Quotes of the Day:

“Human beings are so made that the ones who do the crushing feel nothing; it is the person crushed who feels what is happening. Unless one has placed one shelf on the side of the oppressed, to feel with them, one cannot understand.” 

- Simone Weil

"The surest way to corrupt. A youth is to instruct him to hold in higher steam, those who think alike than those who think differently."

- Friedrich Nietzsche

"A man is like a fraction whose numerator is what he is and whose denominator is what he thinks of himself. The larger the denominator, the smaller the fraction."

- Leo Tolstoy

1. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, June 30, 2023

2. Poor planning under Trump, Biden led to chaotic Afghanistan withdrawal, report says

3. China-Taiwan Weekly Update, June 30, 2023

4. A Warrior's Goodbye: A Heartfelt Sendoff Hosted for Legendary Green Beret and 'National Hero' Billy Waugh

5. National Archives concludes review of JFK assassination documents with 99% made public

6. Military Marks Half-Century of the All-Volunteer Force

7. Why won’t China Admit that it’s Competing with the United States?

8. The Ukrainian Nuclear war of 2023 and its Aftermath

9. Don't Ask Ukraine to Lose the War for 'Peace'

10. Pentagon to filmmakers: We won’t help you if you kowtow To China

11. CIA director, on secret trip to Ukraine, hears plan for war’s endgame

12. Michael G. Vickers Is Worried About the Future of American Power

13. How China’s Overseas Security Forces Differ From Wagner

14. To Foreign Policy Veteran, the Real Danger Is at Home

15. This Day In History: “Mr. X” article on Soviet Union appears in Foreign Affairs

16. Opinion | The American Empire in the Fog of Ukraine

17. Biden Abroad: The Moral and Material Collapse of U.S. Foreign Policy

18. Milley: Measured pace of Ukraine’s counteroffensive not a surprise

19. China TikTok figure fingered in ‘deepfake’ anti-U.S. Russian soldier videos

20. Treasury Sanctions Russian Intelligence Officers Supervising Election Influence Operations in the United States and Around the World

21. Biden Administration Foreign Policy Tracker: July

22. Humans Aren’t Mentally Ready for an AI-Saturated ‘Post-Truth World’

23. Gen. Milley warns US military must modernize now

24. Navy SEALs Seek New Tech for Covert Missions

25. In Japan's Backyard, Russian Navy Warship 'Knocks Out' Anti-Ship Cruise Missile With Air Defense Missile

26. [Wang Son-taek] US-China dialogue sheds light on a new global order

27. Fears for people and firms as China’s new anti-espionage law comes into effect

28. China uses laser for 10 times faster satellite-to-ground communication in major breakthrough

29. Raytheon Calls Up Retirees to Help Produce Weapons for Ukraine

​30. ​Poland Wants To Host NATO Nukes To Counter Russia

1. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, June 30, 2023

Maps/graphics/citations: https://understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-june-30-2023

Key Takeaways:

• Ukrainian forces conducted counteroffensive operations in at least three sectors of the frontline on June 30.
• Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief General Valerii Zaluzhnyi stated on June 30 that Ukrainian forces continue to advance in eastern and southern Ukraine despite lacking essential resources.
• The Russian information space is reacting disproportionately to the Russian military’s failure to drive a small Ukrainian force from east (left) bank Kherson Oblast.
• Ukrainian intelligence reported that Russian forces and officials are gradually leaving the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP) possibly in preparation for an intentional “accident” at the facility.
• Russian forces remain unlikely to cause an intentional “accident” at the ZNPP, and Russia is likely continuing to use the threat of an intentional radiological incident to attempt to constrain Ukrainian counteroffensive actions and Western support for Ukraine ahead of the upcoming NATO summit.
• The Wagner Group is reportedly still actively recruiting personnel within Russia, although it is unclear if new recruits are signing Wagner contracts or military contracts with the MoD.
• The Wagner Group reportedly will operate three large field camps in Belarus and an apparent Belarusian milblogger reported that Wagner Group personnel will deploy to Asipovichy, Belarus, soon.
• A Kremlin-affiliated news outlet reported that the Wagner Group will continue operating in Africa, although the details of its operations remain unclear.
• Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin reportedly dissolved his domestic media company Patriot.
• Russian and Ukrainian forces continued to engage in battles along the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna line.
• Ukrainian forces continued to counterattack and reportedly made some gains in the Bakhmut area.
• Ukrainian and Russian forces continued to skirmish on the Avdiivka-Donetsk City line, and Ukrainian forces advanced as of June 30.
• Ukrainian forces continued counteroffensive operations in western Zaporizhia Oblast and on the administrative border between Donetsk and Zaporizhia oblasts.
• Russian authorities continue efforts to improve monetary and educational benefits to servicemen in order to retain loyalty and incentivize military service.
• Russian officials and occupation authorities are attempting to explain away the deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia.

RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, JUNE 30, 2023

Jun 30, 2023 - Press ISW

Download the PDF

Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, June 30, 2023

Riley Bailey, Grace Mappes, Kateryna Stepanenko, Angelica Evans, George Barros, and Frederick W. Kagan

June 30, 2023, 8:30pm ET 

Click here to see ISW’s interactive map of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This map is updated daily alongside the static maps present in this report.

Click here to access ISW’s archive of interactive time-lapse maps of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. These maps complement the static control-of-terrain map that ISW produces daily by showing a dynamic frontline. ISW will update this time-lapse map archive monthly.

Note: The data cutoff for this product was 1pm ET on June 30. ISW will cover subsequent reports in the July 1 Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment.

Ukrainian forces conducted counteroffensive operations in at least three sectors of the frontline on June 30. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces continued offensive operations in the Melitopol (western Zaporizhia Oblast) and Berdyansk (eastern Zaporizhia Oblast) directions.[1] The Ukrainian General Staff added that Ukrainian forces achieved partial success on the Levadne-Pryyutne line on the administrative border of Donetsk and Zaporizhia oblasts and on the Mala-Tokmachka-Ocheretuvate line in western Zaporizhia Oblast. Ukrainian forces also reportedly consolidated newly reached lines in the Pryvillia-Zalizyanske direction north of Bakhmut and are continuing to exert pressure on Bakhmut’s flanks. Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Malyar reported that Ukrainian forces are confidently advancing on Bakhmut’s flanks and that Russian forces have transferred a large number of troops to the area.[2] Malyar added that Ukrainian forces are advancing with varying degrees of success in southern Ukraine, advancing one kilometer on some days and advancing less on others.[3] Select Russian sources also claimed that Ukrainian forces counterattacked around Kreminna and on the Donetsk City-Avdiivka frontline.[4]

Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief General Valerii Zaluzhnyi stated on June 30 that Ukrainian forces continue to advance in eastern and southern Ukraine despite lacking essential resources.[5] Zaluzhnyi said that the Ukrainian forces are still making battlefield gains even if they advance only 500 meters per day. Zaluzhnyi also stated that Ukrainian forces are continuing to use Western-provided armored vehicles and tanks in combat instead of saving them for “parades” when responding to a question about military equipment losses. Zaluzhnyi noted that Ukraine needs aircraft in order to support its counteroffensive efforts, which are hindered by the lack of air superiority.

The Russian information space is reacting disproportionately to the Russian military’s failure to drive a small Ukrainian force from east (left) bank Kherson Oblast. Russian milbloggers have complained for nearly two weeks that Russian forces have failed to push a very small Ukrainian force – reportedly of up to 70 personnel – from their entrenched positions underneath the eastern span of the Antonivsky Bridge.[6] The milbloggers complained that the Russian military command blindly ordered Russian forces to retake the area under a span of the Antonivsky Bridge on the east bank, resulting in significant losses among Russian personnel and armored vehicles due to Ukrainian artillery fire and remotely laid mines.[7] The milbloggers called on Russian forces to conduct “accurate” strikes against both the spans of the bridge on each riverbank to prevent Ukrainian forces from using the bridge’s approach spans as cover against Russian air and artillery fire, which the milbloggers previously criticized as inaccurate and ineffective. Russian forces launched an Iskander ballistic missile strike against the east bank span of the Antonivsky Bridge on June 30, though the extent of the damage is currently unclear.[8] Some milbloggers claimed that the strike damaged enough of the standing bridge span to prevent Ukrainian forces from using it as cover, while other milbloggers complained that the strike only partially damaged the bridge and that Russian infantry has resumed attempts to clear Ukrainian positions elsewhere in the area.[9] Ukrainian Air Force Spokesperson Colonel Yuriy Ihnat stated on June 1 that Russian forces are conserving Iskander missiles due to a shortage, underscoring the oddity of Russian forces using one of these missiles against a 70-person light infantry element under the approaches to an already destroyed bridge.[10] Some milbloggers claimed that Russian forces used TOS-1A thermobaric artillery systems – a scarce military district-level asset – to strike the Ukrainian positions under the bridge after the Iskander strike.[11] One milblogger complained that the Russian 8th Artillery Regiment (22ndArmy Corps, Black Sea Fleet) does not have enough ammunition to strike the Ukrainian positions.[12] Russian President Vladimir Putin awarded the “guards” honorific to the 8th Artillery Regiment on June 30, which will not help the regiment dislodge the Ukrainian forces.[13]

The severe milblogger response to the Russian military command’s decision making demonstrates that Russian milbloggers have not rallied around the Russian military command in the aftermath of Wagner’s armed rebellion. Some milbloggers claimed that the Ukrainian presence is limited and that there is no significant threat of Ukrainian forces breaking out of their foothold on the east bank.[14] Milbloggers complained that the Russian military command is unnecessarily impaling Russian forces on Ukrainian remotely laid mines and compelling Russian forces to put heavy military equipment in range of Ukrainian artillery fire.[15] One milblogger explicitly blamed Russian “Dnepr” Group of Forces (Kherson Oblast) Commander Colonel General Oleg Makarevich, reportedly headquartered in Rostov-on-Don, for these operations, implying that there is no relevant commander closer to the front line responsible for east bank Kherson Oblast.[16] Wagner Group forces notably surrounded the Russian Southern Military District (SMD) headquarters in Rostov-on-Don, which appears to include the “Dnepr” Grouping headquarters, during its armed rebellion.[17] The rebellion and surrounding of the grouping headquarters notably did not stop Russian milbloggers from criticizing the Russian military command, with one milblogger calling for someone to travel to Rostov to beat up Makarevich.[18] The harsh tone of this Russian information space response is reminiscent of the response to the Russian military command’s failed efforts to take Vuhledar in western Donetsk Oblast in November 2022 and February 2023.[19]

Ukrainian intelligence reported that Russian forces and officials are gradually leaving the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP) possibly in preparation for an intentional “accident” at the facility. The Ukrainian Main Military Intelligence Directorate (GUR) reported on June 30 that the Russian contingent at the ZNPP is gradually leaving the facility and that three employees of Russian state nuclear energy company Rosatom who managed the facility have recently left for Russian occupied Crimea.[20] The GUR reported that Ukrainian employees at the ZNPP who have signed contracts with Rosatom received instructions that they must evacuate the facility by July 5.[21] The GUR reported that Russian forces are decreasing patrols around the ZNPP itself and in neighboring Enerhodar and that workers at the ZNPP have also received instructions to blame Ukrainian forces in the event of an emergency.[22] ISW has not observed visual confirmation of Russian units leaving the ZNPP or the immediate area as of June 30. GUR Chief Kyrylo Budanov stated on June 30 that Russian forces have prepared for an artificial disaster at the facility.[23] Ukrainian officials in Mykolaiv, Kherson, Zaporizhia, and Dnipropetrovsk oblasts oversaw emergency preparation exercises for a possible “accident“ at the ZNPP on June 29.[24] Ukrainian Energy Minister Herman Halushchenko reported that Ukrainian officials lack the ability to monitor the ZNPP closely enough to become instantly aware of an “accident” at the ZNPP.[25] The president of Ukrainian nuclear energy operator Energoatom, Petro Kotin, stated that the closest radiation censors on the right (west) bank of the Kakhovka Reservoir would alert Ukrainian officials within a few hours of a potential release of radiation at the ZNPP.[26]

Russian forces remain unlikely to cause an intentional “accident” at the ZNPP, and Russia is likely continuing to use the threat of an intentional radiological incident to attempt to constrain Ukrainian counteroffensive actions and Western support for Ukraine ahead of the upcoming NATO summit. ISW has previously assessed that Russian forces would not be able to control the consequences of an intentional radiological incident at the ZNPP and that a radiological incident could further degrade Russia’s ability to cement its occupation of southern Ukraine by leaving areas uninhabitable and ungovernable.[27] The likely Russian destruction of the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant (KHPP) dam also adversely impacted Russian forces, however, and possible Russian plans to sabotage the ZNPP cannot be ruled out. Russian forces could conduct several possible radiological man-made incidents at the ZNPP, some more serious than others. Russian forces could discharge irradiated water from the ZNPP into the Kakhovka Reservoir to disrupt a potential Ukrainian crossing of the now largely drained reservoir. Russian forces could also attempt to create a radiological plume to cover a larger area of southern Ukraine, although the reactors are designed to make doing so difficult. The prevailing winds in Zaporizhia Oblast are most often from the north from June 9 to September 3, although forecasted wind directions in the area following the reported July 5 evacuation deadline include days of predominantly easterly winds.[28] A radiation plume from the ZNPP would most certainly affect the Russian forces in Zaporizhia and Kherson oblasts and possibly in Crimea and would likely impact the Russian forces to a greater degree than the Ukrainian forces given the usual direction of the wind in the area. Russian forces could conduct a man-made “accident” that creates a smaller radiological radius immediately focused on preventing Ukrainian advances near the ZNPP itself. None of these options provide more military benefit for Russian forces than the likely consequences they would create. Ukraine, for its part, would derive no benefits from causing a radiological incident at the ZNPP remotely consonant with the enormous price it would pay in irradiating lands and peoples it seeks to liberate and hindering its own ability to advance in the area, making Russian informational efforts to set conditions for blaming Ukraine for such an incident entirely implausible even if it could do so without physically occupying the plant.

Russian Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Maria Zakharova stated on June 30 that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s previous statements that Russia was preparing an attack at the ZNPP could actually be an indication that Ukrainian officials are preparing an attack on the facility to pull NATO into the war in Ukraine.[29] Zakharova’s preposterous speculations are typical for the Kremlin’s information operations alleging threats to the safety of the ZNPP. The Kremlin has routinely employed threats of nuclear escalation and have warned of largely Russian created threats to the ZNPP in attempts to pressure Ukraine to constrain its military actions and to prevent further Western support for Ukraine.[30] The Kremlin is likely attempting to signal a feigned intent to create a radiological incident at the ZNPP in hopes of creating fears over a Ukrainian crossing of the Kakhovka reservoir in the area so that Russian forces will not have to defend a larger section of the front. The Kremlin’s nuclear blackmail rhetoric has also heavily targeted Western audiences, and the reemergence of escalatory signals and rhetoric around the ZNPP is likely meant in part to shape Western decision-making vis-a-vis Ukraine ahead of the NATO summit in Vilnius, Lithuania on July 11.

The Wagner Group is reportedly still actively recruiting personnel within Russia, although it is unclear if new recruits are signing Wagner contracts or military contracts with the MoD. BBC reported that Wagner Group recruitment centers are still open and are continuing to accept recruits in Russia.[31] BBC reported that several recruiters stressed that new members are still signing contracts with the Wagner Group and not with the Russian MoD.[32] One recruiter confirmed that Belarus is now a possible destination for new recruits while other recruiters said that recruits are still being sent to Molkino, a Wagner training center in Krasnodar Krai, “as usual.”[33] Russian military officials have previously used coercive and deceptive means to compel Russian citizens to sign contracts with the MoD, and it is entirely possible that Russian citizens who sign supposed Wagner contracts are actually signing contracts with the MoD.[34] It is also possible that Russian officials have not yet coordinated their intentions for Wagner with the more than 42 Wagner recruitment centers in Russia.[35] Russia citizens may also be signing contracts with Wagner to serve in Wagner operations abroad. ISW previously assessed that the agreement brokered by Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko to end Wagner’s armed rebellion will very likely eliminate Wagner as the independent actor that it was before the rebellion but that elements of the organization may endure.[36]

The Wagner Group reportedly will operate three large field camps in Belarus. Russian and apparent Belarusian sources reported on June 30 that the Wagner Group in Belarus will operate out of three large field camps, including the previously observed field camp in Asipovichy, Mogilev Oblast.[37] The sources reported that the locations of the other two field camps have not yet been determined but that they will be in western Belarus postured against Poland.[38] The other two unidentified Wagner Group field camps may be located nearby Belarus’ large combined-arms training grounds, such as the Gozhsky Training Ground in Grodno Oblast, the Brest Training Ground near Brest City, or the Obuz-Lesnovsky Training Ground near Baranavichy. Wagner fighters in Belarus would likely need access to such training facilities to serve in the training and advisory role that Russian sources continue to ascribe to them.[39]

An apparent Belarusian milblogger reported that Wagner Group personnel will deploy to Asipovichy, Belarus, soon. An apparent Belarusian source reported on June 29 that the construction for the Asipovichy camp is complete and that Wagner Group personnel will deploy to the camp on an unspecified nearby date.[40] New high resolution satellite imagery collected on June 30 shows that at least 303 tents, each of which can accommodate between 20 – 50 people, have appeared at the formerly abandoned Belarusian military base between June 24 and 30.[41] There is no evidence of heavy equipment at the Asipovichy camp or that the camp is occupied as of June 30.

Assessing the footprint of the Wagner Group in Belarus may help assess the number of Wagner fighters who opt to sign contracts with the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD). A Russian source stated that it will be possible to estimate how many Wagner Group personnel sign contracts with the Russian MoD by assessing the size of the Wagner Group personnel that go to Belarus (presumably by subtracting the estimated Wagner presence in Belarus from Wagner’s assessed pre-rebellion strength).[42]

A Kremlin-affiliated news outlet reported that the Wagner Group will continue operating in Africa, although the details of its operations remain unclear. Kremlin-affiliated news outlet Vedimosti reported that sources close to the Russian MoD claim that the Wagner Group’s pre-existing projects for “the provision of security services in Africa” are ongoing and that there are no plans to transfer Wagner personnel to other departments.[43] Vedimosti claimed that another source familiar with the Wagner Group’s operations in Mali said that Wagner employees have no reason to fear that a supply disruption will interfere with their current tasks.[44] A Russian milblogger claimed that this is the correct approach and that Yevgeny Prigozhin’s armed rebellion should not affect Russia’s long-term plans in Africa.[45] The Kremlin may allow the Wagner Group to continue operating abroad in some capacity, likely in name only and will be subsumed under the Kremlin’s authority.

Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin reportedly dissolved his domestic media company Patriot. Russian media outlet Mash reported that Yevgeny Prigozhin dissolved the Patriot Media Holding, the St. Petersburg based media company that Prigozhin founded in 2019.[46] Russian sources claimed that Prigozhin personally announced the dissolution of Patriot Media Holding and laid off all its employees.[47] A Kremlin-affiliated milblogger confirmed the report and claimed that according to unconfirmed information the Russian MoD is also dissolving Prigozhin’s St. Petersburg-based company “Concord” and selling its assets.[48] Russian opposition news outlet Vazhnye Istorii reported that Russian state media censor Roskomnadzor blocked access to several of Patriot‘s websites, including RIA FAN, Politika Segodnya, Ekonomika Segodnya, Narodnye Novosti and others.[49] The future of Prigozhin’s other companies remains unclear but some Russian sources claimed that the Russian Presidential Administration will likely assume control over Prigozhin’s media assets.[50]

Key Takeaways:

• Ukrainian forces conducted counteroffensive operations in at least three sectors of the frontline on June 30.
• Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief General Valerii Zaluzhnyi stated on June 30 that Ukrainian forces continue to advance in eastern and southern Ukraine despite lacking essential resources.
• The Russian information space is reacting disproportionately to the Russian military’s failure to drive a small Ukrainian force from east (left) bank Kherson Oblast.
• Ukrainian intelligence reported that Russian forces and officials are gradually leaving the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP) possibly in preparation for an intentional “accident” at the facility.
• Russian forces remain unlikely to cause an intentional “accident” at the ZNPP, and Russia is likely continuing to use the threat of an intentional radiological incident to attempt to constrain Ukrainian counteroffensive actions and Western support for Ukraine ahead of the upcoming NATO summit.
• The Wagner Group is reportedly still actively recruiting personnel within Russia, although it is unclear if new recruits are signing Wagner contracts or military contracts with the MoD.
• The Wagner Group reportedly will operate three large field camps in Belarus and an apparent Belarusian milblogger reported that Wagner Group personnel will deploy to Asipovichy, Belarus, soon.
• A Kremlin-affiliated news outlet reported that the Wagner Group will continue operating in Africa, although the details of its operations remain unclear.
• Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin reportedly dissolved his domestic media company Patriot.
• Russian and Ukrainian forces continued to engage in battles along the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna line.
• Ukrainian forces continued to counterattack and reportedly made some gains in the Bakhmut area.
• Ukrainian and Russian forces continued to skirmish on the Avdiivka-Donetsk City line, and Ukrainian forces advanced as of June 30.
• Ukrainian forces continued counteroffensive operations in western Zaporizhia Oblast and on the administrative border between Donetsk and Zaporizhia oblasts.
• Russian authorities continue efforts to improve monetary and educational benefits to servicemen in order to retain loyalty and incentivize military service.
• Russian officials and occupation authorities are attempting to explain away the deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia.

We do not report in detail on Russian war crimes because these activities are well-covered in Western media and do not directly affect the military operations we are assessing and forecasting. We will continue to evaluate and report on the effects of these criminal activities on the Ukrainian military and the Ukrainian population and specifically on combat in Ukrainian urban areas. We utterly condemn these Russian violations of the laws of armed conflict, Geneva Conventions, and humanity even though we do not describe them in these reports.

• Russian Main Effort – Eastern Ukraine (comprised of two subordinate main efforts)
• Russian Subordinate Main Effort #1 – Capture the remainder of Luhansk Oblast and push westward into eastern Kharkiv Oblast and encircle northern Donetsk Oblast
• Russian Subordinate Main Effort #2 – Capture the entirety of Donetsk Oblast
• Russian Supporting Effort – Southern Axis
• Russian Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts
• Activities in Russian-occupied areas

Russian Main Effort – Eastern Ukraine

Russian Subordinate Main Effort #1 – Luhansk Oblast (Russian objective: Capture the remainder of Luhansk Oblast and push westward into eastern Kharkiv Oblast and northern Donetsk Oblast)

Russian and Ukrainian forces continued to engage in combat along the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna line on June 30. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian attacks in the Novoselivske direction (15km northwest of Svatove), near Bilohorivka (13km south of Kreminna), and Rozdolivka (31km southwest of Kreminna).[51] The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) claimed that Russian forces repelled Ukrainian counterattacks against Novoselivske, Bilohorivka, and in the direction of Kuzmyne (3km southwest of Kreminna).[52] Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian and Ukrainian forces are engaged in positional battles near Synkivka (9km northeast of Kupyansk) and Dvorichna (17km northeast of Kupyansk).[53] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces have the initiative west of Kreminna but failed to break through in the area, only capturing some Ukrainian positions and pushing Ukrainian forces westward.[54] A Kremlin-affiliated milblogger claimed that Russian Airborne Forces (VDV) continued their offensive operations in the Serebryanske forest area and in the Torske salient (15km west of Kreminna) and claimed that Russian forces must construct a defensive line along the Siversky Donets River to eliminate threats of Ukrainian raids into the forests.[55] Another Russian source claimed that Ukrainian forces launched an offensive in an unspecified area in the Lyman direction and that Russian VDV forces are maintaining their defense.[56]

Russian Subordinate Main Effort #2 – Donetsk Oblast (Russian Objective: Capture the entirety of Donetsk Oblast, the claimed territory of Russia’s proxies in Donbas)

Ukrainian forces continued to counterattack and reportedly made some gains in the Bakhmut area on June 30. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces had partial success on the Pryvillya-Zalizyanske line (10-15km northwest of Bakhmut) and consolidated new positions.[57] Russian milbloggers claimed that Ukrainian forces made gains near the Kurdyumivka dam about 13km southwest of Bakhmut.[58] The milbloggers also claimed that Ukrainian forces continued attacking north of Bakhmut near Yahidne (immediately northwest of Bakhmut), Berkhivka (6km north of Bakhmut), Dubovo-Vasylivka (6km northwest of Bakhmut); west of Bakhmut near Ivanivske (6km west of Bakhmut); and southwest of Bakhmut near Pivnichne (20km southwest of Bakhmut), Ozarianivka (15km southwest of Bakhmut), Kurdyumivka, and Klishchiivka (7km southwest of Bakhmut).[59] One milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces conducted assault operations in an unspecified area within Bakhmut’s city limits, but Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Malyar reported that Ukrainian forces are not within the Bakhmut city limits but maintain control over the southwestern outskirts of the city.[60] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces conducted unsuccessful ground attacks near Bakhmut, Bohdanivka (8km northwest of Bakhmut), and Ivanivske.[61] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces made limited gains south of Ivanivske and in a forest near Chasiv Yar (12km west of Bakhmut).[62]

A Ukrainian official provided details of the current composition and strength of Russian forces in the Bakhmut area as of June 30. Ukrainian Eastern Group of Forces Spokesperson Colonel Serhiy Cherevaty stated that the Russian force grouping in the Bakhmut direction has over 330 tanks, 140 artillery systems, and 50,300 personnel, including airborne forces, infantry units, BARS units, and small units of the “Veterany” private military company (PMC).[63] Cherevaty noted that there are no Wagner Group personnel in the Bakhmut area. A Russian milblogger claimed that unspecified elements of the Russian 98th Airborne (VDV) Division are operating in the Bakhmut direction; ISW has previously observed elements of the 98th Airborne Division committed to the Kreminna area and serving in reserve in the Vuhledar area in March 2023.[64]

Ukrainian and Russian forces continued to skirmish on the Avdiivka-Donetsk City line, and Ukrainian forces advanced as of June 30. Geolocated footage shows that Ukrainian forces have advanced north of Avdiivka west of Novobakhmutivka (13km northeast of Avdiivka) and in Krasnohorivka (3km northeast of Avdiivka).[65] The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) and the Southern Group of Forces spokesperson claimed that Russian forces repelled Ukrainian ground attacks near Kamianka (3km northeast of Bakhmut), Kruta Balka (3km east of Avdiivka), and Pervomaiske (6km southwest of Bakhmut).[66] A Russian milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces attacked Russian positions on the Krasnohorivka-Kruta Balka line and expressed concern that Ukrainian forces may capture Vesele (4km northeast of Bakhmut).[67] The milblogger also claimed that Ukrainian forces probed Russian defensive lines near Vodyane (7km southwest of Avdiivka). The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces conducted unsuccessful ground attacks near Avdiivka, Pervomaiske, Marinka (immediately southwest of Donetsk City), Pobieda (5km southwest of Donetsk City), and Novomykhailivka (30km southwest of Donetsk City).[68]

Russian Supporting Effort – Southern Axis (Russian objective: Maintain frontline positions and secure rear areas against Ukrainian strikes)

Ukrainian forces continued counteroffensive operations on the administrative border between Donetsk and Zaporizhia oblasts on June 30. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces achieved unspecified partial success along the Levadne-Pryyutne line (up to 20km southwest of Velyka Novosilka) and consolidated on newly reached lines.[69] The Russian MoD claimed that Russian elements of the Eastern Grouping of Forces repelled Ukrainian attacks south and southwest of Velyka Novosilka.[70] Zaporizhia Oblast occupation deputy Vladimir Rogov claimed that Russian forces counterattacked from Staromayorske (9km south of Velyka Novosilka) towards Rivnopil (10km southwest of Velyka Novosilka).[71] A Russian milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces have improved their tactical positions along the Staromayorske-Rivnopil line as of June 30.[72]

Ukrainian forces continued offensive operations in western Zaporizhia Oblast on June 30. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces achieved partial success along the Mala Tokmachka-Ocheretuvate line (up to 28km south of Orikhiv) and consolidated on newly reached lines.[73] The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) claimed that Russian forces repelled a Ukrainian reconnaissance-in-force operation in western Zaporizhia Oblast and struck Ukrainian forces attempting to advance south and southeast of Orikhiv.[74] Russian milbloggers claimed that poor weather conditions in western Zaporizhia Oblast have slowed the tempo of Ukrainian operations and that there are mainly positional battles along this sector of the front.[75] The Orikhiv area received rain throughout June 29 and briefly on June 30, although these storm showers likely did not degrade the ability to maneuver armored vehicles, and recorded winds in the area were likely not strong enough to cause prolonged disruptions to aviation units.[76] Other milbloggers claimed that Ukrainian forces continued unsuccessful offensive operations south of Orikhiv on June 30.[77] Russian milbloggers claimed that Ukrainian forces tried to break through Russian defenses near Pyatykhatky (25km southwest of Orikhiv) and made marginal advances in the area.[78]

Ukrainian forces struck Russian rear positions in Berdyansk, Zaporizhia Oblast on June 30. Ukrainian Strategic Command reported that Ukrainian forces conducted successful strikes against a Russian headquarters and a fuel and lubricants depot in the suburbs of Berdyansk.[79] Geolocated footage published on June 30 shows smoke plumes in Berdyansk following the reported strike.[80] Russian milbloggers claimed that Ukrainian forces launched six Storm Shadow cruise missiles at targets in the vicinity of Berdyansk and that Russian Pantsir-S air defense systems shot down some or all of the missiles.[81]

Russian Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts (Russian objective: Expand combat power without conducting general mobilization)

Russian authorities continue efforts to improve monetary and educational benefits to servicemen in order to retain loyalty and incentivize military service. Russian sources reported that the Russian government issued a decree on June 28 to increase the salaries of Russian military, Rosgvardia, and some law enforcement personnel by 10.5 percent on October 1, 2023.[82] Russian sources reported that the Russian Ministry of Education and Science has recommended that Russian universities give preferential consideration to applicants who served in the "special military operation" under conscription, volunteer contract, mobilization, or in “volunteer formations.”[83]

The UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) responded to a recent estimate of Russian military spending by the Stockholm International Peace Research Insitute (SIPRI).[84] SIPRI estimated in its June 2023 report that Russia’s budgeted military spending for 2023 is around 6.6 trillion rubles ($75.4 billion).[85] The UK MoD stated that the exact amount of Russia’s military expenditure remains uncertain due to a lack of transparency around the Russian government‘s total budget.[86] The UK MoD stated that the increase in spending highlights the cost of Russia’s war in Ukraine and that Russia is “almost certainly” paying additional expenses for security in the occupied territories and increased defensive measures in border oblasts.[87]

Activities in Russian-occupied areas (Russian objective: Consolidate administrative control of annexed areas; forcibly integrate Ukrainian civilians into Russian sociocultural, economic, military, and governance systems)

Russian officials and occupation authorities are attempting to explain away the deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov claimed on June 30 that Russia placed 300 Ukrainian orphans in occupied Ukraine under the foster care of Russian families in Russia.[88] Lavrov claimed that Russia publicizes the names of Ukrainian children and claimed that any direct family member can take these children out of foster care. Lavrov added that dozens of children have been picked up from their foster families. Lavrov emphasized that these children were not adopted but placed under preliminary guardianship and claimed that of all 700,000 children who entered Russia from occupied Ukraine, only 2,000 children were orphans from Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts. Kherson Oblast Occupation Ministry of Natural Resources and Ecology announced that 18 school children from occupied Kherson Oblast went to children’s camp “We Are the Children of the Volga” in Yaroslavl Oblast, Russia. The ministry claimed that the program will last 10 days.[89]

Russian citizens are purchasing real estate in destroyed and occupied Mariupol city.[90] Russian investigative outlet Bumaga reported that Russian officials began selling real estate in Mariupol as early as May 3, 2022.[91] Some Russian real estate websites reportedly list and sell Mariupol apartments on average for three million rubles (about $33,780).

The Kremlin reportedly approved 25 billion rubles ($281.5 million) in special treasury loans for the four occupied regions in eastern and southern Ukraine to “modernize infrastructure.”[92] Occupation officials announced that occupied Kherson Oblast will receive 2 billion rubles, while Donetsk People’s Republic would receive 11.5 billion rubles ($129.5 million).[93]

Significant activity in Belarus (Russian efforts to increase its military presence in Belarus and further integrate Belarus into Russian-favorable frameworks).

Belarusian Ministry of Defense (MoD) announced that another new Belarusian S-400 air defense battery entered service in Belarus on June 30. The Belarusian MoD did not specify where the S-400 battery is located, though the independent Belarusian monitoring organization The Hajun Project reported that the battery is based near Dubrova, Minsk Oblast, at the base of the Belarusian 6th anti-aircraft missile battery of the 15th Anti-Aircraft Missile Brigade.[94] These systems are likely in service with the Belarusian military but under Russian operational control. Russia’s and Belarus’s combined regional air defense system became operational in 2016, effectively subordinating Belarus’ Air and Air Defense command to the Russian Western Military District.[95] Russia deployed more S-400 air defense systems (probably at least a battery) to Belarus on May 28 and Belarusian officials confirmed that Russian-provided S-400 in Belarus became operational and deployed on combat duty on December 25, 2022.[96] ISW forecasted in 2020 that Russia would deploy S-400 systems to Belarus.[97]

ISW will continue to report daily observed Russian and Belarusian military activity in Belarus, as part of ongoing Kremlin efforts to increase their control over Belarus and other Russian actions in Belarus.

Note: ISW does not receive any classified material from any source, uses only publicly available information, and draws extensively on Russian, Ukrainian, and Western reporting and social media as well as commercially available satellite imagery and other geospatial data as the basis for these reports. References to all sources used are provided in the endnotes of each update.

2. Poor planning under Trump, Biden led to chaotic Afghanistan withdrawal, report says

The 24 page State Department After Action Report can be accessed here: https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/State-AAR-AFG.pdf

It only has the introduction and the conclusion as the entire report is over 80 pages long.

Updated 3 hours ago - World

Poor planning under Trump, Biden led to chaotic Afghanistan withdrawal, report says

https://www.axios.com/2023/06/30/state-department-afghanistan-withdrawal-report

• Jacob Knutson

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A U.S. Marine giving out water to evacuees at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, Afghanistan, in August 2021. Photo: Isaiah Campbell/U.S. Marine Corps via Getty Images

Poor planning among senior officials during both the Trump and Biden administrations contributed to the chaotic and deadly U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in the summer of 2021, according to a report released Friday.

Driving the news: The State Department's long awaited after action report found that under both presidents, "there was insufficient senior-level consideration of worst-case scenarios and how quickly those might follow."

• The State Department, which released the critical report on Friday afternoon before a holiday weekend, told CNN it would not answer "process" questions.

The big picture: The report said that once the Taliban took control of Kabul in mid-August — much earlier than anticipated — the State Department "confronted a task of unprecedented scale and complexity."

• "The scope and scale of this evacuation was highly unusual, with no comparable situation since the U.S. departure from Vietnam in 1975 following many years of intense military and political involvement," the report said.
• Though the U.S. evacuated roughly 125,000 people — including nearly 6,000 U.S. citizens — 13 U.S. troops and more than 150 Afghans died in a suicide bombing during the operation.

Zoom in: When Trump left office in early 2021, "key questions remained unanswered" about maintaining the embassy in Kabul and the fate of Afghan allies after the withdrawal, the report says.

• It was also unclear how the U.S. would meet the initial May 2021 deadline, the report says — despite the fact that the Trump administration had struck the withdrawal deal with the Taliban more than a year before.
• There was also "a significant backlog" in the process for Afghan special immigrant visas (SIV) for those who worked alongside U.S. forces during the war.
• "That administration made no senior-level or interagency effort to address the backlog or consider options for other at-risk Afghans despite its commitment to a military withdrawal," the report says.

When President Biden took office, he decided to proceed with the withdrawal with a new deadline: Sept. 11, 2021.

• Top administration officials "took steps to accelerate the SIV process," the report says.
• But the U.S. military's swift "retrograde" from the country compounded the difficulties the State Department had in "mitigating the loss of the military’s key enablers," the report found.

• It also criticized the Biden administration's decision to transfer Bagram Air Base to the Afghan government, as it left Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul as the only viable evacuation avenue.

Between the lines: The report lauded the State Department employees and members of the military — particularly those on the ground — tasked with getting thousands of people to safety in an increasingly dangerous place.

• "The stress, demands, and risks of the situation are hard to exaggerate and placed tremendous burdens on the Department’s personnel and its crisis response structures," the report said.
• "Overall, the Department’s personnel responded with great agility, determination, and dedication, while taking on roles and responsibilities both domestically and overseas that few had ever anticipated."

Yes, but: The report made a range of recommendations for the State Department as a whole, including better planning for "worst-case scenarios" and ensuring "that senior officials hear the broadest possible range of views including those that challenge operating assumptions or question the wisdom of key policy decisions."

Go deeper: U.S. admits Afghanistan evacuation should have begun sooner

Editor's note: This story has been updated with additional details from the report about the SIV process.

3. China-Taiwan Weekly Update, June 30, 2023

CHINA-TAIWAN WEEKLY UPDATE, JUNE 30, 2023

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/china-taiwan-weekly-update-june-30-2023

Jun 30, 2023 - Press ISW

China-Taiwan Weekly Update, June 30, 2023

Authors: Nils Peterson of the Institute for the Study of War

Editors: Dan Blumenthal and Frederick W. Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute

Data Cutoff: June 28 at Noon ET

The China–Taiwan Weekly Update focuses on Chinese Communist Party paths to controlling Taiwan and relevant cross–Taiwan Strait developments.

Key Takeaways

1. The PLA has normalized drone flights around Taiwan within Taiwan’s air defense identification zone (ADIZ) and may begin conducting such flights with regular manned aircraft during the next 12-24 months.
2. Ongoing media coverage about TPP presidential candidate Ko Wen-je’s support for resuming cross-strait talks involving the controversial Cross-Strait Service Trade Agreement (CSSTA) may improve the standing of the DPP or KMT in the 2024 presidential election.
3. The PRC framed the Wagner Group rebellion as a minor challenge that Russia overcame.

Taiwan Developments

This section covers relevant developments pertaining to Taiwan, including its upcoming January 13, 2024 presidential and legislative elections.

The PLA has normalized drone flights around Taiwan within Taiwan’s air defense identification zone (ADIZ) and may begin conducting such flights with regular manned aircraft during the next 12-24 months. The PLA began flying drones in Taiwan’s ADIZ on September 4, 2022.[1] The PLA conducted its first drone flight around Taiwan within the ADIZ in April 2023 and did so twice in May 2023.[2] The flights around the island reflect a change over the last year, during which the PLA flew drones and manned aircraft up to halfway around Taiwan starting from southwestern ADIZ.[3] The way in which PLA violations of Taiwan’s southwestern ADIZ changed over the last year suggests that that the PLA will expand flights around Taiwan. The pattern of PLA intrusions into the southwestern ADIZ began with individual aircraft or drones on a near daily basis. The PLA committed ADIZ violations intermittently with sorties of tens of planes in the months and years thereafter.[4] The PLA has not regularly sent large numbers of drones into Taiwan’s ADIZ without accompanying manned aircraft. The PLA’s flights around Taiwan within the ADIZ is a change from the manned “island encirclement patrol” flights, which have circumnavigated Taiwan outside of the ADIZ since 2016.[5] It is unclear if some of these flights briefly entered into the Taiwanese ADIZ. This demonstrates the PLA conducts manned flights that circle Taiwan.

The PLA likely aims to reduce Taiwan’s decision-making timeline for responding to military flights within the ADIZ. The PLA flights encircling Taiwan within the ADIZ complicate the ROC’s contingency planning compared to previous flights around Taiwan. Aerial encirclement of Taiwan confers operational advantages to the PLA by presenting nearly constant flights that the ROC must track. This compresses the ROC’s decision-making timeline about engaging PLA aircraft and presents challenges to determining which aircraft to target.

The normalization of manned flights around Taiwan within the ADIZ would support a CCP coercion campaign to induce unification on the PRC’s terms. The flights aim to wear down Taiwanese military readiness, force difficult decisions regarding ROC resources allocation, as well as create a sense of impenetrable siege among the Taiwanese population. These effects support CCP efforts to degrade the Taiwanese populace’s confidence in its government’s capacity to defend the country, a key part of the longer-term CCP coercion campaign to induce unification under the PRC. Compressed decision-making timelines about whether to engage PLA aircraft also enhances the risk of miscalculation by the PRC or ROC that could lead to a crisis.

Elections

The Taiwanese (Republic of China) political spectrum is largely divided between the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and the Kuomintang (KMT). The DPP broadly favors Taiwanese autonomy, Taiwanese identity, and skepticism towards China. The KMT favors closer economic and cultural relations with China along with a broader alignment with a Chinese identity. The DPP under President Tsai Ing-wen has controlled the presidency and legislature (Legislative Yuan) since 2016. This presidential election cycle also includes the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) candidate Ko Wen-je who frames his movement as an amorphous alternative to the DPP and KMT. It is normal for Taiwanese presidential elections to have third party candidates, but none have ever won. The 2024 Taiwan presidential and legislative elections will be held on January 13, 2024 and the new president will take office in May 2024. Presidential candidates can win elections with a plurality of votes in Taiwan.

Ongoing media coverage about TPP presidential candidate Ko Wen-je’s support for resuming cross-strait talks involving the controversial Cross-Strait Service Trade Agreement (CSSTA) may improve the standing of the DPP or KMT in the 2024 presidential election. The CSSTA is an unratified cross-strait trade agreement that many Taiwanese view as controversial due to the length it would have opened the Taiwanese economy to Chinese investment.[6] Ko called for resuming cross-strait talks through the CSSTA on June 20.[7] He renounced this statement on June 24, stating that his comments were from an internal discussion rather than his policy proposal or campaign platform. Ko accused the media of defaming him as being a pro-China candidate.[8] The media coverage of Ko’s comments reflects a change in public attention from scandals that involve the DPP and KMT that contributed to an increase in popular support for Ko to cross-strait policy issues that favor the DPP.[9] The DPP stands to gain voters amid concerns that Ko’s cross-strait policy is unfavorable or incoherent and as a counterpoint to the KMT’s policy of pro-China engagement. DPP presidential candidate Lai Ching-te is maintaining the platform of Taiwanese sovereignty that helped the party win the last two presidential elections.[10]

Ko’s comments about resuming cross-strait talks involving the CSSTA are surprising because he opposed the agreement during his successful run for Taipei mayor in 2014.[11] This aligned him with Taiwan’s Sunflower Movement, which was a series of protests in 2014 that resulted in the occupation of the Legislative Yuan and the successful prevention of the ratification of the CSSTA. Ko competes with pan-green parties such as the DPP for the political support of individuals who participated in the Sunflower Movement. KMT presidential candidate Hou Yu-ih took the position that Taiwan should pass the CSSTA and engage in greater overall exchange with China.[12] The DPP released a statement condemning the CSSTA and condemning the PRC for coercive trade practices aimed at Taiwan.[13] Ko’s comments could push some of his supporters to vote for pan-green parties like the DPP who condemn the CSSTA.

China Developments

This section covers relevant developments pertaining to China and the governing Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

The PRC framed the Wagner Group rebellion as a minor challenge that Russia overcame. The Chinese press portrayed Russian daily life in a state of normalcy by showing that the Scarlet Sails festival went ahead as scheduled in St. Petersburg.[14] The Chinese state expressed support for Russia in stabilizing the situation and framed China as a responsible power aiming to maintain regional stability.[15] Chinese state media also repeated Russian narratives blaming Western intelligence agencies for inciting the rebellion.[16]

ISW is considering two hypotheses about Chinese support to Russia in the aftermath of the rebellion.

The CCP may message support for Putin’s regime without providing direct materiel assistance to him. This is plausible because China is sensitive to European criticisms of its military support to Russia.[17] This hypothesis is unlikely because China already provides Russia with military assistance such as rifles and smokeless powder.[18] Indicators that would support the hypothesis include: 1) Chinese state media repeating Russian information narratives about the Wagner rebellion and 2) Chinese ambassadors in Europe stressing Chinese neutrality while falsely blaming NATO and the United States for instigating the war. In this outcome, the PRC would weaken its relationship with Putin.

The CCP may alternatively increase its economic, military, or intelligence support to Russia to ensure regime stability. This is plausible because the CCP aims to avoid an economically and politically unstable Russia.[19] This hypothesis is unlikely because the PRC is sensitive to Europeans viewing China as a threat rather than partner.[20] Indicators that would support the hypothesis include: 1) Unannounced meetings between Politburo or CMC members and their Russian counterparts during the coming weeks; 2) negotiations or agreements for arms sales or technological transfer; and 3) the expansion of Sino-Russian military cooperation through military exercises or intelligence sharing. In this outcome, Chinese material assistance to Russia would undermine the CCP’s efforts to divide the United States and Europe on trade restrictions, including sensitive technology such as semiconductor chip production.

4. A Warrior's Goodbye: A Heartfelt Sendoff Hosted for Legendary Green Beret and 'National Hero' Billy Waugh

I will bet Sergeant Major Waugh never thought he would be featured in People Magazine.

Honor to a true American hero and national treasure.

A Warrior's Goodbye: A Heartfelt Sendoff Hosted for Legendary Green Beret and 'National Hero' Billy Waugh

Within the tight-knit communities of Green Berets and CIA covert warriors, Waugh is known as "the Yoda of Special Forces."

By Susan Katz Keating  Published on June 29, 2023 04:45PM EDT

https://people.com/a-heartfelt-sendoff-for-legendary-green-beret-billy-waugh-7555393?utm

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Billy Waugh. PHOTO: COURTESY OF ENRIQUE 'RIC' PRADO

The bagpipe strains of "Amazing Grace" still reverberated through the theater at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Fla., on Tuesday when a soldier marched to the front. A Special Forces Command Sergeant Major in dress blues stationed himself near a large photo of legendary Green Beret-CIA paramilitary operative Billy Waugh. The audience braced for the roll call that signaled a final sendoff for the man they had come to celebrate. The man who passed away this April at age 93: Billy Waugh.

Within the tight-knit communities of Green Berets and CIA covert warriors, Waugh is known as "the Yoda of Special Forces." Throughout a 50-year career that began during war in Korea, he was wounded in action eight times, brought down the deadly terrorist Carlos the Jackal and went into Afghanistan at age 72 to link up with the Northern Alliance on behalf of the CIA. His wife, Lynn, remembers another side of him: The man who loved classical music and courted her by raking leaves and pulling (what he thought were) weeds from her garden. 

Speakers at the ceremony told story after story of a man who took part in the first HALO (High Altitude, Low Opening) combat jump into enemy territory in Vietnam; who foiled Soviet attempts to steal sensitive missile technology; who spotted Osama bin Laden long before the attacks of 9/11; and who — while infirm at age 93 — tried to escape from the hospital while his gown flapped open behind him. 

 Former Marine Whose Leg Was Amputated Poses as 1940s-Style Pin-Up for Calendar to Benefit Veterans

"There was no one like Billy," former colleague and close friend Enrique "Ric" Prado tells PEOPLE. "What is there not to love about a national hero?" 

Prado — a legend himself in the world of CIA clandestine and counter-terror operations — recalled how in the Philippines decades earlier, Waugh was on point in the wake of the high profile assassination of another iconic Green Beret, Col. Nick Rowe. As a counter-surveillance team leader "with teeth," Waugh would jog around the Americans' compound and memorize the license plates of suspicious vehicles, Prado said.

COURTESY OF LYNN WAUGH

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While stationed in Khartoum, Waugh spotted the prolific terrorist, IIich Ramirez, known as "Carlos the Jackal." Waugh provided a photograph and information that led to Jackal being arrested and then convicted in France, where he remains in prison.

"Billy was super smart and super without fear," Lynn Waugh tells PEOPLE. "It's different from being brave. I think it's a gene set that he had that he had no fear. He just did it."

"He was fearless and victorious for all of us," echoed four-star Army Gen. Bryan Fenton, the head of U.S. Special Operations Command.

As much as Waugh loved his country, he cherished his wife. On his cell phone, he listed her as "Lynn the Beautiful."

 Service Dog Program Dedicated to Helping Veterans with PTSD Gives Hope: 'He Saved My Life Many Times Over'

"We were great, great companions, and we loved each other," she says — even when Billy mistook Lynn's iris plants for weeds, and pulled them from the garden.

The classical music and Frank Sinatra songs that Billy loved were replaced on Tuesday by bagpipe strains. They were a signal to the "community" that a revered and powerful tradition was about to be enacted.

The man in dress blues — Command Sergeant Major Josh King, of 5th Special Forces Group — began to call the roll.

One by one, men in the audience responded to their names.

"Here, Sergeant Major!" came each resounding voice.

Then CSM King called one final name.

"Sergeant Major Waugh!"

There came no answer. King searched the auditorium. He tried again.

"Sergeant Major William Waugh!"

Again, no answer. King tried for a third time.

"Sergeant Major William Dawson Waugh!"

After a moment's extended silence, there came the three volleys of a 21-gun salute, followed by a bugler playing Taps.

Then there came Billy Waugh's favorite song, one that he played every day while at home. Throughout the auditorium, men quietly mouthed the words to "The Ballad of the Green Berets."

5. National Archives concludes review of JFK assassination documents with 99% made public

The JFK records at the National Archives can be accessed here: https://www.archives.gov/research/jfk/release2023

National Archives concludes review of JFK assassination documents with 99% made public | CNN Politics

CNN · by Sam Fossum · July 1, 2023

CNN —

The National Archives has concluded its review of the classified documents related to the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, with 99% of the records having been made publicly available, the White House said Friday.

“This action reflects [President Biden’s] instruction that all information related to President Kennedy’s assassination should be released except when the strongest possible reasons counsel otherwise,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Friday.

President Joe Biden released a memo Friday certifying that the archivist had completed the review in May and affirmed the remaining documents authorized to be declassified had been released to the public – meeting a previously set June 30 deadline.

In 1992, Congress passed the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act, in part prompted by furor caused by the conspiratorial Oliver Stone film “JFK.” The act dictated that all assassination records should be publicly disclosed by October 2017, but former President Donald Trump and Biden allowed multiple postponements on the advice of the FBI, the CIA and other national security agencies.

Trump ultimately released tens of thousands of documents, the majority of which include at least some redactions.

By December 2022, Biden had released more than 14,000 additional JFK assassination-related documents, at which point he ordered the archivist and relevant agencies to conduct a six-month review into the remaining records. More than 2,600 documents have been released since then, with 1,103 documents posted publicly Tuesday.

Kennedy’s assassination prompted a whirlwind of questions from the public and researchers, plenty of conspiracy theories and reflexive secrecy from the government. With each drop, historians have reviewed the documents with fine-toothed combs to ensure there are no new clues surrounding the assassination or novel pieces of historical information about CIA and FBI operations in the ’60s.

Biden on Friday also directed that remaining classified documents or redacted portions of documents be released on an ongoing basis when the underlying reason for their declassification is no longer applicable, according to the archivist and a White House official.

“The President also instructed agencies involved in this effort to provide NARA’s National Declassification Center (NDC) with transparency plans, which are available to the public here. NARA approved these plans, which will be used by the NDC to ensure appropriate continued release of information as specific identified harm dissipates, then triggering public disclosure,” the National Archives said in its release.

The Archives noted Friday that released documents are available for download and can be viewed here.

CNN · by Sam Fossum · July 1, 2023

6. Military Marks Half-Century of the All-Volunteer Force

The all volunteer force officially began on July 1, 1973 when the draft law expired in the United States when Congress refused to extend it. The U.S. military without the draft.

Military Marks Half-Century of the All-Volunteer Force

https://www.defense.gov/News/Feature-Stories/Story/Article/3413614/military-marks-half-century-of-the-all-volunteer-force/

June 13, 2023 | By Jim Garamone , DOD News |   

"You can't quit, Trainee. You VOLUNTEERED." 

Military training instructors throughout the U.S. armed forces began shouting this (or something very like it) at their charges soon after the American military ditched the draft and returned to its all-volunteer roots in 1973. 

An Army recruit receives his clothing during basic training, 1977.

A Navy company commander addresses a recruit, circa 1990.

Airmen run during basic military training school, 2003.

A Marine Corps staff sergeant works with recruits, 2011.

Selective Service – the draft – had been in place near continuously in the United States since 1940, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the first peacetime draft in response to developments in Europe and Asia. By most assessments, the draft had been very successful: The United States raised a 10-million-man military in World War II and supplied the manpower needed to later fight the Korean War and Vietnam War. 

President Richard Nixon with U.S. soldiers assigned to the 1st Infantry Division in South Vietnam, 1969.

But by the late 1960s, most Americans viewed the draft as unfair, and as opposition to the war in Vietnam increased, so did opposition to the draft. The saying at the time was Vietnam "was a rich man's war, but a poor man's fight," which echoed the sentiment during the American Civil War when the rich could "buy" their way out of the draft. 

During his run for the presidency in 1968, Richard M. Nixon pledged to get rid of the draft and move to an all-volunteer military. 

This came to fruition when Defense Secretary Melvin R. Laird announced on January 27, 1973, that "after receiving a report from the Secretary of the Army that he foresees no need for further inductions, I wish to inform you that the armed forces henceforth will depend exclusively on volunteer soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines. Use of the draft has ended." 

So, Laird issued the announcement and everyone in the Defense Department cheered and moved on to create the best military the world has ever seen. Right? 

Defense Secretary Melvin R. Laird announced on Jan. 27, 1973, that use of the draft had ended.

Actually, no. 

Many military and civilian leaders in the Defense Department had doubts about the move.

Even though U.S. troops had left South Vietnam the year before, the Soviet Union still loomed large. Worldwide, the U.S. military had a strength of almost than 3.3 million service members. 2.3 active duty and 970,000 reserves. There were 350,000 U.S. troops in West Germany alone. There were another 8,200 based in Taiwan. In South Korea, there were 41,000 U.S. service members. In Panama, there were 6,800 service members. There were troops based in Japan, Ethiopia, Thailand, Tunisia, Bahrain and thousands of service members afloat. 

Many American civilian and military officials believed it would be impossible to man the force adequately without the draft. Even many in favor of an all-volunteer force believed that in the event of a conflict, political leaders would immediately reinstitute a draft.

"It's a fair assessment to say that the early years of the all-volunteer force were rocky at best," said Erin Mahan, the chief historian at the Office of the Secretary of Defense. "If you look at the 1970s as a whole for the all-volunteer force, there was no indication that it was going to be a success. In fact, there were many indications that it might fail."

Service members conduct flight operations aboard the USS America, 1976.

U.S. soldiers disembark from a landing craft during training in Panama, 1977.

And there were many who probably wanted the all-volunteer force to fail. They spoke of the expense of the force and the inability of the services to recruit the numbers they needed. "There continued to be opposition within the military leadership," Mahan said. "In the early years, the main support for the all-volunteer force came from the Secretary of Defense and the larger Office of the Secretary of Defense." Edward C. Keefer is literally the man who wrote the chapters on the all-volunteer force – publishing the official DOD histories for the 1970s and 1980s. He discussed the motivation of young people to enlist in the all-volunteer force. "While patriotism and the desire to serve were always motivations, I would have to say that a primary motivation [for enlisting] was much better pay," he said. "And then remember that in the early years of the all-volunteer force, there was a recession, high inflation. The four services seemed like a good career opportunity." 

The U.S. Army, especially, learned how to recruit service members without the threat of a draft. Keefer said the service's "Be All That You Can Be" campaign resonated not only with potential recruits, but their mothers. "Maxwell Thurman, who was the head of army recruiting, … had people do some research on why people enlisted," he said. 

That group found that the combination of the "be all you can be" with the college benefit for honorable service attracted mothers "who would encourage their daughters and sons to join the (service), because they wanted them to move up and go to college," Keefer said. "That was an amazingly strong recruiting tool." 

The all-volunteer force was also increasingly family friendly, he said. "With the draft, you had mostly singles in the armed forces," he said. "But with the all-volunteer force, it moved to much more of a family force with children and spouses, sometimes dual-service spouses." 

The last also presaged a shift: the growing importance of women in the ranks. While "Be All That You Can Be" was a great slogan "the other great slogan was 'some of our best men are women,'" Keefer said. "The way that the all-volunteer force solved its recruiting problems in the late '70s and the early '80s was by successfully recruiting women." 

This was a sea change for DOD. Before the AVF, women could make up just 2% of the total force. "In reality, most of the time, they were 1%," Keefer said. In the years following World War II, women were members of separate corps – the Women's Army Corps, the Navy's WAVES and Women in the Air Force. 

"Those separate corps were eliminated after the all-volunteer force started," he said. "One of the advantages of women in the armed forces was one that they were almost all … high school graduates, and they scored higher on the mental aptitude tests."

Caspar Weinberger, defense secretary, Jan. 21, 1981-Nov. 23, 1987.

Harold Brown, defense secretary, Jan. 21, 1977-Jan. 20, 1981.

Successive defense secretaries – Harold Brown and Caspar Weinberger – encouraged the enlistment of women.

Changing an organization as large as the Defense Department is a daunting task and one that takes time. "The skepticism that was felt within the military leadership about an all-volunteer force was most pervasive in the '70s," Mahan said. "And that's understandable." 

Many people had fears and doubts that had some legitimacy. "Those centered around quantity, quality and cost," she said. "First, would an all-volunteer force be able to supply the necessary numbers? Second, would those new service men and women have the capability to handle what was becoming increasingly sophisticated weaponry. And in third, the cost – which continues to be a question today." 

An all-volunteer force is more expensive than a conscripted force. DOD officials had to convince successive presidents and Congress that the AVF would be worth the expense. "But I think in time, those challenges and fears were overcome," she said. 

In 1979, Gen. Edward "Shy" Meyer, the Army chief of staff, said his service fielded "a hollow force" that lacked the training to accomplish its basic mission of deterrence. New equipment – tanks, aircraft, ships, missiles, radars, computers and more – were coming in, but money was lacking for personnel and training. Then-Army Brig. Gen. Colin Powell later wrote the military was like a "tumbledown shack with a BMW in the driveway." 

But the military was changing. In 1983, President Ronald Reagan ordered DOD to rescue American citizens on the Caribbean island nation of Grenada caught in the midst of several bloody coups. Operation Urgent Fury was the first test of the all-volunteer force, and it was successful, but the effort pointed to disconnects among the services.

It was a joint operation, but there was little cooperation – the services "deconflicted" the battlefield. The various services had radios that couldn't speak to each other. Army helicopters couldn't refuel on Navy ships. Each service planned operations differently, and intelligence sharing was non-existent. 

But the troops adapted and overcame. There was the classic story (possibly apocryphal) of an 82nd Airborne Division soldier who used his civilian telephone calling card on a pay phone to communicate back to the Pentagon, who then relayed a message to a ship off Grenada for fire support. The Pentagon later determined that while this particular call could not be verified, soldiers and Navy SEALs did use personal phones to support operations during Urgent Fury. 

The troops rescued the U.S. citizens, restored democracy in Grenada, and the military looked at the lessons that could be learned from the operation. 

More emphasis went to training and attracting the right personnel for the services. New legislation – most notably the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986 – emphasized the joint nature of warfare. The military responded with new doctrine, more realistic training, new standards and more. 

An all-volunteer force was not cheap: It required higher pay, better living conditions, money for training and education, better health care and programs for families. 

But if you want to have well educated recruits, you have to pay for them. During the draft "only 32% of the recruits for the Army had high school diplomas, the rest were dropouts," Keefer said. "As the all-volunteer force moved on, [that percentage] rose to 50. And then it rose to the 60s. It topped out at almost exclusively people with high school degrees or better." This was needed for high-tech service members. And many of them stayed in the military. "You've got retention of a much more educated military force to handle the more sophisticated technology that came in the '70s and onward," he said. 

While there were operations in the 1980s – notably against Libya, Panama and Lebanon – it wasn't until Iraqi President Saddam Hussein invaded neighboring Kuwait in 1990 that the American people realized what their money had bought. "The Gulf War really proved the mettle of the all-volunteer force," Mahan said. 

Videos of U.S. aircraft pinpointing targets in Baghdad, choosing which window a missile should fly into, the Army's Battle of 73 Easting, the Highway of Death on the roads leading out of Kuwait, and the "left hook" that demolished the Iraqi army demonstrated the proficiency and professionalism of the U.S. forces. Americans were amazed. 

"The all-volunteer force had two great challenges in the in the Gulf War: Get 500,000 troops to those inhospitable deserts of Saudi Arabia, keep them there for six months, sweltering, and then … liberate Kuwait," Keefer said. "And they did that in a six-week air war and 100-hour ground war. It was a stunning success." Service members – both enlisted and officer – displayed skill, enthusiasm and professionalism, he said. The weaponry developed during the 1970s and deployed in the 1980s proved to be excellent and destroyed the Iraqi armed forces, which used Soviet equipment. 

Keefer said the Gulf War also solidified the role of women in the military. "In the all-volunteer force 33,000 women served in the Gulf War area, and five women were killed in action," he said. "I think what the Gulf War did was it shattered myths about women in war; that they wouldn't fight [or] … they couldn't stand up to physical pressure, or inhospitable conditions. And they would somehow lessen combat readiness." 

The all-volunteer force of the 1990s and today is "a far different institution than that of its early years in the '70s, Mahan said. "I think the all-volunteer force has always been somewhat of a microcosm of American society. I think that's even more true today. … The military generally has often been on the forefront of societal change – whether it's gays in the military, suicide prevention, a host of societal issues – the AVF is a microcosm of society. And the military brings all of its force to tackle those challenges, and I think does so ultimately, quite successfully." 

Certainly, the all-volunteer force proved itself in the Gulf, Iraq and Afghanistan, both historians said. Along the way, the military solved many vexing problems – retention, the prevalence of drugs in the ranks, women in combat, gays in the military and more. Of course, more needs to be done as these are works in progress. The military must deal with the scourge of sexual assault and harassment, provide mental health aid, counter the epidemic of suicide and maintain standards. 

By any measure, the all-volunteer force has been a success. As President Joe Biden nominated Air Force Gen. Charles Q. Brown to be chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he called the U.S. military "the best in the history of the world." 

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Over 50 years, millions of Americans have served in the all-volunteer force. Most served one enlistment, but many served for careers. Their service didn't end when they returned to civilian life. "I think what's less obvious is that the all-volunteer force has had a tremendous impact on American society," Keefer said. "It has allowed people of lesser means … to rise to middle-class status. You join the all-volunteer force, you learn skills, you serve for 20 years or less, you get your benefits, then you go out and get a second job, either in teaching or in industry or back in the civilian government. 

"The all-volunteer force is this group of people that are very skilled, very well-educated and very capable, and they have been able to add, not just to the military, but to society as a whole," he said.

7. Why won’t China Admit that it’s Competing with the United States?

Why won’t China Admit that it’s Competing with the United States?

PAUL HAENLE, DENNIS WILDER

JUNE 30, 2023

ARTICLE

Even though Beijing is competing, it doesn’t want to define bilateral relations in competitive terms.

carnegieendowment.org · by Paul Haenle, Dennis Wilder

This Q&A was adapted from a Carnegie live event assessing U.S.-China relations following U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s visit to China. It has been edited for clarity.

Paul Haenle: Our friend, Bonnie Glaser, put out a Tweet shortly after Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s visit to China, focusing on the readout of the meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping. She noted with concern that Xi stated “major-country competition does not represent the trend of the times.” The Biden administration has been trying to convince the Chinese side to accept its framework of competition as the mainstay of the relationship, while also recognizing that it is essential to work together and to prevent competition from veering into conflict. Part of the reason that China may not be willing to reopen military-to-military channels may be related to this philosophical disagreement between China and the United States. Clearly, China is competing with the United States. You and I can come up with a dozen examples of how Beijing is competing quite intensively. But why are Chinese officials so unwilling to accept the notion of competition in U.S.-China relations?

Dennis Wilder: We all know about the idea of American exceptionalism—our belief that we are a shining city on a hill; that democracy is a far better system of government than autocracy. This has been part of our narrative throughout American history. John Kennedy and other presidents referred to it. China also has a version of exceptionalism. It can be seen in what Xi Jinping calls the “Global Civilization Initiative.” Beijing views itself as the world's first ancient civilization with a 5000-year continuous history. China is starting to say that its model can be one for the world in a way that it hasn’t said in recent history. In not only the “Global Civilization Initiative” but also the “Global Security Initiative,” China has put forward a notion of win-win cooperation, common humanity, and a peaceful world. So, for Xi Jinping it is very difficult to accept the notion of competition. For him, competition is an American idea, and in a competition, there can only be one winner. They see it as a race where there is going to be a loser and there's going to be a guy that gets the medal. The Chinese don't like that metaphor. So I think that what you saw in the recent visit between Antony Blinken and Xi Jinping was partially this philosophical position; that we need to find a way for us all to win in this competition. To some degree, this framework of competition would better serve China’s interests.

We are seeing more and more that Xi Jinping is cloaking himself in China’s history in a way that Mao Zedong and other modern Chinese leaders never did because they rejected their dynastic history. I would have you look at the video of the recent Shanghai Cooperation Organization meeting in Xi’an. If this wasn't an imperial event, I don't know what is. Xi Jinping is wrapping himself in China’s imperial history in ways that I think we need to start looking at. I don't think we can understand Xi Jinping if we don't understand that history.

carnegieendowment.org · by Paul Haenle, Dennis Wilder

8. The Ukrainian Nuclear war of 2023 and its Aftermath

Fri, 06/30/2023 - 11:00pm

The Ukrainian Nuclear war of 2023 and its Aftermath

by Martin N. Stanton

https://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/ukrainian-nuclear-war-2023-and-its-aftermath

The Ukraine, July 2023: Russia’s only option for quick victory – Break a Taboo / Change the World.

The Ukrainians long promised summer offensive has begun and is slowly inching its way into the Russian defensive belts. The Ukraine conflict has already surpassed anyone’s expectations for duration and losses suffered. Since February of 2022 the Russians have been bloodied and embarrassed in the Ukraine. The Ukrainians have proved surprisingly resilient but have suffered substantial losses as well and only survive through massive infusions of western aid. By the middle of June 2023 each side had evolved. The Ukrainians have become marginally less effective due the attrition of their most trained forces but also managed to husband significant operational reserves which now form the core elements of their summer counteroffensive. The Russians on the other hand became slightly more capable while at the same time continuing to exhibit many of the deficiencies in training and planning that have hobbled their efforts since the beginning of the war. If the recent fighting around Bakhmut is anything to go by the Russians may be able to win exhaustive battles of attrition in single localities but haven’t demonstrated the ability to translate this into a war winning general offensive. Meanwhile the Ukrainians have conducted their largest drone attack on Moscow to date and are grinding into the Russian defensive belts towards Melitopol and Mariupol. How this will play out is hard to predict, but even if the Russians manage to blunt the Ukrainians offensive (no sure thing), they will only do so after suffering significant attrition in another series of bloody, drawn-out battles.  

Putin may not have begun the war understanding that he was playing for existential stakes (his own survival in power), but he knows that he is now. His conventional forces have shown themselves to be surprisingly incapable and aren’t getting better fast enough. The impact of the war on Russia’s home front is increasing with Ukrainian strikes on Russian border towns like Belgorad. Additionally, Putin has just seen the first shots in what promises to become a drone “War-of-the-cities” like the Scud exchanges on population centers during the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s. Even with government control of the media it’s getting harder to convince the Russian man-in-the-street the war is going well. The recent “Wagner” mutiny led by Prigozhin with its abortive march on Moscow is another clear indicator that many of Russia’s power elite are becoming increasingly restive under Putin’s leadership.

To survive in power, Putin can’t afford to lose in the Ukraine and must eke out some kind of victory – sooner rather than later. He wants to avoid the war dragging into next year – which could necessitate a call for general mobilization. Relying on attrition and the traditional Russian model of mass to eventually deliver something that could be called a “victory” has its drawbacks. Russia’s military has already been badly attritted and further years of fighting will only further delay its reconstitution. Additionally, although the Russians have greater personnel reserves than the Ukrainians, they are far smaller than the inexhaustible pool of manpower in which the Soviets drowned the Wehrmacht 80 years ago.  Putin must also be thinking about “what-comes-next” even after “victory” in the Ukraine. Russian manpower lost in future attritional battles in the Ukraine will be manpower unavailable to rebuild Russia’s military after the shooting stops. 

In short, Putin is in a quandary. He needs to show that he is decisive and powerful in order quell the whispers of weakness following Prigozhin’s mutiny. Putin also needs to win in the Ukraine (and soon too, so that he can rebuild his badly worn Army). However, his forces are incapable of achieving a quick decisive conventional victory and could be upset yet again by the Western backed Ukrainians (who stand to get even more western weapons – including F-16s as the war drags on). Putin only has option available to both (a) look strong and unchallengeable on the Russian political scene and (b) Win the war in 2023. This option is to use Tactical Nuclear Weapons (TNW). Russian TNW employment in the Ukraine would shatter the taboo over the use of nuclear weapons that has existed since 1945. We need to be thinking about what the policy implications of a post Ukraine nuclear war are and how the world will change forever.

The first battlefield practical application of TNW: The Ukraine nuclear war of 2023

The US Department of Defense defines Tactical Nuclear Warfare as:  The use of nuclear weapons by land, sea, or air forces against opposing forces, supporting installations or facilities, in support of operations that contribute to the accomplishment of a military mission of limited scope.

Based on this, here are some of the things we should be looking for in potential Russian TNW employment in the Ukraine:

• Surprise: The Initial use of TNW would be even more effective if it came without warning. The Russians know they exist under a microscope of intel collection. They will do their best to compensate for this while preparing for their first strike – which would likely involve a small number of weapons. Remember, they only need to be secretive about their initial use of TNW, after that it doesn’t matter. 

• Going for the win:  Most military analysts in the media today believe the Russians probably won’t employ TNW, but if they do, (a) they will only do so “in-extremis” to stave off disaster (IE keep the Ukrainians from taking Crimea back) and (b) they will exercise a self -imposed incrementalism. Media “experts” postulate the Russians are most likely to use either a single device used in “demonstration” that doesn’t kill anyone or a single weapon strike that does inflict casualties as part of the “demonstration’.  No one seems to think about the Russians using them as a mechanism to achieve victory. The people who make these postulations are, in my estimation, making two grave errors. (1) They believe that international opinion and sanctions matter more to the Russians leadership than it does (they also believe international opinion is far more unified against Russia than it is, but that’s another issue). (2) They believe the Russians, having made the decision to use TNW, will voluntarily choose an incremental approach that minimizes their effectiveness. That Russia’s leadership will make a decision that furthers the international opprobrium and isolation she already suffers while at the same time deriving no tangible military benefit from the decision. This flies in the face of common sense. If the Russians make the drastic decision to use TNW. They’ll be using them to win.

• Mass Employment: Once the decision to use nuclear weapons is made, it makes far more sense for the Russians to use a larger number of TNW in their initial strikes to achieve the tactical effect they desire on the ground. It is very easy to envision Russian first use of TNW that involves numerous 1-10Kt warheads that are tied to larger maneuver and designed to break the Ukrainians momentum/resistance.

• Continual Employment: Once nuclear weapons have been used it makes little sense not to keep using them. Subsequent nuclear strikes will most likely be tied to anywhere the Ukrainians are massing or trying to make a stand. TNW become the tactical “Easy” button for oft stymied Russian forces. Nuclear strikes on key airfields and LOCs also make sense at this stage to impede the Ukrainians from responding with their carefully husbanded airpower or moving reserves. We could expect to see a full week or more with nuclear employment every day. The number of TNW ultimately used will vary with the efficacy of the Russians targeting processes, accuracy of their delivery systems and rate of weapon proper function, but several dozen (or even more) would not surprise me at all.

• Minimize Fallout:  Fallout can be minimized through use of fuze settings that explode the device in such a manner as to not have the fireball touch the ground (airburst). The Russians would have the incentive to employ TNW in this manner on the battlefield as they will likely have to maneuver through the strike areas soon after they occur. Given the low state of training and readiness in general that the Russians have displayed to date it cannot be assumed their forces are prepared to maneuver through highly contaminated areas, so it would behoove them to keep residual contamination to a minimum. The only potential targets for surface bursts and cratering effects (with their associated high residual fallout) are major Ukrainian airfields, logistics hubs and national C2 facilities on the west bank of the Dnieper beyond the potential advance of Russian ground maneuver.

• TNW Employed from Russian soil whenever possible. Some of the Russians shorter ranged systems will have to be employed from inside Ukraine’s borders. Many however, can engage targets in Ukraine from Russian soil. This presents a significant escalation difficulty for those NATO leaders who have publicly advocated for a NATO conventional response against Russian forces in the Ukraine in the event of Russia’s use of tactical nuclear weapons. Does NATO really go after Russian tactical nuclear systems based in Russia?

The likely outcome of Russian tactical nuclear weapons use:

Short of general hostilities with Russia, NATO’s options in the face of the kind of TNW employment I have just described are limited and unlikely to be availing. The most likely outcome of Russian TNW use as postulated here is a negotiated peace with terms more favorable towards Russia than she would have otherwise received – and much quicker. It would be an ugly minimalist victory, but it would suffice for Putin’s purposes. Winning ugly is still winning.

Tactical nuclear weapons worked – now what?

Russia will, of course, face Western rage and a certain amount of international diplomatic and economic censure and isolation. However, we would be mistaken in thinking that the Russians could not weather this. There would be, in the developing world, a certain admiration of the Russians for calling the West’s bluff. Domestically, Putin would look like a strong man who stood up to NATO and the US and did what he had to do to win. Post Ukraine, the bear will burp and lick its wounds. The Russian military has been badly damaged, in the Ukraine and will take years to recover. Expect no more moves for expansion during Putin’s lifetime as they seek to absorb their newly acquired (and worse for wear) territory from a diminished (and dependably anti-Russian) Ukraine.

The Chinese will make “Tut – Tut” noises and censure the Russian’s diplomatically but be privately gleeful as the US knee jerk reaction is to stop our “Pacific shift’ and send forces to support our newly awakened (and hysterical) “less-than-2% GDP Defense Budget” NATO partners. They will be mindful that Taiwan will be frantic to acquire its own nuclear weapons but likely calculate Taiwan by itself couldn’t achieve nuclear capacity before China’s military is fully ready to take the island by force if necessary.  The Russians energy and wheat customers across the world will all swoon with the vapors but be quietly back to business as usual within the year. 

In the meantime, militaries all over the world will be studying exhaustively just what did happen with TNW in the Ukraine. What kind of radiation patterns and fallout did they produce? How effective were they? The Russians (and by extension – the Chinese, Iranians, and North Koreans) will have a leg up on this because the Russians will own most of the battlefields / strike locations. However, even those countries without immediate access to the battlefields will have enough data to draw two very important conclusions. (1) The residual radiation impact of judicious TNW employment is manageable and (2) TNW produced decisive effects on the battlefield. 

The final collapse of the old Arms Control / counterproliferation order: 

After the Russians use TNW there will be much wailing and gnashing of teeth over the “flouting of international norms” and the violation of numerous arms control treaties. The West, led by the US may have some limited success isolating Russia for a short time (although even this is not guaranteed) but none of this really matters. International counterproliferation efforts over the decades have been spotty at best and have not prevented India, Pakistan, North Korea, or Israel from developing nuclear weapons. Other nations are already on the cusp of acquiring them as well.  Successful use of TNW will spur acquisition efforts. Counterproliferation efforts as we know them will largely fall to the wayside. The hard men of the world don’t really care about the opinions of western intelligentsia and the Union of Concerned Scientists can have all the conniptions it wants to. The genie will be out of the bottle.

The only real question is how long will the US cling to the wreckage of the obsolete international counterproliferation regime, desperately trying to convince a world that has already moved on to remain adherent to it? Think of Kevin Bacon’s character at the end of the movie “Animal House” trying to convince everyone that “all is well” as the parade descends into chaos around him. Like Kevin Bacon, we’ll be ignored.

The scramble for acquisition of TNW.

The scramble for acquisition will be divided between two kinds of nations. (1) Nations that can build one – that is to say, nations with the scientific, technological, and industrial capacity to build an atomic bomb if provided with enough of the proper materials and (2) Nations that can buy one – Nations that do not have the capacity to produce indigenous weapons but have the wherewithal to acquire them from outside sources.

In the first category we have nations like Brazil, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Australia, most European countries, etc.   In the second we have nations like Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, etc. (If your country hasn’t been listed sorry – but I’m trying to save space). Many countries who can build one can also buy one.

So, who’s to sell? Well, Russia for one. They’ve tons of them and can make more. Calculated proliferation of TNW could make them a lot of money and buy them a lot of influence. Pakistan is cash strapped and so is North Korea, but both have fully operational nuclear programs. India is a possibility if they see others cashing in, as is Israel. The on-the-cusp producers like Iran could be depended to get in on the action once their basic national security needs are met.

            The scramble for acquisition will leave the US with hard choices and no good options. The longer we act like Kevin Bacon and ignore the reality of the world around us the worse it will be for our position in the world and for those of our partners that still trust us. We will also have to recognize that we are well behind our potential adversaries in the number and types of TNW we have available. Our divestiture of these systems after the fall of the Soviet Union was, in retrospect, a bad move.

The next nuclear war and beyond

            Looking at the potential conflicts in the world it is easy to see several flashpoints where use of TNW would be likely in the event of conflict. Taiwan is the most obvious, but Korea and India-Pakistan also become more likely as do conflicts in the Middle East (Sunni vs Shia). The nuclear war in the Ukraine will have broken the psychological barrier against nuclear weapons use and proven that it is possible to use TNW to achieve decisive battlefield effect. From there it’s all just targeting mechanics and weighing political risk of conflict. Nor will the great powers be immune. Localized tactical nuclear conflicts between strategic nuclear powers with recognized self- limitations are also possible.  We must also recognize the possibility that the next military use of nuclear weapons after the Ukraine will be at sea.

A new normality

            Today we live in a world with nine recognized nuclear weapons nations (US, Russia, China, UK, France, India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea). Soon we will be in a world where a respectable two-digit number of nations possess TNW. What’s the new normal look like?

First, the strategic nuclear powers will still hold the ability to execute mutually assured destruction. This will ensure continued restraint between them in terms of the use of strategic nuclear weapons. However, underneath the shade of these massive strategic arsenals, little mushroom clouds will pop up from time to time.

 Tactical nuclear warfare will be just another tool in the toolbox. But this does not mean they are automatically the tool of choice. The expense of TNW and limited circumstances in which they make battlefield sense (vice some less expensive/destructive option) mean that TNW won’t be going off in every border skirmish across the world. 

We can also expect calculations as to potential aggressive moves to resolve international disputes before one (or both) parties acquire TNW. In some scenarios it may make strategic sense to use TNW to achieve battlefield victory and subsequently desired political results at the peace table before the other combatant can arm itself. Striking first in this kind of war carries priceless advantage.

There will be a certain amount of uncertainty as to what constitutes a TNW (recall, the Hiroshima bomb was only 15Kt) and the next international arms control regime will spend a good amount of its efforts on this subject.

Arms control efforts will also concentrate more on surety / security of nuclear weapons as opposed to their proliferation.  There will be a concerted effort by societies with the most to lose to keep TNW out of the hands of non-state actors.

Finally, responsible governments will increase civil defense measures and preparations for TNW use and the associated consequence management such use entails.  

Summary

           The long period between August of 1945 and the present has contributed to the mistaken belief that nuclear weapons are somehow unique in the history of mankind and we really could refrain from their use. This was never true. Barring some miraculous “Deus Machina” we’re about to enter a new era in human history. We need to be thinking about what comes after the 2023 Ukrainian nuclear war.

About the Author(s)

Martin Stanton

Martin Stanton is a retired Army officer currently residing in Florida. The opinions expressed are his own and do not reflect any official DOD or USG position.

9. Don't Ask Ukraine to Lose the War for 'Peace'

Don't Ask Ukraine to Lose the War for 'Peace'

One of the most curious aspects of the Ukraine war is the steady effort by some actors to push Ukraine to negotiate the war’s end, and essentially lose.

19fortyfive.com · by Robert Kelly · June 30, 2023

One of the most curious aspects of the Ukraine war is the steady effort by some actors to push Ukraine to negotiate the war’s end, and essentially lose.

This is bizarre. Ukraine did not start the war, and none of the countries making these entreaties would accept such an outcome for itself.

Yet just this year, the Pope, French President Emmanuel Macron, China, and a delegation of African leaders have all sought to push Ukraine toward peace talks.

The unstated assumption of each effort has been that Ukraine must submit — that it must accept Russia will permanently control Crimea or the Donbas, that Kyiv may not join NATO or the European Union, and that it should not try to fully defeat Russia on the battlefield. Last year, former U.S. diplomat Henry Kissinger made a similar suggestion.

Why Would Ukraine Agree to Lose?

The core argument behind all of these efforts is that Ukraine should accept defeat and partial dismemberment for the wider good of the world. It would benefit European stability, stabilize food prices and the global economy, and so on. But this argument often seems to mask the actors’ actual interests.

Macron wants Europe to increase its autonomy from the U.S. But the war is reinforcing U.S. primacy in European security, because Washington is the prime driver of Western aid to Ukraine. China has tied itself to Russia as a partial ally, a bet that looks worse all the time. A Russian defeat would be terrible for Chinese hopes to challenge the U.S.-led world order with Russian help. African states have seen food costs explode as the war disrupts exports.

The Ukrainians can see these parochial interests masquerading as the common good, and they have predictably rejected such overtures.

More importantly, the basis for these arguments is wrong. Ukraine is not doomed to defeat. It is not at all clear that Russia can win, or hold on to what it has taken. At the start of the war, it was briefly fashionable to claim that Russia’s advantages were so overwhelming that Ukraine should accept some losses in exchange for peace. But today that claim is not viable. Ukraine is not losing the war. Its two counteroffensives last year retrieved about 40% of the territory Russia initially captured, and Kyiv is now undertaking another offensive. Its population supports the war. And there is good reason to think that if Putin is not decisively defeated now, he will simply attack again in a few years.

In other words, Ukraine has a decent chance of winning militarily, and if that does not work, of defeating Russia in time by exhausting it. My own sense is that the latter is more likely. Russia can avoid defeat by fighting on, but it cannot win decisively anymore. If Ukraine can continue to harass the Russians indefinitely, they will eventually tire and choose to leave, much as the Soviet Red Army chose to leave Afghanistan in 1988 after nine years of fruitless combat.

Putin, Not Ukraine, Is the Problem

The other strange element the various peace overtures share is their expectation that Ukraine do most of the accommodation, when it is Putin who started the war and cannot win it. Often wars begin in ill-defined circumstances of mutual escalation, but this is not such a war. Like the German invasion of Poland in 1939, or the North Korean invasion of South Korea in 1950, the line between aggressor and defender in this conflict is very clear. There was a line separating the two sides, and Putin vividly crossed it in huge force. Even now, Ukraine remains very careful not to cross back much.

Putin has worsened this black-and-white moral difference by prosecuting the war harshly. He has purposefully shelled civilian areas for more than a year now. His army has kidnapped thousands of Ukrainian children, and his various militias and mercenaries have engaged in war crimes, including torture and rape.

Any delegation to end the conflict needs to begin by addressing Russia, the war’s instigator. At a minimum, they must push Putin to prosecute the war in a more humane way.

Instead, the logic seems to be that Ukraine is the weaker of the two and thus more amenable to outside pressure. Given that Ukraine is the victim and Russia is the aggressor, that logic is morally appalling. No wonder Ukraine rejects these efforts.

A Real Peace Deal

Any serious peace deal will start with a Russian commitment to withdraw to the lines of February 2022 and to stop violating Ukrainian civilians. From there, a deal on Ukraine’s future could begin, and Ukraine could make some concessions, such as joining the EU but not NATO, or joining NATO but foregoing Russian reconstruction aid. There are many possible modalities. But they start with ending the war, and the only one who can do that is the person who started it — Vladimir Putin.

Expert Biography

Dr. Robert E. Kelly (@Robert_E_Kelly; RoberEdwinKelly.com) is a professor of international relations in the Department of Political Science at Pusan and a 19FortyFive Contributing Editor.

From 19FortyFive

A Russian Submarine Accidently ‘Destroyed Itself’

Did Ukraine Just Win the War?

Total Massacre’: Ukraine Footage Shows Russian Cruise Missile Shipment Attacked

19fortyfive.com · by Robert Kelly · June 30, 2023

10. Pentagon to filmmakers: We won’t help you if you kowtow To China

Excerpts:

Cruz said he was pleased with the new rule.

“The Chinese Communist Party spends billions on propaganda and censorship,” he said. “For years Hollywood helped them by censoring movies so they could be screened in China, while still working with the U.S. government to get those very same movies developed.

“This new guidance — implementing the legislation I authored in the SCRIPT Act — will force studios to choose one or the other, and I’m cautiously optimistic that they’ll make the right choice and reject China’s blackmailing.”

Pentagon to filmmakers: We won’t help you if you kowtow To China

Politico

DOD will no longer work with directors if their movie will be censored by Beijing.

Hollywood and the Defense Department have enjoyed a symbiotic relationship for decades. The Pentagon has allowed filmmakers to shoot their projects on military bases, Navy ships, or other locations. | Petty Officer 3rd Class Carson Croom | U.S. Navy

06/30/2023 12:09 PM EDT

If you’re a filmmaker and you want the Pentagon’s help, from now on you’ll have to guarantee that you won’t let China censor your movie first.

On Wednesday, the Defense Department updated its rules for working with movie studios to prohibit any assistance to directors who plan to comply or will likely comply with censorship demands from the Chinese government in order to distribute their movie there.

The issue came to a head with last year’s release of “Top Gun: Maverick.” In trailers for the film, viewers noticed that the studio removed the flags of Taiwan and Japan from Capt. Pete “Maverick” Mitchell’s flight jacket in an apparent attempt to appease Chinese investor Tencent. But after criticism in the U.S. — and after Tencent reportedly dropped its investment in the film –– the flags were restored in the final version.

The Pentagon updated its rules for working with filmmakers after Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) inserted language into the fiscal 2023 defense policy bill. Cruz has pushed back on Beijing’s censorship of films.

“What does it say to the world when Maverick is scared of the Chinese communists?” he said in a floor speech at the time.

According to a new Defense Department document obtained by POLITICO, filmmakers who want the U.S. military to help with their projects must now pledge that they won’t let Beijing alter those films.

The DOD “will not provide production assistance when there is demonstrable evidence that the production has complied or is likely to comply with a demand from the Government of the People’s Republic of China … to censor the content of the project in a material manner to advance the national interest of the People’s Republic of China,” the document reads.

Hollywood and the Defense Department have enjoyed a symbiotic relationship for decades. The Pentagon has allowed filmmakers to shoot their projects on military bases, Navy ships, or other locations, and weighs in on filmmaking processes. The military benefits from positive portrayals of service members, and moviemakers benefit from authentic settings and technical expertise.

But as China’s ruling Communist Party has developed increasingly advanced censorship and surveillance tools, countless American companies — including Hollywood studios — have sought to comply with Beijing’s demands while attempting to dodge stateside pushback.

Chinese government censors can be unpredictable and demanding. They pushed the producers of “Spider-man: No Way Home” to remove the Statue of Liberty, according to Puck. And they wanted the filmmakers of “Lightyear” to cut a short same-sex kiss, according to CNN. Neither of the studios complied, and neither film was released in mainland China.

In its new rule, the department will also weigh any “verifiable information” from people who aren’t connected to the production who indicate that the film could comply with a censorship demand.

Once DOD greenlights cooperation on a project, the agency assigns an officer to work with the filmmakers. From now on, the production company must notify that person “in writing of such a censorship demand, including the terms of such demand, and whether the project has complied or is likely to comply with a demand for such censorship.”

Cruz said he was pleased with the new rule.

“The Chinese Communist Party spends billions on propaganda and censorship,” he said. “For years Hollywood helped them by censoring movies so they could be screened in China, while still working with the U.S. government to get those very same movies developed.

“This new guidance — implementing the legislation I authored in the SCRIPT Act — will force studios to choose one or the other, and I’m cautiously optimistic that they’ll make the right choice and reject China’s blackmailing.”

POLITICO

Politico

11. CIA director, on secret trip to Ukraine, hears plan for war’s endgame

CIA director, on secret trip to Ukraine, hears plan for war’s endgame

During meetings in Kyiv, William Burns was told of Ukraine’s ambitious goal to retake territory and push Moscow into talks by the end of the year

By John Hudson and Shane Harris

June 30, 2023 at 7:23 p.m. EDT

The Washington Post · by John Hudson · June 30, 2023

During a secret visit to Ukraine by CIA Director William J. Burns earlier this month, Ukrainian officials revealed an ambitious strategy to retake Russian-occupied territory and open cease-fire negotiations with Moscow by the end of the year, according to officials familiar with the visit.

The trip by Burns, which has not been previously reported, included meetings with President Volodymyr Zelensky and Ukraine’s top intelligence officials. It came at a critical moment in the conflict as Ukrainian forces struggle to gain an early advantage in their long-awaited counteroffensive but have yet to deploy most of their Western-trained and -equipped assault brigades.

“Director Burns recently traveled to Ukraine, as he has done regularly since the beginning of Russia’s recent aggression more than a year ago,” said a U.S. official, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the unannounced visit.

Its purpose was to reaffirm the Biden administration’s commitment to sharing intelligence meant to help Ukraine defend itself, the official added.

Publicly, Ukrainian officials have expressed frustration with critics of the pace at which the counteroffensive has played out thus far. But in private, military planners in Kyiv have relayed to Burns and others bullish confidence in their aim to retake substantial territory by the fall; move artillery and missile systems near the boundary line of Russian-controlled Crimea; push further into eastern Ukraine; and then open negotiations with Moscow for the first time since peace talks broke down in March of last year, according to three people familiar with the planning.

“Russia will only negotiate if it feels threatened,” said a senior Ukrainian official.

Whether Ukraine can deliver on those plans, on such a truncated timeline, remains to be seen. The CIA declined to comment when asked for Burns’s assessment of the offensive’s prospects.

Burns’s trip occurred just before the aborted rebellion by Russian mercenary leader Yevgeniy Prigozhin against Russia’s defense establishment. Although the U.S. intelligence community had detected in mid-June that Prigozhin was plotting an armed assault of some kind, those findings were not discussed during the meetings with Zelensky and others, the U.S. official said.

Biden administration officials have repeatedly emphasized that Washington and Kyiv had nothing to do with the failed march on Moscow, a rare challenge to Russian President Vladimir Putin that the United States has characterized as an internal matter.

In an effort to reinforce that line, Burns made a phone call to his Russian counterpart, Sergei Naryshkin, after the event and underscored that the United States was not involved in any way, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Zelensky and his military commanders, facing deeply entrenched Russian forces in occupied parts of Ukraine’s east and south, are under extraordinary pressure from the Western nations that provided Kyiv with billions of dollars in advanced weaponry and training ahead of the counteroffensive.

Ukraine has taken heavy casualties as its troops and armored vehicles navigate thick minefields and fortified trenches across wide-open territory. The challenging terrain has left troops vulnerable to Russian airstrikes and missile attacks.

Zelensky has acknowledged that the counteroffensive is going “slower than desired,” and officials have confirmed the destruction of some Western-provided Leopard 2 tanks and Bradly Fighting Vehicles.

But Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov has dismissed skeptics, saying the “main event” is yet to come, while the country’s top military commander, Gen. Valery Zaluzhny, has called for patience, saying the offensive is being “carried out” as diligently as possible.

“Yes, maybe not as fast as … the observers would like, but that is their problem,” Zaluzhny told The Washington Post this week.

Military analysts say Ukraine’s goal of forcing a negotiation is ambitious given Russia’s fortified defenses, but not out of the question.

“It’s possible they can cut off the land bridge to Crimea, either by seizing the terrain or putting it within range of HIMARS and other artillery, but much depends on the level of attrition,” said Rob Lee, a military analyst at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.

“If Ukraine sustains too many losses, its offensive could culminate early. But if Ukraine can inflict enough losses on Russian forces and equipment, and interdict the movement of reinforcements, Ukraine may be able to weaken Moscow’s defenses enough to achieve a breakthrough,” he added.

In preparation for the fall, Zelensky and top aides have begun thinking about how Kyiv can force an end to the fighting on terms that are acceptable to Russia and the Ukrainian people, who have been subjected to a year and a half of violence, forced displacement, atrocities, and food and electricity shortages.

In an ideal scenario favored by Kyiv, Ukraine’s military would gain leverage over Russia by advancing troops and powerful weapons to the edge of Ukraine’s boundary with Crimea — holding hostage the peninsula that is home to Russia’s prized Black Sea Fleet.

“If Ukraine has the capability to target additional important airfields, bridges, rail lines and logistics hubs, they can make it more difficult for Russia to sustain the war,” said Lee, the military analyst.

In agreeing not to take Crimea by force, Kyiv would then demand that Russia accept whatever security guarantees Ukraine can secure from the West, said Ukrainian officials.

Obtaining those guarantees, however, has been a tall order.

The Zelensky government has pushed hard for the United States and Europe to make firm commitments on Ukraine’s accession to NATO and the European Union — but the U.S. and Western European governments remain cold to the idea, more interested in offering pledges of long-term security assistance instead of the expansion of NATO, which risks a direct conflict with Russia.

The hesitance has frustrated Poland and the Baltic states, NATO member countries that are looking ahead to next month’s NATO summit in Lithuania, where Secretary of State Antony Blinken and other Western leaders have said they intend to provide a “very robust package” to Ukraine. Strong disagreements over the contents of the package threaten to project an image of disunity at the gathering.

But while U.S. and Ukrainian officials differ on the topic of NATO membership, they say there is broad agreement on Kyiv’s aims for the offensive.

“The U.S. agrees that Ukraine should enter the negotiations from a strong position,” said a senior Ukrainian official. “The U.S. is satisfied that our command does not do anything stupid, it keeps soldiers and equipment. The support is strong, and it makes our motivation higher.”

Still, signs of stress are abundant. While U.S. military leaders want to see Ukraine accelerate its offensive, Zaluzhny has begun venting that the West has not sent ammunition and fighter jets to the battlefield fast enough.

It “pisses me off,” Zaluzhny said, in response to complaints that the counteroffensive hasn’t progressed quickly.

White House spokesman John Kirby on Friday sympathized with Ukrainian complaints about weaponry, saying, “You can hardly blame them for talking to the world about additional support, whether that’s in quantity or quality of capabilities.”

He denied, however, that Washington would play the role of “armchair quarterback” from the sidelines.

“Where they go and how fast they go,” Kirby said, “that’s really going to be up to them to decide.”

Ukraine’s cautious approach in the opening days of the offensive is a sign of the challenge that lays ahead, analysts say.

“The problem is that Russia has emplaced a large number of mines, both in front of and behind the main defensive line,” said Lee. “Even if Ukraine can achieve a breakthrough, it will still take time to exploit. It may take weeks, it may take months.”

The Washington Post · by John Hudson · June 30, 2023

12. Michael G. Vickers Is Worried About the Future of American Power

Three paragraphs really match the headline.

Excerpts:

“We’re past the period where our main enemy is jihadists or regional rogue states like Iran or North Korea,” Vickers, 70, says over the phone from his home near Washington, D.C., which he shares with his wife, Melana Zyla Vickers. “In the 20th century we had what I call economic escalation dominance, with an economy that was at least twice the size of any rival, but we don’t have that anymore.” He is troubled that the U.S. can’t seem to boost production of rockets and long-range missiles, given that our support for Ukraine has run through much of our arsenal: “Now imagine a conflict with China.”

...

Although he describes American primacy in the past tense, Vickers insists it is still possible to remain a leading power “if we win the tech arms race against China.” He recommends leveraging U.S. advantages in undersea warfare and sustaining our advantages in space and in “global precision strike capabilities,” which he hopes will deter a full-scale war. “China poses a threat to us in its region, but not so much globally,” he says. He adds that failing to arm Ukraine sufficiently “would lead to a more aggressive and powerful Russia.”

Given these challenges, Vickers says he’s particularly concerned about the rise of political polarization and the “fraying” of America’s social fabric. Although he avoided partisanship throughout his career, he broke his silence in 2016 to speak out against Donald Trump: “I thought that he was unfit, and his administration confirmed it for me.” Vickers expresses nostalgia for a time when politicians were more engaged in honest debate: “We’re going to need good leaders on both sides if we hope to prevail in this new Cold War.”

WEEKEND CONFIDENTIAL

Michael G. Vickers Is Worried About the Future of American Power

In a new memoir, the intelligence community veteran draws lessons from his experiences in the Middle East, Afghanistan and beyond

By Emily Bobrow

June 30, 2023 12:29 pm ET

https://www.wsj.com/articles/michael-g-vickers-is-worried-about-the-future-of-american-power-8d63442c?

Michael G. Vickers is concerned about the future of American power. The former undersecretary of defense for intelligence, who played a central role in shaping the country’s use of covert forces under George W. Bush and Barack Obama, admits that he now worries about the U.S.’s ability to win wars, both cold and hot.

“We’re past the period where our main enemy is jihadists or regional rogue states like Iran or North Korea,” Vickers, 70, says over the phone from his home near Washington, D.C., which he shares with his wife, Melana Zyla Vickers. “In the 20th century we had what I call economic escalation dominance, with an economy that was at least twice the size of any rival, but we don’t have that anymore.” He is troubled that the U.S. can’t seem to boost production of rockets and long-range missiles, given that our support for Ukraine has run through much of our arsenal: “Now imagine a conflict with China.”

This, he says, is why he decided to write his new memoir, “By All Means Available.” By chronicling some of the lessons he learned guiding national security through various crises, Vickers hopes to help the U.S. in its “new Cold War” against China and Russia. “It is in some sense 1947 all over again,” he warns. “This decade could well prove decisive, and the side that prevails will determine what kind of world we live in for the remainder of the 21st century.”

Vickers (center) at his graduation from the Special Forces Qualification Course, May 1974. PHOTO: MICHAEL VICKERS

Growing up in Hollywood with a father who built and sold homes, Vickers was far more interested in sports than school. A self-described “superb underachiever,” he took his C-plus average to a local community college with dreams of playing baseball or football. When these ambitions fizzled, he remembered a high-school teacher who took him aside to share an article about a covert CIA operation against the North Vietnamese Army. “I imagined myself leading secret armies in far-off lands and winning against impossible odds,” Vickers recalls. At 19 he set his sights on joining the CIA, liking the idea that “a highly trained individual could make a difference.” He adds, “I probably saw too many James Bond movies.”

Vickers had yet to earn the college degree he needed to work for the CIA, so he began training to become a Green Beret first, in 1973. He allows that it was a strange time to dream of becoming the next T.E. Lawrence, with the U.S. still mired in its chastening war in Vietnam. Yet he notes that the military had already pivoted to deterring a war with the Soviet Union, and many of the Vietnam veterans he served with in his first Special Forces unit were Eastern European émigrés, eager to liberate their former homelands from Soviet tyranny. “They were my first exposure to freedom fighters,” he writes.

By the time Vickers applied to join the CIA in 1982, he had learned Czech, Russian and Spanish, trained to parachute behind enemy lines with a “backpack nuke,” commanded a clandestine counterterrorism unit, and earned a bachelor’s degree in international relations from the University of Alabama. In a preliminary interview, he was told his owlish glasses made him look more like an insurance salesman than a Green Beret. “This is the CIA,” he replied. “Aren’t we supposed to look like something other than what we are?”

Vickers says running the CIA’s support for Afghan resistance fighters in the 1980s was ‘the job of a lifetime.’ PHOTO: GREG KAHN FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

After participating in the U.S. invasion of Grenada in 1983, Vickers helped shape the American response to the Iranian-backed bombings of the American embassy and Marine barracks in Beirut. The region’s increasingly ruthless operators demanded more intensive intelligence efforts: “A new era of mass-casualty terrorism had been born.” By 1984 Vickers was running the CIA’s support for Afghan resistance fighters in their ultimately successful war against the Soviets. “It was the job of a lifetime,” he says. Feeling that nothing he could do in the CIA would match it, he decided it was time to leave the agency: “To this day, I don’t know if I made the right decision,” he says.

He went on to earn a masters from the Wharton School of Business—“I learned how to think strategically in a different way”—and a Ph.D. in international relations and strategic studies from Johns Hopkins. When planes slammed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, Vickers was working as a strategic consultant to the U.S. government and other clients, focused mainly on China “I was as shocked as most Americans,” he admits. With hindsight, he says the U.S. should not have disengaged from Afghanistan after the Soviets were expelled in 1989: “The 9/11 attacks were not inevitable.” Many of the Afghan fighters he helped arm in the 1980s turned on American soldiers decades later. He says that the Iraq war was a costly distraction that “took us away from the main problem, which was defeating al Qaeda.”

By 2006, with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq dragging on, President George W. Bush lured Vickers back to government with a new job in the Defense Department that gave him oversight over everything from nuclear weapons to “shaping the military for the future,” he says. Forgoing nation-building as a counterterrorism strategy, Vickers instead expanded the military’s fleet of armed drones and helped craft plans for remotely killing insurgent leaders. He also oversaw the creation of a Cyber Command and the development of new space capabilities. He is mum on specifics, but says “space superiority is to the 21st century what air superiority was to the 20th.” President Obama kept him on and then promoted him to undersecretary of defense for intelligence, a position Vickers held from 2011 till he retired from government service in 2015.

Vickers (right) talks with Afghan policemen. PHOTO: MICHAEL VICKERS

Vickers was alarmed by America’s abrupt withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, which he says “turned a stalemate into defeat” and “made us look weak.” He notes that some of al Qaeda’s biggest supporters are now back in power: “We don’t want Afghanistan to become jihad central again.”

Although he describes American primacy in the past tense, Vickers insists it is still possible to remain a leading power “if we win the tech arms race against China.” He recommends leveraging U.S. advantages in undersea warfare and sustaining our advantages in space and in “global precision strike capabilities,” which he hopes will deter a full-scale war. “China poses a threat to us in its region, but not so much globally,” he says. He adds that failing to arm Ukraine sufficiently “would lead to a more aggressive and powerful Russia.”

Given these challenges, Vickers says he’s particularly concerned about the rise of political polarization and the “fraying” of America’s social fabric. Although he avoided partisanship throughout his career, he broke his silence in 2016 to speak out against Donald Trump: “I thought that he was unfit, and his administration confirmed it for me.” Vickers expresses nostalgia for a time when politicians were more engaged in honest debate: “We’re going to need good leaders on both sides if we hope to prevail in this new Cold War.”

Copyright ©2023 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

Appeared in the July 1, 2023, print edition as 'Michael G. Vickers'.

13. How China’s Overseas Security Forces Differ From Wagner

How China’s Overseas Security Forces Differ From Wagner

Private, military-style security firms mostly guard Chinese projects, but Beijing could expand their role

https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-chinas-overseas-security-forces-differ-from-wagner-34112fc0?mod=hp_lead_pos9

By James T. Areddy and Austin Ramzy

July 1, 2023 5:30 am ET

Special patrol officers drilled earlier this year in Zhoushan in Zhejiang province. PHOTO: CFOTO/ZUMA PRESS

The ascendancy of the Russian mercenary group Wagner is putting a spotlight on the role played by private security companies in developing countries. Among them are Chinese contractors that have fanned out across Africa and Asia.

Private, military-style security companies are an increasingly visible element of China’s expanding global footprint—hunting pirates from the decks of cargo ships in the Gulf of Aden, guarding a railway in Kenya and protecting a fuel depot in Sri Lanka.

Both the Russian and Chinese versions of private security forces feature murky ties to their countries’ militaries, secretive missions and beachheads in places where their governments have influence.

But the similarities stop there, according to defense analysts. 

The Chinese Communist Party’s fixation on centralized power leaves little room for private security firms to mount a military rebellion as Wagner did in Russia. The People’s Liberation Army is technically the party’s army, and the party demands absolute loyalty from all national security forces. Gun laws are so tight that few Chinese police officers carry weapons.

Unlike Wagner paramilitary fighting forces that are equipped for war, China’s security companies primarily handle guard duties that don’t require lethal weaponry. For more dangerous jobs overseas, China’s security companies function like consultants, hiring and managing local staffs who might be armed.

Still, Beijing’s broad definition of national security and its drive to infuse political priorities into commercial enterprises suggests to some analysts that it could expand the remit of private security firms. China has a history of covert use of commercial enterprises to achieve government aims, such as fishing boats that press territorial claims in regional waters and internet providers that assist in cyber espionage.  

Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road infrastructure construction drive has created jobs for Chinese professionals abroad—and the need for security forces to protect them. PHOTO: JU PENG/ZUMA PRESS

“China could use private security companies as a platform for spreading its influence,” says Sergey Sukhankin, a senior fellow at the Jamestown Foundation, a Washington think tank. 

Sukhankin says such suspicions, coupled with fresh scrutiny of Wagner’s modest origins, might muffle the welcome Chinese security contracting firms receive from some governments. Despite a spate of attacks in Pakistan on Chinese nationals, Islamabad last year rebuffed Beijing’s overtures to dispatch private security agents, saying it could handle security within the nation.

The globalization of China’s economy has added to Beijing’s security concerns.

Now a decade old, Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road infrastructure development program spans ports, railways and dams worth billions of dollars across dozens of mostly developing countries. The construction, together with fleets of ships and aircraft that service the world’s largest trading economy, has created jobs for hundreds of thousands of Chinese nationals as engineers and laborers in sometimes risky foreign locations. 

As the Chinese enterprises expand, Beijing has encouraged a go-global push by commercial security firms such as Huaxin Zhongan Group, China Huawei Security Group and Frontier Services Group’s DeWe Security. (Frontier, controlled by Beijing-based investment group Citic, was co-founded by Erik Prince, the American military contractor known for the firm formerly called Blackwater, though Frontier’s financial reports say he departed in 2021. Frontier didn’t immediately respond to questions.)

Chinese commercial entities often have close links to state political priorities, leading some observers to predict that the role of private security forces might be expanded. PHOTO: CFOTO/ZUMA PRESS

The bulk of each company’s business appears to be domestic—guarding office buildings and running armored cars—but all advertise the expertise of People’s Liberation Army special-forces veterans and experience securing Belt and Road projects outside China. 

Like symbols of American capitalism in some parts of the world, China’s international projects introduce enticing targets for thieves and terrorists who regard Beijing’s presence as neocolonial, say security analysts. 

Suicide bombers in Pakistan have killed, injured and threatened Chinese nationals, including three teachers last year whose deaths prompted diplomatic efforts by Beijing to enlist private security. Chinese road builders in Sudan have been kidnapped for ransom. In March, nine Chinese nationals were shot dead at a newly opened Central African Republic gold mine, which local authorities blamed on Wagner mercenaries. 

The demanding job of protecting Chinese nationals and investments abroad puts Beijing in a tricky position. Any impulse to respond directly is offset by a pillar of China’s international diplomacy: a pledge of noninterference in the domestic affairs of other nations. 

After the gold-mine rampage, Xi delivered vague instructions to protect Chinese nationals and bring the perpetrators to justice. But the government did little more than to reiterate a travel warning and urge the Central African Republic government to act.

Special officers drilled with weapons in Zhoushan in Zhejiang province; most Chinese police officers don’t carry weapons. PHOTO: CFOTO/ZUMA PRESS

“Beijing has witnessed firsthand how the sole reliance on economic development and the principle of noninterference could not completely shield Chinese workers and infrastructures from criminal and political violence,” Italian academic Alessandro Arduino writes in “Money for Mayhem: Mercenaries, Private Military Companies, Drones, and the Future of War,” a book set for publication in October. Arduino calls private security firms “gap filler” between maintaining the noninterference policy and a People’s Liberation Army presence.

Wagner has acted as a shadow Russian military in countries such as Syria, the Central African Republic and Mali, a mercenary force paid to defend governments Moscow wants to protect that also sometimes carves out for-profit side ventures.

By contrast, Chinese security firms are typically hired by other Chinese business groups, such as shipper China Ocean Shipping and China Road and Bridge, that seek protection for their own commercial interests. While such business groups are controlled by China’s government and often execute plans that serve Beijing’s political goals, their security interests tend to have only indirect links to the host government’s own stability, experts say.

Overseas, many Chinese companies present themselves as multinational commercial enterprises and play down the Communist Party’s role in their operations. But the security firms often do the opposite by publicizing party links.

“Wherever the security business extends, the party organization will be established,” said a statement posted last year to the website of Huaxin Zhongan. “The company has always taken political quality as the first element in the inspection and management of overseas armed escorts, and insisted on strengthening the party’s leadership of the escort team,” it said.

Huaxin Zhongan, which didn’t respond to questions, says on its website that 42% of its security guards, who mostly work in China, are retired soldiers and that all of its security staff based overseas are ex-military. In another post from this year describing escorts to help ships protect against piracy, one type of security work in which Chinese contractors have leeway to carry firearms, the company acknowledged it could only use such weapons with the party’s blessing. It said its officers have repelled pirates more than 40 times, saving customers millions of dollars in potential losses. 

The group’s Communist Party committee requires its overseas branch to “inherit our party and army’s glorious tradition of ‘the party commands the gun,’” the company said, adding that it should “take weapons management as a political task.”

Write to James T. Areddy at James.Areddy@wsj.com and Austin Ramzy at austin.ramzy@wsj.com

14. To Foreign Policy Veteran, the Real Danger Is at Home

I would recommend his short but powerful new book be part of modern civics education. It should be a foundational text.

The Bill of Obligations: The Ten Habits of Good Citizens

https://www.amazon.com/Bill-Obligations-Habits-Good-Citizens/dp/0525560653/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_

If we cannot follow these 10 Obligations of citizenry then we are doomed.

Be Informed

Get Involved

Stay Open to Compromise

Remain Civil

Reject Violence

Value Norms

Promote the Common Good

Respect Government Service

Support the Teaching of Civics

Put the Country First

To Foreign Policy Veteran, the Real Danger Is at Home

The New York Times · by Peter Baker · July 1, 2023

Richard N. Haass said the United States has become the most profound source of instability throughout the world.Credit...Karsten Moran for The New York Times

Richard N. Haass says the most serious threat to global security is the United States.

Richard N. Haass said the United States has become the most profound source of instability throughout the world.Credit...Karsten Moran for The New York Times

By

Peter Baker is the chief White House correspondent and interviewed Richard Haass at offices in Washington and New York.

• July 1, 2023

Everywhere he has gone as president of the Council on Foreign Relations, Richard N. Haass has been asked the same question: What keeps him up at night? He has had no shortage of options over the years — Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, climate change, international terrorism, food insecurity, the global pandemic.

But as he steps down after two decades running America’s most storied private organization focused on international affairs, Mr. Haass has come to a disturbing conclusion. The most serious danger to the security of the world right now? The threat that costs him sleep? The United States itself.

“It’s us,” he said ruefully the other day.

That was never a thought this global strategist would have entertained until recently. But in his mind, the unraveling of the American political system means that for the first time in his life the internal threat has surpassed the external threat. Instead of being the most reliable anchor in a volatile world, Mr. Haass said, the United States has become the most profound source of instability and an uncertain exemplar of democracy.

“Our domestic political situation is not only one that others don’t want to emulate,” he said in an interview ahead of his last day at the Council on Foreign Relations on Friday. “But I also think that it’s introduced a degree of unpredictability and a lack of reliability that’s really poisonous. For America’s ability to function successfully in the world, I mean, it makes it very hard for our friends to depend on us.”

Mr. Haass is stepping down as the president of the Council on Foreign Relations.Credit...Karsten Moran for The New York Times

The challenges at home have prompted a man who has spent his entire career as a policymaker and student of world affairs to turn his attention inward. Mr. Haass recently published a book called “The Bill of Obligations: The Ten Habits of Good Citizens,” outlining ways Americans can help heal their own society, like “Be Informed,” “Remain Civil,” “Put Country First” — all admittedly bromides and yet somehow often elusive these days. In addition to consultant work, he wants to spend much of the next chapter of his life promoting the teaching of civics.

“My own trajectory has changed,” he observed during a pair of interviews summing up two decades at the council. “This new book is not something I would have predicted writing five or 10 years ago, but I actually think it’s almost a recasting of American democracy. Now it’s become a national security concern. And that’s different.”

By dint of position as well as temperament, Mr. Haass, 71, is a member in good standing of the establishment that has fallen into disfavor in the era of Donald J. Trump, a voice of the largely bipartisan “realist” consensus that for better or worse defined America’s place in the world for most of the three-quarters of a century since World War II. It is a clubby world, of course, one that invariably leads to charges of elitist groupthink or even conspiracy theories. For his final appearance as president of the council this past week, Mr. Haass interviewed Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken onstage and online, the 27th secretary of state to appear before the council.

“It’s hard to think of anyone who’s done more to make this institution what it is,” Mr. Blinken said, praising his host.

“I want to thank him for that,” Mr. Haass replied with a smile. “But I’m still going to ask him tough questions.”

A veteran of four administrations, one Democrat and three Republican, Mr. Haass has nonetheless transcended the insular world of think tank policy wonks through regular appearances on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” where in measured but unmistakable terms he has lamented the political polarization and excesses of recent years and tried to make sense of it all.

Mr. Haass, right, served as director of policy planning at the State Department under President George W. Bush.Credit...Stephen Crowley/The New York Times

From the set at Rockefeller Plaza in New York, Mr. Haass would head most mornings about 20 blocks north to the council’s Upper East Side headquarters. His relatively modest-sized fourth-floor office looked exactly like what you would imagine that the cluttered office of the president of the Council on Foreign Relations would look like, crammed with literally thousands of books, dozens of globes, stacks of paper, honorary degrees from various universities and photographs with family members, presidents and colleagues from past administrations.

It will be hard to imagine the council without him. The longest-serving president in the century-old organization’s history, he takes pride in preserving its place in the firmament while increasing and diversifying its membership, opening an expanded Washington office, focusing on education and maintaining a bipartisan approach, albeit not one that embraces America First Trumpism. He will be succeeded by Michael Froman, who was the U.S. trade representative under President Barack Obama.

Born in Brooklyn and raised on Long Island, Mr. Haass studied at Oberlin College, where he made a documentary on the student response to the Kent State shootings. After graduating in 1973, he became a Rhodes scholar. He worked for Senator Claiborne Pell, Democrat of Rhode Island, on Capitol Hill, where he met a young senator named Joe Biden in 1974.

Mr. Haass went on to serve in the Pentagon under President Jimmy Carter, the State Department under President Ronald Reagan and the National Security Council under President George H.W. Bush. Under President George W. Bush, he served as director of policy planning at the State Department but ultimately left in 2003, disenchanted with the Iraq war, which he later called “a poor choice poorly implemented.”

As a young man, Mr. Haass opposed the Vietnam War and thought of himself as liberal but then became inspired by the writings of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the rise of Margaret Thatcher and the Reagan-Bush vision of American leadership abroad and restrained government at home. For more than 40 years, he was a Republican, although he sometimes voted for Democrats. But by 2020, he renounced the party that had been captured by Mr. Trump and after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol and publicly declared himself unaffiliated.

Mr. Haas served as National Security Council under President George H.W. Bush.

Over the past century, America has experienced other periods of division and discord — Jim Crow, McCarthyism, Vietnam, civil rights, Watergate. The assassinations and riots and war of 1968 often come to mind as a singularly miserable year in the life of the nation. But Mr. Haass sees this moment as even worse. “These were not threats to the system, the fabric,” he said. “That’s why I think this is more significant.”

Mr. Haass, who agreed to meet with Mr. Trump in 2015 to advise him on foreign affairs, just as he would any presidential candidate, admitted that he misjudged the bombastic real estate developer.

“Where I was dead wrong is I assumed the weight of the office would moderate him or normalize him, whatever word you want to use — that he would be more respectful of traditions and inheritances,” Mr. Haass said. “And I was wrong on that. If anything, he became more radical. He doubled down.”

The question is whether America has changed for the long run. “I should have a nickel,” he said, “for every non-American, every foreign leader who said to me: I don’t know what’s the norm and what’s the exception anymore. Is the Biden administration a return to the America I took for granted and Trump will be a historical blip? Or is Biden the exception and Trump and Trumpism are the new America?”

Mr. Haass is a veteran of four administrations, one Democrat and three Republican.Credit...Karsten Moran for The New York Times

After exploring other countries for most of the past half-century, Mr. Haass is ready to explore his own. Putting his foreign policy hat aside for now, he said he wants to expand the message from his book and help refocus the country on the core values embodied in the Declaration of Independence as the 250th anniversary of the document approaches three years from now.

For all his worries, he insists he is not pessimistic. “When I go around speaking about this topic, people know there’s something wrong with American democracy,” he said. “They know it’s going on off the rails. And we may not necessarily agree on how to fix it. But there’s a real openness to the conversation.”

Peter Baker is the chief White House correspondent and has covered the last five presidents for The Times and The Washington Post. He is the author of seven books, most recently “The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021,” with Susan Glasser.

The New York Times · by Peter Baker · July 1, 2023

15. This Day In History: “Mr. X” article on Soviet Union appears in Foreign Affairs

Who is today's Mr. X?

“Mr. X” article on Soviet Union appears in Foreign Affairs | HISTORY

history.com · by History.com Editors

State Department official George Kennan, using the pseudonym “Mr. X,” publishes an article entitled “The Sources of Soviet Conduct” in the July edition of Foreign Affairs. The article focused on Kennan’s call for a policy of containment toward the Soviet Union and established the foundation for much of America’s early Cold War foreign policy.

In February 1946, Kennan, then serving as the U.S. charge d’affaires in Moscow, wrote his famous “long telegram” to the Department of State. In the missive, he condemned the communist leadership of the Soviet Union and called on the United States to forcefully resist Russian expansion. Encouraged by friends and colleagues, Kennan refined the telegram into an article, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” and secured its publication in the July edition of Foreign Affairs. Kennan signed the article “Mr. X” to avoid any charge that he was presenting official U.S. government policy, but nearly everyone in the Department of State and White House recognized the piece as Kennan’s work. In the article, Kennan explained that the Soviet Union’s leaders were determined to spread the communist doctrine around the world, but were also extremely patient and pragmatic in pursuing such expansion.

In the “face of superior force,” Kennan said, the Russians would retreat and wait for a more propitious moment. The West, however, should not be lulled into complacency by temporary Soviet setbacks. Soviet foreign policy, Kennan claimed, “is a fluid stream which moves constantly, wherever it is permitted to move, toward a given goal.” In terms of U.S. foreign policy, Kennan’s advice was clear: “The main element of any United States policy toward the Soviet Union must be that of a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies.”

Kennan’s article created a sensation in the United States, and the term “containment” instantly entered the Cold War lexicon. The administration of President Harry S. Truman embraced Kennan’s philosophy, and in the next few years attempted to “contain” Soviet expansion through a variety of programs, including the establishment of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1949. Kennan’s star rose quickly in the Department of State and in 1952 he was named U.S. ambassador to Russia. By the 1960s, with the United States hopelessly mired in the Vietnam War, Kennan began to question some of his own basic assumptions in the “Mr. X” article and became a vocal critic of U.S. involvement in Vietnam. In particular, he criticized U.S. policymakers during the 1950s and 1960s for putting too much emphasis on the military containment of the Soviet Union, rather than on political and economic programs.

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16. Opinion | The American Empire in the Fog of Ukraine

Excerpts:

The Ukraine war has been shaped by, and interacted with, all these trends. Vladimir Putin’s revanchist rule in Russia is itself an example of the global retreat of liberalism. His decision to invade was probably encouraged by the failure of U.S. arms in Afghanistan. Russia’s relative resilience against the U.S.-led embargo depends on both China’s strength and the rest of the world’s unwillingness to join fully with an American and European design. Ukraine’s dependence on American aid, specifically, reflects the continuing weakness of our European partners relative to our own strength.

But that strength still casts its shadow as well: We’re fighting Russia via proxy, using a fraction of our strength, and it’s Russian troops that are stuck advancing by inches or facing counterattacks, the Russian regime that’s under massive strain.

So which is the larger story of the Russia-Ukraine war — our strength cracking, or our strength prevailing? We’ll know more when the fog lifts.

Opinion | The American Empire in the Fog of Ukraine

The New York Times · by Ross Douthat · June 30, 2023

Subscriber-only Newsletter

Ross Douthat

The American Empire in the Fog of Ukraine

June 30, 2023, 1:10 p.m. ET

Credit...Alain Pilon

By

Opinion Columnist and co-host of “Matter of Opinion”

In a critique of the political thinker James Burnham, penned in the wake of World War II, George Orwell wrote:

Power worship blurs political judgment because it leads, almost unavoidably, to the belief that present trends will continue. Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible. If the Japanese have conquered South Asia, then they will keep South Asia forever, if the Germans have captured Tobruk, they will infallibly capture Cairo; if the Russians are in Berlin, it will not be long before they are in London: and so on.

Orwell was characterizing the intellectual response to a conflict that had fairly clear directional trends — steady advances for the Axis powers until about 1942, followed by a grinding, brutal but consistent Allied counteroffensive. But a war that seems stalemated, that grinds without dramatic shifts, poses a somewhat different challenge to political judgment; the observer is always tempted to discern a certain trend, a sweeping historical judgment, amid a state of ebb and flow and wartime fog.

The war in Ukraine is a case study, yielding very different big-picture arguments based on developments from month to month and even week to week. Thus you see, one moment, the delays and the disappointingly slow progress of a Ukrainian counteroffensive securing realist skeptics in their certainty that the war will inevitably turn Russia’s way. The next moment, the bizarre Yevgeny Prigozhin mutiny secures hawkish certainties about the direction of the conflict — Putinism is faltering, the Russian regime is starting to crack, full Ukrainian victory is within reach.

The same pattern applies to analysis of how the war fits in the global power picture. I will use my own columns as examples: At various times in the past year and a half I have interpreted the war through the lens of revived great power conflict and the waning of the post-Cold War Pax Americana, but then also through the lens of the persistent weaknesses of America’s major adversaries, the deficits of legitimacy and competence in illiberal regimes. You could accuse my interpretations of being in tension with each other, or you could defend them by saying that each captures something about a shifting and unstable reality — a world where Samuel Huntington’s theory of civilizational conflict and Francis Fukuyama’s end of history both have claims to relevance.

But it isn’t just the fog of Ukrainian war that makes it difficult to capture this particular moment. The exact American relationship to the rest of the world would be a bit hazy even without battlefield confusions. Clearly our position has weakened relative to the heady 1990s or even the Obama years. But the language of a “multipolar” world, a clash of rival great powers, implies to the casual reader a kind of parity between the various poles, the United States as just one power center among many — with the secondary implication that maybe we’ve entered the kind of superpower decline that unmade British power in the 20th century, or Spanish power in the 17th, or Soviet power much more rapidly than that.

And that’s pretty clearly not true. America is emerging from the Covid era with stronger G.D.P. growth than the rest of the Group of 7. It’s China, not America, that faces the more acute birthrate crisis. It’s the United Kingdom and Italy and Japan, not America, that seem in danger of becoming “undeveloping” countries, with stagnation shading into decline. Pick your example — the clear military weakness of Russia relative to NATO, the G.D.P. of even our poorest state relative to that of other developed countries — and American advantages seem resilient.

This resilience allows for arguments, as in an April Foreign Affairs essay by Stephen Brooks and William Wohlforth, that the unipolar moment hasn’t actually passed, that American power still bestrides the globe whatever challenges it faces. These arguments can be met with counters on behalf of China’s position as a peer competitor, often involving differing interpretations of what counts for national might; arguments that would be tested, obviously, in a war over Taiwan. But nobody can seriously argue that any non-Chinese power center — the European Union, India, Brazil, Russia — is a peer to the United States.

At the same time, you also can’t seriously argue that the American imperium has anything like the freedom of action it enjoyed two decades ago. Instead, you have to analyze the world in terms of both the resilience of core American power and the developments that have cut against U.S. influence outside its circle of close allies. A short list might include:

• A failure of American-style liberal norms to take root outside what I’ve termed our “outer empire” in Western Europe and the Pacific Rim, and the emergence instead of hybrid regimes, neither fully liberal nor fully post-liberal, in rising powers like Turkey and India and to some arguable extent in Eastern Europe, too.
• A failure of armed Fukuyamaism, meaning the inability of American military power to function as a tool to spread democracy and expand our outer empire by turning Iraq and Afghanistan into the equivalent of Germany or South Korea.
• A shift in economic and military power from countries that share our values and/or regard themselves as part of a common Western civilization to countries that do not — meaning, mostly, the decline of European power relative to the rest of the world. And relatedly, a simmering resentment of both America and the West as arbiters of global priorities and international norms.
• A widening ideological gap between the specific version of liberalism ascendant in the American elite and the core values of non-American populations around the world, and a related internal division within the United States over what, in a clash of civilizations, our own civilization represents.
• The emergence of China as a real military rival, in the Pacific if not worldwide, and an economic and diplomatic alternative to American influence across the Global South.

The Ukraine war has been shaped by, and interacted with, all these trends. Vladimir Putin’s revanchist rule in Russia is itself an example of the global retreat of liberalism. His decision to invade was probably encouraged by the failure of U.S. arms in Afghanistan. Russia’s relative resilience against the U.S.-led embargo depends on both China’s strength and the rest of the world’s unwillingness to join fully with an American and European design. Ukraine’s dependence on American aid, specifically, reflects the continuing weakness of our European partners relative to our own strength.

But that strength still casts its shadow as well: We’re fighting Russia via proxy, using a fraction of our strength, and it’s Russian troops that are stuck advancing by inches or facing counterattacks, the Russian regime that’s under massive strain.

So which is the larger story of the Russia-Ukraine war — our strength cracking, or our strength prevailing? We’ll know more when the fog lifts.

Breviary

Sohrab Ahmari against both diversocracy and meritocracy.

Noah Smith believes in “maximum Canada”; Lyman Stone, not so much.

What happens when your dad claims to be an alien abductee.

How the Southeast prospered in the Covid era.

Michael Brendan Dougherty on paleoconservatism.

Dan Kois on Pixar’s crisis; Freddie deBoer on Pixar’s myth.

This Week in Decadence

We study whether anger fuels the rise of populism. Anger as an emotion tends to act as a call to action against individuals or groups that are blamed for negative situations, making it conducive to voting for populist politicians. Using a unique data set tracking emotions for a large sample of respondents from 2008 to 2017, we explore the relationship between anger and the populist vote share across U.S. counties. More angry counties displayed stronger preferences for populist candidates during the 2016 presidential primaries and elections. However, once we control for other negative emotions and life satisfaction, anger no longer operates as a separate channel in driving the populist vote share. Instead, our results indicate that a more complex sense of malaise and gloom, rather than anger per se, drives the rise in populism.

— Omer Ali, Klaus Desmet and Romain Wacziarg, “Does Anger Drive Populism?” National Bureau of Economic Research working paper (June 2023)

Ross Douthat has been an Opinion columnist for The Times since 2009. He is the author, most recently, of “The Deep Places: A Memoir of Illness and Discovery.”

The New York Times · by Ross Douthat · June 30, 2023

17. Biden Abroad: The Moral and Material Collapse of U.S. Foreign Policy

A brutal critique. But just to confirm my bias, like the great majority of pundits, Professor Hanson omits north Korea.

Biden Abroad: The Moral and Material Collapse of U.S. Foreign Policy › American Greatness

amgreatness.com · by Victor Davis Hanson · June 28, 2023

The American post-Cold War order from the Ronald Reagan through George W. Bush administration is over.

Barack Obama began its erosion with his tired lectures about the past sins of the United States.

Obama empowered radical Islamists. He invited Russia back into the Middle East after a forty-year hiatus. He snored while Vladimir Putin swallowed large areas of Ukraine. He nonchalantly allowed ISIS almost to take over Iraq. And he authored the Libyan misadventure.

Joe Biden has greatly amplified what Obama inaugurated. He accentuates the Obama-authored foreign policy disasters by his own family corruption.

If the U.S. had an honest media, a disinterested Department of Justice, and a professional FBI, the Biden family would likely be facing felony bribery charges and an impeachment vote for leveraging the interests of the U.S. for a few millions of Ukrainian and Chinese cash.

Biden has forfeited any moral credibility America once had in sermonizing to the world about the advantages of transparent democracy.

Instead, Washington under Biden went full Third-world. His family got rich from his offices, and Joe Biden warped government agencies in efforts to take out his next possible presidential rival.

Antony Blinken, Biden’s current Secretary of State, is known mostly for meekly accepting a dressing down from Chinese diplomats in 2021 and subsequent ritual humiliations.

Blinken was also the author of the 2020 election shenanigan of soliciting former intelligence authorities to publish a preposterous lie that Hunter Biden’s laptop had all the “hallmarks” of “Russian disinformation.” Blinken’s inspired farce was dreamed up to aid a then struggling candidate Biden in his last presidential debate.

The net result of the Obama-Biden continuum has been the moral and material collapse of U.S. foreign policy.

Americans are bewildered that China is now buzzing our jets. It plays chicken with American warships.

It mocks our homeland defenses by sending a spy balloon with impunity across the continental United States.

It is defiantly mum about its creation of a gain-of-function virus under the auspices of the People’s Liberation Army, despite the ensuing Covid epidemic that killed over 1 million Americans.

The weird reaction of the Biden administration to these affronts is either to contextualize Beijing’s aggression or to ignore them entirely.

Under the earlier Obama-Biden “reset” of Russia, we also paid little attention to the past aggressions of Vladimir Putin, appeased his provocations, and earned the 2014 Russian take-over of the Ukrainian border and Crimea.

Then the resetters flipped during the Trump administration.

They now preposterously claimed that Donald Trump—who had neutered Putin by flooding the world with cheap oil, pulled out of an asymmetrical missile deal with Moscow, killed attacking Russian mercenaries in Syria, and greenlighted offensive weapons to Ukraine—was a Putin “puppet.”

After sleeping when Putin invaded Ukraine twice under Obama, and once under Biden (but not at all under Trump), the Left abruptly adopted Ukrainian resistance as their last chance to prove that Russians should have been guilty of “Russian collusion” and “disinformation.”

Their new legacy is a Chinese-Russian-Iranian anti-American axis.

U.S. arms stockpiles are drained so that a beleaguered Ukraine might have the third largest military budget in the world—and a Verdun-like deathscape of static warfare on the borders of Europe.

Biden desperately sought to revive the failed Obama Iran deal. His subtext was to return to the bankrupt notion that by empowering Iran and its henchmen in Lebanon and Syria, and Hezbollah and Hamas, America could leverage allies like Israel and distance itself from friends such as the oil-exporting Gulf monarchies.

China and Russia loved the Obama-Biden resets. Now both are the guardians of Middle East oil and money, while the U.S. alienated our friends and drove allies away.

The Biden administration abandoned billions of dollars in military hardware as it fled in ignominy from Afghanistan.

It sent billions more in arms to Ukraine, while ending U.S. self-sufficiency in oil and gas, inflating the currency, exploding the debt, and ignoring replacing the arms we have sent abroad or abandoned.

Instead of restocking our depleted arms arsenals, Biden started tapping the Strategic Petroleum Reserve for cheap political advantage on the eve of the midterm elections.

A frail and disorientated Biden may be considered useful by his controllers to implement a hard-left agenda. But otherwise, an enfeebled Biden personified the decline in American stature that he had wrought.

He was recently helped to steady himself by a Mexican President.

He was shuffled into place for a photo-op by a Japanese Prime Minister.

In a conversation with the British Prime Minister, he forgot the name of Winston Churchill, a British icon.

And he entered the G-7 summit by falling down the steps of Air Force One.

It would be hard for a Chinese or Russian strategist to come up with a record better than Biden’s to emasculate America’s military and radically reduce its global stature.

amgreatness.com · by Victor Davis Hanson · June 28, 2023

18. Milley: Measured pace of Ukraine’s counteroffensive not a surprise

Excerpts:

“I said this [counteroffensive] is going to take six, eight or ten weeks. It’s going to be very difficult, it’s going to be very long, and it’s going to be very, very bloody,” he said. “No one should have any illusions about any of that. Ukraine is fighting for its life.”

He said the U.S. and its NATO allies are providing Ukraine with as much firepower “as is humanly possible.”

On Wednesday, the Pentagon announced a $500 million security assistance package for Ukraine, which includes more armored vehicles and more munitions for U.S.-provided Patriot air defense systems and mobile artillery rocket systems.

Milley: Measured pace of Ukraine’s counteroffensive not a surprise

washingtontimes.com · by Mike Glenn

By - The Washington Times - Friday, June 30, 2023

America’s top general said he’s not surprised that Ukraine’s much-anticipated spring counteroffensive against Russia hasn’t progressed as rapidly as some analysts and commentators might have predicted.

In a speech on Friday to the National Press Club, Army Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said war on paper and the “real” war experienced by soldiers on the ground are entirely different.

“In ‘real’ war, ‘real’ people die. Real people are on the front lines [and] real people are in those vehicles,” Gen. Milley said. “Real bodies are being shredded by high explosives.”

Gen. Milley, who is stepping down soon, said he is receiving regular updates on the campaign through a variety of sources, including intelligence reports and frequent discussions with his Ukrainian counterpart, Gen. Valery Zaluzhny.

The Ukrainian commander has publicly expressed his frustration over public criticism that his troops are moving slower than anticipated against dug-in Russian fortifications in occupied eastern and southern Ukraine.

Gen. Milley, who is fond of historical analogies, noted that Allied progress after the Normandy invasion of World War II went much slower than anticipated at the time. Commanders back in London predicted that their soldiers would reach their assault objectives by the end of D-Day and would liberate Paris within 45 days.

“It took us 90 days to get to Paris. It was bloody, hard fighting,” he said. “People were dying. War is an extraordinarily violent human exercise.”

Ukrainian troops are advancing steadily and deliberately — 500 to 1000 yards per day — as they make their way through a heavy tangle of barbed wire and minefields that Russian troops placed in their path, Gen. Milley said. Expectations had been high because a Ukrainian offensive last fall had proved a major success, reclaiming several major cities that had been in Russian hands since the February 2022 invasion.

“I said this [counteroffensive] is going to take six, eight or ten weeks. It’s going to be very difficult, it’s going to be very long, and it’s going to be very, very bloody,” he said. “No one should have any illusions about any of that. Ukraine is fighting for its life.”

He said the U.S. and its NATO allies are providing Ukraine with as much firepower “as is humanly possible.”

On Wednesday, the Pentagon announced a $500 million security assistance package for Ukraine, which includes more armored vehicles and more munitions for U.S.-provided Patriot air defense systems and mobile artillery rocket systems.

The latest round of assistance marked the 41st drawdown of equipment from Defense Department inventories since August 2021.

Gen. Milley is set to retire from the Army at the end of September, after an unusually contentious tenure that included public clashes with former President Trump. He told the National Press Club that his post-military plans are still up in the air but quickly knocked down any notions that he might get into politics.

“In all honesty, absolutely not,” he said. “I can make contributions to my country after I retire in many, many different ways. But public office is not one of them.”

• Mike Glenn can be reached at mglenn@washingtontimes.com.

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19. China TikTok figure fingered in ‘deepfake’ anti-U.S. Russian soldier videos

China TikTok figure fingered in ‘deepfake’ anti-U.S. Russian soldier videos

washingtontimes.com · by Guy Taylor

Subscriber-only

By - The Washington Times - Wednesday, June 21, 2023

A “deepfake” video series purporting to track a Russian special operations soldier’s adventures in Ukraine was actually created by a TikTok figure in China. The series was used to promote narratives of Russia-China friendship to hundreds of thousands of followers on the Chinese version of the social media site.

Officials overseeing the Douyin app — the only version of the social media platform permitted in China — have recently cracked down by suspending the account on grounds the AI-created videos were being used to spread misinformation, according to a report by Britain’s The Sunday Times.

Authorities say an unidentified suspect, who calls himself Baoer Kechatie on his Chinese TikTok site, used deepfake technology to dupe his 400,000 followers of the Douyin app inside China. The account was first reported this week by Sixth Tone, a Chinese state-owned online magazine, which said a “content creator” used the increasingly sophisticated video technology and AI tools to manipulate his appearance and claim he was a Russian special ops fighter reporting from Ukraine.

“Some accounts have been posting videos, claiming to be from Russia and soldiers at war. In that time, they spread false information such as ‘battlefield videos’ and ‘battlefield movements’ to attract attention and gain traffic,” Douyin wrote in a statement on Saturday.

The development has triggered fresh unease over the proliferation of deepfake proliferation on social media.

It also comes amid growing concern in Washington over TikTok, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Chinese technology firm ByteDance, which also owns the Douyin app. Both the Trump and Biden administrations have expressed concern that Chinese intelligence agencies could exploit TikTok to gather intelligence on Americans by forcing the parent company to hand over data on some 150 million U.S. users of the social media platform.

Chinese officials say such fears are unfounded. However, a bipartisan group of U.S. lawmakers have been pushing legislation to try and thwart data theft by foreign adversaries via social media. Montana in May became the first state to ban the use of TikTok within its borders. Experts say the ban may be hard to enforce or defend in court.

News of the deepfake operation on the Chinese version of TikTok also coincides with the circulation of a recent Pentagon Defense Science Board report warning that China and Russia are engaged in new kinds of “gray zone” warfare against the United States.

Gray zone operations are defined as the use of military methods short of open combat and employing an array of tactics, including economic coercion, cyber espionage, disinformation and “unattributed” military forces.

The Sunday Times report said the deepfake videos of a Russian soldier featured a bearded man in military fatigues, who just happened to speak Mandarin, but appeared in videos from locations across Ukraine to issue regular updates from the battlefield.

“Hello, Chinese friends,” the “soldier” tells his Chinese admirers in one video. “I’m from Chechnya, Russia. Behind me is a nuclear power plant in Ukraine. We just conquered this place and caught some big fish. One of them was a U.S. consultant.”

In other videos, the purported Russian soldier claimed to have clashed with U.S. Marines fighting Ukraine — no American Marines have been deployed — and to have captured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s car.

The paper reported that the deception was exposed following the growing popularity online for his reports. His internet address turned out to be located in China‘s Henan Province. The deepfake videos have since been removed from Douyin and the account where they had appeared on the social media app has changed its name to Wang Kangmei, meaning “Resisting the U.S.”

Chinese investigators say Baoer Kechatie, the website operator, was using the bogus Ukrainian reports to increase web traffic in part as a way to sell merchandise through his site, including imported Russian honey, vodka and powdered milk.

• Guy Taylor can be reached at gtaylor@washingtontimes.com.

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20. Treasury Sanctions Russian Intelligence Officers Supervising Election Influence Operations in the United States and Around the World

Treasury Sanctions Russian Intelligence Officers Supervising Election Influence Operations in the United States and Around the World

home.treasury.gov

WASHINGTON — Today, the Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctioned two Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) officers recently indicted by the Department of Justice who played a significant role in the Kremlin’s attempts to conduct global malign influence operations, including efforts to influence a local election in the United States.

“The Kremlin continues to target a key pillar of democracy around the world — free and fair elections,” said Under Secretary of the Treasury for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence Brian E. Nelson. “The United States will not tolerate threats to our democracy, and today’s action builds on the whole of government approach to protect our system of representative government, including our democratic institutions and elections processes.”

The Kremlin seeks to expand Russia’s influence by creating and exploiting societal divisions in the United States and among allies and partners; reducing confidence in democratic processes; weakening U.S. diplomatic ties; and encouraging anti-U.S. and anti-democratic political views. As part of its efforts, the Kremlin often uses social media as a tool for disseminating disinformation to confuse and mislead citizens globally and to co-opt witting U.S. persons to advance Russia’s operational and geopolitical goals.

In support of its influence operations, Russia has recruited and forged ties with people and groups around the world who are positioned to amplify and reinforce Russia’s disinformation efforts to further its goals of destabilizing democratic societies. These efforts have included using front organizations to promote connections between the Kremlin and its compatriots living abroad, to propagate disinformation, and to surreptitiously seek access to foreign officials, businesspeople, and other figures, in the United States and elsewhere, to advance Putin’s interests.

Russia’s intelligence services, including the FSB, support Kremlin-directed influence operations against the United States and its allies and partners, and often recruit individuals — known as “co-optees” — leveraging these individuals to sow discord within their own and other countries.

Today’s action follows a series of OFAC designations that expose Russia’s attempted election interference efforts and destabilizing efforts in Ukraine. Specifically, today’s action follows DOJ’s April 18, 2023 indictments of the same individuals, and is directly related to the July 29, 2022 designation of FSB co-optees Aleksandr Viktorovich Ionov (Ionov) and Natalya Valeryevna Burlinova (Burlinova) and their organizations. OFAC designated Ionov and Burlinova pursuant to Executive Order (E.O.) 14024 for having acted or purported to act for or on behalf of, directly or indirectly, the Government of the Russian Federation. On July 29, 2022, DOJ concurrently indicted Ionov for working on behalf of the Russian government in conjunction with the FSB.

FSB Officers Oversee Co-Optee Influence Operations

The individuals designated today are FSB officers assigned to the FSB’s Service for the Protection of the Constitutional System and the Fight Against Terrorism (the “FSB 2nd Service”), which has worked to undermine democratic processes in the United States and other countries through a network of co-optees. These FSB officers include Ionov’s and Burlinova’s main handler and his unit chief.

Yegor Sergeyevich Popov (Popov) is an FSB 2nd Service officer who served as Ionov’s primary handler. Popov frequently communicated with Ionov to gather information related to Ionov’s foreign malign influence activities in the United States and elsewhere. Popov also often communicated with Burlinova to relay information in intelligence reports regarding her activities.

Ionov directed more than six U.S. co-conspirators, including two individuals who ran as candidates in local U.S. elections, to provide detailed information regarding the activities of several political groups, which Ionov subsequently compiled into reports for Popov and other FSB 2nd Service officers. In the Summer and Fall of 2019, Ionov and Popov communicated about a local U.S. election and Ionov’s support of a candidate, who won in the primary contest.

From as early as 2015 through at least 2022, Popov worked with Burlinova and oversaw her activities on behalf of the FSB. In 2015, Popov assisted and provided guidance to Burlinova in her travels to the United States. Popov provided Burlinova a list of U.S. citizens and proposed possible approaches to interact with them. Burlinova provided Popov evaluations of how U.S. citizens responded to presentations, and who had had positive attitudes towards Russia and were prepared to continue to collaborate with her. In 2018, Burlinova informed Popov that two individuals she identified, who resided in Europe, were running for public office, and Burlinova boasted that these were the fruits of her labor and described the developments as soft power.

Popov reported to his FSB 2nd Service unit chief Aleksei Borisovich Sukhodolov (Sukhodolov). Sukhodolov also worked with Ionov to conduct foreign malign influence operations around the world, including in the United States, Ukraine, Spain, the United Kingdom, and Ireland. Ionov directed reporting to Sukhodolov and other FSB officials of detailed information regarding the activities of several U.S. political groups. Ionov also reported on his malign influence activities to Sukhodolov, including his consulting role in a U.S. local election.

In late 2021, Sukhodolov worked with other FSB officers and a Russia-based institution to draft and submit grant applications on behalf of several FSB co-optees and their organizations and enterprises, which included Ionov and Burlinova.

OFAC designated Popov and Sukhodolov pursuant to E.O. 14024 for having acted or purported to act for or on behalf of, directly or indirectly, the Government of the Russian Federation.

On April 18, 2023, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Florida indicted Popov and Sukhodolov for working on behalf of the Government of the Russian Federation. Also on April 18, DOJ filed a criminal complaint in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, charging Burlinova with conspiring to violate 18 U.S.C. § 951 (acting as an agent of a foreign government) in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 371 (conspiracy to commit offense or to defraud the United States).

SANCTIONS IMPLICATIONS

As a result of today’s action, all property and interests in property of the designated persons described above that are in the United States or in the possession or control of U.S. persons are blocked and must be reported to OFAC. In addition, any entities that are owned, directly or indirectly, individually or in the aggregate, 50 percent or more by one or more blocked persons are also blocked. Unless authorized by a general or specific license issued by OFAC, or exempt, OFAC’s regulations generally prohibit all transactions by U.S. persons or within (or transiting) the United States that involve any property or interests in property of designated or otherwise blocked persons.

In addition, financial institutions and other persons that engage in certain transactions or activities with the sanctioned entities and individuals may expose themselves to sanctions or be subject to an enforcement action. The prohibitions include the making of any contribution or provision of funds, goods, or services by, to, or for the benefit of any designated person, or the receipt of any contribution or provision of funds, goods, or services from any such person.

The power and integrity of OFAC sanctions derive not only from OFAC’s ability to designate and add persons to the Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons (SDN) List but also from its willingness to remove persons from the SDN List consistent with the law. The ultimate goal of sanctions is not to punish but to bring about a positive change in behavior. For information concerning the process for seeking removal from an OFAC list, including the SDN List, please refer to OFAC’s Frequently Asked Question 897. For detailed information on the process to submit a request for removal from an OFAC sanctions list, please refer to OFAC’s website.

Click here for more information on the individuals designated today.

###

home.treasury.gov

21. Biden Administration Foreign Policy Tracker: July

Access the FDD foreign policy tracker here: https://www.fdd.org/policy-tracker/2023/06/30/biden-administration-foreign-policy-tracker-july/

June 30, 2023 | FDD Tracker: June 2-June 30, 2023

Biden Administration Foreign Policy Tracker: July

John Hardie

Russia Program Deputy Director

Trend Overview

By John Hardie

Welcome back to the Biden Administration Foreign Policy Tracker. Once a month, we ask FDD’s experts and scholars to assess the administration’s foreign policy. They provide trendlines of very positive, positive, neutral, negative, or very negative for the areas they watch.

Russian businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin grabbed headlines as his Wagner paramilitary group launched a short-lived mutiny against Russia’s military leadership. Prigozhin ultimately backed down but not before dealing a serious blow to President Vladimir Putin’s image. Meanwhile, Ukraine launched its much-anticipated counteroffensive. Kyiv’s forces have made only minor territorial gains so far, but it is still early. The Biden administration unveiled several impressive military aid packages for Ukraine and is reportedly warming to Kyiv’s requests for ATACMS missiles and DPICM cluster munitions.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken made a high-profile visit to China, his first in his current position. The administration hoped the trip would reopen communication channels between the two superpowers, but it seems unlikely to lead to a significant improvement in U.S.-China relations. Later in June, President Joe Biden hosted his Indian counterpart for a state visit. The two sides announced several important agreements, yielding progress in Washington’s efforts to bolster ties with New Delhi to counter Beijing.

Meanwhile, media reports indicate the Biden administration is negotiating an ill-advised nuclear accord with Iran. The Biden team is reportedly offering economic inducements in exchange for a deal that would leave Tehran dangerously close to nuclear weapons.

Check back next month to see how the administration deals with these and other challenges.

Trending Positive

Trending Neutral

Trending Negative

Trending Very Negative

Defense

Europe

Gulf

Indo-Pacific

Russia

Cyber

Korea

Latin America

Syria

Turkey

China

International Organizations

Israel

Iran

Lebanon

Nonproliferation and Biodefense

Sunni Jihadism

22. Humans Aren’t Mentally Ready for an AI-Saturated ‘Post-Truth World’

Get ready.

Excerpts:

AI is going to have an impact on almost every aspect of human life, and Graziano says much more research is needed into how this will affect people’s minds. If social media can have such a major impact on society, there’s no telling what consequences a rapidly advancing technology like AI could precipitate.

“I would like to see people collect actual data on people’s psychological state, personalities, their mental health as a function of their engagement with AI,” Graziano says. “What does that do? Does it actually improve things in some ways and harm things in other ways? Is it dependent on the particular personality or particular socio-economic status of a person? There’s this giant area that isn’t studied.”

Kosinki says people are just starting to see how quickly these AI systems are advancing, and they’re just going to keep becoming more complex and capable of more things. The world might look a lot different in just a year, and there’s no saying what it will look like further down the road.

“We are sliding, very quickly, towards an AI-controlled and AI-dominated world,” Kosinki says.

Humans Aren’t Mentally Ready for an AI-Saturated ‘Post-Truth World’

The AI era promises a flood of disinformation, deepfakes, and hallucinated “facts.” Psychologists are only beginning to grapple with the implications.

Wired · by Condé Nast · June 18, 2023

Artificial intelligence is arguably the most rapidly advancing technology humans have ever developed. A year ago you wouldn’t often hear AI come up in a regular conversation, but today it seems there’s constant talk about how generative AI tools like ChatGPT and DALL-E will affect the future of work, the spread of information, and more. A major question that has thus far been almost entirely unexamined is how this AI-dominated future will affect people’s minds.

There’s been some research into how using AI in their jobs will affect people mentally, but there isn’t yet an understanding of how simply living amongst so much AI-generated content and systems will affect people’s sense of the world. How is AI going to change individuals and society in the not-too-distant future?

AI will obviously make it easier to produce disinformation—from fake images to deepfakes to fake news. That will affect people’s sense of trust as they’re scrolling on social media. AI can also allow someone to imitate your loved ones, which further erodes people’s general ability to trust what was once unquestionable. That may also affect how they think about identity.

Your own identity can be threatened by deepfakes, too, if people are creating images or videos of you doing things you never actually did. In the US, people often identify with their jobs, and those could soon be threatened. Will AI make people more reliant on and distracted by technology at a time when that’s already a major issue? There are countless ways AI could reshape how people operate in the world. But researchers are only just beginning to grapple with the implications of an AI-saturated existence.

Larry Rosen, a professor emeritus of psychology at California State University, Dominguez Hills, says he worries that AI will make people more reliant on technology. Humans like things to be as simple and easy as possible, to avoid stress, he says, so people might start automating every aspect of their life that they can.

In the same way you might use Google Maps to get everywhere and not know how to get there otherwise, AI might cause people to stop learning things they would have otherwise had to learn. Ironically, though, Rosen thinks this could cause more stress as people are inundated with AI and constantly shifting gears and not seeing anything quite clearly.

“I get concerned about the fact that we just blindly believe the GPS. We don’t question it. Are we just going to blindly believe the AI?” Rosen says. “As it is, we’re overwhelmed. We’re so overwhelmed that we can’t make ourselves do a simple task and see it to completion. Anxiety is just going to ratchet up as we’re faced with this unknown thing in our world.”

Michael Graziano, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Princeton University, says he thinks AI could create a “post-truth world.” He says it will likely make it significantly easier to convince people of false narratives, which will be disruptive in many ways.

“Reality has become pixels, and pixels are now infinitely inventable,” Graziano says. “We can create them any way we want to.”

That being said, Graziano also wonders if AI could help us with the loneliness epidemic, which is a big strain on mental health. Perhaps people will think of AI as a friend? But what happens then? We don’t yet know, Graziano says.

“We don’t actually know what kind of impact this technology will have,” Graziano says.

Michal Kosinski, a computational psychologist and associate professor of organizational behavior at Stanford University, says AI could have an interesting impact on how people think about their work. He says AI will be better at doing many tasks that humans do today, so people will rely on it, and they could essentially become the human face of the work the AI is doing.

“Increasingly, not only medical doctors but politicians and judges and teachers will become interfaces for algorithms,” Kosinki says. “When you go to a doctor, a doctor will still give you a diagnosis, but this diagnosis will just be printed out of a computer that analyzed your vital signs and symptoms and told the doctor to give you this medicine.”

AI is going to have an impact on almost every aspect of human life, and Graziano says much more research is needed into how this will affect people’s minds. If social media can have such a major impact on society, there’s no telling what consequences a rapidly advancing technology like AI could precipitate.

“I would like to see people collect actual data on people’s psychological state, personalities, their mental health as a function of their engagement with AI,” Graziano says. “What does that do? Does it actually improve things in some ways and harm things in other ways? Is it dependent on the particular personality or particular socio-economic status of a person? There’s this giant area that isn’t studied.”

Kosinki says people are just starting to see how quickly these AI systems are advancing, and they’re just going to keep becoming more complex and capable of more things. The world might look a lot different in just a year, and there’s no saying what it will look like further down the road.

“We are sliding, very quickly, towards an AI-controlled and AI-dominated world,” Kosinki says.

Wired · by Condé Nast · June 18, 2023

23. Gen. Milley warns US military must modernize now

Excerpts:

"I think the United States military needs to accelerate our modernization," he said. "And it's not so much just the actual modernization, but it's the acceptance of the idea that future war, the fundamental character of war, is actually changing in really significant radical ways. If we, the military, don't adapt ourselves, our doctrine or tactics or techniques, our leader development, our training and talent management, but also the weapon systems. If we don't do that, then we won't have a military that's capable of operating in that future operating environment."

"They want to exceed global U.S. military power by mid-century," he noted of China's military goals.

Milley has made the modernization of the military a primary effort of the Army, going back to his days as the branch's chief of staff.

Gen. Milley warns US military must modernize now

Miley made his remarks about China and Russia at the National Press Club luncheon in Washington D.C.

Published June 30, 2023 4:39pm EDT

foxnews.com · by Louis Casiano | Fox News

Video

Gen. Mark Milley talks about China, Russia at National Press Club luncheon

U.S. Joint Chiefs chairman Gen. Mark Milley on Friday said the United States military should further is ambitions to compete with China as Beijing continues to strengthen its forces.

U.S. Joint Chiefs chairman Gen. Mark Milley on Friday said the United States military "needs to accelerate our modernization" in an effort to compete with China as warfare technology continues to evolve and criticized Russia over its conflict with neighboring Ukraine.

During his remarks at the National Press Club luncheon in Washington D.C., Milley accused Moscow of committing a "direct frontal assault" on the rules-based international order with its "illegal invasion" of Ukraine.

"Our political leaders have said multiple times that our task is to ensure that Ukraine has the support it needs to remain free and independent and we're doing that in order to make sure that rules-based international order holds," he said.

HOUSE GOP MOVES TO SLASH PENTAGON DEI BUREAUCRATS: 'MASSIVE VICTORY FOR THE ANTI-WOKE CAUCUS'

Mark Milley, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, on Friday said the United States military should "accelerate our modernization" to compete with China ambitious goals. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

He also said that China was looking to "rewrite" those rules as it leverages its financial power to build up its military. The U.S. should counter Beijing's military ambitions by focusing on what type of conflicts it will face in the future.

"I think the United States military needs to accelerate our modernization," he said. "And it's not so much just the actual modernization, but it's the acceptance of the idea that future war, the fundamental character of war, is actually changing in really significant radical ways. If we, the military, don't adapt ourselves, our doctrine or tactics or techniques, our leader development, our training and talent management, but also the weapon systems. If we don't do that, then we won't have a military that's capable of operating in that future operating environment."

"They want to exceed global U.S. military power by mid-century," he noted of China's military goals.

Milley has made the modernization of the military a primary effort of the Army, going back to his days as the branch's chief of staff.

Video

While discussing Ukraine, he noted that an offensive against Russian forces has made slow but significant advances. The Biden administration has provided billions of dollars in military aid to Ukraine, which has surprisingly taken the fight to Moscow, frustrating Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin.

When asked about the potential supply of cluster munitions to Ukraine, Milley noted that the U.S. considers "all kinds of options."

"So that it's going slower than people had predicted doesn't surprise me at all," he said of Ukraine's ongoing military offensive. "I had said that this offensive, which is going, by the way, it is advancing steadily, deliberately working its way through very difficult minefields, etc., you know, 500 meters a day, 1,000 meters a day, 2000 each day, that kind of thing. What I had said was this is going to take six, eight, 10 weeks. It's going to be very difficult. It's going to be very long and it's going to be very, very bloody. And no one should have any illusions about any of that."

"Ukraine is fighting for its life," he added. "It's an existential fight for Ukraine."

Video

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When asked about the short-lived rebellion by Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhinn against Russian President Vladimir Putin earlier this month. Milley said the move is part of internal politics and said ti was too early to tell if Putin was weakened.

Louis Casiano is a reporter for Fox News Digital. Story tips can be sent to louis.casiano@fox.com.

foxnews.com · by Louis Casiano | Fox News

24. Navy SEALs Seek New Tech for Covert Missions

Navy SEALs Seek New Tech for Covert Missions

nationaldefensemagazine.org · by Stew Magnuson

6/30/2023

By

A Navy SEAL participates in Exercise Trident 18-4 near Hurlburt Field, Florida.

Air Force photo

TAMPA, Florida — Whether it is in super-fast and stealthy boats, mini-submarines or combat diving suits, Special Operations Command’s elite maritime forces — better known as SEALs — are on the lookout for technologies that make their jobs easier.

“We’re predominantly focused on access for maritime mobility, getting into denied areas other people can’t go — other countries can’t go. We provide the means and the methods for insertion,” Navy Capt. Randy Slaff, program executive officer for maritime systems at Special Operations Command, said at the May SOF Week conference.

The good news to come out of the conference was that SEALs would soon receive the long-awaited Dry Combat Submersible, a mini-sub built by Lockheed Martin that can remain underwater for 24 hours, has a range of 60 miles and can travel at depths of 330 feet.

Naval special operators needing to travel undersea must currently don wet suits and use the SEAL Delivery Vehicle MK 11. The dry submersible — which can transport eight SEALs, plus two crew members — is expected to give them more time underwater because they are not exposed to the cold.

The concept for a dry submersible dates back to the early 1980s with a contract awarded to Northrop Grumman to build six of the Advanced SEAL Delivery Systems in 1994. After years of delays due to technical issues, the Navy canceled the program in 2009 after spending some $883 million. The current iteration was the Navy’s third attempt at developing a dry submersible for SOCOM.

Also helping keep SEALs dry — at least until they arrive at their destination — is the Dry Deck Shelter, which attaches to Virginia-class attack submarines. SEALs use the shelter to don their wetsuits and leave and return via a lockout system.

“We’re starting to look at what the next one looks like and how are we going to get after replacing them, because they can’t last forever,” Slaff said.

The command is currently studying the requirements for the Dry Deck Shelter Next, which will be affixed to the top of the new models of the Virginia-class submarines.

The program is seeking a new shelter capable of dispersing up to 18 swimmers and their equipment, as well as unmanned underwater or surface vehicles, according to slides.

It should also support “dry” missions, suggesting that it connect to the new dry submersible.

Like the Dry Combat Submersible, the Navy will develop the new shelter on behalf of SOCOM, which is currently working through the requirements.

Once SEALs are in the water, they rely on combat diving equipment to do their jobs. Most of that comes from the commercial or recreational diving world, said Jim Knutson, combat diving program manager. It takes off-the-shelf equipment and modifies it for special ops use, he said.

One area where divers need industry help is underwater communication when SEALs use mixed gases to extend their time underwater. They need to speak “clearly with each other so they’re not talking like Mickey Mouse,” Knutson said.

As for the small, speedy surface boats that deliver SEALs to their missions such as the Combatant Craft Assault and the medium and heavy models, the fleet is mostly built out with boats now entering the sustainment part of their lifecycle, Slaff said.

However, the command is starting to look at “what comes next and how do we want to keep going on the craft and have some evolutionary upgrades.”

Conrad Lovell, next-generation mobility team lead under the command’s Science and Technology Office, said his program is interested in new ways to make the watercraft stealthier. That includes reducing their acoustic, visual and thermal signatures as well as high-tech coatings, composites and metamaterials that can help them evade radar.

Slaff said his office is always on the lookout for new technology that can assist naval special warfare. “When you have … some new whiz bang technology that we could use downrange, we definitely want to hear about that. If it’s something about reliability, maintainability, sustainability, we want to hear about that, too. The whole spectrum is ours.”

nationaldefensemagazine.org · by Stew Magnuson

25. In Japan's Backyard, Russian Navy Warship 'Knocks Out' Anti-Ship Cruise Missile With Air Defense Missile

In Japan's Backyard, Russian Navy Warship 'Knocks Out' Anti-Ship Cruise Missile With Air Defense Missile

eurasiantimes.com · by Parth Satam · June 30, 2023

The Russian Navy tested one of its new corvettes by intercepting an anti-ship missile fired towards it by a friendly warship with its onboard surface-to-air missile (SAM). The drill took place in the Sea of Japan on Wednesday.

Rezky, the Project 20380-class corvette designed by Russia’s Almaz Central Marine Design Bureau, is optimized for antisubmarine and surface warfare in addition to supporting land operations.

East Asian waters have been witnessing increasing hostility between Russia, China, North Korea, and US, Japan, and South Korea camps, which makes the test firing significant. The Rezkiy is Russia’s Pacific Fleet’s newest corvette.

The Russian Ministry of Defense (RuMoD) released a video of the test between an R-20 missile boat and the Rezkiy, where the former fired a Moskit anti-ship cruise missile (ASCM), and the latter claimed to shoot it down with its Redut anti-aircraft missile.

The Sea of Japan has seen several joint drills between the Russian and Chinese militaries since 2022.

The last maneuvers were held on June 6, comprising Russian Tu-95MS strategic bombers, Su-35S, Su-30SM fighter jets, China’s H-6K strategic bombers, and J-11B jets flying in formation.

The #RussianNavy tested one of its new corvettes by intercepting an anti-ship missile fired towards it by a friendly warship with its own onboard surface-to-air missile. The drill took place in the Sea of Japan. #Russia #Japan pic.twitter.com/Stumt0MnqR

— EurAsian Times (@THEEURASIATIMES) June 30, 2023

Intercepting Anti-Ship Missile With Air Defense Missiles & Cannons

The RuMoD footage showed three different shots of the R-20 missile boat, acting as the enemy ship, performing a launch of the Moskit ASCM from its forward-slanted canister launchers.

The RuMoD claimed the firing took place from a distance of 90 kilometers. The Rezkiy then opens four of the hatches of its Vertical Launch Silo (VLS) cells and fires two Redut SAMs.

A Steregushchy-class Corvette in 2018.

The ship’s main gun, identified as the A-190 artillery gun, also turns left and fires at least five rounds, presumably to shoot down the missile.

“The personnel of Rezkiy radio-technical combat unit detected the launch of the target missile and escorted it, after which the crew of Redut anti-aircraft missile system destroyed the supersonic target at a safe distance for the ship. Simultaneously with the SAM system, a 100-mm A-190 artillery gun fired at the target,” the RuMoD statement said.

Refining Tactics

The REDUT-K SAM is the naval version of the S-350 Vityaz medium-range Air Defense (AD) system. The publicity video, however, did not show the interception, so it is unclear if the projectile was shot down by the Redut missile or the volley of fire from the A-190.

Firing a two-missile salvo on incoming aerial threats is a common air defense tactic since it is assumed a single missile might miss the target. The large main gun, too, can double up as a Close-In Weapon System (CIWS) since the rounds released by the stabilized platform travel faster than a missile and stand a chance of hitting it.

The rounds fired can also be programmed for different effects, such as delayed explosion, explode-on-impact, or air-burst modes, the last of which could be the most useful for hitting or throwing off an ASCM.

Russian Navy’s Newest Corvette

Interestingly, the RuMoD also released a video of the Rezkiy on June 22, where it fired a Kh-35 Uranus cruise missile at a “naval target in the Sea of Japan as part of a factory Sea trial.”

“The cruise missile successfully hit a designated training target at a distance of more than 30 kilometers,” the RuMoD added.

Trollstoy, a leading Twitter handle that reports the war from the Russian perspective, while posting the video of the previous June 22 test, said the corvette is “designed for the search and destruction of enemy submarines, surface ships and defense of naval bases.”

Rezkiy belongs to the Project 20380 Steregushchy class of missile corvettes built by the JSC Severnaya Verd shipyard and the Amur Shipbuilding Plant. Earlier ships of the class had the famous twin-Gatling gun Kashtan close-in weapons system (CIWS) that was replaced with the REDUT-K SAM.

It said the Pacific Fleet has three corvettes of this project – Perfect, Loud, and Aldar Tsydenzhapov. “In total, the Pacific Ocean will receive six corvettes of this project, then the plant will go on to build the classified project 20385 corvettes,” the handle said.

• The author can be reached at [email protected]
• Follow EurAsian Times on Google News

eurasiantimes.com · by Parth Satam · June 30, 2023

​26. [Wang Son-taek] US-China dialogue sheds light on a new global order

Conclusion:

There is a not-so-small possibility that the US and China will agree on a new global order. We saw a brief sign of movement toward that direction by the talks between the US and China in Beijing. I hope people worldwide will enjoy happiness and prosperity in a peaceful environment in the near future.

[Wang Son-taek] US-China dialogue sheds light on a new global order

koreaherald.com · by Korea Herald · June 28, 2023

On June 18-19, US Secretary of State Tony Blinken visited Beijing, where he talked with China's top foreign policy decision makers one after another and achieved some consensus for improving bilateral relations. This is welcome news when 8 billion people worldwide, including myself, are troubled by anxiety over the US-China strategic competition.

The two countries have not made splendid breakthroughs in managing the US-China strategic competition. However, considering the two sides' difficulties, it has achieved relatively significant results. Above all, confirming that the two countries establish communication channels in various fields is very positive.

Along with Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang's schedule to visit the US, US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen's push to visit China is also a positive story. It is also refreshing that the two countries reaffirmed their position that conflict and catastrophe should be avoided. In the case of the US, I commend the Biden administration for conducting the dialogue even though some groups opposed and obstructed dialogue with China domestically. The disclosure of information about the Chinese spy facilities in Cuba and the saga on the reconnaissance balloon some days before Blinken's scheduled visits to Beijing twice are believed to be efforts by the forces against the dialogue.

China also showed its willingness to improve relations with the US. In the first half of this year, there were widespread concerns that China could provide weapons to Russia in connection with the war between Russia and Ukraine. However, China did not offer them. This scene might be interpreted as China taking a step back to proceed with the dialogue. China's recent sharp reduction in the notorious wolf warrior diplomacy since late last year has also helped discussions.

While the US and China deserve praise for conducting dialogue and achieving significant results under challenging conditions, they still have a long way to go to reach their final goal. The most important task should be to create a new global order for the coexistence and co-prosperity of the two countries and the global community.

A new order is needed because the current US-led liberal order, which was formed after the end of the Cold War in 1991, has visibly cracked. The cracks began in 2003 when the US invaded Iraq and the US lost some of its sense of legitimacy as the hegemon state. The unreasonable invasion led to the 2008 financial crisis, which triggered a second plunge in US leadership.

But the critical fall in US leadership happened from the absurd policies of the former president of the US Donald Trump. He declared an "America First" approach, breaking away from the hegemonic power controlling the world order. The global community, which has been in a leadership vacuum due to this absurd deviation by the US, has no choice but to wait for a new order to be established.

The installation of a new order should still be led by the US, the world's strongest country. However, China, which has grown its national power on a colossal scale, should also participate. The United States should lead the new order, but an agreement should be reached to the extent that China agrees.

Possible new global rules, if not US rules, could include stopping coercive diplomacy, suspending unfair trade practices, banning illegal securing of cutting-edge technologies and using them for military use, prohibiting human rights violations, and suppressing democracy activists. On the other hand, China could have different ideas. If their practical meaning is to keep China in check, China will oppose them. China cannot agree that the new rules will ultimately be used as a pretext to disregard China's territorial sovereignty, unfairly block China's economic development opportunities, and interfere with China's internal affairs.

However, there is a possibility of a compromise in that China can also accept the US demand. China has also dramatically expanded its national power through the US-led liberal order over the last 30 years. Even if the US and China fail to reach an agreement on the new order, the ongoing negotiation process and the negotiation channel itself may constitute the new order or become its most significant feature.

Suppose the US wants to establish a new order for coexistence and co-prosperity with China. In that case, it must revise its Indo-Pacific strategy to check China or present a new policy initiative. The new initiative should be strategic guidance for the US to cover the global village as a hegemonic country, not targeting a single nation. Rather than a one-sided approach to economic sanctions against China, a process that combines compensation for countries complying with the US-led order is needed. To maintain its hegemonic order, the US must not be a prisoner of domestic politics but show wisdom and determination to separate diplomatic issues from domestic politics.

Let’s assume that China also wants stable national development for the next 30 years through coexistence and co-prosperity with the United States. In that case, it is necessary to partially revise the current strategy that focuses on the domestic political situation. President Xi Jinping's third consecutive term went smoothly, and policies to revive the pride of China and the Chinese people have already achieved significant results over the past decade. Therefore, it will benefit China to strengthen its internal capability in various fields, such as corporate capabilities and high-tech development.

There is a not-so-small possibility that the US and China will agree on a new global order. We saw a brief sign of movement toward that direction by the talks between the US and China in Beijing. I hope people worldwide will enjoy happiness and prosperity in a peaceful environment in the near future.

Wang Son-taek

Wang Son-taek is a director for the Global Policy Center at Hanpyeong Peace Institute. He was a former diplomatic correspondent at YTN and former research associate at Yeosijae. The views expressed here are his own. -- Ed.

By Korea Herald (khnews@heraldcorp.com)

koreaherald.com · by Korea Herald · June 28, 2023

27. Fears for people and firms as China’s new anti-espionage law comes into effect

Fears for people and firms as China’s new anti-espionage law comes into effect

Warning companies and individuals could be punished for ‘traditional business activities’ under ambiguous legislation

The Guardian · June 30, 2023

A revised law dramatically expanding China’s definition of espionage has come into force, giving Beijing even more power to punish what it deems threats to national security.

The US government, analysts and lawyers say that the revisions to Beijing’s anti-espionage law are vague and will give authorities more leeway in implementing already opaque national security legislation.

The US National Counterintelligence and Security Center (NCSC) said the law, which came into effect on Saturday, gives Beijing “expanded legal grounds for accessing and controlling data held by US firms in China”.

The NCSC said the new law is ambiguous on what fits its definition of national security secrets, but believes Beijing’s view could include information that companies use as a normal part of their business.

US companies and individuals could “face penalties for traditional business activities” if Chinese authorities label them espionage or says they are assisting foreign sanctions on China, the NCSC said in an advisory notice.

China widens ‘already breathtaking’ scope to arrest foreigners for espionage

Read more

Originally released for public comment in December 2022, the revisions were formally approved by China’s top legislative body in April.

Chinese law already carried harsh punishments for those involved in alleged espionage, from life in prison to execution in extreme cases.

In May, a 78-year-old US citizen was sentenced to life in prison on spying charges.

Under the revised law, “relying on espionage organisations and their agents” as well as the unauthorised obtaining of “documents, data, materials, and items related to national security and interests” can constitute a spying offence.

China’s embassy in Washington said Beijing had the right to safeguard national security through domestic legislation.

“China will continue to promote high-level opening-up and provide a more law-based and international business environment for companies from all countries, including the United States,” embassy spokesperson Liu Pengyu said.

But experts have warned that the changes could sweep up those with even tenuous links to organisations accused of spying.

Foreign businesses already face a tense environment in China, after raids on and questioning of staff at due diligence company Mintz Group and consulting firm Bain and Company this year.

China targets foreign consulting companies in anti-spying raids

Read more

The new law embodies a “whole-of-society approach to dealing with anything that is a risk to this broad definition of national security”, Jeremy Daum, senior research fellow at Yale’s Paul Tsai China Center, told Agence France-Presse.

Daum said the law builds on a broader trend of tightening control since 2014, after President Xi Jinping took power.

But its vague definition of espionage and national security gives authorities a wider berth, he added, and will probably have a “chilling effect on Chinese citizens who have contact with foreigners and foreign organisations”.

The new revisions have ruffled feathers among the business community, with companies fearing even tighter scrutiny.

The changes “have raised legitimate concerns about conducting certain routine business activities, which now risk being considered espionage”, Craig Allen, president of the US-China Business Council, wrote in a recent blog.

“Confidence in China’s market will suffer further if the law is applied frequently and without a clear, narrow and direct link to activities universally recognised as espionage,” wrote Allen.

Diplomatic officials from several countries have also sounded alarm bells before the legal changes, urging citizens in China to be vigilant.

The US state department said the law will “greatly expand the scope of what [Beijing] considers espionage activities”.

Deputy spokesperson Vedant Patel said Washington would “continue to speak out for human rights and rule of law issues and promote accountability for [China’s] repressive activities, which this of course would be one”.

The Guardian · June 30, 2023

28. China uses laser for 10 times faster satellite-to-ground communication in major breakthrough

China uses laser for 10 times faster satellite-to-ground communication in major breakthrough

• Team at CAS institute uses laser instead of microwaves to hit 10 Gbps space-to-ground data transfer speed from satellite in Jilin-1 constellation
• Feat represents first such ‘ultra-high-speed’ test for business applications in China, chief designer at company behind satellite says

Zhang Tong in Beijing

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Published: 8:04pm, 30 Jun, 2023

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3226159/china-uses-laser-10-times-faster-satellite-ground-communication-major-breakthrough

China has successfully deployed laser-based high-speed communication technology on commercial satellites, increasing space-to-ground data transfer speed tenfold to 10 gigabytes per second (Gbps).

“Using a ground-based 500mm (19.7 inches) aperture, researchers received laser signals emitted from a transmitter on the Jilin-1 MF02A04 satellite,” the official Science and Technology Daily reported earlier this week.

The 108-strong Jilin-1 constellation in lower Earth orbit is the world’s largest imaging satellite network, and sends back commercial remote sensing data for sectors including land resource survey, urban planning and disaster monitoring. The latest breakthrough is forecast to significantly enhance ground communication with the satellites.

Traditionally, satellite-to-ground links have primarily relied on microwave technology. However, as the range of microwave frequencies is restricted, so is the speed of data transfer.

Lasers, by contrast, have a much wider spectrum. Therefore, using lasers as data carriers can help pack more data into each transmission, with the bandwidth potentially reaching several hundred gigahertz.

A team from the Aerospace Information Research Institute (AIR), under the country’s premier research institute – the Chinese Academy of Sciences – set up a satellite-to-ground link using lasers, for what is formally known as “optical communication”.

Their system, sent into orbit with the Jilin-1 MF02A04 in December, was successfully tested on Wednesday, opening the doors to more efficient data exchange.

China space laser zaps competition with data speed record: paper

26 Apr 2022

Li Yalin, the leader of the ground system at AIR, compared the technology to city roads.

“Using the common microwave at 375 MHz is like driving on a single lane, and the emerging [technology of a] higher 1.5 GHz microwave would be a four-lane road,” he said. “Lasers, meanwhile, can accommodate hundreds or even thousands of lanes.”

“With [such] optical communication, it is possible to transmit a high-definition movie in one second, which is 10 to 1,000 times faster than the current microwave communication method.”

The first batch of data sent back to Earth by the Jilin-1 transmitter included a picture of Doha, the capital of Qatar.

“It is the first ultra-high-speed [10 Gbps] satellite-to-ground optical communication test for business applications in China, and the single communication lasted for more than 100 seconds,” chief designer Chen Shanbo at Chang Guang Satellite Technology, the commercial company that launched the Jilin-1 MF02A04 satellite, said.

The highly concentrated energy of lasers also means the size, weight, and power consumption of satellite-borne laser transmitters are markedly less than those powered by microwave.

Lasers also have strong anti-electromagnetic interference capabilities, which can significantly improve the security of ground-to-satellite communication.

Notably, Nasa has speeded up similar research, and teamed up with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers to achieve a downlink speed of 100 Gbps last June.

The feat was achieved by the MIT-developed TeraByte InfraRed Delivery (TBIRD) system, which was taken into orbit by Nasa’s Pathfinder Technology Demonstrator 3 (PTD-3) satellite. The system is named after the terabyte, a unit of digital data that equals 1,000 gigabytes or about 500 hours of high-definition video.

PTD-3 is about the size of two stacked cereal boxes, and the TBIRD payload it carries is no larger than the average tissue box, according to Nasa.

This year, the US laser link doubled that data rate, reaching a record-breaking transmission speed of 200 Gbps.

“With optical communications, we’re blowing that out of the water as far as the amount of data we can bring back. It is truly a game-changing capability,” TBIRD project manager Beth Keer said.

The Nasa record, however, was achieved on a demonstration satellite, which are usually more powerful than the commercial type.

The Jilin-1 MF02A04 is a commercial satellite designed for practical use and a longer lifespan. It weighs less than 40kg (88 pounds) but the weight of its transmitter is not known.

Faster data transmission could drive development in many areas. Missions to collect important data on Earth’s climate and resources, as well as astrophysical discoveries and military detection could all be boosted by this technology.

“Laser communications is the missing link that will enable the science discoveries of the future,” Keer was reported as saying in May.

However, when it comes to the technology’s commercial application, China might have an edge. The Jilin-1 constellation is set to have 138 satellites in orbit this year and complete the second phase of construction by 2025, by which time it will have 300 satellites.

The powerful Chinese megawatt laser ‘small enough for a satellite’

7 Jan 2022

The system’s powerful remote sensing image capability will generate a large amount of data every day by then, feeding the growing demand for data transmission from satellite to ground and between satellites.

Another Jilin-1 series satellite coded “02A” was successfully launched by Chang Guang Satellite Technology on June 15. It carries a new generation of optical communication payload to validate high-speed inter-satellite, and satellite-to-ground and back to satellite communication technologies, and aims to form a network with the others in orbit.

According to the company website: “As the next step, Chang Guang Satellite Technology will carry out the normalisation and commercial trial operation of ground-to-satellite laser communication, providing a technical foundation for the subsequent large-scale application of 40 Gbps satellite-to-ground laser communication payloads.”

CONVERSATIONS (3)

Zhang Tong

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Tong earned his Bachelor's degree from Tianjin University and Master's degree from the University of Washington. His major was Chemical Engineering and Data Science. He used to work as an editor of academic journals. He is enthusiastic about news writing and finding stories behind scientific research.

29. Raytheon Calls Up Retirees to Help Produce Weapons for Ukraine

Raytheon Calls Up Retirees to Help Produce Weapons for Ukraine

A weapon that made its mark in the 1980s is in demand again - thanks to the war in Ukraine

Published 06/30/23 09:36 AM ET|Updated 12 hr ago

Carlo Versano

themessenger.com · June 30, 2023

Raytheon, one of the world's largest defense contractors, has been calling on its retired engineers to teach employees how to build Stinger missiles headed to Ukraine, according to a report in the industry publication DefenseOne.

The shoulder-fired, heat-seeking Stingers, which made their first global mark in the Afghan insurgency against the Soviet Army in the 1980s, have become a high-demand weapon for the current Ukrainian resistance against Russia. Stingers, which individual soldiers can carry and use to shoot down aircraft, were widely credited with helping Ukraine beat back Russian forces in the early days of the war.

“Stinger's been out of production for 20 years, and all of a sudden in the first 48 hours [of the war], it's the star of the show and everybody wants more,” said Wesley Kremer, president of Raytheon’s missile and defense unit, during an interview at the Paris Air Show, per DefenseOne.

“We were bringing back retired employees that are in their 70s … to teach our new employees how to actually build a Stinger,” Kremer said. “We're pulling test equipment out of warehouses and blowing the spider webs off of them.”

The Biden administration has thus far sent about 2,000 Stingers to Ukraine, which came mainly from U.S. inventory. This month, the Pentagon announced another $325 million military aid package that includes more of the missiles.

Ukrainian soldiers are on standby with a US made Stinger MANPAD (man-portable air-defense system) on the frontline on December 29, 2022 in Bakhmut, Ukraine.Pierre Crom/Getty Images

The problem is that there aren’t many Stingers left. And the ones that remain have obsolete electronics that require retrofitting, according to Raytheon CEO Greg Hayes.

Further, the Stingers can’t be redesigned from scratch because it would involve a lengthy certification process, so production needs to be more or less identical to what it was 40 years ago, according to DefenseOne. That old production process may add to delays.

On top of that, Raytheon has a knowledge gap, given that the Pentagon hasn’t ordered Stingers for decades – a problem it’s hoping its retired engineers can solve.

Raytheon is now one of only five major defense contractors for the Pentagon, down from more than 50 in the 1990s, according to a Dept. of Defense report issued last year. While that consolidation is largely a result of the end of the Cold War and a subsequent drop in demand for weapons manufacturing, it's also led to bottlenecks and delays as the U.S. and its allies fund the Ukraine war effort.

themessenger.com · June 30, 2023

30. Poland Wants To Host NATO Nukes To Counter Russia

Does just placing NATO nuclear weapons on Polish soil really "counter" Russia?

Poland Wants To Host NATO Nukes To Counter Russia

Poland says Russian nuclear weapons in Belarus are driving its desire to be part of NATO’s nuclear sharing program.

BY

JOSEPH TREVITHICK

|

PUBLISHED JUN 30, 2023 4:15 PM EDT

thedrive.com · by Joseph Trevithick · June 30, 2023

Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki says his country wants to join NATO's nuclear weapon sharing program. This is in direct response to Russia's deployment of some of its own nuclear weapons to neighboring Belarus. This also comes as Poland is pushing ahead with a massive conventional rearmament effort that was accelerated in the wake of the all-out Russian invasion of Ukraine last year.

Prime Minister Morawiecki made his remarks about Poland's desire to become of NATO's nuclear weapon sharing arrangements in response to a question at a press conference on the sidelines of a European Union in Brussels, Belgium, earlier today.

"The final decision will depend on our American and NATO partners. We declare our will to act quickly in this matter," Morawiecki said, according to Polesat News. "We do not want to sit idly by while [Russian President Vladimir] Putin escalates all sorts of threats."

Putin said earlier this month that Russian nuclear weapons had begun to arrive in Belarus as part of an agreement the two countries cut last summer. Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko said earlier this week that a " significant" portion of the total number of nuclear munitions that Russia plans to place in his nation have now arrived. Per previous statements from Putin and Lukashenko, these weapons are a mixture of nuclear-capable Iskander-M short-range ballistic missiles and air-dropped nuclear bombs, the latter of which the Belarusian Air Force now claims to be capable of employing.

This is not the first time Polish authorities have publicly stated their interest in joining the NATO nuclear weapon sharing program in light of Russia's decision to deploy nuclear weapons in Belarus.

"There is always a potential opportunity to participate in the nuclear sharing program," Polish President Andrzej Duda said in October. "We have spoken with American leaders about whether the United States is considering such a possibility. The issue is open."

That same month, NATO conducted the annual iteration of its nuclear deterrence exercise, Steadfast Noon, which includes practicing putting the alliance's nuclear weapon sharing plans into action. The Polish military took part in that exercise, but in a supporting role rather than as one of the members that would be actually employing nuclear munitions.

"We would like to stress that Poland did not strive for the possession of nuclear weapons," a spokesperson for the Polish Ministry of Defense told The War Zone at the time. "As a NATO member, we participate in the Alliance's nuclear policy and are also covered by the guarantees of the Allied Nuclear Sharing program."

At present, NATO's nuclear weapon sharing agreement is entirely centered on U.S. B61-series air-dropped nuclear bombs. The program provides for the forward deployment of these weapons in secure vaults at air bases in multiple member nations under U.S. military control. In a crisis where the alliance approves their use, they would then be loaded onto combat jets belonging to participating countries. NATO aircraft capable of employing these nuclear weapons are known as Dual Capable Aircraft (DCA), referring to the dual nuclear and conventional capabilities.

Specific details about the program are both classified and politically sensitive for many of the participating countries, a number of which do not even publicly acknowledge the presence of American nuclear weapons on their soil. As of last October, the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) estimated that around 100 B61s in total were spread across six bases in five countries – Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Turkey. There have been estimates as high as between 150 and 200 bombs in the past.

A map of current and former locations where B61 bombs are located in Europe under NATO's nuclear weapon sharing arrangements and a table breaking down estimated total bombs at each current site. FAS

At that time, NATO had publicly acknowledged seven members of the nuclear sharing program, did not name them. This list is at least understood to include Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and the United States.

Turkey continues to host weapons, but it has long been reported that it is no longer active itself in the nuclear sharing arrangements and no longer operates DCA aircraft. The chill in U.S.-Turkish relations following the attempted coup against Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in 2016 also prompted speculation that the B61s could be withdrawn from the country, but there is no evidence that has happened to date. NATO outright denied a report in 2016 that those bombs had been relocated to Romania.

A satellite image of Incirlik Air Base in Turkey, where U.S. B61 bombs are stored. Google Earth

FAS suggested last year, given the total number of NATO nuclear weapon sharing program participants, that Turkey could still have a reserve role of some kind. It reported at that time that Greece, which no longer hosts bombs or has DCA aircraft, was also among the seven countries, but again in a reserve capacity.

The United Kingdom has also hosted U.S. nuclear weapons under the NATO nuclear sharing agreement in the past, but those bombs were withdrawn by 2007 at the latest, according to FAS. The U.S. military's 2023 Fiscal Year budget proposal included a mention of work to modernize nuclear weapon storage facilities in the United Kingdom, suggesting that there could be plans in the works to redeploy B61 bombs there in the future.

In response to a Freedom of Information request The War Zone submitted last year asking for details about "the current... participation of the United Kingdom in NATO's nuclear sharing arrangements, whether or not the country operates dual-capable aircraft (DCA), and/or whether the country hosts U.S. nuclear gravity bombs of any type," the U.K. Ministry of Defense said it "neither confirms nor denies" any relevant information.

As for the actual bombs that make up the core of the NATO nuclear weapon sharing program, these are currently understood to be B61-3 and/or -4 variants, which American authorities categorize as tactical nuclear weapons. Both are so-called "dial-a-yield" designs where the total explosive force of the weapon can be set before employment. The B61-3 reportedly has eight separate yield settings: 0.3, 1.5, 5, 10, 45, 60, 80, or 170 kilotons. The B61-4 is understood to have fewer that only range from 0.3 to 50 kilotons. You can read more about the entire B61 family here.

A quartet of B61-series bombs loaded on a dolly. DOD

The U.S. military is in the process of replacing the bulk of its B61-series bombs with new B61-12 versions, which include remanufactured components for B61-3s, -4s, -7s, and -10s. They also incorporate new features, most notably a precision guidance tail kit, as you can learn more about here.

U.S. Air Force F-15E Strike Eagle combat jets, B-2 Spirit bombers, and some F-16 Viper fighters are certified to employ existing B61 variants. As part of the nuclear weapon sharing agreement, some Belgian, Dutch, and Italian F-16s, as well as German Panavia Tornado swing-wing combat jets, are also capable of dropping these weapons. In order to be able to drop these bombs, the launching aircraft needs to have special modifications to be able to "talk" with the weapons in order to transmit the necessary secure codes to activate them and set the yields via what are known as Permissive Action Links (PAL).

The U.S. military has been working to integrate the B61-12 onto the F-15E, F-16, and B-2, as well as the F-35A Joint Strike Fighter, in support of its own requirements and those of NATO. The U.S. Air Force's future B-21 Raider stealth bombers will also be capable of dropping these bombs. Interestingly, at present, the only platforms expected to be able to make use of the new guided functionality of the B61-12 will be the F-15E, F-35A, B-2, and B-21. F-16s will only be able to employ them in their unguided mode.

Reports emerged last year that the U.S. military was looking to accelerate the fielding of the B61-12 in Europe in light of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, but it's unclear whether or not this has actually started. It is known that fit checks have been conducted to ensure that the new B61 version can fit inside existing secure vaults.

US Air Force personnel load inert B61-12 "shapes" onto the lower rack of a secure vault during a test. Older B61 shapes are seen on the top rack. USAF via DODIG/FOIA

Altogether, at least from a technical standpoint, if Poland is to join the NATO nuclear weapon sharing program, it will need to modify a certain number of its combat jets. The country already operates F-16s that could be configured for this role and is in the process of acquiring F-35As. If it were to physically host bombs inside its borders, it would also need to build the requisite secure facilities. Other relevant security and safety policies and protocols would also need to be implemented.

It is possible that Poland could join the program on a more truncated timetable by first modifying aircraft and planning to have them operate from NATO bases where B61s are already stored. The country could also serve as a forward staging point for nuclear-armed DCA aircraft.

It of course remains to be seen whether or not Poland will actually join NATO's nuclear weapon sharing program. At the same time, it would align in many ways with the country's existing conventional rearmament, which has further ballooned in the wake of Russia's all-out invasion of Ukraine.

Just this week, Poland received its first M1 Abrams main battle tanks from the United States and the country is also in the process of acquiring K2 tanks from South Korea. That latter purchase is just one element of a massive arms deal the Polish and South Korean governments concluded last year that also includes combat jets and self-propelled artillery, along with industrial cooperation agreements.

Some of Poland's first M1 Abrams tanks at the port of Szczecin after their arrival this week. Polish Ministry of Defense

M1s are hardly the only new weapons the Polish are buying from the United States. Poland is on track to become the second-largest operator of AH-64 Apache attack helicopters in the world and U.S. authorities just recently authorized a potential $15 billion-dollar sale of Patriot surface-to-air missile systems, Integrated Battle Command Systems IBCS), and other related material and services. On the air and missile defense side of things, Poland is on track to become the first U.S. ally to field IBCS, a powerful network architecture that can link various weapons and systems together that you can read more about in this past War Zone feature.

Polish personnel train on IBCS at the U.S. Army's Redstone Arsenal in Alabama. US Army

In January, the Polish government announced its intention to increase the size of its defense budget to four percent of its gross domestic product (GDP), a decision authorities there said was being driven by the conflict in Ukraine. This would make it the highest per-capita spender in NATO, even above the United States. The alliance requires its members to strive for a goal of at least two percent GDP spending on defense, but few members actually meet this target.

Poland has of course seen the potential for spillover from the conflict in Ukraine firsthand, when what was likely a stray Ukrainian surface-to-air missile killed two Polish farmers in November 2022. At the same time, Warsaw has been raising concerns about Russian aggression for years now and its military buildup predates the current fighting in Ukraine or the deployment of nuclear weapons to Belarus.

The Polish government has had its own concerns about security threats emanating from Belarus, as well. In 2021, a crisis emerged along Belarus' borders with Poland, as well as Latvia, and Lithuania, with migrants from the Middle East finding themselves trapped in between. Polish and other European authorities accused the Belruarisan government of weaponizing those individuals to deliberately foment unrest.

Poland stepped up security along its border with Belarus again after Russia's invasion of Ukraine. It is now further reinforcing those defenses in light of reports that thousands of members of the Russian private military Wagner are relocating to Belarus following an abortive putsch on Moscow led by the group's leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin.

All told, whether or not Poland ends up hosting nuclear weapons itself, the country is already becoming a major driving force in NATO and European defense and security discussions.

Contact the author: joe@thedrive.com

thedrive.com · by Joseph Trevithick · June 30, 2023

​

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