was deeply felt, and those feelings would persist through the 1930s and, in fact, well into the postwar era. To many, especially Jews, all this amounted to a great betrayal.
Far worse, to my mind, is Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt’s 1963 book, which is based on her original reporting. (The historian David Cesarani has been especially critical of Arendt. In his book Becoming Eichmann: Rethinking the Life, Crimes, and Trial of a Desk Murderer, he noted that Arendt spent only a handful of days reporting on a trial that lasted nearly four months.) The book’s subtitle includes the fatuous phrase the banality of evil, a concept ripe for recycling by midwits and pseudo-intellectuals. And, lurking behind that subtitle, is a fundamental misreading of the man she profiled.
As the historian Bettina Stangneth showed in her far superior work Eichmann Before Jerusalem, Eichmann fooled Arendt. He was not, as Arendt portrayed him, a cog in the system, a man whose evildoing was but a function of a vast machinery of death, a man whose evildoing could somehow, perversely, be explained away. He was a monster, and the historical record shows it.
But despite all that, we should, in the spirit of Arendt’s talk and this week’s column, forgive her for that. By the time she gave it, she had already been assured a permanent place in the intellectual firmament. She had become famous not just for a few flashy phrases but because her thinking could be both deep and direct. Indeed, there are few thinkers who better grasped the philosophical bases for the totalitarian mindset than Arendt did.
I can think of few better examples of her insight than her talk at the University of Chicago and, more to the point, her discussion of forgiveness. Did she have Heidegger in mind when she gave it? Possibly. She certainly spent a great deal of time grappling with Heidegger’s cowardice and the consequences of that cowardice, as Daniel Maier-Katkin argues in Stranger from Abroad: Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Friendship and Forgiveness.
Arendt began the talk by discussing the irreversibility of human action: “Since we always act into a web of relationships, the consequences of each deed are boundless, every action touches off not only a reaction but a chain reaction, every process is the cause of unpredictable new processes.”
She goes on: “This boundlessness is inescapable.”
All this may sound abstract. But the implications of what she’s talking about are not. If we cannot know what the consequences of our actions are, and if all human action is indeed irreversible (“no author or maker can undo or destroy what he has done”), then we risk living lives that are unbearable, or even unlivable. How is one to go on not knowing how many people we have hurt, how much wrongdoing we have inadvertently introduced into the world?
And this is where she hits on a truth that is so urgent for our own age: “Without being forgiven,” Arendt says, “released from the consequences of what we have done, our capacity to act would, as it were, be confined to one single deed from which we could never recover; we would remain the victims of its consequences forever, not unlike the sorcerer’s apprentice who lacked the magic formula to break the spell.”
A little long-winded, to be sure—let us not forget she was steeped in the highly abstract German style of thinking and writing—but piercing and true.
Now more than ever, the number of people we can affect—including those who misconstrue our words and deeds—includes everybody on earth thanks to technologies that did not exist in Arendt’s day. Thinking about forgiveness has never been more urgent.
I was reminded of this while reading Nellie Bowles’ new book, Morning After the Revolution, the other day. It is, in part, a catalog of people who have been “canceled” or otherwise unpersoned for a single act or word. The social media age adores this pastime.
We rarely consider the possibility of uncanceling people, allowing for the possibility of redemption. What would a world in which people are forgiven for making a mistake—for example, uttering a politically inconvenient truth—look like? Older people sometimes tease younger people, so-called digital natives, for their fragility. But I sympathize with them, in no small part thanks to Arendt. A world of infinite possibilities is also a world of infinite catastrophes, a world in which one is always at risk of being consigned to the ranks of The Unforgiven. Who are those of us who did not grow up in such a world to tell those who did to buckle up? We, too, might be fragile, frozen into a kind of sad compliance or inactivity.
We cannot, we must not, succumb to that inactivity.
As Arendt argues in this beautiful passage of her lecture, we are born not simply to die, but to create, to act. That is how we transcend our mortal confines.
“Action, with all its uncertainties, is like an ever-present reminder that men, though they must die, are not born in order to die but in order to begin something new,” Arendt says. “Initium ut esset homo creatus est—‘that there be a beginning man was created,’ said Augustine.”
Then, she adds: “With the creation of man, the principle of beginning came into the world—which, of course, is only another way of saying that with the creation of man, the principle of freedom appeared on earth.”
To listen to Douglas read from Arendt’s speech, click below.
6. Chechen man was killed near US military base — what happened?
Very curious. Or curiouser and curiouser.
Of course FOX news jumped to a conclusion to support their agenda. But despite them being initially wrong on the immigration aspect there are still too many questions that are unanswered.
Even if it was all completely innocent and the man was not doing anything wrong, the company should really be questioned as to why they allowed someone who could not effectively communicate in English walk around private property with a camera to supposedly do his job? What was his job? And let's consider the background and connections of the company.
Chechen man was killed near US military base — what happened?
June 07, 2024 7:30 PM
voanews.com · June 7, 2024
The shooting death of a Chechen man near a U.S. military base has sparked controversy in the United States after media coverage tied the incident to concerns about foreign surveillance of U.S. military personnel.
Ramzan Daraev, 35, was shot to death on the evening of May 3 during an altercation with an unnamed U.S. military service person on the outskirts of Carthage, a city in North Carolina located an hour away from Fort Liberty, one of the largest U.S. military bases.
The service person, whom media have identified as a U.S. Army special forces colonel at the base, reportedly believed that Daraev was photographing his home. But Utilities One, Daraev's employer, said he was photographing utility poles as part of a local fiber-optics project.
Police noted that Daraev was not wearing a uniform, had no special equipment and carried no identification — all details that raised questions for journalists.
But Daraev's family members, along with Utilities One and one of his coworkers who spoke to Voice of America, say he was just an immigrant doing his job when he was killed.
"Ramzan was not armed and did not show any aggression towards the killer," his sister Diana Daraeva wrote in an online petition calling for her brother's killer to be brought to justice.
No charges filed
Police in Moore County, where Carthage is located, are investigating the shooting. So far, no charges have been filed.
Despite suspicions of foreign surveillance reported in the press, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has not taken part in the investigation. The agency only provided the services of an interpreter to the local police.
"The local investigation has not uncovered evidence of a federal crime. The FBI is in regular contact with sheriff's office investigators and is prepared to investigate if a federal matter comes to light," an FBI spokesperson in Charlotte, North Carolina's largest city, told VOA.
Many questions remain, and the lack of criminal charges a month later has angered Daraev's family.
Who was Ramzan Daraev?
An ethnic Chechen, Ramzan Daraev appears to have come to the United States in 2022 or 2023. According to police, he lived in Chicago, Illinois.
At the time of his death, Daraev was working for Utilities One, a company that provides "infrastructure solutions" in the utilities sector. The company was founded by a native of Moldova and counts among its employees many people from countries that were once part of the Soviet Union.
In a statement published on its Facebook page, Utilities One said that Daraev immigrated to the U.S. "to escape the conflict between Russia and Ukraine."
In its reporting, U.S. television channel Fox News first connected Daraev's shooting to concerns about surveillance and initially suggested that Daraev was living in the United States illegally.
However, journalist Seth Harp, who is writing a book about Fort Liberty, later published a photo of a valid, category C08 work permit in Daraev's name. Such permits are issued to individuals who have a pending asylum application.
While VOA cannot independently confirm the document's authenticity, Fox News national security correspondent Jennifer Griffin later clarified on the social platform X that, according to immigration documents published by Daraev's family, he was in the United States legally.
Daraev's brother declined to comment for this story. VOA was unable to reach other family members for comment.
What led to the shooting?
According to media reports, the unnamed colonel discovered Daraev on property adjacent to his home, which is in a wooded area on the outskirts of Carthage.
At 8:12 p.m., the colonel's wife called the police.
"There's an intruder on our property. My husband has gone to meet him, is now talking to him and yelled to me from the woodline to call the police," she told the operator, according to a recording of the call, which was released on May 30. "[The man has] been very aggressive. They're talking to each other on the property line right now and they're obviously having a difficult time communicating."
Less than 10 minutes later, at 8:20 p.m., the wife called again. This time she sounded panicked and hurried the police, whom the dispatcher said were tied up with other calls.
"I really need the cops here," she said.
"This person is from Chechnya," she continued. "He came up on our property line. My kids were in the backyard. He's taking pictures of our property."
"He's taking pictures of your property?" the dispatcher asked.
"Of our children, of our property, yes," the wife said.
Officers responded to the scene around 8:32 p.m. By that time, Daraev lay dead.
Daraev's family says he was shot twice in the back and once each in the head and hand. No official information about the number and nature of the gunshot wounds has been released.
Police discovered another Chechen man, Adsalam Dzhankutov, 31, nearby. VOA was unable to reach Dzhankutov for comment.
Although Daraev was not carrying ID, officers were eventually able to establish his identity with the help of his relatives and a foreign identification document they found in his car.
VOA was unable to reach the colonel for comment.
Surveillance or misunderstanding?
Daraev's killing occurred at a time of growing concerns in the United States about foreign — and especially Russian — espionage.
Citing unnamed sources, Fox News reported that American intelligence agents abroad frequently use the guise of utilities workers as cover.
U.S. Navy Admiral Daryl Caudle told Fox News that foreign citizens are stopped two or three times a week at the gates of U.S. military bases and installations.
Kazbek Khazbulatov, Daraev's coworker, told VOA that he and Daraev were simply doing their jobs as utility workers.
He said that one Chechen man in the Chicago area had started working for Utilities One and directed five acquaintances — including him, Daraev and Dzhankutov — to the company.
The six of them came down to North Carolina to work for Utilities One on a fiber-optics project for Brightspeed, an internet provider.
"We were saddened to learn from one of our vendors that supports our fiber network build that Ramzan Daraev, someone working on their behalf, was a victim of a deadly shooting," a Brightspeed spokesperson told VOA in an email.
The six men had maps of utility poles and were supposed to photograph them. They did not know who lived in the nearby houses, Khazbulatov said.
Fox News reported that Daraev may have used a telephoto lens, but Khazbulatov claims the men only had their mobile phones.
VOA sent an inquiry to the Moore County Sheriff's Office about whether Daraev had such a lens but received no response.
"Our problem was that we didn't have a uniform," Khazbulatov said.
Daraev was killed on a Friday. According to Khazbulatov, the uniforms were supposed to arrive on Monday.
Why did they start working without uniforms? "The more you work, the more you earn," Khazbulatov said.
What remains unclear is how the confrontation between Daraev and the colonel unfolded, and whether Daraev was "aggressive," as the colonel's wife said in her 911 call.
Khazbulatov said that Daraev's wounds — reportedly, two in the back — indicate he was running away. But he was not a direct witness to the altercation.
Daraev's family is also convinced that he was an innocent victim.
"Ramzan left Russia, not realizing that the greatest injustice against him would be done in a free country, where, in theory, he should have received protection," his sister wrote in the petition.
The investigation into the shooting is ongoing.
voanews.com · June 7, 2024
7. Why Deploying Western Special Forces to Ukraine may Help Prevent Global Conflicts
This article is kind of like a bait and switch. I read the entire article to try to understand the meaning of the headline (and the subtitle).
It really comes down to the final 5 paragraphs after the author provides a fairly lengthy summary (for an online publication) of all the major potential conflicts around the world.
While I think SF can make valuable contributions through advising and assisting (and as Frank Hoffman advocates with his principle of understanding - gaining knowledge of what is happening to support a deep understanding of the situation, conditions, and conflict by being present at the tip of the spear) I think the author might do SF a disservice with his provocative thesis that sending SF to Ukraine can help prevent global conflicts. That may be a bridge too far. We might do better being a little more humble and under promise and over deliver. I believe SF could do all the author cites (if others would pay heed to their assessments) but we can also argue that there are others in the military who could do this - FAOs would argue this is their role. The SFABs might argue it is their role (though they are supposed to be focused on military institution building), and the right combat arms officers (with the right aptitude and attitude) could also do this (e.g., some well trained and experienced OCs from JRTC and NTC).
Excerpts:
Considering numerous threats and the growing tensions that Russia may not stop, and that Western intervention could be a reality, now is the time to deploy special operations forces to Ukraine in advisory and training roles.
France and Estonia are preparing to send troops to train Ukrainian military personnel. Estonia has flaunted the idea of putting troops in Ukraine to relieve other Ukrainian forces held up in different regions so they can become reserves in hardened frontlines in Donetsk and Kharkiv.
Estonia’s premise makes the most sense as much of Ukraine’s reserves are still held up in the north around Kyiv due to Russian troops in Belarus and the Southwest near Transnistria due to the threat of the breakaway state. The strategy would not only free up tens of thousands of troops but also call Putin’s bluff that his threats towards fighting NATO would just be empty words.
Special forces can also collect critical conventional warfare data from Ukraine, which now has the most battle-hardened military and is intertwined with traditional warfare throughout all allied countries. If they arise, the valuable lessons and data from Ukraine can be applied to future conflicts in Eastern Europe, East Asia, and the Middle East.
While sending troops to direct frontline roles is currently out of the question in Ukraine, the role of special forces collecting intelligence and combat data and advising and assisting should not be out of the question. As various tensions worldwide seemingly veering towards a global conflict, it is better to prepare for war to maintain peace and deterrence than be caught off guard with complacency.
Why Deploying Western Special Forces to Ukraine may Help Prevent Global Conflicts
With conflicts simmering across the globe, NATO should help Ukraine more and introduce special operations forces and intelligence assets in preparation for future wars
Julian McBride
3 June 2024
bylinetimes.com · by Julian McBride · June 3, 2024
Going into the second half of 2024, various regional conflicts continue to brew, with many of them being intertwined in a potential outcome of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Vladimir Putin, the two-decade autocrat of Russia, is preparing for a longtime war with imperial ambitions beyond Ukraine. Xi Jinping, the Chinese premier, is watching events unfold, pondering what kind of response the West could potentially give to Taiwan.
Events and response times in the Middle East, Africa, South Caucasus, and the Korean Peninsula could also come to blows as the geopolitical quagmire escalates.
Given the tensions, especially towards foes with conventional militaries, NATO should help Ukraine more and introduce special operations capable forces and intelligence assets to prepare for global conflicts.
Russian Invasion of Ukraine
The first initial Russian invasion of Ukraine occurred during the illegal seizure and annexation of Crimea in 2014 by the Kremlin’s “little green men,” which happened to be GRU Spetznaz. A few months later, Russian FSB operatives led by Igor Strelkov ignited a war in Ukraine’s Donbas region.
The United Kingdom and its highly capable special forces, such as the Royal Marines and SAS, would become some of the first Western forces to provide enhanced training to the Ukrainian military, who, in the early days of the war, were more disorganised and corrupted due to negligence.
Putin would later declare a total war, and the biggest full-scale invasion on the European continent would ensue. Western countries rushed to Ukraine’s aid and continued the training program the British had sponsored for several years.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has cost it thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars – but its military influence has also taken a major hit
Mark Temnycky
Both Ukraine and Russia have suffered heavy military casualties in the past two years, with Moscow amassing the worst battlefield casualties not seen in the country since World War Two.
Despite not reaching any of their primary objectives, such as the dismantling of Ukraine’s government in Kyiv, demilitarisation, and enacting the Novorossiya project by attempting to make Ukraine landlocked, Russian forces have recently gained momentum.
Seven months of political gridlock in the United States that hungered military aid, slow European shell allocations, and Ukrainian shortfalls in defensive fortifications and mobilisation allowed Russia a window of opportunity to take advantage of mishaps, as seen in recent offensives.
Tom Mutch tells a harrowing story of resilience and desperation
Tom Mutch
Growing Concerns Putin May Not Stop
Outside of Ukraine, the Russian Federation is making it clear that they view the collapse of the Soviet Union and Russian Empire as their greatest tragedies as various nations gained independence from the boot of Moscow.
Akin to Ukraine, nations such as Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Finland, Moldova, and Romania are all facing hybrid and vocal threats of war directly from Russian state officials.
Eastern Europe, particularly the Baltics, Moldova, Finland, and Poland, have raised the alarm over Russia’s aggressive posture and hybrid warfare against them. One of NATO’s weak points is the Suwalki Gap between Poland and Lithuania, and the Kremlin has always wanted to physically unite Kaliningrad with Russia proper—especially as the oblast is now more isolated than ever after Sweden and Finland joined NATO.
Demonstrators in New York protesting Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Photo: Adam Stoltman / Alamy
A major policy in the war allowed Russia to adapt and gain the initiative, which was the restriction of Western weaponry on Russian territory.
The Kremlin, knowing Western indecision is impeding the Ukrainian military from striking key targets across the border, is using such advantages to amass forces near the border and use Russian airspace to bomb Ukraine unabated.
Ultimately wanting to enact the Novorossiya project, the Russian Federation would be in direct conflict with Moldova, Romania, and Poland and the Baltic states. If Odesa were to be forcibly taken and annexed by Russia, the Russian military could link with the illegitimate breakaway state of Transnistria in Moldova, which would bring a new war to the country along with a potential Romanian intervention.
Emmanuel Macron, the President of France, stated a fall of Odesa or Kyiv to Russia could bring a French-led military intervention, and recently, it has been reported by the German outlet Spiegel that Eastern Europe (Poland and the Baltics) could also intervene if Russian forces overwhelm the eastern regions of Ukraine and push westward towards them.
Growing Worldwide Tensions of Conventional Threats
Rising global tensions in various regions are displaying a need for a new rapprochement, diplomatic policy, and contingencies by the West to be ready for all scenarios if regional conflicts become global.
In the backdrop of the Israeli-Hamas War, the Islamic Republic of Iran and Israel nearly came to full-scale war after a strike next to the Iranian embassy in Damascus killed senior IRGC commanders. In return, Iran launched the largest combined ballistic missile and drone attack against Israel, in which most missiles were shot down by the combined efforts of the US, UK, France, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Israel.
In West Africa, the rise of pro-Russian military juntas has forced out French influence and America’s counterterrorism efforts in the ‘coup belt.’ The Wagner group and Russian GRU have taken the place of the powder keg, along with extremist organisations, and threats of continued migration from Africa into Europe could overwhelm the social systems in the continent.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu faces arrest if he visits the UK, if the warrants are issued
Josiah Mortimer
The South Caucasus is seeing wide-scale Georgian protests over a recently-passed Russian-backed law by the pro-Russian government, and Armenia’s and Azerbaijan’s tensions still have not simmered. US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken warned that Azerbaijan could potentially invade Armenia, and France is sending major military aid packages to the region.
East Asia’s tensions may be the most tumultuous as various regional tensions could bring a large-scale conflict that could potentially ignite World War Three.
In the South China Sea, aggressive maritime posturing by the Chinese navy towards the Philippines and Vietnam is putting the region on edge. Vietnam has reassessed its security and recently signed a strategic partnership with the United States—something Ho Chi Minh always wanted before his death.
East Asia is also seeing renewed hostilities between North and South Korea, especially as Kim Jong Un withdrew from peace and unification talks and Pyongyang continues to build up its military. Both Seoul and Pyongyang are some of the top suppliers of Kyiv and Moscow, turning their armistice into a proxy conflict in Ukraine.
Georgian Dream’s ‘Russian-style’ law has prompted strong statements of concern from the UK, US and EU with critics saying it is an attempt to muzzle the media and NGOs – it may also end Georgia’s hopes of joining the EU
Alexandra Hall Hall
North Korea’s missiles are also a threat to Japan and one of the major reasons why Japan is remilitarizing. Japan also sees Chinese aggression and Russia’s paranoia over the Kuril Islands as other threats to their national security, and NATO is preparing a liaison office to the region.
China is also eyeing Taiwan, causing major concern with America and Japan. Recent drills have only heightened tensions, and Taiwan has become a major backer of Ukraine. NATO is finding ways to support the island nation, though most member states do not have force projection into Asia.
Now Needing Experience for Conventional Opponents, Ukraine Could be the Catalyst
Considering numerous threats and the growing tensions that Russia may not stop, and that Western intervention could be a reality, now is the time to deploy special operations forces to Ukraine in advisory and training roles.
France and Estonia are preparing to send troops to train Ukrainian military personnel. Estonia has flaunted the idea of putting troops in Ukraine to relieve other Ukrainian forces held up in different regions so they can become reserves in hardened frontlines in Donetsk and Kharkiv.
Estonia’s premise makes the most sense as much of Ukraine’s reserves are still held up in the north around Kyiv due to Russian troops in Belarus and the Southwest near Transnistria due to the threat of the breakaway state. The strategy would not only free up tens of thousands of troops but also call Putin’s bluff that his threats towards fighting NATO would just be empty words.
Special forces can also collect critical conventional warfare data from Ukraine, which now has the most battle-hardened military and is intertwined with traditional warfare throughout all allied countries. If they arise, the valuable lessons and data from Ukraine can be applied to future conflicts in Eastern Europe, East Asia, and the Middle East.
While sending troops to direct frontline roles is currently out of the question in Ukraine, the role of special forces collecting intelligence and combat data and advising and assisting should not be out of the question. As various tensions worldwide seemingly veering towards a global conflict, it is better to prepare for war to maintain peace and deterrence than be caught off guard with complacency.
bylinetimes.com · by Julian McBride · June 3, 2024
8. Why Russia Is Happy at War
Excerpts:
This unholy symbiosis of a martial state and an obedient people is bad news for the free world. It means that Putin has succeeded in mobilizing Russia in order to realize his dreams of domination, and Russia can indulge its expansionist mania indefinitely, particularly as the Western response is stymied by the fear of escalation. But Putin has already escalated, unfurling the map of conflict with his hybrid war of sabotage, psychological operations, and interventions in Africa.
The West must take this threat seriously and fight back. And here, it can take a different lesson from Russian history.
As Napoleon and Hitler both discovered, to carry a conflict onto Russian soil can come at a devastating cost. But defeat in a war beyond its borders can be fatal for Moscow’s rulers. Only when faced with that sort of military disaster and humiliation do Russian autocracies teeter and collapse: Already damaged by its failures in the Crimean War of 1853–56, which accelerated the abolition of serfdom, and in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05, which forced Nicholas II to concede a parliament and constitution, the Romanov dynasty could not withstand the catastrophe of World War I; the humbling of the mighty Red Army in Afghanistan in the 1980s proved to be one of the nails in the U.S.S.R.’s coffin. A year ago, at a nadir of Russia’s campaign in Ukraine, Putin survived the rebellion of the Wagner leader Yevgeny Prigozhin; since then, Russia’s military has recovered its position, and Putin’s rule has stabilized. But if Ukraine can begin to prevail, Putin’s narrative as the grand defender of Russia will no longer hold, and regime change will become possible once more.
Until then, the world’s security will always be at risk from “the nation of victors,” as Russia likes to call itself. Meanwhile, for Russians themselves, the independence they are told to celebrate on June 12 is simply a pledge of allegiance to a state that treats them as disposable assets of its imperial designs.
Why Russia Is Happy at War
A centuries-long tradition of authoritarian rule and disregard for individual rights underpins Vladimir Putin’s imperial project.
By Anastasia Edel
The Atlantic · by Anastasia Edel · June 9, 2024
On June 12, Russia celebrates its Independence Day. The commemoration was instituted by President Boris Yeltsin in 1992 to a collective shrug—“Who did Russia declare independence from?” people asked. But in the early 2000s, President Vladimir Putin elevated the day to a major national celebration, accompanied by a cornucopia of flag-waving. For the past two years, “Russia Day,” as it is popularly known, has gone beyond reenactments of historic military victories to celebrate the country’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine—complete with charity auctions and motor rallies in support of the troops, and flash mobs to show national unity branded with a hashtag that translates as #WeAreRussiaWeAreTogether.
Propaganda aside, Russia does seem surprisingly unified. Despite the war’s heavy human toll, estimated by the United Kingdom’s Defence Intelligence to be as high as 500,000, and near-total isolation from the West, Russian society has not unraveled. On the contrary, it appears to be functioning better than before the war and shows clear signs of once-elusive social cohesion. One explanation for this paradox—national thriving amid unfolding calamity—is that, unlike Western states, which are designed to advance the interests of their citizens, Russian society operates with one purpose in mind: to serve the interests of its belligerent state.
A rigid autocracy since the nation emerged from Mongol rule in the 15th century, including seven decades of totalitarianism in the 20th century, Russia’s government has never had any effective separation of powers. For most of that history, the state has allowed few, if any, avenues for genuine political debate or dissent, and the judicial system has acted as a rubber stamp for its rulers’ orders. During my childhood, in the late Soviet years, the message that the individual and individual rights don’t count was drummed into us at school: Я, the Russian pronoun meaning “I,” is “the last letter of the alphabet,” we were told.
This subjugation to the collective embodied by the Russian state is the reason Putin could mobilize society for war so easily. Before the invasion, a quarter of Russians already believed that the state was entitled to pursue its interests at the expense of individual rights. More than two years into the carnage, public support for the war in Ukraine is polling at an average of 75 percent. So who’s to stop the Russian autocrat?
In peacetime, conformism, nepotism, a weak rule of law, and corruption do not inspire the innovation and initiative necessary for economic advancement. But when war comes, Russia suddenly starts humming along. The very things that hamper Russia in peace—the rigidity of its authoritarianism; its top-down, centralized system of government; its machinery of repression; and its command economy—become assets during periods of conflict because they allow the government to quickly and ruthlessly mobilize society and industry for its war effort, making up for the technological backwardness and social atomization that otherwise typify the country.
To the state, war provides its raison d’être: protecting Russians from enemies. In other words, Russia has been made for war.
Robert F. Worth: Clash of the patriarchs
Russia’s renewed vigor is manifest: In 2023, its GDP grew 3.6 percent, boosted by the government’s military spending; growth is projected to keep rising in 2024. Capital flight from the economy is finally over, allowing Putin to advance grandiose infrastructure projects. Instead of the empty shelves predicted by foreign commentators, Russians continue to enjoy their favorite products—rebranded with domestic names—thanks to Kremlin insiders’ buying or seizing assets of Western companies that left the Russian market after the invasion. Dubious schemes that circumvent economic sanctions have also enabled Russia to source strategic technologies and components, including those it needs for its weaponry, and this in turn has created lucrative business opportunities for Russian entrepreneurs.
The country is awash in money: Incomes are up across the board. The wage for enlisting to fight in Ukraine is at least eight times higher than the national average. Lump sums payable to those wounded—or, for those killed in battle, to their relatives—are enough to enable the purchase of previously unaffordable apartments, cars, and consumer goods. Russian media outlets, official and unofficial, are rife with stories like that of Alexei Voronin, who doesn’t regret fighting in Ukraine despite losing part of a foot there. “Now I have everything,” he says, after the camera shows him gaming. His mother agrees that her son is lucky—he “only stepped on a mine,” whereas several of his fellow enlistees have been killed.
The situation at the front has also improved since last year. Volunteers continue to sign up to fight in Ukraine without Putin having to order another mobilization. Compared with the prospects for soldiers at the invasion’s start, the chances of survival are now much higher: The Russian military has better weapons and supplies, thanks in part to the willingness of civilians in the munitions industry to work round-the-clock shifts to make artillery shells and drones, outpacing Ukrainian and Western production. For our boys and We will win! read the graffiti on the Russian missiles and bombs that are cratering Kharkov and other Ukrainian cities and towns.
Such confidence is not just Russian jingoism. After reshuffling its commanders and improving logistics, Moscow has gained ground in Ukraine, neutralizing last year’s Ukrainian counteroffensive. Russian signals units have also learned to jam Western satellite systems and high-precision weapons.
Meanwhile, Russia has expanded the theater of war to its advantage. It has staged successful sabotage operations in Europe. It has increased its influence in Africa: Having absorbed the Wagner paramilitary force into its official military, Moscow has strengthened its relationship with various governments and local warlords. A self-proclaimed leader in the global fight against American hegemony, Russia has successfully courted regimes hostile to the U.S. all over the world, including Iran and North Korea, as well as more ostensibly neutral countries such as China, India, Hungary, and Brazil. Russia is far from isolated diplomatically.
Putin’s approval ratings remain high. With Kremlin propaganda casting him as a wartime president defending Russia from NATO and the West, Russia’s president has increased the number of his supporters. The opposition leader Alexei Navalny is dead; other dissidents have been exiled, imprisoned, or murdered, so no alternative viewpoints or narratives can break through. Instead of protesting a war that, for many, is literally killing their relatives—some 11 million Russians had relatives in Ukraine at the start of the invasion—young Russians today are lining up to gawk at captured NATO tanks and flocking to concerts of patriotic singers, where they chant “Russia” in almost religious exultation. At least some of that fervor appears genuine. More than half of Russians express confidence that their country is moving in the right direction.
Anastasia Edel: What to read to understand Russia
Russia is hardly unique, of course, in enjoying a powerful movement for national unity in a fight against a perceived external threat. What is specifically Russian is that its autocratic leaders always position their aggression as defense, and the Russian people invariably go along with it. The princes of medieval Muscovy seized neighboring territories under the guise of “gathering of the Russian lands.” The 18th- and 19th-century czars expanded this purported defense of Mother Russia to include Crimea, the Baltics, Finland, Poland, and the Caucasus. In the 20th century, the Bolsheviks “defended the achievements of the Revolution” in provinces of the Russian empire that had declared their independence, forcing them back into the fold under a Communist yoke.
The Kremlin’s self-mythology of offense-as-defense has been aided by two big invasions: the Napoleonic invasion of the early 1800s and the Nazi invasion in the 1940s. These exercises in national resistance cost millions of lives—yet the official piety ordains that this very sacrifice is what made Russia great. Putin has continued the tradition under new management, fighting imperialist wars in Chechnya, Georgia, and now Ukraine. For decades, his propaganda machine has exploited the real trauma of the Nazi invasion to support the fiction that all evil comes to Russia from the West, which envies Russia’s greatness and resources, and that it is therefore a duty of every Russian to rise up and fight it.
If you live inside this Fortress Russia, as I did when it was the Soviet Union, the sense of being besieged is almost impossible to escape. At summer camp, our games included “finding and disarming” saboteurs who’d infiltrated the camp to poison our dinner or steal our flag. In school and during holiday parades, we sang such lines as “We’re peaceful people, but our armored train stands at the ready!” The paranoia eased in the perestroika period of the late ’80s, and remained mild through the dissolution of the U.S.S.R. in the ’90s, but it never died. The fact that Russia can today produce 3 million artillery shells a year means that even during its ostensibly democratic years following the end of the Cold War, it did little to dismantle its military capacity.
Putin’s war in Ukraine is exacting a greater toll than Russia has experienced in many decades. He is mortgaging the future of Russia and its people to fight his colonial war. A third of the Russian state budget is now dedicated to the effort, much of which consists of simply raining fire on the battlefields of Ukraine. That money won’t be spent on schools, hospitals, or social services. Half a million young men are lying dead in zinc coffins or sitting disabled in wheelchairs. Civilians are paying for their acquiescence with the complete subjugation of civil society, an absence of free speech, and severe travel restrictions. Still, any expectation that Russians will at some point hold their government responsible for all of that is mistaken. In Russia, pain is part of the deal.
Everybody falls in line. Soviet-era tanks are pulled out of storage and sent to the front line, bread factories get converted to drone production, kindergarteners weave camouflage nets: “Everything for the victory” goes the slogan. Businessmen who lost their Italian properties get over the grief and buy new palaces in Dubai with proceeds from government military contracts. The denunciation and prosecution of saboteurs is no longer just a game at summer camp. All aboard the armored train!
This unholy symbiosis of a martial state and an obedient people is bad news for the free world. It means that Putin has succeeded in mobilizing Russia in order to realize his dreams of domination, and Russia can indulge its expansionist mania indefinitely, particularly as the Western response is stymied by the fear of escalation. But Putin has already escalated, unfurling the map of conflict with his hybrid war of sabotage, psychological operations, and interventions in Africa.
The West must take this threat seriously and fight back. And here, it can take a different lesson from Russian history.
As Napoleon and Hitler both discovered, to carry a conflict onto Russian soil can come at a devastating cost. But defeat in a war beyond its borders can be fatal for Moscow’s rulers. Only when faced with that sort of military disaster and humiliation do Russian autocracies teeter and collapse: Already damaged by its failures in the Crimean War of 1853–56, which accelerated the abolition of serfdom, and in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05, which forced Nicholas II to concede a parliament and constitution, the Romanov dynasty could not withstand the catastrophe of World War I; the humbling of the mighty Red Army in Afghanistan in the 1980s proved to be one of the nails in the U.S.S.R.’s coffin. A year ago, at a nadir of Russia’s campaign in Ukraine, Putin survived the rebellion of the Wagner leader Yevgeny Prigozhin; since then, Russia’s military has recovered its position, and Putin’s rule has stabilized. But if Ukraine can begin to prevail, Putin’s narrative as the grand defender of Russia will no longer hold, and regime change will become possible once more.
Until then, the world’s security will always be at risk from “the nation of victors,” as Russia likes to call itself. Meanwhile, for Russians themselves, the independence they are told to celebrate on June 12 is simply a pledge of allegiance to a state that treats them as disposable assets of its imperial designs.
The Atlantic · by Anastasia Edel · June 9, 2024
9. 82nd Airborne paratroopers cut down a 101st flag from an iconic bar on D-Day
Of course I made my wife watch the "Longest Day" this week so I could coincidentally explain this "incident" to her. She thoroughly understands the theory and value of LGOPs.
82nd Airborne paratroopers cut down a 101st flag from an iconic bar on D-Day
Troopers didn't like the flag of their rival airborne division flying over Sainte-Mère-Église, a town the 82nd Airborne liberated on D-Day.
BY JOSHUA SKOVLUND | PUBLISHED JUN 7, 2024 4:29 PM EDT
taskandpurpose.com · by Joshua Skovlund · June 7, 2024
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Soldiers in the 82nd Airborne and 101st Airborne divisions fought together on D-Day 80 years ago, but they carry on a fierce rivalry over hallowed spots the two liberated across Normandy. The latest chapter in that feud came this week when 82nd paratroopers took offense to a 101st flag flying over the Stop Bar in Sainte-Mère-Église, a town that 82nd paratroopers famously liberated on D-Day and have gathered at on D-Day anniversaries in the decades since.
A video emerged this week of an 82nd paratrooper climbing atop the Stop Bar in the town’s central square and cutting the 101st flag down as dozens of current and former paratroopers cheered from the streets below. The Stop Bar, in Sainte-Mère-Église central square, has long been a central meeting spot for 82nd troops and vets.
An 82nd paratrooper who was there told Task & Purpose what happened.
“The past few anniversaries we have in our drunken splendor mentioned that we want to take that filthy thing down because the 101st has never landed in Sainte-Mère-Église and that this is an 82nd town first and foremost,” the paratrooper said. “So 101st has no place to be in Sainte-Mère, so to have their flag above our stop bar is heresy.”
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The 101st flag, said the paratrooper, had flown over the bar for each of the last several D-Day anniversaries, which often serve as unofficial reunions for current troops and vets of the 82nd, which is known as the “All-American Division.” Sainte-Mère-Église was the site of some of its fiercest fighting during the invasion, including one of D-Day’s best known stories, in which 82nd paratrooper Pvt. John Steele landed on the roof of the town’s church, and hung there for over two hours. He was taken prisoner, but later escaped.
The church is visible in the background of the flag video.
“We have had multiple NCOs last year and the year before explicitly state: ‘Give me the order, give me the directive, you say the word,’” the paratrooper said. “From an E-5, to an E-6, to an E-7, and the request just goes up the chain. No one ever did anything in the past two years. However, this year, we finally pulled the trigger, and we executed what needed to be done.”
The rivalry over French turf between the 82nd and the 101st has been going strong since both units dropped thousands of paratroopers into Normandy during the D-Day invasion. While Sainte-Mère-Église was at the heart of the 82nd’s actions, the 101st seized an area around the town of Sainte Marie-du-Mont.
But the paratrooper said it didn’t stop with their All-American flag flying high. Another flag had taken its place by the next day — possibly installed, the Americans suspect, by a secretive French resistance.
“Someone took down one of [the 82nd flags] and replaced it with a French flag during the curfew hours,” the paratrooper said. “Now it appears that it’s zip-tied up there. So, we don’t know if it’s official or if it was carried out by just a couple of Vanguard-type hooligans of the French local populace.”
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Joshua Skovlund
Joshua Skovlund is a staff writer for Task & Purpose and a former U.S. Army forward observer. He has been covering the military, veterans, and first responders for over three years, reporting on assignment from Ukraine during the opening salvo of the Russian invasion, multinational military exercises in Germany, and during the 2020 civil unrest in Minneapolis. His previous bylines include Coffee or Die Magazine and Outdoor Life. Contact the author here.
taskandpurpose.com · by Joshua Skovlund · June 7, 2024
10. This Is What It Looks Like When AI Eats the World
Conclusion:
AI is eating the world is meant, by the technology’s champions, as a triumphant, exciting phrase. But that is not the only way to interpret it. One can read it menacingly, as a battle cry of rapid, forceful colonization. Lately, I’ve been hearing it with a tone of resignation, the kind that accompanies shrugged shoulders and forced hands. Left unsaid is what happens to the raw material—the food—after it’s consumed and digested, its nutrients extracted. We don’t say it aloud, but we know what it becomes.
(So what does it become? Ammunition for north Korea's filth balloon barrage? - apologies, I could not resist trying to some humor)
This Is What It Looks Like When AI Eats the World
The web itself is being shoved into a great unknown.
By Charlie Warzel
The Atlantic · by Charlie Warzel · June 7, 2024
Tech evangelists like to say that AI will eat the world—a reference to a famous line about software from the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen. In the past few weeks, we’ve finally gotten a sense of what they mean.
This spring, tech companies have made clear that AI will be a defining feature of online life, whether people want it to be or not. First, Meta surprised users with an AI chatbot that lives in the search bar on Instagram and Facebook. It has since informed European users that their data are being used to train its AI—presumably sent only to comply with the continent’s privacy laws. OpenAI released GPT-4o, billed as a new, more powerful and conversational version of its large language model. (Its announcement event featured an AI voice named Sky that Scarlett Johansson alleged was based on her own voice without her permission, an allegation OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman has denied. You can listen for yourself here.) Around the same time, Google launched—and then somewhat scaled back—“AI Overviews” in its search engine. OpenAI also entered into new content partnerships with numerous media organizations (including The Atlantic) and platforms such as Reddit, which seem to be operating on the assumption that AI products will soon be a primary means for receiving information on the internet. (The Atlantic’s deal with OpenAI is a corporate partnership. The editorial division of The Atlantic operates with complete independence from the business division.) Nvidia, a company that makes microchips used to power AI applications, reported record earnings at the end of May and subsequently saw its market capitalization increase to more than $3 trillion. Summing up the moment, Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s centibillionaire CEO, got the rock-star treatment at an AI conference in Taipei this week and, uh, signed a woman’s chest like a member of Mötley Crüe.
The pace of implementation is dizzying, even alarming—including to some of those who understand the technology best. Earlier this week, employees and former employees of OpenAI and Google published a letter declaring that “strong financial incentives” have led the industry to dodge meaningful oversight. Those same incentives have seemingly led companies to produce a lot of trash as well. Chatbot hardware products from companies such as Humane and Rabbit were touted as attempts to unseat the smartphone, but were shipped in a barely functional state. Google’s rush to launch AI Overviews—an attempt to compete with Microsoft, Perplexity, and OpenAI—resulted in comically flawed and potentially dangerous search results.
Read: A devil’s bargain with OpenAI
Technology companies, in other words, are racing to capture money and market share before their competitors do and making unforced errors as a result. But though tech corporations may have built the hype train, others are happy to ride it. Leaders in all industries, terrified of missing out on the next big thing, are signing checks and inking deals, perhaps not knowing what precisely it is they’re getting into or if they are unwittingly helping the companies who will ultimately destroy them. The Washington Post’s chief technology officer, Vineet Khosla, has reportedly told staff that the company intends to “have A.I. everywhere” inside the newsroom, even if its value to journalism remains, in my eyes, unproven and ornamental. We are watching as the plane is haphazardly assembled in midair.
As an employee at one of the publications that has recently signed a deal with OpenAI, I have some minor insight into what it’s like when generative AI turns its hungry eyes to your small corner of an industry. What does it feel like when AI eats the world? It feels like being trapped.
There’s an element of these media partnerships that feels like a shakedown. Tech companies have trained their large language models with impunity, claiming that harvesting the internet’s content to develop their programs is fair use. This is the logical end point of Silicon Valley’s classic “Ask for forgiveness, not for permission” growth strategy. The cynical way to read these partnerships is that media companies have two choices: Take the money offered, or accept OpenAI scraping their data anyway. These conditions resemble a hostage negotiation more than they do a mutually agreeable business partnership—an observation that media executives are making in private to one another, and occasionally in public, too.
Publications can obviously turn down these deals. They have other options, but these options are, to use a technical term, not great. You can sue OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement, which is what The New York Times has done, and hope to set a legal precedent where extractive generative-AI companies pay fairly for any work they use to train their models. This process is prohibitively costly for many organizations, and if they lose, they get nothing but legal bills. Which leaves a third option: Abstain on principle from the generative-AI revolution altogether, block the web-crawling bots from companies such as OpenAI, and take a justified moral stand while your competitors capitulate and take the money. This third path requires a bet on the hope that the generative-AI era is overhyped, that the Times wins its lawsuit, or that the government steps in to regulate this extractive business model—which is to say, it’s uncertain.
The situation that publishers face seems to perfectly illustrate a broader dynamic: Nobody knows exactly what to do. That’s hardly surprising, given that generative AI is a technology that has so far been defined by ambiguity and inconsistency. Google users encountering AI Overviews for the first time may not understand what they’re there for, or whether they’re more useful than the usual search results. There is a gap, too, between the tools that exist and the future we’re being sold. The innovation curve, we’re told, will be exponential. The paradigm, we’re cautioned, is about to shift. Regular people, we’re to believe, have little choice in the matter, especially as the computers scale up and become more powerful: We can only experience a low-grade disorientation as we shadowbox with the notion of this promised future. Meanwhile, the ChatGPTs of the world are here, foisted upon us by tech companies who insist that these tools should be useful in some way.
But there is an alternative framing for these media partnerships that suggests a moment of cautious opportunity for beleaguered media organizations. Publishers are already suppliers for algorithms, and media companies have been getting a raw deal for decades, allowing platforms such as Google to index their sites and receiving only traffic referrals in exchange. Signing a deal with OpenAI, under this logic, isn’t capitulation or good business: It’s a way to fight back against platforms and set ground rules: You have to pay us for our content, and if you don’t, we’re going to sue you.
Read: Generative AI is challenging a 234-year-old law
Over the past week, after conversations with several executives at different companies who have negotiated with OpenAI, I was left with the sense that the tech company is less interested in publisher data to train its models and far more interested in real-time access to news sites for OpenAI's forthcoming search tools. (I agreed to keep these executives anonymous to allow them to speak freely about their companies’ deals.) Having access to publisher-partner data is helpful for the tech company in two ways: First, it allows OpenAI to cite third-party organizations when a user asks a question on a sensitive issue, which means OpenAI can claim that it is not making editorial decisions in its product. Second, if the company has ambitions to unseat Google as the dominant search engine, it needs up-to-date information.
Here, I’m told, is where media organizations may have leverage for ongoing negotiations: OpenAI will, theoretically, continue to want updated news information. Other search engines and AI companies, wanting to compete, would also need that information, only now there’s a precedent that they should pay for it. This would potentially create a consistent revenue stream for publishers through licensing. This isn’t unprecedented: Record companies fought platforms such as YouTube on copyright issues and have found ways to be compensated for their content; that said, news organizations aren’t selling Taylor Swift songs. (Spokespeople for both OpenAI and The Atlantic did clarify to me that The Atlantic’s contract, which is for two years, allows the tech company to train its products on Atlantic content. But when the deal ends, unless it is renewed, OpenAI would not be permitted to use Atlantic data to train new foundation models.)
Zoom out and even this optimistic line of thinking becomes fraught, however. Do we actually want to live in a world where generative-AI companies have greater control over the flow of information online? A transition from search engines to chatbots would be immensely disruptive. Google is imperfect, its product arguably degrading, but it has provided a foundational business model for creative work online by allowing optimized content to reach audiences. Perhaps the search paradigm needs to change and it’s only natural that the webpage becomes a relic. Still, the magnitude of the disruption and the blithe nature with which tech companies suggest everyone gets on board give the impression that none of the AI developers is concerned about finding a sustainable model for creative work to flourish. As Judith Donath and Bruce Schneier wrote recently in this publication, AI “threatens to destroy the complex online ecosystem that allows writers, artists, and other creators to reach human audiences.” Follow this logic and things get existential quickly: What incentive do people have to create work, if they can’t make a living doing it?
If you feel your brain start to pretzel up inside your skull, then you are getting the full experience of the generative-AI revolution barging into your industry. This is what disruption actually feels like. It’s chaotic. It’s rushed. You’re told it’s an exhilarating moment, full of opportunity, even if what that means in practice is not quite clear.
Read: It’s the end of the web as we know it
Nobody knows what’s coming next. Generative-AI companies have built tools that, although popular and nominally useful in boosting productivity, are but a dim shadow of the ultimate goal of constructing a human-level intelligence. And yet they are exceedingly well funded, aggressive, and capable of leveraging a breathless hype cycle to amass power and charge head-on into any industry they please with the express purpose of making themselves central players. Will the technological gains of this moment be worth the disruption, or will the hype slowly peter out, leaving the internet even more broken than it is now? After roughly two years of the most recent wave of AI hype, all that is clear is that these companies do not need to build Skynet to be destructive.
AI is eating the world is meant, by the technology’s champions, as a triumphant, exciting phrase. But that is not the only way to interpret it. One can read it menacingly, as a battle cry of rapid, forceful colonization. Lately, I’ve been hearing it with a tone of resignation, the kind that accompanies shrugged shoulders and forced hands. Left unsaid is what happens to the raw material—the food—after it’s consumed and digested, its nutrients extracted. We don’t say it aloud, but we know what it becomes.
The Atlantic · by Charlie Warzel · June 7, 2024
11. D-Day, 80 years later, contains lessons for defending Taiwan
Lesson one: Do not keep the Panzers in reserve until it is too late.
Lesson two: Do not let the Fuhrer take a sleeping pill if he has to make a decision.
In all seriousness:
Conclusion:
The Normandy landings occurred after two and a half years of war for the U.S., nearly five years of war for the UK, and arguably seven years into the world crisis that we now term the Second World War. Putin’s war against Ukraine began in 2014, and shifted to a new, more brutal phase in 2022. The U.S. must recognize that it has wasted its gifted time. Decisions that seem radical or provocative in peacetime are not so in wartime. While the U.S. is not yet at war, the world is certainly close enough to it.
While we prepare for possible conventional war (with the first intention to deter it), we must not lose sight of the political warfare that is being fought (yes it is a fight) that could cause the PRC to win while we lose without a conventional fight.
D-Day, 80 years later, contains lessons for defending Taiwan
https://thehill.com/opinion/national-security/4702452-d-day-80-years-later-contains-lessons-for-defending-taiwan/
BY SETH CROPSEY, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR - 06/06/24 9:30 AM ET
Eighty years ago today, soldiers from ten nations hit the beaches in northern France.
Five thousand assault craft carried 160,000 soldiers onto Normandy’s shores. They were supported by seven battleships, dozens of cruisers and destroyers, and extensive ground-based air cover.
They followed closely behind around 30,000 American and British paratroopers and glider infantry, who had been dropped in the night before to disrupt German defenses. All of this took place after years of mass bombing against Germany, months of aerial reconnaissance, and equally critical, six months of carefully planned deception operations to spoil German planning and preparation.
Even then, the D-Day landings were a very close call. The U.S. should take a distinct lesson from this as it faces an adversary contemplating an operation of similar complexity in the Pacific. No single element will deter or defeat China and its intentions against Taiwan. Instead, only the comprehensive application of national military power and alliances can succeed. This should include military integration with Taiwan.
The D-Day landings were not the largest military operation in history, at least not by number of participants. That distinction belongs to Operation Barbarossa, the nearly four-million-man German offensive into the Soviet Union. Despite its tactical successes, Barbarossa failed strategically to knock the Soviets out of the war.
Operation Overlord, although much smaller in numbers, was decidedly more sophisticated in operational needs. It required synchronization not only of infantry, artillery, and armor, but their delivery to enemy-held shoreline, and their support by tactical airpower, bomber interdiction, and naval gunfire. The Allies, using their collective industrial and technical capacity, needed not only to man and equip an enormous ground force, but also to invent wholly new machines. This included the well-known Higgins Boat and its cousins, as well as “Hobart’s Funnies,” a series of bespoke armored vehicles armed with flamethrowers, heavy mortars, and mine-clearing weapons to push through tenacious German defenses.
Much of the technical difficulty of D-Day stemmed from its unprecedented character. The Allies had conducted several amphibious assaults in the European theater before D-Day, including landings in Sicily and Italy. But no prior amphibious assault had been so central to the war effort. Failure in Sicily or Italy would have been a strategic reversal, but German resistance in Western Europe could not have been broken without a successful crossing of the channel. Had D-Day failed, Germany could have again turned eastward. This would have extended the war until 1946 at least, before the U.S. would have developed enough nuclear weapons to beat the Nazis into submission. A rupture might have also occurred between London and Washington, since the Americans had decided on the Normandy landings, ruling out British alternatives in Scandinavia and the Mediterranean.
China is currently contemplating a cross-strait attack of equal complexity to the Normandy landings. The strategic roles have been reversed — Taiwan, a nominal U.S. ally, faces attack, meaning that the U.S. will be preventing a Chinese landing. Such an operation has enormous complexities, and even if successful, will involve tens of thousands of Chinese casualties in its first day, alongside the risk of a wider war. Indeed, the Chinese Communist Party is setting the conditions to manipulate Taiwan into submission without an invasion, and to keep the U.S. and its allies politically separated from Taipei. But China has to prepare for a cross-strait attack simply as a matter of political calculation, in case Taiwan will not come willingly.
Germany’s experience offers some help to U.S. planners. The Germans were ultimately overwhelmed after D-Day for two reasons: proper deceptive planning and cumulative attrition. The Allied deception effort ensured that critical German reserves were out of position. In turn, the Allied bomber offensive, despite failing to cripple German industry, did erode German fighter strength over the front line. Combined with general combat exhaustion and declining fuel reserves, this hampered German mobility.
At the operational level, the Germans still fought well, or at least better than the Allies. German officers noted that Allied forces lacked the operational talent or, in most cases, the tactical competence to exploit opportunities as they developed, instead relying on heavy firepower and methodical advances. The result was a heavily delayed timetable. It took the Allies six days to link their beachheads, another 20 days to take the port of Cherbourg, and nearly two full months to capture an intact port, Caen.
The central lesson for the defense of Taiwan is the need to slow down the enemy operation. Taiwan should, of course, be armed with a host of mobile anti-ship missiles to sink Chinese troop transports. But considering the amount of mass that China can bring to bear against its island neighbor, this will not stop a landing by itself.
A number of publicly available wargames indicate that China will be able to land on Taiwan’s beaches, despite heavy losses. It is the next phase that will be crucial: Taiwan, assisted by the U.S. and its allies, must prevent the PLA from breaking out of one or more landing sites and taking a major port along the coast, while also countering a near-continuous missile and drone barrage.
The longer each phase of the cross-strait operation takes, the more critical assets China will lose, progressively degrading its ability to employ its operational concepts and plans. By corroding Chinese forces and slowing the operation, the U.S. and Taiwan can ensure that a People’s Liberation Army assault grinds to a halt without achieving its strategic objective.
This implies that anti-ship missiles alone are not enough. No single capability is enough. Taiwan cannot be made a “bristling porcupine” independently. For even with enough forward-deployed weapons to resist for weeks or even months, Taiwan is at risk unless the U.S. and its allies fight.
The result is a need for a truly integrated command structure that puts Taiwanese, American, and Japanese officers together to plan and fight true combined and joint operations. This requires a radical culture change in the U.S. military in particular, which is used to picking and choosing Pacific partners in a compartmentalized series of alliances, rather than integrating allied capabilities. It will also require a proper political and intelligence support effort for Taiwan to mitigate the threat of Chinese subversion of Taiwan’s officer corps.
Put more broadly, it requires direct engagement with Taiwan, alongside Japan, in a manner that treats Taiwan as a de facto state ally. This would amount to a radical revision of our Taiwan policy. But it must be done if the U.S. seeks to defeat a Chinese attack on its democratic neighbor.
The Normandy landings occurred after two and a half years of war for the U.S., nearly five years of war for the UK, and arguably seven years into the world crisis that we now term the Second World War. Putin’s war against Ukraine began in 2014, and shifted to a new, more brutal phase in 2022. The U.S. must recognize that it has wasted its gifted time. Decisions that seem radical or provocative in peacetime are not so in wartime. While the U.S. is not yet at war, the world is certainly close enough to it.
Seth Cropsey is the founder and president of Yorktown Institute. He served as a naval officer and as deputy Undersecretary of the Navy and is the author of Mayday and Seablindness.
12. Chinese media pushes 'Philippines as aggressor’ narrative before viral Marcos deepfake
The three warfare at work against the Philippines.
Chinese media pushes 'Philippines as aggressor’ narrative before viral Marcos deepfake
philstar.com · by Cristina Chi,Nadie Esteban
This report forms part of Philstar.com's coverage of influence operations, which involve the spread of false information and propaganda that can mislead, cause confusion and prevent informed understanding and discourse. Read our explainer on influence operations.
A relentless months-long campaign by Chinese state media to depict the Philippines as the aggressor in the South China Sea preceded the viral spread of the “deepfake” audio of Marcos allegedly ordering an attack on China.
MANILA, Philippines — Chinese state media have routinely portrayed the Philippines as a provocative and aggressive country in the West Philippine Sea following the private meeting between former President Rodrigo Duterte and Chinese President Xi Jinping in July 2023, with most articles published right after an altercation between the two countries in the tense waterways.
Every month since August 2023, the Chinese Communist Party’s propaganda apparatus has published news articles or editorials that claim the Philippines was “stirring up trouble” or “making provocations at sea,” typically hours or days after Chinese vessels block or attack much smaller Filipino boats.
Philstar.com’s monitoring over nine months found more than 60 such articles and/or statements from media outfits owned or associated with the Chinese government. Most statements are published by People’s Daily and The Global Times, newspapers controlled by the Chinese Communist Party.
While local media and influencers targeting Filipinos have not echoed this narrative on the same scale, there appeared to be a recent attempt to sow confusion among Filipinos over whether the Philippines was an aggressor. This was done through the recently viral “deepfake” audio of President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. supposedly ordering the military to attack China — the origins of which remain unknown but is believed to have come from a foreign source.
Besides framing the Philippines as an instigator, Chinese social media influencers and anonymous accounts have also pounced on the Duterte-led Mindanao independence campaign in the Philippines to spread rumors of an all-out civil war in the country.
These articles have some of the markings of an influence operation that Philstar.com is tracking across all social media platforms, groups and spaces on the internet.
Marcos’ ‘strikingly different’ stance on West Philippine Sea
In July 2023, the Philippine government issued a statement commemorating the seventh anniversary of the 2016 Hague ruling that invalidated China’s sweeping claims in the South China Sea. The Department of Foreign Affairs called the ruling a “settled landmark” and a “shining beacon of internal law practice.”
China, which has never accepted the arbitral decision, said in a report by the Global Times that this was a “strikingly different” statement from the Philippines. Citing “experts,” the report said that the wording used by the Philippines showed the country was “growing tougher in its stance.”
Exactly a week after the publication of the statement, Duterte met with Xi behind closed doors, where Duterte reportedly expressed support for “friendlier” Philippines-China relations, according to a Global Times report.
Thus began the pattern. For almost a year, every time Chinese vessels block or attack a Philippine vessel in the West Philippine Sea, usually during resupply missions to the Ayungin Shoal, Chinese state media would quote Chinese officials who have concluded that Philippine vessels’ “aggressive actions” and “dangerous maneuvers” provoked Chinese vessels to respond.
The pattern was observed first in August 2023 when Chinese Coast Guard vessels shot water cannons at PCG during a resupply mission for military troops in Ayungin Shoal.
A day after the incident, People’s Daily Online published an article quoting Wu Qian, spokesperson for the Chinese ministry of national defense, who said that the Philippines must “cease provocation” and that they will continue to safeguard their territory.
This pattern was repeated seven times more monthly from September to March, where encounters between Chinese and Philippine vessels were attributed to the Philippines’ “dangerous provocations” at sea.
December escalation
In December, a wider network of Chinese state media and Facebook pages amplified the narrative that the Philippines often provoked Chinese vessels in the tense waterways, thus reaching a larger audience.
In two separate incidents on December 9 and 10, the CCG and the Chinese Maritime Militia fired water cannons at Philippine vessels resupplying Filipino fishers and the anchored BRP Sierra Madre.
In one of its most aggressive maneuvers in 2023, on December 9, Chinese Coast Guard vessels repeatedly fired three Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources vessels with water cannon blasts. Suspected militia ships also reportedly used painful sound blasts that temporarily affected Filipino crew members’ hearing.
The next day, the CCG rammed and fired water cannons at Philippine vessels engaged in a resupply mission to military personnel stationed on BRP Sierra Madre.
Both incidents were immediately depicted by Chinese state media and state agencies as the result of the Philippines’ “dangerous” actions in the South China Sea. For instance, CGTN, the English-language news channel of state-run China Global Television Network, said the December 10 incident was caused by the Philippine vessels that “swerved in an unprofessional and dangerous manner.” The CCG also accused a Philippine boat of “deliberately colliding” with a Chinese vessel after “disregarding our multiple stern warnings.”
On Dec. 18, 2023, the Chinese foreign ministry accused the Philippines of repeatedly dismissing “China’s goodwill and restraint and challenged China’s principles and red line with repeated provocations.”
The Chinese Embassy in Manila on Dec. 24, 2023, said in a Facebook post that certain Filipino politicians have manipulated the narrative to proliferate anti-China sentiments among Filipinos.
Meanwhile, there was a sudden surge of social media posts and articles depicting the Philippines as an aggressor after The People’s Daily published a story that alleged the Philippines made "repeated provocative moves" in the South China Sea and ignored China’s “goodwill and restraint” on December 27.
Monitoring by Philstar.com and the Taiwan-based Doublethink Lab shows that Beijing’s information campaign involved over 20 social media posts and articles that either reposted the People’s Daily article word-per-word or used nearly the same keywords, such as the Philippines being “extremely dangerous” or “ignoring China’s goodwill.”
On the same day, Facebook page We Are China, labeled as a “China state-controlled media” by the social media platform and which has 25 million followers, also posted a snippet and a link to the article.
Beijing-affiliated accounts were not the only accounts to disseminate the narrative. Alongside Voice of the People and The People’s Daily Online official channels, Samachar Dainik from Nepal, Korea Post, and a dubious website of the Subic Bay Naval Station reposted the China-controlled state media’s article on December 28, 2023.
The Subic Bay Naval Station publishes other defense-related news but also uploads content related to hotels and resorts.
These screengrabs, taken at different days in the month of May, show the articles that form the influence operation to depict the Philippines as an aggressor.
Filipino ‘experts’ echo narrative
Two Filipino experts leading the think tank Asian Century Philippines Strategic Studies Institute (ACPSSI) have also spread this narrative either by granting interviews to Chinese state media or through local forums and news reports.
Herman Tiu Laurel, president of ACPSSI, said in a CGTN video on December 23 that the Philippine Coast Guard and “some civilian Filipino boats” have been provoking Chinese vessels based on the orders of the United States government through a certain “project Myoushu.”
Laurel is also the host of Global Talk News Radio, a radio show broadcasted by Radyo Pilipinas, the flagship government AM radio station of the Philippine government’s Presidential Broadcast Service. A quick scan of the Facebook page of his radio program shows that it also spreads similar pro-China narratives on the social media platform.
Similar to the keywords used by Chinese state media, ACPSSI posted an article on December 28 that claimed the Philippines is “stirring up trouble,” “building up hype” and creating “publicity stunts” in the WPS.
Besides Laurel, ACPSSI vice president for external affairs, Anna Malindog-Uy, has also been repeatedly quoted by Chinese state media as saying that the Philippines is an instigator in the WPS.
A Filipino-language Facebook page named CRI Filipino Service, labeled by the social media platform as “China state-controlled media,” also posted on December 29 claiming the same narrative. The page has around 1.2 million followers.
Lead up to Marcos’ deepfake
After the barrage of narrative attacks in December, January 2024 saw no direct incidents between the two countries, but there was still an attempt from Beijing-linked media to paint the Philippines as an aggressor.
Quoting certain “analysts,” a China Daily article on January 29 again pressed the Philippines to cease its “provocations” in the South China Sea, a week after the Philippine Navy air dropped supplies for personnel at the BRP Sierra Madre.
The pattern continued in February and March. On the morning of March 23, video footage captured China using water cannons against smaller Philippine vessels during their routine resupply mission to the BRP Sierra Madre.
Two days later, Hua Chunying from China's foreign affairs ministry posted an infographic on X accusing the Philippines of "playing victim after provocation” and said that China has tried to resolve disputes through dialogue.
Screengrab taken on May 30, 2024.
Hua’s post earned over 2,100 likes and 1,300 reposts.
In April, Marcos became the subject of an “audio deepfake” clip that depicted him directing the Philippine military to act against China.
Days after the video was uploaded on YouTube, anonymous accounts on two Chinese social media platforms, Baijahao and NetEase, spread the narrative that the United States was behind the AI-generated audio to worsen tensions between the Philippines and China.
The source behind a widely circulated deepfake audio of President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. telling the Armed Forces of the Philippines to launch an attack against China has yet to be identified pending an official investigation launched by the Philippine government.
But a couple of… pic.twitter.com/9iv3Zwh3iA
— Philstar.com (@PhilstarNews) May 13, 2024
— With reports by Doublethink Lab, John Marwin Elao, Christian Patrick Laqui
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This alert/analysis/series was produced with support from an Internews initiative aiming to build the capacity of news organizations to understand and monitor disinformation and influence operations in the Philippines.
philstar.com · by Cristina Chi,Nadie Esteban
13. 'New Containment' Strategy Is Doomed To Fail
Excerpts;
Today's proponents of New Containment, by contrast, seem to have misunderstood the original doctrine's subtleties. They advocate for a blanket strategy that targets both Russia and China simultaneously, without considering the distinct challenges each country presents or the vastly different global context we now inhabit.
Consider the economic realm. New Containment relies heavily on economic isolation as a tool of coercion, as in the case of the recent spate of sanctions deployed against Russia. During the Cold War, elements of this approach made sense: the West enjoyed a near-monopoly on advanced technologies and economic resources, which it used to incentivize allies and deter adversaries.
Today, however, the global economic landscape has changed dramatically. Unlike the Soviet Union, modern Russia and China are deeply integrated into the global economy. China, in particular, has emerged as a manufacturing powerhouse, deeply integrated into global supply chains. A strategy of economic isolation is therefore far less feasible and potentially much more self-damaging for the U.S. This can be seen in current attempts to "re-shore" manufacturing from China: supply chains are being lengthened while retaining the same starting and endpoints. Products are still coming from China, but are either transported through or going through the final stages of assembly in an intermediary country to give the appearance that they are delinked from China.
'New Containment' Strategy Is Doomed To Fail
Newsweek · by Carlos Roa Visiting fellow, Danube Institute · June 7, 2024
Published Jun 07, 2024 at 4:05 PM EDTShare
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In recent years, the concept of "containment" has made a surprising comeback in U.S. foreign policy circles, with strategists proposing a "New Containment" strategy aimed at Russia and China. This idea, modeled after America's Cold War strategy, seeks to create a cordon sanitaire around these nations, using economic and military measures to limit their influence.
This approach, however, is fundamentally flawed, and risks not only failure but an exacerbation of global tensions. Indeed, as scholars Nicolai N. Petro and Arta Moeini argue, the current trajectory of the Russo-Ukrainian War highlights the dangers of underestimating Russia's willingness to defend its perceived vital interests, even at great cost to itself.
The original containment strategy, as conceived by George Kennan, was tailored to the unique geopolitical context of the Cold War. It aimed to limit Soviet expansion through a combination of military deterrence and economic incentives, focusing on areas of strategic importance while avoiding direct conflict. Kennan's approach was nuanced, recognizing the limitations of military power and emphasizing the need for political and ideological engagement.
Today's proponents of New Containment, by contrast, seem to have misunderstood the original doctrine's subtleties. They advocate for a blanket strategy that targets both Russia and China simultaneously, without considering the distinct challenges each country presents or the vastly different global context we now inhabit.
Consider the economic realm. New Containment relies heavily on economic isolation as a tool of coercion, as in the case of the recent spate of sanctions deployed against Russia. During the Cold War, elements of this approach made sense: the West enjoyed a near-monopoly on advanced technologies and economic resources, which it used to incentivize allies and deter adversaries.
Today, however, the global economic landscape has changed dramatically. Unlike the Soviet Union, modern Russia and China are deeply integrated into the global economy. China, in particular, has emerged as a manufacturing powerhouse, deeply integrated into global supply chains. A strategy of economic isolation is therefore far less feasible and potentially much more self-damaging for the U.S. This can be seen in current attempts to "re-shore" manufacturing from China: supply chains are being lengthened while retaining the same starting and endpoints. Products are still coming from China, but are either transported through or going through the final stages of assembly in an intermediary country to give the appearance that they are delinked from China.
Other kinds of sanctions and trade barriers, while certainly disruptive and even costly, are unlikely to achieve the desired effect of crippling these nations' economies. For one, they can simply experience the same process of supply chain lengthening described above. Consider that, over the past two years, Serbia's exports to Kyrgyzstan have gone up by 6,200 percent. As one economist notes, "There's no doubt that Kyrgyzstan is a key node in transshipment of Western goods to Russia." More broadly, continually sanctioning Russia and China—and anyone who might be taking advantage of the current opportunity, as Kyrgyzstan is—risks pushing these countries closer together, accelerating the development of alternative economic networks such as the BRICS+ grouping, which seeks to create a parallel global economy less dependent on Western institutions and currencies.
BEIJING, CHINA - MAY 16: Russian President Vladimir Putin (L) and Chinese President Xi Jinping (R) arrive for Russian-Chinese talks May 16, 2024 in Beijing, China. Putin is in China for a two-day state visit. BEIJING, CHINA - MAY 16: Russian President Vladimir Putin (L) and Chinese President Xi Jinping (R) arrive for Russian-Chinese talks May 16, 2024 in Beijing, China. Putin is in China for a two-day state visit. Contributor/Getty Images
Beyond the realm of trade and finance, however, there is the more concerning possibility of military confrontation. One of the key flaws of the New Containment strategy is its failure to account for the principle of "escalation dominance" in regions adjacent to Russia and China. During the Cold War, the United States carefully avoided direct military engagements with the Soviet Union in areas deemed vital to Soviet security. If it had not, Moscow would have deemed it a major threat, easily precipitating a nuclear war. Today, however, the West is attempting to project power into areas where Russia and China have significant military advantages, such as Ukraine and the South China Sea.
This aggressive posture increases the risk of direct conflict, with potentially catastrophic consequences. A miscalculation in the Indo-Pacific could provoke a dangerous escalation with China, whose military capabilities and regional influence have grown significantly.
Such a miscalculation could also come about for ideological reasons. The ideological aspect of containment during the Cold War played a crucial role in its success. Kennan's strategy envisioned a future where the Soviet Union could eventually reintegrate into the global community once communism collapsed. This hopeful vision offered an alternative to Soviet citizens, fostering its eventual transformation.
In contrast, the New Containment strategy lacks a positive vision for Russia or China. It portrays these nations not just as strategic competitors but as existential threats that must be defeated and isolated indefinitely—if not dismantled. This approach alienates Russian and Chinese leaders, entrenches nationalist sentiments, and makes diplomacy—let alone future détente—more difficult.
New Containment is thus not only a flawed approach, but a misapplication of Cold War logic to a fundamentally different global context. It risks escalating conflicts, damaging the U.S. and global economies, and alienating potential allies. Instead of clinging to dated, aggressive, and unsound strategies, the United States should adopt a more nuanced approach, drawing on the principles of Washingtonian Realism. This philosophy—which advocates for a foreign policy that prioritizes national unity, economic self-sufficiency, and pragmatic diplomacy—emphasizes the importance of engaging with the world in a way that aligns with America's core interests and values. It recognizes the need for strategic partnerships based on mutual respect and shared goals, rather than coercive tactics and unilateral demands that are unlikely to work.
By fostering dialogue, cooperation, and mutual respect, the United States can build a more stable and prosperous international order—one that reflects the complexities of the 21st century rather than the binaries of the Cold War. This approach offers a more hopeful vision for the future that aligns with America's enduring principles, and its role as a global leader.
Carlos Roa is an Associate Washington Fellow at the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy and a Visiting Fellow at the Danube Institute. He is the former executive editor of The National Interest and remains a contributing editor of that publication.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
De Oppresso Liber,
David Maxwell
Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy
Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation
Editor, Small Wars Journal
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
Phone: 202-573-8647
email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com
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